Okay, here's the deal. I'm going to give you four keys to a successful long-term relationship with a loving, empathic, holding and warm partner. In short, with someone like me.
And these four keys, note them down, print them out, magnetize them on your fridge, hang them upside down and down, sunny side up, next to the alarm system. Because these are the only four relevant keys when you meet someone, when you date someone, when you fall in love with someone and when you consider having a life with someone.
And so, here we go. If it feels wrong, it is wrong.
Number two, if it takes too much conspicuous and ostentatious effort, it is fake. If you see too much effort going into anything, dating you, talking to you, having sex with you, whatever, it's fake. Effort equals fake or at least too much effort.
Number three, if it is too good to be true, there's only one reason for that. It is not true.
Number four, in today's world, believe nothing and verify everything. He tells you good morning, look out the window, make sure the sun is still up there. He tells you it's the 4th of July, pull out the calendar, click on your smartphone, make sure it is July and make sure it's the 4th. Believe nothing, distrust everything, verify every single thing.
Why is that?
Because studies have shown, studies by Dana Rayelli and many other behavioral psychologists, studies have shown that people, all people, can I repeat this? Not only narcissists, not only psychopaths, not only so-called sociopaths, even self-styled nonsensical empaths, all people, men and women, young and old, educated and less educated, blue collar, white collar, no collar, all people like everyone with two legs, lie about every single thing, a whopping 90% of the time. Did you get that straight? 9 out of 10 sentences are false, fake, exaggerated, wrong, misleading, manipulative. That's not 9 out of 100, that's 9 out of 10.
And these are studies. This is based on studies. It's not speculation.
I recommend to you to go online and look up for everything ever done, ever written by Dana Rayelli, wonderful behavioral psychologist, Israeli of course.
So people lie 90% of the time and they lie unnecessarily most of the time. There's no reason, no rhyme, no goal, nothing. People just lie.
And here's the clinch. Here's the punchline. You believe them 90% of the time. This is called the base rate fallacy.
And before you send me an avalanche of emails, base like military base, B-A-S-E, not base the mathematician, base rate fallacy. People lie 90% of the time and you believe them 90% of the time. I call this the 1990 rule.
So verify everything. Trust nothing.
Let me recap these for you.
If it feels wrong, it is wrong.
If there's too much conspicuous and ostentatious effort, it's fake. If it's too good to be true, it's not true.
And by far most importantly, check, check, do your homework, do your research, verify.
In today's world, it's much easier. There's Google. All this has to do with of course intuition.
This is the topic of today's video. Can you trust your gut feeling? What is intuition? Is there only one type of intuition? How does it operate? How is it constructed?
So what I did being as old as I am, I went and spoke to philosophers dating all the way back to ancient Greece when I was younger. And so I asked philosophers, what do they have to say about intuition? And I created an anthology, Compendium for you. And I'm going to tell you in this video, what philosophers say about intuition.
And now before you turn me off, philosophers were very wise people. And what they have to say is, has applicability to your lives.
It's a pity people study philosophy much less than they used to.
The phenomenon of Jordan Peterson exemplifies, demonstrates the importance of philosophy, wrong philosophy, and philosophy is debatable, but it's philosophy. Philosophy used to be the mother and the father and the cousin and the grandparent of sciences. All sciences came from philosophy, including psychology to this very day in many countries in the world. Psychology is part of the faculty of philosophy. So don't underestimate what philosophers have to tell you.
Now, before I go there, as is our habit, my name is Sam Vaknin. I'm a professor of psychology, and a professor of finance and psychology in some other universities. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited. First edition was published in 1999, like 20 years before everyone else. And I've written other books about personality disorders and numerous other topics.
Today, we discuss intuition.
But before we go there, let's straighten one administrative, one issue, I usually answer someone.
So I received an email, and there was a comment, I think, from one of the videos regarding a new discovery, the dark empath. The dark empath is supposedly a narcissist or a psychopath who has empathy.
First of all, there's no such thing as empath. I've been saying it numerous times. There's no such clinical entity, no diagnosis, nothing. There's no such thing as empath.
Can you get it through your head? Empath is a self- attributed label, self-imputed label, victims with grandiosity, or people who believe themselves to be victims, or professional victims. They want to feel virtuous. They want to feel sanctimonious. They want to feel morally superior. They want to feel that they had nothing to contribute or to do with their own abuse. So they self-label embers.
That you self-label something doesn't mean that it has an validity in psychology.
Now we do have something called HSP, Highly Sensitive People, and I've discussed it in other videos which I recommend that you see. I do regret, however, to see academics, scholars, professors prostitute themselves and pander to the grandiosity of self-styled professional victims just in order to sell their products and services.
There are people online who should know better because they are professors of psychology and so on and so forth. They should fight the good fight. They should resist the tide and they should not sacrifice academic integrity for self enrichment, which is exactly what they're doing.
Now the particular study that came up with a construct of dark empath was conducted at the University of Nottingham and it is the outcome simply of ignorance. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is the Bible of psychiatry, but only in North America. It is used mainly in the United States. In other parts of the world, such as Europe, such as the United Kingdom, we use another book called ICD, International Cross-Editing of Diseases. The 11th edition is about to be published. There's a huge gap, there's an abyss between the DSM and the ICD. I'm not going into it right now.
And the outcome is that European scholars and academics, and I can tell you this from personal experience, are not fully updated. They are not cutting edge. They are not bleeding edge. They are like five to ten years behind. Absolutely five to ten years behind. I'm not exaggerating.
And so had these esteemed colleagues from the University of Nottingham bothered to look up the alternate model of narcissistic personality disorder. In the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual published seven years ago in 2013, they would have found to their shock that narcissists and psychopaths now do have empathy, or at least narcissists.
