The Unfathomed: Follow Up to The Philosophy of Intuition

A belief that has made itself dogmatic, after some time, must then question itself. This is always, and it is forever. 

I want to briefly speak on how invested I have recently felt in poetry, despite having no classes in such an area. I have taken poetry writing classes and poetry analysis classes in the past, but it has been some time, and perhaps it is now that my curiosity has gotten the better of me, and thus I am intuitively inclined to reevaluate my worship of this art form. 

Molly Peacock, a contemporary writer, a dual-citizen of Canada and America, and a former president of the Poetry Society of America, writes in her poem titled “Altruism” about a type of love that we must decide rationally, only after grappling with ourselves enough to know that love perhaps often contradicts rationality. Her concluding line, “…love become a decision,” is contrasted by her propensity to be inquisitive about her own intuition on the matter within the poem: “What if we got outside ourselves and there / really was an outside out there, not just / our insides turned inside out? What if there / really were a you beyond me…” That is to say, to love is to possess the most expansive intuition we ever have as people. I realize how vague and broad this verb is, but it seems irrelevant to delve into the vast details of what the word itself means—after all, I am assured that each of us has an intuition about it already. And we know to trust ourselves more than we believe we ought to. Peacock seems to chew on this abstraction of love as a basic intuition until it becomes something rational, which I will argue is the point at which we determine that love is so striking.

Therefore, directly building upon my prior essay, “The Unfathomed: The Philosophy of Intuition,” I will extrapolate my essential ideas in order to prove that, when we experience what I call an intuition, it always comes across as the exact same feeling, regardless of its context, until we have rationalized it cognitively in terms of its validity and consequence. 

Firstly, I will use the immediate example within grasp—my recent search for poetry that I had yet to encounter after several months of not engaging with poetry at all. It seems to have crept back to me as soon as I started to forget that, within poetry, we find questions that we have not thought to ask, but once we read them, once we ponder them ourselves, we realize that we have wanted to ask the same thing. This is, of course, an intuition itself, but one of former absence, only recognizable once the void in our soul is filled by the question before us on the page. Furthermore, I will highlight the process itself of being drawn to poetry again. As soon as I fulfill my intuition based on my soul’s expressed need, I am enriched by such beautiful art, which in turn allows me to feel more comfortable pursuing my own thoughts. One might claim that this is simply self-fulfilling, and surely it is to some degree, but this has to do with some subsequent cognitive rationalization coinciding with my reading and not with my intuition informing me to read more poetry. It seems tantamount to saying that poetry is not an emotion, but that there appears to be a poetic emotion which I can jot down; in the same way, an intuition is not a cause (rather, our rational minds causally interact with the extent of our intuitive feelings), but there is an intuitive cause of everything. We act primarily on our trustworthy intuition, or at least we should.

Then, can we truly rationalize love? Does the extent of rationality we find within our intuition matter? And is this the space from which we designate what makes good art? Such would be the next points of contention.

I will answer these questions, which quickly become deceptive concerns regarding my argument that intuition guides us always, by laying out the following:

1. An intuition is not a cognitive process but one of the soul.
2. Rationalizing the probability that an intuition is warranted or not, as well as the extent to which we can convince ourselves to feel its influence, are cognitive processes.
3. An intuition cannot be cognitively rationalized before it has already taken initial effect—only subconsciously. 
4. Therefore, an intuition has no defined or relative extent one way or another—it simply is.

Concisely put, because an intuition is not rationally conceived, it is impossible to ascribe to it our rational perception of its truth, which lends itself to its extent—its potency, so to speak. As such, it is evident that an intuition only ever feels one particular way to us, and any tangential feelings we come across within ourselves after analyzing the adjacent situation are simply ancillary and a different concept entirely. By extension, it is plausible to claim that the intuitions we experience are never wrong and that they are always present, though some may be lost to our rationality, telling us they are unimportant. 

Take, for example, the child and the fried chicken, which I referenced in my prior essay. The substantial evidence we have to trust this intuition telling us not to allow the child to eat the fried chicken is scarce. However, consider standing on the side of a cliff and feeling an intuition to not fall off. Clearly, in one situation over the other, there is more certainty that the intuition is trustworthy, and yet I am asserting that, in either case, the intuition itself feels the exact same until we rationally consider the situation warranting the soul’s need in the first place. At such a point, the extent is evident. Moreover, there could arise a daily circumstance of feeling intuitively apprehensive to cross the street, even after looking both ways for approaching vehicles and seeing none at all, but our cognitive faculties would get rid of such an intuition before we could even truly recognize it consciously. 

Additionally, something abstract like love can in fact be rationalized from a certain perspective, because love as an intuition—that is, a remote intuition about someone or something we know and want to know better—is merely such an inclination, whereas its extent and variety are dependent on our cognitive analysis, given the context of this intuition. What makes good art falls under the same logic. Often, we cannot truly say why we enjoy a poem, a painting, or a song, but we do, and as we think about its mystery more and more, thinking we understand where the intuition is coming from, our passion only grows more intense. 

The beauty of life, as we understand it, is based on intuition alone, but its profundity is rational—more so with our understanding of intuition.