Episode 124 - Intuition
Transcript
Ellie: 0:14
Hello, and welcome to Overthink.
David: 0:16
The podcast where two friends, who are also professors, help you think about your everyday life, including your intuitions.
Ellie: 0:24
I'm Dr. Ellie Anderson.
David: 0:26
And I'm Dr. David Peña Guzman.
Ellie: 0:30
So I feel like when people talk about intuition in everyday contexts, they say things like trust your gut, right? So intuition is basically synonymous, I would venture to say, with a gut feeling in our everyday parlance. Thoughts?
David: 0:44
Yeah, and, you know, sometimes people also call themselves intuitives to mean lightly psychic as if somehow your intuition not only gives you a gut feeling, but also a brain feeling about the future or about people's mental states.
Ellie: 1:02
I have so little patience for this. I was just watching the new season of The Traitors, which is like a reality TV show. And it has to do with guessing, it's like a game, a guessing game of whether somebody's a traitor or a faithful.
David: 1:15
Yeah, like mafia.
Ellie: 1:16
Yeah. And one of the contestants was like, yeah, you know, I read energies and Nikki is definitely a traitor. Nikki, not a traitor. The energy she was reading, non existent. That's how I feel about so called intuitives. You ready to listen to a TikTok?
David: 1:34
Always.
TikTok Clip: 1:35
I need you to hear this because I needed to hear this and this is a reminder because I know this is coming on your page and I'm not gonna use any hashtags I'm just gonna post this and hope it finds you or maybe it'll get 200 views and it won't matter. But listen to me Your Intuition is always fucking right. I promise you, it's always right. Because what do you do? Because this is what I do. I say, my intuition is always right. And then I have things happen and I'm like, I knew it the whole time. Whatever it might be. I knew it the whole time. But in the moment when I think, Oh, I should just listen to my intuition. I'm afraid to trust it because what if it's wrong just this time? Just one time? What if this singular time my intuition is wrong? But then what happens? It's never wrong. And we think, but what if I don't have all the information? What if this is anxiety and not intuition? But as I'm sure you've heard, intuition is calm. Intuition does not scream. Intuition is just a knowing. There's no but if or no, it's just, it just is. And anxiety is lots of questioning and this and that. And so if you can just sit with it and ask, is this Can I trust my intuition? Just, you can, I'm just going to say that you can, you can trust your intuition. It's always right. It's never wrong. And even if you decided to trust your intuition and for some reason it was wrong, it wasn't wrong because there was a reason that you chose it because it led you to something else. Your intuition is always fucking right. Okay.
Ellie: 3:08
David, the Jedi mind tricks of this video. Did you finish it?
David: 3:11
They are full blown Simone Biles level mental gymnastics. Intuition is never wrong. But if it is, it's because it was right all along.
Ellie: 3:25
You know, David, when I found this TikTok, I asked, should we listen to all of it? Should we play all of it for our listeners or should we just do a clip? And yeah, once, once I got to the end, I was like, no, we must play this entire thing because that moment at the end is just chef's kiss. So yeah. Okay. Let's play. Unpack this a little bit because I do think that this is not at all an original idea that this TikToker is with such vociferous energy promoting, but it's just like a really standard hackneyed piece of advice. Your intuition is always right. And I mean, the idea of seems to be don't doubt it because that kind of self doubt is just going to lead you astray. And then the recognition at the very end of, well, occasionally it might lead you astray. It's like, it's still all okay in the end. So there's just a complete undercutting of the point articulated in the video at very end.
David: 4:17
Well, but also this idea that, well, if it led you astray, it's because you needed to learn that lesson. My answer is, well, wouldn't that be the same about me not listening to my intuition? Like wouldn't it also lead me wrong path into an insight or a realization, a moment of epiphany that I needed to get to by some cosmic standard?
Ellie: 4:37
This is why I feel like in this type of view of trusting your intuition, there is a latent theological belief in the benevolence of the universe. Whether I guess technically that doesn't need to be theological specifically, but So the idea there would be, well, you know, in the cases where you trusted it and it was wrong, it was still right that you trusted it because then you opened yourself up to what the universe had to offer you. Whereas when you didn't trust your intuition, you weren't doing that. I mean, I don't think it makes any sense at all.
David: 5:08
So despite how much I despise videos of this kind and messages of this kind, I want to admit that one of the values of thinking about intuition as this gut feeling, without going all the way to like it's always right no matter what,
Ellie: 5:25
You're so close to calling yourself an intuitive.
David: 5:27
I know, like my intuition at the moment tells me that even though I hate it, one of the benefits of thinking about intuition as a gut feeling is that it attunes us to a kind of intelligence that is proper to the body and that I think we have not recognized for a long time. I think there is embodied knowledge, there is embodied wisdom that we carry with us. I just wouldn't necessarily call it intuition.
Ellie: 5:55
Mm hmm.