According to the DSM-5, narcissists do have empathy. They have a special kind of empathy.
15 years ago, I proposed, I was the first to propose, that narcissists have empathy. And I labeled it cold empathy.
In between, there were numerous other scholars who came up with a construct of cognitive empathy.
In other words, I don't know what's the brouhaha that narcissists and psychopaths have empathy.
There's no need to invent a new label of dark empath unless you want to fit in, you want to fit into the hype of YouTube.
If you're a serious scholar, you would have known that narcissists and psychopaths possess cognitive or cold empathy. And that this is a 15 year old discovery, at the very least, if not older.
Additionally, of course, cognitive empathy is only one component. Another component that narcissists and psychopaths have is reflexive empathy. It's the bodily reactions, the biological reaction to the condition of someone else. This is mediated through a special type of neurons called mirror neurons.
So narcissists and psychopaths, to summarize, have empathy. I repeat, they have empathy.
Only it's reflexive or cold or cognitive. I don't care about the label.
Go on my YouTube channel and look up all the videos on cold empathy, some of them dating back 10 years.
No need to invent a label, a new label, and definitely no need to prostitute yourself and to become popular on YouTube by using the absolute nonsensical, nonsensical misnomer empath.
Now, highly sensitive people fit in somehow, fit into this video somehow, because highly sensitive people have something called overexcitability. Overexcitability is a part of the developmental root or developmental half of certain individuals. It's a heightened physiological experience of stimuli resulting from increased neuronal sensitivity. I discussed it when I discussed in the video where I talk about whether narcissism is genetic or epigenetic and so on. I mentioned this.
Overexcitability is going to feature a big time in this video.
And in this sense, I'm somehow connecting overexcitability with personal growth, with highly sensitive people, with intuition, because intuition implies some kind of oversensitivity. We feel ill at ease.
When you meet a narcissist, you feel ill at ease. Even if you think that you are feeling perfectly fine, even if it's a first date and it's going swimmingly and it's the greatest date ever, you know, flowers, romants, limousines, white beloved waiters with masks, of course, even if this kind of date with romantic music played by a gypsy band, there's something there.
There's something of note. There's something of key.
There are these snippets. There's these smidgens. There are these flashes of wrongness, ill-fitting things, ill-fitting expressions. They're called micro-expressions, ill-fitting behaviors.
And you can't put everything together. It's like a jigsaw puzzle with one of the pieces wrong, one of the pieces coming from another box.
So the jigsaw puzzle is never complete. And you have this ill background, background ill at ease. There's information there. It's not abundant. It's incidental. But there's information there that generates cognitive dissonance.
He says one thing and he behaves in another way. Or he generates emotional dissonance.
I am so into him, I will try to ignore his misbehavior. So these dissonances, they lead to something called confirmation bias.
You filter out. You so want to be with him. You so wanted to work. You were so happy and so excited to go this day or to develop this relationship or to talk to him or that we filter out.
You ignore, you repress, you delete. Any information, to the contrary, any information that challenges your view of him as perfection.
In other words, you idealize him. It's very common in a relationship with the narcissist that you idealize the narcissist as much as he idealizes you.
I'm against, I actually came up with a concept of, with a cycle of idealization, devaluation, a discard.
In 1995, I am the one who proposed this cycle. But today I've modified it and I call the first phase co-idealization.
You idealize him, he idealizes you.
And there are, you know, there's always thin lines. There are always thin lines.
For example, complexity. Complexity is one thing. Defiance is another thing. Stupidity is a third thing.
It's very easy, very easy to conflate and confuse. A complex person with a defiant person, with a contumacious person and with an idiot.
And so if he's an idiot, you would tend to think of him as complex. You would tend to believe that there are some background processes that you're not aware of and will reveal themselves in due time.
You tend to create confabulated narratives to justify your presence in his life. You tend to ignore your own intuition.
Is he a misogynist? Is he a sadist? Is he a narcissist?
You know, is he an equal opportunity abuser?
He abuses men and women. Does he heap his abuse on the weak people, subservient people, in positions where they cannot retaliate?
Like, I don't know, waiters, cabbies, service providers?
Your intuition keeps ringing alarm in the background. It keeps telling you, hey, wake up, something's wrong, but you don't want to. You don't want to wake up from this dream until it's well advanced and you begin to realize that it's actually a nightmare.
It's a surrealistic lucid dreaming, because you're inducing this dream. You're co-creating it. You're collaborating.
Had you just listened to your intuition and followed the aforementioned four rules, believe me, 90% of your relationship trouble would have never happened.
And philosophers have a lot to tell you about your gut feeling and whether, when, and how you should trust it.
There was a Polish combo, combophilosopher, psychologist, poet. His name was Kazimierz Dażyński, yet another unpronounceable name, which qualifies you as a psychologist. And he came up with a theory of positive disintegration, TPD.
Dabrowski was essentially an existentialist because existentially it came up with the concept of angst. Angst is mistranslated as anxiety. Angst is not anxiety. Angst has a component of anxiety, but it also has a component of tension, of stress. It's like the stress of existing. Existence itself exerts such enormous amount of stress, so many conflict-laden tensions, that it generates anxiety.
And this complex is called angst.
And Dabrowski said that angst is necessary for growth. He said that there are processes that disintegrate us, but he regarded them as positive.
He said that people who don't disintegrate, don't reintegrate. They remain stuck in what he called primary integration.
He said to move from primary integration to secondary integration, to progress, to grow, to mature, to become an adult, a true, full-fledged adult with all these dimensions, you need first to disintegrate.
And if you don't disintegrate and then reintegrate, you lack true individuality. You must advance courageously and sometimes you must induce personally your own disintegration because it's a hierarchy.
