time, space, essence, eidos

Tim Morton links to this THIS ARTICLE in Cosmos and History, so I’ll explain the context of it again.

The article is a streamlined and shortened version of the January 2009 lecture I gave at the American University of Paris, at the invitation of Oliver Feltham (the one at the École normale supérieure was the next night, at Meillassoux’s invitation).

I think it was the first time I grouped the four terms in the title together. I did a talk at the Architecture School in Delft in November 2007, which is now a chapter in Towards Speculative Realism. “Eidos” was missing from the schema at the time, though I seem to remember in the discussion afterward wondering aloud if there was a term for the duel between sensual objects and real qualities.

In 2008 I went back carefully through the whole of Husserl’s Logical Investigations, and realized that the Husserlian eidos already was that very thing.

Namely, what has an eidos is a sensual (intentional object). Not a real object, because there is no such thing as a real object for Husserl in my sense of the term. Husserl simply isn’t a realist, and neither is he “beyond realism and idealism” as the typical phenomenological attitude wrongly holds. Husserl’s an idealist, even though we sometimes call him a correlationist. (I can see why Meillassoux wants to just call him a correlationist and avoid all the usual evasions about how “we’re always already outside ourselves in intentionality,” etc. etc., but in fact Husserl is an idealist. He simply feels like a realist, and that’s something I try to explain by calling him the first object-oriented idealist; he really is the first, as far as I can tell. Objects are not just nicknames for bundles of qualities or properties for Husserl, but something over and above and preliminary to those bundles, which doesn’t seem true even for Brentano– this scotches the frequent “Brentano saw everything first and Husserl took the credit” exaggeration. Credit to Husserl where it is due, please.)

So, given that an eidos belongs to a sensual (intentional) object, why not just say that its qualities are sensual as well? Because Husserl tell us that the eidos of an object is not accessible to sensible intuition. Only adumbrations are found in that sensual-sensual pair: the flickering shadows across a raincoat or a pencil as I dim the lamp in my living room. The eidos lies beyond such transient incidents, and is accessible only to categorial intuition. But while Husserl wants to think that what is categorially intuited is still directly accessible, I have made the case that it is accessible not directly, but only through allusion.

In short, there is such a thing as the tension between a directly encountered sensual object and withdrawn rather than sensual qualities. It is surely the strangest axis of quadruple ontology, but ironically perhaps already the best mapped, since Husserl did much of the work, for purposes of his own.

The two most suppressed great philosophers in today’s mainstream-cutting-edge continental philosophy:

1. Aristotle
2. Husserl

Brentano is number 1.5, the missing link between these two, and it’s no accident that Brentano is probably the most underrated philosopher by today’s mainstream-cutting-edge, which wants to dismiss individual entities as “manifest image” dupery in favor either of lavalampy materialism (Morton’s lovely phrase) or some vaguely defined mathematical structure. The cutting edge today remains a critical position. It wants to knock things down, and it can only knock things down if it thinks it has access to some immanent version of the thing itself so that it can then dismiss everything inaccessible as reaction and superstition and obscurantism. But the desire to denounce the hidden is no disproof of the hidden.