Intuition vs intellect by Sjoerd van Tuinen
According to his most famous sonnet, Michelangelo held that “the best artist has no concept [concetto] which some single marble does not potentially enclose within its mass, but only the hand which obeys the intellect [intelletto] can accomplish it.” This is usually interpreted in hylomorphic terms as saying that the content lies waiting within the marble for its form to be hewn out. Of course, the authority of mannerist texts on art has led to precisely such an interpretation, which is idealist insofar as it would be the task of the intellect to recognize the form of this content and of the obeying hand merely to free it from the surrounding mass. It was precisely in these Aristotelian terms that Benedetto Varchi, a pupil of Michelangelo’s, described the task of the sculptor as an inducing of “form” into “matter,” as a drawing forth of “real” from “potential” existence. But when he complimented his master, “Signor Buonarroti, you have the brain of a Jove,” Michelangelo responded “but Vulcan’s hammer is required to make something come out of it.” 1

The passage from the intellectual concetto to the hand that realises it entails much more than just a hylomorphic passage from matter to predetermined form, because the idea of the whole composition must constantly be rehearsed in a painstaking process of experimental construction. In fact, the genesis of any experimental work of art should not be longer be interpreted in the classical terms of the real and the possible, the latter somehow resembling and limiting the former. In reality, as Henri Bergson argues, possibility means only an “absence of hindrance,” which the human intellect retrospectively turns into “pre-existence under the form of the idea”: 2
“For the possible is only the real with the addition of an act of mind which throws its image back into the past, once it has been enacted.” 3
In Aristotelian terms: energeia is prior to dynamis, the actual is prior to the potential. In order to understand what a truly creative act is, we therefore need an alternative to classical aesthetics in which thought precedes expression, and thus also to its scientific representative, art history or the rationalised study of creative processes. Creativity knows no retrograde movement, only intelligence does. 4 Indeed, the more general an idea is, i.e., the more possibility it contains, the emptier it is. 5 Poetic acts simply cannot be submitted to the reversible historical rationality of conditions of possibility. No zeitgeist, psychosocial or economic milieu, or technical development enables us to predict a priori what an act of generation will bring.
However, let us remember that Bergson distinguishes human intelligence, as the faculty of a posteriori remembrance, from the mind or spiritual life, which is the faculty of intuition. To see something is not necessarily to know it. While the eye takes its legitimacy from the general idea, the mind takes its legitimacy directly from the singular and unforeseeable becoming of the visible itself. Intuitive ideas are generated in the mind’s faculty of fantasia, a sub-rational but all the more speculative faculty of the mind, and therefore lack the generality of Platonic ideas. If things exist in time as much as in space, as intuition tells us, then we also see in time as much as in space. The intuition is the visionary ability to contract a multiplicity of abstract tendencies that enables the mind to recapitulate the constitutive elements of a concrete situation in “a simple thought equivalent to all the indefinite richness of form and color.” 6 As French cinematographer Robert Bresson says, to have a visionary idea is not to see what you are already thinking, but to think about what you see and to be the first to see what you see, the way you see it. The idea is no longer an ideal condition of possibility, but rather a material condition of reality, a condition of the new. To have an idea is to move into, or adhere to, the poiesis of reality itself.

Michelangelo Buonoarroti as cited in Robert J. Clements, Michelangelo’s Theory of Art(New York: New York University Press, 1961), 35.
Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Dover Publications, 2007), 83, 10.
Bergson, The Creative Mind, 81.
Bergson, The Creative Mind, 10-11, 73, 75, 84.
Bergson, The Creative Mind, 81.
Bergson, The Creative Mind, 196, original emphasis.