David: 5:55
And so, I think this is the saving grace of some of this rhetoric, but I'm being very, very gracious in just recognizing that they are moving us towards a more integrative understanding of the kind of intelligences that we are, where some of it is not purely cognitive, although in this case the woman does say it's a kind of knowing rather than a gut feeling.
Ellie: 6:19
Yeah, but that cognition or knowing we can also say is embodied. So I agree you, of course, that we should take seriously the information that our body gives us. And we're often really disconnected from our bodies and our culture, and we should reconnect with them. On the other hand, this appeal to intuition or to trusting your gut is not it for me. I mean, what our gut feelings actually tend to track most often are implicit bias and cultural stereotypes. Right? And so there's this amazing essay by the philosopher George Yancey, one of our former professors in grad school, about being a black man who walks into an elevator with a white woman who kind of instinctively clutches her purse. And he has this really interesting phenomenological account of what that means. And I think the white woman in the elevator is not self consciously being like, Oh my gosh, this person is dangerous, but she has this intuitive or gut reaction that is brought about by all of the messages. And of the nefarious and racist messages that we get about black men being unsafe for white women to be in a private space with or the idea that they might take her purse. So, I feel like, if anything, it's up to us to connect with our bodily knowledge in such a way that we're hesitating or pausing before enacting those biases. And of course, there's a lot of research showing that implicit bias is not something that we can control. But I do think, at the very least, we can understand conceptually that it's not something we should trust.
David: 7:48
Yeah, no, and there are steps that you can take to minimize the expression of implicit bias. But what's really funny to me is that the woman that we listened to in the TikTok video said something that stood out to me, which is that intuition doesn't scream. She wants to present it as this very, almost like a whispering intelligence. It's very calm. It's like, your spiritual guru, your inner voice. And I think some of the research that you're pointing to, Ellie, in psychology, especially about intuition, tracking social prejudices, that kind of intuition does scream, right? It's like the white screaming like, ah, I am in danger at the moment. And the reason that I point this out is because it underscores what makes those implicit biases so difficult to uproot. And that is that we experience them not as an intelligent voice whispering in our ear, but as a kind of revolt of our entire organic body in the presence of a particular stimulus. And so it, it feels so primal, so basic, so biological that it seems like something that we should always listen to precisely because it screams, but that's paradoxically the very reason why we should try to hold it in check.
Ellie: 9:05
Yeah. And if we're being fair to this TikTok, then maybe we would say that she just wouldn't call that intuition. She would say that's what I'm distinguishing. But I don't know. For myself, it's not as though there are certain intuitions that are calm, quiet, and coming from some sort of deeper, more stable place, and others that are screaming or kind of frenetic. In fact, like, I don't know, the whole idea of an intuition is that it's a snap judgment. Today we're talking about intuition.
David: 9:39
Should we trust our intuitions or do they merely reveal our implicit biases?
Ellie: 9:43
How do intuitions get used in analytic philosophy and phenomenology?
David: 9:44
And are intuitions at odds with the scientific method?
Ellie: 9:50
There is a whole school of philosophy that uses intuitions. This is analytic philosophy, and one thing I find in analytic philosophy is that an appeal to intuition is frequently the beginning of an argument. This school of philosophy often uses intuitions as evidence in favor of the argument itself. Take the role of hypothetical case studies or thought experiments in analytic philosophy. One of the most famous ones is the Ship of Theseus. Say that Theseus has a wooden ship. Every single one of the planks needs to be replaced. So do the sails of the ship, the masts, the wheel, and so forth, until eventually, every single part of the ship has been replaced with a newer part. The question philosophers ask is, Is this still the same ship? These are the kinds of things that Intro to Philosophy students love to puzzle over, and I find them really helpful for helping us figure out what we think. When we consider such thought experiments, we're testing our intuitions. Central to all of this line of thinking is the idea that we figure out what we think through considering weird puzzles like this. And, you know, I don't have a problem with that at all. I think that's true. Like it's nice to test our intuitions, but I'm concerned about the fact that an extra step is often taken. Where finding something intuitive is often used as a reason for thinking that that thing is the case. That is, intuitions get used as evidence in arguments. And conversely, finding something not to be intuitive is used as a mark against that theory. And that's where things get a little weird, partly for reasons that we discussed a little bit earlier This idea that intuitions actually track biases more than anything. Can we really trust these intuitions?
David: 11:49
Neither you nor I are analytically trained. And so we come from a very different tradition and way of thinking about the task and the value of philosophy than this kind of analytic appeal to intuitions. And it's funny to me that you said that in the analytic camp, intuitions are often used as the beginning of an argument, because in my experience, they're also just as often used to end an argument because when people realize that they disagree about something think is intuitive, they just end by saying, well, my intuitions don't track yours. And that's sort of the end of the Q& A session of the presentation and everybody is left deeply dissatisfied.
