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Kant, Coleridge and the Power of Intuition
My current presentation of the evolutionary ideas of Ralph Waldo Emerson is a good place for a discussion about epistemology to fall in. How do we know what we know? is the question that epistemology asks. Sure we might know something is true, but how do we know it is true? What I am amazes me most in Emerson is the power of his intuition. He was an incredibly creative thinker and he had gems of ideas in his writing that would take the rest of humanity literally centuries to catch up with – and some of them we may not have caught up with yet. At the same time some of his ideas strike us today as completely implausible and we wonder how this great man could ever have believed in them. But don’t be too hard on Emerson; after all it is likely that many of our own cherished and defended ideas may look equally implausible even to us in the future.
Emerson’s epistemology was largely rooted in his belief in the power of intuition. Intuition is the experience of pure knowing. It is a kind of knowing that verifies itself. We have all had the experience of intuition even if some of us are more inclined than others to take it seriously. Sometimes you just know something because you know it, because you feel with a certain kind of certainty that you don’t have any need to question. This is the kind of knowing that Chuck is raising questions about on this blog and which I think are good questions to ask – even if I still retain some faith in intuition myself.
Emerson’s conviction about the power of intuition was influenced by the English Unitarian Minister and Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge read Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and then wrote his own interpretation of Kant in a book called Aides to Reflection. Before we talk about Coleridge’s interpretation of Kant, let’s first have a short visit with Kant himself.
In his Critique Kant makes a distinction between understanding and pure reason. Understanding for Kant is constructed knowledge. As we pass through life’s experiences we gather information and then put that information together into an understanding of the world. Kant’s huge insight is that this understanding of the world rests on a deeper understanding that he called pure reason. Pure reason is an apriori, or before thought, understanding of certain absolutely fundamental aspects of reality such as the nature of time, space and causality. Without this underlying pure reason our constructed understanding would not be possible. Let’s illustrate this with a fictitious example.
Imagine you are a detective arriving on the scene of a homicide in New York City. You find a dead body with a gunshot wound and you immediately create an understanding of what happened. You would conclude that someone else must have been present at the time of the incident and that individual must have shot a loaded weapon that created the wound and killed the victim. Pretty simple, but what would happen if you were not able to assume anything about the nature of time, space and causality to name just three?
If you could no longer assume that events happened sequentially in time there would be no way to know if the gun was fired before or after the murder. If you could not assume that objects have to pass from one place to another through all adjacent point in space you could not assume that the gun was ever located on the scene. If these fundamental truths of reality didn’t necessarily hold then it would be plausible that the gun that fired the bullet that killed the victim was actually fired in Vienna, Austria in the year 1571 and ended up striking the victim in New York City in 2010. On top of all that if you couldn’t assume causality then you couldn’t know that the gunshot would had anything to do with the person’s death at all.
Kant is often thought of as the father of modern philosophy because he realized that the world we look at is seen through eyes that have deep assumptions about reality built into them. Before Kant it was generally assumed that the world that we saw was objectively real. Kant proved that what we take as objectively real is to a greater extent than we are aware of actually an interpretation of reality. This insight would forever change the way human beings think about thinking and knowing.
Now back to Coleridge. Samuel Taylor Coleridge read Kant, but in his Aides to Reflection he interprets Kant’s pure reason as intuition. Kant had made a distinction between understanding and reason where understanding was a kind of “knowing” that was constructed by thinking and pure reason was a “knowing” that was built into the way that we thought. By interpreting Kant’s pure reason as intuition, Coleridge was making a different distinction between understanding and reason. Coleridge still saw understanding as a kind of “knowing” that was constructed by thinking, but he interpreted pure reason to mean anything that you know just because you know it – hence intuition. And it was this interpretation that came to the American Transcendentalists and was adopted, particularly by Emerson, as the driving engine of their creed.
Dear Jeff, thank you for keeping the interest in philosophy so alive and fascinating. Every time a read one of your blogs I find something new that I absolutely want to know more about. This one is full of it. I immediately had to think about Catherine’s beautiful explanation of Steiner’s ‘Absolute knowing’.
