Plato Against Phenomenology A Genealogic

Plato Against Phenomenology: A Genealogical Critique
I. The Crisis of Phenomenology
To secure the sovereign centre of science Edmund Husserl delivered a series of devastating critiques
of ‘psychologism’ in his celebrated Prolegomena to Pure Logic. Psychologism is the derogatory term
used by Husserl to deride any belief that the laws of logic could be grounded in, derived from, or even
adequately explained by the immanent activity of human psychology. He argued that psychologism
threatened to collapse the standards of scientific truth by first falsely conflating the invariant laws of
logic with the variable flux of empirical psychology, and finally by either flatly dismissing or
vacuously presupposing the very principles that it purports to explain.1 Yet Husserl was evidently
unsatisfied with these critiques, and, for decades afterwards, repeatedly reiterated, at increasingly
apocalyptic registers, his condemnation of psychologism in one and the same voice with his
celebration of phenomenology. In his early work The Introduction to the Logical Investigations
(1900), for example, Husserl described phenomenology as “an ancillary to psychology conceived as
an empirical science” that “lays bare the ‘sources’ from which the basic concepts and ideal laws of
logic ‘flow’”2; but in a later lecture, Pure Phenomenology, Its Method, and its Field of Investigation
(1917), Husserl re-describes phenomenology as “an utterly original philosophy” that seeks to
“penetrate to the primal ground” where “all philosophical disciplines are rooted in pure
phenomenology.”3 This archaeological excavation of the primal ‘Ur-region’ of science is an
expression of an inverted chthonic piety that, by plumbing the subterranean depths of possible
experience, phenomenology may secure an indubitable foundation for the towering edifices of
positive science and save the light of philosophic knowledge from sceptical darkness. In a diary entry
from 1906, Husserl revealingly confided: “I am fighting for my life, and because of this have
confidence that I will be able to make progress .... Only one thing will fulfil me: I must come to
clarity!”4
Husserl’s fixation on psychologism, I wish to suggest, can partly be explained as an expression of his
own premonition of the impending collapse of the ‘neutral’ sphere of secular reason upon which had
been constructed a social space for Jewish emancipation from medieval ghettos. Where in previous
eras membership in Christian states had been conferred by baptism into the religion of the ruling
prince (e.g. the Westphalian principle ‘cuius regio, eius religio’), secular reason, from Spinoza and
Locke to Voltaire and Mendelssohn, afforded the Jews a common space of non-confessional
membership. After Immanuel Kant’s critiques, this notion of secular reason was gradually
reformulated into the hegemonic discourse of scientific positivism, which projected to construct
towering ontologies of knowledge on the agnostic foundation of pre-determined beings (e.g. nature,
matter, atoms etc.). But at the very apex of their adulation, each of the sciences quarrelled in electing
a single sovereign science to legislate a basic method that could govern all science: chemistry
pretended to rule biology; physics to rule chemistry; and psychology to rule physics. Phenomenology
seemed to settle this conflict by demonstrating an inner logic of descriptive psychology, but it also
seemed to flounder when even this logic collapsed into psychology. Psychologism thus threatened to
1
Husserl, Edmund. Logical Investigations, §23
2
Ibid., §1
3
Moran, Dermot & Mooney, Timothy ed. The Phenomenology Reader, 2002, 124
4
Husserl, Edmund. ‘Personal Notes,’ in Early Writings in the Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics, Collected
Works V, trans. D. Willard, Dordrecht, 1994, 494; cf. Moran & Mooney 2002 134
Ryan Haecker © 2015

sink the foundations of positive science into an intractable swamp of scepticism. In the Crises of
European Sciences (1936) Husserl ruminated upon how this foundational crisis for secular reason:
“Scientific, objective truth is exclusively a matter of establishing what the world, the physical as well
the spiritual world. But can the world, and human existence in it, truthfully have a meaning if the
sciences… dissolve themselves like fleeting waves, and that it always was and ever will be so, and that
again and again reason must turn into nonsense, and well-being into misery?”5
Where former eras “still held the conviction of proceeding toward unity, or arriving at a critically
unassailable edifice” the present age has more forlornly recognized that “this conviction could not
survive for long” as “this ideal suffers an inner dissolution.”6 The inner dissolution of the sciences
might occur whenever the ‘idealization’ or ‘mathematization’ of theoretical models exceeded the self-
determining ‘life-world’ of empirical phenomena. Husserl describes this inner dissolution as the
“innermost driving force of all historical philosophical movements” through which “all modern
sciences [have] drifted into a peculiar, increasingly puzzling crisis” which “shakes to the foundations
the whole meaning of truth.”7 Heidegger would later identify these crises with the concealment of the
meaning of the ‘basic concepts’ of the sciences, and especially - the most basic of all concepts - that
of predetermined Being itself. But for Husserl the primary culprit was the psychologistic reduction of
the pure forms of logic into the impure content of empirical psychology. He writes that “the history of
psychology is actually only the history of crises… If psychology had not failed, it would have
performed a necessary mediating work for a concrete, working transcendental philosophy, freed from
all paradoxes” but “psychology failed” because “it failed to inquire after… the universal science of
psychic being” which now requires the transformation of psychology into “a universal transcendental
philosophy.”8 To save the positive sciences from sceptical dissolution, Husserl commissioned the new
science of phenomenology in the guise of a spiritual saviour of both secular reason and Jewish
emancipation. He prophetically described, in the English edition Preface to Ideas, how
phenomenology may lead the positive sciences to “the infinite open country of the true philosophy,
the ‘promised land’ on which he himself will never set foot.”9
Martin Heidegger radically re-envisioned Husserl’s apocalypse, as though he had witnessed the very
sacking of Jerusalem, as an eternal possibility that has already transpired, and would always transpire,
until the empire of ontology ‘enframed’ by technology had been permanently overthrown. Where
Husserl sought to lead emancipated Jewry to a secure foundation for the construction of a sovereign
ontology of secular reason, Heidegger blocked his path by giving a voice to the most unasked
question of the meaning of Being that “has been presupposed in all ontology up till now.”10 This
presupposition, he argues, causes us – now and everywhere - to forget the origin of “those primordial
‘sources’ from which the categories and concepts handed down to us” until it “has had its
‘historicality’ so thoroughly uprooted by tradition” that “it has no ground of its own to stand on.”11
Heidegger’s proposes to “destroy the traditional content of ancient ontology until we arrive at those
primordial experiences in which we achieved our first ways of determining the nature of being.”12 But
since this ontology has hitherto secured the theoretical edifice for science, technology, and even
5
Husserl, Edmund. The Crises of European Sciences, §2
6
Ibid., §5
7
Ibid., §5
8
Ibid., §57
9
Husserl, Edmund. Ideas, 1931, 29
10
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time, §2, 8
11
Ibid., §6, 43
12
Ibid., §6, 44

modern industrial civilization, Heidegger confesses that “this destruction does not relate itself towards
the past” but rather, more radically, that “its criticism is aimed at ‘today’.”13 It involves nothing less
than the palingenetic re-construction of an alter-modern ontology of Dasein, by which the rootless
self-concealment of technical production must die to be re-borne. Leo Strauss commented that
German nihilism had intended to “destroy the present world and its potentialities” in response to the
horrific “prospect of a pacified planet” that was “devoted to production and consumption” of
“spiritual as well as material merchandise” but “in which no great heart could beat and no great soul
could breathe.”14 To rejuvenate the spirit of the world, Heidegger sought to infinitesimally individuate
and infinitely reiterate Husserl’s apocalyptic future in the present potentialities of each and every
imploding singularity of self-reflective being.
Plato’s dialogues were likewise borne from the death of Socrates after the destruction of the world
created by Perlicean politics and Athenian ambition. But his love for apollonian wisdom suggests a
subterranean current of discourse, pregnant with alternative possibilities, upon which to navigate an
escape from the apocalyptic master-discourse of agonistic nihilism. Although Plato never directly
addressed the distinctly modern question of phenomenology, indirect provisions for an alternative
formulation may be recollected from the seeds scattered throughout his dialogues: in the Phaedrus, he
finds the logic of the Ideas immanent in the self-reflexive beings of the phenomena that are
remembered through a ‘living speech’ of philosophic discourse; in the Philebus, this activity of
remembering is rendered as the ‘mixing’ of phenomenal elements by an aesthetic imagination; and, in
the Timaeus, this imaginative mixing is apotheosized as the luminous transmission of the divine Ideas
of logic. The genealogy of phenomenology, from Kant to Heidegger, has concealed an ontological
inversion of Plato’s real logic of phenomena into an ‘irreal’ phenomenology of epistemic correlations.
But by exposing this hidden inversion, we may retrieve from the depths of the phenomena the
possibility of a theological critique and reformulation of phenomenology. Where phenomenology has
compressed and concealed its epistemic divisions of subject and object within its intrinsically pre-
determined being of the phenomenon, Trinitarian theology promises to disclose how its inwardly
collapsing differentia may be reflected back into a supersaturated matrix of free ecstatic love. This
Trinitarian reflection may promise to succeed, where Heidegger had failed, in escaping the apocalypse
of phenomenology by raising the radiant icon of the risen Christ from the depths of the past.
II. Plato's Logic of Phenomena
Phenomenology hides from its own contingency of alternative reformulations when it seeks to
construct ontologies of ‘objective validity’ beyond time and place. Husserl seems to have suggested
that he could not concede the genealogical indebtedness of phenomenology without compromising its
ahisotricality.15 Yet a closer study of the pages of history exposes its more ancient pedigree.
Heidegger had, for example, traced the meaning of the Greek terms ‘phenomenon’ to “that which
shows itself in itself” by the “light of day”, and ‘logos’ to a “discourse” that “lets something be
seen.”16 The Pythagoreans had, in this way, once conceived of the Sun as a mirror that reflectively
radiated both the light of phenomenal appearances as well as the limiting-functions of logical
analysis.17 Philolaus elaborated upon how this light of logical forms “fitted together” everything in the
13
Ibid., §6, 44
14
Strauss, Leo. “German Nihilism”, 1999 359-360
15
Moran trans. 133
16
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time, §7, 51, 56
17
Klein, Jacob. Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra. 1992, 64

