/lit/ - Literature

>>13908252
>Question: how is that justified? If sensible intuition is so feeble and error-prone, why is intellectual intuition, itself a human faculty and in practice just as error-prone as the other one, consider so incommensurably above it?
It helps to understand Guenon's writings if you are familiar with the teachings of Advaita Vedanta. From Guenon's perspective intellectual intuition is incommensurably above sensible intuition precisely because it is *not* a human faculty. According to Advaita, the ultimate God 'Brahman' underlying everything is actually the inner Self of all beings, the "ear of the ear" and the "mind of the mind" who is the witness of all sensory experience and mental activity as the pure awareness which illuminates these various objects while remaining forever separate from and untouched by them as the transcendent subject. Advaita like Kant is critical idealist in that it accepts that the mind can only present representations of the noumenon to the subject and not offer any sort of direct access, Advaita also identifies Brahman as the absolute reality and underlying basis of everything. As the transcendent subject is essentially the reality responsible for the appearance of the external world the subject is able to detach itself from the mind through intuitive realization or 'intellectual intuition' (with proper instruction) that it is normally identified with and abide in its own state as the ultimate reality, in doing so bypassing sensory intuition and its inherent flaws. It is this that Guenon is referring to when he talks about intellectual intuition, or jnana/gnosis. It is interesting to note that in his first critique Kant wrote that human intuition is sensible only, and that we don't know whether intellectual intuition is possible or not because we have no way of knowing how it could occur; but that if there was a God or primordial being that it would have to have intellectual intuition because any sort of sensory intuition would amount to a limitation of God who is unlimited. Kant seems to have remained unaware of Advaita Vedanta but in positing God as the subject it presents an explanation compatible with his ideas for how humans (or rather their inner Self who is their real identity) could experience intellectual intuition.