That Slippery Intuition

What we mean by words is, ultimately, intrinsically personal—and especially so when it comes to “objects” that are beyond the reach of the outward senses. One such word is intuition. Prodded in Kant’s direction by a post today on Siris (link), I came across this fascinating quote (source):

Our nature is so constituted that intuition with us never can be other than sensuous, that is, it contains only the mode in which we are affected by objects. On the other hand, the faculty of thinking the object of sensuous intuition is the understanding. Neither of these faculties has a preference over the other. Without the sensuous faculty no object would be given to us, and without the understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are void; intuitions without conceptions, blind. Hence it is as necessary for the mind to make its conceptions sensuous (that is, to join to them the object in intuition), as to make its intuitions intelligible (that is, to bring them under conceptions). Neither of these faculties can exchange its proper function. Understanding cannot intuit, and the sensuous faculty cannot think. In no other way than from the united operation of both, can knowledge arise.

       [Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Introduction, translated by J.M.D. Meiklejohn]

[In the Original German:]

Unsre Natur bringt es so mit sich, daß die Anschauung niemals anders als sinnlich sein kann, d.i. nur die Art enthält, wie wir von Gegenständen affiziert werden. Dagegen ist das Vermögen, den Gegenstand sinnlicher Anschauung zu denken, der Verstand. Keine dieser Eigenschaften ist der andern vorzuziehen. Ohne Sinnlichkeit würde uns kein Gegenstand gegeben, und ohne Verstand keiner gedacht werden.Gedanken ohne Inhalt sind leer, Anschauungen ohne Begriffe sind blind. Daher ist es eben so notwendig, seine Begriffe sinnlich zu machen (d.i. ihnen den Gegenstand in der Anschauung beizufügen), als, seine Anschauungen sich verständlich zu machen (d.i. sie unter Begriffe zu bringen). Beide Vermögen, oder Fähigkeiten, können auch ihre Funktionen nicht vertauschen. Der Verstand vermag nichts anzuschauen, und die Sinne nichts zu denken. Nur daraus, daß sie sich vereinigen, kann Erkenntnis entspringen.

This fascinates me because, in that first sentence, Kant defines intuition in a peculiarly narrow way. And for me, anyway, that definition, by itself, explains Kant’s view of reality—not least that we can only ever have access to appearances (phenomena) and never to the real (noumena).

The English version then made me curious what Kant actually wrote in German . The word he used for intuition was Anschauung—although Intuition is, and was then, a common German word. Our dictionary (Cassells) defines Anschauung as view, perception, observation, and contemplation, in that order, and finally also as intuition. Etymologically intuition derives from the Latin for  “looking at” (which is also what the literal German Anschauung means), but when I stand before a mural in a museum, Brigitte doesn’t approach me and ask “What are you intuiting there?” The word has come to have another meaning for us, with a contrarian etymology: it is a message, a tuition, from within. Thus it is the soul’s own grasp of something—which need not be sensory in character at all. Indeed, intuition is a kind of inner knowledge; it is always a feeling quite stripped of any visual or sensory modes.

Kant himself asserts that “all of our knowledge begins with experience.” Well and good. But he limits experience to the sensory whereas experience includes, for us, ranges of reality the senses know nothing about. If you stay on the reservation, you’ll never see what is beyond the borderzone.

Two Kinds of Dualities

Among the many dualities philosophy and ordinary speech present, some are highly time-dependent, others are, you might say, are timeless, sub specie aeternitatis. To pick two on each side, potency-and-act and being-and-becoming are of the time-dependent kind. The living-and-the-dead and phenomenon-and-noumenon, belong to the timeless category. Let’s deal with these last first.

A person might think that living-and-dead are most definitely time-dependent, arguing that everything living dies and does so within time. But the odd thing is, we can’t be sure. Bodies most certainly die, but what are bodies made of? They’re made of elements. Elements do not die. What constitutes a living being is something more than organic elements, characterized by having carbon as a constituent. A corpse still has all those elements the dying person had a moment before dying. Life has fled, as we say, but until we know just what it is, we can’t say that it has disappeared. If life is a transcending force, living-and-dead are permanently here. Only the forms change.

Phenomenon-and-noumenon, the Kantian categories, meaning that which is capable of being perceived and that, behind it, which cannot, the thing-in-itself, are more obviously independent of time. They co-exist. Thus they point at a basic definition of reality.

Turning to the other side, potency-and-act, the Aristotelian categories, are embedded in time. Potency is a capacity to change. It’s a sleeping power and, when it is unfolding, becoming actual, it is transformed from invisibility to manifestation. Becoming-and-being are equivalent categories. But becoming is impossible to picture without time. Aristotle’s word for potential was dunamis, thus “capacity, possibility.” As it unfolds into act, we have dynamism, a word we derive from dunamis. We’re really dealing here with change, very much a here and now sort of thing, arising from philosophical attempts at explaining motions of sundry kinds. They do not tell us anything about the cosmos, which is always in motion too.

For me the timeless dualities produce more food for thought—because I sense that there is something beyond the here and now. The very abstract, modern formulation I most value is the duality offered by David Bohm, the physicist.† In attempts to make room for intelligence in the Cosmic Whole—but it can be extended to include life and spirit—he suggested two orders in the universe. One is conditioned, the other unconditioned. Call this duality necessity-and-freedom. Intelligence—and life, and spirit—belong to the latter. And these may be thought of as existent within the time flow as well as without.

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†I never tire of trying to sell Bohm’s wonderful book, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge, 1996, wherein the relevant passage on this subject is on pages 50-53.