cosmos “out of things which are unlimited and out of things which are limited.”18 This ‘showing-
forth’ of the limiting-functions illuminated not only the logic of arithmetic but also Plato’s dialogic
form of writing. Hans-Georg Gadamer, for example, has argued that it was these Pythagorean
principles that made possible Plato’s interminable dialectic.19 In Plato’s dialectic, the phenomena
shows themselves as unlimited and become limited through their discursive formulation in words,
grammar, and narratives; but, also, by contradiction and reformulation, reflect the chaotic limits of
discursive thought towards its ultimate trans-phenomenal source. Plato’s dialogues, in this way,
explored the logic of the phenomena, long before phenomenology, but from a quite different
perspective: where phenomenology is meant to collect a logic of descriptions, essences, and meanings
that are immanently given within the pre-determined being of the phenomena themselves, Plato’s
logic of the phenomena is meant to re-collect a logic of perfect paradigms, or Ideas, from which all
the phenomena ultimately derive their intelligibility and being.
In the Republic, Socrates speaks of an ideal city in which the true lovers of wisdom - the philosophers
– are distinguished from the “lovers of sounds and sights” - the doxaphilists - by their pure
contemplation of the Ideas themselves.20 Genuine knowledge, he suggests, is meant to infallibly
explain the ultimate conditions for all beings21, including all of the opinions that may divide the
content of mental phenomena.22 Plato describes this mass of mental phenomena as “something darker
than knowledge but brighter than ignorance”, and situated somewhere at the interstices between
reality and non-reality23, in a region of reflexive analysis which Husserl will later name the ‘irreal’.
Plato illustrates this knowledge with an allusion to the Pythagorean light of logic when he describes
how “the greatest thing to learn is the idea of the Good”24 that gives “truth to the objects of knowledge
and the power of knowing to the knower.”25 He writes:
“It is right to deem light and vision sunlike, but never to think that they are the Sun [for] the objects of
knowledge not only receive from the presence of the Good their being known, but their very existence
and essence is derived to them from it, though the Good itself is not essence but still transcends essence
in dignity and surpassing power.”26
To ascend to these adamantine heights of knowledge, Plato proposes a dialectical movement from
“assumptions to a beginning or principle that transcends assumptions, and in which it makes no use of
the images employed by the other section [of phenomena], relying on ideas only and progressing
systematically through ideas.”27 Dialectic is thus undoubtedly “compelled to employ assumptions”
and use “images or likenesses” to progress from the phenomenal ectypes to the trans-phenomenal
archetypes; but it only uses images to “get hold sight of those realities which can be seen only by the
mind”28 until the mind may make “no use whatever of any object of sense but only of pure ideas
moving on through ideas to ideas and ending with ideas.”29 This “last thing to be seen and hardly seen
is the Idea of Good”, which “is indeed the cause of all things”, and which, “giving birth to the visible
18
Fragments of Philolaus, fr.1
19
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies of Plato, 1980, 152
20
Plato. The Republic, 476a
21
Ibid., 478a
22
Ibid., 477c
23
Ibid., 478c
24
Ibid., 505a
25
Ibid., 508e
26
Ibid., 509a-b
27
Ibid., 510b
28
Ibid., 510e
29
Ibid., 511c

world to light”, as “the author of light” and “the authentic source of truth and reason.”30 For Plato,
science is knowledge of necessary conditions; hypotheses are merely possible conditions; and
dialectic is meant to move from these merely possible hypotheses to necessary knowledge. But Plato
declined to provide any analytic instructions to prescribe how thinking may ascend, step-by-step, from
merely possible hypotheses to trans-phenomenal and infallible knowledge of the Ideas themselves.31
In the Phaedrus, Socrates abruptly abandons this task and departs from the city of the philosophers for
the countryside where he may symbolically cast down the wall that separates reason and culture from
poetry and nature; and where he may to re-discover the ‘friendly matrix’ of the phenomena that is “the
mother of our city and our life” at the liminal margins of excessive thought.32 He asks Phaedrus for a
‘recipe’ for forgetting his love of learning in favour of “trees and open country” 33, and, after a flurry
of speeches on love, admits his first principles to have been merely assumed with “no basis of
reasoned arguments at all” but only by “our fancy pictures.”34 Each of us, like mad lovers, “fashions
for himself as it were an image, and adorn it to be the object of his veneration and worship.”35 Plato
writes that “the lover is as it were a mirror in which he beholds himself… since he possesses that
counter-love which is the image of love.”36 Where previously the phenomena had been assumed and
discarded by thinking in a dialectical ascent towards the trans-phenomenal knowledge of the Ideas,
Socrates may now be read to descend beyond the ideal city of self-enclosed reason to find the logic of
the Ideas immanent in the self-mirroring of phenomena themselves. The setting then comes to the
foreground as the discourse on love becomes shifts to the phenomenality of nature that is most
intimately known through an erotic passion for the phenomena. Socrates then petitions the ‘god of
Love’ that he may “live for Love in singleness of purpose with the aid of philosophical discourse.”37
In the famous digression on the superiority of remembered “living speech” to the dead reminder of
“external marks”, Plato embeds a meta-narrative reflection upon, not only the possibility of writing,
but also implicitly upon a discursive re-formulation of phenomenology.38 While each of Plato’s
dialogues have opened vistas for a kind of proto-phenomenological imaginary by folding concentric
rings of inter-signifying narratives, it is uniquely here that his discourse exceeds and suspends any
possible enclosure of meanings within the bounds of writing. Socrates relates how Theuth was
questioned about the danger that the invention of writing might imprison thinking in object-like
phenomena that could only ever remind us of what we have already thought. He unfavourably
contrasts the ‘silent painting’ of writing with an oral discourse which may enliven thinking to “defend
itself” when it is “written in the soul” of self-reflexive subjectivity.39 This digression, together with a
parallel passage in the Seventh Letter, has sometimes been read to exonerate Plato for writing.40 But
Plato is more equivocal in his complicity: by crafting the orality of Socratic dialogue into a written
drama, he has consigned inter-subjective discourse to an objectified form; but by reflecting through
writing upon the contingency of writing, he has also entered and exceeded this enclosure within the
medium of writing. By entering so as to reflexively exceed the medium of writing, Plato can now be
30
Ibid., 517b-c
31
Cf. Seung, Thomas Kaehao. Plato Rediscovered: Human Value and Social Order, 1996, 117-121
32
Ibid., 130-132
33
Plato. The Phaedrus, 230d
34
Ibid., 246c
35
Ibid., 252d
36
Ibid., 255d
37
Ibid., 257b
38
Ibid., 275a
39
Ibid., 276a
40
Cf. Reale, Giovanni. Toward a New Interpretation of Plato, Catan, John R., 1997

read to have, by reflecting upon the pre-modern peril of writing, anticipated an answer to the post-
modern problematic of the possibility of writing that exceeds objectification in the deadening
difference of external marks. Where this possibility may determine an infinitude of ontic facts
collapsing into ‘being-towards-death’, Plato’s possibility of orality points towards a reflective
participation that is consummated in a kind of ‘being-towards-love’. To open this possibility, Socrates
departs from the cities of self-enclosed rationality towards, not merely Husserl’s pre-determined life-
world, but rather for the immanent discursivity of the phenomena.
In the Philebus, Plato illustrates this possibility of this ‘living speech’ through the ‘divine method’,
which Socrates advertises as “a gift from the gods to men... for which there neither is nor ever will be
a better way"; superior to all arts of measuring and numbering; for the purpose of acquiring pure
knowledge of unchanging forms rather than changing opinions.41 Where in the Republic, he had
modelled knowledge on the axiomatic deductions of geometry42, in the Philebus Plato describes how
the concepts may rather only be dialectically constructed from the unlimited phenomena through
memory, reflection, and imagination, where they may “write words in our souls” like a painter “who
paints in our souls pictures to illustrate the words which the writer has written.”43 After Protarchus
complains that he doesn’t understand how the unlimited phenomena and the limiting-forms are meant
to be combined to create “all other beautiful things”44, Socrates first describes it, like the labor-pains
of philosophy45, as the “progeny” and “coming-into-being” of the limiting-forms46, but finally as
effects that are caused by “the king of heaven and earth” who acts as “a wondrous regulating
intelligence” to order “the sun, the moon, the stars, and the revolutions of the whole heaven.”47 In the
Timaeus, Plato further elaborates this cosmogony, in which the Divine Craftsman, or Demiurge,
mixes variously delimited ratios48 to transmit the light of the Sun through the eye of the body and
perception to the soul.49 Through perception and memory, Plato thus develops a kind of logic of
phenomena, in which the limit-forms of light transmit the divine Ideas that memory reflexively
constructs for the recollection of divinity in our souls. He suggests this interpretation when he writes:
“God invented and gave us sight to the end that we might behold the courses of intelligence in the
heaven… that we, learning them and partaking of the natural truth of reason, might imitate the
absolutely unerring courses of God and regulate our own vagaries.” 50
Once the Gospel of John had rendered the Word as Christ, Christ as the “true light” of the world, and
Christ as God51, Saint Augustine of Hippo could recast Plato’s logic of phenomena into a more
incarnational logic of divine illumination. Augustine describes, in the Confessions, the “vast
mansions” and “huge repository” of memory “with its secret and unimaginable caverns” in which
“treasured innumerable images [are] brought in there from objects of every conceivable kind
perceived by the senses.”52 But because he has known some supra-essential truths “through no bodily
sense whatsoever”, he is also compelled to recognize an illumination of innate truths of reason that
41
Plato. The Philebus, 16a-c, 57c, 58c, 59c
42
Plato. The Republic, 510c
43
Plato. The Philebus, 39a-e
44
Ibid., 25e-26a
45
Cf. Plato. The Theaetetus, 150b-151d
46
Plato. The Philebus, 26d
47
Ibid., 28c-e
48
Plato. The Timaeus, 36b
49
Ibid., 45b
50
Ibid., 46e
51
Jn. 1:1, 1:9, 1 Jn 1:5Jn. 10:30, 17:21
52
Augustine of Hippo. The Confessions, Bk. X ch.8

