On the Internal Contradictions and Solution to Mou Zong-san’s “Intellectual Intuition”
Author：Qing-Chun Chen
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Mou Zong-san’s “intellectual intuition” contains two internal contradictions: first, a contradiction between intellect and sensibility regarding moral feeling; second, a contradiction between being and creation of the thing-in-itself. These contradictions are caused by his acceptance of Kant’s theoretical assumption of a dichotomy between sensibility and intellect as well as by the characteristics of non-sensibility and creativity in Kant’s theory of intuition. In turn, this has led to unresolvable difficulties in Mou’s “intellectual intuition” reading of Chinese philosophy. While Husserl’s theory on the intentionality of perception resolved Kant’s dichotomy between sensibility and intellect, his distinction between sensation and perception also provides a phenomenologically based theoretical foundation for solving the internal contradictions of Mou’s “intellectual intuition”: while sensation is equivalent to intellectual intuition as a way for intuiting the thing-in-itself, it involves sensibility and non-creativity, and therefore avoids Mou’s two theoretical contradictions.