INTUITIONISM. — A philosophical term whose meaning cannot always be precisely defined, sometimes replaced by the other term intuitionalism. In general, it designates a doctrine that attributes to intuition (v.) or to intuitive knowledge an importance and a function superior or special with respect to other forms of knowledge. In this sense, i. is distinguished from or opposed to rationalism, intellectualism, etc., with respect to which, in its polemical positions (characteristic especially of contemporary philosophy), it presents itself, negatively, as anti-rationalistic and anti-intellectualistic. In itself, however, and in its positive aspect, it does not deny and does not exclude the validity of rational or intellectual knowledge. In any case, it indicates an immediate or direct knowledge and hence different from that which is mediated or discursive or indirect. On the one hand, it seeks to satisfy the need for a concrete knowledge, that is, one that embraces in a single glance (synoptic), without abstracting or de-pauperizing, and, on the other, the need for a more intimate, more interior, more penetrating and fuller possession of truth than that allowed by rational knowledge. From the mystical point of view it translates (often into powerful images and symbols pregnant with spirituality) the desire for an ever fuller and more direct contact with God. This explains why intuitive knowledge is at one time considered as the initial grade of knowing, at another as the final one, in which the cognitive dialectic culminates: in the first case it remains absorbed in the higher grades, in the second it includes and surpasses the others. I. in the proper sense is only the latter.
In the history of thought it presents different forms: a) gnoseological i., when a theory of knowledge considers intuition as the direct and primary source of truth; b) ethical i., when a moral doctrine assumes direct and immediate experience as the source of recognition of ethical values; c) aesthetic i., when aesthetic activity in general is considered a fact of intuition; d) scientific i., when an epistemological theory attributes scientific discovery to a kind of intuitive divination, to a rapid and intuitive "grasping."
Before going deeper, through rapid historical sketches, into these principal forms of i., it is necessary to clarify two fundamental positions of i. itself. The way of understanding the value of intuition or of intuitive knowledge proper to classical-Christian thought is in fact different from that proper to modern subjectivist and immanentist thought: for the former the act of intuition is receptive of the object intuited or of the truth (whether sensible or intelligible); for the latter it is, instead, creative of its object, that is, in the act in which the spirit intuits, it "constitutes," "posits," "creates" the truth or the reality intuited. It is the substantial difference that runs (in this as in other problems) between Greek-Christian "realism" and the "subjectivism" of modern philosophy.
Although the term is lacking, intuitive knowledge (intellectual intuition) is found at the foundation of Platonic gnoseology: νόησις or immediate knowledge of principles is more perfect than διάνοια or the discursive analytical procedure, which gives an imperfect and derived knowledge "which stands to science as the image to the object" (Respubl., 510 a). The latter presupposes the former, whose scope in Plato is metaphysical: souls had an original intellectual intuition even before falling into a body, when, in the train of the gods, they, some more some less, succeeded "with difficulty in discerning the essences" (μόγις καθορίσας τὰ ὄντα, Phaedr., 248 a). The dormant recollection of this primal intuition awakens upon contact with sensible things, produces in the soul "astonishment" and kindles in it ἔρως to the point of delirium (μανία, ibid., 250 a b). Of all the essences, only Beauty is visible through sensible images, only it shines to the sight (κάλλιος δὲ τότε ἦν ἰδεῖν λαμπρόν, ibid., 250 b) and kindles in the "newly initiated" an intimacy of love without limits, not "adulterated by mortal prudence, intent on mortal and petty things" (σωροσύνη θνητῇ κεχαμένη, θνητὰ τε καὶ φειδωλὰ οἰκονομώσας, ibid., 256 e). Thus Plato does not disjoin sensible (one might also say "aesthetic") intuition from intellectual intuition and makes of the one and the other the origin, the foundation and also the end (contemplation, as the apex of dialectic, is also a form of intuition) of discursive and rational knowing. And since dialectic is also (above all) moral elevation, one can say that Plato's gnoseological i. is implicitly also ethical i. Although in his philosophy reason clearly prevails over intuition,
Aristotle (v.) considers principles (τὰ ἄμεσα) as the object of immediate apprehension in the sense of being evident of themselves. Plotinus (v.), referring back to Plato, identifies pure intellectual contemplation (the union of the soul, released from the sensible, with the Νῶς) with intuitive thought. For him too intuition belongs to the first (προτέρα) or superior Soul and discursive reasoning to the second (δεντέρα) or inferior Soul; indeed intuitive science excludes reasoning and is proper to the divine Intellect (and to the human one insofar as it returns to the Νῶς), since reasoning is not possible in eternity (ὁν γὰρ ἐνλογίζεσθαι ἐν τῷ ἀεί), where everything is intuited at once and where decision is made at once, without reasoning or choice (Enn., VI, 7, 1-3).
