• 1  Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologische Forschung. Erstes Buch: Allgem (...)
• 2  Ibid., pp. 9-10; English trans., p. 7.
• 3  Ibid., p. 10; English trans., p. 8.

3Already in the introduction to Ideas I Husserl distinguishes phenomenology and psychology by presenting the former as “a science of essences (as an ‘eidetic’ science)” whose corresponding methodological instrument is a reduction: “The relevant reduction which leads over from the psychological phenomena to the pure ‘essence’ [...] is the eidetic reduction”1. In § 2 he opens the reasoning by unfolding an inner overturning of factuality, that is by showing how “fact” cannot but reveal itself as “essence”. In the argumentative form this becomes particularly evident where Husserl makes use of the word Wesen (essence) to directly describe the Tatsachen, that is in the very moment in which he has not yet performed any reduction – in which, to say it better, he should not be yet able to speak of essence. Individuality means thus, “with respect to its essence [seinem Wesen nach]”, “something factually existing spatiotemporally, as something that is at this temporal locus” but that “could just as well have been at any other temporal locus”; “Individual existence of every sort is, quite universally speaking, ‘contingent’. It is thus; in respect of its essence it could be otherwise [o.i.]”2. Husserl himself recognizes his strategy: “When we said that any matter of fact, ‘in respect of its own essence’, could be otherwise, we were already saying that it belongs to the sense of anything contingent to have an essence and therefore an eidos which can be apprehended purely; and this eidos comes under eidetic truths belonging to different levels of universality”. That allows him to assert that, phenomenologically, “Experiencing, or intuition of something individual can become transmuted into eidetic seeing (ideation) – a possibility which is itself to be understood not as empirical, but as eidetic”3.

• 4  See “The Basic Problems of Phenomenology” in Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. T (...)

4The Husserlian strategy consists in remarking at the same time analogies and differences between eidetic and empirical intuition. The result is that Husserl, not in spite of, but in light of these efforts, cannot conceive of eidetic intuition but on the model of the empirical one. The fact that he, in describing “factuality”, cannot but anticipate – to its being not yet intuitively grasped – the notion of Wesen, testifies, beyond all the appeals to the possibility of a “transmutation” of a fact into an essence, not simply to a lack of method, but to the fact that the question itself of the passage to the eidetic attitude does not appear as a problem altogether: the impression is that the eidetic intuition is consequence of a blunt change of attitude4 which cannot to be able to guarantee that what in such a way is obtained is really an essence and not the empirical generalization from the individually given right now.

• 5  Hua III/1, p. 12; English trans., p. 11.

7But what about phantasy? Husserl states at the beginning of § 4 that “The eidos, the pure essence, can be exemplified for intuition in experiential data – in data of perception, memory, and so forth; but it is equally well exemplified in data of mere phantasy”5: “In this connection, it does not matter whether anything of the sort has ever been given in actual experience or not. If, by some psychological miracle or other, free phantasy should lead to the imagination of data (sensuous data, for example) of an essentially novel sort such as never have occurred and never will occur in any experience”. It is amazing that “free phantasy should lead to the imagination of data [...] of an essentially novel sort such as never have occurred and never will occur in any experience” – but it is amazing too that this would be only due to “some psychological miracle or other”. The reference Husserl makes to phantasy does not come then in conflict with what we argued: it means on the contrary that it makes the phenomenological inquiry free from whatsoever Tatsache and Aktualität affectting perception, but it is conceived just as a possible starting point upon which the phenomenologist can develop eidetic considerations, the other starting point being obviously perception. It just furnishes material to submit to eidetic gaze, namely to the change of attitude.

• 6  Ibid., pp. 129-130; English trans., pp. 157-158.
• 7  Ibid., pp. 130-131; English trans., p. 158. “The popular concept of phantasy, however, does not re (...)

8Even if we suddenly switch to § 70, we cannot but repeat the just asserted: “It is of the universal essence of the immediately intuitive seizing upon essences that (as we have already emphasized) it can be effected on the ground of a mere presentification of exemplificative single particulars. Presentification, e.g., phantasy, however, as we have just explained, can be so perfectly clear that is makes possible a perfect seizing upon essence and a perfect eidetic insight [o.i.]”6. Here, again, phantasy is what makes possible, near to perception, “a perfect seizing upon essence and a perfect eidetic insight”; and in fact, considered as presentification, it is equated to whatever other form of Vergegenwärtigung. Of course, perception has a certain privilege due first of all to its giving in originality, but, as well-known: “There are reasons by virtue of which in phenomenology, as in all eidetic sciences, presentifications and, more precisely, free phantasy acquire a position of primacy over perceptions”7. At this very moment of the reasoning Husserl evokes the model of the “investigative thinking of geometer” by comparing it with the phenomenologist. This latter

• 9  Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil. Untersuchungen zur Genealogie der Logik, hrsgg. von L. Landgrebe, H (...)

