Husserl Studies (2020) 36:271–286

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-020-09273-8

Der Meister der Wesensschau Acts of Translation

in Husserl’s Plato Without Platonism

Nicolas de Warren1

Published online: 25 September 2020

© Springer Nature B.V. 2020

Abstract
The aim of this paper is understand Husserl’s “Platonism” through an understand-
ing of how the method of eidetic variation and a phenomenological conception of
essences reformulates by means of a conceptual and historical translation Plato’s
doctrine of essences. In arguing that a theory of essences and method for the dis-
covery of essences proves indispensable to a proper conception of phenomenology,
Husserl positions himself as a philosophical “friend of essences” without thereby
adopting a Platonic conception of essences. In addition to a reconstruction of Hus-
serl’s image of Plato and the historical tradition, this paper examines the pivotal
role played by “variation” and “manifold” in Husserl’s distinctive understanding of
essences.

Keywords Essence · Husserl · Eidos · Plato

1 Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas

Letters of philosophers tell us much about a philosopher’s attitude towards their

thinking and perception of the critical reception of their intellectual endeavor.
Although philosophical correspondence need not necessarily be taken as harboring
the esoteric truth of a philosopher’s published writings, the privacy of letters offers
a vantage point within philosopher’s thought that might otherwise not be available
to those for whom such letters were not originally intended. As a largely unguarded
expression, philosophical letters are often revealing of what, in the eyes of the letter
writer, matters most about their thinking, its significance and aspiration. Rarely con-
sidered as a notable writer of letters, Husserl’s extensive correspondence represents
an exemplary instance of how letters illuminate a philosopher’s course of thinking.
If, as Husserl once himself stated, “ein Brief ist doch ein Besuch,” it is in the inti-
macy of such visits—with colleagues, students, and friends—that Husserl frequently

* Nicolas de Warren
njd15@psu.edu
1
Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PENN STATE, USA

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articulates the value of his ‘ungeheure Lebensaufgabe’ and what he considered

indispensable to his envisioned reform of philosophy. It is not so much that Hus-
serl’s elaborately fluid thinking, as manifest above all in his research manuscripts,
becomes somehow deepened with his philosophical letters, but rather that the profile
of his self-styled ‘neuartige Philosophie’ enters more sharply into view. In particular,
Husserl’s understanding of the novelty and challenge of his Promethean undertak-
ing becomes apparent in his letters with his frequently displayed sensitivity towards
misunderstandings of his phenomenological philosophy. We are especially sensitive
to critiques of those aspects of ourselves we hold to be most true in defining who we
are, in life as in thought. With Husserl’s letters, his reactions to misinterpretations of
his phenomenological project reveal much about where the nerve and promise of its
philosophical provocation resided.
A case in point. In a letter to Dietrich Mahnke from February 25, 1917, Hus-
serl takes issue with his student’s proposed dedication of his war-time book,
Der Wille zur Ewigkeit. Gedanken eines deutschen Kriegers über den Sinn des
Geisteslebens. Written during his convalescence from wounds suffered at the
front, Mahnke sent to Husserl the finished manuscript of his short book with a
dedication to ‘der Meister der Ideenschau.’ Having facilitated its publication with
Niemeyer, Husserl was extremely favorable to Mahnke’s work of Kriegsphilos-
ophie. He observes, however, that this dedication strikes him as ‘ein bißchen
großartig,’ while quickly remarking that Mahnke should not thereby retract the
dedication (B III, 409). On the contrary, Husserl writes that such a dedication is
received in joy and gratitude. What nonetheless strikes Husserl as ‘ein bißchen
großartig’ is not the dedication per se, but the specific title assigned by Mahnke
to his Master and thus to this master’s philosophical thinking, as ‘der Meister
der Ideenschau.’ As Husserl insists, this designation should be changed, given
“die beständigen und unglaublichen Missverständnisse, denen meine philoso-
phischen Bemühungen bei flüchtigen und voreingenommenen Lesern unterla-
gen” (B III, 410). This is not to deny that phenomenology makes central to its
endeavor a cluster of problems designated by this otherwise ill-advised term of
Ideenschau. As Husserl reminds Mahnke: “In Wahrheit fordere ich ein allumfas-
sendes Studium der Welt der Ideen, aller Systeme ‘idealer Möglichkeiten’, als
Fundament für eine Erforschung der Wirklichkeit und ihrer endgültigen Sinne-
sinterpretation” (B III, 410). As Husserl expounds, this “all-encompassing study
of the world of ideas” entails an “umfassenden Bau aller eidet < ischen > Ontol-
ogien […], dann aber […] aller Phänomenologien, in denen jedwede Grundart
von Gegenständlichkeit in Bezug auf das gebende Bewusstsein studiert [wird]”
(B III, 410). The term Ideenschau lends itself to a fundamental misunderstanding
of what is central to the originality of Husserl’s phenomenological thinking: its
demand for an ‘encompassing study of the world of ideas.’ The term would thus
mark an important element to Husserl’s phenomenology while at the same time
obfuscating its genuine meaning.
As evident from this letter, Husserl’s phenomenological philosophy firmly rests
on the commitment of establishing an encompassing theoretical framework for ‘all
eidetic ontologies,’ where the meaning of ‘eidetic’ is characterized as ‘ideal possi-
bilities,’ as well as on the systematic investigation of intentionality in its various and

