Intelligence, Intuition, and an Absurd Dinner

On intelligence and melancholy

Killing the Mood

I want to reflect on the following quote from the School of Life that describes an experience of the “absurdity of the world,” which is explored by Jean-Paul Sartre in his novel, Nausea:

“Think of what you know as the “evening meal with your partner.” Under such description it all seems very logical. But a Sartrean would strip away the surface formality to show the radical strangeness lurking beneath. Dinner really means that when your part of the planet spun away from the energy of a distant hydrogen and helium explosion, you slide your knees under strips of a chopped up tree, and put sections of dead animals and plants in your mouth and chew. While next to you another mammal whose genitals you sometimes touch is doing the same.”

Besides being the most interesting description of date night that I have ever heard, what I find most compelling about this quote is that it provides an excellent example not just of the function and nature of intelligence, but also its relation to depressive states of mind.

To start, let's examine what's going on with this quote.

What the experience of absurdity has done here is strip the evening meal of all the vital significance that makes dinner special in the first place. The Sartrean does two things here: 1) she dismantles the dinner ritual and reconstructs it using the same material components divested of their experiential/social significance; 2) she then claims that only once the “surface formality” of dinner has been stripped away can we see what dinner really is, which undermines our common sense, value-laden understanding of the evening meal.

This implies that the true meaning of dinner remains veiled by the subjective conventions that organize human social life. We're really just organic lifeforms procuring nourishment and satisfying reproductive desires, not lovers looking to enjoy each other's company and deepen their love for each other.

This thought process ends up being a buzzkill which obviously sucks the life out of date night.

Perhaps there are people out there that don't find this depressing. But in my experience, someone doesn't think or speak in this way unless they are deeply dissatisfied or brooding. But why is this kind of absurdist analysis so often coupled with negative states of mind?

What is Intelligence?

Henri Bergson's distinction between intelligence and intuition provides a very interesting answer.

For Bergson, intelligence is a form of consciousness whose function and nature are most clearly understood in contrast to instinct. We find instinct in its most highly evolved form in the Hymenoptera (bees, wasps, and ants). The evolutionary function of instinct is to manipulate matter using organic instruments, such as bodily organs and appendages. Another feature of instinct is that it establishes a powerful sympathy between a being and its world, such that instinct puts an organism in direct contact with the current of life flowing around it. Think of the hive mind of bees, or the surgical precision of a wasp that “knows” which nerve centers to sting in a caterpillar, such that it doesn't die but remains paralyzed, so the wasp can lay its eggs and keep the caterpillar fresh for the larvae to feed on later—another buzzkill.

Intelligence, on the other hand, though still concerned with the manipulation of matter, uses inorganic instruments (tools) for this purpose—Bergson argued that modern science and technology represent the most advanced development of intelligence that we find in nature. Furthermore, whereas instinct is essentially automatic by definition, intelligence is able to hesitate and consider different options prior to acting.

Intelligence works by identifying stable patterns within the ceaseless flux of reality. The intellect translates these stable patterns into static concepts that it can work with and manipulate, which is what makes language and, more importantly for science, mathematics possible. Thus, the success of intelligence is owed to the fact that the intellect relates to the world by breaking down the uninterrupted and unified flow of material reality into easily manageable and static concepts. The intellect can then easily manipulate and reconstruct reality by means of these concepts. Intelligence, left to its own devices, cannot help but treat its conceptual creations as more real than reality itself.

Isn't this exactly what happens in our dinner example? The Sartrean analysis of absurdity has the fingerprints of intelligence all over it. The dinner ritual, full of vital significance and social meaning, is dismantled and reconstituted by its bare material components, which have had their experiential context and meaning stripped from them. This dead version of dinner is then taken to be what dinner really is. But is this form of intellectual analysis the only legitimate way of understanding the world?

Saving Dinner

Luckily, intelligence isn't the only form of consciousness we can use to relate to the world. Bergson argued that surrounding our intelligence there is a “fringe” of instinct, as there is a fringe of intelligence surrounding the instinct of the Hymenoptera. This leaves open the possibility of an intellectual effort to refine instinct with intelligence. This effort would lead to a self-conscious and reflective form of instinct that Bergson called “intuition.” So, whereas intelligence arrests the movement of life from the outside and replaces it with static concepts, intuition can put us in touch with the interiority of life itself.

(It's important to note that when talking about intelligence, intuition, and instinct that Bergson sees these as forms that our conscious experience tends to take, but that in reality they exist intermingled with each other. It is part of Bergson's philosophical method to identify these different tendencies and isolate them for the sake of analysis to obtain greater clarity on the different tendencies that make up our conscious experience.)

From this point of view, the underlying materiality of dinner that is highlighted by the Sartrean is just as real as the social significance that she stripped away from it. They are the same event looked at from different perspectives: externally and internally.

However, in terms of what dinner really is, it is intuition that gets closer to the heart of the matter. Without some grasp of the experiential context and social significance of dinner, the material arrangement of chairs, tables, food, celestial bodies, and genitals risks becoming a blind act of chance or simply incoherent. So why should we prefer the absurdist account of dinner over the common sense one if the latter does a better job at accounting for why the event is happening in the first place?

Looked at from this perspective, it's no wonder we feel more melancholic when intelligence alienates us from the interior/vital aspect of life that colors human experience with feeling and a sense of meaning. We deny the intuition of what is really meaningful about dinner for the sake of intellectual analysis, which concerns itself solely with the material/external aspects of life and misses its interior vitality. It is in this sense that intelligence can act as kind of a numbing agent, in that it tends to externalize consciousness from the heart of life, which is why Bergson suggested that comprehensive knowledge of reality requires us to turn intelligence inwards to refine instinct in the direct of intuition, so that our knowledge of the external shell of life is complemented by its vital interior.

Therefore, it is only through intuition, through an effort to understand life from within, that we grasp what dinner really means. We wait until our part of the Earth has spun away from a distant helium and hydrogen explosion because that is the only time of the day we can spend together. We slide our knees under strips of a chopped up tree so we may comfortably gather and direct our attention towards each other and converse. We cook and eat dead sections of plants and animals (if that's your thing) as a communal act of care and pleasure that strengthens our bond. And finally… I think you get the gist.