Moritz Schlick: Philosophical Papers (1909 1922) Utdrag s.

141-151

6. IS THERE INTUITIVE KNOWLEDGE?

The present relationship of philosophical to scientific thought. The doctrine of intuitive knowledge as an obstacle to their unification. Analysis of the concept of knowledge shows that intuition can never be knowing. Confusion of these two concepts in the past and present, and its consequences. The rapprochement between philosophy and science which set in some de-cades ago, and which finally reconciled the hostile opposition fomented by Schelling and He gel, was certainly a very pleasing spectacle for anyone having at heart the attainment of the final goals of science. In solving their own problems, the scientists were moving into epistemological and thus into philosophical territory, and the philosophers were recognizing the fruitless-ness of all pure speculation that did not rest wholly and solely on the findings and methods of positive science; and so both joined hands in an amicable agreement to work together in constructing the great highway to truth which runs through the territories of both. It seemed that, given the great understanding and esteem on both sides, this happy state of affairs was bound to be constantly reinforced and to bring forth ever fairer fruits; but on examining more closely the present state of philosophy we notice, I fear, indications of a rift in the lute. Now whether the causes of this are to be sought in current uncertainties in the ultimate -foundations of the exact sciences, which have perhaps detracted in many minds from the admiration hitherto unconditionally accorded to them, or whether the causes lie deeper -in a generally more 'idealistic' turn in the spirit of the times -one must in any case see in this mutual estrangement a serious danger, for philosophy in particular, and do all that one can to stifle misunderstandings the moment they arise. On the side of philosophy there is a certain dissatisfaction with the exact sciences; it arises at many points, as if awakening from a sleep cast upon it by the stern hypnotic eye of exact research. At a congress of scientists an ho~oured psychologist and thinker gave an address which ended in an exhor-tatiOn to th1e men ~f science to leave philosophizing to professional philoso-phers only. That IS to erect a boundary in which we must surely perceive als~ a danger to the heal~hy development of science, even if we are otherwise ~Ulte_ out of sympathy With the philosophical ideas evolved by famous scien-ti~ts m our own day. But there are other phenomena far more threatening still. Rumours are abroad concerning the 'bankruptcy of science' there is talk of the 'downfal! of rationalism', and by this it is implied (with a ~unning shift of verbal ~eam~g) that a philosophy founded on the epistemology of the mathematical sctenc_es is inadequate. 2 The writings of an Eucken have exerted a great e~fect;-the 1~eas of a Bergson enjoy an astonishing popularity, and powerful m~uences m the same direction have emanated from William lames a great admtrer o_f Bergson. There has been much approval for the writing; o~ Co_unt Keyse~lmg, who leans

strongly to Hegel, and in whose works the scientific aspe~t IS increasingly overgrown by an aestheticizing bent. In these thmkers and many others we perceive a clear repudiation of the concept of knowled~e entertained in the exact sciences. Not that they have in any way turned agamst the methods and findings of these disciplines _ this can n~ longer be done nowadays; but their philosophy feels uneasy and ham-?ered m such ~n atmosphere of mathematics and quantities, it seeks to turn 1ts back as qmckly_ as possible upon the world dominated by exact inquiry and to fi~d a temtory upon which it need no longer be troubled by th~ mathematical knowledge of nature.

Now such a territory is the realm of intuition. There is an ever-increasing diffusion and welcome for the views of those ph1losoph~rs who reject the quantitative, mathematical method of obtaining the most Important and ultimate kinds of knowledge, and who replace it by that of 'absolute empiricism' (James) or 'intuition' It is not by c 1 . ' ompanng, measunng_ and c~ culatm~, they say, that we obtain our final insights, but by t~e m~st Immedtate expnence, by living and looking. It is above all the acute dtalecttcs and the. eloquence of Henri Bergson which a b h th f . gam nng onour to e conc_ept o mtuitive knowledge, after it had ceased to occupy the foreground smce the days of the mediaeval mystics. Bergson sets forth with great clarity and energy the fact that it is b 1 t _ ly and es t. ll . "bl a sou e . sen 1a Y 1mposs1 e to apply the quantitative concepts of mathe-matics to mental quantities (which he groups under the notion of 'd , ' II ') d uree ree e , an Imposstble, therefore, to measure them in the strict sense em-ployed by exact science. They are by nature purely qualitative, and so can not be represented by pure quantities. Now since the whole of reality is initially given to us in purely qualitative fashion, and since it is experiences (Erlebnisse) that are most indubitably real, he concludes that quantitative, mathematical methods provide only a falsified knowledge -they first have to translate the real into theirlanguage and present it symbolically in numbers, but can therefore never grasp its true nature. Intuition alone can do this, and is thus the method of philosophy and metaphysics. "Philosophy consists in placing oneself within the object itself by an effort of intuition."4 Starting as it did from an undoubtedly correct fact, Bergson's argument had a most alluring effect; already existing tendencies came to meet it, and it was thus able to exert a powerful influence.-Nowhere, perhaps, is this influence more plainly visible than in the latest turn given by Edmund Husserl to the presentation of his philosophical ideas. Like Bergson (who gained a prize for an early mathematical work), Husserl has a good knowledge of mathematics, and so in his case the elevation of the intuitive method, as the specific method of philosophy,