Ellie: 12:27
Well, and usually with the weird implication that their intuitions are somehow right, and yours are wrong.
David: 12:32
Yeah, that that they've touched what they call intuitive bedrock, right? Like they got to the lowest level of thinking.
Ellie: 12:40
This is just so bonkers to me. Like anybody who has studied any dialectical materialism will find the utility of this to be only in helping us understand ideologies of our day, not in understanding, you know, bedrock of any sort. But anyway, continue.
David: 12:57
Yeah, no, and so you and I don't quite relate to it in the same way. Nonetheless, I think it's important for us to think about what reasons analytic philosophers have for turning to intuitions as part of their rhetorical strategies and argumentative strategies. And one answer that you frequently find is that there are some propositions or some claims or beliefs out there that cannot be justified by memory. They cannot be justified by experience. They cannot be justified by introspection. But most of us nonetheless sort of assent to them. And so if they can't be justified in those ways, then we have to invoke some other faculty or capacity that justifies them. And that seems to be intuition.
Ellie: 13:48
Rather than say, cultural beliefs. This is so bizarre to me.
David: 13:51
Well, but cultural tradition doesn't necessarily justify beliefs. And so it's a question of justification, right? So the fact that I inherit certain things from the past doesn't necessarily mean that I should continue to do so. Now, think about the examples that are often given as propositions that are intuited. This includes things like logical principles, like A equals A. That statement, or that proposition, you know, it's not from experience, it's not because I, like, meditate, it's not because I remember it, it just sort of is evident to me, it is intuitive that A equals A. Think also about mathematical truths, like 2 plus 2 equals 4. You know, is that justified? Yes. How? Well, it's just kind of there. You see it.
Ellie: 14:38
Yeah. but those are both logical. I mean, those are both valid in that they conform to the principle of identity. I mean, this is now taking me a bit out of my depth and I know that there's a lot of debates around like the origins of mathematical truths, but I feel like those are kind of weird examples of intuitions.
David: 14:54
Yeah. And so, like, equally odd would be analytic propositions, right? Like all bachelors are unmarried men.
Ellie: 15:02
No, because that's logical. It's different from the intuition that the Ship of Theseus is the same, even though all of its planks have been replaced.
David: 15:08
Yeah, no, but in the case of the ship of Theseus, the point is that different people can have different intuitions. So that's a case in which there is intuitive divergence. These logical, mathematical, and analytic propositions are the ones that analytic philosophers say, look, We all kind of agree to these, and so intuition must be a real thing. The problem is that then they run with it and apply it to every other domain of philosophical inquiry, as if all philosophy reduced to logical, mathematical, and analytic puzzles. And so I'm here just presenting the analytic defense of intuition.
Ellie: 15:43
But what we were looking for was a defense of those kind of common sense intuitions that are appealed to in a lot of analytic philosophy. But what you've given are examples of logical truths. So it seems like our understanding of what an intuition has just changed. I still don't see the justification for intuitions around like the trolley problem, for instance, that it's wrong to pull the lever, but not wrong to let the five people die.
David: 16:08
Correct. What I wanted to do was not so much justify common sense intuitions as much as explain why analytic philosophers believe intuitions are a real thing at all. And it's because they point to these fundamental logical mathematical analytic claims as deriving their validity from a capacity that is not memory, experience, experiment, or introspection.
Ellie: 16:32
Not all analytic philosophers are happy with the use of intuitions in this tradition. And one article I found very interesting on this point is by Moti Mizrahi called Your Appeals to Intuition Have No Power Here. And Mizrahi argues that analytic philosophers should not use intuitions in their arguments because the aim of analytic philosophy is at odds with the use of intuition. So, Mizrahi says that Analytic philosophy's aim is to compel agreement by rationally persuading other people of your position. And that's like a cool thing, right? I mean, this is a totally useful thing that philosophy can do for us. Compel agreement by rationally persuading others of your position. And rational persuasion requires that any evidence for or against your position should be public or transparent. So, I'm not coercing somebody or saying, just trust me on this, I'm rationally persuading them by making the means of evidence that are leading me to a certain conclusion available to them. Right? So the evidence has to be public, transparent But intuitions are not public or transparent. Even though there's some debate about what an intuition actually is, which maybe we've just performed ourselves, most understand intuition as a mental state, and therefore think about it as private. So intuitions have no effect of rationally persuading others. Even if you share the same intuition as I do, say about the ship of Theseus. I'm going to leave two plus two equals four aside because I don't think that's an intuition. It is still your intuition that is the evidence and not my intuition. So I'm not really rashly persuading you using reasons, right? I'm just saying this is my intuition and trading on the fact that you happen to have the same intuition. And if we don't share that intuition, then I have no power to convince you of my position. Hence Mizrahi's conclusion that analytic philosophy should not appeal to intuition. I'm very on board with this. I think it's right.
