The poet, the philosopher, the scientist and the mystic have a common pursuit- the quest for Truth. Each pursues his/her passion according to his/her disposition. If the poet explores Truth with a leap of imagination, the philosopher probes it with reason. The scientist too uses reason to plumb the depths of Truth, but he/she distrusts speculative system building; (s)he would rather base his/her inferences on adequate observable data. The mystic abandons the shore of reason to plunge into the seamless sea of the Unknown, with nothing to serve as a guidepost except utter surrender to the object of inquiry. The intimations of Truth that (s)he has are attributed, in popular parlance, to intuition.
In the historical trajectory of Time, empirical reason got privileged over other methods of inquiry. It got touted as the sole touchstone of Truth. While it would be wrong to run down the achievements of empirical reason for the modern industrial society and its sky-kissing artifacts are products of this mode of inquiry, it is an aberration all the same to privilege this mode of inquiry over the others. Long ago, Keats wrote very aptly, that in poetry, Imagination is the judge and Reason is in the dock. In other words, imagination breaks the barriers of the known systems, forms and structures of thought and life to look at life afresh with the eyes of a child and create new forms, new structures and new institutions of thought and life. Imagination plays a two fold function in the expression of Truth: metonymic and metaphorical. While the metonymic function is revealed in the sequence of events, the metaphorical function acts as the hidden organizing principle as well as vision, the poetic Truth, so to speak. Not surprisingly, many have spoken of the poetic Truth as being sovereign over the historical Truth. The apprehension of this Truth is facilitated by the Negation of the Self, as T. S. Eliot put it. In other words, the poet is not different from the mystic in as much as he too apprehends the Truth when he transcends/surrenders his self.
It is time this over-reliance on reason is corrected and other methods of inquiry are recognized and rehabilitated in popular consciousness.
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