Instinct, Will, Intuition

For good and ill

With Descartes, you can say it is precisely because of our love for truth that we utter falsities and fall into error. We are so obsessed with this thing — ‘Truth’—, that we can’t help but affirm what we think is true or renounce what we think is false, even if we are not entirely certain. We want to know, and if we don’t, we prefer to posit as absolutely true what is only possibly true, just to curb our needs. This is so because our will is much greater than our understanding. Because of this, we are able to affirm or deny much more than we are able to understand. I can affirm a belief, even if I have no reason to believe it is actually true. I can treat a certain ideology as true, and act on it, even if I do not understand it.

You are much more powerful than what you know. Some later Cartesians will see this as further proof that we are fallen creatures marked by hubris. Better to curb your will as much as possible. Stick to what is, don’t judge, and extinguish the will as far as possible. But in truth, you wouldn’t want your will and understanding to take up exactly the same space as each other, only able to affirm or deny what you know for certain. From the perspective of life and action, you would be entirely impotent. In life, where you do not always have the luxury to contemplate until you have indubitable certainty, but have to act on what is probable, any and all action would be made impossible. You have to go beyond what the understanding knows for certain, this is what it means to be human.

In this sense, the animal is a much more ‘reasonable’ creature than man. In the animal, instinct, will, and understanding are one. In man, the will always goes beyond the understanding, always laying claim to what might be true but as of yet is still uncertain. This is what explains man’s superior creativity and productivity over the animal, his capacity to go beyond the always limited frameworks of knowing. His daring to go certain places, without knowing whether it will lead to good or disaster. His daring to discover something new, while the much more conservative understanding wants us to stay with what we already know.

This is what makes man much more of a co-creator of reality than the animal. Not because man knows more, but because relative to his knowledge, he can do much more. 

This is not to say that we always judge beyond our knowledge on a purely arbitrary basis. No. In the absence of sure knowledge, there are still guides: instinct and intuition. The will is not blind, it simply doesn’t see in the same way as the understanding.

Intuition is not of the order of the purely reasonable or the understanding, but neither is it of the order of experience. Confronted with a new experience or a choice in front of which our understanding is impotent, it is our intuition on which we rely. This intuition, it does not arrive to us from the experience in question, it comes from somewhere else, from inside of us perhaps, and allows us to judge on the experience. Neither does this intuition come from our understanding, for confronted with something entirely new which is too different from what we already know how to do or comprehend, we can still rely on ‘intuition.’ Intuition is not a type of understanding, but what remains when there is no understanding. 

When a thinker seeks to think in a new way, to go beyond the models of knowledge already in existence, he does not just shoot from the hip, seeking to destroy what is known in hopes of discovering something new, trying out new things in hopes of stumbling onto truth by chance. Rather, he has a clear intuition of where he wants to go, but as of yet, it is impossible for him to put it into words. Intuition is a type of pre-knowledge. Some relate it to the Idea. This intuition is at the basis of all creation, for the thinker, the artist, and the scientist. In art, this term, ‘experimental’, is among the worst. No true artist experiments, if the term is taken only as a blind groping in the dark. We do not know, but we have an Idea. A story could be told about how intuition is the faculty of Ideas, but not now.

Where does this ‘intuition’ come from? What does it mean and what is its sense? Some say it comes from somewhere higher, deeper, ‘soul’, others say it comes from the body. The latter say that, on the basis of all that we have experienced before, we are able to judge on new experiences, and that this judgement is what intuition means. And so, in the end, intuition is still knowledge through experience. It allows judgment on new experiences, on the basis of knowledge through experience. Yet intuition speaks to us, sometimes in a very clear and ‘reasonable’ way, surely not merely through the blind feelings and impulses that are the language of the body. And often, what it says is contrary to the impulses of the body.

For Descartes at least, and many other philosophers, there is something like an intellectual intuition. This is an intuition which has little or nothing to do with body. In the replies to the Meditations, everyone critiques Descartes for claiming we have an immediate and certain intuition of ‘thinking’ or ‘being.’ They say this is not right, because our thinking presupposes the workings of our organs and our brain and so on, and before ‘I’ was certain, my parents had to be there, and so on. Descartes’ reply has a quite simple form: you are not thinking in the right way, you are not meditating, you must think of these things in a state of meditation, when your thinking has abstracted itself as much as possible from bodily influence, and only then can you intellectually intuit what thinking or being means without reference to the world of body. This ‘meditation’, it has little to do with what we generally call meditation today, and is more like a state of deep reflection and concentrated thought. When you are so lost in thought that the outside world disappears to you. People could be calling your name, strangers could be passing by, rain could be falling on you, and you wouldn’t even notice. This is all that meditation means here: deep thought, in which you are no longer as conscious of what affects the body, and hyper-conscious of the activity of your own thinking. It is a state in which you, as soul, become more of an actor and less of a thing acted upon by the world. There is nothing magical or ‘spiritual’ about this for Descartes, it is merely this state of deep thought which everyone can experience at the most insignificant moments, sitting in the train, at a café, dreaming away during a lecture, anywhere. The problem is of course that we seldom take the time to think anymore, always distracted as we are by our phones and what have you.