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related transcendental functions. This emphasis on the eidetic purchase of phenome-

nological philosophy encourages, on Husserl’s view, grave misunderstandings of his
project. As Husserl reports to Mahnke, his philosophical efforts are plagued by mis-
readings and confusions that would make of his thinking a new type of ‘Logicism
and Scholasticism,’ from which, as he wryly notes, one is said to extract (heraus-
pressen) a metaphysics. Husserl’s worry is not unfounded: Wilhelm Wundt (1910)
had charged Husserl’s Logical Investigations with the fault of ‘logicism’ and the
Neo-Thomistic appropriation of Husserl’s early phenomenology was already under-
way through Léon Noël (see Dupont 2014). Such misunderstandings touch upon the
central nerve of Husserl’s phenomenology: the reform of philosophical thought into
a rigorous science on the basis of an eidetic and transcendental science called phe-
nomenology. Is philosophy a robust form of knowledge, that is, a rigorous science?
What characterizes genuine philosophical knowledge in contrast to other forms of
knowledge? Is there a specific method, unique object (or domain of objects), and
particular guiding Idea of philosophical inquiry that would make of philosophical
thinking a project of research with foundational and systematic aims?
As formulated in Philosophy as Rigorous Science, Husserl’s reform of philo-
sophical thinking positioned itself against two fronts: against the ‘naturalization of
consciousness’ as well as the ‘naturalization of ideas.’ If the theme of intentionality
holds the key for a genuine phenomenological approach to consciousness, the theme
of eidetics holds the key for Husserl’s phenomenological renewal of a philosophical
theory of essences. Both are indispensable for Husserl’s conception of phenomenol-
ogy as promising in methodological and systematic terms the realization of philoso-
phy as a rigorous science. Husserl’s proposed reform of philosophical thought by
phenomenological means with inter alia “ein allumfassendes Studium der Welt der
Ideen” met with resistance, misunderstanding, and critique. Such confusions sur-
rounding one of the defining features of his phenomenological thinking haunted
Husserl even in his published works. In Ideen I, Husserl calls attention to the charge
of Platonism leveled against his earlier Logical Investigations, which clearly he felt
still dogged his transcendentally advanced thinking. As Husserl writes in evident
annoyance: “Besonderen Anstoss erregte es immer wieder, dass wir als angeblich
‘platonisierende Realisten’ Ideen oder Wesen als Gegenständen, wirkliches (wah-
rhaftes) Sein zusprechen, so wie, korrelativ damit Erfassbarkeit durch Intuition—
nicht anders wie bei den Realitäten” (Hua III, 48).1 Husserl’s corrective to this mis-
understanding does not merely respond to the charge of Platonism leveled against
the Logical Investigations written a decade before, but equally provides an antici-
patory response to the likely repetition of such a misunderstanding with respect to
his reformulated transcendental phenomenology in Ideen I. This charge against Hus-
serl’s ‘Platonism’ was further compounded by the perception that phenomenology
either rehabilitated a pre-Kantian form of intellectual intuition (as Ernst Cassirer
argued) or found itself committed to a form of mystical intuitionism.2 As Husserl

1
For complete references to Husserliana (Hua hereafter) and other primary Husserl materials, see the
shared bibliography at the end of the introduction (Aldea & Jansen) to the special issue this paper is part
of.
2
For Cassirer’s critique of Husserlian intuition, see de Warren 2015.

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274 Husserl Studies (2020) 36:271–286

notes in a letter from February 11, 1922 to his friend and student Winthrop Bell
after returning from his 1922 London Lectures, he continually finds himself strug-
gling to set his phenomenology aright against conflations with logical intuitionism
and the ‘mysticism’ of Bergsonian intuition, as most recently occurring during his
visit to England.
It was not only in England, among a philosophical environment different from his
own, that the originality of Husserl’s Wesenerkenntnis remained susceptible to mis-
understandings and conflations. Any novelty that appears extremely familiar neces-
sarily opens itself to contradictory types of misrecognition. The novelty of Husserl’s
thinking on this eidetic score was consciously formulated in forming part and parcel
of the audacity of Husserl’s phenomenological enterprise. That Husserl remained
extremely mindful of the challenge posed by this new phenomenological innovation
is evidenced by his sensitivity towards his student Mahnke’s proposed dedication.
At Husserl’s behest, rather than der Meister der Ideenschau, Mahnke adopted der
Meister der Wesensschau in the published edition of his work. This change from
Ideenschau to Wesensschau is anything but ornamental, for it signals a substantial
displacement and recasting of essences and knowledge of essences within Husserl’s
phenomenological thinking. As Husserl argued, this recasting of Ideenschau into
Wesensschau underpins phenomenology as ‘eine neuartige Philosophie’ which, as
he writes in his Introduction to Ideen I, necessarily runs against “all of our estab-
lished habits of thinking,” and, by implication, against the entrenchment of such
habits in the history of philosophy. But even as phenomenology’s new type of think-
ing runs against the historical grain of philosophy, it at the same time proposes an
ambitious attempt to retrieve and to renew the original aspiration of philosophy, as
Idea and method, from its Greek beginnings in Plato. As symbolized with Husserl’s
insistence on changing Mahnke’s designation of his philosophical mastery from
Ideenschau to Wesensschau, Husserl rejects any affinity between phenomenology
and an historically dominant form of Platonism associated with Ideenschau, while
nonetheless affirming the phenomenological restoration of a theory of essences,
under the heading Wesensschau, as indispensable for the realization of philosophy
as a rigorous science. This shift from Ideenschau to Wesensschau marks a point of
discontinuity as well as a point of continuity with the original master of philosophy,
Plato. The complexity of this shift from Ideenschau to Wesensschau is both a dis-
tancing from and a retrieving of the original Idea of philosophy for which Husserl
claimed a novel kind of mastery called phenomenological thinking.

2 Husserl’s Modernism

Of the many defining characteristics of Husserl’s ‘neuartige Philosophie,’ none is

more revealing of phenomenology’s anachronism and avant-gardism than Husserl’s
claim that phenomenology is based on a novel conception of Wesenerkenntnis. This
combination of anachronism and avant-gardism characterizes Husserl’s modernism.

