“In whatever 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 to which all thought as a means is directed.” (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason)

I’ve always like Kant’s definition of intuition. It is that through which we know objects immediately. There’s an interesting tension in that definition since a medium is something that a thing passes through. So intuition appears to be that through which something passes without passing through anything. “The medium of immediacy,” as I sometimes call it.

These days, however, we lack immediacy. We have a tendency to appeal to empirical data to support claims as though we have no immediate access to the objects in question. In the social sciences, this leaves a somewhat uncanny sensation. But I would argue that in the philosophy of science, evidence is almost absurd. Our thoughts, as Kant points out, should be directed not at objects (represented by data) but at intuitions, i.e., at those aspects of objects that are immediately present to us.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading about literacy lately and this uncanniness (and absurdity) is never far from my mind. Even such concrete questions as “what is a research paper?” has been turned into an empirical question requiring detailed ethnographic study of scholars, teachers and students to settle. Shouldn’t it be the most ordinary object in the world to a scholar? After all, it’s something each of us encounters every day, and makes sense of everyday. Do we really need a science to tell us what we’re doing when we read and write a research paper.

Kierkegaard said that faith is immediacy. I think we have, in a profound sense, lost our faith in scholarship. Our constant search for empirical answers to questions that we should already know the answers to, indeed, that our very ability to read and write presupposes we know the answers to,  is a testament to confusion. Our obsession with “new media” is certainly a sign of it. I think it is time we approach the problem more immediately. We need to start saying plainly what is on our minds.