“A moment is being, not an entity. Intuition knows being together with those entities who are being’s content at the moment.”

Content is synthesized, but being conceives and is conceived. Can you intuit the difference?

Conception means spontaneously taking-together as given. Our being must have a capacity for taking-together any particular given, or we are oblivious to its presence.

That for which we have ears to hear, eyes to see or a mind to know, — for those with the means to conceive a particular reality — a given is self-evidently present.

Conversely, that for which we lack the means to conceive is not present. It is nothing. And we can’t understand how others who claim something is present are unable to see that nothing is there.

And it does not help at all that many who see nothing claim to see something, and perhaps even manage to see what they imagine. They gush about the emperor’s new clothes, and the cynics rejoice. The emperor, however, is clothed — sometimes quite majestically.

But we all conceive some kind of content. The question is only: which content.

The content we manage to conceive we can combine in any number of ways. We make arguments. We construct theories. We build bodies of knowledge.

Some of this knowledge is only conceived at the base, but is synthesized all the way up. In order to make immediate, intuitive, experience-near sense of it all, the whole must be traced back to its simple components.

Some knowledge, however is conceived at the base and also at the crown and is conceived through and through. The edifice is reinforced throughout with immediate intuitions. We intuit not only elementary particles, the sun and moon, and whole, wide world but also such important in-between realities, like love, responsibility and inspiration.

We need much more of this latter knowledge. Physicists ought to think like physicists, but the rest of us should think like the beings we are, playing the roles we are called to play. If we all think like physicists, we will not only be second-rate physicists — we will all duplicate the kinds of mistakes physicists make, and we will not be the beings we need to be to see where the physicist’s sharp sight is most blind.

We must become wiser about how we know. We must reroot all our knowledge in what is beyond the limits of knowledge, in the immediacy of intuition. This rooting of knowledge in mystery beyond knowledge is wisdom.

Intuition relates to what is present, in its passage from who it was to who it will be. The memory and anticipation of the present moment is who that moment is.

Strange language. Why “who”? Why not “what”?

A moment is being, not an entity. Intuition knows being together with those entities who are being’s content at the moment.

A subject is beneath and beyond every object.

A subject plucks definites from the infinite.

When we learn the subject Mathematics, we are able to count, add and subtract what was merely none, some or many. When we learn the subject Literature, we are taught how to make imagination a good neighbor to actuality, because “Good fences make good neighbors.”

When we learn the subject Myself, we learn how to give and accept presents from beyond ourselves.

Intuition is not about things, but, rather, movements of being, and intuiting gives us access to participating in such movements. So it is more how things have been to how things will be. But it is not only about anticipation but influence. Anyone who has participated in craft will recognize this: Intuition is how things have been and how they ought to be next, and next again.

Later, we may reflect. We may intuit patterns in these events in which we participated, and these patterns may enhance our future participation. We may experience our participation more lucidly, remembering further back and anticipating further beyond in one bright intuition. If this happens, knowledge is glorious. And we might convey our knowledge to others and enhance their intuitions. If this happens, knowledge is great.

But if knowledge tries to substitute itself for direct intuition of reality, if knowledge tries to think or feel where it ought to intuitively be in the moving suspense of the present, then it becomes a logical usurper and a verbose kidnapper of souls.

Everything good is rooted in being’s direct skin-to-skin contact with the realities of reality.

Intuition is being’s direct skin-to-skin contact with what is beyond itself.

Our understanding of the reality is rooted in our participation in the world around us.

Some of us participate mainly by observing, which is certainly one good mode of participation, but it gives us only one type of knowledge.

Experimentation — trial and error in various domains of reality is another. We might experiment with matter, or with logical forms or with words and sounds. Or we might experiment socially, and try out different public personas. Or we might experiment interpersonally and see what kinds of interaction is possible with different people in our lives. Anywhere reality is, experiment is possible.

Some of us participate in life mainly by learning about various realities second-hand and trying to construct a clear, consistent and comprehensive theory of everything.

Years ago, I noticed Kant used the word “intuition” strangely.

