Telos 206 (Spring 2024): The Intuitive and the Conceptual is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
We often have the experience of intuiting something without being able to precisely define what that intuition is. Sometimes this intuition leads to a more well-defined insight, and sometimes it might lead to some kind of action, even in the absence of clear conceptual definitions. Yet it is difficult to ascertain what kind of knowledge or awareness such intuitions consist of. What is an intuition as opposed to a defined concept of something? How seriously should we take such intuitions? Are they something separate and qualitatively different than concepts? Are they just fuzzy concepts? Do they really exist at all? These are crucial questions because they lead to conclusions about the status of concepts themselves. If the alternative to clear concepts is nothing at all, then the sociopolitical corollary would be that the alternative to conceptual knowledge and the holders of such knowledge would also be nothing at all. By contrast, if intuitions are separate from concepts and real, then expert knowledge might possibly have some deficiencies in comparison with intuitions. The essays in this issue of Telos explore in one way or another this question of the status of conceptual knowledge as opposed to intuitive awareness.
Anatol Lieven argues that U.S. liberal internationalist policies lead to conflict and threaten to undermine the security and safety of the people they are meant to help. Grounded in an Enlightenment-based model of rationality and a human rights ethic, such an approach sees liberal democracy as the best form of government, and a corresponding U.S. foreign policy has often attempted to destabilize governments that do not fit this model. But the results of attempts at regime change to create liberal democracy in places such as Iraq, Libya, and the former Soviet Union have not always led to an improvement, and indeed sometimes have caused a deterioration, in the living conditions of the people in those places. Lieven emphasizes that authoritarian governments, though often based on fear, also maintain a strong state structure that prevents banditry and crime from threatening basic security. Rather than requiring the world to adopt liberal democracy, Lieven recommends making valid criticisms of government abuses but in the context of a willingness to engage with all governments whose rule is legitimized by their ability to maintain order and stability. Such order is in the end an indication of a minimum level of consent of the governed, even in repressive regimes.
Liberal internationalism abroad corresponds to a managerial mindset at home that Joel Kotkin describes in his analysis of the changing politics of class in the United States. On the one hand, wealth has become increasingly concentrated among a small percentage of the population. On the other hand, an educated class of academics, lawyers, government bureaucrats, corporate managers, and health professionals dominates education and culture, promoting a vision of a society managed and regulated by experts. The alliance of the wealthy with the educated elites has been most harmful in the promotion of a climate policy agenda that threatens to slow growth. Kotkin notes that the elements of this top-down climate policy—increasing regulation, spending on green subsidies, and rising energy costs—will disproportionately affect the lower classes and small businesses, preventing upward mobility. As a consequence, the divide between the “laptop” class and the “frontline” workers in restaurants, factories, and warehouses will define the political landscape in the future. Rather than a conflict between the haves and the have-nots, politics will be defined by the conflict between the managerial class of those who want to control society from above and those who favor self-government and free, self-regulating societies.
Both liberal internationalism and liberal managerialism are premised upon a trust in a rational, conceptual understanding of the world and a corresponding suspicion of more intuitive and aesthetic approaches. Yet such intuitive awareness cannot be simply dismissed as irrational but should be appreciated as the basis for conceptual understanding.
In order to distinguish between aesthetic and conceptual modes of relating to the world, Hugo Herrera analyzes how both Friedrich Hölderlin and Carl Schmitt link the beginning of human consciousness with the establishment of political divisions. Though critics such as Giorgio Agamben have argued that Hölderlin’s and Schmitt’s conceptions differ, Herrera demonstrates that they both carefully distinguish between a preconceptual, primordial, intuitive experience of the earth and a conceptual understanding with a political element. Because consciousness requires the division of a unity of Being into the split between subject and object, the move from intuition toward consciousness also requires a fundamental alienation from the object as that which resists the goals of consciousness. For this reason, the beginning of consciousness is in fact a fundamentally political move that, in differentiating between self and other, establishes the earth as something opposed to the human but also the human as defined through political division. Hölderlin’s understanding provides the basis for Schmitt’s argument that legal-political understanding is similar to understanding in general to the extent that both are based on the opposition between a concept and a real situation that requires a specific decision. Rules, norms, and principles are undefined and lack meaning without the interpretive decision that links a concept to a concrete situation.