I just read in The passion of the Western Mind: ..at precisely the same time that the Enlightenment reached its philosophical climax in Kant, a radically different epistemological perspective began to emerge- first visible in Goethe with his study on natural forms, developed in new directions by Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, Coleridge, and Emerson, and articulated within the past century by Rudolf Steiner. Each of these thinkers had his own distinct emphasis on the developing perspective, but common to all was a fundamental conviction that the relation of the human mind to the world was ultimately not dualistic but participatory (..) this concept held that the subjective principles (Kant) are in fact an expression of the worlds own being, and that the human mind is ultimately the organ of the world’s own process of self-revelation. In this view nature’s unfolding truth emerges only with the active participation of the human mind. (..) from within its own depths the imagination directly contacts the creative process of nature, realizes that process within itself and brings natures reality to conscious expression. Hence the imaginal expression is not a subjective distortion but is the human fulfillment of that reality’s essential wholeness. The world’s truth achieves its existence when it comes to birth in the human mind. As the plant at a certain stage brings forth its blossom, so does the universe bring forth new stages of human development. And, as Hegel emphasized, the evolution of human knowledge is the evolution of the worlds self-revelation (p.433f).
I also looked in ‘Emerson’s life in Science’ for Coleridge and I found a lot of nice stuff in connection with your blog. To jump in: ‘Whewell e.a. had all fully justified Emerson’s remark that science itself started with Bacon (science in shape of a pyramid). Bacon: ‘the rules of method will string the beauties of the external world like pearls on threads of mathematical reasoning’. In Whewell’s eyes, Bacon’s greatest flaw was that he had slighted the role of Ideas and so it fell to Whewell to correct this by establishing that ‘Ideas are not less indispensable as than facts themselves. What emerged from the 19th century theorists was a proper scientific method as a circle: from facts to ideas, to facts again, a carefully managed sequence combining deduction and induction. Emerson wrote: ‘temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung. This image of limitation, of Emersonian necessity was influenced by Coleridge’s slightly altered version of scientific method which reconstituted science as a function of his ‘redefined’ Reason. ‘Coleridge hoped to render 18th century empirical reason obsolete by redefining it as Reason, ‘the spiritual organ’ that subordinates experience to absolute principles or necessary laws. He redefined science as ‘the properties of means by the Laws that constitute them. It closed the divide of body and mind by looking straight through the material world to the pre-existing causal ‘idea’ of God. Since nature was the art of God the cause of nature had to be a single self-subsisting idea in the mind of God, an antecedent method, or self-organizing purpose, which moving through matter organized it into physical form. To comprehend this on generative idea was to comprehend how all the scattered pieces are actually united parts of the whole. The name for this generative idea was LAW, which predetermined the relationship of parts to each other and to the whole ‘by a truth originating in the mind’ as in the physical sciences and mathematics. The true connective principle, when sent forth into nature, would gather all the wild diversity of its forms into one united whole. Coleridge reconciled poetry and science as polar manifestations of the same creative insight, like Shakespeare said ‘find tongues in trees, books in running streams, sermons in stones and good.. in everything. Such correlations from nature fostered a belief that the productive power that acts in nature is essentially one..with the intelligence, which is in the human mind above nature. Coleridge’s scientific method comprehended nature by replacing the creative mind of God by the creative mind of men.
I could continue writing, but I will continue reading this book, it is very clear.
These are only two links I followed from your blog, there are many more.
Hello Jeff,
the blog is nice and alive as always !
Recently , after having read the “Philosophy of freedom” of Steiner, I am undergoing a profound re-evaluation of my beliefs concerning knowledge. My vision of knowledge is completely shifting, with this notion that “thinking itself” is a door to the absolute.
This is extremely close to the visions of Coleridge and Kant, but in my view Steiner is bolder and wilder in a subtle way.
My view at the moment is that there is only two ways to access knowledge.
1. habits
2. pure thinking
habits is what Kant describes as the human “experiences” on which we draw conclusions. As a scientist I would describe it as the field of methodology, or scientific method.
Pure thinking is the door of the Absolute, it is what the transcendentalists have called “Intuition” adn Kant, “pure reason”
Although the visions of Steiner and Kant and the transcendentalists are very close, there are a few points of divergence. The main point is that Kant’s description of knowledge is static, it is like a very dual vision of the world, where where knowledge is a “thing” that we can basically never reach.. I could probably do the same critique to the transcendentalists, but in lesser extend. With their “intuition” they are already more part of the process of knowledge, an actor of it.
With Steiner the whole structure shifts, and only the act of knowledge matters. The act of understanding, the “eureka”, is like the act of “intuition” it is pure “thinking”, it is absolute.
Thoughts on the other hand are relative, mental pictures are relative. Habit are also of the domain of action, of behavior, but I would put them as well in
the domain of the relative. Mechanical actions. Like this: “ I know how evaluate the non degenerate perturbation theory in quantum mechanics, and I can reproduce this for you if you asked me. I have learned it , and my body -mind system can reproduce mechanically the proofs for you.” It is nice but it has nothing to do with the act of pure knowing, it is just like walking; a mechanical action that I have learned.