David: 18:33
So. this question about what role intuitions should play in philosophy, it was a really heated debate in the early modern period when intuition was not really seen as maybe we talked about earlier as this kind of like gut feeling that is not accessible to anybody else but me, but rather as a mental faculty that gives us a certain kind of knowledge. So if you travel back, you come to the realization that really at the origin of modern philosophy are these controversies about intuition. Now, famously Descartes modern project in epistemology, is rooted in the primacy of intuitions. Descartes wanted to build a new and solid foundation for all human knowledge, right? He didn't want people to believe things because they had heard them, but rather because they were in some way certain of their truth and their reality. And the way he built that new solid foundation was by appealing to what he calls clear and distinct ideas. He believed that if you just have these clear and distinct ideas, you can start building an edifice of knowledge that will be immune to the attacks of skepticism. Now, the way Descartes thinks about clear and distinct ideas is precisely as intuitions. Except that they're not really intuitions in the way our TikToker tells us, rather, they are intellectual intuitions. They are things that the light of reason that we carry within us reveal to us when we activate the power of reason correctly. Take Descartes very famous pronouncement, I think therefore I am. For him, that's an example of an intellectual intuition. It's something that I just intuit rationally if I sort of let the light of reason shine in the way that is natural for it.
Ellie: 20:31
No, that is a logically necessary statement, not an intuition.
David: 20:36
Yeah, so for not for Descartes, Descartes also, much to Elie's chagrin, also included mathematical truths like the properties of triangles and squares and lines as examples of things that we rationally intuit. And also, just to like throw one last example here, is the very idea of God. He believes that if you just think about it you can intuit the fact that God necessarily must exist just through an act of reason.
Ellie: 21:07
Yeah, I just I don't want to go down a major Descartes rabbit hole here, but I will just say I think that I think therefore I am claim is logically necessary. And then a lot of the other things that Descartes brings in afterward are unjustified. and so, yeah, intuitions may be in that sense, including. Yeah, these clear and distinct ideas like that of God. So I feel like Descartes kind of violates his own approach there in a way that I don't find justified. And I also do just want to say, hopefully this was implied, but maybe wasn't super explicit, that when we've been talking about analytic philosophers use of intuitions, even though there are a lot of different descriptions of what an intuition is. It's also not the gut feelings we were talking about with TikTok. It's usually thought of as a mental state, often thought of as a snap judgment that you make about something. So maybe a little bit less of a rational intellectual intuition than what Descartes is talking about, but also not a gut feeling.
David: 21:57
Yeah and just to use Descartes here to set the scene about the early modern period, his position that we, that intuition gives us all these different pieces of knowledge, these kernels of insight, really started a debate about intuition among modern philosophers. You know, does intuition really give us knowledge in the first place? Is it really as reliable as Descartes believed? And does it have the scope that Descartes believed that it had? And so you end up with a number of people falling into different camps about this issue. On the one hand, you have rationalists like Descartes who venerate intuition and who believe that it really gives us knowledge that is useful. Then on the other hand, you have empiricists, people like Hume and Locke, who still see intuition as the kind of gold standard of knowledge, but who think that it's actually a lot less useful than Descartes gave a credit for. So they believe that we do have intuitive knowledge of some things, but it's actually limited to a very narrow aspect of human experience. Finally, you have this other group, and this is the group that I'm really interested in for the purposes of our discussion here. I'm just going to call them the radical critics. And they're the early modern philosophers who believe that Intuitions are just not a thing at all. And the best example of this, and I suspect Ellie, you'll be a fan is John Stuart Mill, who writes a pretty devastating, I would say, critique of intuitions in his book from 1843, A System of Logic. And basically the argument that Mill makes, he makes multiple and maybe we can talk about a couple, is that all intuitive truths are really just generalizations from past experience. So we're not really intuiting something automatically, which is how intuition is often described. What we're doing is we're just reasoning on the basis of our past experience and making a generalization, which means that there is nothing really intuitive at all about what people call intuition.
Ellie: 24:10
Yeah, I like that I feel like that's right. I like this idea that it's generalization based on past experience.
David: 24:16
Yeah, Yeah, And so, you know, that brings in tradition that brings in culture that brings in also bias in many ways. And he has some really good examples of this because he says even things that people think are sensible intuitions, you know, like intuitions of the senses, like right now I'm in a well lit room. So I. sensibly intuit the light, for example, or I intuitively grasp that there is a certain distance between me and the wall. Mill says even that is not really an intuition because perception of distance actually requires a lot of learning. It requires mastery body, an understanding of physics And so things that we experience as intuitively given are cultivated skills that take a very long time to develop. It's just that we forget their origins.
Ellie: 25:09
I would love to hear what our esteemed philosopher, John Stuart Mill, would have to say about Anderson 2023's claim.
David: 25:18
About what?