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Although Husserl’s phenomenological thinking is not commonly associated with the

advent of modernism, or, more strictly speaking, as representing a form of mod-
ernism, this combination of old and new, of untimeliness and timeliness, that ani-
mates Husserl’s phenomenology reflects how Husserl situated his project within
the history of philosophy, and, more generally, within the destiny of Europe. In
the Introduction to Ideen I, Husserl defines transcendental phenomenology as “an
eidetic doctrine […] of phenomena that are transcendentally reduced” (exact ref?).
This inaugural statement of transcendental phenomenology arguably remains as pro-
vocatively ‘new’ today as it did one-hundred years ago; then, as now, we still lack
a systematic account of Husserl’s theory of essences, eidetic variation, and knowl-
edge of essences.3 Although Husserl’s insistence on phenomenology as an eidetic
science presents a conspicuous dimension of his thinking, it remains nonetheless
one of the least developed in his writings. Unlike other signature concepts (inten-
tionality, the lived-body, etc.) and distinctive method (reduction, epoche, etc.), dis-
cussions of eidetic variation and knowledge of essences remain extremely discrete in
his writings. Even the recent publication of Zur Lehre vom Wesen und zur Methode
der Eidetischen Variation (Hua XLI), despite its rich trove of manuscripts, reveals
an unsystematic and fragmentary state of affairs for what remains indispensable for
the philosophical underpinning of Husserl’s phenomenology.
For us today, the idea that philosophy should aspire to a form of scientific knowl-
edge, where the meaning of ‘scientific’ (wissenschaftlich) is to be carefully distin-
guished from the established meaning of ‘scientific’ in the natural and mathematical
sciences, has become historically surpassed. We no longer operate in a philosophical
environment where the plausibility or desirability of a scientific and foundational
philosophy can be easily secured. As argued by Richard Rorty, philosophy in the
­20th-century has been drawn in the opposite direction with its multitudinous rejec-
tions of any foundational project for philosophy. This telos of 2­ 0th-century philoso-
phy, away from any conception of philosophy as a foundational science, is epito-
mized by its vocal rejection of Platonism. As Alan Badiou observes, Nietzsche’s
slogan of overturning Platonism has come to define philosophical modernity itself.
To be philosophically modern is to define oneself against Platonism. As Badiou
writes: “It is beyond a doubt that this slogan organizes a convergence of the dispa-
rate tendencies within contemporary philosophy. Anti-Platonism is, strictly speak-
ing, the commonplace of our epoch” (2004, p. 37).
Against such a commonplace of philosophical modernity in the ­20th-century, Hus-
serl declared his own form of modernism with his phenomenological call for phi-
losophy as a rigorous science. This vision of phenomenology as fulfilling the “secret
dream of modern philosophy,” and through this fulfillment, the archaic dream of phi-
losophy shaped Husserl’s alternative philosophical modernity. Husserl’s reform of
philosophy by phenomenological means is, however, even more audacious, and, in
this sense, more anachronistic, since what defines the specific form of philosophical
knowledge called phenomenology is an eidetic science of ‘transcendentally reduced

3
See, however, Rochus Sowa (2007). For a spirited defense of Husserl’s Platonism against the critiques
of Heidegger, Derrida, and others, see Hopkins (2011). See also Majolino (2016). For a thorough investi-
gation of Husserl’s Platonism, see Arnold (2017).

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phenomena.’ This does not discount or minimize the centrality of intentionality,

constitution, and transcendental consciousness (in its embodied and inter-subjective
composition) for Husserl’s phenomenology. But, as Husserl states in the Introduc-
tion to Ideen I (and elsewhere in his lectures and publications meant to introduce the
Idea of phenomenology), this new science of transcendental phenomenology discov-
ers a new domain of objectivity (‘eigenartige Objektivität’) with its own sphere of
problems (‘eigentumliche Problemsphäre’).
As Husserl elaborates in his introductory remarks to Ideen I, the domain of phe-
nomenological inquiry circumscribes the essential properties of the sphere of expe-
rience as such (Wesenseigentümlichkeit der Erlebnissphäre überhaupt). Husserl
repeatedly defines the task of phenomenological analysis as a descriptive investiga-
tion of the structures of pure consciousness, by which Husserl specifically under-
stands, eidetic structures in their transcendental function of constitution, or, in other
words, as structuring the synthetic accomplishments of consciousness. This stress on
the essential structures of consciousness must be borne in mind, especially as a safe-
guard against the present vogue of conceiving phenomenology in exclusive terms as
an analyses of experience from the “first person point of view.” As Husserl devel-
ops in his detailed analyses of intentionality, the reduced field of pure conscious-
ness, as the field of so-called “transcendental experience,” is structured as a mani-
fold of manifolds. Husserl considers consciousness as an ‘infinite field’ of ‘eidetic
manifolds’ and ‘a priori forms of consciousness’ (Hua III, §63). Through-out his
writings, Husserl’s phenomenological descriptions of such manifold structures of
intentionality are gained through an implicit process of eidetic variation that Hus-
serl performed, but for which he rarely gives direct evidence of having performed,
let alone instructions for how. Husserl’s claim to have discovered a “new domain
of objectivity” forms the nub of its unfamiliar novelty; it orients the sense in which
“pure phenomenology is an essentially new science, one that, by virtue of its very
distinctiveness, lies far afield of natural thinking and consequently presses now, for
the first time, for development” (Hua III, p. 1). In “pressing for the first time” for its
development, this anachronistic commitment to a unique domain of objecthood for
philosophical inquiry, as an eidetic domain of structures and structuring accomplish-
ments of consciousness, would at the same time make of phenomenology something
so timely as to be ahead of its own times. From the opening lines of Ideen I, the
reader as would-be phenomenological thinker, as apprentice to an art of thinking
slowly dawning before her eyes, is invited to participate in an unheralded enterprise,
the significance of which is deemed pressing for our times, yet without any initial
transparency regarding the direction and object of this philosophical adventure. This
invitation to pure phenomenology takes the form of an initiation into an original
manner of thinking and novel form of seeing (Husserl speaks of developing a “new
intellectual eye”), and as such, struggles against the inertia and inhibition of “all our
previous habits of thinking.”
As Husserl understood, this new science of phenomenology represents something
of an impossibility from within the natural attitude. Naturalism does not just define
itself with respect to the naturalization of consciousness; it is equally defined by
the naturalization of essences and ‘hostility towards Ideas’ (Ideenfeindschaft). In
its criticism of naturalism, phenomenology restores to philosophy an intellectual

