Issue 15. March 17, 2025
Does Existential Reasoning meet the requirements for an intelligence?
An Existential Moment?
Whose hand is this? The fickle finger of fate? God? One of the gods (or Godz)? Who hasn’t felt this way at some point in life? Is this a daily activity? Or a middle of the night, it’s 2am and I can’t sleep thing? Are there special moments in life when existential thinking comes to the fore? Am I having an existential crisis as the hand of death approaches? Some of us do it often, with more intensity or greater complexity and nuance. Are complex answers to existential questions somehow better? Is there existential humor? Is humor an answer to existential pain? I’m serious. This is no joke. Do I have to have All The Answers to existential questions to be considered existentially intelligent?
Thinking about the Big Questions of Life is a common human experience but does such thinking constitute a unique form of intelligence? I have concluded that it does not. The reasons for this are described in my forthcoming article. Instead, I view it in the same category as higher cognitive activities such as creativity, common sense and a metaphorical ability. In fact, I am most intrigued by its relationship to wisdom, which is the fourth broad ability described by Howard Gardner in Frames of Mind. Of course, wisdom has been a favorite topic for theologians, philosophers, and wise people in everyday life – AKA folk wisdom. It is the capacity to see the Big Picture amid the complex flux and flow of everyday life. Stay tuned. I will soon post my article that makes a deep dive into this fascinating topic.
Tomorrow is another day and I hope you’ll join us in the coming months for a discussion on the meaning of Existential thinking and how it fits into multiple intelligences theory. www.MIResearch.org/blog/
MI@40- Unfinished Business: Is Existential Thinking an Intelligence?
In 1999 Howard Gardner added the Naturalist intelligence to the existing list of seven intelligences (Intelligence Reframed). At the same time, he speculated on the possibility of other forms of intelligence that scientific evidence might confirm in the 16 years since MI theory was first introduced. As a good scholar-scientist he carefully reviewed the rationale and evidence for and against several proposed sets of abilities. His review compared evidence against the eight criteria established in 1983 to determine what constitutes an intelligence. Each intelligence must also be aligned with the essential definition that an intelligence is used to solve problems, create products that are valued in a culture.
Are There Spiritual or Moral Intelligences?
Gardner conducted a detailed review of proposed spiritual and moral intelligences and concluded that they do not meet the necessary criteria but instead are valued human activities of a different sort. He wrote, “’Morality’ is then properly a statement about personality, individuality, will, character – and, in the happiest cases, about the highest realization of human nature” (p. 77). Likewise, spirituality is problematic for several reasons. A fundamental problem is its lack of definitional clarity and difficulty delineating observable levels of skill because “it refers to everything: mind, body, self, nature, and the supernatural – and, sometimes, even to nothing!” (p. 55). This leads Gardner to conclude that “the essence of spirit (is) primarily phenomenological—the attainment of a certain state of being” rather than a set of skills that allow for the solving of problems or fashioning of products.
The Possibility of an Existential Intelligence
But Gardner gives much consideration to the possibility of “existential intelligence, or a concern with “ultimate” issues, seems the most unambiguously cognitive strand of the spiritual”. He defines existential thinking as a kind of philosophical “capacity to locate oneself with respect to the furthest reaches of the cosmos . . . to engage in transcendental concerns” as demonstrated by theologians, artists, poets and theoretical scientists. In the end, however, he concludes that there is insufficient evidence to support its classification as an intelligence. It is a valued human activity but not one of the multiple intelligences.
