Eidetic Variation: a Self-Correcting and Integrative Account

Edmund Husserl’s eidetic phenomenology seeks a priori knowledge of essences and eidetic laws pertaining to conscious experience and its objects. Husserl believes that such eidetic knowledge has a higher epistemic status than the inherently fallible empirical knowledge, but a closer reading of his work shows that even eidetic claims are subject to error and open to modification. In this article, I develop a self-correcting account of Husserl’s method of eidetic variation, arguing that eidetic variation plays a critical role in both challenging and improving upon the eidetic results in phenomenology. More specifically, I argue that the self-correcting account of eidetic variation 1) is consistent with Husserl’s own formulations of his eidetic methodology and epistemic principles; 2) captures the dual epistemic function of eidetic variation as means for both testing and intuitively validating eidetic claims; and 3) offers methodological support for contemporary attempts to integrate eidetic variation with non-eidetic methods and resources. To substantiate these claims, I first contrast the self-correcting account with the falsificationist interpretations of eidetic variation. Then, I turn to three applications of eidetic variation in order to examine how eidetic phenomenology could draw from real-life deviations, artificial variations, and critical–historical reflection. The goal is to lay the methodological groundwork for a self-correcting and integrative account of eidetic variation and illustrate its usefulness in research practice.

DIALOGIC PHENOMENOLOGY OF PAIN EXPERIENCE SAULIUS GENIUSAS THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF PAIN. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2020 ISBN 978-0-8214-2403-2

The review focuses on Saulius Geniusas’ book, The Phenomenology of Pain. In this study, Geniusas develops his own systematic phenomenology of the experience of pain, based primarily on the conceptual resources of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. In doing so, the philosopher formulates and successfully implements original methodological principles of “dialogical phenomenology.” Such a phenomenology consists of, on the one hand, strict phenomenological analysis of pain based on the methods of epoché, phenomenological reduction and eidetic variation, and on the other hand, of actual and partly polemical inclusion of phenomenological point of view in the ongoing discussion of pain in the social and biological sciences. The author manages to do this by supplementing his eidetic analysis of the essence of pain experience with the method of “factual variations” and by appealing to the analytical optics of Husserl’s late genetic phenomenology. This way the book reflects—on strictly phenomenological grounds—numerous findings from the sociology and biology of pain. The book relies on the tradition of phenomenological research, offers a conceptual reconstruction of the key dispute about pain that took place in this tradition (between Franz Brentano and Carl Stump) and, in its turn, grounds the positive sciences of pain in the direct evidence of experience itself.

Phenomenology and the Problem of Universals

This paper argues that the Problem of Universals as derived from Plato, i.e. the question of how abstract universal knowledge is possible and what that knowledge is of, is at the center of Phenomenology. It will be shown how Husserl’s answer to this question, via phenomenological epoche and eidetic variation, orients him primarily within the field of modern philosophy and is open to the standard criticisms of universal knowledge and abstraction offered by Hume and Berkeley. Heidegger, in more overtly recognizing the origin of the problem in Plato and orienting phenomenology directly in relation to the Platonic answer to that problem, is able to achieve a clarity about the modern prejudices of philosophy and so is able to reinvent phenomenology free from the distortions of an unquestioned metaphysics of presence and assumption of the necessity of structure grounded in an unrecognized substance ontology.

Hen epi pollon. The Origin of Husserl’s Eidetic Variation and the Divide Between Plato and Aristotle on the Universal

It is commonly known that Husserl’s eidetic variation is of paramount importance for phenomenology. For if phenomenology is a science of pure essences and formulates scientific laws about such essences, there has to be something like a method to follow in order to discover and test such eidetic truths; and this method is dubbed as eidetic variation. Now, a crucial aspect of this method has not been under active consideration yet: namely, as Husserl stresses in Experience and Judgment, that the eidetic variation is somehow to be related to the Greek notion of “hen epi pollôn”: the one over the many. An expression first used by Aristotle in the context of his dispute with Plato on the status of intelligible objects as universals. Accordingly, it seems clear that, by using this expression, Husserl wanted to refer his method to this Aristotle/Plato divide. The aim of this paper is to take this claim seriously, and to show, by an historical detour which takes into consideration this dispute, in which sense this method can be considered as a crucial contribution to the tradition to which phenomenology belongs, namely the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition.

