IndexUnderstanding intuitionIntuition in The Sound and the FuryConclusionUnderstanding intuition Intuition is said to be the simplest feeling in the world. The simplicity of the insight becomes much clearer when reading Friedrich Nietzsche's essay entitled On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life. Nietzsche clarifies Bergson's notion of intuition by placing it in historical context. His point is that history, whether individual or communal, is useful up to a point, but that all truly great actions are accomplished when the agent, if only for a moment, forgets everything he has known and becomes "unhistorical". Therefore, no matter how much importance we give to the knowledge of history, "we must... consider the ability to perceive to some extent anti-historical as the most important and fundamental since it provides the only foundation on which something right, healthy and great, can grow something truly human.” Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned” Get an original essay On the other hand, Henri Bergson, in his essay, An Introduction to Metaphysics, is trying to place absolute knowledge in the debate between rational and empiricist philosophy, his essay is very complex. The intuition he talks about seems beyond the reach of an ordinary person. Bergson says: "that kind of intellectual sympathy with which one places within an object to coincide with what is unique and consequently inexpressible in it". No matter how many times you analyze an object, it is not possible to truly understand it until you do so intuitively. The striking similarity between Bergson's moment of insight and Nietzsche's ahistorical moment can be clearly seen when we compare the two philosophers' notions about the fleeting duration of these objects. moments. Consider Bergson: "while we can...with...imagination, solidify duration once it has passed...this operation is performed on the frozen memory of duration" (Metaphysics, 30). Nietzsche essentially poses the same thing about an ahistorical moment when he writes: "The ahistorical resembles an enveloping atmosphere in which only life is generated and then disappears again with the destruction of this atmosphere" (History, 11). An ahistorical moment is, like a moment of intuition, expressible only in terms of the past, yet it is in these moments of our lives that we discover the greatness of things or perform the greatest actions. From a historical perspective they are moments of greatness that are remembered throughout the ages, but from a personal perspective they are the moments in our daily lives that push us forward, remind us that there are great things to do and be seen. Without these moments of intuition we will never truly know anything, but will reduce everything to symbols. Furthermore, without these moments in which we forget everything but what is before us, as Nietzsche tells us, we can "like the true pupil of Heraclitus, hardly ever dare to lift a finger." Or, more simply, we cannot get any satisfaction in our life. Intuition in The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner knows a thing or two about intuition, otherwise he would never have been able to write a character who completely lacks any knowledge. of it. Jason Compson is the literary equivalent of a man who has never had a moment of insight, has never experienced a moment in which he is able to forget the rest of his life. Faulkner makes this clear through Jason's inability to perceive any emotion, or existential moment in life, and therefore his need to reduce all these moments to their starkest symbols. What makes Jason asuch an ingenious character is further illuminated by Nietzsche, who postulates that the only way to live without needing moments of anti-historicity is to be super-historical. The superhistorical man is he who realizes the "antihistorical atmosphere in which every great historical event took place". It has no ahistorical moments, nor does it need any history: "the past and the present are one, that is, typically similar in all their many varieties... and have eternally the same meaning." Furthermore, he does not need the future; as Nietzsche tells us, no one, if asked, would want to repeat the previous ten years of their life, but most would give the reason for their response as the hope that the next ten years will be better. The superhistorian, however, "does not see salvation in this process, for him, however, the world is complete and reaches its end in every single moment". He wouldn't relive the last ten years because they will be exactly the same as the next ten. Faulkner's Jason Compson attempts to compensate for his lack of intuition by being a superhistorian, yet is constantly burdened by the past. Without having experienced an ahistorical moment, but still unable to abandon the past, Jason is condemned to be unhappy and to make others equally so. The very structure of Jason's section in The Sound and the Fury is emblematic of his inability to experience intuition. The chapter, like those surrounding his brothers Benjy and Quentin, follows Jason throughout the day. Unlike Benjy for whom time has no meaning, or Quentin whose notion of time is so intuitive that he must kill himself to escape it, time for Jason is only its most obvious symbol, the clock. In class we defined Jason's problem with the maniacal linearity of time. An ahistorical moment is one in which we completely waste time; time, at least the conscious time of the clock, does not matter and has no meaning, because it is only a symbol. Because Jason is a man who has never lived a moment out of time, he is completely dependent on this symbol. He doesn't understand why anyone would distrust the clock, as becomes clear when his boss looks at his watch and then at the city courthouse's. Jason says "[y]ou should have a dollar watch... It won't cost you that much to believe I'm lying" (Sound, 306). He constantly reminds the reader what time of day it is: "[a]very about ten o'clock I went to the front. There was a drummer there. It was a couple of minutes to ten" (237). Each hour has a programmed meaning for Jason, and we soon learn that ten o'clock is when stock market reports arrive at the town's telegraph office. As is clear from both of the above-mentioned examples, Jason is as maniacally obsessed with money as he is with clock time. However, Jason doesn't take risks with money; he doesn't take chances with anything. Nietzsche postulates that every great action requires ahistorical moments in which to conceive it: "no artist will paint his picture...nor will any people [achieve] their freedom without first desiring and pursuing it in...an antihistorical condition" (History , 11). Since Jason never aspires to an ahistorical condition, he never risks or achieves anything great. The stock market consumes Jason's thoughts and yet he says, "I never risk a lot at a time" (Sound, 238). Jason has never experienced a moment of trust, so he doesn't even trust the symbol he relies on. Money, for Jason, is the symbol of everything he has lost, and at the same time the only thing he lives for. Money is only the approximate symbol of an object's value, yet for Jason, who relies completely on symbols, it is the most reliable judge. This