[T]he whole enterprise is based on an error. Millions of careers rest on the false belief that by analyzing human phenomena from the outside, and by gathering more and more knowledge through research, we can get an accurate representation of reality to substitute for knowing these phenomena from the inside, through intuition. […]
Analysis has generated thousands of empirical concepts that large numbers of people are believed to share. Examples include “rational decision making,” “wellness,” “whiteness,” and “addiction,” to name just a few. Much of our economy is built around these words in the form of services sold or models constructed, while millions of people are employed to perform research around these concepts or simply offer services in their name. Yet much of this is based on an illusion. The concepts may represent certain aspects of people, but they are not parts of people, as people’s minds cannot really be broken down into parts.
The philosopher Henri Bergson illustrated the futility of relying solely on the analytical method when he described breaking down a poem into letters, and then, without knowing the poem’s meaning, trying to reconstitute the poem through the letters alone. It can’t be done, he said, because the letters are not “parts” of the poem; they are merely symbolic elements used to express the poem’s meaning. Rather than fragments of meaning, the letters are merely fragments of symbols. Applying analysis to the poem’s letters without any intuition of the poem’s meaning yields a ridiculous outcome.
Reconstituting the totality of a person knowing only the “parts” of his or her mind is equally nonsensical. What we think of as parts are just fragments of feelings, thoughts, or sensations that run through the mind and have been given names, but which cannot be assembled to estimate the meaning of any person’s life. To understand that we need intuition.