One of the key differences between humans and other animals is the former’s ability to supplement (and sometimes even supplant) intuition with rationality. This uniquely human feature mostly manifests itself through various systems of compositional symbols, of which language is the most important one. Yet in practice, rationality never triumphs completely. Even the most cerebral feat always remains an intuitive act at its core – even the most detailed instructions on how to perform a certain technical process may not work without that final ‘click in place’ to be reported by the user’s ‘sixth sense’. The above gulf between intuition and rationality is felt all the more acutely in those areas of human psyche which reason has been historically struggling to assimilate. Among obvious examples are: 1) Failed attempts to rationalize certain basic body movements where consciousness is not habitually involved (to be exemplified by a challenging reading of Zeno’s famous aporia about Achilles and the tortoise); 2) Works of art and other products of creativity (to be illustrated by a remarkable exchange of letters between John Ruskin and Robert Browning); 3) Religious consciousness with its famous ‘leap into faith’ thought by some to be necessary for adopting a particular belief system. The last case is especially interesting as it allows us to observe a ‘feedback effect’ caused by attempts to rationalise mystical experience by means of mythology and, later, theology. Such rationalization clashes with the object’s ultimate unanalysability and in turn necessitates a longer ‘leap’, more difficult to perform.

Authors:
Dmitry Usenco, Independent Scholar, United Kingdom

About the Presenter(s)
Dmitry Usenco earned his PhD in English Literature from the Institute of World Literature (Moscow) in 1998. Since then his scholarly interests have been expanding to interfacing disciplines. His special interest is Semiotics of Religion.

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