“were there even before I learned them.”53 Augustine prays: “See, I am climbing through my mind to
you… beyond even this faculty of mine which is called memory” where “I shall be forgetful of
you.”54 There he describes: “He who knows the Truth knows that Light; and he that knows it knows
eternity. Love knows it. O Eternal Truth, and true Love, and loved Eternity!”55 Memory is no longer,
as it was for Porphyry, merely an unequal imitation of an objectified logic of phenomena, but has, as a
“consequence of the equality of the moments in the triadic” recollection of memory, become a kind of
cooperative recollection, that is mediated through the active volition of human subjectivity, and,
ultimately, through that divine love that is shared within the Trinity.56 Its Light is, moreover, not
merely Plato’s originary and universal Light that eternally radiates from a trans-phenomenal source
(e.g. Nous, the Good, the One etc.), but is moreover the unique presence of that “light of the world”
which has become an individual person and “walked among us” in the phenomenal realm.57 The Light
of the Incarnation thus casts a never-before-seen hue upon the logic of the phenomena: the erotic
mirroring of love and counter-love between men, which may be written by philosophic discourse
upon the soul of the learner, is now re-lit by the burning fire of a more intimate, embodied, and
ecstatic love of God in man and man in God. St. Augustine writes:
"What is this light which now and again breaks in upon me, and thrills through my heart without a
wound? I tremble and I burn: I tremble, because I am unlike Him; I burn, because I am like Him. It is
Wisdom, Wisdom's own self, which thus shines upon me." 58
Modern phenomenology has systematically inverted this incarnational illumination with a chthonic
piety that struggles in vain to excavate a more originary light of logical forms from within the
primordial depths of pre-determined phenomena. This ontological inversion, from Platonic reality to
Husserlian ‘irreality’, began with John Duns Scotus’ distinction of the subjective order of
representations from the objective order of substances; was broken by Immanuel Kant’s sublime
unmediation of the phenomena for-us from the noumena in-themselves; was accelerated into an
infinite nothingness by Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s infinite self-positing of Kant’s synthetic concepts;
but - unbeknownst to many - was completely transmogrified by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s
individuation of Fichte’s infinite ‘ought-to-be’ in a profusion of indifferently unrelated and pre-
determined beings that float vertiginously above the deepest abyss of their own intrinsic nothingness.
Since the Absolute is, for Schelling, unconditionable by any conceivable relation to all thought and
being, it is inscrutably both the condition and not the condition for every conditioned being. From the
perspective as conditioned beings, every being must contradictorily seem both pre-determined and
undetermined in the innermost depths of its indeterminately pre-determined being. But since an
indeterminate predetermination is an ostensible contradiction, and a contradiction explodes any
coherent phenomenal apprehension of being, this ‘eternal contrareity’ dooms all beings to an inward
agony of infinitesimal self-implosion. Heidegger had attempted to escape from the fate of Husserl’s
onto-phenomenology by first circumventing the history of ontology to re-interrogate the meaning of
being itself, but finally by rejuvenating being with the self-reflexive freedom to re-construct
alternative ontico-ontologies, or phenomen-ontologies. The following investigation into the genealogy
of phenomenology will disclose how Heidegger, even more than Husserl, remains perilously caught
within this whirling maelstrom and collapsing centre of phenomenology.
53
Ibid., Bk. X ch.10
54
Ibid., Bk. X ch.17
55
Ibid., Bk.VII ch.10
56
Cf. Hankey, Wayne. “The Postmodern Retrieval of Neoplatonism in Jean-Luc Marion and John Milbank and
the Origins of Western Subjectivity in Augustine and Eriugena”, Hermathena, 165, 1998, 36
57
Jn. 8:12, 1:14
58
Augustine of Hippo. The Confessions, Bk.XI ch.9

III. The Collapsing Centre of Phenomenology
In Being and Time, Heidegger asked but failed to answer the question of the meaning of being.
Without having answered this question, he could not justify its meaning. He had attempted to
circumvent its trivialization by exposing and exploring the most unasked question in the history of
ontology, the question of the meaning of Being itself.59 Plato had divided being into a multitude
categories that each reflexively participated in Being60, but Aristotle had distinguished various senses
of ‘to be’ and affirmed, as its primary sense, the beings of substances61; Aquinas had similarly
distinguished the essence from the existence of beings62, but Scotus had argued that all beings must
first be predicated univocally63; Kant had denied that existence could be predicated at all except,
perhaps, as a category of the unity of experience64, but Schelling had denied that being could ever be
unified in judgments and planted the nullity of its intrinsic dis-unity in ungrounded pre-determination
of beings.65 Heidegger acknowledged, what he called, an “ancient dogma” of ontology, inherited from
Plato, in which, as Hegel remarked, “Being, the indeterminate immediate, is in fact nothing, and
neither more nor less than nothing.”66 He challenged this emptying of being, by “very fact that we
already live in an understanding of Being”, by opposing to ontology a primordial pre-determined
being that discloses itself while always remaining “veiled in darkness.”67 The nullifying seed of
Schelling’s pre-determined being has thus ripened to maturity in Heidegger’s Dasein.
Phenomenology may perhaps only preserve its scienticity only by forgetting its historicality: for if its
scientific truth is founded upon various atemporal correlations to the positive ground of being; but
being “finds its meaning in temporality”, and temporality “makes historicality possible”, then, as
Heidegger comments, it seems that every “ontological understanding” of phenomenology merely
“makes us forget that they have such an origin, and makes us suppose that the necessity of going back
to these sources is something which we need not even understand.”68 Heidegger sought to trace the
origin of phenomenology back before Plato to “the possibilities which the ‘Ancients’ have made
ready for us”69, but its proximate influences lay even closer that he cared to disclose. It began with
Brentano as an epistemology of ‘descriptive psychology’ but, through Husserl’s opposition to
psychologism, quickly metamorphosed into an ontology that pretended to the sovereign domination of
all science. It is well known how phenomenology derives its epistemology from the tradition
beginning with Scotus’ division between subjective representations and the objective substances;
developing in Descartes’ division of mental ideas and corporeal substances; and culminating in Kant’s
division of phenomena for-us and noumena in-themselves. But what is less well known is how it has
also derived its ontology from Schelling’s ungrounded pre-determined being, which Feuerbach recast
as matter, and Brentano re-cast as mental phenomena. Unbeknownst to Heidegger, this genealogical
inheritance had implanted the phenomena with an explosive alchemical paradox: for if Dasein is pre-
59
60
Plato. The Sophist 254d-255e
61
Aristotle. The Metaphysics, 1028b
62
Aquinas, Thomas. Existence and Essence, §77
63
Scotus, John Duns. Ordinatio 1, d. 3, pars 1, q. 1
64
Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Pure Reason, A597/B625, A80/B106
65
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph. The Ages of the World, 8:212
66
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Science of Logic, §132
67
68
Ibid., §6, 41-43
69
Ibid., §5, 40

determined in its being, then it is both other-determined and self-determined; both conditioned and
unconditioned; and both ontological and ontic, or, ‘ontico-ontological’. To overcome all of these
epistemological divisions, Heidegger compressed the melancholic agony of their inward self-
opposition into an implosive singularity of self-reflective Dasein, in which the creation and
destruction of every ontico-ontological construction is infinitely re-enacted at the site of the forever
collapsing centre of phenomenology.
John Duns Scotus, together with Henry of Ghent, was instrumental in inaugurating modern
epistemology by first separating the semantic possibility of univocal predication from the analogical
ontology proceeding from divine creation, and finally assimilating Thomas Aquinas’ acts of existence
into an ‘occult sympathy’ of correspondences between the “raw aconceptual apprehension” of being
and the “raw purely semantic internal grasp” of knowledge.70 Where, for Aquinas, all “being is
analogically like knowing and knowing like being”, for Scotus, the possibility of a univocal semantics
implies an equally univocal epistemology, in which intellectual forms can only be transmitted
between being and knowledge across the coequal continuum of a flattened plane of representations.71
Scotus divided this univocal plane between the subjective order of possible mental representations and
the objective order of represented necessary substances.72 But where Aquinas had, in the tradition of
Dionysius, Augustine, and Plato, rendered knowledge as a participation in the divine creative intellect
(Ars), Scotus rejected Ghent’s equivocal correspondence theory between created and uncreated
exemplars in favour of a more univocal correspondence between semantic propositions and sensory
experience.73 This correspondence between propositional-judgments and representational experience
anticipated Franz Brentano’s re-formulation of ‘intentionality’ as a purely descriptive orientation of
the subjective mind towards its own mental phenomena. By re-defining intentionality as subjective
representation, Scotus prepared the path for Descartes’ modern epistemology74; but by failing to
clearly define the ontological status of these representations, Scotus also inadvertently broached the
problem of Suarez’s modern ontology.75
Modern philosophy, from Descartes and Suarez to Leibniz and Spinoza, has, at ever more prophetic
registers, repeatedly promised to reconstruct the real order of necessary substances according to the
ideal order of subjective representations. But this great promise has been bedevilled from the
beginning by an even greater problematic: how are the two orders of ideal subjectivity and real
objectivity related? Various answers were proffered: Scotus answered the divine will; Suarez, the
divine being; Descartes, the innate ideas; Leibniz, the pre-established harmony; and Spinoza, the
infinite substance. Since every purported ideal-real relation seemed, no less than Plato’s Third Man
argument76, to require some further mediating form and so on ad infinitum, none of these answers
could garner widespread acceptance. In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Immanuel Kant sought to
resolve this problematic by distinguishing and correlating the appearances of things-for-us, which he
called ‘phenomena’, and the represented things-in-themselves, which he called ‘noumena’, through
the minds’ activity of judgment.77 He writes that “the understanding can make no other use of these
70
Pickstock, Catherine. “Imitating God: The Truth of Things According to Thomas Aquinas”, 2000, 312
71
Pickstock, Catherine & Milbank, John. Truth in Aquinas, 2000, 5, 8
72
Scotus, John Duns. Ordinatio, I, d. 3, pars 3, q. 1
73
Ibid., 1, d. 3, pars 1, q. 4
74
Cf. Normore, C. “Meaning and Objective Being: Descartes and His Sources,” in Rorty, 1986, 223–24
75
Cf. Pickstock, Catherine. “Duns Scotus: His Historical And Contemporary Significance”, Modern Theology,
2005, 21: 4, 543–574; Miner, Robert C. “Suárez as Founder of Modernity: Reflections on a “Topos” in Recent
Historiography”, History of Philosophy Quarterly, 18, 2001, 217–36
76
Cf. Plato, The Parmenides 132a
77
Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Pure Reason, A235/B294