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friendship with Ideas. And yet, in this phenomenological turning of friendship

towards Ideas, Husserl will nonetheless remain steadfastly a friend of truth above
any faithfulness to Platonism, even while remaining a friend of Plato in seeking to
fulfill Plato’s archaic Idea of philosophy as a science of essences. Amicus Plato, sed
magis amica veritas.
A structuring metaphor of Husserl’s phenomenological Great Instauration of
phenomenology in Ideen I is revealing of how Husserl understands the significance
of his phenomenology enterprise in this regard. Husserl speaks of the phenomeno-
logical reduction as “discovering a new territory” of experience. As Husserl writes:
“Our way of proceeding is that of someone on a research trip in an unknown part
of the world, who carefully describes what presents itself to him on its untraveled
paths, paths that will not always be the shortest” (Hua III, p. 203). Ideen I is cast as a
“journey of exploration in an unknown part of the world.” This metaphor of explora-
tion expresses the underlying attitude of Husserl’s modernist aspiration. With this
intrepid attitude of broaching a novel territory of exploration, Husserl’s phenom-
enological enterprise places itself as the avant-garde of a philosophical modernism,
where the meaning of such an exploration of an unknown world is less the prospec-
tive triumphalism of conquest, and more akin to the wonder of cautious discovery—
not of a world other than that commonly, that is, naively, experienced in the natural
attitude, but the world of commonplace experience rediscovered and regained anew
from a genuinely philosophical perspective and interest.
Although Husserl’s phenomenology as an eidetic science and its purported dis-
covery of a new domain of objectivity would seem to be entirely anachronistic
within the development of 20th-century philosophy, it was in these exploratory
terms that Husserl envisioned his “new science” of phenomenology as advancing
its own form of modernism. This modernist impulse becomes more pronounced in
Husserl’s post-war essays on Erneuerung in the Japanese journal Kaizo, where phe-
nomenological philosophy is portrayed as nothing less than the avant-garde for a
European culture and humanity to come. At the center of this modernist vision of
European culture stands the Neue Sachlichkeit of phenomenology’s discovery of a
‘new form of objectivity,’ or, in other words, the field of pure experience in which
a priori structures of possible experience are to be mapped. This Neue Sachlichkeit
of phenomenological thinking positions itself against the expressionism of Leb-
ensphilosophie and Weltanschauungsphilosophie, but also against the dogmaticism
of positivism and bald naturalism.
Much as with other claimants to modernism at the turn of the 20th-century, phe-
nomenology responds to the crisis of the historical present, which Husserl under-
stands as defined by the falsification of reason through the paradoxical success of
reason with the triumph of the modern natural sciences and its consequent natu-
ralism; and with the fatigue of modern European culture with regard to the prom-
ise of reason in the form of Lebensphilosophie and Weltanschauungsphilosophie.
This falsification and fatigue become concentrated forms at the level of concepts, or,
more precisely, the conceptual signification of words. The crisis of modern reason
is inseparable from the modern crisis of language; and, specifically, the language
of reason. It is therefore not surprising, when seen through this lens, that the Pro-
legomena to the Logical Investigations as well as the First Logical Investigation

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are essentially concerned with language, signs, and signification. Husserl begins
by confronting the falsification of reason as incarnated in the numerous equivoca-
tions among fundamental concepts (consciousness, sign, logic, number, et.) and the
fatigue with reason as expressed by the abdication of thinking through the mech-
anization of signification. Signs become employed without any thinking; thinking
becomes detached from any intuitive givenness of ‘things themselves.’
The praxis of Husserl’s phenomenological reformation of philosophy responds
to this crisis of reason as a crisis of signs and significations. This forging of phe-
nomenological language serves as the implicit gateway into phenomenology itself.
In the concluding remarks of his Introduction to Ideen I, Husserl reminds his read-
ers that ‘phenomenology is here a science of essences’ (eine Wesenswissenschaft)
as an ‘a priori’ or ‘eidetic’ science. Revealingly, Husserl concludes his Introduc-
tion with what he calls a “brief terminological explanation.” As Husserl remarks,
philosophical terms are burdened by the “malignant heritage of the past,” by which
he understands specifically, “confusing ambiguities and equivocations” that inhibit
his phenomenological reformation of philosophy from its linguistic, intellectual, and
spiritual crisis (Hua III, p. 8). Philosophical concepts accrue sedimentations of usage
that render them obscure or empty of genuine signification. Husserl singles out the
terms Idee, Ideal, and Wesen, and remarks with the latter that, given its equivocation
and obscurity, he prefers to employ in its place the “foreign and terminologically
unspoilt term Eidos” as a German word (Hua III, p. 9). This act of translation, by
which Husserl reaches back to a so-called “unspoilt” and neutral term Eidos in order
to introduce a place-holder, or sign, in German for a phenomenological refashioning
of the concept of Wesen, effects a double-movement of translation: the extraction
and hence distancing of the Greek concept Eidos from its original meaning (as well
as the historicity of its transmission) and the forging of a new concept of Wesen
through this transplanted/translated term Eidos. Translation is here the crucible in
which phenomenology comes to its own speech, or philosophical logos.
In retrieving an “unspoilt” Greek term from the Greek in order to think forward to
a renewed conception of Wesen in German, Husserl both looks back to Plato in look-
ing forward to a Plato extracted from Platonism, to wit, to a retrieval of Plato from
Platonism (and from Greek philosophy and its reception) through the new science
of phenomenology (and its new institution of German philosophy). The term Eidos
becomes transposed—translated—into Husserl’s discourse as shorn of its encum-
bered Platonic meanings, so as to open a space as well as mark the place where
phenomenology will claim a novel, that is, renewed, meaning for Eidos. The Ger-
man term Wesen becomes in turn displaced by the “neutral” Eidos (and its cognate:
eidetic) in order to become reborn as Wesen once more in its genuinely instituted
phenomenological sense, and hence, in this regard, once again looking back to a
surpassed Platonism, as no longer conflated with the traditional meaning of Ideen in
the Platonic cipher Ideenschau. No longer thought in terms of Ideenschau, phenom-
enological Wesensschau must pass through a purifying renewal of Eidos. No longer
thought in terms of Platonism, phenomenological philosophy must pass through a
renewal of Plato in order to arrive at its genuine point of departure towards itself.