There's always a higher level of development, but you can't move into this higher level of developmental potential if you don't first destroy creative destruction, destroy the previous phase.
And he said that it all depends on what he called overexcitability, above average reactions to stimuli, as I mentioned before. He said that overexcitability is the thing that pushes you. That's the energy, that's the fuel that pushes you towards personal growth.
And I think intuition plays a critical part in this. We'll come to it in a minute.
Dabrowski had shared something in common with Jordan Peterson, and in this sense, Peterson would hate me for saying it. Peterson is actually an existentialist, but both Dabrowski and Peterson suggested that suffering is crucial, that in order to grow and to develop, you need to suffer. I'm not talking you need to be disappointed. I'm not talking you need to have pain. You need to suffer. You need to suffer as the condition of your existence.
He said that intense personal suffering, self-infliction of suffering, this is the key to healing mental illness. He said that the shaping of personality depends on this, on processes of suffering, which lead such extreme suffering, which leads to disintegration.
He said that one of the major factors, he called it the second factor, one of the major factors in growing and developing and evolving and suffering is socialization. Socialization is conveyed to us via peer pressure. Society informs us how it expects us to behave. Society communicates to us its norms and mores, its values and its prescriptive behaviors. Society tells us all these conditions, shapes us, molds us, use any words you want. Society does this via peers mostly, peer pressure.
And he says that when we challenge this, when we break through this, when we do not accept peer pressure, when we are essentially defined, then we grow.
Now this is debatable of course, because if defines is taken to the extreme, it renders you a psychopath. But if there's no defines whatsoever, you become a Robopath.
Robopath is a term coined by a systems biologist. His name was Von Bertalanffy.
My apologies again. And Von Bertalanffy suggested that people who have modified, who adhere 100% to what society tells them to do, who mold and shape shift in order to fit into their peer group. These people are not human. They're robotic. They're Robopaths. They're not only robots, they're sick robots.
And so this integration requires fighting back society, fending back, fending society off. It requires countering, countering, countermending, undermining social signaling and pressures.
And then the question arises, how do you spot these signals?
And my answer is intuition. I think a major part of what we call intuition is picking up signals, picking up signals mainly from others.
And we have this radar, this detector, this scanner that is constantly on. And we scan all the time, exactly like narcissists and psychopaths.
The difference between normal people, healthy people, and narcissists and psychopaths, the narcissist and the psychopath, they scan. But they scan and they have no emotional reaction to what the scanning reveals about other people. You do. You have an emotional reaction.
But everyone, narcissists, psychopaths, normal people, healthy people, everyone is scanning all the time, picking up signals all the time. Beep, beep, beep. It's like this project of SETI, the project for discovering alien life in the universe. We are trying to pick up signals and we're trying to make sense of this signal to discover structures, repetitiveness, rules. And I think this is what we call intuition. This is where this Polish psychologist, Dabrowski, fits into the video today.
Because I think the missing part in his theory of positive disintegration is what mediates the communication. What is the communication channel? What is the transmission mechanism between individual and society, individual and peers?
And you know what? Individual in himself or herself. What is this communication channel?
And I think this communication channel is intuition.
And if we introduce intuition into Dabrowski's work, it is rendered complete. It's a fascinating work. I encourage you to go online and look, look for whatever you can, you can find.
Let's go to, let's now begin to discuss intuition problem.
Profits in the Bible and scientists, they're both in the business or we're in the business of making predictions. Both these types, prophets and scientists, resort to metaphysical frameworks as the source of their knowledge. The prophet will tell you, I got my knowledge from God. And the scientists will tell you, I obtain my knowledge via the scientific method.
It's another argument whether science is not actually a religion. Put that aside. Both prophets and scientists vehemently deny the role of intuition in their output.
If you challenge a prophet, if I could talk to Muhammad or to Jesus and challenge them and tell them, actually, you're not talking to God, you're talking to yourself, it's intuition.
They would challenge me. They would have challenged me. They would have told me you're wrong. I am talking to God.
Or if they would really be in an advanced stage, they would say this is what you call intuition is the voice of God.
The prophet claims to possess privileged access to a transcendental being. And the prophet says, I'm merely serving as a conduit.
This supreme being has his own faults, his own intentions. I am nothing. I'm a channel. I'm channeling God.
The scientists insist that his work is objective and rational, of course, God forbid, intuition, no way. And that in principle, this work can be emulated by a computer, for example.
There's an open question now in the age of artificial intelligence. Why do we assume that computers cannot have intuition? Leave it aside for a minute.
Both scientists and prophets actually transform deep-set, unconscious processes into structural statements, sentences, laws.
They think that if they take what is profound, what is deep, what is unconscious, and they convert it via language to something that is communicable, it had lost its profundity and its inexplicability.
I think it's a very dubious proposition that you talk about some of something doesn't change its essence.
And there is a problem with intuition. There is a problem with the essence of intuition.
And if you listen carefully from now to the end of the video, you will learn a lot about your gut feeling and your intuition, and how and when and where should you trust them.
And you become handy when you date the next narcissist, or when your next relationship falls apart, or when it succeeds, or when you have children, or when you start a new job.
Intuition is arguably a much more critical part of decision-making than rationalization.
Our ratio, our reasoning are not what they are made out to be. And our intuition is very powerful.
First, let's clear the field.
There are three types of intuition. And I will start by describing the first type.
The first type is called Idetic Intuition. Intuition is supposed to be a form of direct access.
When I ask you what is intuition, you would say, well, I directly receive an answer to something.
I didn't even know that I had the question, but suddenly I have the answer.
But it's direct access to what?
This intuition, does it access directly some objects called intuitions? Is it like you're going to a supermarket of intuitions, and there's off-the-shelf intuitions, and you pick up one of them?
