How is it possible to get inside an object? Here is the house in front of me. It has stood at this place for half a century, and sometimes it seems to me that I hear the voices of the residents who once lived here, their songs to the button accordion in the park in front of the house, conversations, weddings, funerals …
How is it possible to get inside an object? Here is the house in front of me. It has stood at this place for half a century, and sometimes it seems to me that I hear the voices of the residents who once lived here, their songs to the button accordion in the park in front of the house, conversations, weddings, funerals … And if you listen closely, you can imagine the barrack that used to be on the site of this house, its inhabitants, post-war punks … And before that – a forest and a shallow swamp, which in the 1920s were covered with sand in order to put a barrack for migrants from the village in this place … And all this is in the Stalinist house: he preserved the past is in itself, and it emerges, as damp spots appear on its wall in spring. Of course, to see all this, you need a developed imagination. Imagination is an integral part of intuition. The brighter and freer it is, the more truly it reveals reality to us. Most obviously, the mechanism of intuition is found in human cognition. It is impossible to recognize a person from the outside. One is always closed to the other. But sometimes a barely noticeable shadow that runs across the face, a smile or a special laugh opens the soul of another for us: we suddenly seem to feel his essence. In the gaze, in the facial expressions, the inner shines through and breaks out. And a person opens up to us, a revelation of one “I” to another happens. The Other does not cease to be a mystery to me, but it is a mystery that comes into contact with me, invades me, is experienced by me through its active influence on me. All this is given in any other person’s gaze directed at me, in the secret of living human eyes directed at me… , even the most fluent and superficial “communication” – this is the most common, everyday phenomenon, however, for someone who has ever thought about it, at the same time one of the most mysterious phenomena of human life – or rather, the most concrete discovery of the eternal mystery, which forms the very essence of human life. In this phenomenon, a genuine miracle is performed: the miracle of transcending beyond oneself, the mutual self-disclosure for each other of two people, Frank believed.
THE OTHER DOES NOT CEASE TO BE A MYSTERY FOR ME, BUT THIS MYSTERY INVADES ME, IS EXPERIENCED BY ME.
Intuition is a direct, without logical reasoning and conclusions, comprehension of the truth, “that kind of intellectual empathy or sympathy, through which we penetrate the inside of an object in order to merge with what is unique and inexpressible in it” **. This is a special ability to see (and not just look), with its help we see much more than the world around us offers. Plunging into this world of shades, intonations, allusions, images, fears and delights, we feel that we are living, that this is real life, and not a frozen reflection of the knowing mind ***.
* S. Frank “Incomprehensible. An ontological introduction to the philosophy of religion” (AST, 2007).
** A. Bergson “Immediate data of consciousness. Time and free will” (LCI, 2010).
*** See Glance, 2011, no. 2 (21) for details.