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3 Rhizomic Plato

The origin of philosophical concepts is often rhizomic. Such origins become rhi-
zomic, given that philosophers often lay down the roots of their own concepts
within their own conception of the history of philosophy, and thus over-lay the
actual historical genesis of their concepts (within the historical span of their biog-
raphy) with a super-imposed narrative of a virtual genesis extending back to the
origins of philosophy itself. Every concept within the constellation of Husserl’s
thinking possesses multiple lines of genesis within his writings. Aside from the
development of these multiple points of issue, Husserl constructed under the head-
ing of the history of philosophy a trans-generational genealogy which planted the
genesis of his phenomenological concepts within the historical life-span of phi-
losophy since its Greek origins. In transplanting the roots of his own thinking into
the history of philosophy, crafted in his own telling, Husserl lays down an his-
torical genealogy that over-lays his own proximate origins. Such self-planted roots
become entangled with the planting roots of a concept, thus blurring any clear
demarcation between the actual historical genesis of Husserl’s concepts and Hus-
serl’s own conception of their virtual genesis in the history of philosophy. In the
instance of the method of eidetic variation, essence, and knowledge of essences,
Husserl self-plants the roots of these concepts into his broader narrative of the
history of philosophy by attributing their virtual origin to Plato. Husserl refers
to Plato as ‘der Vater aller echten Wissenschaft,’ and even speaks of Plato as der
Urvater—as the primeval or founding father of fathers of philosophy, given that
Descartes will also be recognized as the ‘father of modern philosophy.’4 As Hus-
serl writes: “Man kann sagen, dass erst mit Platon die reinen Ideen: echte Erk-
enntnis, echte Theorie und Wissenschaft und—sie alle umspannend—echte Phi-
losophie, in das Bewusstsein der Menschheit traten” (Hua VII, pp. 12–13). In so
doing, concepts that are deemed to be “new” in phenomenology, as ‘eine neuartige
Philosophie,’ are molded as an anachronistic repetition of Plato’s original Idea of
philosophy. Anachronism must be understood as an act of translation and produc-
tive repetition, much in the vein proposed by art theorist Mieke Bal, for whom the
creativity of anachronism resides with the power of translation, where a chrono-
logically distant work translates another work as the “liberation and release of its
potential.” The repetition of a work from the past in the present would make of
its anachronism a retrieval of its potential to create a meaning, or better, space of
meaning, beyond its own temporal circumstances and historical reception (see Bal
1999, 2003). In Husserl’s ascription to Plato of the origins of his own phenom-
enological elements, this act of repetition does not repeat or reproduce an actual
Platonic thinking that once was. It does not fold Plato back into Platonism, but
releases Plato from Platonism in repeating within phenomenology a possibility of
thinking signed Plato.

4
On this image of Descartes within German philosophy, see Schütt (1998).

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Husserl’s image of Plato as the ‘father of philosophy’ is never based on any

extensive or engaged interpretation of Platonic dialogues. Nor does Husserl ever
discuss Plato with the intention of reconstructing a Platonic doctrine, for exam-
ple, Plato’s so-called theory of Ideas. As Husserl points out, Plato’s dialogues are
ridden with myths and poetical expressions that betray and obscure the genuine
idea of philosophy as a rigorous science that nonetheless animated his thinking.
As Husserl remarks: “auf den konkreten Gehalt seiner Philosophie darf ich nicht
eingehen, so sehr übrigens all eine Gedanken als triebkräftige Impulse für das
wissenschaftliche Denken der Folgezeit gewirkt haben” (HuaMat 9, 28).5 This
approach to the history of philosophy is not restricted to Husserl’s treatment of
Plato. In his lectures on Fichte’s Ideal of Humanity, Husserl grants that his pres-
entation of Fichte’s thinking is “doch etwas [eine] freie Interpretation, die aber
das Dunkel der Fichteschen Intentionen klären dürfte” (Hua XXV, 278). While
such liberty of performing an hermeneutical “free variation” on an historical fig-
ure might be seen as a substantial limitation to Husserl’s discussion of Plato (in
this instance) due to this self-serving manner of interpretation, Husserl’s pres-
entation of his own ideas through Plato allows for a self-presentation of his own
thinking at an historical distance from himself. Husserl plants in Plato the roots
from which Husserl himself grows philosophically. The yield of Husserl’s discus-
sion is an eidetic Plato dislocated from Platonism; it is Plato no longer defined by
an image of Plato’s theory of Ideas as metaphysical, epistemological, or political.
Such a phenomenological translation of Plato without Platonism (even as Plato
scholars can only bristle at Husserl’s conceit) yields a possibility yet to be ful-
filled signed ‘Plato.’
This displacement of Plato from Platonism effected through Husserl’s transplanta-
tion of the Idea of phenomenology back into Plato sources a possibility for re-think-
ing the concept of Idea, Ideal, and Wesen by phenomenological means. This act of
translation is retroactive and prospective: it translates back into Plato a proto-image
of Husserl’s own thinking while in the same gesture translating forward an image of
Plato into Husserl’s phenomenology. This act of translation, as a bi-directional trans-
lation between ‘Plato’ and ‘Husserl,’ as marking the span, and hence tension—the
veritable plot of the history of philosophy itself—also has a critical purchase as an
over-turning and re-turning. Even as Husserl claims the Idea of Plato, he remained
emphatic in his critique of Platonism, if we are here to understand the historical
reception of Plato’s so-called ‘theory of ideas’ that would equate Platonic Ideas with
“Gegenstände, die absolutes Sein haben.” In an illuminating manuscript from around
1918–1920, Husserl speaks of the importance of distinguishing different meanings
within the concept of Idea (Hua XLI, pp. 116–118). Although Plato is acknowledged
as discovering Ideas, he nonetheless “reduziert die Idee auf das allgemeine Wesen
(ideale Wesen) als Gegenstand.” Plato remains beholden to the distribution of ideas
into different classifications of objects, where categories of objects are conceived
under the title of general types. Platonism, in this Husserlian perspective, can be

5
For full references to the Husserliana Materialien, see the shared bibliography at the end of the intro-
duction to the special issue this paper is part of (HuaMat hereafter).