I always thought of intuition as hunches — as a mysterious kind of knowing arising from the depths of the unconscious. But this was just an artifact of the distorting schema of the freudian worldview (or maybe vulgar freudianism), which thinks with words about a spoken-about world. In this world, anything that is not sayable is just a sayable thing that cannot be accessed. The content of the unconscious is suppressed, or concealed in darkness — but in principle, but once it is brought into the light of consciousness, what was dark is now lucid and articulate.

But, it turns out intuition is much simpler than all this.

Intuition is our access to reality which bypasses language.

That’s it.

But many of us have it in our heads that it is always better to think things out carefully before acting. We inventory and assess the elements of a situation. We apply our theories in order to project the likely outcomes of our actions. We look for gaps in our understanding. We look for errors, contradictions and inconsistencies in our logic. We talk it out in our own heads and with each other. Then we make a plan. Then we execute that plan.

Things get decided this way, far, far away from the situation discussed. And often these decisions are made by people with shockingly little first-hand experience of the situations. They have never observed these situations directly, let alone participated in them or experimented with them. It is all second-hand knowledge. And plans are guided by theories which are also often not informed by first-hand participation. And often, on the ground, on the front-lines, these decisions are made to work, despite being unhelpful or even harmful to the situations in question.

Intuition is spontaneous response to situations. Intuitions might be purely practical. Or they may be unsayable understanding, but which, with effort and skill, can be outfitted with words. Intuitions might be a sense of significance — a sense of “something might happen here” or “this is important” or “this is good” — or the opposite of these. Intuition might trust or mistrust. All these can and do happen — and should happen — prior to language.

Whether words are “experience-near” or “experience-far” to us is a function of whether our intuition can handle these words directly, or whether other words must assist our use. When we must think about words, using other words, before we can get them to convey a point, we are in the realm of experience-distant, and those words feel dry and awkward or even meaningless.

And sometimes the words we use are just memorized strings that seem to refer to something real, but serve other purposes. Sometimes they convey a general attitude or mood. Or they may serve as shibboleths, signaling membership in a tribe. We say things ostensibly about the world, but in actuality, are meant only to indicate who we are — or, more accurately, what we are.

Experience-near language is informed by real, intuitive experience, and this allows the words to also be used and understood intuitively.

Experience-distant language can be used with skill and force, but it always feels separated from anything recognizably real.

Ideally, we would equip ourselves with language that intuitively connects with the things closest and most important to us. The tradeoff might be an inability to explain more distant phenomena and integrate the whole into a clear, consistent, comprehensive theory of everything. But there are tradeoffs in the other direction, too. A clear, consistent, comprehensive theory of everything might, for instance, be able only to theoretically account for things such as love, pain, morality or beauty — but be unable to offer any practical guidance or insight or do justice to the experiences of these things.

For those souls whose highest value is attacking existential threats, the deprivation of existential threat is an existential threat.

I do not doubt in my heart that there is higher and lower, better and worse.

A person who, looking at the duck-rabbit optical illusion, sees only a duck or only a rabbit has a worse understanding than a person who sees an optical illusion. A person who understands others primarily as instances of categories is morally worse than someone who approaches others as subjectively real persons — as a fellow I, addressed as Thou.

There are others who share my certainty regarding higher and lower and better and worse, but whose ideas of higher and better are lower and worse than mine.

Of course, it is possible that I am wrong. And, of course, if I am wrong, I cannot know it. But it does not follow from this that I must assume skepticism toward my own beliefs. Absolutely not. I will doubt when and only when I arrive at actual doubt, and not a minute before.

Meanwhile, I will fight for what I know to be right against what I know to be wrong, and I will do do with the same fervor and ferocity of those who confuse the artificial clarity of ideology with the natural immediacy of intuitive contact with reality.

C. S. Peirce, from “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities Claimed For Man”:

We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy. These prejudices are not to be dispelled by a maxim, for they are things which it does not occur to us can be questioned. …

A person may, it is true, in the course of his studies, find reason to doubt what he began by believing; but in that case he doubts because he has a positive reason for it, and not on account of the Cartesian maxim. Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.

Yesterday, on my bike ride, I (re)listened to Eric Voegelin’s Autobiographical Reflections. When I heard this passage I almost fell off my bike.