concepts than that of judging by means of them… Judgment is therefore the mediate cognition of an
object, hence the representation of a representation of it.”78 Kant claimed to deduce the a priori and
necessary categories for all judgments of human understanding in the Transcendental Deduction of
the Categories79, but Salomon Maimon and others protested that Kant’s own unbridgeable dualism,
between pure understanding and empirical sensibility, effectively rendered his purported deduction
little more than an arbitrary rediscovery of his own pre-defined schema.80
After the failure of his last great attempt at mediating the categories in The Critique of Judgment
(1790), Kant’s critical project of reconstructing ontology by epistemology was successively re-
constructed, with a Bacchic delirium of romantic enthusiasm, in increasingly more elaborate systems
that emphasized the moral will, the aesthetic intuition, and the transcendental logic. In the Science of
Knowledge (1794), Johann Gottlieb Fichte tasked himself with discovering the “primordial, absolutely
unconditioned first principle of all human knowledge” that “can be neither proved nor defined” but
which “lies at the basis of all consciousness and alone makes it possible.”81 From the “absolutely
certain” identity-proposition “A is A”, he claimed, by some logical sleight of hand, to deduce the “I
am I” of the ‘absolute subject’ whose “being or essence consists simply in the fact that it posits itself
as existing.”82 Later, in the Foundations of Natural Right (1797), he further attempted to demonstrate
that this self-posited absolute subject (i.e. the Ego) must be summoned to “exercise its free efficacy”
by postulating not only the objective world (i.e. the non-Ego) but also every other self-conscious
agent in an intersubjective community.83 But since each of Fichte’s postulations remained a purely
formal relative identity that only ‘ought to be’ the absolute identity of the Ego and the non-Ego, his
student Johann Friedrich Herbart rejected Fichte’s moral summons in favour of the ‘real’ things
reminiscent of the windowless monads of Leibniz; while his student Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph
Schelling rejected Fichte’s positing of all substances in favour of an indifferent ungrounded ground of
transcendental ideality and natural reality reminiscent of the natura naturans of Spinoza’s Substance.
While still under the influence of Fichte, Schelling had denied that there could be any demonstrative
knowledge of the unconditionable Absolute ‘I’ that posited the conditions for all the substances of
nature. In Of the I as the Principle of Philosophy (1795) he writes: “That there is an absolute I can
never be proved objectively… To prove objectively that the I is unconditional would mean to prove
that it was conditional."84 But beginning in his 1794 commentary on Plato’s Timaeus, Schelling also
began to re-materialize Fichte’s self-posited intuitions of the non-Ego as the “difficult and dark Idea”
of matter.85 In the First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature (1799), Schelling claims to
deduce matter from intuition by arguing: “Every external being is a being in space… What is in space
can also be affected by physical force… Accordingly, [external being] must be that which, if the
(mechanical) division of matter proceeds to infinity, preserves every little piece of matter.”86
Schelling’s external being of matter is meant to be produced by the “absolute non-objective factor” of
the “original productivity of Nature”, which he conceived as an unconditionable, unknowable, and
ineffable power of the Absolute.87 Schelling’s apophatic philosophy of nature would later lead him to
78
Ibid., A68/B93
79
Ibid., A93/B126
80
Cf. Beiser, Frederick C. The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte, 1993, 186, 286
81
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. The Science of Knowledge, §1, 93
82
Ibid., §1, 94-98
83
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. The Foundation of Natural Right, §§3-4
84
Schelling, Friedrich Joseph Wilhem. Of the I as the Principle of Philosophy, 1796, §3
85
Cf. Plato. Timaeus, 49a; Grant, Iain Hamilton. Philosophies of Nature After Schelling, 2006 33-39
86
Schelling, Friedrich Joseph Wilhem. The First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, 1799, 1.II., 20
87
Ibid., §6.II., 202

re-conceptualize created beings, in a way reminiscent of Plotinus, as the unconditionally conditioned
products of an inscrutably productive primal ground ‘beneath’ and ‘beyond’ all thought and being.88
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who had been Schelling’s housemate at the Tübinger Stift and
collaborator at Jena, later re-conceived of created beings, in a way reminiscent of Proclus, as the
triadic and syllogistic determinations of the self-reflective Idea of logic, towards which he narratively
ascended through the successive stages consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), and
from which he encyclopaedically expounded in the Science of Logic (1817). In the Phenomenology of
Spirit, he describes how “‘Notion’ and ‘object’, ‘being-for-another’ and ‘being-in-itself’, both fall
within that knowledge [of] the matter in hand as it is in and for itself”89, and argues that every
perception of material elements “contains within it opposite aspects of truth, a truth whose elements
are in antithesis to one another.”90 In the Science of Logic, he further contends that “it is true that
matter as it exists for sense perception is no more a subject matter of logic than are space and its
determinations"91, and that the “Notion is determinate and it is this determinateness which appears as
content [but] not sensuously intuited or represented; it is solely an object, a product of thinking, and is
the absolute self-subsistent object, the logos.”92 Hegel describes, at the conclusion of the Logic, how
all objective determinations have been withdrawn into the identity of the Idea93, which “gives itself a
content” and in “which only the form of externality has been sublated.”94 For Hegel, the objective
determinations that differentiate ‘being-in-itself’ from ‘being-for-another’ (e.g. sense-perception,
being, and matter) are, by their antitheses, ultimately meant to be annulled and sublated into the self-
differentiated and self-reflective identity of the Idea.
Hegel later criticized Schelling, in his Berlin Lectures on the History of Philosophy (1818), on
precisely this point, for mistakenly beginning with an “absolute identity” whose “absolute
indifference of real and ideal, of form and essence, of universal and particular” produced matter as the
“first quantitative difference of the Absolute.”95 Schelling countered in his Erlangen lectures (1821)
that Hegel’s all-sublating “identity of the Idea” amounted to nothing more than an empty
objectification of the ‘absolute identity’ (i.e. A=A) of his early Identitie-Philosophie: “This Idea
which is realized at the end of the Logic is exactly as determinate as the Absolute at the end of the
identity philosophy was determinate… There is nothing earth-shaking about the Logic. Hegel must
come to reality.”96 Schelling opposed this hollow determinateness of self-identical ideality to the full-
blooded reality of his later Naturphilosophie and declared that Hegel’s “withdrawal to pure thought, to
the pure concept, was, as one can find stated on the very first pages of Hegel’s Logic, linked to the
claim that the concept was everything and left nothing outside itself.”97 To foil Hegel’s logical
sublation of differential externality into the self-identity of the Idea, Schelling sought to reduce
Hegel’s Logic into a merely possible ontology of ideal concepts that stand in inimical opposition to
the real and necessary ground of created nature. He also anticipated Heidegger’s critique of ontology
when, for example, he scoffs that “Hegel had nothing in mind but this ontology… which also had
88
Cf. Snow, Dale. Schelling and the End of Idealism, 1996, 199
89
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Phenomenology of Spirit, §84
90
Ibid., §122
91
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Science of Logic, §375
92
Ibid., §28
93
Ibid., §1638
94
Ibid., §1700
95
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Lectures on the History of Philosophy, III 529-532
96
Schelling, Friedrich Joseph Wilhelm. On the History of Modern Philosophy, Bowie trans., 154
97
Ibid., 134

concepts only as concepts as its contents”98, and complains that “Hegel wanted to erect his abstract
Logic above the Naturphilosophie [by] wishing to elevate into the merely logical the method which
definitely had nature as its content and the intuition of nature as its companion.”99
Schelling further developed this alternative conception of the ground of created being in Munich
under the alchemical influence of Böhme, Oetinger, and, especially, Franz von Baader.100 Jakob
Böhme had impressed upon Schelling a “Plotinian-Dionysian-Eckhartian via negative” in which
divine creation proceeded from an abysmal “eternal contrariety” of an ungrounded primal ground, or
‘Urgrund’. Franz von Baader persuaded Schelling that the created world was not simply good and
tinged by a fortunate fault, but forever spoilt by an originary and pervasive evil erupting from the
Fall.101 In his Essay on Human Freedom (1809), Schelling described this originary opposition as one
between a universal divine will and a particular creaturely will, which forever strives to “particularize
everything or to make it creaturely” by transmogrifying difference into conceptual identity that “can
become perceptible to itself and to the will.”102 To save human freedom from either the dizzying
heights of determinism or the abysmal maelstrom of contingency, Schelling proposes a “real concept
of freedom” in which being determines its own difference in and for itself.103 He claims that
“individual action results from the inner necessity of a free being and, accordingly, from necessity
itself, to determine intelligible being” in “a primal and fundamental willing, which makes itself into
something and is the ground of all ways of being.”104 In the Ages of the World (1811-1815), Schelling
further describes this self-particularizing but primordially willing ground of being as the “primitive
germ of visible nature” that “appears everywhere only as something issuing from the original
negation” of the “oldest” and “deepest” abyss, or ‘Abgrund’, of Nature.105
Marxist historicism has gradually recognized the subterranean influence of Schelling’s ‘positive
philosophy’ of pre-determined being on the emergence, in mid-19th Century Germany, of both
scientific positivism and dialectical materialism.106 In Reason and Revolution (1941), Herbert
Marcuse writes: “Positive philosophy was a conscious reaction against the critical and destructive
tendencies of French and German rationalism… The 'positives,' to Comte, are the matters of fact of
observation, while Schelling stresses that 'experience' is not limited to the facts of outer and inner
sense.”107 Marcuse observes that “Comte himself derived the positivistic method from [Schelling’s]
the foundations of positive philosophy”, from which he quotes Schelling to declare: “if we had only a
choice between empiricism and the oppressive apriorism [Denknotwendigkeiten] of an extreme
rationalism, no free mind would hesitate to decide for empiricism.”108 Manfred Frank has further
shown how it was Schelling’s refusal of Hegel’s triadic logic of difference reflected into identity that
compelled him to radically transform the opposition between beings, in a way that anticipated
98
Ibid., 144
99
Ibid., 143
100
Cf. Bolman, Frederick trans. The Ages of the World, 1942, 21; Gutmann, James. Schelling: Of Human
Freedom, 1936, xliv
101
Beach, Edward Allen. The Potencies of Gods: Schelling’s Philosophy of Mythology, 1994, 79
102
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph. Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, Love,
Jeff & Schmidt, Johannes trans., 2006, 47
103
Ibid., 48-49
104
Ibid., 50-51
105
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph. The Ages of the World. Bolman, Frederich trans., 1942, 116-7, 132
106
cf. Bloch, Ernst. Das Materialismusproblem, seine Geschichte und Substanz, 1972; Frank, Manfred. Der
unendliche Mangel an Sein. Schellings Hegelkritik und die Anfänge der Marxschen Dialektik, 1992; Žižek, Slavoj.
The Indivisible Remainder: Essays on Schelling and Related Matters, 1996
107
Marcuse, Herbert. Reason and Revolution, 1941, 324-325
108
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph. Sämmtliche Werke I, vol. X, 1861, 198