Are intuitions abstract objects? Are they like numbers or properties? Are they the objects of the mental act of intuition? Or maybe intuition is the mind's way of interacting directly with some ideas, platonic ideas, or phenomenological essences.
Maybe there are things out there that are essential, maybe even ideas and symbols, of their own existence. And it is true intuition that we access them.
And what do I mean when we say direct access? Like access by itself is problematic.
But what do you mean direct, directly?
Well, when we say direct access, we usually mean without the intellectual mediation and arbitration of a manipulated symbol system, and without the benefits of inference, observation, analysis, deduction, experience, or reason.
Like all these things, higher level, upper level things, they are absent in intuition.
Intuition is very animal-like, very primordial.
The appropriately named philosopher Kant thought that both Euclidean space and time, for example, are intuitions. He said, there is no such thing as space, there's no such thing as time. They are intuited.
In other words, he thought that the senses interact with our transcendental intuitions to produce a synthetic a priori knowledge.
We have this intuition of space and time, we get sensory input, and then we organize it within these intuitions of space and time.
The raw data obtained by our senses, our sensory experience, these data presuppose intuition.
Intuition is like a drawer, like a big cupboard. You arrange your clothing according to the shape and the internal space of the cupboard.
One could argue that intuition is independent of our senses, of course.
Thus, these intuitions, and these are the identical intuitions that I mentioned, these intuitions are not or would not be the result of sensory data, or I don't know, of calculation, or processing, or manipulation of sensory data.
It's like this intuition and their sense are. Our senses have nothing to do with our intuitions. They are independent entities.
They are like file folders. They are like operating system, in a way.
Kant came up with the term erchaeon. Erchaeon means phenomenon or appearance. It's the way an object appears to our senses.
He says that erchaeon is a kind of sense intuition, and then it's processed by categories of substance, of cause.
So first we have, there's an object. It has objective reality, presumably. We have no way of knowing, but we think there is objective reality because we all share the same way of watching it, of seeing it.
And then there's erchaeon. Erchaeon is essentially the interaction, the way it appears to us, and only then, once we have gone through this sense intuition, do we begin to organize it in drawers and cupboards and categories and file folders and so on.
And as opposed to the phenomenon, because this is a phenomenon, yes, there is something called normal. Normal is the object, the thing in itself. And the thing in itself, of course, is not dependent on us. It's not dependent on us seeing it. It's not subject to any category or any intuition or anything. It's just a thing in itself. Even that is debatable now with insights that we have from quantum mechanics. Even this is very debatable.
You see, immediately we started to talk and we're stuck. We are stuck because what is access? What is direct? What is intuition? What is object?
Our language breaks down. Ironically, our language breaks down when we try to cope with reality.
How do you want to cope with the narcissist or the psychopath? They're so alien and removed from your daily experiences.
When I ask you to describe intuition, which is something you had experienced a billion times, you fail. The language fails you.
How do you want to describe the alien landscape of the narcissist mind, which is non-human in any critical sense of the word.
And why won't you trust your intuition when it beeps, beeps the alarm and warns you?
Descartes, Véné Descartes, which is my favorite punching bag. Véné Descartes in the 17th century, a French philosopher, he of course came up with a famous sentence, I think, therefore I am. Coquito au jus. I think therefore I am. It's actually about intuition because I am the knowledge that I am. That's an immediate, an indubitable innate intuition.
And you can develop a whole metaphysical system for me as he did. So there is at least one intuition which all of us share. I am.
And here again, it breaks down when you come to the narcissist.
The narcissist has no sense of I am. He has no sense of existence. He outsources his existence. He needs you to make him feel alive. He needs you to regulate his internal environment. He needs you to stabilize his sense of self-worth. He has no ego. He has no constructs. He's a hall of mirrors in an empty space. He's a vacuum. He's what Kernberg called the emptiness, the void.
So even this foundational Cartesian intuition I am breaks down when we discuss narcissism.
People ask me, why do you make so many so many videos about narcissism? Are you kidding me?
Narcissism is where philosophy breaks down. I mean, forget psychology, forget relationship advice, forget YouTube coaches and self-styled experts and so on. Forget all this. This is the fluff. This is the fluff of the magic. This is the lintel on the suit. This is nothing.
As far as I'm concerned, narcissism is where all our categories of thinking, all our way of seeing the world, all our understanding of literally everything breaks down, break down. It's an investigation into the core. It's like Jules Verne wrote a book about travel to the earth's core. This is the core. I'm not elevating narcissists.
Most narcissists are total buffoons, clowns, and not very bright. That's all I'm saying.
I'm saying the psychological disorder, psychological phenomena of narcissism, if we study it properly and deeply, it's like travel to outer space, to another galaxy. We're going to reach unimaginable places.
This is precisely what I'm trying to do in my videos. The galaxy is far, far away and it's the only spaceship we have.
Luckily, narcissists use language. I mean, people are waiting with bated breath for alien spaceships and UFOs to land on earth.
Are you kidding me? There are aliens among us, the likes of which no extra-terrestrial can equal or compete with. There's nothing more alien than the narcissist. Nothing can be more alien.
Why?
Because it's partly human, and the part that is human is insignificant. It's a simulation. It's an imitation. It's artificial intelligence. It's amazing.
Narcissism is an amazing phenomenon, philosophically speaking.
One of my PhDs is in philosophy. I'm a philosopher. Another is in physics. I'm a physicist. I mean, it's all there. The cards work in the respect is reminiscent even of Gnosticism, of religion. Gnosticism is a form of religion, secular religion. Gnosticism says that the intuition of the mystery of the self leads to revelation. Gnosticism is incapable of revelation. They don't have an intuition of the self. They don't have a mystery of the self.
For the simple reason, they don't have a self. How can you have a God if you don't have a self? How can you have an epiphany if you don't have a self?
