"Intuition" could mean all sorts of things. The word itself still requires deeper definition.

If we are talking about the capacity to have correct hunches -- what is normally referred to as 'women's intuition" -- then the best explanation/definition I have heard is that this is a category of intuition possessed by all who are in a position of being oppressed. The capacity to anticipate the actions of the "master", to effectively "read his mind" can be a life-preserving skill -- and therefore one worth developing for anyone in an especially vulnerable position in relation to power. So, it is not just women, but others who have been a long time in a position of relative dis-empowerment, who will be likely to develop this skill.

Alternatively, one may wish to consider the question in relation to a different set of ideas. Supposing that "intuition" was the capacity to detect cause and effect, that is something entirely different from the capacity to have the right hunch about what someone will do next.

Certainly, many women have a better grasp of cause and effect than their male counterparts would have. This is because women were historically positioned to relate more directly to the concrete (empirical) world than men are, whereas men were relieved of the everyday burdens of housework and child rearing so as to be able to become, in effect, Philosophical Idealists (people who relate to the world in terms of intangible abstract concepts) to a greater degree.

Philosophical Idealists have the tendency not to see cause and effect as stemming from the relations of the material world. Rather, they experience cause and effect as the influence of one set of abstractions on another. So, for instance, "cultural decline" can be viewed as having the abstract cause of "female insubordination". In such an estimation, neither of the two concepts -- one posited as "cause" and the other as "effect" -- need be given any concrete definition. Also, on an intangible plane, by means of a strange reversal, patriarchal myths have it that male creativity "causes" females to come into being, but never the other way around. This reversal of cause and effect is obvious.

I came from a culture which couldn't have been more different from the one where I moved. The problems were cultural and historical, rather than to do with class status. I was perpetually misread on these bases.

To be a child of a colony isn't what people thought. There had been a propaganda war fought against us "whites", so that we appeared to be people who lounged around swimming pools and ordered our black staff to bring us cocktails, whilst we did nothing.

Most of us came from practical classes of Britain -- our parents were soldiers or farmers, or in very rare cases, managers of companies. There was no intellectual or artistic strata to our colonial culture. Our society has been a very rustic one indeed.

Also, although my family did have a swimming pool, we lived very frugally. On Saturday at lunch, my father would open one bottle of beer for himself. We would eat a family sized packet of potato chips, which we would only just afford, and share a family sized coca-cola between us. People don't like to hear that this was all the "luxury" we could afford, because it raises ire and sounds like apologetics. "What about all the millions of black people you personally oppressed? What could they afford?" is the common comeback. Such an angry and resentful attitude shuts down conversation, making it impossible to proceed.

When we came to Australia, in early 1984, we sold everything. We had to start again in every possible sense -- psychologically, economically and socially. I didn't have any new clothes for about five years, although I wasn't culturally wise enough to realise I needed them. Of course, I had absolutely no social pretensions. I noticed that people were extremely unwilling to help me find my feet, and I later understood this was because I was a 'colonial' and so was expected to pay for recompense for that.

I became a little crazy: I turned to fundamentalist Christianity as a way of trying to inject some heart and soul into my new circumstances. This didn't help at all, as I later discovered so much of the doctrine I'd been learning was intellectually contradictory and at odds with my personality.

I had come from a conservative to right-wing culture and I ought to have stayed in that kind of cultural context where I would have been treated more sympathetically. As I had no idea that I was being discriminated against, and that I was effectively making things worse by not choosing conservative environments that would have welcomed my identity, I gravitated towards liberal intellectual and artistic contexts.

As time went by, I developed chronic fatigue syndrome a result of not being able to make sense of it all. 

Violent transformation is depicted by Nietzsche, Bataille and Marechera and I view all of this in practical terms. I had to undergo violent transformation to adjust to modern life.

I'm a philosopher, a Doctor of Philosophy, an experimenter with life and a martial artist. I'm originally from Africa and I insist on ending my life in a mountain wilderness surrounded by horses and wildlife.

It took me a lot of experimenting and book learning to try to understand what Western egoism was about. I knew I was missing something, because people assumed I was saying things using a sub-text, when I really was, quite simply, blurting things out. Like if I said, “Is this the way we are supposed to do this task?” I really wasn’t criticizing anybody implicitly for the way they were doing something. I was asking a simple question.