Ellie: 25:19
I mentioned women's intuition in my hermeneutic labor article, and I write, sorry, I literally pulled up my own article to my quote, but I'm pretty proud of sentence, guys, so I hope you like it. So called women's intuition is in fact a hard won achievement that takes years to produce and sustain. It is a euphemism for hermeneutic labor. If you want to hear more about hermeneutic labor, check out our emotional labor episode. But in any case, I'm with Mill on this one.
David: 25:44
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Ellie: 26:12
One thing that's come up already is that there are different ways of defining intuition and those different definitions of intuition are going to give us really different pictures of the role that intuition plays in philosophy. I think it's become clear that I'm kind of a hater of intuition as used as evidence for an argument, but in the tradition that you and I are schooled in and that I especially work in phenomenology, Intuition is used in a slightly different way, and here it refers to our immediate consciousness of the flow of experience. The philosopher Nishida Kitaro, who's associated with the Kyoto school and is really influenced by Bergson and some other early 20th century European philosophers, some of whom are phenomenologists, some of whom are like compatible with the school. He writes in his book, Intuition and Reflection in Self Consciousness, that intuition is consciousness of unbroken progression, of reality just as it is. For Nishida, there is no distinction in intuition between subject and object or knower and known. And he contrasts this with reflection, which is the consciousness that stands outside of this progression and views it. So let's say I'm drinking a glass of water. When I'm just, like, living my life drinking a glass of water, I have a consciousness of the unbroken progression of lifting the water to my lips, drinking it, and so forth. I'm just having an intuition of drinking the glass of water. Whereas when I reflect on that act, I can, you know, break it up into different parts. I can recognize that there's a moment of grasping it, etc., etc. And that requires being at a distance from the unbroken progression. For Nishida, reflection doesn't double consciousness. It's not as though you have the initial stream of consciousness and then a doubled, like, representation of that consciousness outside of it. Nishida thinks that would be incoherent because it would have to treat the reflecting state and the reflected state as distinct states in time. We would have to imagine that the representational or reflective consciousness came slightly after the original one. But that doesn't necessarily need to be the case. We can reflect at the same time as we are. But Nishida's question then becomes, how is it that we can take that step outside of experience? We are rooted in our experience at all times, we're intuiting, and so how does reflection take that step backward from the consciousness of unbroken progression and observe it?
David: 28:48
I really like this way of thinking about experience being constituted by a flow that kind of folds upon itself in a way that transcends any subject object duality. But there are a couple of questions that come from me about Nishida's philosophy. One of them is, if we can do both, we can have an intuition, we can have the flow of experience, and we can reflect on it at the same time, whether there is a limit to the degree to which those two can coexist. Because, you know, we know from some research on experiences of flow that some activities really require turning off the reflective intellectual dimensions of our subjectivity. You know, if you start thinking too much about running while you are running, you're not going to run efficiently. So it's not the case that the two can always coexist. So that's just one question that I have organically. And the second one is that it leads me to believe that if the flow of experience is not separate from the reflection, on experience but rather there is a kind of folding onto the self, like there is intuition kind of folds itself in an act of intellectual reflection, then that must mean that the distinction between intuition and reflection is just a heuristic, but it's not really an objective distinction at all, because there must be a germ of reflectiveness already at the level of intuition, such that we, when we are having an intuition of, you know, drinking the glass of water, can, from that state, lift ourselves up into a moment of reflection, right? There must be a little trace of reflection already at the base in order for the base to fold onto itself.
Ellie: 30:40
Okay, so that takes us into Nishida's answer to the question about the relationship between intuition and reflection. Before thinking about that, I want to address the first point that you made. I think there's like a Nishida inspired answer, and if I'm forgetting that he does address this explicitly in the book, then someone can correct me. But recall that for Nishida, reflection is not a doubling of consciousness. And so it's not that there's like an amount of consciousness that we have, so that reflection would replace or be on top of our initial consciousness. So I think this question of like, could there be too much reflection probably just wouldn't track with the way that he's thinking about reflection. And I wonder whether there might be a clue to understanding that in his life, because Nishida was also a practicing Zen Buddhist. I mean, this also shows up in his philosophy. It's not just in his life, but he was a practicing Zen Buddhist, and this comes out a lot in his philosophy. And I feel like what happens when you meditate is that you encounter your experience in a new way that actually brings you closer to the experience, while also encouraging what a lot of Buddhist traditions call non attachment. And that is a reflective move, like to be able to recognize that you're thinking at a given moment, to be able to recognize the pain that you have in your leg. I would consider an act of reflection, but it's not reflection in the way that we're often accustomed to thinking about reflection, which as detaching us from experience. I mean, sure, it is removing us from the unbroken progression of our experience. And so there is maybe like an extent to which that might be a fair characterization, but it's not a fair characterization to think about it as thematizing what's there in a way that takes us away from directly encountering what's there.
