The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, 1852

Wont to think of intuition as Avicenna did, a divine illumination, a serendipitous co-harmony between our limited intellect and the celestial emanations, an experience rather like surfacing for air, we should remind ourselves that we drown in it. Intuition is all well and good when it delivers us to some desired result of inquiry, when it accords with the world and the rest of our considered beliefs and provides impetus for further investigation. But we should recognize that intuition is an affliction, an inescapable inability to grasp a belief as anything but true, an optical illusion of the intellect. One does not choose intuition. It simply emerges, fully-formed as though Athena from the head of Zeus, and commits us brutely to a particular train of thought. More than any amount of education or training it is intuition which births the philosopher, the one who follows it with such singleminded passion that they scarce see the scorched countryside they leave in their wake. It is very possible to give up everything for an intuition; to condemn a whole project of thought, entire fields of study, a career, a life. But intuition on its own presents no signs of such external imperative. For by the time intuition strikes us it is already far too late. We only seize upon a truth as a fly seizes upon the web of the spider or the nectar of Dionaea muscipula. To its credit intuition coerces us to its side with the common decency to make us feel such a move agreeable (and do not say coercion functions inappropriately here; how else to describe the interaction between a student and their wizened professor who asks, prefiguring the answer, “but what do you think of this case?. . .”). And we are always chained to intuition by ghastly figures: philosophical zombies, botched products of teletransportation, daemons, swamp-men, a whole cryptid menagerie pushing levers and turning cranks in the recesses of imagination, grinning, hoisting lights like anglerfish.

In his 2013 “The Taming of Philosophy” Michael Della Rocca makes roughly the same point albeit in more sobering language, though one still gets the creeping impression from his paper that philosophers one by one have succumbed to a sinister entity parasitic on thought, method, and argumentation; in other words to intuition. Della Rocca argues that reliance on intuition leads to “the ungrounded [read: illegitimate] limitation of philosophy’s engagement with reality,” condemning us at once to a conservativism (of endorsing status quo belief), psychologism (of reading facts about human psychology as facts about the nature of reality), and arbitrariness (of choosing between competing intuitions) (190).

Della Rocca’s criticism elucidates a crucial question for any philosopher relying on intuitions: what are the conditions for the possibility of intuition yielding substantive philosophical conclusions (rather than, say, data about contingent psychological features of the human mind)? For the natural charge against intuition specifically and introspective philosophy generally is that it is a mere psychologism. It purports to offer fundamental facts about the nature of reality while peddling nothing but contingent facts about one’s mental state at a given moment. A contender for a response to this transcendental question is Kant’s — against charges that the First Critique was mere psychologism, he replied that the object of his study was both necessary and universal among all cognizing beings. With necessity and universality come philosophical significance. To make the distinction perfectly clear we need only consider the difference between one’s intuition that vanilla ice cream is delicious, which is neither necessary (imagine you grew up hating sweets) nor universal (there are those who hate vanilla and eat strictly chocolate), and one’s intuition that bodies in space must be extended. To be sure these may both present themselves as immediately plausible conclusions about the world, and we might even preface either judgment with an of course. But only one merits the designation of “intuition” in any philosophically meaningful sense, and it is not the intuitive nature of the conclusion per se which merits such a designation but rather the judgment’s necessity and universality. Surely an unsatisfying response to the intuitionist, for here the whole significance of intuition drops out as totally peripheral to the truth of what is intuited.

Indeed, Della Rocca rightly points out this tension in the method of the intuitionist: insofar as they are an intuitionist, they seek to develop a philosophical system which accommodates intuitions. But given that truth about reality stands as the object of our inquiry, philosophical or otherwise, shouldn’t it rather be that we develop philosophical systems which accommodate reality? But, in what really becomes the only disappointment in an otherwise outstanding piece, he never treats the intuition itself as something real. Rather he can only conceive of it as an epiphenomenal pointing-at some belief which, regrettably and all-too-often, ends up being false. Where the intuitionist claims the irrelevancy of the contingent conditions under which one’s mind produces an intuition as to the truth of its contents, Della Rocca (rightly, again) adopts the negation of this naivete: if the conditions are suspect, so too should be our faith in the content. But, as happens often the negation of a falsity, rather than bringing us straight at the truth, only makes apparent the juncture at which thought has taken the wrong turn. To put it rather crudely the debate focuses on the relation between the form of the intuition (the manner in which and by which the intuition presents itself) and its content (the belief the intuition renders obvious or obviously false). Intuitions are either damned to irrelevance by merit of its inadequate relation to the content of the belief (“…it seems obvious only because you were raised a certain way!”) or otherwise defended (“…well yes, but mathematicians and geometers too must be raised a certain way, and we do not doubt Pythagoras’ theorem nonetheless.”). Della Rocca wages battle admirably on this terrain, but not even the greatest tactical skill can prevail in a campaign in which the enemy sets the terms of engagement. For the intuitionist in times of trouble may always play their trump: “you have argued very well that our conviction in the truth or falsity of a belief is an illegitimate hold-over of biology, upbringing, and environment, a contingent psychological fact that cannot serve as the basis of philosophical knowledge. But know this — in damning us you damn yourself, for all things you believe and say succumb to the same mighty critique; if we are not left with intuitionism, we are left with barbarism.” One can hardly negotiate when such antinomy, the philosophical equivalent of a mutually assured destruction, lurks at the end of the discussion.

(part 2 here)