[Advaita-l] A chapter summary of an important new academic text

[Michael Chandra Cohen]

Reviving Intellectual Intuition in Metaphysics: Contemplative Philosophies
and Being --Abstracts Prof. Kenneth Rose


*These abstracts from my latest published book, which I prepared for the
publisher, provide a summary of its arguments. It is avail*able from
PBloomsbury at this link.

*Boo*k A*bstract*
The sight 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 Abstracts
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.