James’s study on the question “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” (1904) struck me at the time, and still strikes me, as one of the most important philosophical documents of the twentieth century. In developing his concept of pure experience, James put his finger on the reality of the consciousness of participation, inasmuch as what he calls pure experience is the something that can be put into the context either of the subject’s stream of consciousness or of objects in the external world. This fundamental insight of James identifies the something that lies between the subject and object of participation as the experience. Later I found that the same type of analysis had been conducted on a much vaster scale by Plato, resulting in his concept of the metaxy — the In-Between. The experience is neither in the subject nor in the world of objects but In-Between, and that means In-Between the poles of man and of the reality that he experiences.

The In-Between character of experience becomes of particular importance for the understanding of response to the movements of divine presence. For the experience of such movements is precisely not located in man’s stream of consciousness — man understood in the immanentist sense — but in the In-Between of the divine and the human. The experience is the reality of both divine and human presence, and only after it has happened can it be allocated either to man’s consciousness or to the context of divinity under the name of revelation. A good number of problems that plague the history of philosophy now became clear as hypostases of the poles of a pure experience in the sense of William James, or of the metaxy experiences in the sense of Plato. By hypostases I mean the fallacious assumption that the poles of the participatory experience are self-contained entities that form a mysterious contact on occasion of an experience. A mystery, to be sure, is there, but even a mystery can be clearly expressed by stressing the participatory reality of the experience as the site of consciousness and understanding the poles of the experience as its poles and not as self-contained entities. The problem of reality experienced thus becomes the problem of a flow of participatory reality in which reality becomes luminous to itself in the case of human consciousness. The term consciousness, therefore, could no longer mean to me a human consciousness that is conscious of a reality outside man’s consciousness, but had to mean the In-Between reality of the participatory pure experience that then analytically can be characterized through such terms as the poles of the experiential tension, and the reality of the experiential tension in the metaxy. The term luminosity of consciousness, which I am increasingly using, tries to stress this In-Between character of the experience as against the immanentizing language of a human consciousness, which, as a subject, is opposed to an object of experience.

This understanding of the In-Between character of consciousness, as well as of its luminosity — which is the luminosity not of a subjective consciousness but of the reality that enters into the experience from both sides — results furthermore in a better understanding of the problem of symbols: Symbols are the language phenomena engendered by the process of participatory experience. The language symbols expressing an experience are not inventions of an immanentist human consciousness but are engendered in the process of participation itself. Language, therefore, participates in the metaxy character of consciousness. A symbol is neither a human conventional sign signifying a reality outside consciousness nor is it, as in certain theological constructions, a word of God conveniently transmitted in the language that the recipient can understand; rather, it is engendered by the divine-human encounter and participates, therefore, as much in divine as in human reality. This seems to me, for the moment at least, the best formulation of the problem that plagues various symbolist philosophers — the problem that symbols do not simply signify a divine reality beyond consciousness but are somehow the divine reality in its presence itself.

We start from givens, and must be faithful to those givens, but if we work to understand more than we already know, remaining faithful not only to what we know and do not know but also to where we experience perplexity, our givens can change, and we can re-start from new givens, and experience new truth.

We cannot choose those new givens, nor can we invent them. Attempts to choose or invent our new givens — to construct a truth to our liking — in the mistaken belief that with repetition and application any newly-constructed truth can become habitual, familiar and true, will result only in dishonesty, alienation, nihilism and despair. If a constructivist does manage to experience a construction as true, this is only because their sense of truth is so thoroughly lost that there is no faithfully-felt truth with which to compare it. The most hopeless alienation is one ignorant of its alienation, which regards whatever is not itself as a threat. Alienation is homophilic and heterophobic. It hates alterity.

If we wish to live faithfully in truth, all we can do is find live, felt problems and follow them where they lead us. And if we cannot live with where we arrive, we can only iterate this process until we arrive at a given truth we can live with. We must take what is given.

And once we find a given truth we love, we are not required to look for problems. Problems will arise when the time is right.

Truths deserve not only faithfulness, but also gratitude, care and love. Why should we demand unconditionality and immortality from truth?