dialectical materialism.109 Once the reflexive identity of identity-and-difference has been rejected,
there remains only the indifferent non-identity of identity-and-difference, in which every differentia is
paradoxically unrelated (cf. Bradley’s Paradox of Relations). More recently, Slavoj Žižek has recast
The Ages of the World as one of the seminal contributions to the paradoxical ontology of materialism.
He explains that after Schelling “logos can never fully mediate/internalize this Otherness of the
Ground — in its elementary dimension, Grund is nothing but the impediment of an Otherness which
maintains forever its externality.”110
Andrew Bowie has, in more exacting detail, illuminated how Schelling’s never fully mediated but
always contingent and external ‘ground’ of creation, evil, and freedom, had sown the philosophic
seeds for an indifferent opposition between beings, which would later fructify into, not only
Feuerbach’s other-opposing notion of matter, but also in Heidegger’s self-opposing ‘ontico-ontology’
of Dasein.111 Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach and Friedrich Engels rejected Schelling’s apophatic
theology, in which an ineffable Absolute eternally creates the primordial ungrounded ground of
Nature, but retained his positive conception of the self-determined being in matter. In The Principles
of the Philosophy of the Future (1839), Feuerbach decapitated Schelling’s indifferent Absolute to
fully re-immanentize its divine power into matter, Nature, and mankind. He writes:
“God is only the prime and general cause of matter, motion, and activity; but particular motions and
activities and specific, real, and material objects are considered and known as independent of God…
The divinization of the real, of that which exists materially—materialism, empiricism, realism,
humanism—and the negation of theology are, however, the essence of the modern era.”112
Freidrich Engels completed Feuerbach’s re-materialization of theology when, for example, in Ludwig
Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, he commented that for Feuerbach “matter is
not a product of mind, but mind itself is merely the highest product of matter.” August Comte in
France, like Feuerbach in Germany, presented a parallel plan, in a General View of Positivism (1848),
for how such a materialist humanism might secure the positive ground for the construction of a
sovereign science. He elaborated how an “utter inability of theology to deal with practical life” had
bedevilled its empty speculations and gradually “brought about the entire destruction of the
theological fabric.”113 Comte, at the head of the entire subsequent tradition of scientific positivism,
promises a new “science of Society” to supersede traditional theology by reconstructing the “scientific
link” and “prepare the advanced portion of humanity for the acceptance of a true spiritual power, a
power more coherent, as well as more progressive, than the noble but premature attempt of mediaeval
Catholicism. ”114 Émile Durkheim later re-formulated Comte’s empirical sociology into a general
methodology for validating the experimental results of the empirical and natural sciences. Gillian
Rose comments:
“The meaning of the paradigm of validity and values was decisively changed. It was the ambition of
sociology to substitute itself for traditional theoretical and practical philosophy, as well as to secure a
sociological object-domain sui generis.”115
109
Frank, Manfred. Der unendliche Mangel an Sein. Schellings Hegelkritik und die Anfänge der Marxschen
Dialektik, 1992, 322-3
110
Žižek, Slavoj. The Indivisible Remainder: Essays on Schelling and Related Matters, 1996 6-7
111
Bowie, Andrew. Schelling and Modern European Philosophy: An Introduction, 1993, 4, 8, 92
112
Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas. Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, Vogel, Manfred trans. 1986 13, 21
113
Comte, Auguste. A General View of Positivism, Bridges, J.H. trans., 1908, 10
114
Ibid., 2-3
115
Rose, Gillian. Hegel Contra Sociology, 1995, 13-14

After rejecting the creative logos of divine creation, scientific positivism scrambled in various
directions but never succeeded in explaining the god-shaped ‘gap’ at the furthermost conditions of
empirical explanation: the astonishing successes of natural science (e.g. Hemholtz, Boltzmann, Hertz,
Mach) were hollowed at the apogee of their triumph by the equally stunning absence of any logical
justification of their essential truth. Neo-Kantianism attempted to fill this theoretical lacuna by
constructing various a priori and self-validating methodologies of ‘objective validity’ to explain the
positive ‘facts’ of the empirical natural sciences.116 Otto Liebmann’s Kant and his Epigones (1865)
discounted the contributions of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel in order to summon a generation of
scholars “Zurück zu Kant!” Friedrich Albert Lange’s History of Materialism (1865) criticized the
possibility of that genuine knowledge could be transmitted through merely material sensory organs.
Where the Marburg school of Neo-Kantians (e.g. Cohen, Natorp, Cassirer) focused on the
transcendental deduction of the categories in the Critique of Pure Reason to validate German science,
the Baden school of Neo-Kantians (e.g. Windelband, Rickert, Troeltsch) focused on the aesthetic
dialectic of the Critique of Judgement to validate German culture. Yet since these transcendental
methodologies could never themselves be validated (without risking an infinite regress or vicious
circularity) apart from the actual achievements of the positive science, the Neo-Kantians remained
little more than “botanists in the garden of the a priori”117 whose “kind of ‘logic’”, Heidegger later
denigrated, always “limps along after, investigating the status of some science as it chances to find it,
in order to discover its ‘method’.”118
In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant had sought to collapse and banish the pretensions of psychology
from the heights of apodictic science119; and in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, he
further argued that empirical psychology could never become an exact science because it could not
possibly quantify and isolate distinct thoughts.120 Schelling’s philosophy of nature and Herbart’s real
things-in-themselves promised to provide a new ground for the observations of psychology in the
enduring substratum of the psyche: Herbart’s textbooks on psychology had suggested the possibility
of an empirical examination of psychology121, and Schelling’s unmediated division of the conscious
and unconscious psyche later influenced James, Freud, and Jung.122 In the Elements of Psychophysics
(1860), Gustav Fechner combined Schelling’s substratum and Herbart’s psyche in a panpsychic
monism, or ‘psychophysics’, for the purpose of demonstrating an arithmetical correspondence
between physical and psychical stimuli. Wilhelm Wundt, following the example of Feuerbach,
rejected Fechner’s theology but retained his methodology, and, in 1879 established in the first
laboratory for experimental and physiological psychology. By adopting the methodological
assumptions, standards, and instruments of the positive sciences, Wundt persuasively circumvented
the prevailing Kantian objections by quantifiably measuring the regularly occurring results of
psychological observation.
116
Cf. Friedman, Michael. A Parting of Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger, 2000
117
Plessner, Helmut. Die Verspätete Nation, 1974, 185
118
119
120
Kitchner, Patricia. Kant’s Transcendental Psychology, 1990, 11
121
Cf. Herbart, Johann Friedrich. Lehrbuch zur Einleitung in die Philosophie, 1813; Lehrbuch der Psychologie,
1816; Psychologie als Wissenschaft, 1824
122
Ffytche, Matt. The Foundation of the Unconsciousness: Schelling, Freud and the Birth of the Modern Psyche,
2013, 135

Franz Brentano initiated a reversed return to Kant when he supplanted Wundt’s application of the
methods of physiology to psychology with a purely descriptive analysis of mental phenomena.123
Since whatever appears is given by an “act of presentation” he rendered all physical phenomena into
mental phenomena. Brentano unmistakably asserts the ubiquity of mental phenomena when he
describes how the “act of presentation forms the foundation not merely of the act of judging, but also
of desiring and of every other mental act.”124 Since “external perception cannot be proved true and
real even by means of direct demonstration”, but mental phenomena alone are known with
“immediate” and “infallible” certainty, Brentano argued that only true knowledge consists in
knowledge of the phenomena.125 But Brentano’s phenomenology did not simply repeat Hegel’s
phenomenology or Hume’s phenomenalism because, following Wundt, he sought to distinguish and
correlate his results with those of the other positive sciences. In his 1888 lectures Descriptive
Psychology or Descriptive Phenomenology, Brentano distinguished descriptive psychology as the
“contemplation of psychical realities” that is prior to genetic psychology because its class of mental
phenomena subsumes the class of all physical phenomena, including every conceivable correlation
with physiology.126 It is meant to construct a logic of phenomena to relate the various classes of
mental phenomena (e.g. mental and physical, descriptive and genetic). Brentano explicitly derives this
psychological relation from the Scholastic notion of intentionality when he writes:
“Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the
intentional (or mental) inexistence (Inexistenz) of an object (Gegenstand) and what we might call,
though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to
be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity… We can, therefore, define mental
phenomena by saying that they are those phenomena which contain an object intentionally within
themselves.127
Brentano concluded that since all of the natural sciences merely study specific observations within the
general realm of the “phenomena of imagination”, while phenomenology studies the structures of all
phenomena, phenomenology must be the absolutely general science that subsumes all of the other
special sciences.128 Phenomenology was thus conceived, in its earliest origins, as a purely descriptive
alternative to empirical psychology that also purported to subsume this and every other science. It was
precisely this claim to subsume all sciences that planted a paradox in its primordial heart: for, as
Cantor would later discover, just as no set can subsume all sets including itself (cf. Russell’s
Paradox), no general set of all sciences can subsume all special sciences and remain distinctly
correlated to these special sciences. After Schelling had divided the unconditional Absolute from the
ungrounded self-determined beings of Nature, Feuerbach and Engels had recast these self-determined
beings as matter, and Fechner and Wundt had established empirical psychology by correlating
psychical and physical phenomena. Brentano further divided empirical psychology from descriptive
psychology, and purported to subsume all the positive sciences under the new science of
phenomenology. But where empirical psychology was meant to be validated by the correlation of its
methods to those of the positive sciences; and the positive sciences were, in turn, meant to be
validated by some further array of correlations between theoretical hypotheses and experimental
observations; phenomenology was uniquely meant to subsume - together with all phenomena - every
123
Titcher, E.B. “Brentano and Wundt: Empirical and Experimental Psychology”, The American Journal of
Psychology, 32, 1921, 119
124
Moran, Dermot & Mooney, Timothy ed. The Phenomenology Reader, 2002, 36
125
Ibid., 43
126
Ibid., 51
127
Ibid., 41-42
128
ibid., 47