11Among all the Husserlian texts we opt for Experience and Judgment (§§ 86-93) because it seems to offer the most organic and structured articulation of eidetic variation. The § 87 provides direct insights into the method of “eidetic seeing”. The first section (a) is on “free variation as the foundation of essential seeing” and Husserl immediately asserts the necessity of preliminarily “freeing” the universality from the given contingency. This Befreiung is the “modification” of “an experienced or phantasied objectuality into an arbitrary exemplarity [Exempel]”9. The first transition is thus from contingency to exemplarity.

• 10  Ibid., pp. 413-414; English trans., pp. 342-343.

14Switching to the third section (c) we realize that Husserl has still to show in what way we attain the eidos right in the middle of the manifold of variations. He remarks that “In this multiplicity [...] is grounded as a higher level the true seeing of the universal as eidos”. This is the second transition, the one from exemplarity to essentiality. Then comes the variation, described as a “transition” “from image to image, from the similar to the similar” in which “all the arbitrary particulars attain overlapping coincidence in the order of their appearance and enter, in a purely passive way, into a synthetic unity in which they all appear as modifications of one another”10. What here strikes is the equivalence Husserl settles on between image – and then variation as variation of images that at the same time are copies too –, and Ähnlichkeit, in this way arranging eidetic variation as a variation of similarities.

• 11  Ibid., p. 414; English trans., p. 343.

15At the end of the process of variation we grasp “the eidos as the ideally identical, which only is an hen epi pollon. [...] Only if we retain in grasp the earlier fictions [Fikta], as a multiplicity in an open process, and only if we look towards the congruent and the purely identical, do we attain the eidos”11. The passage confirms one point in particular: that along all the process of variation we have to take into account phantasy mainly with reference to the ontological status of the varied as Fiktum; this means that the Fikta plays the role of mediation between the staring point (Übergang from contingency to exemplarity) and the eidos (Übergang from exemplarity to essentiality).

• 12  Ibid, p. 224; English trans., p. 189.

16It is in § 44 that Husserl develops an accurate analysis of both Gleichheit and Ähnlichkeit; analysis which, even though offered on the ground of an account for the passive synthesis of receptivity, already anticipates the future meaning of its outcomes12. Then a first description of the process of grasping similarities which recalls the one aiming at the essence: “The contemplative running-trough changes into a succession of single apprehensions, and in the transition from apprehension to apprehension there comes to prominence for observation [...] a foundation of similarity or likeness between this and that, as well as what is made dissimilar and unlike by contrast. The things which are common ‘coincide’, while those which are different separate”. It is question of a “coincidence in the objectual sense”. After such a preliminary, and common to both “similarity” and “likeness”, characterization, Husserl switches to an account for what more directly differentiates the former from the latter. Here a long but very clear extract:

• 16  “Das konkrete Wesen ist das en epi pollon und zwar das vollständige Eidetisch-Identische der Manni (...)

24The Husserlian words themselves reflect the status of the androgynous by attributing to it features that have immediately to be retracted, as the one of individuality. Husserl certainly states that “the identical substrate, is not an individual pure and simple”; but in accounting for this “concrete androgynous unity” he ascribes to it the same logic he usually makes use of in describing the classical phenomenon of a correction of an perception (“it is a human being”) by a second one (“it was just a mannequin”) which retentionally holds that former but only “in the cancelled form” (durchstrichenen Form). If it were so, namely if Husserl were authorized to speak of “unity of individual mutually nullifying and coexistentially exclusive”, that means that what entails these coexistentially exclusive possibilities, is not yet a realm of “pure possibilities” – which should only mean ideal, i.e. non-exclusive, possibilities –, but just “real possibilities” in the course of variation (hen epi pollon)16. Only of real possibility (“alle realen Möglichkeiten betreffen Unverträglichkeiten in der Tatsachenwelt” (Ms. D 12, 83b)) one can assert what Husserl asserts here of what should be a pure eidos (“This remarkable androgynous unity is at the bottom of essential seeing”): its being “unity of individual mutually nullifying and coexistentially exclusive”.

