Talking about intuition…
The last post, about cricket and art and intuition set me to thinking
There is a real difficulty in speaking about intuition. I’m not talking here about the way to get a hunch or knowing
We have real difficulty using our ‘normal’ language when talking about it. We say stupid things like “I have this feeling”, or “somehow I just knew…” See how vague and useless that is? It doesn’t tell us anything, does it?
So what can we do about that? It’s not as easy as it first appears, at least to my eyes it doesn’t.
If we are really going to be able to describe our intuition and how it works for us and how we recognize as such, it would seem that we are going to have to go into more interesting areas of language and communication.
If language is a method of communicating anything, then why not ditch the old grammatically sound method when it comes to intuition? Why not do something different?
Hang on there! I think it’s already been done, hasn’t it? What about artists? What about composers? What about poets?
Aren’t they simply using another method of communication, another language if you will, to tell us how they feel about something, how they view it, how they react and respond to the world around them? And isn’t that what intuition is anyway: a method of reacting to the world around us? I know it can be much more than that, but it contains that aspect at least.
So shouldn’t we consider the arts as a method of communication about our intuition? Now, wouldn’t that be a great way of sharing our viewpoints on the world? No longer abstract, no more ‘art is strange’ or ‘I can’t understand this music / painting / sculpture’. Instead a recognition of a shared viewpoint and a means of expressing it to each other!!
Popularity: 25% [?]
I like your line of thought..but even if intuition was expressed in the form of art, it would not help in our understanding of either. By putting two equally abstract entities together, you cannot expect either to be more understandable, only comparable.
And also, since language is an attempt to erase the abstractness of communication through art, going back in the other direction does not help.
OK….to a degree. The main point I was hoping to make was that artistic expression is simply another way of sharing feelings, the vagueness of intuitive ways of seeing the world.
Much as we can all understand a little when someone says “I just have this feeling…”, so we can all understand a little when we hear, for example, Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. It won’t be the same for most people, but it will be, as you said, comparable. And the greater the comparisons, the closer the shared non-verbal experiences become….I hope!