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Key points
- Intuition is not the same as instinct.
- In Zen, a kōan is a paradox that encourages the student to connect the dots by subverting the rational mind.
- Philosophers such as Socrates and Plato emphasized the importance of intuition.
At a wine bar in Corsica, I ordered a glass and shared some low-key wine talk with the chap who brought it to me. After some time, I ordered another glass, and we spoke again. I like testing my intuitions, so I said, at point blank, ‘You’ve written poetry, haven’t you?’ The chap, taken aback, confirmed that he did write poetry, and even that some of it had been published.
‘Intuition’ derives from the Latin tuere, ‘to look at, watch over’, and is related to ‘tutor’ and ‘tuition’ and perhaps also to the Sanskrit tavas, ‘strong, powerful’. Broadly speaking, an intuition is a disposition to believe evolved without hard evidence or conscious deliberation. I say ‘disposition to believe’ rather than ‘belief’ because an intuition is usually held with less certainty or firmness than a belief; and ‘believe’ rather than ‘know’ because an intuition is not justified in the normal sense, and not necessarily true or accurate. It is not just that intuition is evolved without hard evidence or conscious deliberation, but that hard evidence and conscious deliberation can actually impede it. ‘I am not absentminded’ said GK Chesterton, ‘it is presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.’
Intuition Versus Instinct
Intuition is often confused with instinct. Instinct is not a feeling about something, but a tendency towards a particular behavior that is innate and common to the species. ‘Anna stepped back, intuiting that the dog would follow its instinct and bite.’ Although instincts tend to be associated with animals, human beings also have quite a few, even if they are, or can be, strongly modified by culture, temperament, and experience. Examples of human instincts include any number of phobias, territoriality, tribal loyalty, and the urge to procreate and rear their young—even in the face of all the inconveniences, compromises, and costs involved. These instincts are often disguised or sublimed, for example, tribal loyalty may find an outlet in sport, and the urge to procreate may take the more rarefied form of romantic love. Aristotle says in the Rhetoric that human beings have an instinct for truth, and in the Poetics that we have an instinct for rhythm and harmony. No doubt he overestimated us.
The Psychology of Intuition
If intuition is not instinct, how does it operate? An intuition involves a coming together of facts, concepts, experiences, thoughts, and feelings that are loosely linked but too profuse, disparate, and peripheral for deliberate or rational processing. As this process is sub- or semi-conscious and the workings are hidden, an intuition appears to arise out of nothing, ex nihilo, and cannot, or at least not immediately or readily, be justified. But what makes an intuition especially hard to support is that it is founded less on evidence and arguments than on the interconnection of things. It hangs, delicately and invisibly, like a spider’s web. The surfacing of an intuition, which can also occur in dream or meditation, is usually associated with a concordant feeling such as joy or dread, or simple pride and pleasure at the supreme cognitive and human achievement that an intuition represents.
If this is how intuition works, then we can encourage intuition by expanding the number and range of our experiences, and by tearing down the psychological barriers, such as biases, fears, and taboos, that are preventing them from coalescing. We should also give ourselves more time and space for free association: my own intuitive faculty is sharpest when showering, travelling, or daydreaming, and when I am well rested. Finally, it would help if we actually believed in our ability to form intuitions. We have micro-intuitions all the time, about what to eat for breakfast, what to wear, what road to take, whom to talk to, what to say, how to respond, and so on. I call them micro-intuitions because they depend on a large number of subtle variables, and escape, or largely escape, conscious processing. But what about the macro-intuitions? Never in the history of humanity has the intuitive faculty been more neglected or devalued than in our rational-scientific age.
Zen
As a writer, some of what I think are my best lines are intuitions, and work by prompting the same open-ended associations in the reader. Similarly, in Zen practice, a kōan is a paradox or riddle that encourages the apprentice to connect the dots by subverting the rational and egotistic mind.
One day, a monk said to Joshu, “Master, I have just entered the monastery. Please give me instructions.”
