Re: Wisdom LO879

Jim Michmerhuizen (jamzen@world.std.com)
Fri, 21 Apr 1995 22:13:57 +0059 (EDT)

Replying to LO854 --

Yeah, I was struck by Birren's response too, but couldn't think what it
was I wanted to say. That was then, this is now...

On intuition and logic, I had a big goround with a good friend some months
ago. We were over there for dinner, and his wife had recounted a story in
which she had taken a particular therapeutic path with a patient (my
friend and his wife do family therapy and counselling) "on intuition". My
friend was not, that evening, on the side of intuition, and gave many
contrasting examples from his own practice, the general import of which
was to show where he had _not_ used intuition but careful reasoning and
analysis, and would, if he had followed his intuitions, have gone down
some very wrong paths.

So the evening's thread was settled: it was to be intuition versus logic,
like the present discussion. I suggested, being congenitally disposed to
the wimpiest sort of compromises, that maybe the two weren't all that far
apart. And I gave examples from my own life and art of having intuitive
insights that I was able, later, to elaborate into rational arguments, or
to discover rational foundations for.

This did not, as I'd hoped, resolve the evening's discussion so we could
all go and watch women's mud wrestling, but it _did_ set me to remembering
Leibniz.

And that seems relevant here too. Leibniz, somewhere, suggested that
intuition was "confused perception". When I first read that, it seemed
like nonsense. Now I'm not so sure.

Look, haven't you had the experience of seeing that something _must_ be
the case, without being able to say how? The intuition that we say is at
work in such cases, the "inner" intuition that Lindsay and Birren are
referring to, has got to be "connectable" to logical thinking. I think
when you're saying that intuition and logic are very different, you can't
mean that these are different truths or worlds, whatever. Because none
of us, in our individual lives, can afford to leave these two forms of
experience _isolated_ from each other. And so, in fact, it often happens
that where an insight may come at me first in the form of intuition, I
can over some hours, or weeks, "unpack" it into some logical expression
that can then connect with - and have an impact on - the rest of my world.

Thought you'd like to know, anyway. Thanks for the posts.

Regards
jamzen@world.std.com
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On Thu, 20 Apr 1995, Lindsey, Paul wrote:

> So I end up agreeing with most of David's conclusion: "I think of wisdom
> as knowing what is best in a given situation, the kind of knowing that
> comes from an inner sense of how the many phenomena and actors within a
> situation relate to each other. It is inherently intuitive, and that's
> the realm of compassion, not logic. I don't mean to set up compassion and
> logic as opposites, because they work together. But they do use different
> mental resources and they work in very different ways."
>
> But if my model for wisdom is a composite of logics, then perhaps
> compassion is wisdom with empathy. I'm still thinking about that.