Intuition as a Philosophical Method in India

Abstract

Intuition as a philosophical method is an intricate and intriguing problem, because philosophers are not agreed as to precisely what intuition and philosophical method are. The same problem with reference to classical Indian philosophies is further complicated by certain preconceived notions about Indian philosophies among some Western students of the subject. During some of the lectures which the writer gave in the West, questions like At what age do you begin to give a child training in intuition? and If I go to India, how long will it take to get complete training in intuition? were put to him. Such questions reveal, in the minds of the questioner, the feeling that intuition is a mysterious faculty with the help of which almost every Indian is able to see God or ultimate reality. Indeed, they show also, so far as philosophy of life is concerned, a sense of frustration and disappointment with the pure logicalism of most of the contemporary philosophical trends of the West. But in this attitude toward philosophy there is the danger that a complete divorce between intellect and intuition may be assumed, and the academic philosopher might say, with Professor Cunningham,' that, if reason and intellect are not to be trusted, his place cannot be in a university, which implies that philosophies based upon intuition (and not on reason) have no place in universities, since universities are centers of critical thinking, and the validity of many intuitions is not beyond doubt and any criterion to test their validity will have to be logical. There is another wrong conclusion which philosophers tend to draw, namely, that thinkers belonging to cultures the philosophies of which are supposed to be intuitive are inherently incapable of standing the strain of logical and scientific thinking. This conclusion makes many assumptions which it is not possible to discuss here. For instance, it assumes that there are two kinds of cultures and philosophies, the intellectual and the intuitive,