David: 32:22
You know, that makes really good sense because I was thinking of reflection as a form of detachment where, you know, somehow the mind lifts itself above immediacy and kind of reflects upon itself. But this non dualistic way of thinking about experience, of course, reminds me of some thinkers in the Western tradition also who try to move away from that subject object duality, people like Bergson, but also William James and Whitehead, who choose a process oriented philosophy as an alternative to the subject object duality that they believe they have inherited actually from the early modern period and also the Greeks.
Ellie: 33:00
Yeah, and it's not that there's no subject object distinction at all for an Nishida, but it's that that subject object distinction, yeah, doesn't exist on the level of intuition. And even when it does emerge in reflection, we have to see subject and object as two different ways of viewing the same content of consciousness, he says, not as like separate entities. So with respect to the other question that you asked, like, is there a germ of reflection already in intuition? This takes us to Nishida's answer about the relation between intuition and reflection. The relation is self consciousness. That is the hinge point between intuition and reflection. He says that self consciousness lights up the internal connections between the two. And reflection is the very nature of consciousness as such in the sense of making one's own activity its object. So we do have this kind of subject object pairing that emerges in reflection. Again, they're not different substances. It's one in the same, it's like two ways of seeing the same thing. But the subject object distinction does emerge there such that we become conscious of our own activities. And for Nishida, there is a form of consciousness that inherently reflects or mirrors itself within itself. So there's no difference between that which reflects and that which is reflected. In our self consciousness, immediate experiencing and reflection are unified. And Nishida is deeply influenced by German idealist philosophy, especially the philosophy of Fichte. And I think this is another way of thinking about that. The self consciousness is both fact and act. It's like this act of turning onto its own activities that doesn't create a new double stream, but creates like, a duality of perspective.
David: 34:48
Yeah, and so it would mean that the two just sort of coexist or are united as long as we don't assume that they have a preexisting separation between them. And you know that now that you mentioned German idealism, this is making me think about how Immanuel Kant thinks about intuition, which is in a very different way than many of the phenomenologists that take some kind of influence from him down the road in the 20th century. Because when Kant talks about intuition. He really talks about intuition in connection to sensible experience. So in the Critique of Pure Reason from 1781, Kant talks about time and space as forms of sensible intuition. So in short, time and space are not things that are given to me in experience, right? Like I don't feel or sense or perceive time. I don't, I also don't see space as such. So they are not objects of experience, but they are structuring principles of my sensible experience. So all objects of sensible experience are given to me as already organized in time and space. And so when I look around me. I have a representation of a table, a representation of a chair, but these are not chaotic sensations. They're all organized according to spatial temporal coordinates. The chair is over here. The table's over there. If I then break the table, the table now is different than the table before . And that means that for Kant, time and space are forms of intuition understood as subjective principles. They are things that my mind adds to what it receives from the senses in order to give me a coherent field of experience. Now, in the critique of pure reason, and actually there, there could be a connection here to Nishida Ellie as I'm talking about this.
Ellie: 36:53
Mm hmm.
David: 36:54
So Kant basically says the following, it must be the case that every time I have a representation, I have it in such a way that I can also attribute that representation to myself. So like, I have a representation of a chair. So it's not just that there's a chair there, is that it's a chair kind of for me, or a chair that I experience. Which means that there is this subject, which is the same for all of my self attributions, and which is distinct from the representations that I attribute to it, and which can nonetheless be conscious of those representations. So it's this kind of floating subjectivity that Kant is very vague about. There are a lot of debates about the status of the TUA, the Transcendental Unity of Apperception. But the point that I'm getting to here is that for Kant, the flow of experience, which is opened up by time and space as forms of intuition, already also comes with this kind of reflective principle of the necessary unity of apperception. There's a kind of sense of subjectivity already built into the flow of experience, which is what I was alluding to when I talked about there already being a germ of the subjective or the reflective in the very flow of intuition as Nishida defines it.
Ellie: 38:25
I think the connection to Nishida, it's intuitively appealing in the sense that Nishida is deeply inspired by Fichte, who in turn is deeply inspired by Kant.