above the quantitative mathematical concept of knowledge is carried out with the surest insight into the nature of this step and its enormous importance. Husserl says5 :
However, to the extent that philosophy goes back to ultimate origins, it belongs precisely to its very essence that its scientific work moves in spheres of direct intuition. Thus the greatest step our age has to make is to recognize that with the philosophical intuition in the correct sense, the phenomenological grasp of essences, a limitless field of work opens out, a science that without all indirectly symbolical and mathematical methods, without the apparatus of premises and conclusions, still attains a plenitude of the most rigorous and, for all further philosophy, decisive conclusions.

Now to show how, even in its outward manner, this philosophy recalls earlier periods of German speculation, I append the further remak6: "Intuition grasps essence as essential being, and in no way posits being-there (Dasein)". he intuitive concept of knowledge doubtless receives its mos.t subtle and radical elucidation in the following words of Husserl:

The whole thing, however, depends on one's seeing and making entirely orie's own the truth that just as immediately as one can hear a sound, so one can intuit an 'essence' -the essence 'sound', the essence 'appearance of thing', the essence 'apparition', the essence 'pictorial representation', the essence 'judgement' or 'will', etc. -and in the intuition one can make an essential judgement.

And these insights are to inaugurate that 'philosophy as rigorous science' which has hitherto been vainly hoped for since the beginning ofall serious thought! For that is the title of the essay we have been quoting from. I believe, on the contrary, that by intuition and contemplation we can obtain no knowledge whatsoever, that it is not only no method for a rigorous science, but not even a scientific method at all. In order to see this, we have only to ask: 'What, then, is it really to know?' It is remarkable how seldom it is in the history of philosophy that we encounter a careful, thorough answer to this simple question. There are investigations of the boundaries of knowledge and its origin, the object of know-ledge and its possibility, the preconditions and goals of the enterprise, but we do not often meet with the simple formula: What is knowledge? What does it really mean when we say someone has known an object or occurrence? We think, indeed, that we know what this means in particular cases, without further inquiry or explanation, but this very belief leads to unthinking use of the word 'knowledge' and to an extension of the concept to cases for which it is not suitable. We shall now proceed to satisfy ourselves that a case of this sort arises in talking of intuitive knowledge. When I see a large bird in the distance and say: 'I know that's a stork'-what do I mean by this? Obviously that the bird is of a type familiar to me, with which I am

acquainted by observation or instruction, and which I have learnt to designate by the name of storks. I rediscover in this bird certain features -large beak, long legs, etc. -which are nothing new to me, and which I have been accustomed to regard as features of the stork species. The knowing therefore comes about only by comparison of a new object with an old one, and a rediscovery of the latter in the former. Knowing implies two factors: something known, and that as which it is known. If we encounter something new, it remains unknown to us, unexplained, so long as we can perceive in it no resemblance to anything otherwise experienced, and are thus unable to place it among our recollections of what we have so far met with, or to call it by a familiar name. This was an example from the everyday use of the word 'know', but the situation is no different when we employ it in science; we come across the very same features there as well. When physics tells us, say, that it knows the nature of heat to be a motion of the minute parts of matter, this means that it has been able, by experimental research and theoretical reflection, to rediscover in the behavior of a hot body all the properties of a system made up of particles in violent motion. Or if chemistry cl~s to know the constitu-tion of benzol -namely, as the combination of carbon and hydrogen in a specific relation -what this means is that these familiar elements, and no others, have been rediscovered in benzol, that this substance is not an irredu-cibly new one, but belongs to the class of carbon and hydrogen compounds and occupies a well-defined position among them. If in philology the origin of some word is ascertained, or in history the cause of some historical event established, then there, too -I need not show it in detail -each piece of knowledge consists in reducing what is to be known to something as which it is known. There are always two constituents, which are so coupled together in the act of cognition that the one is rediscovered and pointed out in the . other. Whatever example we examine from any given science, wherever an indubitable, universally acknowledged advance in knowledge is to be found, knowing, grasping or explaining never means anything else but the pointing out of such a relation between two constituents (and thus indirectly a relation between many such, since each is connected with others).