I'm an agnostic. I'm not a believer, and I regard people of faith as feeble-minded and possibly mentally ill, delusional disorder. I have an extremely dim view of religion. I mean, compared to me, Richard Dawkins is a religious person.
That's not the issue.
The issue is that the process of revelation, the process of relating to God, is a process of self-discovery and self-evaluation, which should culminate in Gnosticism.
But even if it doesn't, it's a laudable process, and it's barred. It's blocked. Narcissists and psychopaths can't do this.
In a way, you could say that on a first date with a narcissist and a psychopath, your first intuition should be, is he godly?
Not does he believe in God. Is he a godly person?
Bergson, another Jew, of course, Henry Bergson, a French philosopher, described a kind of instinctual empathic intuition, which penetrates objects and persons, identifies with them, and in this way derives knowledge about the absolutes. He called it duration.
Duration for him was the essence of all living things, and he distinguished it from Elon Vital. Elon Vital is the force of life, the creative life force.
So this is what I'm talking about. If you don't have empathic intuition, you're not human. And if you're not human, there is nothing meaningful you can learn or say or discover or even explore about any object and any person, even an absolute person like God.
You are in a penal colony, isolated, and when you date a narcissist or when you begin to have a relationship with a narcissist, let alone a psychopath, you can see this penal look. You can see this haunted, haunted criminal look in his eyes, even when he orders wine in the restaurant.
There is this tension of the body and emptiness of the eyes. There is this about to leap sensation. It's like permanent state, permanent frozen state of flight or fight.
Bergson wrote, intuition is an instinct that has become disinterested, self-conscious, capable of reflecting upon its object and of enlarging it indefinitely. Clever man he was.
And so to Bergson's science, the use of symbols by our intelligence to describe reality is the falsification of reality.
He said that only art based on intuition and unhindered by mediating thought, not warped by symbols, only art provided one with access to reality.
In this sense, of course, modern art is much more art than naturalist art or ancient art.
Spinoza, Benedicto, Baruch Spinoza. I keep telling you this anecdote.
My great, great, great, great grandfather was the Rabbi of Amsterdam. His name was Paldo. And he's the guy who excommunicated Spinoza. He made Spinoza walk across the aisle and everyone spat on him because he dared to challenge the conception of God. He dared to undermine in their view or question the attributes of God.
So my great, great, great, great, great father was as much a sadist as I was.
Runs in the family.
Anyhow, Baruch, Benedicto Spinoza, Bergson, two Jews, they intuited knowledge of the world as an interconnected whole. And this is also a form of identity intuition.
Remember, we're discussing the first type of intuition, identity. Spinoza thought that intuitive knowledge is superior to both empirical knowledge, sense knowledge, and to scientific knowledge, reasoning knowledge, because intuitive knowledge unites the mind with the infinite being and reveals to it an orderly holistic universe.
In his view, intuition was kind of a penetrative instrument. I don't want to be gross, but I use the word penetration.
Yes, intuition creates unity also in a sexual way. What is sex? Sex is the merging of bodies and minds.
What the youngsters call hookups and meaningless sex, they have no idea what they're talking about. They're denying the meaningfulness of sex. That's not the same as rendering sex meaningful. Sex is the supreme, most subtle act, most religious act in a way.
No wonder religions all over the world were obsessed with sex with the regulation of sex.
Intuition is having sex with the world. When you have an intuition about someone, when you have intuition about something, you just had sex with the world. You just have sex with the world.
The climax in your mind is the intuition.
There was a guy, Friedrich Schleiermacher. Did you notice that every word in German sounds like I'm going to execute you and burn your body? I mean, evenich libidch, which believe it or not means I love you, sounds like a serious threat. It's like, you know, I'm going to mutilate you and then we're going to feed you to the crows in the field, something like that.
I mean, German has a way with words, no question about it.
So, Friedrich Schleiermacher and Rudolf Otto, they discussed the religious experience. And there is a concept called the numinous. Numinous is God, essentially. It's the spiritual power that pervades the universe.
And they discussed the numinous. And they suggested that the numinous itself is a kind of intuitive, pre-lingual, before language, an immediate feeling. And this immediacy, where I disagree with them, is that this immediacy does not pertain only to the numinous, but also to the phenomenon, in other words, also to the world around us.
I think the numinous pervades the world around us. It's not because the world is made of spirits or the spiritual, the world is made of atoms and whatever, but it's because we are incapable of perceiving the world properly and fully except through the spiritual dimension.
There's no wonder that religion is far more popular and always has been far more popular than competing alternatives like ideologies or animal science.
Because it has an advantage. The advantage is the leveraging of the spiritual.
Cogley, an Italian philosopher, distinguished what he called concept, representation, or classification, from intuition. He said that intuition is expression of the individuality of an object out of an artistic object. And he said this concept, which is how we represent the object, how we classify it, how we analyze it, how we categorize it, the boring stuff.
And this intuition is like, boom, this is the object. And it's individual. It's nothing like it.
Of course, we have the same reaction to people. Aesthetic interest is intuitive.
But aesthetic interest is intimately connected to individuation and separation.
There is beauty in becoming an individual. And one cannot become an individual if one is not beautiful.
Everyone, therefore, who is an individual is also beautiful. Some people are beautiful in the outside as well as the inside, like me, for example. But some people are beautiful only in the inside.
But there's no person alive who is an individual, who is an individual, who doesn't have an aesthetic value, a beauty, who is not, therefore, an au jait d'art, artistic object, with two exceptions, narcissists and psychopaths.
They have no individuality. They have hive minds, collages.
And so when you come across a narcissist or psychopath, one of the main reasons that you feel ill at ease is, that they are not beautiful.
