Farmer Hoggett, Stalin Claus, and the Clown Effect
Oct 2nd, 2008 by Micah Tillman | 8 Comments |
My latest article is up at The Free Liberal.
Do you ever feel weird about something, even though you have no logical argument against it? Let’s talk about it.
Yes, I know the feeling. I usually trust my intuition, and figure that there’s a logical reason somewhere that I’m just not able to see or understand.
-Eating jelly-filled doughnuts on Thursdays.
-And, finding a perfectly square rock in nature (if it has parts of/is a fractal, it is disqualified) .
Think about it. WEIRD.
Jeff– So this happens to you too? I find it fascinating (and kind of frustrating) to know that there is a reason for some of my reactions to things, but to not know what the reason is. Having a reason I don’t know about is . . . well, something that doesn’t make a lot of sense. And yet it happens.
Abby– I have never tried the doughnut/Thursday thing. I have a new goal in life. Has the rock thing actually happened to you?! Straight lines are supposed to be a geometric ideal/fiction, not something you actually encounter in the real world.
“Knowledge has three degrees—opinion, science, illumination. The means or instrument of the first is sense; of the second, dialectic; of the third, intuition.”
I don’t know who wrote that, but if trusting my intuition brings me one step closer to illumination, then I’m all for it. What bothers me is that I have no clear way of measuring the accuracy of my intuition. True, it’s usually right, but when faced with myriad choices, there are probably many of them that will feel right, possibly even a majority of them, so maybe my intuition isn’t very good at all.
Furthermore, we humans have an amazing ability to selectively remember things. Maybe my intuition is only right 10% of the time, but because it’s so uncommon, those times stand out in my head such that I think they’re a majority.
And how do I even know what I’m following is my intuition, and not some covertly placed corporate/political message, or my own narcisism subtly pushing me toward to most beneficial choice, regardless of philosophical merit? Usually I respect someone who supports an idea, or a position, that harms them, or at least doesn’t help them, so I suppose I could use that as a guideline for myself, but how do I know I’m not just making that harmful choice because I want to feel good about myself?
What happens when my intuition is opposed to your intuition? Can we still have a discussion? And not that I see this here, but I certainly see it in the political realm: how do we deal with those for whom intuition trumps reason?
Ah, the glorious topic of intuition. If intuition is the experience of something as present (as Husserl would say), then the only test of intuition is intuition (as Husserl would say).
There can be degrees of intuition (i.e., you can experience more or less of a thing as present, you can experience part of a thing as present in more or less clear ways).
The ideal which helps one organize intuitions relative to each other is that of the complete (all-sided, clear) presence of whatever is being intuited.
I wrote a high school commencement address on the issue of how to deal with conflicting intuitions, cuz it’s an important topic.
As for intuition trumping reason, we’d have to discuss in what sense we’re speaking of trumping. Intuition is the foundation of reason, insofar as the principles with which reason operates cannot be proved or justified by reason, but must simply be seen. The job of seeing such truths was assigned to the highest part of the rational part of the soul by Aristotle.
Another meaning of intuition trumping reason would be: simply rejecting the results of one’s own reasoning because one has an intuition against the result.
Such occasions should lead one to interrogate both the conflicting intuition and the intuitions on which the original reasoning was based (and the process of reasoning which lead to the “anti-intuitive” conclusion).
Okay, now I’m officially sick of the word ‘intuition.’ :)