This moment in which intelligence passes from potentiality to act can be neither acquired, nor taught, nor demonstrated; it is intuitive, direct, and unengineerable. At first glance, one may say that only the non-contradictory is intelligible (a square-circle cannot be intellected), yet this is only the extrinsic condition of intellection.

The act of intellection consists in grasping the essence in its suchness (its proper nature, its content as such). This is an intuitive and synthetic act of contemplation, in which the essence reveals itself as meaning, and its suchness as significance.

Thus, intrinsic intelligibility is what “makes sense” to intelligence, what awakens within it a semantic resonance, what “says something” to it, what “speaks” to it (Borella).

More precisely

The intelligible is what can be known by intelligence, that is, what can be apprehended as meaning. It is not what is grasped by the senses, but what the sensible manifests to intelligence: the essence, the form, the “what-it-is.”

Intelligibility is therefore not primarily an external property of things but the internal adequation between intelligence and its object: something is intelligible insofar as it responds to intelligence as a unity of meaning.

The grasp of meaning constitutes the proper act of intelligence. The essence is received as an intelligible unity, immediately recognized because intelligence finds itself within it. Truth appears as a co-nascence, an intimate agreement between the knowing subject and the intelligible object.

This direct contact with essence grounds the order of the concept, and only secondarily that of discursive reasoning. Hence intelligence is not primarily a power of deduction but a power of vision, a participation in the Logos, the principle of intelligibility.

The intelligible therefore cannot be reduced to logical coherence or non-contradiction: it designates the essence revealed to intelligence as meaning — what manifests itself to intelligence as truth.

For further reading

  • Plato, Republic, Phaedrus, Parmenides — On the distinction between sensible and intelligible.
  • Aristotle, De Anima III — On intellection as the reception of form without matter.
  • Plotinus, Enneads — On the Nous as the realm of intelligible forms.
  • Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 79–84 — On the intellectual act and passage from potency to act.
  • Meister Eckhart, Sermons, ed. A. de Libera — On intellection as the birth of the Word in the soul.
  • Étienne Gilson, Le réalisme méthodique — On the grasp of essence by the intellect.
  • Jean Borella, Lumières de la théologie mystique (L’Âge d’Homme, 2002) — On intellectual intuition, semantic resonance, and intrinsic intelligibility.
  • Bruno Bérard, Metaphysics for Everyone (Angelico Press); trans. of Métaphysique pour tous (Paris, L’Harmattan, 2022); It. Sui sentieri della metafisica ; Spa. ¿Qué es la metafísica? ; Ger. Was ist Metaphysik? — On the sensible/intelligible distinction, intellection, and suchness as meaning.