Joshu replied, “Have you had your breakfast?”
“Yes, I have.”
“Then wash your bowls.”
The monk understood something.
Before reading on, try to work it out for yourself. You may have to shift gears, or pass into neutral.
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What the monk understood is that life is to be found in all of life; that life, at all times, is right in front of us, waiting to be lived. Suddenly it is so obvious, but it is not something that the rational, task-driven mind seems able to grasp or hold on to for more than a moment.
Socrates and Plato
Socrates is often upheld as a paradigm of reason and philosophy. Yet, he seldom claimed any real knowledge. All he had, he said, was a daimonion or ‘divine something’, an inner voice or sense that prevented him from making grave mistakes such as getting involved in politics or escaping Athens after his trial and conviction: ‘This is the voice which I seem to hear murmuring in my ears, like the sound of the flute in the ears of the mystic.’
In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates goes so far as to say:
Madness, provided it comes as the gift of heaven, is the channel by which we receive the greatest blessings… the men of old who gave things their names saw no disgrace or reproach in madness; otherwise they would not have connected it with the name of the noblest of arts, the art of discerning the future, and called it the manic art… So according to the evidence provided by our ancestors, madness is a nobler thing than sober sense… madness comes from God, whereas sober sense is merely human.
In the Meno, which features Meno in conservation with Socrates, Plato explores the nature of virtue. After Socrates has applied his dialectic method, Meno reaches the realization that he is unable to define virtue, even though he has delivered innumerable speeches on the subject. He compares Socrates to the flat torpedo fish, which torpifies or numbs all those who come near it: ‘And I think that you are very wise in not leaving Athens, for if you did in other places as you do here, you would be cast into prison as a magician.’ Socrates, the paradigm of reason and philosophy, is also the very embodiment of a kōan!
Meno asks Socrates how he will look for virtue if he does not know what it is:
And how will you enquire, Socrates, into that which you do not know? What will you put forth as the subject of enquiry? And if you find what you want, how will you ever know that this is the thing which you did not know?
In reply, Socrates says that he has heard from certain wise men and women ‘who spoke of things divine’ that the soul is immortal, has been born often, and has seen all things on earth and below. Since the soul already knows everything, ‘learning’ consists merely in recollecting that which is already known. Socrates traces a square in the dirt and asks one of Meno’s slave boys a series of questions that prompt the uneducated boy, in effect, to derive Pythagoras’ theorem. For Socrates, the boy’s performance demonstrates that there is at least something to his theory.
Aristotle
Reason is not the only road to knowledge. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle says that the types of disposition [hexis] by which the soul can arrive at truth are five in number: [1] scientific knowledge [episteme], which arrives at necessary and eternal truths by deduction and induction; [2] art or technical skills [techne], which is a rational capacity to make; [3] practical wisdom [phronesis], which is a rational capacity to secure the good life, and includes the political art; [4] intuition [nous], which apprehends the first principles or unarticulated truths from which scientific knowledge is derived; and [5] philosophic wisdom [sophia], which is scientific knowledge combined with intuition of the things that are highest by nature.
What is interesting in Aristotle’s schema is that scientific knowledge (and reason more broadly) is not independent of intuition. Rather, it is intuition that makes scientific knowledge possible. Centuries later, Locke made a similar point in contrasting intuition and demonstration: demonstration requires conscious steps, but each step is or should be intuitive. At the very least, intuition underpins the reasoning process, since fundamental axioms and elementary rules of inference cannot be established by any other means—and, of course, the same is also true of our fundamental moral beliefs, of ‘practical wisdom’. Today there is a summit in Antarctica that has been named ‘Intuition Peak’ in honour of the role of intuition in the advancement of human knowledge.
But one important caveat to climb down from this high point. If you put a right-wing person in a room with a left-wing one, or a religious person with a non-religious one, you will soon find that their intuitions conflict.
Intuition can and should be used to generate hypotheses, but never to justify claims.
Read more in Hypersanity: Thinking Beyond Thinking.
