method – 8 – Intuition and Construction

Intuition and construction – 

I can examine the process of abstraction—the transformation of feeling into words—in retrospect by going into the various formats of my containers and seeing what is depicted there. I return to the original form. One cannot reverse the transformation of a feeling that has already been abstracted—that is, its transformation into a word or a sentence—without its source, because abstraction erases concreteness. An abstraction is fixed.

The preliminary form of abstraction, however—the naive emotional state, the one-sided perception, the romantic gaze, the error, the search— wrong  bull’s-eye, the longing, the desire, the mistaken thought, the as-yet-unperceived, the deception, the intuitively grasped exact fact or moment—is a raw form that can be archived in containers like artifacts and thus preserved. In this way, the raw forms—which are strongly shaped by the feeling—and what I can recognize are preserved.

On this basis, I can now reconstruct and then undo the reconstruction once I realize that it has led me astray. I then pick up a new trail by returning to the preliminary form like a tracking dog, picking up the scent, and beginning the search anew.

If we can verify and distinguish between intuition and construction, then we can determine to what extent we are shaped or influenced by social processes, whether past or present. We can then explore our relationship to the world within ourselves to a certain degree of autonomy, in spite of majorities and fads.

While doing my research, I also discovered something surprising: when I sit alone in my study, I am always caught up in the hustle and bustle of the world and yet, at the same time, I have escaped it. Others have called this a victory over time.