Intuition is selective seeing — an implicitly managed selective ignorance — which assigns relevance to some beings, irrelevance to others, and, even more importantly fails to perceive some beings at all, and just looks past or through them.

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Freedom is living according to one’s intuitions.

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Everyone is at some point required to think through whatever is deemed relevant by another’s intuition. Everyone must sacrifice some freedom in order to live socially — at least to the degree one lacks the power to impose one’s intuitions on the less powerful.

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Intuitions are personal. They are preferred or hated according to how natural they feel to an individual’s mind. Or, as we say, how intuitive they feel.

An intellectual discipline that feels unintuitive might eventually come to feel intuitive, at least to some degree, but prior to its becoming intuitive, practicing that discipline requires an enormous sacrifice of energy. And it might be that such disciplines always operate in the red, and always require a sacrifice of energy. You can be sure that somewhere, someone who finds the discipline more intuitive is actually acquiring energy practicing it.

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A person who finds natural the intuitions of the most powerful strata of society will find it easy to gain power.

First, when such a person adopts the intellectual and practical norms of the powerful, this is a cultivation of his nature. Conformity with the norms is empowering and pleasurable, even if it is involuntary. Others, however, experience the same norms as alien, its concepts and practices artificial, its imposition oppressive, and its effect is to make life more arduous, tedious and less spontaneous. In other words, the norms favor some temperaments and cripple others.

Second, people who share intuitions are natural allies. It is by our intuitions that we are friends or enemies.

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Reason is the commitment to discover new ways of understanding that accommodate more and more intuitive natures. Reason is guided by the pluralistic faith that there are many possible ways to conceive and perceive — many possible lifeworlds — and each of these lifeworlds favor some intuitions and hinder others. The ideal we will never reach but must always pursue through constant transcendence of intellectual comfort for the sake of others, is the lifeword that is natural to all people.