intuition: Descartes' account of human knowledge is indebted to a long
philosophical tradition which draws a comparison between mental cognition and
ordinary ocular vision. The notion goes back as far as Plato (Republic [c.
380 BC], 514-8), and plays a prominent role in the writings of Plotinus
(Enneads [c. AD 250], III, viii, 11 and V, iii, 17) and Augustine (De
Trinitate [AD 400-16], XII, xv, 24). Augustine puts the matter as follows:
'The mind, when directed towards intelligible things in the natural order,
according to the disposition of the creator, sees them in a certain incorporeal
light which is sui generis, just as the physical eye sees nearby objects
in corporeal light' (loc. cit.). This is the background which informs
Descartes' use of the term 'intuition' (Latin intuitus) - the word being
derived from the verb intueri, which in classical Latin means simply to
look at or inspect. His claim is that the mind, when freed from interference
from sensory stimuli, has the innate power to 'see', or directly apprehend, the
truths which God has implanted within it. 'By intuition, I do not mean the
fluctuating testimony of the senses, or the deceptive judgement of the
imagination as it botches things together, but the conception of a clear and
attentive mind which is so easy and distinct that there can be no room for
doubt about what we are understanding. Alternatively, and this comes to the
same thing, intuition is the conception of a clear and attentive mind which
proceeds solely from the light of reason.... Thus everyone can mentally intuit
that he exists, that he is thinking, that a triangle is bounded by just three
sides and a sphere by a single surface, and the like' (AT X 368: CSM I 14). In
the Regulae (Rules for the Direction of our Native Intelligence), from
which this last quotation comes, intuition is put forward as the fundamental
basis of all reliable knowledge; and although a finite mind will often be
unable to 'see a whole series of interconnected truths at a single glance, the
ideal remains that it should attempt to survey the series 'in a single and
uninterrupted sweep of thought', so that the process of Deduction is reduced,
as far as possible, to direct intuition.
(Abbreviations: CSM = J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, D. Murdoch: The
Philosophical Writings of Descartes; AT = C. Adam, P. Tannery: Îuvres de
Descartes)
