INTUITION. — From the Latin intueri (Gr. εἰσπρέω), to see, look within, contemplate, it indicates, etymologically, vision, gaze, generally with a sense of penetration and intensity. But already in classical usage the term was transferred from the visual sphere to indicate intellectual perception: « nuentis aciem seipsam intuens » (Cicero, I Tusc., 30, 73). And this is the principal reference that the term has preserved in the Romance languages (the German Anschauung also tends in this direction), although with a multiplicity of meanings, particularly in philosophical usage.
In current language i. has the twofold meaning of: a) an original and profound perception of a reality, a truth, a value, a principle, or a fact, e.g. Platonic, Galilean, or Einsteinian « i. »; b) a ready and instantaneous knowledge or perception both of theoretical-abstract truths and of practical-concrete facts or relations. In this sense common usage contrasts the « intuitive type », which grasps at once, through simple indications, the meaning of a fact or problem, the exact value of a situation, with the « discursive type », which requires a slower process of analysis, comparison, and deduction. Scientific discoveries (laws, hypotheses) and, in general, the inventive and creative moments of thought, although they often follow preceding analyses and conceptual elaborations, are for the most part referred to i. in the twofold sense indicated. A reference to the common meaning may be found in Aristotle, who contrasts ἀγγύνοια, sagacity, readiness of intuition, with εὐβουλία, prudent deliberation (Eth. Nic., VI, 9, 1142 a 31 ff.), and says of εὐστοχία (= sureness of i.) that it occurs without discourse and is something instantaneous: ἄνευ τε γὰρ λόγου καὶ ταχύ τι ἡ εὐστοχία (ibid., 1142 b 3).
In philosophical usage, five principal meanings of i. may be distinguished. 1) With a predominantly logical reference, i. is the direct and immediate knowledge of principles (theoretical, practical, moral) and evident truths (the reference to « evidence » is connected with the primitive meaning of the term: « intueri », to see), in opposition to derived, mediated, logical-discursive knowledge. The term is used in this sense by Locke, Leibniz, and Descartes. Connected with it, but with a predominantly epistemological reference, are the Platonic-Plotinian sense: i. as the direct apprehension of the intelligible in itself; the Augustinian-Bonaventurian sense: i. as the mind’s immediate contact with truth, the direct apprehension of the « rationes aeternae » or absolute values; and the Rosminian sense: i. as the immanent and essential relation of the intellect to its fundamental object, the idea of being (cf. Teosofia, V, national edition, Rome 1939, p. 20). 2) I. as the direct perception of the existent, the individual, the concrete, in opposition to abstractive, representative, universal knowledge: a sense of Kantian derivation, frequent today; related to it is the technical meaning proper, according to some, to Thomism: i. as the perception (in sensible knowledge) of the real without intentional mediation, and i. (in the beatific vision) as the union of the intellect with the divine essence in itself, without the mediation of a mental word. 3) I. as sympathetic and instinctive penetration into the innermost depths of reality and life, in opposition to external and fragmentary knowledge through conceptual determinations. This is the Bergsonian sense (cf. L'évolution créatrice, 77th ed., Paris 1948, pp. 176, 179). The Husserlian sense may be brought close to it, although it entails a different metaphysical meaning: i. as the vision of essences, Wesenschau. 4) I. as the productive process of the first forms of the theoretical activity of the spirit. This is the idealist sense, already foreshadowed by Kant’s pure i. (the i. of space and time as a priori forms of the spirit: cf. Critica d. r. pura, Est. trasc., § 1, Italian trans., Bari 1940, p. 63). From it derives the aesthetic reference developed by Croce: i. as the original activity of the spirit, creative and expressive of pure images (words, colors, sounds, forms). 5) In the religious-mystical sense (and it could have analogous applications in other fields): i. as the apprehension of God and the divine, predominantly affective, and therefore distinct from purely logical-rational religious knowledge.
The theory of i. (for its historical developments V. INTUITIONISM) presents two principal questions: a) whether and in what sense human knowledge can be called intuitive; b) what the epistemological-metaphysical meaning of i. is.
a) I. in the sense of the immediate perception of values, principles, relations, connections, and intrinsic links among facts, concepts, and principles, is a fundamental function of the intellect; indeed, ultimately, it is the very essential power of thought to express the values of being in conscious apprehension. In this sense i. is the substratum of all fundamental noetic processes: ideation, judgment, and reasoning. idea (v.) in fact becomes actual in thought only as i. of a value; judgment (v.), in its cognitive moment, is perception of the relation between subject and predicate; reasoning, both in the order of abstract truths and in that of concrete facts, is essentially intuitive perception of the logical connection between premises and conclusion (St. Thomas distinguished between intellectus and ratio only in the sense that intellectus indicates immediate knowledge, ratio discursive knowledge: Sum. Theol., 1ª, q. 59, a. 1, ad 1). The meaning, not entirely obsolete, of i. as a synonym for intellectual perception in general (cf. St. Thomas, I Sent., 3, 4, 5, c.; De Verit., q. 15, a. 1 ad 7) is related to this original meaning of knowledge as the « vision » and « penetration » of an object or a value.
