The thing is that in the West where the intellect is the be-all, end-all of the senses, they dont remind you that an experience isnt obligated to make “sense.” They praise you for your ability to discover or uncover a reason, reasons, reasoning. You start thinking that a reason is a meaning. But it doesn’t work in reverse (does it?). Its contribution is to that general rule saying or something, that if you’re intelligent or an intellectual then quite naturally you may end up depressed. That even if in your case it isn’t genetic, you come with your own build-an-existential-crisis home kit. I still like poetry because it’s one of the last remaining places where Jungian intuition can play freely. That’s imagery, patterns, metaphor, symbol, fiction, surrealism, break and trade and shift in perspective, linguistic reinvention, streams of consciousness. I won’t say it’s the opposite, but on some level, it’s transcendent of the intellect. Reason is not an obligation (a limit). What’s that saying, creativity is intelligence having fun. It’s how I choose to interpret the quote by Hannah Arendt, “The great obstacle that reason (Vernunft) puts in its own way arises from the side of the intellect (Verstand) and the entirely justified criteria it has established for its own purposes, that is, for quenching our thirst, and meeting our need, for knowledge and cognition… The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same. The basic fallacy, taking precedence over all specific metaphysical fallacies, is to interpret meaning on the model of truth.”
Posted on: Fri, 26 Sep 2014 00:45:36 +0000