Wednesday 5 April 2017

Understanding, Intuition and Adhiropa/Apavada (adhyaropa/apavada)


It might well be insisted that you either understand or you don’t, there is no liminal condition. Understanding is a success verb. When you understand you’re there, you’ve got it. That is the rigorist view and it has its place in the Q.E.D. world of Euclidean demonstration. What of the more hazy world of philosophy, politics and economics in which understanding is vague and can be said to dawn where there is a gradation of let us call it nous factor from one to five, i.e. from god like clarity to ‘sit down O’Toole you’re wasting the time of the class’.

Sometimes understanding is at the tip of your mind, it’s dawning; the night of inconscience is giving way to the bulking shadows of cows and trees. Philosophy of a certain sort has this gradualism of understanding. Even the hyper-smart philosophers of the Partially Examined Podcast speak of the initial recoil from the counter intuitive theories of Bergson
P.E.L. on Bergson
to a later feeling that there was a profound point that required time to develop.

The First Rule of the Podcast is: Only talk about the set text. That is a limitation for the discussion of difficult Bergsonian concepts of intuition, image, duration etc. The text in question was an essay Introduction to Metaphysics first published in 1903 and included in the book The Creative Mind.

In an essay on philosophical intuition, in the same book, he discusses the difficulty of attaining the intuition of Berkeley. What was his sense of the wholeness of things, that unbroken continuity, that plenum. and not merely the elements lain side by side which we get in any account of his thought? Bergson in the attempt to draw us into his own intuitions of the real used analogies and metaphors which highlights his idea that the image is next to the intuition. An analogy is, so to speak, an active image and can function as a portal to the central intuition. Here I think is the key to deep understanding and how it might relate to Coleridge and the adhiropa/apavada of Advaita is something I will have discern through the fog of inconscience. Later.


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