Reviving Intellectual Intuition in Metaphysics
Contemplative Philosophies and Being--Abstracts
These are summaries of the book and chapters from my latest published book, which I prepared for the publisher, provide a summary of its arguments. It is available from Bloomsbury at this link.
Book Summary
The insight that everything arises through the generosity of being is a metaphysical claim and an intellectual intuition. It is not merely the conclusion of a thought-experiment or of an exercise in conceptual analysis but of the intellectual intuition of being. This long-neglected faculty of philosophical insight is an immediate, intuitive discerning of being as it parcels itself out into the ideal intellectual forms (eidē, ta katholou, jāti) providing the underlying nonphysical arrangement of the physical and mental worlds. Its neglect in Western philosophies over the last millennium has led to a forgetfulness of being, with a corresponding loss of meaning and ontological grounding of contemporary globalizing culture. Reviving Intellectual Intuition in Metaphysics: Contemplative Philosophies and Being seeks, long after its banning by Kant, to revive the use of intellectual intuition in metaphysics as essential to the development of an ontology that depends not only on conceptual analysis and logic but also on intellectual intuition, which is cultivated through contemplative practice. The cultivation of what is named pratibhā in Sanskrit, theōria in Greek, contemplatio in Latin, and intellectual intuition (intellektuelle Anschauung) in more recent European philosophy is the primary method and probe that I will apply in the following considerations. In contrast to the procedure in most contemporary metaphysical treatises, the intellectual intuition of being precedes arguments for metaphysical claims about being in this book. Reviving Intellectual Intuition in Metaphysics, as a work of contemplative metaphysics drawing upon historical sources across multiple Eastern and Western philosophical and religious traditions, has the potential to ameliorate divisions between science, philosophy, and religion and between diverse cultures and divergent worldviews.
Chapter Summaries
Introduction
The introduction suggests that before metaphysics can overcome the forgetfulness of being it must add contemplative practice to mathematical logic and conceptual analysis. Moving beyond popular and philosophical views of intuition and Kant’s deflation of classical intellectual intuition to recognition of transcendental shaping of sensations, the introduction argues for a contemplative metaphysics grounded in the perception through contemplatively fortified intellectual intuition of being and its ideal forms. Because being, as infinite, is prior to conceptualization, a conceptual metaphysics must be supplemented with a contemplative metaphysics grounded in the intellectual intuition of being. This speculative and dialectic knowing cognizes being as being through the interplay of positive (cataphatic) and negative (apophatic) movements of intellectual intuition. Although alien to many contemporary philosophers, this view has had many adherents globally. The ontological wasteland of modernity drains our lives of significance, but it can be overcome by reviving the intellectual intuition of being as a central method in a global contemplative metaphysics.
Chapter 1: The Forgetfulness of Being
This chapter begins with Heidegger’s claim that European philosophy has forgotten being. This charge is evinced in the use of the ancient ontological term being (ens, ousia) in deflationary schools of analytic metaphysics, which take the word as indicating nothing more than the fact that something exists. This chapter evokes in brief historical accounts the progressive forgetting of being from Aristotle through Aquinas, Kant, and Rorty. Attention then turns to the ontological flatland of contemporary life where physicalist accounts of existence have displaced ontologically more robust classical ontologies with the result that metaphysical meaning, which once was guaranteed by robust ontologies, has evaporated. Analytic philosophy’s zombie argument suggests that a physicalist account of consciousness is false because a zombie world with actors but no consciousness is inconceivable. This foretells the end of ontological physicalism and a remembrance of being through intellectual intuition.
Chapter 2: The Scope and History of Intellectual Intuition
This chapter defines intellectual intuition and traces its theorization in Asian and European philosophy. As cognition of the noetic, immaterial ground of the physical universe, intellectual intuition grounds conceptualization and inference, making it essential to every act of knowing and judgment. The role of intellectual intuition in Asian philosophy—chokkan in Japanese and pratibhā in Sanskrit—and European philosophy—noesis in Greek and intellektuelle Anschauung in German—is traced in a series of historical vignettes. Since Kant’s critiques, intellectual intuition has been obscured in Western philosophy, and it is under assault currently through the influential criticism of Herman Cappelen and the negative program in experimental philosophy. Despite these challenges, it retain a central place in analytic philosophy and it has never disappeared from traditional and Asian philosophies. A revival of metaphysics that moves beyond technical competence in conceptual analysis and logic to intuitive perception of their grounding being itself will require training in contemplative practice alongside those other skills.