possible correlation in and between the positive sciences. Since every correlation requires some
identity between the correlates (i.e. if a is related to c by F then Fa & Fb), but subsumption requires an
absolute difference between the superordinate and the subordinate set (i.e. if a ⊃ b then a ≠ b), the
methods of generic science of phenomenology must be both identical and different to those of the
special sciences. This identity and difference of phenomenology with psychology, in particular, meant
that phenomenology must be both psychologistic and anti-psychologistic.
Edmund Husserl recognized in phenomenology this latent possibility for the imminent implosion of
positive science into psychology: since phenomenology subsumed all science, and phenomenology is
a descriptive psychology, but psychology is not scientific, then it seemed that phenomenology
threatened to collapse all science into non-science, and knowledge into ignorance. The genuine danger
of psychologism thus portended, not only the dissolution every necessary form of logic into the
contingent happenstances of empirical psychology, but also the apocalyptic annihilation of the secular
space of emancipated Jewry constructed by the “science of Society.” Husserl had first studied
mathematical logic under Kronecker and Weierstrass, but after Weierstrass fell ill he departed to study
psychology in Vienna with Brentano from 1884 to 1886. Gottlob Frege had, in The Foundations of
Arithmetic (1884), argued against any reduction of the ideal objects of mathematics to the variable
fluctuations of psychology. And after Frege had criticized similar psychologistic tendencies in The
Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891), Husserl became increasingly convinced his own ambiguous
psychological-genetic accounts of concepts had been complicit in precipitating a foundational crisis
between pure logic and empirical psychology. He believed that the pure forms of logic, mathematics,
and geometry were absolutely, universally, and categorically true regardless of their variable content.
But descriptive psychology had, to the contrary, purported to derive these pure forms from the
relative, particular, and hypothetical vagaries of mental phenomena. Were these pure forms of logic –
per impossibile – reducible to mental phenomena, then Husserl feared that any formulation of
scientific truth would collapse into a dark maelstrom of the most ‘vicious relativism’ where, as
Socrates once quipped, every statement is “equally right” and every man is “every bit as wise as any
other man and even as any god!”129
In the Prologue to The Logical Investigations (1900), Husserl argued that if psychologism dismissed
the laws of logic then it could not be logically justified; but if, alternatively, psychologism purported
to derive the laws of logic from psychology, then any possible derivation must surreptitiously use the
very laws of logic that it purports to derive.130 Frege and Husserl’s anti-psychologistic arguments each
implicitly invoked new renditions of Bernard Bolzano’s re-platonized notion of ‘objective sentences
in themselves’ to divide and oppose the pure entities of logic to the variable flux of empirical
phenomena. But where Plato’s universal Ideas were originally cast as the unique trans-phenomenal
paradigms from which were derived the many phenomenal imitations131, Husserl ingenioiusly recast
them, in a positivist mould, as the ‘eide’ that were formally distinguishable but immanently contained
within the pre-determined phenomena. In Ideas (1913), he defines phenomenology as the “science of
essential being” that is meant to establish “knowledge of essences.” He contrasts it with psychology,
which he alternatively defines as the “science of facts” that “belong in the one spatio-temporal
world.” The pure eidetic essences that distinguish phenomenology are, to the contrary, conceived as
the universal categories through which the phenomena might be re-constructed. Where the entities of
the physical world (including psychology), are real, the pure essences of phenomenology are ‘irreal’
129
Plato. The Theaetetus, 183a, 162c
130
Husserl, Edmund. Logical Investigations, §§19-23
131
Cf. Plato. The Phaedo 74c; The Republic 596a

beings. Husserl denied that he was guilty of any “perverse ‘Platonic hypostatization’”132, but, as
Heidegger later recognized, he had merely constructed a new, inverted, and ‘irreal’ reflection of the
original, upright, real Platonic ontology.
Husserl writes: “As over against this psychological "phenomenology", pure or transcendental
phenomenology will be established not as a science of facts, but as a science of essential Being.”133
He promises that phenomenology may disclose the “transcendentally purified ‘experiences’” of irreal
essences that are “excluded from every connection with in the ‘real world’” for the purpose of
discovering the essence of “Absolute Knowledge” that the “perpetual precondition of all metaphysics
and other philosophy.” (46) He proposes, first, to (a) bracket, suspend, and annul the necessity of all
propositional-judgments in a general ‘phenomenological reduction’ of all mental phenomena to the
‘phenomenological residuum’ of ‘pure consciousness’; then (b) to ‘abstract’ pure essences from
empirical facts; and, finally, (c) to synthesize together all pure essences in ‘eidetic connections’.134
This (a) bracketing is not meant to annihilate but merely to withhold affirmation of necessity from all
contingent phenomenon. Husserl first brackets the ‘natural attitude’ along with every fact of the
natural world.135 Then he brackets all of the positive sciences constructed from the empirical facts of
the natural world. Finally, Husserl prohibits himself from accepting any of the un-bracketed standards
of science relating to the natural world.136 Once the world and all scientific standards have been
bracketed “out of action” by the ‘phenomenological reduction’ there remains nothing for Husserl
except the bare “phenomenological residuum” of the pure consciousness.137 Husserl summarizes:
“The thesis of my pure ego and its personal life, which is ‘necessary’ and plainly indubitable, thus
stands opposed to the thesis of the world which is ‘contingent’” 138
Husserl describes this ‘pure consciousness’, in a way reminiscent of Fichte, as a ‘ray’ of intentional
relations “shooting forth anew with each new cogito and vanishing with it.”139 It is meant to
intentionally posit “the whole spatiotemporal world” through the medium of “a merely intentional
being.”140 This intentional positing is described as the relation of the intentional noesis (thinking) that
gives meaning to its intentional noematic (thought) object.141 Husserl, like Descartes before him,
believed this phenomenological reflection to be “a self-evident unshakable existential thesis” that “has
its ground in the essential nature of a pure Ego and of experiencing in general.”142 But by neglecting
to explain any further conditions for this ‘existential thesis’, he effectively elevated the Ego to the
Fichte’s absolute and unconditioned condition of all conditions. Where, however, the Fichtean Ego
self-posits each of its objects (i.e. the non-Ego), Husserl reverses this self-positing process to bracket,
suspend, and displace every noematic object until it has excavated the “central “core” and “nucleatic
noema” of science from the surrounding noetic layers.143 This reverse-positing, or un-positing, of all
noematic objects recalls Schelling’s positive critique of Hegel’s Logic: where Schelling had rendered
Hegel’s ontology as an array of negative and contingent concepts that stand opposed to positive and
132
Husserl, Edmund. Ideas, §22 83
133
Ibid., 44
134
Ibid., §1, 52
135
Ibid., §7, 61
136
Ibid., §32, 111
137
Ibid., §33, 114
138
Ibid., §46, 145
139
Ibid., §57, 172
140
Ibid., §49, 153
141
Ibid., §88, 257
142
Ibid., §46, 145
143
Ibid., §90, 262

pre-determined beings, Husserl similarly renders all of the positive sciences into merely contingent
‘matters of fact’ that stand opposed to the necessary Ego of phenomenological reflection. But where
Schelling had rooted these pre-determined beings in the “oldest” “deepest” “abyss of what is past”,
Husserl planted them in the shallower soil of ‘pure consciousness’ from whose vanishing ground he
would struggle in vain to re-construct all science.
For the purpose of reconstructing this “fundamental structure of all possible cognition”, Husserl
arranges the sciences into ontological regions that are linked together - brick by brick - to erect the
towering ontology of phenomenology, which we may call Husserl’s ‘ontophenomenology’. He first
purports to extract the eidetic essences from individual and empirical ‘matters of fact’ by a process of
‘ideation’ or ‘abstraction’, in an bafflingly opaque process by which the essence is distinguished,
separated, and ‘objectified’ as an independent intentional object.144 Self-sufficient essences are then
described as ‘concretum’; the essences which are not self-sufficient are ‘abstractum’; and any material
concretum is an ‘individuum.’ Empirical facts correspond to a material genus, while essences
correspond to a formal genus. The regions of material genera, likewise, have their essential theoretic
foundations in the regions of the formal genera that are designated by essences. Each essence is then
artificially placed within a genus-species hierarchy descending from the broadest generality to the
narrowest specificity. The narrowest species are the infirmae species of eidetic singularities that have
no more particular species ‘under them’. Every eidetic connection implies an eidetic participation
since each part is contained or subsumed in the whole. All noetic intentionality and noematic
intentional objects are, in this way, meant to be linked together by eidetic connections that are
“hierarchically built up on one another” and “encased in one another.”145 Noetic consciousness is, in
this way, said to actively produce noematic theses; combine each thetical correlation of noesis-noema
into further composite syntheses; and combine all composite syntheses into a “total synthetical object
[that] is constituted in synthetical consciousness.”146
Husserl never fulfilled this promise of re-constructing the ‘Absolute Knowledge’ of all science
because his phenomenological method of (a) bracketing and (b) analysing all phenomena into
essences could never - according the lights of its own method - succeed in (c) synthesizing the
essences of bracketed phenomena into a “systematically rigorous grounding and development of this
first of all philosophies.”147 Although he denies that he intends to bracket all of the phenomena all at
once, he never appears to have furnished any methodological criteria for formally deciding between
the phenomena that should and should not be bracketed. Nor could he have consistently done so,
because furnishing any such methodological criteria would blatantly violate his own prohibition
against accepting any unbracketed propositions, including those forms of method and logic.148 But
once he had prohibited himself from accepting any un-bracketed criterion, he could not honestly
admit any prior methodological criteria to select which particular phenomena to bracket and analyse.
Since, moreover, Husserl’s ‘phenomenological reduction’ must also suspend any possible
recollection149 of an eidetic standard (or paradigm) for a completed synthesis, he can neither know
that he knows (nor even that he does not know) any particular synthesis. Absent of any knowledge of
his own eidetic syntheses, he is compelled, in a blind stupor, to infinitely re-posit partial syntheses
even as he un-posits each and every synthesis in a serial devolution of (a) bracketing and (b) analysis.
144
Cf. Husserl, Edmund. Logical Investigations, §67
145
Husserl, Edmund. Ideas, §100, 245
146
Ibid., §120, 338
147
Ibid., 46
148
Ibid., §32, 111
149
Cf. Plato’s Meno Paradox in The Meno, 80d

