Many people of the ‘spiritual but not religious’ milieu tend to believe they invented intuition, or that intuition came into existence when glossy oracle cards with gaudy images and inspirational quotes started being published–the kind that was especially en vogue before Doreen Virtue went from a fundamentalist with a deck of cards in her hands to a fundamentalist without a deck of cards in her hands.

But, believe it or not, intuition is a concept with a legitimate philosophical history. It is present, either implicitly or explicitly, in the epistemology (theory of how knowledge happens) of many great traditional Western and non Western philosophers.

If had to provide a generalization of what the tradition meant by intuition, I would say that it’s the immediate apprehension of universal principles and truths. It had nothing to do with the stream-of-consciousness-like association of ideas that many moderns mistake for psychic ability.

Old philosophers held that true intuition could only happen when someone had developed all their human faculties (including, and especially, reason) to their utmost degree, so that such faculties, having been tamed and trained, fell into place and were ready to receive truths otherwise reserved to the gods. In other words, intuition was the reward of the flourishing human.

Nowadays, “I’m intuitive” is usually synonymous with “I’m incapable of simple deduction but I am also deep up my ass and don’t take well to criticism.” Back in the day, intuition was regarded as the efflorescence of the rightly cultivated mind. Put simply, in the past intuition was considered suprarational. Now it is implicitly considered irrational.

So much so that intuition is today relegated to psychic exercise, whereas in days of yore prophecy through psychic means was regarded as a wholly separate matter: the famous prophetess of the Oracle of Delphi, for instance, entered a state of ‘enthusiasm’, that is, of literal divine possession, whereas intuition was, essentially, a gift of God to the philosopher who had educated himself to the point where his excelling human faculties grazed on the superior sphere of divine knowledge, allowing some of it to filter down to him.

This fact is especially clear when we consider the old conception of the cosmos as an onion-like set of emanated spheres, with humans in the middle, capable of either falling deeper or rising above. But the modern intuitive moves in a world that has no clear up or down and where over a century of psychologizing everything has planted in people’s minds the impression that everything is in their head and that, therefore, if it’s in their head it’s true. We could summarize this by saying that intuition in the older sense required people to get out of their ass and become bigger than they were, whereas by today’s standards it requires them to entangle themselves even further in their delusions.

MQS