Phenomenon - More Notes

That word, phenomenon, has come to be associated with the purely physical in the eighteenth century when Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) made a sharp distinction between phenomena and noumena, the appearances of things (die Erscheinungen) and things-in-themselves (die Dinge-an-Sich). We only have access to phenomena, Kant taught, and that by means of the five physical senses. Noumena are inaccessible to us, utterly unknowable. He thus split reality in two. Nothing is accessible to us except by the senses, but what the senses tell us has a kind of mysterious and hard reality behind it.

This illustrates the way philosophers can influence perception—especially those philosophers who are lifted into prominence, a social process actually. The word he used for thing-in-itself, noumenon, in the Greek once meant either “thing perceived” or “what is known.” The linkage implied between perception and knowledge in this word is not emphasized in that other Greek word, phenomenon, “that which appears.” But that which is perceived is certainly that which appears. Hence Kant’s exploitation of the word had an intention: he used the second sense of noumenon and restricted the word phenomenon to the first meaning of noumenon. In the Greek they are equivalent, but one carries more emphasis on knowledge.

But is there any legitimacy in thinking that phenomena hide something utterly inaccessible? And how then do we deal with perceptions in which vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch are not genuinely present? Such is certainly the case in hypnagogic visions, for instance, of which I mentioned one the other day here and have discussed the subject at greater length here. Is vision with eyes closed some as yet undiscovered sixth sense?

This subject is important for a reason. Our current bias to narrow the meaning of the word phenomenon to the senses absolutely forces us to regard any other experience, however real it is, to the region of illusion. This served the spirit of the enlightenment and the succeeding era of materialism very well. A consequence of this has been that we’ve marked as Off Limits an extensive range of reality with possibly very serious consequences. I’ll expand on that as the New Year takes hold and starts to run.

Toying With Time

So far as we can tell, time has no frequency—but everything else does. Everything else has a cyclic pattern of existence and a dual character: things manifest as waves, which have periodicity (frequency) but also simultaneously manifest as particles. The time dimension happily accommodates either version of reality. It is necessary for measuring frequency, which we do in units of time. At the same time it happily accepts particles too. Thus we can at least imagine a totally static and stationary particle, never changing at all, but it also requires time in that form of it we call duration. Movement combined with change gives us a sense of time that flows—but it’s not time but everything else that does the flowing. Maddening, in a way. Not surprisingly, some conclude that there isn’t any such thing as time—by itself; it is simply a necessary aspect of human perception. Immanuel Kant had this take on time.

You don’t have time for this philosophical twaddle? Okay, click away and speed up your time. Time also has a subjective aspect. We can accelerate it by increasing our stimulation or we can slow it down. Just take ten breaths, slowly counting up to five on each inhale, five on each exhale. That’ll do it. The less we do and the more monotonous our action, the slower we perceive time’s flow—or the nothingness that it is.

Our own mode of being is yoked to cycles. The most basic wave we know is that between birth and death, more precisely between awakening to consciousness and our passing. All through this wave we are individuals, particles. And we cycle between sleep and wakefulness.

I got off on this not very fruitful tangent because it occurred to me, after the last post, that higher religions differ from earlier forms because they have very distinct time dimensions, whereas earlier forms of religiousness have annual cycles matched to the seasons. In Hindu cosmology, great cycles follow each other. In the Judeo-Christian and Muslim (call it Western) traditions, one cycle suffices. It begins in a creation and ends in the final judgment. The Mazdean religion (Zoroastrianism), apparently the oldest of prophetic religions, also begins with a creation; Ahura Mazda’s creation arouses a cosmic opponent, Ahriman; a great war between Darkness and the Light commences; the cycle ends when the Saoshyant (the Zoroastrian Savior) appears at the final defeat of Ahriman. Zoroaster lived in the period between 799 and 750 BC. Our materialist cosmology permits either a single great cycle, ending in heat death, or many cycles each beginning in a Big Bang and ending in a Big Crunch. A Big Crunch is in our future if the mass of the universe is sufficient eventually to slow down, stop, and the reverse the expansion we claim to see as a consequence of a Big Bang that started things about 14 billion years ago. Civilization produces big cyclic cosmologies.

Mazdaism, incidentally, later gave rise to an interesting concept of God. The religion is uncompromisingly dualistic. The Persian imagination projected an infinite column of Light in one direction, of Darkness in the other, and the created world situated at their boundaries, the mixing region. We might call that the border zone. This view produces a tremendous logical tension that most humans feel. Our concept of God is unitary. Thus, over time, a heretical version of Mazdaism appeared, Zervanism. In this conception a divine person higher than Mazda and Ahriman was imagined as the father of these two. His name was Zurvan, Time. Time has thus at least in one cultural tradition been imagined as the Absolute Ultimate, beyond good and evil.

I find it interesting that the Hermetic saying (“as above, so below”) applies here as well as elsewhere. The individual’s cycle is the same as that of the great cosmic process in which the individual exists. The individual appears to have been “created” at birth—no memory (for most) of having been before. It ends in a great final battle or “end times,” death, which is supposed to be followed by a judgment. With these facts before us, and with the individual experience much more accessible (and unavoidable—as sure as death and taxes) it is easy to dismiss cosmologies by simply saying that they are a projection of individual fate onto the collective. The truth of the matter may be more interesting. What if Hermes was right? I would suggest that the reader visit this site and play with some of the fractal images presented there. The organization of reality may indeed be analogous to the fractal, where the ever smaller retains the basic patterns of the larger, while yet always changing…despite the steady flow of time which is the ultimate dimension.