Sunday 28 May 2017

Intellect, Intuition And Imagination

In Poul Anderson's Murder In Black Letter, the detective work is done not by the detective, Trygve Yamamura, but by his friend, Robert Kintyre, who:

consciously reasons about possible motives and suspects in a murder case;
but also feels or intuits that he already knows more than he has as yet consciously realized;
has perhaps three moments of sudden realization.

We have already seen that moments of realization are frequent experiences for Anderson's problem-solving characters. Yamamura is a Buddhist and a practitioner of judo who knows about Zen. Thinking about Yamamura and Kintyre, I suddenly made a link with my own three main interests from earlier in life:

philosophy - intellect;
spirituality - intuition;
science fiction - imagination.

Philosophy is analysis of concepts or thought about thought.
Zazen is "neither trying to think nor trying not to think; just sitting with no deliberate thought."
Hard sf = imagination + intellect.

I find that coherent and comprehensive.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I really HATE it when people clip the corners of jacket covers! Alas, some of the books I amassed into my PA collection came with clipped jacket covers. GGGRRRRRR!!!

And I would define "spirituality" differently from you, to mean seeing answers to the ultimate questions. Or to seek for the Creator.

Sean