In the Christian philosophy of the first centuries, intuitive knowledge acquires a significant and new meaning and importance, as interior experience of truth, especially with St. Augustine. The concept of "interiority" replaces the Platonic one of "innatism," intellectual intuition becomes a loving, vital and living participation in truth, an experience of spiritual life. The philosophical meaning of the term is enriched with a mystical sense and charged with a theological value (relations with the problem of Grace), without there being however (at least in Augustine) confusion or identification of meanings. To the mens there inhere naturaliter the ratio and the intelligentia or intellectus (De Civ. Dei, XI, 2): the former "est mentis motio, ea quae discutur distinguendi et connectendi potens" (De ord., II, 11, n. 30); the latter, superior to the ratio, is an interior seeing of the truth, objectively present to the mind. Therefore the intellect is the true eye of the soul (ibid., 9, n. 26), while the ratio is the discursive faculty (analysis and synthesis) that applies itself to sensible things in order to judge them (De vera relig., cap. 29, n. 30). In short: reason builds the science of the sensible world (De divers. quaest. ad Simplic., I, II, cap. 2, n. 3), intelligence applies itself intuitively to the intelligible world of the supreme ideas (Solid., I, I, cap. 6, n. 13). Augustinian i., which does not exclude reason and does not invalidate the discursive procedure (and which is realist, insofar as the truth intuited is an object given to the mind) has nourished later Christian philosophy down to St. Anselm, of whose famous ontological argument (v.) it has the roots in that i.; it is found again in the Franciscan school (St. Bonaventure), in modern Christian philosophy (e.g., Pascal, Rosmini, etc.), as well as, in its more interior meaning of spirituality, in Christian mysticism of every age. Thomist scholasticism accepts an intuitive knowledge in the Aristotelian sense of immediate evidence of principles and, in the other sense, of evident knowledge of an external object present or actual. There are therefore implicit in it the two senses that intuition has had in modern thought, the Cartesian and the Kantian, it being understood that the difference between realism and subjectivism of truth and of reality remains firm.
Indeed, Descartes identifies intuited truth and evident truth, the principle and foundation of discursive reasoning: intuition is the "conception évidente," which is born from the sole light of reason and is more certain "parce qu'elle est plus simple que la déduction." Or, as he also says: "Atque perspicuum est intuitum mentis tum ad illas omnes extendi [naturas simplices], tum ad necessarias illarum inter se connexiones cognoscendas, tum denique ad reliqua omnia quae intellectus praecise, vel in se ipso, vel in phantasia esse experitur" (Regulae, XII). Descartes also admits an intuitive knowledge that, one may say, derives from discursive exercise: the fourth rule of the method renders thought so agile (it "exercises" it) that it then embraces with a single act of the mind what it previously saw successively and discursively (Discours de la méthode, part 2). In short, there is an intuition slowly and laboriously acquired, as Blondel notes. Both Locke and Leibniz preserve the Cartesian intuition as evidence: all primitive truths are known "par intuition," whether they be "vérités de raison ou vérités de fait" (Nouv. Essais, I, IV, ch. 2, § 1).
Intuitionistic is the philosophy of the so-called Scottish School (v. REID; STEWART), to which Hamilton and French eclecticism are linked: the foundation of knowledge is the intuition of rational truths, superior to experience; on the other hand, the subject knows directly the existence of material objects, without the intervention of reason. It is enough to perceive an object, says Reid, for there to be the "irresistible conviction" or the "belief," beyond all doubt, of its actual existence. This conviction is immediate and not the "effect of reasoning," that is, "it is not in consequence of reasoning and demonstration that we come to be convinced of the existence of the objects we perceive." In short, it is enough to perceive (intuit) an object in order to admit its existence (Reid, Essays on the powers of the human mind, Edinburgh 1785, essay II, ch. 6). There is in man a "suggestion," an "instinct," an original belief, connatural and infallible, which leads him to admit the reality of perceived things, as the universal consent of all thinking beings also attests. The principles of morality too are immediate and direct. Already Shaftesbury — and with him the philosophers of the so-called moral sense — had admitted in man an innate "instinct" of esteem and admiration for what is noble and just, and had identified the principle of ethics with it. Hutcheson (v.) too places at the foundation of morality the innate and immediate sentiment of helping others, which reason employs (and therefore its function is secondary and not primary) to find the means suited to its practical realization. Thus, a short time after the appearance of Kantian criticism, as a reaction against the phenomenism of Hume and, on the other hand, against the egoism systematized by Hobbes, there arise, within English empiricism (also through Platonic influences), the epistemological and ontological i. of the Scots and the ethical i. of the philosophers of the moral sense.
