Jul 28, 2020
Intuition or Intellect: Which Is the Arbiter of Truth?
Intellect is the arbiter of truth.
Knowledge is power enabling the human beings to subjugate forces of nature and to exercise control over their fellowmen.
There are two ways to gain knowledge of nature and life: 1) mysticism and 2) scientific method.
The scientific steps to acquire knowledge about the world and life are:
1. Observation: A stone piece sinks in water and a plastic piece does not sink in water but floats on it.
2.Hypothesis: A thing having density more than that of water such as a piece of stone sinks in water and a thing of density less than that of water such as a piece of plastic does not sink in water but floats on it.
3. Test/experiment: We put both the stone piece and the plastic piece on the water. The stone piece sank in the water and the plastic piece floated on it.
We conducted this test repeatedly and the result was the same.
4. Evidence: A thing having a density more than that of water sinks in water and a thing having a density less than that of water floats on it.
5.Conclusion: We have some evidence now that a thing having more density than that of water sinks in water and a thing having a less density than that of water floats on it. This is the way to discover the truth about the world scientifically and to obtain its evidence. A similar process is applied to discover truth about the body and mind of living beings.
Natural sciences like physics, chemistry, biology, and so on and medicine, pharmacy, and so on follow this method to uncover truth about nature and life. These sciences are exact sciences.
Truth is ‘that which is true or in accordance with fact or reality’, fact is ‘a thing that is known or proved to be true’ and knowledge is ‘true or justified belief; the sum of what is known.’(Oxford English Dictionary).
Claims of truth about the world and life beyond the test and falsifiability are not scientific. Scriptural ‘truths’ are irrational and false. Scientific claims are rational and analytical.
Rationality is scientific. Every day we live our lives rationally and protect ourselves from risks and survive. We avoid risks from poison, fire, flood, wild animals, human frauds, vehicular traffic, diseases, and so on by using our rational knowledge or experience of the risks. There are limitless risks to human life. Some risks are known, some are unknown, and some may remain unknown.
The plumber, electrician, carpenter, and other similar professionals use reason in their professions.
History is witness to the fact that no yogi has transcended the laws of nature. To transcend nature is to perform a miracle, something in violation of the laws of nature. None has produced a child without a mother, brought rain through his prayer, defeated death, walked on water, and so on. Mythological miracles are not facts.
As science is progressive, scientific evidence of truth about the world, animate or inanimate is provisional and not conclusive. New facts may be found out and may modify or overturn the existing scientific conclusions. Science, unlike religion, is not dogmatic and humble enough to accept its limitations.
Human knowledge is limited. Mysteries of nature are limitless
The mystic, Eastern or Western, claims that he has direct and empirical apprehension of truth about the world and life and that his vision of truth about them is intuitive and completely reliable. But his vision is mostly only a spark of light in the darkness.
The mystic is like a poet or artist. He is a visionary.
A minor aspect of mysticism about knowledge is touched here. Its major part concerns the ultimate goal of the human being who longs to reach and unite with the ultimate reality, variously described as universal consciousness, energy, life, existence, or nature and attain deliverance, liberation, or Mukti or Moksha, as the Hindus describe it.
A glimpse of the mystic impulsive outlook on the universe is available in one of the twelfth-century Indian rational mystic, Basavanna’s vachanas(poetic prose):
‘ Like the volcano hid in the water, it was.
Like the sap-juice in the plant, it was.
Like the fragrance in the bud, it was.
Koodalasngamadeva,
Like the tender love in the virgin maid, it was.’
Basavanna refers here to the element of the universal consciousness, energy, spirit, mother nature, or life itself in the human body. It is invisible, ineffable, and borderless and longing ultimately to merge with mother nature of which it is an inseparable part.
S.Radhakrishnan, the respected Indian idealist philosopher writes: ‘The deepest things of life are known only through intuitive apprehension. We recognize their truth but do not reason about them.’
The philosopher further claims:
‘For the Hindus, a system of philosophy is an insight, a darshana. It is the vision of truth and not a matter of logical argument and proof.’
Logic can know the physical and not the spiritual. It can understand the outside of the human mind and not it's inside.
But the mystic’s insight of truth about the world or life may not be fully true or may be false since such truth is privileged to be not subject to repeated test, falsifiability, and always open to the public, and is purely subjective.
It is true that philosophers accept an element of truth in the mystic’s vision of the world, animate or inanimate.
Bertrand Russell, the passionate skeptic writes: ‘… insight, untested and unsupported, is an insufficient guarantee of truth, in spite of the fact that much of the most important truth is first suggested by its means.’
He continues:
‘But in fact, the opposition of instinct and reason is mainly illusory. Instinct, intuition, or insight is what first leads to the beliefs which subsequent reason confirms or confutes;…… Reason is a harmonizing, controlling force rather than a creative one. Even in the most purely logical realm, it is the insight that first arrives at which is new.’
Dr. Radhakrishnan also ultimately agrees with this stance: ‘Though intuition lies beyond intellect, it is not contrary to it.’
There has been a constant co-existence and harmony between science and mysticism in the search for the complete truth about the living and non-living worlds.
Russell declares that the philosophies of Heraclitus and Plato represent this fact of harmony and co-existence between science and mysticism.
But intellect is superior to mysticism in discovering the whole truth about the world, animate or inanimate. The rationalist as an adherent of intellect is the decisive arbiter of truth about the world or life.
The great mystic, the Buddha’s compelling rational advice to us about knowledge is:
‘Believe nothing
Merely because you have been told it.
Or because it is traditional.
Or because you yourself have imagined it.
Do not believe what your teacher
teaches merely out of respect
for the teacher.
But whatever after due examination and analysis
you find it conducive to the good, the benefit,
the well-being of all things,
that doctrine believe and cling to and take it as your guide.’
You may think over the concept of truth and draw your own conclusion.