David: 38:34
And, you know, one thing to observe here to bring this all back to intuition is that I think a lot of our contemporary ways of thinking about intuition, largely as a gut feeling that cannot be doubted in the style of the TikToker that we collectively hated upon at the start of our episode, can in a kind of loose way be traced back to Kant's way of talking about time and space as forms of intuition. And the reason I say that is because with Kant, intuition is something that we just like, bring with our mind. It's in the nature of the mind to do these things, to give us temporally and spatially organized representations. So intuitions are not things to be doubted or questioned in the Kantian architectonic. And I think we have inherited a little bit of that, even though, of course, I'm not saying that our contemporary way of talking about gut feelings is Kantian. But I think, There is some connection There around the untouchability of intuitions and there being outside criticism in the of the term. We've seen some critiques of intuition. Intuitions could be mere generalizations from past experience. They could be reflections of biases that we have absorbed from our cultural and social surroundings. The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard has a very different and I think quite compelling critique of intuition. Bachelard believes that intuition is just about the worst thing that you could use for understanding science. You cannot do science, you cannot become a scientist, you cannot even comprehend basic scientific concepts if you rely on intuition, because the vast majority of scientific ideas, hypotheses, and concepts by now have by far surpass the bounds of human intuition. And his critique of intuition, I have to specify, is both philosophical in the sense that he is raising philosophical objections to our use of intuitions, but also pedagogical. Because Bachelard really worried that we educate children, to expect things to make sense according to their intuition, which might be great when you're like learning math 101 or like basic geometry, but by the time you advance to things like trigonometry, calculus, advanced chemistry, intuition is only going to be an obstacle that often leads kids to believe that they're not smart enough to do science when in fact the problem is that they are applying the wrong standard of progress to the domain of scientific reasoning.
Ellie: 41:45
Hmm. And Bachelard has in mind phenomenology here, right? Especially that of its founder, Edmund Husserl, for whom intuitions are the way that consciousness enters into contact with being, essentially, so intuitions have a pretty important role for Husserl because he thinks that phenomenology helps us ultimately intuit the essences of things, but first and foremost through just being our form of contact with things in the world.
David: 42:17
No, that's right. He is very much critiquing Husserl and the entire School of Phenomenology that, he founded. And as some of our listeners may remember, I wrote my dissertation on Bachelard and a number of other philosophers of science and their critique of phenomenology precisely around phenomenology's treatment of the natural sciences. And the idea that grows especially out of the French historical epistemology tradition to which Bachelard belonged, is that there is a break between ordinary experience, lived experience, like my experience as a subject moving through the world, for which maybe phenomenology is great and scientific experience, the kind of experience that we produce in laboratories with specialized equipment according to theoretical expectations. and to understand that experience, you actually need to toss phenomenology. Especially Husserlian phenomenology out the window.
Ellie: 43:20
Yeah, and this is a substantial criticism of Husserl's method because Husserl wanted to found phenomenology as a rigorous science, and he believed that all of the natural sciences derived from phenomenology. So it's kind of cutting his project at the root. And I, how does he do this, David? Because I was so excited when you told me you wanted to talk about this because I don't really know Bachelard's critique of Husserl and want to learn about it. So hit us with it.
David: 43:44
So in a number of his books, which he was a very prolific writer, he wrote books like Rational Materialism, The Philosophy of No, The Rationalist Compromise. And in all these books, you find a lot of rants and critiques against phenomenology. And what those rants have in common is the idea that you cannot intuit the essence or the meaning of scientific concepts, like Husserl thought that you could, right? Husserl gives us a method, the phenomenological method for getting at the essence of things. And Bachelard says, good luck applying that method in the laboratory. And the reason for that is that since the 1800s, actually really since the 1700s, Modern science basically has left intuition in the dust. Most things in science are not only not intuitive, they are straight up counterintuitive. So, for example, think about the non Euclidean geometry of Lobachevsky. Think about the special relativity theory of Einstein. If you really think about those concepts, it's really hard to have an intuitive, clear, and distinct idea of what exactly you're talking about because it doesn't really make a lot of intuitive sense. Nonetheless, we know that it is justified by scientific standards. Think of the concept of infinity. Can you really intuit the meaning of infinity? What do you think?
Ellie: 45:20
Man, I'm just thinking about Descartes. It's an idea that's implanted in us of something greater than that of which we can have an idea.
David: 45:29
Yeah. And so that could be like a very big number, not necessarily infinity. Or think about also like multiple infinities, right? Like there are exponential infinities. Is an exponential infinity greater than like a basic infinity, even though both are infinities? You know, like there are all these concepts in science that when you really push, our mind kind of breaks, our mind hits a limit. And there is a really good example of this that I want us to sort of walk through as a kind of thought experiment, one that Bachelard uses in some of his writings. So we know from contemporary physics that physicists understand light as being both a particle and a wave, right? Like this is the particle wave duality of light that grows out of quantum mechanics. That already is hyper counterintuitive. How could it be both? It doesn't really make a lot of sense. You just have to trust the experiments. But Bachelard says, you know what? Don't even go to the duality. Just choose one of those terms, like the concept of wave. And let's see how far the Husserlian method can actually get you. And you'll realize that it's not very far. So Ellie, I want you to do the experiment. We're going to pretend to be Husserlians at the moment. And I want you to try to intuit with your mind, the concept of a wave, you know? So according to Husserl, you start thinking about different kinds of waves. You vary the specific waves until you sort of intuit the essence from that variation.
Ellie: 47:07
Okay.
David: 47:09
Did you get an aha moment after a while that just captures the idea of waveness, that all those particulars that you thought about share in common.
