IIC. Kant

According to Kant, our senses acquaint us with particulars of things and thus provide us with intuitions. The faculty of understanding provided us with useful taxonomies of particulars ("concepts"). Yet, concepts without intuitions were as empty and futile as intuitions without concepts. Perceptions ("phenomena") are composite of sensations caused by perceived objects and mind's reactions to such sensations ("form"). These reactions are product of intuition.

IID. The Absolute Idealists

Schelling suggested a featureless, undifferentiated, union of opposites as Absolute Ideal. Intellectual intuition entails such a union of opposites (subject and object) and, thus, is immersed and assimilated by Absolute and becomes as featureless and undifferentiated as Absolute is.

Objective Idealists claimed that we can know ultimate (spiritual) reality by intuition (or thought) independent of senses (the mystical argument). The mediation of words and symbol systems only distorts "signal" and inhibits effective application of one's intuition to attainment of real, immutable, knowledge.

IIE. The Phenomenologists

The Phenomenological point of view is that every thing has an invariable and irreducible "essence" ("Eidos", as distinguished from contingent information about thing). We can grasp this essence only intuitively ("Eidetic Reduction"). This process - of transcending concrete and reaching for essential - is independent of facts, concrete objects, or mental constructs. But it is not free from methodology ("free variation"), from factual knowledge, or from ideal intuitions. The Phenomenologist is forced to make knowledge of facts his point of departure. He then applies a certain methodology (he varies nature and specifications of studied object to reveal its essence) which relies entirely on ideal intuitions (such as rules of logic).

Phenomenology, in other words, is an Idealistic form of Rationalism. It applies reason to discover Platonic (Idealism) essences. Like Rationalism, it is not empirical (it is not based on sense data). Actually, it is anti-empirical - it "brackets" concrete and factual in its attempt to delve beyond appearances and into essences. It calls for application of intuition (Anschauung) to discover essential insights (Wesenseinsichten).

"Phenomenon" in Phenomenology is that which is known by consciousness and in it. Phenomenologists regarded intuition as a "pure", direct, and primitive way of reducing clutter in reality. It is immediate and basis of a higher level perception. A philosophical system built on intuition would, perforce, be non speculative. Hence, Phenomenology's emphasis on study of consciousness (and intuition) rather than on study of (deceiving) reality. It is through "Wesensschau" (the intuition of essences) that one reaches invariant nature of things (by applying free variation techniques).

Sam Vaknin is the author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West Lost the East. He is a columnist for Central Europe Review, PopMatters, and eBookWeb , a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory Bellaonline, and Suite101 .

Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com

Torture is ultimate act of perverted intimacy. The torturer invades victim's body, pervades his psyche, and possesses his mind. Deprived of contact with others and starved for human interactions, prey bonds with predator. "Traumatic bonding", akin to Stockholm Syndrome, is about hope and search for meaning in brutal and indifferent and nightmarish universe of torture cell.

The abuser becomes black hole at center of victim's surrealistic galaxy, sucking in sufferer's universal need for solace. The victim tries to "control" his tormentor by becoming one with him (introjecting him) and by appealing to monster's presumably dormant humanity and empathy.

This bonding is especially strong when torturer and tortured form a dyad and "collaborate" in rituals and acts of torture (for instance, when victim is coerced into selecting torture implements and types of torment to be inflicted, or to choose between two evils).

The psychologist Shirley Spitz offers this powerful overview of contradictory nature of torture in a seminar titled "The Psychology of Torture" (1989):

"Torture is an obscenity in that it joins what is most private with what is most public. Torture entails all isolation and extreme solitude of privacy with none of usual security embodied therein... Torture entails at same time all self-exposure of utterly public with none of its possibilities for camaraderie or shared experience. (The presence of an all powerful other with whom to merge, without security of other's benign intentions.)

A further obscenity of torture is inversion it makes of intimate human relationships. The interrogation is a form of social encounter in which normal rules of communicating, of relating, of intimacy are manipulated. Dependency needs are elicited by interrogator, but not so they may be met as in close relationships, but to weaken and confuse. Independence that is offered in return for 'betrayal' is a lie. Silence is intentionally misinterpreted either as confirmation of information or as guilt for 'complicity'.

Torture combines complete humiliating exposure with utter devastating isolation. The final products and outcome of torture are a scarred and often shattered victim and an empty display of fiction of power."

Obsessed by endless ruminations, demented by pain and a continuum of sleeplessness – victim regresses, shedding all but most primitive defense mechanisms: splitting, narcissism, dissociation, Projective Identification, introjection, and cognitive dissonance. The victim constructs an alternative world, often suffering from depersonalization and derealization, hallucinations, ideas of reference, delusions, and psychotic episodes.

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Sam Vaknin is the author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West Lost the East. He is a columnist for Central Europe Review, PopMatters, and eBookWeb , a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory Bellaonline, and Suite101 .

Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com