• 17  Husserl, Phänomenologische Psychologie. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1925, hrsgg. von R. Boehm, Huss (...)

26Let us represent anew the above recalled rhythms of the variation as follows:
1) Faktum → 2) Exempel: reality as possibility17 → 3) Fikta → 4) hen epi pollon: underlying unity of real possibilities (reale Möglichkeiten) → 5) ideal possibility (ideale Möglichkeit)

• 18  Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil, op. cit., p. 437; English trans., p. 360.

27The very reason lying at the basis of the difficulty of catching an eidos emerges properly speaking in § 93, where Husserl faces the problem that “the establishment of the exemplarity to be varied already demands an intricate method”18. The very problem is that, taking as starting point of the whole operation of variation “a thing intended in the exemplary initial intuition”, this thing owns “an open infinity” and “only implicitly includes these ‘infinities’ in its intention, and in fact in such a way that each of these infinities, moreover, is entwined in a multiplicity of relativities”. Variation itself has to operate on such a relativity to grasp “the course of possible experience productive of intuition”, but the question finally touches the manner in which we became aware of the essence (“every single thing has its own essence”) in the course of variation: at what point can we assert with certainty that variation obtains the essence?

• 19  In one passage from the manuscript A III 11, 30a Husserl asserts that by just repeating “two” time (...)

28This question may seem superfluous to whoever remembers that Husserl himself recognizes that it is not necessary a real and actual variation, but only a consciousness of Beliebigkeit. But, and here the problem arises anew, either in fact this consciousness of Beliebigkeit is sufficient at the very moment in which we attain the Exempel, in such a way rendering the operation itself of similarity-variation totally superfluous; or, to get the consciousness of Beliebigkeit, it is however necessary to operate variations (even if only one or two single variations), in such a way giving birth to the problem of where we have to locate the limit of these variations only whose achievement gives us the certainty of having obtained the Beliebigkeit19. But similarity-variation does entail no criterion to be certain of this fact and the consequence cannot be but the impossibility of being sure of having finally grasped an underlying unity, in this way switching from 3 to 4 – from continually different and divergent variations to the hen epi pollon.

• 20  Hua XIII, p. 215; English trans., p. 134: “There is a distinction to be made between the logically (...)

29That means that this variation, not only does not seem to furnish ideal possibilities (“ein absolut reines Eidos” (Hua IX, p. 74)), but rather, if we take a closer look, it is also not able to offer the hen epi pollon. The three phases are, respectively, similarity-variation offering a manifold of variations; the hen epi pollon, or “eidos as the ideally identical”, providing an underlying unity to all those variations; finally the pure eidos, whose unity would be a pure possibility20.

• 21  Dieter Lohmar, “Die phänomenologische Methode der Wesensschau und ihre Präzisierung als eidetische (...)
• 22  See Roman Ingarden, Einführung in die Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls. Osloer Vorlesungen 1967, hrs (...)

31On the basis of these critical remarks it comes into play the necessity of taking into consideration the second form of eidetic variation, the “contingency-variation” which, facing a limit under the shape of features that cannot be varied – under penalty of denying the ontological status of the object –, should be able to offer a methodological solution. It is for this reason that we cannot agree with D. Lohmar, who argues about the necessity of switching from “contingency-variation” to the one of similarity21. The disagreement has not only a theoretical reason – for it is the “similarity” to not offer a very, even if negative, criterion to halt variation –, but mainly textual: it seems to us that it is not possible to find the method of eidetic variation before Phänomenologische Psychologie (circa22), that is before its being arranged as similarity-variation.

• 23  Carl Stumpf, Über den psychologischen Ursprung der Raumsvorstellung, Leipzig, Verlag von S. Hirzel (...)

