Q&A: The Barrier Between “Intuition” and “Experience”
The Barrier Between “Intuition” and “Experience”
Question
Hello Rabbi,
I’ve read quite a bit of what you’ve written, and if I understood correctly (though of course I may not have, and I’d be glad if you corrected me), the Rabbi advocates the following:
- A person has a basic cognitive intuition which, in itself, serves as some indication in philosophical inquiry, without further justification. For example—the intuition that there is an external universe beyond our awareness, or the intuition that we are free to choose.
- A human being contains a spiritual, metaphysical component, which in some way constitutes a part of God (if I remember correctly, the Rabbi spoke about this in the introduction to one of the books in the trilogy, regarding tzimtzum).
- This is less a doctrine and more of a general attitude—a certain alienation from the fields of psychology/existentialism, and the like. Or let’s say, a slight contempt for any inquiry that is not rational inquiry.
My question is: how do these views fit together? If intuition, which is not backed by logical inquiry, has spiritual value, why confine it within the narrow bounds of rationality? That is, if it can be said that in some way our consciousness (or a component of it) is connected to God, doesn’t the inner investigation of experience have significance?
It’s important to emphasize: this is not to say that the existing genres necessarily provide some suitable and coherent inquiry into the matter. Likewise, I’m not talking about therapeutic significance in the style of “if someone finds it nice, good for them,” but about the value of investigating the truth regarding God, His manifestations, and what He wants from us.
Thank you in advance.
Answer
By the same token, you could ask why we shouldn’t accept what a medium says, if we already accept intuition. And likewise you could ask why, in my view, one should accept what one sees with one’s eyes (why are you challenging only intuition?).
In my view, relying on intuition stems from the fact that I understand it to be a reliable and valid cognitive tool. By the way, this is not my personal view; nobody can really disagree with it unless he is a complete skeptic, or simply unaware of how much he himself uses intuition. My innovation is to recognize this and to try to offer an explanation for it (namely, that this is non-sensory cognition).
As for your point, there are situations (such as spiritual feelings) in which, in my opinion, this does not apply. Of course, if someone has a similar sense regarding spiritual feelings, he will probably believe them. I do not have such a sense. And in my opinion, his sense too is usually not cognition but rather an illusion or social conditioning. The fact is that these feelings exist mainly among people whose surrounding society pushes them in that direction.
I also never said that a given intuition is always and necessarily admissible, with no possibility of critique. It is very important to examine intuition critically, precisely because of these phenomena (of illusions that masquerade as intuition). What cannot be criticized is the very validity of intuitions themselves (that is, the tool itself).
Discussion on Answer
1. I don’t see the importance of the distinction between the two claims. This is what seems most reasonable to me, and the reason I trust it is that there is cognition here. So no, I didn’t understand.
2. True. But not spiritual intuitions of a person who feels that a miracle happened to him when there is a natural explanation for it, or that Elijah appeared to him in a dream or while awake, or that he communicates with aliens.
3. My claim is that it cannot be criticized because the criticism itself is also based on intuition. Intuition is the framework for any discussion we conduct, like logic. The only alternative is to fall silent in complete skepticism, and that’s that.
Thanks. 1. So it seems to me that I did indeed understand you correctly, but I don’t really know how to add anything beyond repeating what was said.
2. Thanks, if so, what would you say about Abraham—should he have listened to prophecy?… And is it proper for us to trust him on that?
3. If so, this sounds a bit like the laws of logic, such that if we can think of an intuitive thought that cannot be thought otherwise, you’d simply call it part of logic, right?
Intuitions are ultimately just shortcuts shaped by prior thinking.
Had there been no prior thinking, that intuition would not exist.
Example: what is the probability that among 22 people chosen at random, two of them have birthdays on the same day of the year?
Ordinary intuition says the probability is much lower than 50%, since there are 365 days….
But a person who has solved many problems in statistics (other than this one, of course) has developed an intuition in the matter, and perhaps he’ll be able to say that it’s close and needs to be calculated.
Intuitions are really just a shortcut.