There is ugliness there. Sometimes they are too functional. Sometimes they are too goal-oriented. Sometimes they are distracted by their own absence. Something is wrong, and it's wrong in an ugly way.
You feel ugliness when you are with a narcissist and psychopath, even if it's your first meeting and within the first 10 seconds. You're trying to compensate for it because you're lonely, and you want a partner, and you want to have sex. You didn't have sex for four years. It's your opportunity. Or you want to go on a date, or you want to drink wine. You want to have fun. So you repress it. You deny it.
But think back. There was ugliness there, or at the very least, the absence of beauty. Art, according to Corocia and Collingwood, should be mainly concerned with expression. In other words, with intuition, as an end unto itself, not as a means, but as the end. It shouldn't be concerned with other ends, expressing certain states of mind, and so on.
Idetic intuitions are also similar to what is called the Bhagamantha satya, the ultimate truth, in the Madhyamika school of Buddhist thought. The ultimate truth cannot be expressed verbally, and it is beyond empirical and illusory phenomena.
Eastern thought, Zen Buddhism, for example, uses intuition, or experience, to study reality in a non-duodistic manner.
Okay, enough philosophy.
Next type of intuition. Next type of intuition is what we call emergent intuition. It's the second type, and subjectively, the intuiting person, the person who exercises intuition, has the impression of a shortcut, a short-circuiting of his usually linear thought processes.
In other words, you feel a sudden flash. It's like there was a short circuit in your brain, perhaps the equivalent of a cognitive stroke. It's based on trial and error, but the trial and error are obscured. They are not accessible. They're not transparent.
And this type of intuition feels magical, like a quantum leap from premise to conclusion.
The parsimonious selection of the most useful and the workable from a myriad possibilities.
Intuition, in other words, is rather like a dreamlike, truncated thought process, the subjective equivalent of a wormhole in cosmology.
It is often preceded by periods of frustration, dead ends, failures, and blind alleys in one's work or one's relationship.
Artists, especially performing artists, musicians, for example, they will often describe their interpretation of an artwork, a musical piece, and they will say, well, I intuited the piece. It was intuition.
That's especially true in jazz.
Many mathematicians and physicists, those who follow the kind of Pythagorean tradition, mathematicians and physicists of which are one, they use emergent intuitions in solving general non-linear equations, the dirty secret of physicists and mathematicians.
When we are faced with non-linear equations, very difficult equations and so on, differential, partial differential, non-linear equations and so on, what we do, we guess. We guess the approximate.
We say, well, it looks to me like this would be the solution.
The partial differential equation is very common. It's a guess.
Once we guess, we try to retrofit, reverse engineer, to see if the guess works. If it doesn't work, we guess again.
We guess again, intuition.
Henri Poincaré, one of the greatest mathematicians and physicists of the late 19th, early 20th century, a predecessor of Einstein in many, many ways.
Some even accuse Einstein of plagiarizing some of his work.
In a presentation to the Psychological Society of Paris in 1901, Poincare said that even simple mathematical operations requiring intuition of mathematical order, without which no creativity in mathematics is possible, which is why we can be pretty certain that the language of mathematics is inadequate and insufficient to capture reality or even the laws of nature.
Poincare described how some of his creative work occurred to him out of the blue and without any preparation, the result of emergent intuitions.
He said, these intuitions that just came to me had the characteristics of brevity, suddenness and immediate certainty.
Most striking at first is this appearance of sudden illumination, manifest sign of long unconscious prior work.
The role of this unconscious work in mathematical invention appears to me incontestable and traces of it would be found in other cases where it is less evident.
Remember these words. When you are confronted with someone new in your life and you're wondering, is he a narcissist? Is he a psychopath? Will he be abusive? Will the relationship be a horror movie? Let it go. Stop controlling. Stop analyzing. Allow the Poincare perception of intuition to work.
Rewind this video and listen again to what he said.
Subjectively, emergent intuitions are indistinguishable from insights. Your brain is telling you, giving you insights, is telling you to walk away, you know, cut it out, emerge, diverge, run away, the scream like monk's famous painting.
Insight is more cognitive and structured and concerned with objective learning and knowledge, but both of them have the same mechanism.
Intuition is a novel reaction, a novel solution based on already acquired responses and skills to new stimuli and new challenges.
And still, both in insight and in intuition, there's a strong emotional example, aesthetic correlate.
And this helps the emergence.
So trust your life experience.
Unbeknownst to you, everything you know, everything in your consciousness, every single bit of information, everything from your name to the name of your daughter, everything you know, your job, your skills, absolutely everything.
Statistically, is 5% of what's in your mind. 95% is submerged in the unconscious.
Why would you let the 5% rule the 95%?
When you meet a new person, let your unconscious run free, release the horses, you know, release the stallions.
These are race horses, Arabian race horses, they're gonna win the race. Let it go.
Intuition and insight are strong elements also in creativity, the human response to an ever-changing environment.
They are shock induces, they are destabilizers.
The aim of intuition and insight is to move the organism from one established equilibrium to the next established equilibrium.
And in this way, to better prepare the organism to cope with new possibilities, challenges and experiences.
If you have an intuition, you will have a bodily reaction. Don't be afraid. Don't recoil. Don't avoid. Let your body also talk to you.
As van der Kolk says, the body remembers the trauma.
Both insight and intuition are in the realm of the unconscious, the simple, the mentally disordered.
The great importance of obtaining insights and integrating them in psychoanalysis is because of this.
Psychoanalysis uses insights to establish a new equilibrium.
The third type of intuition is the ideal intuition. These are thoughts and feelings that precede any intellectual analysis and they underlie it.
You know, you're all acquainted with one such ideal intuition. It's called empathy.
Empathy is an intuitive mode applied to the minds of other people. It's a theory of mind. It yields an intersubjective agreement.