Shiqin She also uses the distinction between preconceptual and conceptual awareness to draw a contrast between Chinese landscape painting and Western realist painting. Because Western Renaissance art uses perspective in a way that reduces space to the viewpoint of a single individual viewer, such painting presumes that the object has been detached from the subject and subordinated to the single viewer. By contrast, early Chinese landscape painting does not reduce space to a single perspective but instead includes various perspectives, thus avoiding a strict separation between subject and object. Instead, there is a “wandering focus” in which the viewer is not at the center and can thus become “lost” in the painting and its various organizations of visual space. Accordingly, the viewer would be subordinate to the space of the painting, and consciousness could be in a pre-reflective state.
In their commentary on Carl Schmitt’s essay on Don Quixote, Hannah Hunter-Parker and Nikolaus Wegmann focus on the relationship between an intuitive and a conceptual reception of art when they describe Schmitt’s analysis of the relationships between “the interpreter, the artist, and the public.” The measure of the artist’s activity for Schmitt is ultimately the public, which does not so much interpret the work as react to it. Schmitt links the role of the public to the mythic character of works of art and indicates that the public’s reaction, in establishing a mythic significance, has a powerful impact on the meaning. In posing the public against the interpreters, Schmitt repeats Cervantes’s own denunciation of academic writing. The intuitive grasp of a work of art, embodied in laughter in the case of Don Quixote, provides an unmistakable ground upon which academic interpreters must base their own reflections.
Shira Wolosky describes how a narrative forms an organic whole in which each of the parts is necessary for the construction of meaning. The way in which a narrative moves toward a meaningful end leads to the closed aspect of narrative. Every story precludes alternative stories, and the role of narrative in constituting identity can lead to its exclusionary character. By contrast, commentary consists not of a unity of purpose and meaning but of interruption, dispute, and exchange. Consequently, commentary can break up otherwise closed narratives and subject them to a form of communication that focuses less on agreement and conclusion than on a plurality of meanings and continuing debate. At the same time, a discourse based on commentary avoids fragmentation through the “energy and relationality of participants.”
Social media is an example of the merging of content production and social relations that Wolosky describes as a characteristic of commentary. But Zheng Zang and Yueqin Chen, in their comparison of social media with the Habermasian ideal of a public sphere, argue that social media cannot function as such a public sphere. Though social media discussions occur in a public space, they are primarily about private topics. Moreover, the discussions on social media do not consist of debate toward consensus. Rather than confronting participants with a sense for disagreement and difference, opposing discussion spheres stay within their own perspectives, and there is a fragmentation of discourse into separate opinion groups. Finally, the internet companies that host social media discussions, as well as the governments, such as China’s, that often stand behind such companies, create shadow bans that suppress certain viewpoints and facts, undermining the rationality and critical potential of social media discussions. Even if social media consists of a disunified discourse of commentary, its commentaries seem nevertheless to coalesce into distinct narrative templates and their accompanying communities that exclude alternative ones. The kind of relationality that is established by social media commentary thus creates its own form of narrative closure.
In his discussion of Byung-Chul Han’s The Palliative Society, Ethan Stoneman describes how modern society has become afraid of pain. This fear of pain leads society away from the discipline of Ernst Jünger’s worker, who embraces pain as the sacrifice of the body for a higher purpose. Instead, the bourgeois liberal avoids pain and pursues happiness, resulting in a deterioration of human meaning. Without the sense for higher values for which the body might be sacrificed in pain through work, even leisure loses its meaning and its connection to reflection. Intelligence becomes decoupled from the intuitive aspect that pain represents and is thus reduced to mere computation.
In his review of Alain de Benoist’s book on Ernst Jünger, Ryan Li describes the worker as the dominant figure of an age in which technology has become a “titanic” force that is not merely a tool for human purposes but an independent force in itself. In order to avoid becoming slaves to technology, the challenge for Jünger and Benoist is to conceive of a re-spiritualization of the world, in whatever form that might take.
David Pan is Professor of European Languages and Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and has previously held positions at Washington University in St. Louis, Stanford University, Penn State University, and McKinsey and Company. He is the author of Primitive Renaissance: Rethinking German Expressionism (2001) and Sacrifice in the Modern World: On the Particularity and Generality of Nazi Myth (2012). He has also published on J. G. Herder, Heinrich von Kleist, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Jünger, Bertolt Brecht, Carl Schmitt, and Theodor Adorno. He is the Editor of Telos.
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