INTUITION

INTUITION is usually defined as immediate knowledge of truth with apparent absence or clear insufficiency of data for its sequential cognition. The term I. is readily used in different cases, however giving it different meanings. Most often it is used to denote a guess, e.g., when a scientist, without yet having sufficient factual material at hand, anticipates a thought that later forms the basis of a scientific discovery, or, at the next stage of scientific work, unexpectedly immediately combines into a coherent whole what had previously seemed completely unrelated data of experience and facts of reality. I. is also called an intellectual process by means of which a clinician, based on imperceptible to other people and only vaguely perceived by himself signs, makes an accurate diagnosis and correct prognosis in dark and complicated cases. It is also spoken of when a novelist, teacher, investigator, or finally any person by direct 'instinct' guesses the experiences of people with whom they come into contact. Somewhat in a different sense, artistic I. is spoken of, wishing to indicate that the artist created this or that image and in general found the correct path to solving the creative task set for himself not as a result of painstaking work in selecting and inventing details, but 'by inspiration', i.e., immediately, without reasoning. The concept of I. enjoys great popularity among representatives of various metaphysical directions of modern Western European philosophy. The term is especially readily used by Bergson, who defines I. as 'a kind of intellectual empathy or sympathy, by means of which we penetrate into the interior of an object in order to merge with what is unique in it and therefore inexpressible'. According to Bergson, I. represents a simple and irreducible into separate parts act of cognition, in which man is given absolute knowledge and which is supposedly fundamentally opposed to the complex process of analysis, consisting of many separate acts and reducing the object of cognition to previously known elements. By opposing I. to logical thinking, Bergson diminishes the cognitive significance of the latter, and along with it all scientific knowledge, since it is invariably obtained and processed with the help of logical categories (which in turn are, from the point of view of dialectical materialism, a reflection¹ of objective regularities of reality). 'Our thought,' says Bergson, 'in the form of purely logical is unable to represent the true nature of life, the deep significance of evolutionary movement'. Thus, despite a whole series of masking reservations, Bergson uses the concept of I. for conclusions of an agnostic order. In the field of medicine, the concept of I. has been used more than once for reactionary purposes - both in order to instill the idea of the inaccessibility of the heights of medical knowledge for 'ordinary mortals', and in order to diminish the significance of pathology as a science and to liken medicine to 'pure art'. In this respect, the comparatively recent pronouncements of German pathologists Sauerbruch and Krehl are very telling. According to Sauerbruch, 'intuition is a special kind of knowledge, innate in us - to some more, to others less. It may be permissible to say that it is an improved form of instinct in the process of human development'. Krehl designates I. of the clinician as 'artistic I.', or 'insight', and considers that 'for the analysis and treatment of sick people this form of insight naturally has the greatest importance'. Pointing to the critical state of modern medicine, both pathologists recommend cultivating I. as a way out of the deadlock, thereby obscuring the scientific ways of overcoming the crisis. I. is not an ideal of medical action, but an inevitable surrogate of scientific knowledge for now: the growth of the latter will correspondingly decrease the significance of I. - From the point of view of scientific materialistic psychology, what is usually called I. has no fundamentally special, let alone exclusive significance for the process of cognition, since it is only a particular kind of ordinary thinking, namely thinking based on very fast, fleeting, often barely outlined, in any case not clearly formulated and therefore not reaching consciousness perceptions, associations and conclusions, only the final result of which emerges in consciousness as something ready and complete. Just like all other kinds of thinking, intuition entirely relies on experience, i.e., arises as a result of the impact of the material world on our cognitive apparatus.