“Our perceptions of people are mostly intuitive. We take them in as a whole—accent, clothes, build, expression, complexion, voice, stance, gestures, the regional, social, and class cues—all delivers itself at once, as a full gestalt. Intuitions occur; we do not make them. They come to us as a sudden idea, a definite judgment, a grasped meaning. Mystical thinking attributes this forcefulness, which produces my insight, to a power in the thing. The power in the thing establishes the reality, even the physicality, of the invisible.
However, “Because intuitions are clear, quick, and full, and therefore so convincing, they can be wholly wrong, missing the mark just as quickly and completely as they can get it right. Jung, who placed intuition (with thinking, feeling, and sensation) among the four functions of consciousness, made a major point of intuition’s need for its brother and sister functions. But Jung’s ironic realism regarding intuition was not shared by the idealist strain of intuitionist philosophers.”*
“Intuition is also called upon for explaining creativity and genius, the inexplicable accounted for by a process that is itself inexplicable. But the idolization of intuition neglects especially its darkest shadow, the intuitive opportunism of the sociopath, and the clear, quick and full seizures of the psychopathic criminal whose unmediated and self-evident propositions produce wholly arbitrary and casual deeds of violence, without logic, feeling, or appreciation of real facts.
“Intuition may propose a way, but does not assure right action or even accurate perception. Our mythic sensibility may pick up the authentic tidings of inward things, but only checking the facts, looking back at tradition, thinking carefully, and valuing by feeling can assure authenticity. For centuries the Roman Catholic Church has used these methods for testing intuitive claims of sanctity and examining miracles.
“This excursion on intuition was necessary for three reasons. First, we needed an acceptable term for the kind of perception that sees mythically, that sees through the visible, and that claims insight into the invisible. We needed to make psychologically plausible the idea of mythical sensibility, equivalent to that of math and music so that reliance on myth in this book may carry conviction. To grasp or be grasped by myth you need intuition. The relevance of a myth to life strikes like a revelation or a self-evident proposition, which cannot be demonstrated by logic or induced from factual evidence. The best evidence is anecdote, the telling example that lights up an obscure idea in a clear intuitive flash.
“The second reason for this excursus was to show a common function at work in the three bridges, math, music, and myth, and also in the realm of aesthetics or beauty. It is intuition that gives them each their instantaneity and sureness.
James Hillman writes: "The third reason takes us again to biographies and to a terrible tension between intuition and tuition in many exemplars of the acorn. Emerson wrote: ‘We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition whilst all later teachings are tuitions.’ Emerson opposes the two, seeing intuition as not-tuition. Insight and learning, the heart’s imagination and classroom study, do not have to be opposed. Nevertheless, Emerson correctly intuited that strong division in many of the eminent who chose intuition over tuition. They quit school; they hated it; they wouldn’t or couldn’t learn; they were thrown out; their teachers walked out on them: intuition at war with tuition.
“Not every child will profit from missing school, but for us who watch over them and supposedly guide them, this door to the invisible factors at work in their disorders must be kept open, just in case it is an angel knocking and not merely a malady.
“Remember Jung’s remark: ‘The Gods have become diseases.’ To see the angel in the malady requires an eye for the invisible, a certain blinding one eye and an opening of the other to elsewhere. It is impossible to see the angel unless you first have a notion of it; otherwise the child is simply stupid, willful, or pathological. Even in the sciences, you only begin to see the phenomenon in the sky or under the microscope if someone first describes what you are looking for; we need instruction in the art of seeing. Then the invisible becomes suddenly visible, right in your squinting eye."
No comments:
Post a Comment