Developing intuition: Another viewpoint
This article Developing intuition has another viewpoint about intuition which is worth considering.It’s written by a mathematician, not normally the sort of academic activity which you would suppose would lend itself to speculation about intuition as a useful tool.
Be prepared for a surprise!
For example, he says that,
“Intuition is always making connections and seeing possibilities. Invariably most of these connections and possibilities are meaningless, nonsense or false. But that is how intuition must work. If it is constrained by what makes sense logically than it cannot do its job. Intellect and other functions are needed to evaluate the work of intuition, but they must not limit the scope of its functioning.”
His main concern throughout is that intuition is valuable but only when it is used in conjunction with the intellect. How true!! I’ve said many time that intuition is not infallible! (Yet that is one of the major ’scientific’ complaints about it.) If intuition truly is one normal and natural part of being human then doesn’t it make just the most obvious sense that it should be used in conjunction with all the other faculties??
Anyway, leaping lightly from my soapbox and returning to the article, the author makes this fascinating point:
After all intuition can be extremely distracting. Instead of focusing minds on the material at hand it leads off in all directions. We need the discipline of focus, but we equally need the discipline of intuitive rambling. We need to give space for and encouragement to both. Formal education almost universally discourages intuitive wandering. No doubt one of the effects of Ritalin widely prescribed to children for `Attention Deficit Disorder’ is to weaken intuition.
I’m liking this person more and more!! I agree with the three ways he says to develop intuition: provide the life experience necessary to furnish it; use it; and develop the archetypal images which it uses (he suggests fairy tales for young children). The whole approach is a sane one. He (I’m assuming it’s a he, but go ahead and prove me wrong), is all for encouraging this faculty in society. Yet he realizes that, to have intuition accepted as a valid process in problem solving and in life in general, there is a need for it to become more developed and differentiated. “We must know when and how to use it and we must know with some, albeit imperfect, reliability when it leads us too far afield from what is practically possible.”
Now I know that he(?) is talking primarily about problem solving in this link. Yet much of what he says is of value in broader terms. If we scoot over the importance of the computer which is touted, we arrive at the following conclusion:
People with powerful intuition that have played a major role in science like Einstein and Jung are usually in Jung’s terminology thinking
types. Their greatest strength is their powerful intuition, but it is only through the dominance of intellect that they are able to digest the fruits of that intuition to a form that can be appreciated by our intellectually dominated culture. To get beyond this stage is no small task. We have regressed in the institutional structures to develop intuition since the middle ages. It is not possible for anyone to say what a world with intuition and intellect in more equal roles would be like other than it will be markedly different and far richer than the world we know.
Ladies and gentlemen, I draw your attention to the very last sentence. Read and re-read it. For it is true, beyond a shadow of a doubt. If we, as a culture, are ever able to combine the two aspects of ourselves together in such a way that they are virtually invisible as separates, then things would be so different as to be unthinkable now.
By relying on our intellect, as a culture we are preventing ourselves from accessing whole areas of experience and from ways of fully expressing ourselves. Honing our intellect is fine, as long as it is not at the expense of any of our other faculties.
I seem to remember a quote from the poet Robert Graves which decries the barbarity of the present culture:
“To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind: civilization implies the graceful relation of all varieties of experience to a central humane system of thought. The present age is particularly barbaric… [The poet’s] function is truth, whereas the scholar’s is fact. Fact is not to be gainsaid; one may put it this way, that fact is a Tribune of the People with no legislative right, but only the right of veto. Fact is not truth…”
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I found you when surfing around at random.
Funny how I was just pondering how to connect the intuitive w/ the intellect. It’s such a coincidence.
Ah! But was it purely coincidence? That opens up a whole new area. What is coincidence and can it exist only in a universe which is not random? The key point, however, is that you found something which helped you. That is good. That you commented upon it is even better. Thank you!