In Kant (v.) intuitive knowledge acquires an original sense, especially in the transcendental aesthetic. Intuition (Anschauung) is the knowledge that refers immediately to objects, but on condition that the object be given and modify the mind in a certain way. Objects are given by means of sensibility (the capacity to receive representations) "and it alone provides us with intuitions" (Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Aesthetic, § 1). But every intuition is nothing but the representation of a phenomenon. Man does not know objects in themselves, but only his way of perceiving them (ibid., section II, § 8). Intuition, for Kant, is connected to sense, but it contains a formal element: space and time are the "pure forms," which are known a priori, that is, before every real perception; they are pure intuition (reine Anschauung: ibid.). From this, which is sensible, Kant distinguishes intellectual intuition, or that by which the existence of the object of intuition is given, belonging only, so far as man can know, to the Supreme Being; the sensible one is derived (intuitus derivatus), the other is original (intuitus originarius: ibid., section II, § 8, IV). For Fichte, intellectual intuition is identified with self-consciousness, but it is not separable from a concept and from a sensible intuition: all three form a synthesis. Schelling connects directly to Fichte: self-consciousness is knowledge "absolutely free" (not by proofs, not by reasonings, not by concepts) and therefore is an intuition in which the intuiting subject and the intuited object are "identical." He calls it "intellectual intuition," in opposition to sensible intuition, which does not produce its object, as instead happens in the knowledge of the I. "Intellectual intuition is the organ of every transcendental thought"; which therefore is constantly accompanied by it (System of Transcendental Idealism: Werke, III, p. 361). Schopenhauer (v.) speaks of intuition in the broadest sense of immediate and non-conceptual knowledge, both of things and of their relations. Every intuition is intellectual, that is, "it places us in the presence of the real" (The World as Will and Representation, I, § 4). The perfect form of intuitive knowledge is aesthetic contemplation, which effects the sudden passage from the ordinary knowledge of individual objects to that of the Idea: "... knowledge is released from the service of the will, and precisely for this reason the subject ceases to be merely individual, becoming the pure subject of knowledge, devoid of will. And this no longer follows relations, according to the principle of reason, but rests in fixed contemplation of the object offered to it, and immerses itself in this" (ibid., III, § 34, Italian trans. by P. Savi Lopez, Bari 1920). It is enough to cease considering things according to the principle of reason, to cease thinking according to rational categories and to concentrate the whole spirit in intuition, "sinking into it," for the "entire knowledge" to be filled "with the tranquil contemplation of the natural object that stands before us," whatever it may be, provided that "one loses oneself entirely in the object." In this contemplating intuition man ceases to be an "individual" and becomes the "pure subject of knowledge," whose object is the ideas (and not individual objects), outside of will, of pain, of time (ibid.). The essence of "genius" is precisely the aptitude for contemplation or for total absorption in the object (idea), whereby "geniality" is "objectivity" or "the aptitude to abide in pure intuition, to lose oneself in intuition" (ibid., I, III, § 36). Thus, for Schopenhauer, intuition in its aesthetic form has a metaphysical scope; it is revelatory of the Idea and with it of the inseparable meaning of the intuiting subject and the intuited object.
Also of Platonic origin (but what a difference in meaning!) is the intuitionism that underlies the spiritualism of Rosmini (v.) and Gioberti (v.). For the Roveretan, there is no objective and universal knowledge without an a priori element, which, however, is not (as for Kant) a function of the intellect or a form of its activity, but an intuition of the mind as its object, the light of reason. Such is the idea of being, of which the mind has the fundamental objective intuition. Hence its immanence in the mind, but at the same time its transcendence, insofar as the idea of being is given and, as such, points back to the absolute real Being, by whom it is given. It "is an eternal thing," writes Rosmini, "that illuminates the mind; it is a primitive mode of being that has its seat in God himself; it is the essential light; it is what forms the essence of knowing," the mother idea of all other ideas (Introduz. alla filos., Casale 1850, p. 351); not formed by abstraction, but intuited "by us naturally," even though one becomes aware of intuiting it quite late (Il rinnovamento della filos. in Italia, Milan 1856, bk. II, ch. 24, p. 167). Rosminian intuitivism, after the Kantian critique and in resolving the problems it posed, intends to restore to intuition its authentic gnoseological and metaphysical value, which is that of Augustine: the intuition of ideal being is the primary object of knowledge and the foundation of all knowledge, and is at the same time, as constitutive of the capacity to think, one of the metaphysical structures of the human subject. Gioberti, by contrast, tends toward ontologism, with a clear link to Malebranche (v.), insofar as he admits the intuition of real Being. "I call the first idea the psychological First," he writes, "and the first thing the ontological First; but since the first idea and the first thing seem to me to be identified with each other, and therefore the two Firsts make one alone, I gave to this absolute principle the name of philosophical First, and I consider it as the principle and the sole basis of all that is real and all that is knowable" (Introduz. allo studio della filos., II, Brussels 1844, bk. I, ch. 4, p. 152). And so one does not escape pantheism with all its erroneous and unjustifiable consequences.