36This latter is of particular interest: for it is in fact right in the middle of probably the most quoted pages of this book where Stumpf introduces the well-known distinction between self-subsistent and partial contents, that he appeals too to the method of variation as “alteration” (Veränderung) of the absolute contents of a representation. Stumpf argues that, in the case we succeed in separating two contents, it is sure that such contents are self-subsistent – but the contrary case in not true. Such inseparability could be due to a mere psychological incapability or to an associative habit to take them together as unity. We need for a more accurate verification: “We must not merely confine ourselves to consider the contents together and that they do not exist independent of one another; but also to the way they change [sich verändern] and act. It is evident that there exists here a way to take a decision”. Stumpf provides a direct example of relation between color and extension: “It is true in general that they change independent of one another [sich unabhängig verändern], namely that the extension can change while the color remains the same; and the color can change while the extension remains the same. Nevertheless the quality shares to a certain extent the change of the extension”23.

• 24  A comparison with Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Teil. Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologi (...)
• 25  Husserl, Philosophie der Arithmetik. Mit ergänzenden Texten (1890-1901), hrsgg. von L. Eley, Husse (...)

37In spite of the peculiar Husserlian attempt to attain, rather than a mere psychological analysis, purely ontological outcomes, the inheritance is undeniable24. Unlike what Husserl does in the Twenties, when Variation is distinguished from the notion of Veränderung, in both Philosophy of Arithmetic25 and the Third Investigation he makes on the contrary use of Variation, Veränderung and verändern in a synonymic way.

• 26  Paolo Volonté, Husserls Phänomenologie der Imagination. Zur Funktion der Phantasie bei der Konstit (...)

39The truly question is now: what should “contingency-variation” phenomenologically mean? One usually asserts that it varies the so-called contingent features of an object up to the impossibility itself to further vary them, in such a way facing an invariable and essential feature26. Here too we cannot but raise two orders of objections, textual as well as theoretical.

• 27  Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik. Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft, hrsgg. vo (...)
• 28  Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträger, hrsgg. von S. Strasser, Den Haag, M. N (...)

40The first is that all the texts usually quoted in order to support the idea of such method do not seem to offer a whatsoever proof in favour of it. Be it the Fourth Cartesian Meditation or § 98 of Formal and Transcendental Logic, our impression is that this so-called “contingency-variation” does not appear altogether. And it cannot appear at all. Considering for example the corresponding pages from the Logic, where Husserl certainly does not mention the role of similarity but where he does not mention too any form of “contingency-variation”: he undeniably asserts the factuality of the starting point of the operation, but also its validity as Exempel and thus of the consciousness of exemplarity itself only on which that variation can be performed27. In § 34 of the Fourth Meditation Husserl explicitly refers to the necessity of moving into “the realm of unrealities” from a starting Exempel of perception of a table; he makes no reference to the role of similarity, but it is the phenomenological meaning of the Exempel that we have to stress28.

• 29  Ms. A III 11, 31b: “Jetzt ist dieser Tisch da charakterisiert als Exempel, ihm haftet diese Belieb (...)

41For – and this concerns on the contrary the second order of objections – it is by virtue of such Exempel that the idea itself of a “contingency-variation” has phenomenologically no sense: at the very moment in fact in which we switch from the starting consciousness of something individual to the one of exemplarity, we have already left the ground only on whose basis whatever discourse on the notion of contingency has sense. In the realm of possibilities disclosed by the Exempel (a possibility among others) and by its corresponding consciousness of Beliebigkeit the contingency is already set apart. It remains on this side of the exemplarisches Bewusstsein29.

• 30 As recently argued by R. Sowa, “Essences and Eidetic Laws in Edmund Husserl’s Descriptive Eidetics” (...)
• 31 See Ingarden’s remarks on the Fourth Cartesian Meditation: “die Möglichkeit des Übergangs von einer (...)

431) one cannot propose an interpretation of eidetic-variation (in terms of “contingency-variation”) as “falsification”30. Not that the idea of falsification cannot play a very important role; the problem arises when we pretend to save the “contingency-variation” – because of its eventual ambiguities and difficulties31 – by interpreting it as falsification: for it is the idea itself of a “contingency-variation” that we are questioning here;

• 32 Eugen Fink, Phänomenologische Werkstatt. Teilband 1: Die Doktorarbeit und erste Assistenzjahre bei (...)

45In one of his loose notes Fink reports a question on variation asked Husserl by a student, Walter Sachs, during a seminar in Freiburg: Is not the outcome already anticipated by the starting point? [...] If at the beginning I have not already conceived of the outcome, is not the universality that I provide through variation an empirical universality?32. The alternative seems once more to lie between the anticipation of the eidos – which would render the whole operation simply superfluous – and its impossibility under the shape of a mere empirical generality.