Intellectual intuition

Intellectual intuition (intellektuelle Anschauung) is, in the German philosophical tradition, a knowing that would grasp reality immediately, not through the senses and not by means of concepts. Kant held that human beings have no such faculty. Our intuition is sensible: we receive what is given, and know it only as it appears to us. An intellect whose intuition produced its own objects would be divine.

Kant’s successors disagreed. Fichte held that the I is aware of its own activity in an immediate, intellectual intuition, which is the starting point of philosophy. Schelling made intellectual intuition the organ by which philosophy knows the Absolute, the identity of subject and object, and held that art makes this intuition objective. Hegel criticized the appeal to intuition as a short cut: the Absolute must be known through the labour of the concept, not in an immediate vision.

The debate echoes older questions. Plotinus describes Intellect as a knowing in which knower and known are one; the Indian traditions speak of a knowledge (jñāna, prajñā) that is not the knowledge of an object. Whether such knowing is possible is a central question for any account of unitive knowledge.