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understood as an interpretation of Ideas committed to conceiving Ideas as ‘objects’

with ‘absolute being’ and a conception of the ‘universal’ as a ‘general type.’
Such a conception underpins the term Ideenschau in the sense rejected by Husserl,
as denoting any form of Platonizing intuition and reification of essences. Platonism,
intellectual intuitionism, and mystical intuition fall under the shared presupposition
of considering essences as objects to which reality, in some manner, can be predi-
cated. As Husserl notes in a letter to Winthrop Bell, his rejection of traditional kinds
of Ideenschau hinges on what he considers to be one of the more original aspects of
this own theory of essences and eidetics. As he also observes in his letter to Mahnke:
“Die Idee einer ‘Wesenerkenntnis,’ welche nicht bloß unkontrollierbare Dicta eines
an eine mysteriöse ‘Intuition’ appellierenden Temperaments sind, ist in England neu”
(B III, 37). As Husserl developed under the title of ‘eidetic variation,’ the proper phe-
nomenological account of essences must display how one arrives at a knowledge of
essences through a rigorous method. This rejection of Platonism is not merely based
on methodological grounds. It equally reflects Husserl novel conception of essences
as ‘ideal possibilities,’ and hence not in any ontological or metaphysical sense as ‘real
or true being.’ These elements represent what was ‘new’ about his phenomenological
reform of philosophy. It is precisely this ‘new’ method of eidetic variation that Hus-
serl traces back to Plato’s original instauration of philosophy.

4 Twin Stars of Socrates and Plato

Unlike other sciences, philosophy cannot presuppose its domain of research and
method of investigation. Whereas the natural sciences can presume the domain of
their scientific inquiry as a natural given (plants for botany, the human body for anat-
omy, etc.), philosophy, in its own aspiration to achieve a scientific form of inquiry,
cannot assume as given its object of inquiry. Philosophy does not begin by merely
opening one’s eyes to a particular aspect of the world. As Husserl never failed to
stress, the proper domain of philosophical inquiry represented an entirely new
dimension of objectivity, thus requiring an original method of investigation and atti-
tude towards the world. It is not only, however, that philosophical inquiry must dis-
cover its proper domain of objects, method of investigation, and attitude of inquiry;
this new domain of objectivity must be discovered in terms of new problems, or bet-
ter, a novel sense of how to question the world. Philosophy is not a given, but given
to itself as not self-given. It does not emerge within the world of the natural attitude,
but breaks into the world of the natural attitude through its suspension and transfor-
mation—translation—into a genuinely philosophical problem, or questioning.
Husserl adopts the conventional attribution of the origin of philosophy to Plato,
even as he complicates this established narrative of origins. The origin of “First
Philosophy” in Plato is rhizomic. Rather than attribute the origin of the genuine
method and Idea of philosophy to Plato in the singular, Husserl consistently speaks
of Socrates and Plato as “twin-stars” (Doppelgestirn) (Hua XXXV, p. 52).6 This

6
For a more comprehensive account of Husserl’s image of Socrates, see De Santis 2019.

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two-fold origin of philosophy is a response to a crisis of reason. From the beginning,

the Idea of philosophy as a rigorous science emerges in the context of crisis. Crisis
and origin are bound to each other: there is no origin that is not already in crisis in a
dual sense, as both responding to a crisis and as itself falling into a crisis, insofar as
the original accomplishment of Plato’s discovery of the Idea, method, and domain
of “First Philosophy” is constituted through its own opacity, and, in this sense, tran-
scendence, to itself. From the beginning, there is no Plato without his own self-gen-
erated Platonism. Plato is, as it were, lost in translation from the beginning so as
to be recoverable, found once again, in translation. This translation, or recovery, of
Plato from Platonism through phenomenology, in turn, allows for phenomenology to
pass, or translate itself, from the past to the future, as instituting a renewal of philos-
ophy that would at once break with the past and yet fulfill its innermost and original
desire. The anachronistic dimension of Plato’s thinking is not merely an effect of the
repetition of Plato in the future; from the beginning, Plato is at once both anachro-
nistic with and in advance of himself.
Pre-Socratic thinkers proposed different views about the nature of the cosmos with-
out any substantial distinction between philosophy and science. This indiscernibility
between philosophy and science means that philosophy could not aspire to becoming
an autonomous and foundational ‘rigorous science’ given that philosophy, in this cos-
mological orientation, remained a ‘worldly science’ of being, with its object of study as
the totality of beings, or the cosmos. This Pre-Socratic identity between philosophy and
science fostered, on the one hand, a methodological fragility to philosophy in lacking
its own proper method and, on the other hand, a specialization of the sciences into a
technical form of knowledge. An echo of the future—Husserl’s own present—resounds
in this past image of the crisis of rationality, thus suggesting a repeating pattern, or
rebounding, of this form of crisis and origin through-out the history of philosophy
since its Greek beginnings.
This Pre-Socratic condition instigated a crisis of thinking with the consequence of
reducing knowledge to technê as well as provoking the skeptical challenge to the foun-
dations of knowledge. Sophistic rhetoric and scientific technical manipulation of signs
provoked the separation of philosophy from the natural sciences. Crisis, in this sense,
is productive of the origin of philosophy as ‘First Philosophy’ in provoking an inward
turning of thinking while at the same time establishing distinguishing philosophy from
the natural sciences. Socrates’ response to what Husserl dubs the ‘trivial games’ of
the Sophists initiated an ‘ethical reform of human life.’ Central to this Socratic ethical
response to the crisis of knowledge posed by the Sophists and their skeptical challenge
is the molding of a strictly speaking philosophical method of inquiry—Socratic dialec-
tic—which Husserl recognizes as the proto-type for his own method of eidetic varia-
tion, but which Socrates only fashioned within the restricted domain of ethical concepts
(virtue, justice, courage, etc.).
Two significant consequences follow from this Socratic response to the challenge
of skepticism and sophism. In discovering its genuine method and Idea, philosophy
becomes divested of its Pre-Socratic cosmological orientation. Philosophy is not cos-
mology, or, in other words, an ontology of nature. In this Socratic orientation, phil-
osophical knowledge no longer targets the ‘cosmos’ (Weltall), but takes as its proper
theme of investigation the foundations of knowledge as such and the foundation of a