This feature of the knowing-process is naturally not meant to be exhaus-tive; it would need to be further enlarged and deepened in many respects. Our concern here is merely to extract from this process that integrating element which is relevant to our purpose. This element, moreover, has already been previously recognized as the essential one-by Avenarius, among others, who says8, that in apprehending, the mind "reduces the unapprehended to some-thing that, as apprehended, is already part of our mental stock." Now this element has achieved its most perfect significance in the exact or measuring sciences, since detailed epistemological consideration (which will not be pursued further here) shows that a complete and exhaustive reduction of the one to the other is possible only through numerical concepts; for it is only

quantitative, not qualitative, relations which permit the one to be redis-covered in the other completely unchanged and as itself-as the units added are rediscovered in the sum. Hence the exact sciences, which rely on mathe- matical methods, come nearest to the ideal of knowledge, and form a model and goal for all other disciplines. This, therefore, is the nature of all knowing in science: a reduction of two constituents to one another, a rediscovery of the one in the other. But now Bergson and the thinkers who. share_ his outlook, reply: 'This may be so, but philosophical and especially metaphysical knowledge is of an entirely differ-ent sort, namely intuitive knowledge!' They obviously have a right to this claim, to the application of the ordinary term 'knowledge' to intuition, only if they believe that intuition in some sense provides something similar ?r analogous to ordinary comparative knowing. And this is in fact their view; they believe that intuition attains in perfect fashion to precisely what scientific knowledge is pursuing vainly by imperfect means. But in truth the two processes provide quite different things: they head away in opposing directions, and it is a great mistake to attribute a common goal to them. Whereas for knowing in the sciences it is essential for us to couple together two (or more) constituents in the manner described, so that an object is then determined or-'known', in contemplation or intuition we are confronted by a single object, without relating it to anything else. We are therefore dealing with .a wholly different process; intuition has no resemblance at all to knowledge. If I look up at the cloudless sky and devote myself entirely to the sensation of blue, if in acting I immerse myself wholly in the feeling of activity, I then experience the blue and the activity by intuition -but can I say that I have known the nature of blue or activity? Quite obviously not. Had I investigated the wavelength of blue light, measured its intensity and so on, and fitted it, in short, into the general pattern of my physical knowledge, or had I subjected the feeling of activity to a psychological analysis and discovered there certain sensations of tension, feelings of pleasure and so on, I could then say with definite justice that the nature of the blue light or the feeling of activity was known to me. I could even speak already of knowledge -albeit at the lowest level-if a so-called apperception of the sense-impression had taken place; for thereby the senseimpression is already taken up into the sphere of known ideas, the blue, for example, being recognized as the colour designated by the name 'blue' -which takes place, indeed, not by way of conscious comparison, but rather through involuntary associations. But this process already goes far beyond the mere perception of the sensory idea, the pure experience which actually constitutes the intuition. The often-used term 'perceptual knowledge' has meaning, therefore, only when applied to the apperception; it should not be thought that by mere experience of the perception, by perceiving on its own, the perceived is already known in some fashion. So long as an object is not compared, or in some way incorporated into a conceptual system, it is not known. By intuition a thing is only given to us, not apprehended. Intuition is merely experiencing9, whereas knowing is something

different, and more than this. Intuitive knowledge, a knowledge that was simultaneously intuition, would be a contradiction in terms. An object is apprehended or known, in that .by aid of the act of recognition already described, it is assigned the correct place appropriate to it in the sphere of our knowledge; and this is done through concepts, which, like attached numbers, inform us what the object or process really is, that is, what elements otherwise known to us go to make it up. Knowledge is therefore always a designation by means of concepts or symbols; it is thus equally a self-contradiction to speak of a knowledge which "claims to dispense with symbols" 10 Anyone who has fully grasped the true character of knowing, as an essentially comparing, relating and ordering activity, will never again be tempted to take the act of pure contemplation to be knowledge, or to confuse the one with the other. Who indeed -to recall our earlier examples -would seriously suppose the constitution of benzol could be known by 'projecting' oneself into this substance, or the nature of heat by 'becoming one' with it (in a fever, maybe)! Were there an intuition-there is not -by which we could project ourselves into things, it would still never be knowledge. The uncivilized man and the animal probably see nature in a far more perfect way than we do, they are far more involved in it, live in it more intensively, because their senses are more acute; but they do not actually know nature better than we, for they do not know it at all. By experiencing and looking we apprehend and explain nothing. We certainly obtain thereby an acquaintance with things, but never an understanding of them. If we want knowledge, it is only the latter that we want, in all science and even in all philosophy. Thoughtful inquirers have always had the clearest sense of the fundamental difference between science and mere acquaintance, and have also at times expressed it. Thus Riehl; for example, says11:
We see, in fact, how science reduces the content of experience to its law-like elements, to what recurs in similar form, to what is accessible to quantitative determination and is thus expressible in numerical operations, in short, to the conceivable. Everything else is an object, not of conceiving, but of immediate acquaintance, and hence of feeling, sensation and perception.

