Human Intuition

[DanSchenck]

How is human intuition acquired, and is it different than the myths we choose, or just a deeper, more fundamental myth?

[AshvinP]

I find Bergson to be instructive here, who would claim it is not symbolic knowledge:

Henri Bergson defined metaphysics as the science that dispenses with symbols to grasp the absolute.[1] Hence metaphysics involves an inversion of the habitual modes of thought and is in need of its own method, which he identified as intuition.

Henri Bergson defined intuition as a simple, indivisible experience of sympathy through which one is moved into the inner being of an object to grasp what is unique and ineffable within it. The absolute that is grasped is always perfect in the sense that it is perfectly what it is, and infinite in the sense that it can be grasped as a whole through a simple, indivisible act of intuition, yet lends itself to boundless enumeration when analysed.[1][notes 1]

Two images Henri Bergson gave in his essay An Introduction to Metaphysics may aid us in comprehending the ideas of intuition, analyses, the absolute and the relative. The first image is a city reconstructed with juxtaposed photographs taken from every viewpoint and angle. The reconstruction can never give us the dimensional value of walking through the actual city. This can only ever be grasped through a simple intuition. The same goes for the experience of reading a single line of Homer. If you wish to explain this experience to someone who cannot speak ancient Greek, you may translate the line and lay commentary upon commentary, but this commentary shall never grasp the dimensional value of experiencing the poem in its original language.[1]

It can be seen then that intuition is a method that aims at getting back to and knowing the things themselves, in all their uniqueness and ineffable originality. The one thing it is certain one can grasp from within through sympathy is the self.