Opposition Between Analytical Thinking and Intimate Experience

Marsh
The Feynman quote warns us that if we analyze a glass of wine (or the whole universe, or the Marsh) in a scientific way, separating different disciplines and analyzing the glass from the point of view of one discipline at a time, this would not reflect its true nature. And this kind of analytical thinking is opposed to the mere experience of enjoying that wine/universe/marsh.

"If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts — physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on — remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!"

Similarly, the Eddington quote on humor says that phenomena such as humor or religious feeling can either be experienced or analyzed, but that an analysis would fail to describe the experience. Because the analysis relies on symbolic knowledge, but the experience relies on intimate knowledge.

In the marsh, this opposition exists in the puzzles: They are presented as logical constraint-solving problems requiring analytical thinking, but it is sometime easier to cut pieces of paper or to draw them to “visualize” the solution (and thus, to experience it intimately).