The third stage of supersensible cognition, where a fortified I-Being identifies directly with the inner being of what it knows.
Intuition in Steiner's sense is the third and highest stage of supersensible cognition, the faculty by which a fortified I-Being identifies directly with the inner being of what it knows. This Intuition is not the gut feeling of common speech, nor the Moral Intuition that ignites the free deed in The Philosophy of Freedom. It is ego-to-ego union, the cognitive stage where the knower and the known meet as self-contained beings.
In Steiner's Own Words
In Inspiration, he is conscious of his becoming one with the deeds of such beings, with the manifestations of their will; in Intuition, for the first time, he merges his own self into that of self-contained beings. This can happen in the right way only if the emergence takes place, not by the effacement, but by the complete maintenance of his own being. Any “losing of oneself” in another being is bad. Therefore only an ego fortified to a high degree within itself can without damage plunge into another being.
What it Means Today
The Steinerian sense of Intuition reverses the modern colloquial sense almost word for word. Where contemporary usage treats intuition as a half-formed hunch, a felt truth that lags behind reasoned argument, Steiner reserves the term for the cognitive act that surpasses ordinary thinking on the side of precision, not on the side of vagueness. The closest phenomenological cousin is what Edmund Husserl later called Wesensschau, the direct seeing of essence, though Husserl held the act inside concept, while Steiner extends it into spiritual identification with the being itself. The closest devotional analogue is the Christian mystical formulation of unio mystica, with one strict difference: the Steinerian I does not dissolve into what it knows. It strengthens. The capacity for Intuition is exactly the capacity to plunge into another being without losing the centre of one's own.
In practical terms, Intuition is what initiation training is preparing for from the very first imaginative exercise. Imagination loosens the soul from sense-bound thinking. Inspiration opens it to the will and meaning of higher beings. Intuition is the threshold where I-Being recognises I-Being, where the inner content of a stone, a star, a teacher, or a spiritual hierarchy becomes one's own inner content for a moment, then is released. The esoteric Christian tradition that Steiner inherited from the Rosicrucian stream guards this stage with great care, because the same identification that constitutes Intuition is also what makes the soul vulnerable. The whole prior preparation, the long work on thinking, feeling, and willing, is the fortification that lets the merger happen safely.
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