This devolution of all syntheses can – in principle – never succeed in constructing any composite
synthesis from the correlation of noetic intentionality and noematic objects, but is doomed to forever
annul each and every distinction between the irreal essences of phenomenology and the real ‘matters
of fact’ of empirical psychology. Once every distinction is annulled, Husserl’s phenomenology
ineluctably collapses into his baneful foe of psychologism.
Martin Heidegger recognized that Husserl, no less than Descartes and Kant, had “applied medieval
ontology” to his definition of the Ego as a being but “failed to provide an ontology of Dasein.”150
Husserl, he suggests, had attempted to re-construct the real on an eidetic system of irreal correlations
between the noetic (thinking) subject and the noematic (thought) object without having questioned the
meaning of that being at the interstices between the real and the irreal. Husserl’s phenomenology is,
thus, not less ontological than the positive sciences, but, even more so, because it purports to subsume
all of the special sciences into the sovereign science phenomenology. Husserl had attempted to
resolve Brentano’s paradoxical subsumption of correlative sciences into phenomenology by
bracketing away every correlative fact of the spatio-temporal world as it is described by the positive
sciences. But by bracketing away all propositional-judgments of the other sciences, he had
inadvertently dissolved even the phenomenological method of bracketing, analysis, and synthesis.
This dissolution compelled Husserl to a-methodologically repeat the un-positing and re-positing of
every synthesis. And if every re-constructed ontology is immediately de-constructed, then his
ontophenomenological re-construction always devolves into ontophenomenological de-construction.
This bi-polar cycling of un-positing and re-positing, analysis and synthesis, de-construction and re-
construction results the bizarre shuffling of phenomena in which every constructed ontology is
repeatedly divided for analysis even as each division is continually blurred together in a drunken
delirium of descriptive analyses that, Husserl says, threatens to “draws us into infinities of
experience” - idealiter in infinitum.151
In Being and Time (1927), Heidegger compresses this infinitesimal devolutions of Husserl’s
ontophenomenology into the reflexive relationality of Being to Being in Dasein. Dasein is the special
entity that Heidegger proposes to disclose the meaning of Being from its concealment by the
categorial determinations of traditional ontology: where ontology defines all beings by generic
categories and specific differences, Dasein interrogates the meaning of all categories, and especially
the most trans-generic category of categories, that of Being itself. Michael Friedman has traced its
inception to Heidegger’s early efforts to resolve the aporetic Neo-Kantian dualisms of “abstract
formal-logical structures” and the “concrete real objects of cognition” by concocting a new kind of
“being-in-the-world” that is both essentially historical and pragmatically “ready-to-hand.”152 Michael
Inwood notes that ‘Dasein’ can mean “to be there, present, available, to exist”, but has also been used
to signify ‘presence’.153 Schelling had, for example, used the term ‘Dasein’ to describe the presence of
that absolutely originary and unconditionable being of God.154 But after Schelling’s pre-determined
being was re-materialized by Feuerbach and Engels, and the material substrate of psychology was re-
phenomenalized by Brentano and Husserl, Heidegger re-introduces ‘Dasein’ for the purpose of
collapsing every analytic distinction of traditional ontology into a self-determining entity that actively
constructs and reflexively interrogates the meaning of its own Being.
150
151
Ibid., §100, 293
152
Friedman, Michael. A Parting of Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger, 2000, 46-50
153
Inwood, Michael. A Heidegger Dictionary, 1999, 42
154
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph. The Ages of the World, 8:209, 95

Heidegger speaks of ‘Dasein’ as an all-enveloping term that designates all of the intentional and
reflexive relationships of Being towards Being that constitute how we talk, view, intend and act.
Heidegger offers at least eight distinct definitions in the introductions to Being and Time: Dasein is
the (i) self-reflexive questioning of Being upon Being (ii) that is “each of us himself”; (iii) “the ways
in which man behaves” that (iv) “has its Being to be”; in (v) the soul that constitutes (vi) “each of us”;
which (vii) “understands something like being”; and which (viii) defines “man’s being” as “the
potentiality for discourse.” The sheer profusion of possible meanings, coupled with Heidegger’s
implicit rejection of definitionism, has baffled generations of interpreters: on the one hand, Rudolf
Carnap derided Heidegger as the paragon of “metaphysicians [who] are musicians without musical
ability”155; and, on the other hand, Jean-Paul Sartre rebuked Heidegger, in Being and Nothingness
(1943), for an idealist “flight outside the self” that betrayed the humanist promise of the ‘existential
analytic of Dasein.’156 Herbert Dryfus has, however, helpfully cautioned that “we are not to think of
Dasein as a conscious subject” but rather as “more basic than mental states and their intentionality.”
But Dryfus unduly anthropomorphizes Dasein when he describes it as “a way of being that is
characteristic of all people or to a specific person – a human being.”157 In light of Heidegger’s explicit
disavowal of any definition of the ‘human’, no humanist reading Dasein can be sustained.158
Heidegger rather describes it, both more expansively and more fundamentally, as “the fact that
something is, and in its Being as it is; in Reality; in presence-at-hand; in subsistence; in validity.”159
Dasein is not any definite metaphysical entity, nor even a ‘philosophical anthropology’, but, rather it
is ‘that-being’ which constitutes itself by reflecting upon the question of the meaning of Being; by
reflecting Being on Being in Being; through the self-reflexive inter-relationality of Being itself.
Heidegger wields Dasein like a flaming sword to eviscerate the ‘history of ontology’ by eliding and
undercutting its fundamental and unquestioned assumption that “‘Being’ is the most universal and
emptiest of concepts.”160 He claims that the question of Being can only “achieve its true concreteness”
and “positive results” by analysing the genealogical conditions for the functional subordination of
Being and Time, and by illumining how these originary conditions have been re-conditioned as
functional components within ontology. Where Husserl’s ontophenomenology had naively assumed
the being of its phenomena, and bracketed away the criteria for constructing any relations, Heidegger
collapses Husserl’s extrinsic intentional relation of noesis-to-noema into the intrinsic inter-
relationship of Being-to-Being in Dasein. Like Husserl, he brackets all apodictic “dogmatic
constructions” of ontology (e.g. Aristotle’s laws of logic) from his interpretation of Dasein, so that it
may “show itself in itself and from itself” from within its intrinsic self-reflection without the aid of
any extrinsic categories.161 But where Husserl’s ontophenomenology had un-posited and re-posited
atemporal essences, Heidegger’s phenomenontology is meant to reflect upon the ‘historicality’ of the
temporal horizon of Being to compress Husserl’s un-positing and re-positing into the singular self-
reflection of Dasein.162 Ontology, he contends, “has its own foundation and motivation in Dasein’s
own ontical structure” and it is this analytic of Dasein, rather than phenomenology, or any other
155
Carnap, Rudolf. The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis, Pap, Arthur trans., 1931, 80
156
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, Barnes, Hazel trans.,
1993, 249
157
Dryfus, Herbert. Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I, 1991 13-14
158
Cf. Heidegger, Martin. Letter on ‘Humanism’, 1949
159
160
Ibid., §1, 2
161
Ibid., §5, 37
162
Ibid., §6, 41

positive science, that is the “fundamental ontology, from which alone all other ontologies take their
rise.”163
The analytic of Dasein is meant to interrogate both the pre-ontological and the post-ontological
concepts of Being “with equal primordiality.”164 Heidegger promises that it may resolve the crises of
the sciences by “run[ing] ahead of the positive sciences” to produce new concepts. In contrast to the
Neo-Kantian “kind of ‘logic’ which limps along after” the positive sciences to “discover its
‘method’”, the analytic of Dasein “leaps ahead” of each by producing is own methods, logics, and
ontologies through the self-reflection Dasein “with time as its standpoint.”165 Heidegger’s analytic of
Dasein seems a “self-conscious allusion to the Transcendental Analytic” of Immanuel Kant’s Critique
of Pure Reason.166 Kant had similarly described his “analytic of concepts” as a genealogical
investigation into “the possibility of a priori concepts by seeking them only in the understandings their
birthplace and analysing its pure use in general.”167 Heidegger seems to implicitly allude to this
passage when he writes: “In thus demonstrating the origin of our basic ontological concepts by an
investigation in which their ‘birth certificate’ is displayed, we have nothing to do with a vicious
relativizing of ontological standpoints.”168 But Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein is also distinguished
from Kant’s transcendental analytic by its novel conception of Being: where Kant conceives of Being,
like Hegel, as a category of “unconditional unity” in pure and “empty intuition”169, Heidegger, like
Schelling, conceives of Dasein as that ‘presence’ of an “unthinkable dynamic darkness.”170 And where
Kant’s transcendental analytic is meant to trace the genealogical conditions for the hypothetical
possibility of the faculty of understanding, Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein is meant to trace the
genealogical conditions for the unconditioned presence of beings themselves.
Heidegger pursues these genealogical conditions to ‘loosen up’ and ‘dissolve’ the “hardened
tradition” of ontology through the hermeneutic of Dasein, which is meant to excavate the “primordial
signification” of the “phenomenon” from its accumulated layers of auxiliary semblances. He purports
to seize possession of the “ownmost meaning of Being” through a historiological inquiry in which
Dasein reflects on its own constitutive Being and “understands itself as historiological.”171 Since this
self-reflection also constitutes Dasein, “Dasein is as it already was” and inescapably “is its past”.172
But this hermeneutic is already imminently paradoxical because the ‘showing’ of every phenomenon
is an “announcing-itself by something which does not show itself, but which announces itself through
something which does show itself.”173 Heidegger characterizes this ‘showing-itself’ of the primordial
phenomenon (in terms reminiscent of Duns Scotus’ Eucharistic doctrine of ‘separated accidents’174) as
an ‘emanation’ of “something non-manifest” that “is essentially never manifest” but always “veiled in
163
Ibid., §4, 13
164
Ibid., §4, 13
165
Ibid., §3, 10
166
Cf. Carman, Taylor. Heidegger’s Analytic: Interpretation, Discourse and Authenticity in Being and Time,
2003, 10
167
168
169
Cf. Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Pure Reason, A404; Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Science of
Logic, §132
170
Cf. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time, §2, 5; Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, The Ages of the World,
8:212, 98
171
172
Ibid. §6, 41
173
Ibid., §7.A, 51
174
Cf. Scotus, John Duns. Ordinatio, 4.10.I,n.9