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life in truth. This emancipation of philosophy from cosmology establishes a separation

between the natural sciences and philosophy. As Husserl stresses, this Socratic refor-
mulation of philosophy makes into a question the self-evident givenness of the cos-
mos, as the domain of scientific knowledge, into a philosophical question of the condi-
tions of possibility for knowledge. What is most trivial about the world, its givenness
in experience, becomes the index of a genuine philosophical questioning that does not
have the cosmos (Weltall) as its proper domain, but the possibility of any knowledge
of the cosmos. Philosophical thinking and the natural sciences achieve methodological
independence from each other in such manner that the method of philosophical think-
ing is neither a form of rhetoric nor comparable to the technê of the natural sciences.

5 Eidetic Dialectics

Husserl considers Socratic dialectic to be a method for the clarification of equivo-

cations among ethical concepts. This emphasis on the clarification of equivoca-
tions resonates with Husserl’s own procedure in the Logical Investigations, where,
for example, his phenomenological analysis of consciousness in the Fifth Investi-
gation is guided by the clarification of equivocal concepts such as Vorstellung and
Bewusstsein. Husserl’s procedure of clarification aims at univocal determinations
of concepts based on intuitive givenness; the intentionality of the concept towards
its object becomes progressively concretized, fulfilled, through phenomenological
descriptions. In the case of Socrates’ dialectical questioning, Husserl proposes that
this method is “eine geregelte zeugende Tätigkeit” that produces a conceptual clari-
fication (HuaMat 9, p. 27). Socratic clarification of any given concept culminates
with a moment of insight (Einsicht). Husserl stipulates that Socratic dialectics pro-
ceeds through a series of examples (examples of courage, for example) that undergo
a process of variation. The function of examples within this productive activity of
reason (erzeugender Vernunfttätigkeit) is not, however, to provide ‘mere examples’
(blosse Beispiele), by which Husserl understands, illustrations for general concepts
already established, or known. Instead, examples are taken to be exemplifications
of conceptual structures in the making, or ‘constitution,’ through what Husserl calls
the ‘praxis of evidence.’ A concept becomes ‘produced’ on the basis of intuitions
(Anschauungen). Intuition, as a method of discovery, is first and foremost a praxis,
yet this praxis of thinking, in its Socratic form, is neither syllogistic nor dialectic,
but, as Husserl stresses, eidetic. Instead of considering reason as a form of syllo-
gism or as a form of dialectic, Husserl argues that Socrates’ method of philosophical
disputation and discovery recognizes reason as eidetic variation. The ‘free fiction’
of eidetic variation is not the finitization of reason, as would be in Kant, but the
infinitization of sense, insofar as variation liberates the pure Eidos from real pos-
sibility to the domain of ideal possibilities. Husserl defines this Socratic method as
“klärenden Sinnes und Wesenanalyse von begrifflichen Vorstellungen” under the
directive of a renewal of the life in spirit (eine Erneuerung des Lebens in Geist) and
practical-rational form of life (HuaMat 9, p. 28). In this regard, Socratic dialectic
was shaped by a responsibility towards knowledge in the interest of clarifying the
foundation and possibility of knowledge for the sake of knowledge itself. Such an

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ethical attitude allowed for the re-establishment of trust (Vertrauen) in the capacity
of reason (HuaMat 9, p. 34).
Even though Socratic eidetic dialectics remained limited to ethical concepts and
its ‘practical employment,’ this precursor to Plato was already firmly forged as a
method “leading back to the ultimate sources of intuition of essences” (eine Meth-
ode der Zurückführung auf die letzten Quellen der Wesensintuition) (HuaMat 9, p.
34). Plato’s significance resides, for Husserl, in his continuation and expansion of
Socrates’ call for renewal and reform of philosophical thought. In terms mirroring
Husserl’s own self-image, Plato’s fundamental aim consisted in a ‘universal method-
ological reform,’ not only of human knowledge, but of human life, insofar as philo-
sophical reason would offer a path for the realization of human existence as shaped
by reason. As with Socrates, Plato’s seeks a fundamental trust (Vertrauen) in the
possibility of human knowledge and its fundamental significance for human exist-
ence. At the center of Plato’s institution of the idea of rigorous philosophy is his
“Entdeckung der Grundmittel aller echten Erkenntnis” (HuaMat 9, p. 31). This dis-
covery of philosophy as an Ideal, with a teleological movement towards its own self-
realization and method for the production of concepts based on evidence, constitutes
Plato’s enduring Forwirkung: “eine Wissenschaft von den Ideen als den ewig gülti-
gen Normen aller Vernunft” (HuaMat 9, p. 33).
Husserl’s treatment of Plato’s “viel beredeten, viel verkannten und bestrittenen
Ideenlehre” centers on the question: “was sind das: ‘Ideen’ im platonischen Sinne, was
sind sie methodologisch und worin besteht ihre Funktion für die Ermöglichung ech-
ter Wissenschaft?” (HuaMat 9, p. 36). Ideas are distinguished from the real objects of
sense-perception, yet ideas are not separated from sense-perceptions, given their basis
in the variation of examples, and hence, production from sense-experience. Husserl
proposes that Plato’s ontological division between the “pure world of Ideas” and the
world of sense experience, which has come to define the historical legacy and inherit-
ance of Platonism, is both rooted and uprooted by Plato’s thinking. In noting Plato’s
own inter-changeable use of the terms Idea and Eidos, Husserl acknowledges the Pla-
tonic-Socratic discovery of essences (Wesen) as an ‘eigenartige Objektivität,’ or domain
(Reich) of true being over-and-above the flux of perceptual objects. The validity of such
objects, essences, cannot be reduced to sense-perception even as such objects, essences,
are known, or arrived at, from sense-perception through the method of eidetic variation.
Husserl, however, cautions against submitting this domain of essences to an ontological
interpretation as ‘real existing objects’ (real seiender Gegenstand).
Such an ontological reading of Plato’s divided line leads to what Husserl dubs a para-
doxical and “ridiculous” theory of ideas called Platonism. On the contrary, if we con-
sider the meaning of ‘objectivity’ not in terms of real existing object, but as a struc-
ture of validity, as a form of possibility, then such ‘ideal essences’ are, in one sense,
objects of knowledge, yet given in a different and corresponding form of intuition
and evidence. As Husserl observes: Plato’s “reiner Ideenschau” can be translated into
modern terms as “eidetischer Evidenz” (“in reiner Ideenschau (modern gesprochen: in
eidetischer Evidenz))” (HuaMat 9, p. 43). Eidetic evidence is the self-givenness (Selb-
stgegebenheit) of essences as objects of philosophical knowledge. This intuitive appre-
hension of an essence does not deliver an object in an ontological sense, as real being
or mental entity. Instead, as Husserl argues, essences are not ‘entities’ but forms, or

