SanteriSatama wrote: ↑Wed Jul 21, 2021 7:32 am
AshvinP wrote: ↑Tue Jul 20, 2021 11:51 pm
So let's dig deeper into this issue - is it only "intuition" which you say should be outside the semantic scope of "thinking"? I am assuming you have no problem putting abstract intellect and reason within that scope. What about "imagination" (image-consciousness) and "inspiration" (clairaudience)?
Imagination yes, inspiration is for me the etymological meaning, which empirically and typically is a whole body phenomenon..
I agree that Thinking is a "whole body phenomenon" (not just in head/brain) - that is even clear from physicalist interpretations of science, but spiritual science details exactly how Thinking occurs throughout the body. In fact, the various parts of our bodies are alive like animals are alive and connected to a "group soul". And in spiritual science, there is not only the physical body, but the etheric and astral bodies.
So, apart from the "whole body" objection to inspiration (clairvoyance and clairaudience) as "Thinking", do you see any other reason why it must be separated from reason and imagination?
SS wrote:Ashvin wrote:
As for "intuition" - I disagree about Bergson. Below is a quote I posted on an earlier thread. Can we honestly say Bergson is not putting intuition into modes of "Thinking"? The only way we can do that is by separating "Thinking" from "knowing". But what is the justification for such a separation?
Sadly, English has very poor and IMO confused vocabulary in this respect, "knowing" refers to very wide range of phenomena, with epistemic knowing as the dominant meaning. For example, when you ask "Do you know Alice?", meaning have you met Alice and spent time together, in Finnish we ask with similar meaning "Do you feel Alice?". And the answer can be "I don't feel Alice/I have not met her, but I know her - Bob's cousin - by name and relation.
Intuition translates into Finnish with 'vaisto' (instinct) and 'aavistus' (hunch, hint, clue, gut feeling, feel). Intuition does not mean epistemic knowing. "Separation" is too hard expression, as intuitive hunch has the feel of an intent that intends to become more clearly known, sayable.
What Bergson means by intuition can be described as
holographic telepathy, part becoming informed by/via inclusive whole. Vaguely at first, seeking fuller comprehension e.g. in the form of linguistic expression. In that sense intuition and inspiration can be closely related. The expression "gut feeling" and the experience of intentionality give plenty of hints that intuition belongs primarily in the domain of will and action.
Thanks, there is a lot to unpack here. Sticking with the issue of Bergson's understanding for now, there was more to that quote I should have included (my emphasis):
But as they believed that the intelligence worked within time, they have concluded that to go beyond the intelligence consisted in getting outside of time. They did not see that intellectualized time is space, that the intelligence works upon the phantom of duration, not on duration itself, that the elimination of time is the habitual, normal, commonplace act of our understanding, that the relativity of our knowledge of the mind is a direct result of this fact, and that hence, to pass from intellection to vision, from the relative to the absolute, is not a question of getting outside of time (we are already there); on the contrary, one must get back into duration and recapture reality in the very mobility which is its essence. An intuition, which claims to project itself with one bound into the eternal, limits itself to the intellectual. For the concepts which the intelligence furnishes, the intuition simply substitutes one single concept which includes them all and which consequently is always the same, by whatever name it is called: Substance, Ego, Idea, Will.
Philosophy, thus understood, necessarily pantheistic, will have no difficulty in explaining everything deductively, since it will have been given beforehand, in a principle which is the concept of concepts, all the real and all the possible. But this explanation will be vague and hypothetical, this unity will be artificial, and this philosophy would apply equally well to a very different world from our own. How much more instructive would be a truly intuitive metaphysics, which would follow the undulations of the real! True, it would not embrace in a single sweep the totality of things; but for each thing it would give an explanation which would fit it exactly, and it alone. It would not begin by defining or describing the systematic unity of the world: who knows if the world is actually one?
Experience alone can say, and unity, if it exists, will appear at the end of the search as a result; it is impossible to posit it at the start as a principle. Furthermore, it will be a rich, full unity, the unity of a continuity, the unity of our reality, and not that abstract and empty unity, which has come from one supreme generalization, and which could just as well be that of any possible world whatsoever. It is true that philosophy then will demand a new effort for each new problem. No solution will be geometrically deduced from another. No important truth will be achieved by the prolongation of an already acquired truth. We shall have to give up crowding universal science potentially into one principle.
- Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics (1946)
I realize that, at first glance, these remarks could seem more aligned with your position that intuition is like a "gut-feeling" which never arrives at any "absolute truth". There is a certain accuracy to such a position, but it is what I call "low resolution" truth and Bergson calls a truth that "
limits itself to the intellectual... vague and hypothetical... artificial unity... abstract and empty unity". Please note that I am not claiming, and I don't think Bergson is either, that this sort of view does not have feeling or is never useful when interacting with people. That is not the point at all. Rather, we are asking about the living essence of intuition - must it always remain in the domain of "gut feeling" or "hunch" or "hint"? I say it is a big mistake to reduce intuition to instinct in that manner. Instinct is indeed like a primal mode of knowing totally immersed within our willing activity. That is more closely aligned with Schopenhauer's notion of "intuition" - it is a mode we all have immediate access to and simply accessing that mode will "
project us with one bound into the eternal." So Schopenhauer says music gives direct access to the noumenal universal Will, and he is correct in a sense, but that is an "artificial unity" because he leaves out the most important part -
the process of getting to that unity via experience and knowledge.
Bergson clearly wants to
differentiate himself from Schopenhauer as we saw in the first quote. Intuition is of a much different sort of knowing for Bergson. It allows us to gradually uncover more and more of the noumenal relations, just like an exoteric scientist uses reason to uncover more and more of strictly phenomenal relations. Eventually the exoteric scientist gets to "scientific facts" and "laws of nature", while the spiritual scientist gets to principles and archetypes (which is all the activity of living beings). We can see this essence when Bergson writes of "
new effort for each new problem". That is the scientific method, is it not? It seeks a step by step and super-precise uncovering of detailed relations. Instinct simply does not provide that sort of resolution. I think we both agree that Bergson is correct to say we should
not presume any sort of eternal Unity (but Bergson also hints that he concludes we always truly reside in eternity), but then the question becomes whether there is any reason to think our capacities of knowing cannot
systematically arrive at eternal Unity through higher perception-cognition, investigation rooted in "experience alone". My answer is no, there is no reason to discount that possibility, and it seems clear to me that Bergson agrees.