Husserlian Eidetic Variation and Objectual Understanding as a Basis for an Epistemology of Essence

Vaidya has recently argued that while Husserl’s method for acquiring knowledge of essence through use of our imagination is subject to a vicious epistemic circle, we can still use the method to successfully attain objectual understanding of essence. In this paper, I argue that the Husserlian objectual understanding-based epistemology envisaged by Vaidya suffers from a similar epistemic circularity as its knowledge-based foil. I argue that there is a straight-forward solution to this problem, but then raise three serious problems for an amended version of Vaidya’s proposal and any similar Husserlian epistemology of essence. The paper closes with some general reflections on applying the Husserlian method to the contemporary notion of essence and on the idea of refocusing the epistemology of essence on understanding instead of knowledge.

SPECULATIVE IDENTITY AS ABSOLUTE SELF MEDIATION: A FEW APPRAISALS OF THE HEGELIAN LOGIC

Hegelian speculative thought structures its movement through immediately reflected change of opposites. This exchange within elements isn’t merely shifting heterogeneous objects as it doesn’t concern objects’ ontological condition either. The speculative is the opening where the internal constitution and effectiveness of any element is questioned and revealed as simultaneous and immediate overcome of subject and object since the horizon of this opening concerns the absolute conditions of content and form and where the method self-reflected within premises is questioned too. For the true Concept of philosophy, Hegel shows, immediate beginning of knowledge is immediate beginning of Being; and advancement from pure indeterminateness to determinate being’s development supposes self-mediation of the same absolute immediacy, since ineluctably the speculative can’t admit suppositions’ arbitrariness. But such radical endeavor is accomplishable if the ultimate truth of Being (Wesen) is absolutely mediated immediacy — namely Actuality (Wirklichkeit) is the expression of absolutely self-mediated absolute immediate Identity. This fundamental principle is mirrored in the Trinitarian ground of the Hegelian speculative philosophy which is the main doctrinal postulate that permeates the entire metaphysical endeavor of the German thinker. In this, Hegel was singular, although the initiative of rebuilding philosophy without any prior supposition is not exclusively Hegelian. We can think about the Husserlian epoché as a project of redefining the limits of apodictic philosophy and the eidetic variation as the grounds for his fundamental insight (Einsicht). However, we have found that Husserlian phenomenology is yet deriving its entire structure within the realm of determinacy where the principle of determinate, and thus of formal identity, dominates. Hegelian identity is established precisely by an absolute rupture from formal relations and is an eminent case of a speculative opening towards the premises of a transcendent thinking whose eminence would ground the ultimate sight of genuine identity of appearance and essence, of thought and being. Keywords: Hegel, Husserl, Maldiney, speculative logic, absolute identity, immediacy, mediation, phenomenology.

The Phenomenological Method of Eidetic Intuition and Its Clarification as Eidetic Variation

This chapter investigates phenomenology’s “eidetic” methodology, which, when applied to the essential structures of consciousness, opposes an empirical psychology that must rest on empirical generalizations. It clarifies the sense in which eidetic intuition is a form of cognition and how it yields knowledge of a priori (necessary and universal) structures without falling into a kind of Platonism that hypostasizes what is essential to a type. It also explores the intimate connection between “free phantasy” or imaginative variation and the resultant eidetic intuition. In concluding, it discusses a series of potential difficulties with the notions of eidetic variation and intuition.

Is Heidegger a Phenomenologist?

This panel explores Heidegger’s complicated relationship with phenomenology. One question is whether Heidegger was a phenomenologist at all. For Husserl, phenomenology was the study of essential structures of consciousness, and since Heidegger rejects both the ontological and methodological priority of consciousness, it might seem like he rejects phenomenology as well. On the other hand, the defining motto of phenomenology is ‘to the things themselves,’ and this seems to capture the persistent aim of Heidegger’s thinking, be it the work of art, technology, language, animality, or Dasein itself. Yet even if there is some way that Heidegger is ‘doing phenomenology,’ it’s not at all clear how he is doing it. He abandons Husserl’s reliance on the epoche, self-reflection, eidetic variation, and so on, and yet, while clearly not employing such a method, Heidegger does frequently write about a way of thinking proper to philosophy—can this way be described as phenomenological? In some ways our question is intractable—there are just too many ways to define phenomenology and too many ways to read Heidegger such that no single, broad consensus on both is likely to emerge—and yet, the question seems crucial for the understanding of Heidegger’s philosophy as a whole. Phenomenology, one can argue, holds the double promise that we can still think with Heidegger, instead of thinking about him as historical figure, and that there is something in his thought that is revealed, and not just postulated or construed.