Intuition 2
“The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.”—Matthew Arnold
“I realize that all society rests upon force. But all the great creative actions, all the decent human relations, occur during the intervals when force has not managed to come to the front. These intervals are what matter. I want them to be as frequent and as lengthy as possible, and I call them "civilization ". Some people idealize force and pull it into the foreground and worship it, instead of keeping it in the background as long as possible. I think they make a mistake, and I think that their opposites, the mystics, err even more when they declare that force does not
exist. I believe that it exists, and that one of our jobs is to prevent it from getting out of its box. It gets out sooner or later, and then it destroys us and all the lovely things which we have made. But it is not out all the time, for the fortunate reason that the strong are so stupid.”—E. M. Forster
The intellectual value system of our modern age pits intuition against reason. Reason, being culturally ascendent, forces intuition to justify itself. In arguments, intuition often tries to claim rationality, but rationality rarely cares to associate itself with the intuitive. As with all subjective/objective arguments, I see it as a contention between two things that aren’t two things. The interrelation of subjective and objective is one of the great conundrums of modern philosophy—the one that must be resolved before anything else can be truly understood: a process where the question and answer form a circle without an entry point.
Merriam-Webster defines “intuition” as “the process or faculty of attaining to direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought and inference.” In other words, like rationality, intuition deals with “knowledge or cognition”—and intuition covers everything left over when rationality has drawn its conclusions.
One reads about the, maybe overstated, left and right hemisphere functions of the brain. To oversimplify, the left hemisphere, they say, controls logic and reason, the right, creativity and intuition. The truth is, the two hemispheres cooperate to perceive and assess reality—even if one side often seems to dominate in this or that individual or situation. Too much right, you can’t fix your lawnmower yourself; too much left, see Iain McGilchrist, the British psychiatrist who believes the left hemisphere has staged a coup in modern times, and replaced the angel happiness with the bitch success. Left-hemisphere dominance has created a world existentially threatened by wendigo psychosis.
I’m in tune with McGilchrist’s critique of scientific materialism, but I’m not a brain researcher so I can’t weigh in on the left/right thing. I will say I’m skeptical, because I can’t see any way to separate reason and intuition. They are interdependent. We think they are two separate phenomena because we have two separate words. And having two separate words was our crude way of putting rationality within borders. In the multifarious, perhaps infinite, ocean of human experience, reason must build walls to shut out the barbaric nebulous and amorphous. That is, everything in, which is most of, human experience that can’t be known with certainty.
Someone might declare “all good relationships are based on trust,” for example. Another might argue that they are based on love. Considering the question might lead one to recognize that the two words, at least in that context, are actually indistinguishable. Trust and love—the same exertion, the same emotion. They can mean subtly separate things, or they can converge and become what they already were: something for which there is no single word. Like everything. With the available words one’s only tools, it is impossible to denote the entirety of anything. “Denote” can only mean triggering a visualization in another’s mind—a trans-verbal prompt, a complex of meaning that rides around and above language.
Reason and intuition are parallel threads on a spectrum. The spectrum of that greatest mystery of all: the human brain.
Reason insists that its gated community alone has prime validity. The ubiquity of intuition is a constant reminder that it can’t be so. It is impossible to know something is so without feeling it is so. Plato, the “true philosopher,” is said to have loved not things themselves, but the truth in things. Reason and intuition are inseparable.
Reason is like a dam on a river. It is not the river, but a way of exploiting the power of the river. A useful human invention: isolating what can be asserted either without doubt or with high certainty from all the rest of human experience. Because the language of mathematics has prearranged the parameters, it is the only language we have that can achieve certainty. It is rationality boiled down to its essence. Science is comfortable until there is a reason to know. Intuition is a given; reason is an invention—or discovery. We assume reason reveals the structure of the universe, when it actually reveals the structure of the human brain. Only human achievement qualifies as “brilliant,” and what could be more brilliant than mathematics? Especially nears its frontiers where certainty is taxed to its limits and must be constantly redefined. The place where, as with all scientific leaps, intuition is father to reason. Intuition validates reason: it agrees to trust it.
The human race did not spring spontaneously into life, obviously, nor do individual humans. We come from and return to a vast cosmic a priori ocean. That is, we exist in a context. The nature of that context is, and I’m sure will always be, an open question. We will forever seek, and forever fail to find, the source of meaning. In the roots, reason and gut feeling can’t be differentiated, but in the branches and leaves we have sufficient perspective to dimly trace the origins of behavior. Of course I use a metaphor, because just as mathematics works in equation, intuition works in metaphor. In our troubled times, we say—as though all times weren’t—people abandon reason and revert to deeply intuitive, or instinctive, feeling. Maybe these are extreme times—when the urge to destroy matches or surpasses the urge to create—those urges too are interdependent—but the fact is, people have always felt perfectly free to abandon reason at their convenience. I can’t quite summon Swift’s indignation; I have lower expectations of my race. I am dismayed, but not shocked, to see the attack on reason, on intelligence in general, going on all around me—the flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, contrail-fearers, a professional athlete saying in public he doesn’t believe in “space and planets,” deniers and conspiracy-pushers of all stripes. Shades of the Khmer Rouge executing people who were multi-lingual, or wore glasses—signs of being smart. Reason tells the truth, and all of us, if it grates enough, reject the man-made landscape of truth and prefer the primal landscape of our intuition.
Humans have evolved to the point where we are exactly not smart enough to know what’s going on, but smart enough to want to figure it out. There is no way to keep the mind from wandering into the realm of the speculative—but still, that realm, the context that contains us, only concedes in grudging bits to empirical thinking. It is largely the territory of intuition.
Indeed, the vast majority of our experience is intuitive. Consider: how can you know what role you play in other people’s minds? You can’t. You can read signs, make inferences, hook up electrodes to the person’s brain, even resort to believing what he or she tells you, but you can never know. A gut feeling, yes—often disproved later—knowledge, no.
Or take books on how to write fiction. Please. They say follow this plan and these rules when writing, but what really writes the book is your instinct. What to put in, what to leave out, or halfway out, using the phrases that materialize out of the mist, weighing two synonyms and something in you knowing which is the right one. You don’t “build” characters, you see and feel them in your mind. Following the rule books can result in a state-approved product—fine, if that is what you want: tyranny of the left brain. But reason can only take you so far. Just as night follows day, the subconscious mind takes over where the conscious mind leaves off. It sifts through the sea of data and potentiality, finds connections, resonances, combinations, but unlike AI ends in a pulse of self-aware affirmation: a quantum leap from impersonal computation into personal consciousness.
The Enlightenment was a triumph of the empirical over the intuitive, but of course it led to the indignant rebellion of Romanticism. No idealism can survive the truths of human nature. Paradoxically, when most people today refer to enlightenment they mean the intuitive: connection with the unknowable context that contains us. The surrender of reason to intuition—the discovery of your conscious ego as an actor—is the seed discovery that leads to communion with the context—and you think, why, when we are given these egos, such vital parts of ourselves, and need them to survive and create, are we required to transcend them in order to advance? Because there is no loss, only gain—no different from what happens when we evolve from a child to an adult. One doesn’t replace the other; they co-exist.
Our lives are stories—a quantum collapse from another state. And each state is a mystery to the other. Like left and right brain. Ego and transcendence. Intuition and reason.
Believing in anything beyond rationality is a leap. And leaping may lead you down a rabbit hole, or open your eyes to some reality beyond yourself. Maybe in spite of, maybe because of, the fact that it is believing, not knowing.
July 8, 2024