Beyond Logic and Emotion: Noetic Intuition as the Master Cognitive System
On the limits of reason, the honesty of feeling, and the superiority of knowing.
“Nearly all of our faults are more forgivable than the means we use to hide them.”
— Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Ever since I was a teenager, I naturally gave very little credence to feelings in almost all matters of debate or credibility, because the errors in thinking - and thus inadequacy of opinion or proposed solution that resulted - were glaringly abundant to me. It was not that I was some perfectly self-controlled zen master, more that I could see how unreasonable and unfair other people’s emotionality made them.
And yet, as I’ve gotten older, a greater wisdom has emerged. No, I’m not about to say that emotions were in fact, superior and more insightful all along - no. But I learned the limitations of logic. I learned that, less obviously, logic is not the infallible master system my naive teenage self once believed it to be.
So the bias of my inherent disposition was this: emotions are volatile, and untrustworthy. And in one sense, this is very obviously true, and yet it is also, only a snapshot of truth - not the full truth, because emotion, for all its limitation, does point to something real. Emotions are sincere expressions of the embodied self, where reason taken too far becomes a refusal of it, and thereby disconnection from it. Emotion taken to its ultimate conclusion is to lose coherence and unravel, whilst reason uncompromised by emotion can observe more accurately. Stated like this, you see each has different use cases.
To understand a soul, I cannot ignore emotions, but to understand reality, I cannot ignore reason. This is not to say my soul or yours are not part of this reality, only that, they do not conform to the strict limitations of logic. We, as conscious beings, do not conveniently obey reason. We thinking men temperamentally like to reduce everything to reason under the false belief that by understanding we are elevating, when we are in fact, often reducing in our exploring. This is why we’ll look for evolutionary explanations, statistical trends - whatever it is - to “whitewash” or give a preconceived notion a logical, and thereby implicitly credible frame. It is the logos that always seeks to penetrate and demystify, where eros seeks to sustain ambiguity. It is for this reason man is prone to transparency and thus the reduction of things, where woman is opaque in her elevation of them. It is also for this reason that she is categorically by temperament more strongly a religious creature than he, but I digress.
We thinking men dispositionally believe logic is the master system of cognition, and therefore implicitly believe we are elevated by it in our preference for it - but this is wrong. What is true: logic alone is not enough. What is also true: someone who is deeply intuitively integrated will surpass or otherwise outcompete someone who is not, because they will be dysfunctionally seized by the whirlwind of their own emotions, or sterilised by the endless rationalising denial of analytic cognition, rather than internally aligned, and thus integrated.
My naive, teenage self of course did not realise this. He thought the choice was between volatility, and detached rational control - and self-regulation naturally encourages the latter. I was not aware of the third thing underneath (but above) them both, operating as the harmonious synthesis of each: intuition. And it makes sense I wasn’t, because I hadn’t yet learned to integrate them. To oscillate between a binary along a spectrum is natural, especially when you are experimenting with your identity in deciding how exactly you think you should behave, in line with who precisely you wish to be. But crucially: who you wish to be should be a refinement of your deepest nature into its highest form - not a rejection of it.
To cleanly inhabit a stable paradox without collapsing into a binary comes with greater spiritual development, and is therefore the exception rather than the rule. Specifically, this is to be able to understand something intimately in its emotivity and grasp it logically in its granularity, and not prioritise or invalidate either with the other, but instead synthesise each into a deeper knowing.