In the learning process the act of pure knowing is found when one “understands” suddenly something that one didn’t understand before. The “eureka”. It can be a small one or a big one, doesn’t matter sine it is an absolute. As soon as our perspective opens, “ ah! I see now what he or she means…” then we have passed a threshold, a quantum leap, through an absolute.
So yes intuition, understood not at a “thing’ or a “mental image” but as the “ACT of pure thinking” is at the basis of all knowledge. The only distinction to be made is that the act of pure thinking leads to very clear and precise visions of the soul, while intuition is sometimes understood as just vague associations of mental images. Intuition understood a such, is again just a habit, like walking or drinking coffee. It doesn’t tough the absolute.
Hi Jeff
When I began to learn english (actually I’m learning yet) my main objective was read good texts about philosophy. Reading this blog, I comprehend that the effort really worth!
Hi, Jonathan Speke Laudly here,
Kant posits a world that we do not have direct access to: the “thing in itself”. But if we have no direct access then the existence of the “thing in itself” is an assumption, because there is no access to it which could prove it exists!
Kant’s scheme is really is just another version of the mind/body problem.
My own view is that whatever shows up is the world–what other world is there? And that reality is in plain sight every moment.
Confused? Reality. Deep insight? Reality. Hallucination? Reality.
The world is not bifurcated—it is all the same
world.
Whatever shows up as the case, really is the case. That does not mean that it cannot change. The snake you saw last night is , in the morning, found to be a piece of rope.
Einstein replaces Newton. You are sure the girl wants you, but next day she is cold.
Whatever shows up is the case. There is nothing hidden at any point. And it can change. And it is all out in the open.
YOu are a molecular biologist and search for the gene conferring singing ability—and you find it! Or maybe you think you find it but have doubts. What is hidden about all that?
No, the world is plain as day.
If you get information that yesterday you lacked, and the thought arises “That information was lost to all until I found it”.
So be it.
What showed up was that something was lost and now it is found. NOthing hidden there.
Whatever shows up, is the world.
Dear Catherine, I am taking a some time to read Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom as you suggested. I have not been able to give it the though that it deserves yet but I am getting into it. He is making the distinction between “thinking” and “thinking about thinking”. Is that the same distinction that you are making regarding habits and pure thinking? I think your critique of Kant and the Transcendentalists is accurate from what I understand. Emerson was in some of his writing leaning into something very different that wouldn’t come to full fruition for a generation with the Pragmatists. It was a more creative and evolutionary basis for reality that goes a long way toward being non-dualitistic. I suppose we have to give Emerson kudos since he was working almost a century before Steiner withouth the benefit of a great deal of human development that Steiner was born into – And for Kant even more so because he worked over a century before.
The Pragmatists also had a profound understanding of habits – and saw them as habits that formed in the evolving universe itself. I love John Dewey’s understanding of habit forming which is similar to many of the ideas fo Martin Heidegger whom I also love very much.
Thank you for continuing to post here and to help guide our discussion along. Let’s get more into Steiner and intuition as we go!
Jeff wrote: “Intuition is the experience of pure knowing. It is a kind of knowing that verifies itself. We have all had the experience of intuition even if some of us are more inclined than others to take it seriously. Sometimes you just know something because you know it, because you feel with a certain kind of certainty that you don’t have any need to question. This is the kind of knowing that Chuck is raising questions about on this blog and which I think are good to questions to ask even if I still retain some faith in intuition myself.”
Jeff, I highly recommend to you the book “ON BEING CERTAIN: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not,” by Robert Burton M.D. (2008). He lays out a very good case, supported by evidence, that the “feeling of certainty” is just that, a feeling. It feels like “knowledge” but isn’t. Most importantly, it is not reliable. It appeared in humans during the course of evolution, primarily serving the purpose of sending a signal from the unconscious mind to the conscious mind that the unconscious had reached a decision, and it was time to act.
In my experience, the mystical experience always included the “feeling of knowing” without any significant thought content. (Thoughts, which I previously termed ‘interpretation of the experience’, came afterward.) It’s like the aha! experience without anything to aha! about. Thus it “feels” like pure knowing, pure certainty. But it’s only a feeling, a sort of “mental sensation”, which cannot be relied upon.
If you’ve ever been certain about something only to later discover you were wrong, then you’ve experienced the unreliability of your personal “certainty”.