I. in the sense of the direct perception or awareness of the real, of the existent, of the singular, may be referred both to the senses and to the intellect. It must first be specified that pure sensation cannot be equivalent to intuition properly so called: an impression of color, sound, or forms, as such, is a pure lived state of consciousness, lacking both apperception and conceptual clarity, and therefore intuition. But pure sensation is scarcely found in human beings except at the beginnings of existence. In the rapid development of consciousness it soon becomes clarified through the subsequent perceptual processes (apprehension of objects as totalities and apprehension of the meaning that objects present for the subject), and intellectual processes (apprehension of objects as categorical values). It is in this indissoluble sensory-perceptual-intellectual synthesis that the intuitive moment in human knowledge is realized. Indeed, human intelligence, considered formally insofar as it is the pure power of thinking, does not have, as Kant clearly saw,
an immediate relation to concrete reality, and hence no direct intuition of spiritual realities. But, besides being a power of abstract conceptualization and logical discourse, human intelligence is also, by reason of its immanent relation to sense, immediate consciousness of sensory-perceptual contents. In this proper function, the human intellect is intuition insofar as it presents itself as the apprehension of concrete contents in the actuality of their own immanent intelligible value. The universal, which is the proper object of human intelligence, is not, in the most genuine Thomism, the abstract universal, but rather the concrete universal, «in particulari existiens» (Sum. Theol., 1°, q. 84, a. 7, c.). And since sensory data, by their very experiential positivity, have value primarily as reality, the human intellect has, by virtue of its continuity with sense (which St. Thomas expresses in the well-known formula «conversio ad phantasmata»: ibid., a. 7), an effective intuition of reality and therefore of being, according to the various determinations that being itself assumes in sensory presentations. Here phenomenism (v.), insofar as human knowledge does not present itself as pure consciousness of phenomena, as might knowledge enclosed within the sensory-perceptual sphere, but also as intuition of the phenomenon in its value as being. This radical intuition, in which the first actualization of thought consists, does not, however, attain the ontological meaning of being and therefore does not appear to entail an equal intuition of substance, which is a further concept elaborated from the more complex contents of sensory presentations.
It appears, from what has been said, that intuition, even in the sense of perception of the existent and the concrete, should not be opposed to conceptual knowledge except insofar as “conceptual” is improperly identified with “abstract.” The concept is always in the background of every perception or intellectual intuition: every intuition of the concrete is constituted by categorical values more or less distinctly apprehended; indeed, intuition becomes clearer and more objectively consistent to the extent that the concrete is conceptually taken up from the objective sphere of sensibility into that deeper sphere of its real ontological contents. Modern irrationalism, therefore, which reduces the knowledge of values to sentimental, emotional, and volitional moments, to which it attributes the meaning of intuition, in reality fails to recognize the true concept of intuition.
Intuition as perception of the concrete and the existent is not distinguishable, at least in a broad sense, from reasoning. A dialectic of thought on the basis of essentially concrete data and connections is indeed possible, and even frequent (intuitive reasoning): such are, for example, a medical diagnosis and historical reasoning.
A second intuitive moment presents intelligence as self-consciousness. As such, thought is in fact immediate perception of itself as act, process, consciousness. The whole psychic reality of the subject, and particularly thought and willing (beyond the fundamental, though obscure and indeterminate, sense of our being, living, and enduring), insofar as it is immediately present to consciousness, is intuition in the strictest sense of the term, even though it does not in itself entail an equal intuition of its own ontological principle, that is, of the self (v.). The self, therefore, may be said to be an object of intuition in its psychological-operative consistency (intuitive certainty of oneself and of one’s personal continuity), but not in its metaphysical reality (cf. St. Thomas, De verit., q. 10, a. 8, c.). The sphere of psychic-conscious reality is the only objective sphere that does not entail mental representation in knowledge (intuition in the rigorous technical sense which some would extend to the perception of sensible reality). Psychic reality, in fact, insofar as it is an intrinsic determination of the self, has no real consistency outside consciousness, but is, in its very reality, a fact of consciousness and therefore, when taken up in apperception, immediate intuition.
Within the sphere of religious knowledge—if one sets aside the highest forms of supernatural experience, possible through the gratuitous gift of Grace—the so-called mystical intuition does not seem to be intuition in the proper sense of the term. It remains analogical and representative knowledge, although reaching and stirring the deepest strata of the self, through the will and of-
of love, which unite the soul to God and permeate knowledge itself with their affective tone, in a certain manner transfiguring II. Mystical knowledge therefore has a certain experiential value insofar as it is a reflection of religious experience itself (v.), the more vivid the deeper the latter is, but it does not of itself contain a true intuition of God. It implies an integrality in the direction of consciousness toward the supreme object of religious knowledge, not a perception of that object in itself.
In the domain of art, the intuitive moment is present as the conscious expression of images and forms in which the human spiritual world and its values are sensibly configured. It is therefore essentially the work of imagination, but insofar as imagination is part of the living unity of the spirit and draws from the intense moments that the spirit unfolds in the order of intelligence and willing the spiritual contents which it translates into images and forms. Aesthetic intuition, too, cannot therefore be understood in its true nature and is indeed radically misconstrued if it is separated, as in Crocean thought, from intellectual-conceptual knowledge.
Beyond the indicated forms of intuition, there sometimes occur in clairvoyance (v.)—not yet fully explained either from the scientific or from the philosophical point of view—in which an intimate, though conceptually obscure, contact with the deepest values of reality is realized: the mystery of being (time, eternity, existence, duration, nothingness, becoming...) permeates consciousness, giving rise to that lofty sense of wonder and at times dismay already known to Plato. It is perhaps chiefly in this order of experience that an objective foundation for intuition in the Bergsonian sense must be recognized.
b) The gnoseological significance of intuition manifests itself in two fundamental directions. As perception of the existent and the concrete, it is realism (v.); as immediate perception of absolute values, concepts, and principles, it contains within human thought a positive presence of the absolute, though not as the real term of intuition, but rather as the supreme value and condition of thought. It belongs to dialectic, which finds in the value of thought the indispensable bases for all its articulations, to determine the ontological meaning of the Absolute and its transcendence. It is in this essential dialectic that the ever-living moment of intuition in the Augustinian sense must be sought.