On the Phenomenology of Intuition. I.

On the Phenomenology of Intuition.

I really hope that I did not neglect my Intuition this semester in favour of my Rationality. It’s quite possible that my Intuition remained intact but my Rationality simply grew to incredible proportions. Hence the very structure and nature of many of my dreams. And yet hopefully over the course of this month I will break out of that structure and take the necessary action, without necessarily axcessive* premeditation, and I only hope that THIS is not excessive right now.

Obviously, to a considerable degree, I had reason to Abandon Intuitionism, and that might have been from pressure from my professor, and in fact maybe several of my professors; However, I don’t think that I actually carried through with this, judging by the decisions that I made, which were for the MOST part fairly informed, even if I was not Conscious all the time that I WAS following my Intuition primarily. It’s all so possible that owing to my personality type being an Introverted Feeling type this Intuitive aspect of my personality might all ways be secondary to the more Rational aspect of my personality, which is my Value system, which are my Feelings. That’s probably the key thing, that if anything is being blocked right now in my system is responsible for the blockage; Our greatest strengths sometimes become our greatest weaknesses.

Now, that being said:

It seems obvious that the Intuition is one of the strongest functions available to the Human Being. It is our direct contact with the Unconscious. And anyone who calls this into question based upon the grounds of a priori reasoning should really try to apply an a posteriori method before totally disregarding it for everyone. Yes, maybe some people are better off NOT following their Intuition. And yet, for myself, I have found it to be just as glamorous a way of life, and just as rewarding, as Jung had predicted. And that is not just by my OWN standards, but by the standards of other people, in terms of SUCCESS. The best example I can think of Immediately is how I knew intuitively how to arrange the tracks on our album; That is: The demo I recorded with Kresten. Now, I had no way of knowing, even, that one of the songs from this recording would be dropped! Either intentionally or unintentionally [It doesn’t really make a difference when we are dealing with the Unconscious Mind] by our producer, Ro White. Thereby, cementing, one of my strongest songs, “Under the Radar”, as the center-piece of the album. And in many ways this five-song album that we came out with [you know, we were originally planning a six-song album, and then a seven-song album, and then again a six-song album.] This album has an incredible degree of Artistic Consistency and Intricacy running through it. That probably no other arrangement would have had. And we know this from experience because, while we don’t have another arrangement available to us, and trying to make a new arrangement would all ways be the product of a Socratic bias, we know that there are some albums with very good songs on them which just regretably don’t have the right order. And immediately when I introduced my proposed song order to Kresten, he all so Intuitively settled upon it as the best of all arrangements. Of course, he had Some contributing factor in this; he did, in fact, decide what the first track of the album would be, which I totally agreed with him on.

That being said:

There’s all ways, all though, the temptation to question one’s own intuitions through Reasoning, which is one of the projects of Speech and Debate, according to my old friend, Paras Kumar. And of course there is no way of knowing exactly what the original thought process or the original rationale WAS, or if there even WAS an original rationale outside of just the intuitive Feeling. I can TRY to force my mind into those Depths, to uncover what my original plan WAS, but I’ll never know for Certain. What’s more: This gets into the same rutt as Usually the Socratic Ideal does, because: The moment that I’ve all ready stumbled upon a given feeling, a given sentiment that an alternative arrangement might have produced – at that moment I am all ready thinking: Wait! Didn’t I cheat? Because I’d have to admit to myself that whilst trying to imagine my original thought process I’d taken into consideration elements of our finished work which I could not have sensibly, according to a Rationalistic frame-work, predicted, prior to conception.

*I confess that through this Joycean/Jungian spelling I am taking Camus’ Leap.

Dm.A.A.