Chapter 3: Reviving Intellectual Intuition
This chapter discusses the content and operation of intellectual intuition. At the outset, nous, or intellectual intuition, can be distinguished from aisthēsis, or sensation, by considering the general features of presented objects, or the universals that underlie them. Universals are also named and conceived variously under such terms as are known variously as ideas (eidē), forms, and jātis. After suggesting a number of examples of how to become aware of intellectual intuition, a description of a series of phases in which one becomes progressively more aware of the operation of intellectual intuition in cognition follows. These include intellectual intuition in conventional experience, formal intellectual intuition, meditation and intellectual intuition, and the intellectual intuition of being. This discussion turn on the recognition that intellectual intuition enacts a process of cognitive generalization that moves consciousness from dispersion in particulars through the recognition of general and increasingly unified ideas culminating in direct intellectual intuition of being in itself.
Chapter 4: Contemplative Metaphysical Practice
Reviving intellectual intuition as a method in contemplative metaphysics necessitates training in meditative practices such as concentration and insight alongside logic and conceptual analysis. One venerable method of meditation, which blends concentrative and insight practices, Advaita Vedānta’s ātma-vicāra, or “self-inquiry.” It prescribes concentrated probing of one’s sense of self until it vanishes in a sense of mental and spiritual liberation. Another method is the Buddhist uncovering through disciplined insight meditation of the unfindability, or nonexistence of a self, which is the key Buddhist teaching of anātman, or “nonself.” In these practices and in other examples of analytical meditation discussed in this chapter, the bond between meditation and metaphysics in discovered through concentration-fortified insight practices. The author names this bond “the unexcluded middle” because through meditatively fortified intellectual intuition, an unformalizable middle ground or middle way between contradictory positions emerges in which contradictions are resolved in the intellectual intuition of being as fullness, or plenitude.
Chapter 5: The Metaphysics of Intellectual Intuition
Although metaphysics was rejected as meaningless in the early phases of analytic philosophy, it has resurfaced in recent decades as analytic metaphysics. This change of fortunes can be traced to influential articles by W. V. Quine that established a physicalist basis for a minimal ontology and overturned canonical views in analytic philosophy such as the analytic-synthetic distinction. Analytic metaphysics has tended toward actualism and physicalism in keeping with the bias toward nominalism in European thought since Ockham. Following the lead of Bertrand Russell, this ontological preference for existence is reversed and being as essence is given priority over being as existence. This view of being as prior to existence overcomes the modal realism of David Lewis in which every possibility exists by claiming that what exists is limited by the transcendental attributes of being. As the basis of a contemplative intellectual intuition, this contemplative metaphysics suggests that existence is not wholly contingent nor coextensive with every possibility implicit in being. Assisted with this substantive yet ultimately nonformalizable metaphysics, the ironism of Rorty can yield to a new age of robust, intellectually fortified contemplative metaphysics, which accounts for the whole of existence and not merely its physical dimensions.
Conclusion: The Metaphysics of Intellectual Intuition
The call to recover being as what is as it is mobilizes a renewal of intellectual intuition as the necessary condition for a revived and effective contemplative metaphysics. The contemplative intellectual intuition of being in a contemplative metaphysics restore to philosophy its traditional and rightful role in grounding other intellectual disciplines including the sciences. It counters scientism by giving contemplative intuition priority over mathematics and logic in the quest to know being as such. A contemplative metaphysics will thus take its rightful place alongside poetry and the other arts and mystical insight as an organ of the intuitive perception of being. Contemplative metaphysics is a response to the generosity of being, which calls the intellect to participate in its fullness. It also peers beyond the unclosed gate of being into being’s ownmost openness. This suggest three outcomes of the contemplative encounter with being: (1) overcoming skepticism, (2) furthering epistemological pluralism, and (3) reverence for being.