And so, there is an intuition we have but which has little to do with body. And in this way there is a difference between two types of intuition —intellectual and bodily. The former belonging to the soul proper. The latter, also called instinct, belonging to the body.  This intellectual intuition assures us we can know something even when everything coming from the body could be deceiving us, as is the case with the intellectual intuition of cogito. In this case, when everything we think and experience might be one huge lie, one elaborate deception in which both the mind and the body conspire against us, the soul can still know through intuition. The understanding, stretched to the limit, is incapable of giving us certain truth. And the same goes for experience. And so in the end there is only intuition that we can trust, belonging neither to mere understanding nor to experience.

With Descartes, this intuition is intimately linked to this will of ours, this all too powerful will that makes us fall into error by judging on what we don’t know for certain. Descartes’ proof is “I think, I am.” But what is thinking? 

“By the term ‘thought’, I understand everything which we are aware of as happening within us, in so far as we have awareness of it. Hence, thinking is to be identified here not merely with understanding, willing, and imagining, but also with sensory awareness.” (Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, I, §9). 

Why then say ‘I think, I am,’ and not ‘I will, I am’, as an example? Simple. If I say “I will, I am”, it is easy to assume that this will presupposes all sorts of things such as an object to will towards, organs to ignite the will, and so on. The existence of all of these things can be doubted. But if I say, “I think I will, (and therefore) I am.” This is absolutely certain. In the same text, Descartes goes on to say that all the modes of ‘thought’ can be brought under two general categories; 

“Perception, or the operation of the intellect, and volition, or the operation of the will. Sensory perception, imagination, and pure understanding are simply various modes of perception; desire, aversion, assertion, denial, and doubt are various modes of willing.” (Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, I, §32) 

He also mentions what has already been said, that the “scope of the will is wider than that of the intellect.” The latter being limited, the former infinite. (Principles, I, §35)

Remember the cogito proof, despite various versions, goes from ‘I doubt’ to ‘I think’, towards ‘I am.’ Doubting is a mode of willing. And so we can rephrase it as follows: “What I seem to understand can be doubted, but I cannot doubt that I am doubting. Doubting is a form of willing. Willing is a mode of thinking. I think, I exist.”

I can understand something, but surrounding this always finite understanding there is an infinite will that engulfs my understanding, always ready to shatter the certainty I thought I had. And so thought as such is split between the limited understanding and an infinite will. It is this will which truly reveals to me the depths of what thought means, and it is this will as the power to deny, doubt, and affirm that guides me to the certainty of thought as such, which is so much more than mere ‘understanding.’ How do we know this thought is certain and indubitable? Intuition. We know what thought is, immediately, because we ourselves are thinking. Which means, we do not need the understanding to understand what ‘thought’ means before we can affirm that we are thinking. And we do not need the understanding to understand what ‘being’ means before we can affirm that we exist. What thought is, this is immediately certain. Why? We know so much more than we understand. That is, we are able to intuit so much more than we are able to understand. Similar to how we are able to affirm or deny so much more than what we understand.

In all; I think, this is certain. In fact, this ‘I think’, it is what certainty as such looks like. And willing is a mode of thought. I will, this is certain. What I affirm to be true or just might not really be true or just, but the fact that I affirm it to be true, this I cannot doubt. And so even if I understand nothing at all, I have an intuition of myself as a thinking and willing thing. An intuition, because the understanding is impotent here, and so is experience.

From these reflections, we can draw a certain dynamic of self-deception from Descartes. Deep inside of us, we carry this mark of truth —’cogito’—, and so in love with it, so convinced of it, we project its mark of certainty onto a world to which it simply doesn’t apply. I don’t think such a reading of Descartes is inaccurate. We know absolute truth, not through the understanding (only a very limited mode of thought as such) which works through logic and argument, and not through experience which informs us through what occurs to the body. We know it through pure intuition. The truths it gives might be very meager, —thought, existence, and maybe God. But we know them, and we cannot possibly doubt them. Speaking in terms of absolute certainties, we know very little about ourselves except for the fact that we are a thinking thing. Which includes knowing ourselves as a willing thing.

Yet, so in love with what we are, we embark on a mission to shape the world in our image. We take the limited knowledge gained by understanding as absolutely true, and we deceive ourselves into thinking our body tells us nothing but the truth. Nothing we say can be questioned, because we ourselves are truth and carry this truth along with us in all our projects. Everything I touch through my will, everything is true and just, because my will as such is true and just. Everything I grasp through my understanding, all of it is true and just, because my understanding as such is true and just.

This is one way to understand a certain variety of fundamentalism, —”I am the truth”, a small yet magnificent metaphysical claim, falsely applied to the entire world as it presents itself to me and as I act on it. 

