What Is Eidetic Intuition?

Husserl’s unflagging interest in abstract structures and ideal objects is immediately striking. His Prolegomena to a Pure Logics offer an outline of formal ontology that seems to forestall a universal theory of varieties in the Bourbaki style. Moreover, when he engages in the theory of sets and logic with his great contemporaries, Frege, Cantor, and Hilbert, he always does so as their equal. Less obvious, at first glance, is the presence from the outset of Husserl’s equally lively “hunger for fullness,” his conviction that the ultimate source of our knowledge is intuition, that is, a kind of immediate cognition or direct access to contents of every kind. Failure to see how these two demands correlate and support each other throughout Husserl’s entire intellectual career, starting from Philosophy of Arithmetics, has induced most interpreters to describe this career as a progressive descent from the heavens of logic and mathematics down to this earth that we inhabit, embodied in our mortal bodies, embedded in our geographical, historical, social and cultural environments. This description seems quite misleading if it involves more than a shift of focus concerning (some) objects, as if there had been a change in method and fundamental concepts. Even more so if, as it is often the case, eidetic phenomenology gets accordingly relegated to an early stage of Husserl thought, identified as “static” phenomenology, and supposedly dismissed later on, and typically in the later manuscripts and the Crisis, to the advantage of “genetic” phenomenology –as we shall see. A text from the Crisis (§48, footnote) confirms the continuity of Husserl’s primary concern and introduces us to the subject of this chapter:The paradigm of direct cognition is perception in all its sensorial modalities, but typically in the visual mode. The phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty will inherit this theme in particular: perception in all its kinaesthetic implications. From the beginning, just as for the gestalt masters, perception is inseparable from “behavior,” movement, and action, mainly because the perceived object prescribes the standard to perceiving: if I doubt the sight, I touch; if I see only one aspect, I verify the rest “by going around” the thing, and so on.