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structures, of variability, indeed, forms of possibilities. As Husserl writes: “Ich habe in

der Phantasie als einer Vergegenwärtigung verschiedener Klarheitsstufe notwendig Dis-
tanz vom Gegenstand selbst und von der eigentlich quasi-Warhnehmung, die ich quasi
ursprünglich aufbaue, und so ist der phantasierte Gegenstand unbestimmt nach dem sich
quasi aufbauenden Sinn […] Er ist nur dem Allgemeinen nach, als Farbe, als Rot, etc.
bestimmt, das ist hier nicht ein gedachtes Allgemeines, ein begriffliches, sondern eine
Form der Variabilität” (Hua XXIII, p. 550). It is in this sense of ‘form of variability’ that
Husserl translates the phenomenological core of Plato’s conception of ideas. In this act of
translation, ‘Plato’ becomes released from Platonism. As Husserl proposes: “Platonische
Ideen, wenn wir sie frei halten von jederlei nur allzu leicht sich eindrängenden mythis-
chen Beimengungen, sind allgemeine Wesenheiten, nicht aus der Erfahrung, sondern in
einem reinen Schauen, in einer generalisierenden Intuition zu schöpfen und in ihr dann
auch gegenständlich gegeben” (HuaMat 9, p. 61). But as Husserl also remarks: “An den
Gedanken einer formalen Ontologie in unserem Sinne hat er [Plato] selbst schon gerüht,
er hat ihn nur nicht festzuhalten gewusst” (HuaMat 9, p. 60).
This eidetic praxis of evidence is a spontaneous activity of the ‘soul’ directed in an
intentional manner towards essences as objects. The establishment (Herstellung) of an
essence requires drawing upon experience, namely, examples drawn from experience.
As Husserl further remarks, the range of examples that productively can enter into such
an Herstellung of an essence (for example: the essence of friendship—Husserl’s exam-
ple) can either be taken from actual experiences or from imagined intuitions (fingier-
ende). In both cases, the procedure (Verfahren) of evidence requires that an experience
becomes “remodeled in free action of phantasie” (“das wirkliche Erfahrene in freier
Phantasie-Aktion unmodellieren”) (HuaMat 9, p. 40).
Husserl makes an intriguing suggestion that the operation of “free phantasy” (freie
Phantasie) in Plato’s dialectical method is structured by the dynamic of posing and
answering questions, not so much among interlocutors (in fact: Husserl downplays this
dialogical dimension), but in terms of the ‘soul’ and its object of questioning. The oper-
ation of variation is modeled, in other words, on the back and forth of questioning and
answering, such through by means of such variations, the form of an essence becomes
discerned and thought. As Husserl remarks, “wir denken uns den Fall verändert, wir
fingieren ihn um und fragen” (HuaMat 9, p. 45). How might this be different, could this
be thought in this way, etc., such prompts allow the soul to arrive at an essence, and
in such a manner that the soul hears (or ‘sees’) the response of the object itself—the
essence. As Husserl expresses this insight: “Nur in der freien und sinnvoll geleiteten
Selbsttätigkeit der Entfaltung dunkler Intentionen hört das Ich die Stimme der Sachen,
es vernimmt gewissermassen ihre Aufforderungen, so und so Stellung zu nehmen, so
und so sich zu entschieden in Anerkennung und Verwerfung […]”(HuaMat 9, p. 38).
Eidetic variation is thus anchored in an ethical attitude and responsibility: we must
remain truthful to the answers given by things themselves, and follow the unfolding
structure of an essence as it comes into focus before us. Essence are, in this manner,
interrogated, and interrogation is not distinct from dialectics. Although Husserl does
not allude to the canonical texts of Theaetetus (189e-190a) and Philebus (38a-38d),
phenomenological eidetic variation and Wesensschau represent a re-formulation of
Plato’c celebrated image of the soul in dialogue with itself. As Plato writes in the The-
aetetus: “It is a conversation (logos) the soul pursues by itself concerning any matter

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for thought […] As the soul thinks in this way, it presents the picture of doing noth-
ing other than conversing, as it asks itself questions and gives answers, and asserts or
denies. And, when it has reached some definite conclusion, it springs to it either after
some delay or quickly. We think of this as the soul’s judgment. For this reason, I call
forming an opinion ‘spoken discourse’—not indeed one addressed to another individ-
ual or spoken aloud, but one a person voices silently to himself” (189e-190a).

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7
For full references to the Husserliana and Husserliana Materialien, see the shared bibliography at the
end of the introduction to the special issue this paper is part of.

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