Knowledge by intuition
On the axis: Source of knowledge · immediate grasp
Some knowledge seems to come all at once, neither by reasoning nor through the senses: the self-evidence of a principle, the sudden grasp of an essence, the certainty of the heart. Is it a higher form of reason, a kind of experience, or an illusion that borrows the name of knowledge?
Justification
True knowledge proceeds from by deductive chaining, not from sense experience, the source of confused ideas (the first kind of knowledge). Its summit is the third kind of knowledge, intuitive science, which grasps things in their necessity from the essence of God: an unabashed .
This kind of knowledge proceeds from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things.Ethics, II, prop. 40, scholium 2
Ethics, II, prop. 40, scholium 2 (the three kinds of knowledge) · Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect
Justification
Husserl's position espouses neither , which reduces all knowledge to sensation, nor the that deduces the real from reason alone: this is its distinctiveness. His "principle of principles" is that every originarily giving intuition is a source of right for knowledge, but intuition is not only sensory. Alongside the perception of fact there is an , an immediate giving of the general with its own evidence. Knowledge is thus governed not by a privileged faculty but by the given itself, as it presents itself: a third, intuitionist term that passes between the two classic poles rather than arbitrating them.
Ideas I, §24 (the "principle of principles") · Logical Investigations, VI