The mere acquaintance directly given to us through intuition is something utterly different from knowledge of the given; the latter must always take the form of judgements, and judgements presuppose comparison and combination. A way of thinking that confounds together acquaintance and knowledge plunges into the direst of adventures. Hans Rickert's theory of knowledge, for example, relies 12 on an argument in which the word 'acquaintance' ('Wissen') is used to mean knowledge at one moment and intuitive givenness at another; a theory built on such foundations is naturally untenable. Again, the distinction made by Husserl between the hearing of a sound and the 'intuiting' of the essence 'sound' is none other than the distinction between the mental act of hearing and acquaintance with the sound; this acquaintance is not knowledge of the essence 'sound', as the phenomenologists would like to have us believe.

Above all, we have to abandon the notion of some sort of disillusion or downgrading of knowledge being implied if the latter is shown to be merely an ordering and comparing activity which seeks out the already known; as if this sort of knowing was merely a makeshift we have to be content with because we are endowed with nothing better; not but what a more direct ,and perfect mode of knowing, an intuitive method, or an 'intellectual intuition', might certainly be imagined, whereby a suitably gifted being would have _a more direct and intimate apprehension of the objects to be known. That is not the situation at all. On the contrary, our knowing, as we really have it, our comparing, conceptual, discursive knowing, furnishes precisely what we require of knowledge. The intellectual need, for the sake of which we pursue science, is satisfied exclusively by this knowledge of ours; a becoming one with things, an intuitive awareness, an intellectual intuition, would fail to content it. That knowledge brings us advantages in its wake, in life, in technology and in numerous ways; intuition, bare contemplation, is of no use whatever to us in all this. But the whole troop of errors we are combatting here arises from a wrong view of knowing, as a directly immediate relation between the knower and the known, instead of a clear understanding of it as the establishment, by the knower, of a relation between various elements. The act whereby, according to this erroneous naive view, the knower grasps the known in some direct fashion, has been imagined by philosophers -only dimly for the most part -in the most varied ways. The simplest imaginable relation between the two would obviously be that of identity, and the mystics, in fact, also assumed that in the act of contemplation the subject becomes identical with the object contemplated: the knower becomes one with the known. Others are rather more discreet. They view the immediate relation between subject and object, not as identity, but as a sort of intimate contact, describ-able only in metaphors, which are then mostly drawn from the field of haptic imagery; this is doubtless connected with the fact that, as is well known, the naive observer is involuntarily under the impression that touch has the deepest lessons to impart about the nature of sensorY objects: the child, faced with a novel object, tries to feel it and take it in his hands. Apprefzending and grasping are thus the words most commonly substituted for 'knowing'_. It will not do, however -though it is not infrequently tried -to define knowing by means of these terms. 'The mystical writer, Franz von Baader, asserts that knowing is an 'embracing' of the object, as if the latter were surrounded in the process by the knower; but he also describes the act as a 'permeating and penetrating', which is obviously the exact opposite. So too with talk of a 'projecting'; the known object is then envisaged as surrounding the subject. From such crudely sensuous imagery there is no escape, so long as we remain trapped in the basic error of believing that knowing involves a direct and simple relation between object and knower. Knowing is indeed an embracing, but an embracing or enclosure by means of concepts, whereby the known object is unambiguously assigned a place in the midst of them.

