Showing posts with label Picasso. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Picasso. Show all posts
Monday, July 07, 2008
Monday, March 24, 2008
Intuition and analysis
David Seaton's News LinksWhat role does intuition play in analysis?
That all depends, of course, on the analyst.
In my opinion intuition or "gut feelings" only have value in cases where you have immersed yourself in a subject, where concentration has been sufficiently intense for the saturated subconscious to surrender a shortcut to the goal.
The best explanation I can ever remember reading of this selectivity of intuition came from some Indian sage who remarked that the Virgin Mary doesn't appear to devotees of Krishna, nor Govinda to the little shepherd girls of Fatima.
Intuition of this sort has to be subjected in its turn to the same process of concentration and rumination that produced it in the first place. Then, of course, a certain rigor as to the accuracy of the intuitions or "keeping score" has to be in place. This is where the Spanish expression that "the Devil knows more because he is so old than because he is the Devil", comes into play.
I learned the practical aspects of this dialectic of input/feedback/synthesis in a way that is probably not common to most political analysts. For a decade of what many (not me) would consider the best years of their lives, I was a painter (artiste peintre not house). I made a serious attempt at this and managed to show in good galleries and sell enough of my work to live. How I recycled myself into political analysis is another story. Suffice to say here that I never cease to be surprised at how useful the methods developed in painting have been in studying anything else.
What did I learn as a painter besides never to trust an art dealer or buy cheap paint?
In no particular order: that it is fundamental to study the entire space you are working on all the time; that the smallest change in one place changes everything else; that the space around an object is as, or more important than, the object itself; that in every situation, there is a center, perhaps hidden, around which everything in the situation revolves; that, for the clear mind, objectivity and subjectivity are two faces of the same coin... and so on and so on.
Then there are two maxims of Picasso's that go back to the relationship between effort and intuition. "inspiration exists, but it has to find us working" and of course, "I do not seek. I find" and then too, at least in my particular case, "I am always doing things I can't do, that's how I get to do them".
This all came up because in a previous post I said that I had a feeling of foreboding about Barack Obama and a reader, quite reasonably, inquired, "yeah, well, did you have any intuitions about Bush in 1999?" and funny enough, I did at the time.
I had supported Al Gore during the campaign and he is still my favorite for president today, but in '99, at the time of the election limbo, of "hanging chadsville"... I got this very strong intuitive impression that Dubya's presidency would be "transformational"... as indeed it has been.
Did I have any "foreboding"?
No, just the strong feeling in those sunny, pre-9/11 times that the Bush restoration would bring great change.
Has Bush been terrible?
You bet!
Does that have an upside? Ask Picasso.
"Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction."
Seen from that point of view the Bush presidency has been very productive.
Here, what I call my "inner Lenin" comes into play. If most of the planet considers, in poll after poll, that US hegemony is the most dangerous and destabilizing element in the world today, then the sooner it ends, the better for everyone and if the cost of maintaining this hegemony absorbs so much of the nation's resources that it is depriving the American people of essentials like health, education and ultimately, old age pensions, the sooner it ends, the better for the American people.
Again Picasso: "I don't believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents."
And best of all for closing: "You mustn't always believe what I say. Questions tempt you to tell lies, particularly when there is no answer." DS
That all depends, of course, on the analyst.
In my opinion intuition or "gut feelings" only have value in cases where you have immersed yourself in a subject, where concentration has been sufficiently intense for the saturated subconscious to surrender a shortcut to the goal.
The best explanation I can ever remember reading of this selectivity of intuition came from some Indian sage who remarked that the Virgin Mary doesn't appear to devotees of Krishna, nor Govinda to the little shepherd girls of Fatima.
Intuition of this sort has to be subjected in its turn to the same process of concentration and rumination that produced it in the first place. Then, of course, a certain rigor as to the accuracy of the intuitions or "keeping score" has to be in place. This is where the Spanish expression that "the Devil knows more because he is so old than because he is the Devil", comes into play.
I learned the practical aspects of this dialectic of input/feedback/synthesis in a way that is probably not common to most political analysts. For a decade of what many (not me) would consider the best years of their lives, I was a painter (artiste peintre not house). I made a serious attempt at this and managed to show in good galleries and sell enough of my work to live. How I recycled myself into political analysis is another story. Suffice to say here that I never cease to be surprised at how useful the methods developed in painting have been in studying anything else.
What did I learn as a painter besides never to trust an art dealer or buy cheap paint?
In no particular order: that it is fundamental to study the entire space you are working on all the time; that the smallest change in one place changes everything else; that the space around an object is as, or more important than, the object itself; that in every situation, there is a center, perhaps hidden, around which everything in the situation revolves; that, for the clear mind, objectivity and subjectivity are two faces of the same coin... and so on and so on.
Then there are two maxims of Picasso's that go back to the relationship between effort and intuition. "inspiration exists, but it has to find us working" and of course, "I do not seek. I find" and then too, at least in my particular case, "I am always doing things I can't do, that's how I get to do them".
This all came up because in a previous post I said that I had a feeling of foreboding about Barack Obama and a reader, quite reasonably, inquired, "yeah, well, did you have any intuitions about Bush in 1999?" and funny enough, I did at the time.
I had supported Al Gore during the campaign and he is still my favorite for president today, but in '99, at the time of the election limbo, of "hanging chadsville"... I got this very strong intuitive impression that Dubya's presidency would be "transformational"... as indeed it has been.
Did I have any "foreboding"?
No, just the strong feeling in those sunny, pre-9/11 times that the Bush restoration would bring great change.
Has Bush been terrible?
You bet!
Does that have an upside? Ask Picasso.
"Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction."
Seen from that point of view the Bush presidency has been very productive.
Here, what I call my "inner Lenin" comes into play. If most of the planet considers, in poll after poll, that US hegemony is the most dangerous and destabilizing element in the world today, then the sooner it ends, the better for everyone and if the cost of maintaining this hegemony absorbs so much of the nation's resources that it is depriving the American people of essentials like health, education and ultimately, old age pensions, the sooner it ends, the better for the American people.
Again Picasso: "I don't believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents."
And best of all for closing: "You mustn't always believe what I say. Questions tempt you to tell lies, particularly when there is no answer." DS
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