is clear when a man comes into his shop to buy a hame rope. Jason isannoyed that the man spends so much time "deciding whether he wants a twenty-cent rope or a thirty-five-cent one. He advises the man to get the most expensive piece of machinery, but when the man asks him how he does it, who doesn't he's a farmer, he knows what's best, Jason responds, "[b]hy don't they ask for thirty-five cents... that's how I know it's not that good. Without any internal notion of value, Jason has to rely completely on monetary symbols." determine which car is better. Even more disturbing, Jason uses this monetary symbol of value to qualify his relationships and emotions Love is the easiest way to tell a non-historical moment, as it is probably the most widely experienced form of intuition . Nietzsche, in fact, uses love in his essay to "illustrate with an example" the ahistorical: "think of a man tossed and torn by a powerful passion for a woman... how his world has changed Jason." he has never experienced this passion and therefore can only relate to love with symbols. His only lover is a Memphis whore named Lorraine. It trades money for sex in lieu of a real relationship, which, as anyone who has experienced any kind of love knows, cannot quantify. When Lorraine, who clearly has an affinity for him, sends him a letter complaining that Memphis isn't having fun without him and that she misses him. Jason, unable to imagine the emotion of desire, reflects, "I guess she misses me. Last time I gave her forty dollars" (Sound, 240). The love for Jason is only worth the dollars and cents he puts into it. Jason has no more insight into familial love than he does into the passionate love of a woman. Caddy, who knows her brother well, offers him fifty dollars for the chance to see her little girl. After convincing her to give him one hundred dollars, Jason holds the baby near the window of a moving car, while Caddy waits outside. When she goes to beg him for another chance to see the baby, and asks how much it will cost this time, he says, "well, if one look through a window was worth a hundred...". Jason, not having an ideal of love himself, also quantifies the love between mother and son. This inability to sense love is no clearer than when she recalls a scene from her father's funeral. In memory, he watches the gravediggers fill the grave, "as if they were spreading mortar on it or building a fence, and I began to feel a little strange." There are two aspects to this quote that show Jason's profound lack of conscious emotion: the images of the mortar and the fence, two banal scenes, are not what one would normally use to describe the profound pain of seeing one's father's grave fill up. . Even after an argument with one's parents, the sight of their grave would reveal more emotional similarities. Secondly, Jason comments that watching this scene makes him feel "funny"; a page later, after seeing Caddy for the first time since she left their home, standing on her dead father's grave, Jason begins to feel "funny again". Jason could be feeling any number of emotions, yet in both cases his inability to intuit them, let alone express them, is clear with the abstract use of the word “funny.” It's clear that Jason is affected by his father's death. Mr Compson was an alcoholic and died from a drinking-related illness. Jason makes it very clear that he never drinks: "I'd rather gulp down gasoline as much as a glass of whiskey." Yet he does not recognize the memory of his father, and in fact diminishes, whenever he can, any connection with his father. This tendency to downplay the importance of his personal past is Jason's attempt to be superhistorical. This Nietzschean term abovementioned could be called a super-insight into history. A superhistorian is so aware that history is only a collection of ahistorical moments, that he sees no need to use them to help his present, nor the need to change it for the future: "he who adopted [this point of view] could not no longer be tempted at all to continue to live and collaborate in the construction of history" (History, 12). After all, if the past and the present are a "static structure... with unchanged meaning", then what is the point of working towards a future? which will soon be the same as the present that is past. Jason's entire section of The Sound and the Fury, makes comments that seem to be those of an unequivocal superhistorian. The chapter begins and ends with the sentence “once a bitch, always a bitch” (Sound, 223, 329) Who he is referring to is unclear; regardless, Jason's lack of faith in people's ability to change is evident others or makes general comments about race and gender. He condemns the entire Jewish population by saying, "it's just the race. You will admit that they produce nothing. They follow the pioneers to a new country and sell them clothes." The man he's talking to suggests that it's not even Jews that Jason is referring to, because even stereotypically the statement doesn't make sense. However, this is precisely the point of the superhistorical, all cultures are essentially the same: "[a]nhundreds of different languages ​​correspond to the typically fixed needs of men, so that anyone who understood these needs could not learn anything new from all those languages » (History, 13) So the Jews could also be Armenians as Jason's companion suggests, or Buddhists, because for the superhistorical they are the same thing Jason uses this superhistorical logic to convince his mother to burn a check that Caddy sent for her daughter. Quentino. What her mother doesn't know is that the check she's burning is fake and that Jason is actually stealing the money for himself his actions and tells Jason that he will swallow his pride and leave this check intact. To this he replies: «what good would it be to start now, when you have been destroying them for fifteen years... If you continue to do so you have lost nothing» ( Sound, 273). If no moment in history truly changes its course, then why bother to vary from the routine or attempt to improve one's circumstances. Besides, Jason seems to be saying, if no one person ever improves the story, then what they have to say or do isn't really of any importance. consequence. When his boss tells him he knows Jason has done shady things with his mother's money, Jason explains that there's no point in trying to stop his boss from chastising him: "when a man gets into a rut, the best thing you can All that's left to do is let him stay there." Furthermore, when his boss expresses concern about Jason's recurring headaches and suggests that he go see a dentist, Jason thinks to himself, "it's a funny thing like, whatever's wrong with you, a man will tell you to have your teeth examined and to be examined." woman will tell you to get married." This statement is ridiculous except from a supra-historical point of view, because if all advice leads to the same future and does not in any way inform the present, then every man could also tell him to get his teeth fixed and every woman tell him to get his teeth fixed. Jason could convince us that he is a superhistorian, if Faulkner hadn't burdened him with so much history personal past and the past of his race, the white Southern farmer Jason observes.