Ellie: 47:20
Okay. So all waves have crests and troughs, and then sort of lines connecting the two, right? So yeah, it's just a little wave shape.
David: 47:29
Great. I'm really happy that you said this because like, Bachelard is setting you up the get go. And so Bachelard says, chances are you imagine something like either a liquid wave, like a water wave at the ocean, or chances are that you imagined a graph of a wave, which would be lines of peaks and valleys.
Ellie: 47:50
That was what I was doing.
David: 47:52
Yes. And so Bachelard says the problem with that conception is that you don't realize that what you think is the essence, it's actually just a particular. Because, in reality, a wave is not a graph. A wave is just an abstract movement that a graph represents. And so, what you intuited is not the essence of a wave, it's actually a particular rather than a universal. And it's a particular that already leads you astray because you're already thinking in geometrical, ways. Like there's a point and lines connected. And so the conclusion is that Intuition, when you're getting to high level concepts, will always misguide you and give you fictitious essences. And so he rejects that phenomenological approach in favor of what Bachelard calls a phenomenotechnique. And what he means by that is that instead of waiting to have this aha moment that is fetishized by the phenomenologists, what it means to understand a scientific concept is simply to understand how to manipulate equipment in order to bring about predictable results. So if you know how to bring it about, you understand it, even if your limited human mind doesn't have that aha moment that Husserl believes is necessary for understanding.
Ellie: 49:22
Okay. Hold on. There was a lot there, so I want to back second. So one thing to just observe is that even though I work in phenomenology, I'm not super familiar as of this point with Husserl's theory of intuition. But one thing that it sounds like might be different between him and Bergson is that for Bergson. Who we mentioned very briefly in setting up the Nishida point, intuition pertains to our experience of duration, which is a different form of experience than spatial or objective thinking. And so Bergson thinks that we go astray when we put time in terms of space and really just that kind of geometrical way of thinking about things is so overvalued in our society that we overlook duration or different kinds of experience that pertain more to time consciousness. And it seems like Husserl wants to encapsulate both of those modes with intuition, maybe not even seeing them as different modes. Basic intuition, a consciousness of unbroken progression, as Nishida puts it, versus spatial thinking or objective thinking, right? Because the idea that we intuit a wave as a kind of image Yeah, I don't know, actually, maybe I do know a little bit more about Husserl on this than I'm giving myself credit for. For Husserl, pictorial thinking is not the same as intuiting essences, though. So maybe Bachelard's point is that Well, it kind of devolves into that at one point or another, but for Husserl intuiting essences is actually different from pictorial thinking.
David: 50:50
It is, and so it's not too much about the pictorial tendencies of Husserl's thinking, arguably, although there are people who think that intuition for Husserl has a necessarily pictorial component, other people disagree, I think his concern really is about the fact that our mind has certain tendencies, Like the tendency that Bergson talks about to use space to think about time or the tendency that he talks about at more length in some of these books, the tendency to add substantialism or substance to things that are non substantial, right? So like, we cannot imagine a wave, he says, without imagining some kind of substance. in motion, but a wave is not the substance. A wave is just the motion independently of the substance. I think what he's getting at is not just that the method of intuition that we get from Husserl is limited. It's actually that the mind has certain prejudices that make it unreliable for gaining scientific understanding, which is why the mind must be scaffolded by scientific equipment in order to rise it to new heights in epistemology.
Ellie: 52:01
What is the rule? What is phenomenotechnique?
David: 52:04
So phenomenal technique really is just laboratory work Bachelard
Ellie: 52:11
So you're just doing science the way that science is traditionally done.
David: 52:15
Yeah. And so to go back to the example of quantum mechanics, he says, look, if you can set up the right experiment that gives you the results of light as being both particle and wave, then you have created a concept, even if it's not a concept that fits very comfortably into your very limited, very human mind. That's the point.
Ellie: 52:40
I think whether or not that's true, it would definitely still leave phenomenology a place in other non natural scientific inquiries. However, I think there still might be ways to say that phenomenology is compatible with those kinds of technological third person, we might say, scientific inquiries, like the traditional scientific method, because a lot of phenomenologists post Husserl have not really followed his approach to intuitions.
David: 53:06
Yeah, and to bring this to the contemporary moment, even philosophers of quantum physics, to stay with that example, will say, well, there is compatibility there between science and phenomenology because ultimately every scientific observation is precisely that, an observation. by a consciousness, i. e. the consciousness of the scientist. And so you can never really get rid of the subjective dimension of scientific reasoning. And so phenomenology is still quite helpful, even in the domain where Bachelard thought it no longer had anything to say.
Ellie: 53:45
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David: 53:54
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Ellie: 54:09
We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan. Our production assistants, Bayarmaa Bat-Erdene and Kristen Taylor, and Samuel P. K. Smith for the original And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.