Thus all knowledge is by nature conceptual, and it is strictly speaking a contradiction to talk of an intuitive knowledge. If we wish to use this term, we should mean by it only that sort of knowledge in which the contributory concepts are so framed that they can always be replaced in thought by intuitive ideas. By such representations thought, as a psychological process, is immensely facilitated, .and, indeed, first made possible, so that everywhere we endeavour after 'intuitive' knowledge in the sense just explained. Hence it has been possible for the intuitive to be regarded as an essential element in know-ledge, and for knowing and intuition to be obscurely confounded with one another. In reality the latter is merely a welcome adjunct, whereby the essen-tials of knowledge, the conceptual relations, are made psychologically visible to us, just as the details of objects under the microscope are brought out by staining them. But in the very deepest kinds of knowledge, such as theoretical physics, we have lately come to see that on many points we have to renounce this intuitive representation, precisely to preserve such knowledge in all its purity. Kant himself was deceived about the role of intuition in knowing, and hence he could open the Critique of Pure Reason with the words: "In what-ever manner and by whatever means a mode of knowledge may relate to objects, intuition is that through which it is in immediate relation to them, and from which all thought gains its material"13 This confused view of the knowledge process and its paramount form made the great philosopher's task more difficult at many points. Only from this ill-chosen standpoint, for example, can one even raise the question of whether it is possible to have knowledge of things-in-themselves. Even if there were a marvellous power of intuition, whereby things as they are in themselves might "migrate over", as Kant puts it, "into our faculty of representation", so that our consciousness would actually be. one with them, we should certainly experience such things, but that would not be to know them in the least. But if the concept of know-ledge is correctly taken in the manner outlined, we ought in a certain sense (to be explained no further here) to regard any knowledge that is not purely formal as a knowledge of 'things-in-themselves'. But disaster also attends the metaphysics of those who maintain, against Kant, that we are able to know our own selves, our mental processes, as they are in themselves. Schopenhauer's metaphysics of the will, and all world-views of a spiritualist kind, rely upon this tempting prinCiple, which Paulse~ 14, f~r example, has formulated as follows: "In so far as the self apprehends Itself In selfconsciousness, it knows a reality as it is in itself ... " But in becoming sub-jectively aware of mental processes, we do not ~n-truth know t~em in any fashion -they are merely given, posited or expenenced; as expenenced they are the self, or form part of it. We describe this situation wrongly in saying that they are known as they are; we oUght merely to say that they are as they are -and little enough is gained by that. Intuition, as we continue to find, is the very opposite of knowledge. In pure intuition, raw contemplation, everything is utterl~ indi:i~ual, ~or itself, compared with nothing. The multifariousness of expenence IS Infimte -:-th.e same thing never recurs in it exactly as before. To abandon oneself to IntUI-tion

is therefore to ignore all resemblances, to reject all combination and order, in short to disdain everything that actually constitutes knowledge. The would-be knower must ascend into the sphere of the universal, where he finds the concepts he has need of to order and designate the individual; the devotee of intuition is tied from the start to the individual, which he cannot get free from and therefore cannot know. It is obviously quite impos~ible to describe the intUitively given completely, since it can only be expenenced; the infinite, ever-flowing multiplicity cannot be presented in words, for these have fixed meanings, and, apart from proper names, invariably designate general concepts. As the great PoincarelS observed, of the philosophy of Bergson's disciple Le Roy:
See, you have written long articles; for that, it was necessary to use words. And ~erein have you not been much more 'discursive' and consequently much further from hfe and truth than the animal who simply lives without philosophizing? Would not this animal be the true philosopher?

For this reason, too, the demand raised by HusserI for a pure phenomenology cannot be fulfIlled. If we take up the second volume of his Logical Investiga-tions with its multitude of. ever more refined distinctions and novel terms, wher~by the author seeks to exhaust the multiform nature of experience, we cannot avoid the impression that the infinite multiplicity of 'acts' and modes of consciousness remains, nonetheless, at always the same unattainable re-move from description. And it is not through intuition that the truths con-tained in the book are elicited, but rather precisely through a skilled process of coordination, classification and description; not through 'contemplation of essences, but by methods of comparison and symbolization. The more we know, the higher we raise ourselves above irituit~on; the more we lose ourselves in contemplation, the less knowledge we enjoy. There can be no sharper condemnation of metaphysics as a science than the claim that its method is that of intuition. Intuition and science, experiencing and know-ing, are opposites. We may grant that a maximum wealth of experiencing and contemplating may furnish just as high a task, as splendid a life-work, as the most deeply penetrating knowledge, and indeed may be prized far more high-ly than the latter -but we must guard with all our might against confusing the two things together. To do so is a service to neither of them; to be clear about their difference must redound to the advantage of both. If again there is so large a crop nowadays of gifted and ardent spirits who oppose the philosophic to the scientific method, who find no satisfaction in a science which is for ever merely ordering, elaborating, establishing relations, which makes no effort to create anything new, but actually sees it as its task to rediscover in everything the most that it can of what is old and familiar _ well, these people -may betake themselves to intuition, but they should not declare it to be philosophy, nor proclaim experiences to be knowledge; let them admit that it is artistic, not intellectual, satisfaction, which they seek and enjoy.