When orderly reasoning yields an opposite result, the sense of obviousness itself throws up its hands and concedes to the conclusions of the orderly reasoning (this is an empirical observation: when orderly reasoning reaches clear results, the initial evidence agrees that those results are the correct ones). What we are dealing with here is a place where the evidence (or, at lower degrees of certainty, the intuition) insists and stands its ground, or where there simply are no explicit arguments against it. The claim that there are cases in which intuition fails is of course true, but so is that true of every other thinking tool, and therefore we have no choice but to use it cautiously and not throw it in the trash once and for all.
Once you understand how intuition develops, you also understand how much weight to give it.
Intuition is a combination of emotion and intellect. (Emotion works fast, thought is procedural and slow, and therefore there is special importance to emotion shaped by intellect. Both fast and smart.)
More precisely, intuition is emotion shaped by the intellect; the more intellect there was, the more precise the shaping, meaning the intuition will be right more often than it is wrong.
The intuition of an expert in his field on a matter within his expertise is not comparable to the intuition of an ordinary person who has not dealt with the subject.
And therefore in such a case we give much greater weight to that expert’s intuition, even if he did not sit down and make an exact calculation.
But if from the outset we are dealing with an intuition shaped by intellect that was itself unfounded, then that intuition will be like that intellect: unfounded.
The intellect is ultimately a thinking tool, and if we are dealing with reality, then the intellect has a basis; but if we are dealing with things that exist in a person’s fantasies, they have no basis. And that is how one should relate to intuitions shaped by those kinds of intellects.
That is, in the end, good intuition is intuition shaped by thinking about well-founded things.
(Intuitions of experts in demons and ghosts are not interesting, even if they are experts, since we are dealing with fantasies.)
That is true, and I also understand and agree with your allusions and references, but not all intuitions are of that kind. Kant’s synthetic a priori judgments (from which the main force of Rabbi Michi’s position comes) are definitely not of that kind. And infer from this and apply it everywhere.
I wouldn’t call such things intuitions but prejudices, because those “items of knowledge” are based on ancient drives or on evolutionary shortcuts.
Of course, evolutionary shortcuts should not be dismissed entirely, since they are grounded in reality and the need for survival—but one should not assign them weight beyond their original purpose, which is survival and reproduction.
And thus religions are basically founded on those evolutionary shortcuts: solutions to fear of the unknown, and the good feeling and security granted to the believer. None of this has any intellectual basis.
And where does the idea come from that everything true is a product of evolutionary shortcuts? Is that pure logic, or does it contain an element of assumption (of course it does!)? In addition, I refer you to Taylor’s train example, which Rabbi Michi constantly cites.
“And where does the idea come from that everything true is a product of evolutionary shortcuts?”
I said the opposite: that we are dealing with prejudices, and that is sufficient reason to reject their truth—but not automatically, since they are connected to reality through the genes that were preserved thanks to survival and reproduction.
For example, that is the only consideration that gives some weight to information coming from the senses. There is no other rational consideration that can do this. But from that consideration one cannot come and claim that we see all of reality, because our vision developed in order to survive, so it is reasonable that we see only the range needed for our survival, and there are other ranges that we do not see.
From this argument, and because vision is very highly developed, it follows that with regard to the other, more primitive and less developed intuitions, one should not rely on them at all for generalizations about reality, as religion does.
Sorry for jumping into the discussion,
Rabbi, you define intuition as whatever seems reasonable and correct to your understanding, right?
And to that you only add the innovation that intuition is also something that “sees,” like the eyes do. And therefore it is proper to trust it.
So if I’m right about this, in my opinion this is rather confusing in your teaching, because many times you mix the two together and people understand you to mean only the second, while you also mean the first.
As though it were the same thing, and a bit tautological… but in some sense it’s an additional layer. Hope you understand.
2. I think you actually do accept spiritual intuitions, because the Rabbi mentions this when speaking about kabbalists and Kabbalah and so on. Have you changed your mind?
3. By the way, what do you mean in the final sentence: “What cannot be criticized is the very validity of intuitions themselves (that is, the tool itself).” Do you mean only from the standpoint of our experience—that we experience some things as seeming true—or in an essential sense, that intuitions really do correctly predict reality (like analogies and so on)? Because earlier you raise a narrow possibility of criticizing it, and in your book Truth and Unstable you raise at the outset many difficulties about why to trust it unless there exists some coordinating factor between them and the world, like ideal vision or divine providence—so it would seem there is plenty of room to criticize it.