In our own day, Bergson (v.) identifies intuitive knowledge with metaphysics, which is precisely a special mode of knowing, "de posséder une réalité absolument au lieu de la connaître relativement, de se placer en elle au lieu d'adopter des points de vue sur elle, d'en avoir l'intuition au lieu d'en faire l'analyse, enfin de la saisir en dehors de toute expression, traduction ou représentation symbolique" (Introd. à la métaph., in Revue de métaphys. et de mor., 1 [1903], p. 9). Intuition (unlike rational or scientific knowledge) penetrates into the innermost "individual" creativity of beings; it is a kind of sympathie intellectuelle "par laquelle on se transporte à l'intérieur d'un objet pour coïncider avec ce qu'il a d'unique et par conséquent d'inexprimable" (ibid., p. 12). Intuition is therefore defined in opposition to the abstract and discontinuous intellect, as that which is capable of grasping the absolute originality and continuity of the real, although Bergson admits (A. Lalande, Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philos., I, 4th ed., Paris 1938, p. 402) that "une connaissance scientifique et précise des faits est la condition préalable de l'intuition métaphysique qui en pénètre le principe." Croce, on the other hand, identifies intuition with art: works of art are intuitive knowledge (Estetica, 6th ed., Bari 1928, p. 17). Intuitive knowledge is distinguished from logical knowledge: the former is knowledge through "fantasy," of the "individual," of "single" things, producing "images"; the latter through the "intellect," of the "universal," of the "relations" between things, producing "concepts" (ibid., p. 3). Every true intuition or representation is, at the same time, "expression" (ibid., p. 11). Hence it is also distinguished from sensation, which does not objectify itself in an expression. It is an autonomous theoretical form, which is identified with the aesthetic and artistic fact.
While Bergson opposes intuition to abstract scientific intellectualism, other thinkers, by contrast, discern an intuitive knowledge also in the sciences and pertaining to them. Thus W. Whewell observes that induction is not a reasoning either distinct from or reducible to the syllogism; it is a logically incorrect reasoning proceeding by hypothetical suppositions. "Induction is not conclusive as reasoning. It is not a reasoning; it is another way of arriving at truth," and precisely that of "guessing" (Filos. della scienza induttiva. Sulla filos. della scoperta, Edinburgh 1860, p. 454). Accordingly, discovery requires bold initiative, scientific genius, intuition. Poincaré (v.) gives great prominence to the intuition of mathematical order "qui nous fait deviner des harmonies et des relations cachées" (Science et méthode, Paris 1908, p. 47). With logic "one demonstrates," with intuition "one invents." "La faculté qui nous apprend à voir, c'est l'intuition: sans elle le géomètre serait comme un écrivain ferré sur la grammaire, mais qui n'aurait pas d'idées" (ibid., p. 137).
Intuition is a form of knowledge about which no doubt can arise. However, intuitionism understood in opposition to reason and discursive knowledge, or as a devaluation or negation of it, is a polemical and as such negative position: intuitive knowledge itself would lose its value if it were the negation of reason or antithetical to it. This is the error of the anti-intellectualist and anti-rational forms of intuitionism, dangerous for philosophy and also from a theological point of view, if they go so far as to admit the direct and immediate intuition of Being in itself or of God. Modern intuitionism, for its part, by identifying in human knowing the truth or the reality known with the subjective act of intuition, thereby denies intuiting, because there is no longer any intuiting if the subject and the object become one and if the latter is a positing or a creation of the former. Intuition in the finite intellect has meaning as the presence or interiority of truth to the mind of which it is the object (Augustine), without its being the Truth in itself (God), to which, however, it points back, but rather truth as it can be present to the mind in the natural order, which reason uses in order to judge things and to establish connections and relations among them.