And precisely because we are the truth, “I think, I am, at least this is certain”, we are deceived into thinking everything we say or do is true and good. Even if I can doubt everything, I can’t doubt my thinking or will, and therefore everything I will is good or true.  

It is a dynamic of megalomania and hubris, and precisely why later Cartesians will see the will itself as a mark of our fallen nature, denying Descartes’ teaching of self-knowledge along the way. We can’t know ourselves, our soul is entirely obscure, and we can’t will anything. Only God can truly be said to know and will, and we should know our place. 

A psychologist could ask, why and when would one come to see this will as a mark of evil? What type of person is willing to deny his own will as ‘evil’? Is it not precisely at those points where one’s instinct and intuition have failed, making one judge and act with pain as a result, either for oneself or others? We feel shame, and the wish arises to be done with our will entirely. Compare he who has an experience of his will going beyond what is known for certain, judging by intuition, acting on instinct, with joy as a result. Will he feel the same repulsion for man’s power? 

It is only at its lowest point that the will first finds a reason to deny itself. And it is precisely at the point when we are confronted with our own ignorance, that we claim we don’t know anything. If a certain philosopher, after having developed an entire philosophy, posits ‘ignorance’ as characteristic of the human condition at all of its points of development, to what degree was the feeling of ignorance not also already the starting point of his thought?

To return to our original dynamic; the will to truth going beyond the understanding, thereby throwing itself into either darkness or light. Both the greatest goods and the greatest ills have been willed into existence in the name of truth. But what can properly be called evil and life-denying, is to deny one’s will as such after having willed something that has led to pain, sadness, or idiocy. This is the subject of all theodicy; to affirm life is to affirm evil too, because you can not deny evil without also denying life. Because it is the same principle that leads to both. And so the real enemy of a theodicy is not the evil in the world, but the evil of those who deny the world because it supposedly contains evil.

To deny life and will is like an impossibility of sorts. One cannot not will, unless one renounces the will altogether through asceticism or suicide. Which is why the ascetic and priestly type as Nietzsche describes it is properly ‘anti-life’, in that its very aim is to separate man as much as possible from his power, from what he is capable of doing. He is not intent on destroying life as such, but in separating the living as much as possible from everything they are truly capable of. And so, in the name of eradicating evil, the cause of good is extinguished too. Life is never destroyed, only domesticated and made impotent.

Still, the will that wills after having become conscious of the pain it has wrought is no longer the same will, but a will now fuelled by sad passions and resentment for itself. Which is why we can only say so much when we speak of there being one ‘Will’ of which we are all just various expressions. There are as many different wills as there are different ways in which a will can be captured by sad or joyful passions, driven by sad or joyful passions. What is true is that there is a general type of will characterized by the denial of the will as such.

It is written that Pericles said to the Athenians that their daring is their most valuable asset, that it has given them everything, for good and ill. 

This last part is the most important, ‘for good and ill’, because if you are going to deny the ill, be very careful that you do not also deny the good along the way. In the end, it is the same daring that leads to both. The same will that leads to both good and ill. This same will that goes beyond what is already known leads both to the greatest stupidities, and to the greatest discoveries. This will that seeks to go beyond the arrangements of current society leads to the greatest horrors, and to the greatest goods. The same is true in art; its self-identification as boundless creativity has led to a lot of rubbish, and seeing where all of it has led, powerful voices tell the artist to renounce his creative side entirely, in favour of the worst type of soulless conservatism. “Do not dare to do anything new, do you not see what our daring and obsession with ‘the new’ has led to?”

For Descartes himself, true greatness of spirit, —generosity—, has little to do with the outcome, and everything to do with an affirmation of the will’s power as such.

“I believe that true generosity, which causes a person’s self-esteem to be as great as it may legitimately be, has only two components. The first consists in his knowing that nothing truly belongs to him but this freedom to dispose his volitions, and that he ought to be praised or blamed for no other reason than his using this freedom well or badly. The second consists in his feeling within himself a firm and constant resolution to use it well — that is, never to lack the will to undertake and carry out whatever he judges to be best. To do that is to pursue virtue in a perfect manner.” (Descartes, Passions of the Soul, III, §153)

In the first place, generosity does not pertain to the outcome, only to the state of the soul. If the soul is filled with generosity, the outcome will probably be for good. But in truth, we can not predict this. The free will, its power and responsibility, generosity pertains to this in the first place, not to its outcomes. One reason for this is that we can not entirely predict what is good or ill. We can only do what we think to be right. Only in suffering the consequences does the evaluation follow. The important point is to cultivate this state of the soul called generosity, the rest will follow.

Still, Descartes believes that as long as the individual is conscious of his own freedom and power, and affirming of this freedom, the outcome must be good. Weakness can not possibly lead to good. If we would judge the will as such on the basis of what it has willed, we wouldn’t have to look far for reasons to throw it away altogether.