(part 1 here)

How, then, should we conceive of intuition in relation to our inquiry? The mistake, to make it quite explicit, involves the introduction of a dichotomy at the heart of intuition. One takes it that an intuition has particular content, generally a proposition. Such content presents itself in a particular manner — say, according to a certain causal history, and with a certain feeling of plausibility — which we might call its form. An intuition has content, the fact at which it points, and form, which is the fact of the intuition itself as a psychological event. The unresolvable issue, then, becomes the relationship between the form and the content of the intuition. Anti-intuitionists like Della Rocca argue that intuition must be condemned if its form bears suspect relation to its content. One who intuits that “abortion is immoral” merely because they have been primed to the plausibility of such belief, e.g. by a certain religious upbringing, cannot justifiably infer the truth of such intuition’s content: namely that abortion is immoral. After all, one may be primed to the plausibility of many false beliefs, as shown by the history of the sciences. An intuition thus has no necessary connection to the truth of its content, and insofar as it does have such connection we still need to appeal to alternate methods of justifying this content; the intuition falls out of the picture. A thoroughgoing anti-intuitionist would claim that the form inherent to all intuition — its seeming certainty or appeal — has no relation to the truth of its content, but rather comes about as a result of certain psychological features of ourselves at the point in time at which intuition strikes us.

We may go a step further from such negation of intuition which, true though it may be, only presents us a case in which thought falters and stops short of completing the project at which it aims. And there must be some way to make sense of these damnable coercions of thought which strike one as lightning bolts setting the mind ablaze. In a not altogether different context Benjamin writes that “in the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in lightning flashes. The text is the long roll of thunder that follows” (The Arcades Project, N). One must make sense of the legitimate progression from the lightning flash of intuition to the thunder which follows. A child is taught to count the seconds between the flash and the rumble, and in doing so to grasp the location of the storm by a particular schema: 3 seconds = 1 km. The task the philosopher must set upon is to construct such schema as proper to the understanding of an intuition.

Spinoza offers his example of a human body under the sun, a foundation as good as any to work from (Ethics, s2, p35). One glances up from their walk and sees a bright yellow circle situated about 200 feet away embedded in the sky like a shining hole. Here, after all, is where divinity has punctured through. One may intuitively believe this to be the case. No matter how hard one tries, it may be impossible to shake the feeling that the sun lies hundreds rather than billions of feet away. Spinoza points out that strictly speaking such a feeling and the corresponding desire to make an inference about distance are not at all false. These are true psychological facts explained by the interaction between the body of the sun and the body of the person in question. The sun really does present itself as a nearby golden orb given the particular effect it produces on the human sensory system.

It is only a smidge better to declare such presentation false as to hold, based on its immediate plausibility, that the inference such presentation seems to permit (that “the sun is 200 feet away”) is true. The substantial question rather involves assessing what bodies must be like in order for their relation to produce such effect. We may imagine a quite sophisticated explanation which assesses just that: burning 93 million miles away a gaseous star emits rays of light which strike the cones of the eye and trigger neurological responses so as to give the impression that the source of the image lies only 200 feet away. Such explanation demonstrates the relationship between the form of the intuition and its content, showing how the particular manner in which the intuition presents itself (in this case via the complicated story we tell about the relation between the body of the sun and the body of the person) produces its content (in this case the effect of the sun upon the person producing the sensation that they are only 200 feet apart). The content is true inasmuch as we understand its truth to involve the effect produced by one body upon another under certain determinate circumstances (the glancing at the sun), and false inasmuch as we understand its truth to involve the properties of a particular body apart from such a relation, e.g. as a fact about the sun’s distance from the earth — as an essential property of the sun in its spatiotemporal position. At this juncture we are always tempted to fall into reification due to its overwhelming simplicity. Much simpler to say we perceive the sun as hanging up in the sky 200 feet away because, in actuality, the sun hangs up in the sky at such a distance. Much more of an ordeal to articulate such perception as a relation between bodies. And ever we are tempted toward simplifications, though they invariably give out under the weight of their insubstantiality.

Everything falls out of joint when one proceeds from the content of an intuition and attempts to deduce the legitimacy or significance of such intuition on this basis. It strikes one as obviously right that one should pull the lever in the trolley problem. One experiences this effect upon one’s body in its encounter with the thought experiment; experiences a sensation of plausibility corresponding with the entertainment of the proposition that “one ought pull the lever in the trolley problem.” Thus far all is well and good. One errs in presuming that this effect, the plausibility, proffers knowledge of the proposition simply because its entertainment in the mind correlates with such plausibility — that the plausibility of the proposition that “one ought to pull the lever in the trolley problem” implies that one ought to pull the lever in the trolley problem. We are again in the case where the plausibility that “the sun lies 200 feet away in the sky” supposedly implies that the sun lies 200 feet away in the sky. We mistakenly proceed from the effect to the cause in our botched attempt to inquire as to the conditions for the possibility of our intuition.