Morality is another example. Moral ideals, moral rules are intuitions. Can you prove to me, is there any way to prove with reason, with logic, that killing someone is bad? No way. Let me save you the time.
There's no rigorous way to prove, to substantiate, to convince that killing someone is bad.
So why do we all universally agree that killing people is bad?
Because it's intuitive. It's an intuition.
Mathematical and logical axioms, basic rules of interest, necessary truths. I believe these are intuitions.
You know, you can't prove an axiom by definition. It's an axiom.
These moral, mathematical, and logical self-evident conventions do not relate to the world. They relate to our inner world.
They reflect the structure of our mind, the elements of the languages we use to describe the world or the codes that regulate our conduct in the world.
It follows that these a priori languages and codes are nothing but the set of our embedded ideal intuitions.
As the rationalists realized, ideal intuitions, a class of undeniable self-evident truths and principles in these intuitions can be accessed by our intellect.
In other words, intellect and intuition are not mutually exclusive.
It's a myth. It is the intellect that allows us to access ideal intuitions like mathematics, like morality, and even like empathy.
When you date a narcissist or a psychopath, let your intellect do the work as well. Don't block any part of you.
You need all the resources. Trust me. You need your sense of aesthetics.
Is this an ugly person? You need your intellect to analyze discrepancies, misbehaviors, tiny flashes. You need everything.
Rationalism is concerned with intuitions, though only with those intuitions available to reason and to intellect.
Sometimes the boundary between intuition and deductive reasoning is blurred and fuzzy. They both yield the same results.
Moreover, intuitions can combine them to yield metaphysical or philosophical systems or a judgment of another person or a situation. Descartes applied ideal intuitions, rhythm, to his idetic intuitions, and this gave rise to his metaphysics. Husserl, Tvogdowski, Bolzano, they did the same. When they developed the school of phenomenology in philosophy, they combined intuitions.
The a priori nature of intuitions of the first and the third kind, idetic and ideal, led thinkers such as Adolf Lasson to associate it with mysticism. He called it an intellectual vision, which leads to the essence of things.
Lasson said that there is no real distinction between risen and belief in God, for example. In both cases, we are accessing, we are touching the essence. When you are with another person, your essence constantly talks to the essence of the other person. There's constant dialogue.
By the way, this dialogue starts with an exchange of molecules. The minute you meet a new person, giant molecules are exchanged between you, mediated by the olfactory system, smell, and so on. These molecules contain close to 100 bits of information about the other person's genetics, immune system, and so on. This is how it starts.
From that moment on, your bodies are talking all the time, and your minds are talking all the time, and your essences, your souls, if you wish, this constant dialogue and communication.
Only we have been trained by information overload, by mass media, by social media, and by social conventions. We've been trained to shut off this dialogue, to suppress it, to ignore it, to consider it politically incorrect or misleading or stupid or inferior.
The irony of it is the foundation of all knowledge. Earlier philosophers and theologians labeled the methodical application of intuitions the science of the ultimates. Of course, this misses the strong emotional content of mystical experiences, but still.
Confucius talked about fulfilling and seeking one's human nature. He called it rén. He said, this is the way. The way is to fulfill your own human nature.
This nature is not the result of learning. It's not the result of deliberation. It's innate. It's who you are. It is intuitive and, in turn, produces additional, clear intuitions, which he called young.
These new intuitions pertain to what is right, what is wrong, what is productive, what is destructive, what is good, what is evil.
He said, a condition for learning about the world and about what works for you, and about the right people, people who are right for you, and about relationships, and you know what? About dating in a bar. Condition for all these youngs, clear intuition, is rén to seek your own human nature.
This is the way. The operation of the natural law requires that there be no rigid cortex, but only constant change, transformation, Heraclitus, the flowing river, guided by the central and harmonious situation of life.
And now I went and talked to some of my contemporaries in the 17th and 18th century and asked them, hey guys, how have you been doing? Put on your mask, please. I want to talk to you.
So they put on the mask and we discussed intuition.
And the first was Locke. Locke said to me, are intuitions really a priori, or do they develop in response to a relatively stable reality, an interaction with a stable reality? Would we have had intuitions? For example, in an chaotic, capricious, unpredictable, disordered universe, do intuitions emerge to counterbalance surprises and shocks?
Locke thought that intuition is a learned cumulative response to sensation.
The assumption of innate ideas, he said, is unnecessary and contrain is a count. The mind is like a blank sheet of paper, tabula rasa, filled gradually by experience, by the sum total of observations and external objects and internal reflections, operations of the mind.
He said that ideas, what the mind perceives in itself or what the mind perceives in immediate objects, ideas are triggered by the qualities of objects.
But, you know, I plowed him with a few pints and I pushed him hard to the corner and finally Locke said, okay, I accept that they're ideal innate intuitions.
According to Locke, a color, for instance, can be either an idea in the mind, ideal intuition, or the quality of an object that causes this idea in the mind, that evokes the ideal intuition.
And he said that the primary qualities, qualities shared by all objects, come close to being identical intuitions.
So ultimately, he ended up as much a count, as much a countian as a count himself.
Locke himself admits that there is no resemblance or correlation between the idea in the mind and the secondary qualities that provoke the idea in the mind.
And so Berkeley demolished Locke's claim that there is such resemblance or mapping between primary qualities and the ideas that they provoke in the mind.
It would seem, therefore, that Locke's ideas in the mind are in the mind irrespective and independent of the qualities that produce them.
In other words, these ideas are a priori and Locke resorts to obstruction in order to repudiate it.
Locke himself talks about intuitive knowledge. It is when the mind perceives the agreement or disagreement of two ideas immediately by themselves, without the intervention of any other.
The knowledge of our own being we have by intuition.
