Adriana Alfaro Altamirano (Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México [ITAM]) The belief in intuition: Individuality and authority in Henri Bergson and Max Scheler Within the Western tradition, it was the philosophers Henri Bergson and Max Scheler who laid out and explored the nonrational power of "intuition" at work in human beings that plays a key role in orienting their thinking and action within the world. As author Adriana Alfaro Altamirano notes, Bergon's and Scheler's philosophical explorations, which paralleled similar developments by other modernist writers, artists, and political actors of the early twentieth century, can yield fruitful insights into the ideas and passions that animate politics in our own time. The Belief in Intuition shows that intuition (as Bergson and Scheler understood it) leads, first and foremost, to a conception of freedom that is especially suited for dealing with hierarchy, uncertainty, and alterity. Such a conception of freedom is grounded in a sense of individuality that remains true to its "inner multiplicity," thus providing a distinct contrast to and critique of the liberal notion of the self. Focusing on the complex inner lives that drive human action, as Bergson and Scheler did, leads us to appreciate the moral and empirical limits of liberal devices that mean to regulate our actions "from the outside." Such devices, like the law, may not only carry pernicious effects for freedom but, more troublingly, oftentimes "erase their traces," concealing the very ways in which they are detrimental to a richer experience of subjectivity. According to Alfaro Altamirano, Bergson's and Scheler's conception of intuition and personal authority puts contemporary discussions about populism in a different light: It shows that liberalism would only at its own peril deny the anthropological, moral, and political importance of the bearers of charismatic authority. Personal authority thus understood relies on a dense, but elusive, notion of personality, for which personal authority is not only consistent with freedom, but even contributes to it in decisive ways. (Intellectual History of the Modern Age) Contents Introduction Chapter 1. Individuality and Diversity in Bergson and Scheler Chapter 2. Attempts at Free Choice: Bergson and Scheler on Agency and Freedom Chapter 3. Bergson and the Morality of Uncertainty Chapter 4. Varieties of Sympathy: Max Scheler's Critique of Sentimentalism Chapter 5. Personal Authority and Political Theology in Bergson and Scheler Conclusion Notes Index Acknowledgments Author Adriana Alfaro Altamirano is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Mexico Autonomous Institute of Technology (ITAM), Mexico City. https://www.pennpress.org/9780812252934/the-belief-in-intuition/   Transcription: August Baker: Welcome. I am August Baker. Today, the new book we're talking about is The Belief in Intuition: Individuality and Authority in Henri Bergson and Max Scheler, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. I'm pleased and honored to be speaking with the author, Professor Adriana Alfaro of the Mexican Autonomous Institute of Technology. Welcome, professor. Adriana Alfaro Altamirano: Thank you very much for the invitation. August Baker: I wanted to start with... This is a kind of strange quotation, but it's from a book by Bennett Berger, The Survival of a Counterculture, 1981, University of California Press. He's talking about the ubiquity of the term mind-blowing in the vocabulary of the counterculture. He says, "It was broadened to include a variety of experiences that shook up one's ordinary psychology, and that in blowing one's mind revealed some of the tacit assumptions on which one's ordinary organization of understanding was based." He also noted that it was first used to refer to powerful drug experiences, but eventually it had that [inaudible 00:01:25]. And I was thinking here that this is what you were doing, I felt, kind of mind-blowing in the sense of going back to these