I also absolutely didn’t get the idea of identity, at all — that one person could be implicitly criticizing another on the basis of something being wrong with their identity. In retrospect, I think this was happening to me a lot. I was being criticized implicitly because of my white, African (colonial) identity. But I didn’t make much sense of this so naturally I didn’t defend myself either.

I became more stressed because I was way out of my depth in Western culture. When I said, “I’m becoming more and more stressed” (a simple case of blurting something out) people began to say, “You’re making it all about you. You think you’re important. You imagine you’re really great!”

That was weird because I had no such imaginings, nor indeed any concept of my self in relation to the new society.

As I couldn’t understand why my attempts to communicate had to be stymied in every direction I found the situation extremely stressful and bbb...bewildering.

When I teach, I often say: “I’m not sure what you mean here.”
It’s a very useful thing to say, perhaps the most useful.
I find that a lot of people believe their meanings are self-evident, when this is far from being the case. It’s the kindest act to help them sort out their meanings.
A lot of the problem with understanding whether or not one is communicating is to combat psychological projection in some of its more subtle manifestations.
For instance, I always supposed my university lecturers would know what I was trying to mean because they were highly educated and must necessarily know anything of great importance. I was projecting some kind of omniscience into them that they didn’t have.
In other instances, people will project a whole world view and intellectual structure onto reality that isn’t really there. For instance, they might say, “Being single and being married are totally different things — you know what I mean?” Of course, I won’t know what they mean, since there are all sorts of cultural and historical reasons why my experiences of these would differ from theirs.
It’s always better to doubt that communication has actually taken place than to assume it follows automatic channels.

1. An ego-centered approach to criticism remains a puzzle to me, although I do grasp its meaning, in part. To have to overcome an ego that is both overconfident and insecure (for that state of being pretty much defines the operation of ego itself) seems like culturally limited work.

The language of ego was very foreign to me when growing up, and this differentiates me from those for whom ego was an essential part of their cultural development.

My culture was implicitly tribal, so that we kind of surged or held back as a group, depending on the mood in the wind.My cultural background made me not just insensitive, but oblivious to personal criticism. I really didn’t take it in. Comments about my progress in art, for instance, were momentarily interesting, but I considered them to be ultimately arbitrary and pointless.

I actually had no concept of self-improvement, growing up. I considered life in terms of likes and dislikes, but not in terms of being good or bad at anything in particular. My academic performance reflected this, in that sometimes I performed well in English, sometimes Art, sometimes in an entirely other subject. When I did my school leaving exam (the second year after migrating to Australia), my best mark of all subjects was in maths.

I went on to study Art, but I had no concept of Western individualism.   If I’d developed any individual sense of ego by that stage, I would have called my problems “culture shock”. As it was, I had no way to conceptualize why I couldn’t draw any meaning from my situation. On a deep level, I felt like I needed a rite of passage as a transition from childhood to adulthood.

The concept of there being individual egos gradually began to dawn on me. I changed my course from Fine Arts to Humanities, and by the end of the course, I understood individualism a lot better.

I still didn’t understand how completely the ideology of ego was suffused in language in order to give language a sense of having particular reference to the individual who spoke. I felt language was more for pointing out things objectively. However, I found that when I tried to do this, more often than not, people brought the issue back to me, as if to say, “Well that is just what YOU think, but it’s only about you. Your language doesn’t actually point to anything beyond you.”

Ego eventually seemed to me a very limiting factor because of this cultural presupposition that one could not say anything that did not relate primarily, or exclusively to oneself.


2. Et moi, aussi:

Ego isn’t evil -- but it is far easier to control someone who is ego-centered than someone who isn’t. I’m very difficult to control, because my first instinct, when someone criticizes me, is to think, “Surely you are mistaken!”

I do accept criticism and incorporate the knowledge from it very easily, but I also entertain the high likelihood that there are cultural elements of error in many criticisms I received. That’s to do with the assumption that I’m necessarily saying things “about myself”, when I am making observations in an extremely detached manner.

The first fifteen years of my life, I was simply without ego, which doesn’t mean I was without hedonism.

On the good side: a wounded ego can be really useful for keeping one on a particular track. I’ve experienced that before, too. The oyster makes a pearl out of its injury. Such was my PhD.
I’ve reverted to my old ways now, where, having satisfied my intellectual thirsts, I really don’t care what people think of me. This attitude is deeply African. It’s a core part of African resilience, to be able to surge or contract without any reference to ego or identity.





STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

I am an atheist, however, I see such value in Bataille’s conceptualisation of “mystical experience” as “non-knowledge”, since what he really means by that is deep subjectivity.

I’ve had USA citizens positively yelling at me online, because they feel a very profound need to cut loose from the religiosity they are, apparently, surrounded by. The tone of this screaming is that I’m somehow regressing from the standard they would like to set by my own embrace of deep subjectivity.

I do consider their attitudes to be philistine, whilst displaying an inability to separate their own cultural issues (the desire to be done with USA religiosity) from other people’s ideas and experiences.
There really is no harm in growing up and realizing that one’s own personal agenda may differ from others'.

One of these guy’s views was that one must be compelled to embrace the meaninglessness of existence. One wonders what fearsome god he has erected in his head that would command him to embrace “meaninglessness” as a way of proving his atheism. This formulation may seem logically consistent on the surface, but in the absence of a god that actually commands his atheism it makes no sense at all.

David Coltart
I am very distressed about the disappearance of a good friend and colleague, Paul Chizuze, on the 8th February 2012. Paul was one of the first paralegals we trained at the Bulawayo Legal Projects Centre in the 1980s. He has been one of the most consistent human rights activists I know - a man of great compassion and integrity. The following statement has been issued by his colleagues and friends. Please would all those living in Zimbabwe and its neighbouring states look out for the vehicle described as it may be the best way of locating him. I have posted Paul's photograph below.

PAUL CHIZUZE – DISAPPEARED

A long established Zimbabwean human rights activist has been missing since 8 pm on Wednesday 8 February 2012.

Over the last three decades, Paul has been either employed by, or active with, the Legal Resources Foundation, Amani Trust Matabeleland, The Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace, ZimRights, Churches in Bulawayo, CivNet, and Masakhaneni Trust. Paul has worked tirelessly as a paralegal to track activists in jail and offer them support. Paul was among those who maintained the campaign to uncover the truth of what happened to Patrick Nabanyama after his abduction and disappearance in 2000, and has selflessly worked to expose human rights abuses in the last decade.

WHERE IS PAUL? He allegedly left his home around 8 pm on 8th February, and what happened after this remains a mystery. He may have been murdered, hijacked or abducted by parties unknown.

His car, a white twin cab Nissan Hardbody Reg Number ACJ 3446 is also missing.
Paul has searched for other activists and never given up. We appeal to the police to pursue all the possibilities, and we in civics vow to maintain a campaign to find Paul wherever he may be

To think abstractly means to stop paying attention directly  to those things that are going on in the immediacy. 
It's structurally based on the capacity to separate oneself from oneself and to have two senses of the self: the immediate, concrete one and the one that is defined by abstract terminology or "spirit".

Nietzsche was my “psychoanalyst”, at least in the first instance. The limitations of Nietzsche are that he does not deal with the question of patriarchy. Like many a contemporary male, he sees no particular problem with this in terms of causing mental health issues. He is prone to essentialise gender.

Marechera was my second, much deeper and more self-aware “psychoanalyst”. He deals with issues both of race and gender. One understands through him how society is constructed so that both race and gender constrain as well as determine psychological development. Marechera comes from my culture, which is also more primitive than that of European of contemporary Western culture. My problems were sourced in this culture, not in Western culture, which meant that Western therapists had not the background that would have enabled them to get to the bottom of any of my concerns. As a result, there was meaningless talking around the issue — or, if pressed concerning the urgency of finally addressing my issues, the therapists would become extremely abusive.  Marechera, Bataille and Nietzsche, in the reverse order, taught me about a different way of being, which I call shamanism. 

1. Shamanism is a mode that mixes the recognition of extreme trauma with a mode of speaking that is extremely ironic. It’s not to everybody’s taste and is indeed confusing, since most people believe that genuine injustices ought to be taken seriously and with the greatest sense of moral deliberation. Those who are wrecked and turn to intellectual shamanism know that nobody pays any attention to such genuine injustices, at least not today or tomorrow.
2. Shamans are, however, “wrecked out of their wounds”, which means that they've reached such a base level of extreme skepticism about moral rhetoric, and its capacity to do any good, that they can only treat the world ironically, henceforth.