The mind is presently filled with a clear light on it. It is on this intuition that depends all the certainty and evidence of all our knowledge.
Knowledge is a perception of the connection and of the agreement or disagreement and repugnancy of any of our ideas. Knowledge is intuitive, intellectual perception.
Even when demonstrated, and few things, mainly ideas, can be intuited and demonstrated, relations within the physical realm cannot be grasped intuitively.
So even when demonstrated, each step in the demonstration is observed intuitionally.
Locke's sensitive knowledge is also a form of intuition known as intuitive cognition in the Middle Ages. It is the perceived certainty that there exist finite objects outside us.
The knowledge of one's existence is an intuition as well.
But both these intuitions are judgmental and they rely on probabilities.
Ok, Locke defeated one zero in favor of ideal intuitions. Even Locke had to admit that they exist.
So I went not far away and met Hume. Hume denied the existence of innate ideas exactly like Locke.
According to him, all ideas are based either on sense impressions or on simpler ideas. They can be deconstructed into simpler ideas.
In this sense, by the way, Hume is the father of deconstruction centuries before.
But even Hume accepted that they are propositions known by the pure intellect as opposed to propositions dependent on sensory input. These propositions deal with the relations between ideas and they are logically necessarily true.
Even without any sense input, even a blind, deaf, dumb, quadriplegic, resurrected, dead person would come up with these ideas. It didn't have a single second of sensory input.
Even though reason is used in order to prove these ideas, they are independently true all the same, because they merely reveal the meaning or information implicit in the definitions of their own terms.
These propositions teach us nothing about the nature of things, because they are at bottom self-referential.
And isn't this the exact equivalent of Kant's analytical propositions?
Yes, it is.
Which leads me, of course, to Kant. Kant was a recluse who rarely left home, which proves to me that he was a highly intelligent person. And he said that our senses acquaint us with the particulars of things and thus provide us with intuitions.
The faculty of understanding provided us with useful taxonomies, classifications of particulars, which he called concepts.
And yet, concepts without intuitions are as empty as futile as intuitions without concepts. They need each other.
Perceptions, phenomena, are the composite of the sensations caused by the perceived objects and the mind's reactions to these sensations.
For these reactions are the product of intuition.
I said to myself, I'm getting lost. I can't tell anymore if there are ideal intuitions or not.
Locke says no, then he says yes. Jung says no, then he says no. Kant says no, then he says yes.
I'm in the hell with these people. I'm going to meet the absolute idealists. Schelling suggested a featureless, undifferentiated union of opposites as the absolute ideal.
Intellectual intuition entails such a union of opposites, subject and object, and thus it is immersed and assimilated by the absolute that becomes as featureless and undifferentiated as the absolute is.
Objective idealists claim that we can know ultimate spiritual reality via intuition or via thought independent of the senses. This is, of course, a mystical argument.
The Kabbalah makes the same argument.
The mediation of words and symbol systems only distorts the signal and inhibits the effective application of one's intuition to the attainment of real, immutable knowledge.
Sounds good.
The phenomenologist's point of view is that everything has an invariable and irreducible essence. I'm very close to this view, by the way. This essence is Eidos, as distinguished from contingent information about faith.
So everything has essence and then it has information that codes the essence. It's like a wrapping of a gift. And this wrapping, of course, is discarded. It's contingent.
The essence remains the same. We can grasp this essence only intuitively.
Idetic reduction.
This process of transcending the concrete and reaching for the essential is independent of facts, independent of concrete objects or mental constructs.
But that it is independent of facts does not mean that it is free from methodology, free variation. It doesn't mean it's free from factual knowledge or from ideal intuitions.
We don't discard these things. We use them.
The phenomenologist is forced to make the knowledge of facts his point of departure. He then applies a certain methodology. He varies the nature and specifications of the studied object to reveal its essence.
This methodology relies entirely on ideal intuitions, such as the rules of logic, for example.
Phenomenology, in other words, is an idealistic form of rationalism. It applies reason to discover platonic idealistic essences, idealism. It's a marriage, marriage of idealism and rationalism, my kind of relationship.
Like rationalism, phenomenology is not empirical. It is not based on sense data. Actually, it is anti-empirical. It brackets the concrete and the factual in its attempt to delve beyond appearances and into essences.
Phenomenology calls for the application of intuition, anschauung, to discover essential insights.
Wiesenzein sichten.
Phenomenology is that which is known by consciousness and that is in consciousness.
Phenomenologists regard intuition as a pure direct and primitive way of reducing clutter in reality. It is immediate, the basis of higher-level perception.
We spend life hoarding things, hoarding emotions, hoarding information, and here comes intuition, cut through the thicket, declutters our lives, our minds.
A philosophical system built on intuition would, perforce, be non-speculative.
Hence, phenomenology's emphasis on the study of consciousness and intuition is justified.
They don't study reality because reality can be deceiving. Appearances can be deceiving.
It is through wiesenchaal, intuition of essences, that one reaches the invariant nature of things by applying free variation techniques.
Phenomenology is your way to go if you are dating a narcissist or a psychopath.
Ignore appearances. Home in to the essence and when you home in to the essence, don't be shy. Don't feel reduced because you are forced to use intuition.
Knowledge won't get you far, reasoning won't get you far, logic won't get you far.
Narcissists and psychopaths are rationalizing calculating machines. They are better at this than you.
You have one advantage of a narcissist and psychopaths, your empathy, your intuition.
Empathy is a form of intuition. Use all forms of intuition. Listen in, don't listen out.
Observe in, don't observe out. Withdraw, retreat into your mind before you open your mind to someone else. It could be dangerous.
The world is not what it used to be. You may wish to be self-preserving and self-protective. Nature has given you the tools, categories, ideals, empathy, and above all, intuition.
Use it.