Read the book. It might cause you to re-examine your opinion about the value of intuition and “pure knowing” in regards to spiritual experiences.
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” – Mark Twain
Chuch R says: “Most importantly, it [intuition] is not reliable. It appeared in humans during the course of evolution, primarily serving the purpose of sending a signal from the unconscious mind to the conscious mind that the unconscious had reached a decision, and it was time to act.”
I say, what’s most important here is not that intuition is unreliable, but that we do indeed act and therefore survive and thrive. Carl, another contributor to this blog, teaches “fluency” where, through practice and experience, we get better and better at taking immediate and appropriate action. Those who wait for reason to kick in get left behind with nothing more to do than … blogging!
Now back to trimming my hedges.
One of the things I learned from this philosophy blog is that different people can have opposite meanings, but that both can be totally right. Just after reading your post I at random opened a book of Schopenhauer and I read (freely translated): when there are no real passions involved, practical concrete life is quite boring; but when passion is involved, it mostly ends in suffering. That is why people who have more intellect than is necessary for services to the will are very lucky. They have -next to there ordinary life- a life that is lively and pleasant. Free time alone is not enough. A surplus of intellectual activity is necessary to open the way to pure mental activity that is not in service of the will. Free time without study is equal to death, it means for the human to be buried alive…
“If you’ve ever been certain about something only to later discover you were wrong, then you’ve experienced the unreliability of your personal “certainty”.”
as a scientist I ma in this situation all the time. 99% of the time I try a solution for a problem, feeling“certain” that it is the right one. Then I check and it is wrong.
1% of the time I try solution for a problem, feeling again “certain” that it is the right one; and this time it passes all the checks.
So what to say about this mysterious “feeling f certainty”?
the first observation is that if I don’t feel “certain” that the solution will work I will not even try. I will not put myself to act. To this “feeling certain” has a very important function with respect to my behavior [ putting myself to act].
Now can I infer some differences in the “feeling certain” in both cases, in the case where the solution is right and in the case where the solution is wrong ? I believe there is , some kind of quality of harmony or odor, or light to the impression. This is very subtle, but as a researcher, your nose is trained to feel this. It is not the strength of certainty but of the quality of it.
In a sense things are simple in sciences. What differentiate true certainty to false one, is that true certainty allows for doubt. It has some kind of humility character with respect to doubt. I put my certainty to the test simply, with humility and it stays intact.
False certainty is almost immediately destroyed by questioning, its quality changes as soon as the first question is asked. This movement, this change of quality upon questioning, is the mark of Truth.
It remembers me an anecdote about the discovery of the theory of superconductivity. The great physicist Richard Feynman was at that time on the race to elucidate this theory. He had worked on it a a=lot. One day he receives a paper to referee, by Bardeen, Cooper Schrieffer. He opens the draft, looks at it… and he immediately knows that they have the solution he was looking for. No need to calculate, no need to read the proof; there was certainty that they are right . Amazing, no ?
so it seems that as humans beings we can educate ourselves to perceive the various quality of certainly that come to us.
To rely on the Truth is for me one of the fundamentals of any creativity; one cannot give up “certainty” like this… !
Catherine:
Re: “Certainty” in science and elsewhere.
The book I mentioned elsewhere, “On Being Certain” by Robert Burton, M.D. (2008) speaks *exactly* to what you wrote about.
‘Certainty’ in science primarily serves the purpose of encouraging you to follow a line of thought, as you ‘feel’ or ‘believe’ it will be profitable. Experimentation, evidence gathering, etc. serves to determine if you ‘feeling of certainty’ was justified. If it wasn’t, try again, as you said.
Certainty in fields other than science serves a variety of purposes. But in *none* of these fields (e.g. mystical experience) is the ‘feeling of certainty’ any more reliable than it is in science. It’s a feeling, like love or fear, and like them, it serves an evolutionary purpose. It may be justified, but maybe not.
Read the book. It won’t answer all questions as to what ‘certainty’ is and why we feel it, but it will answer a lot of them.
Acquiring knowledge, believing what we learn, believing what we’re exposed to are choices, aren’t they? If we are disciplined thinkers, we try to put our ideas through a verification process based on what others think, what is presented through our life experiences and senses and all the other ways we come to believe what’s true from what’s not.
There should be a balance between intuition, empirical knowledge and exposure to info, including education.
There should also be a continuing monitoring of our ideas and beliefs, esp. when there’s new evidence that gives us pause in what we “know”. Without this monitoring, we risk being misinformed, out-of-date, and appearing stupid.