itself.”175 Since every phenomenon that is shown is also not shown, and “what appears does not show
itself”176, the hermeneutic of Dasein may only revolve in an open circle of “relatedness backward or
forward”177 that repeatedly turns Being over upon itself without ever definitively relating Being to
Being. Erich Przywara has, on this point, memorably described Heidegger as like the “image of a
knotted tree in the Black Forest, suspicious and ingrown, for which reality is downright angular, to the
point that any ideative dimension (of philosophical analysis) is virtually nothing but an intensity of
self-contained tension."178
Heidegger claims that “fundamental ontology, from which alone all other ontologies can take their
rise, must be sought in the existential analytic of Dasein.” This analytic seems to have been intended
to divide the various significations of basic concepts (e.g. Being) in the hope of finding an “inner
relationship between the things meant by these terms.” Heidegger first illustrates this procedure by
dividing the basic concept of Phenomenology into an analysis of (A) Phenomenon and (B) Logos.
(§7) Where Husserl had (a) bracketed empirical facts and (b) analysed eidetic essences for the purpose
of synthesizing the pure essences in eidetic connections in ‘Absolute Knowledge’, Heidegger has
attempted to (a) circumvent ontology and (b) analyse the significations of Being for the purpose of (c)
excavating “most primordial way of interpreting Being.”179 Yet since Heidegger, no less than Husserl,
cannot honestly admit any ontological concepts, such as the arithmetic concepts of division and
combination, Heidegger must gradually abandon the analytic of Dasein in a spiralling movement
away from ontology that foreshadows his later Turn (Kehre) from philosophy towards poetic
hermeneutics. His analysis in Being and Time could, by the very ontologically-laden terms of its own
language, never truly vindicate the meaningfulness of the question of Being because his analytic of
Dasein had, in the end, merely re-spun Husserl’s paradoxical ontophenomenology into an even more
tightly knotted paradox of phenomenontology: where Husserl had distinguished, opposed, and
subsumed empirical psychology into an imminently collapsing eidetic phenomenology, Heidegger
had further compressed Husserl’s noesis-to-noema intentional relations into an implosive singularity
of self-reflective relationality that promised to infinitely re-ennact its paradoxically re-construction
and re-collapsing ontico-ontologies.180
The collapse of phenomenology into the infinitesimally imploding singularity of its phenomena is the
mature result of its inwardly differentiated genetic inheritance: once Scotus and Descartes had divided
ideal representations from real substances; Kant and Fichte had placed thinking on a sublime but
asymptotic path towards a truth that merely ‘ought-to-be’; and Schelling and Feuerbach had
infinitesimally individuated this infinite asymptotic approach into the pre-determined beings of
matter; then no obstacle remained to prevent Brentano and Husserl from transforming the material
substratum of the empirical psyche into the irreal phenomena studied by phenomenology. Heidegger’s
attempted circumvention of this genetic inheritance of phenomenology by epistemology had collapsed
upon his own secret indebtedness to Schelling’s infinitesimal individuation of pre-determined beings
in Dasein. To elide the construction of categorial ontologies, from Plato to Hegel, he had opposed the
emptying of Being into nothingness to the primordial ‘somethingness’ of a pre-determined Being. But
by compressing, in Dasein, all of the dualisms of modern philosophy, Heidegger has merely preserved
175
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time, §7.A, 53
176
Ibid., §7.A, 52
177
Ibid., §2, 8
178
Przywara, Erich. “Husserl and Heidegger”, 1960, Betz, John trans., 2014, 615
179
180
Ibid., §4, 35

the agonistic differentiation of all differentia in and towards its ‘ownmost possibility’ of death.181
Since this ‘being-towards-death’ portends the infinitesimal dissolution of every possible ontico-
ontology, Heidegger can consistently comment that neither philosophy, nor any “human thought and
endeavour” but “only a god can save us” from the technical ‘enframing’ and concealment of ontology.
IV. Love Between The Difference of Phenomenology
The great question of the logical mediation of the phenomena has been repeatedly answered but never
resolved by phenomenology because each successive answer has carried in the seed of its phenomena
the genetic inheritance of an infinitesimally divisive epistemology. Circumventing the history of
ontology anew requires circumventing this hidden history of phenomenology, and this, may perhaps,
only be completed by recollecting Plato’s logic of the phenomena. Plato had, in the Theaetetus,
already asked the unasked question of the possibility knowledge of knowledge. Socrates commented:
“doesn’t it strike you as shameless to explain what knowing is like when we don’t know what
knowledge is?”182 Previously Socrates had, in the Charmides, no less abruptly fallen prey to a medley
of paradoxes when he had hypothesized that wisdom could be the most general science of all sciences
and non-sciences.183 Although self-reflexive relations were admitted to be “altogether inadmissible”
for mathematical quantities184, he suggested that we might yet “determine for us whether there is
nothing which has an inherent [qualitative] property of relation to self rather than to something
else.”185 When, in the Theaetetus, Plato attempted to cover his shame by three abortive ascents up the
dialectical ladder - from perception to true belief to justified true belief - where he was beset by the
paradox of the composition of quantitatively objectified concepts186: it seemed that any composite
concept must either be identical to its combination of unknowable simple elements187; or different
from this combination by the addition of some further unknown elements188; but, in either case,
composite concepts must be no less unknowable than the combination of unknown elements.189 Plato
illustrates this paradox by problematizing the minds’ ascent to the Sun in the Allegory of the Cave:
“Take the sun as an example… If you get hold of the difference, distinguishing any given thing from
all others, then, so some people say, you will have ‘an account’ of it, whereas, so long as you fix upon
something common to other things, your account will embrace all things that share it.” 190
Since we cannot grasp the pure self-identity of knowledge directly with the naked hand of thinking,
Plato suggests that we must alternatively seek to “grasp its difference from all other things.”191 Plato
first attempted to traverse this “vast and hazardous sea” of differences in the enigmatic dialectical
exercises of the Parmenides, but finally investigated the meaning of Difference itself in the Sophist.192
There he described how Motion results from the coincidence of Sameness and Difference that
181
Ibid., §50, 294
182
Plato. The Theaetetus, 196d
183
Plato. The Charmides, 168a-d
184
Ibid., 168e
185
Ibid., 169a
186
Plato. The Theaetetus, 151e-187a, 187b-201c, 201d-210a
187
Ibid., 203d
188
Ibid., 204a
189
Ibid., 205c-e
190
Ibid., 208d, 209d
191
Ibid., 208e
192
Plato. The Parmenides, 136b

participates in Being.193 Through this participation, Being is intrinsically differentiated into cascading
levels of participative non-beings. Every difference then reflects its difference from another into its
difference from itself in an infinitesimal self-differentiation that is only genuinely different by
reflecting an originary different that is related by its difference to Being itself.194 Plato explains that
“that which is not” [i.e. non-being] does not mean “something contrary to what exists [i.e. being] but
only something that is different”195; and “the prefix ‘not’” does not signify its absolute contrary but
rather only “indicates something [relatively] different from the words that follow.”196 This reflexive
participation of relatively differentiated non-beings allows Plato to preserve the contrary differences
of contraries as co-participants in the spiritual dynamism of Being itself.197 And Plato also suggests
that just as Socrates had departed from the city of self-enclosed reason, this inner dynamic of Being
may exceed and resolve the pivoting oscillations of infinitesimally contrary differences through the
intermediation of some “third thing over above these two... in virtue of its own [essential] nature.”198
The centrality of this mediation within the inner dynamic between differences is perhaps best
exemplified in Plato’s discussion of friendship in the Lysis and love in the Symposium. In the Lysis,
Plato, no less than Heidegger, rejects the self-sufficient goodness of beings-in-themselves in favour of
the mutual caring of beings-for-another.199 But since “nothing is so hostile as like to like” Socrates
propounds “a universal and infallible law” that “the nearer any two things resemble one another” the
greater the opposition, while “the greater the dissimilarity” the greater the attraction, because, just as
every relative non-being is different from itself by its difference from another, everything “craves for
its contrary, and not for its like.”200 Plato distinguishes essential and accidental properties201, and
contends that friendship has, as its purpose, no reciprocal exchange of accidental and instrumental
goods (e.g. a quart of wine),202 but rather only the intrinsic goodness of the paradigm of friendship in
which each essentially belongs in a relationship of mutual being-for-the-other.203 Socrates concludes
that “if, then, you two are friendly to each other, by some tie of nature you belong to each other.”204
By friendship, Being for-itself is thus differentiated from and opposed to itself, but, through this
opposition, its accidental differences of likeness and unlikeness are also folded back into a
relationship of loving attraction of mutually co-belonging being-for-another in-itself.205
In the Symposium, Plato elevates this mutual co-belonging of being-for-another in-itself towards that
higher love for an Idea of Beauty itself that is absolutely beyond itself. In the nucleatic narrative of all
embedded narratives, Socrates explains206 how Diotima had taught him how Love mediates between
heaven and earth to “weld both sides together and merge them into one great whole”; for “it is only
through the mediation of the spirit world that man can have any intercourse, whether waking or
193
Plato. The Sophist, 256d
194
Ibid., 257a
195
Ibid., 257b
196
Ibid., 258c
197
Ibid., 250d
198
Ibid., 250b-c
199
Plato. The Lysis, 215b; Socrates pronounces that his discussion of the presence of good and evil in friendship
extends to all beings at 218c
200
Ibid., 215d-e
201
Ibid., 217c-e
202
Ibid., 218d
203
Ibid., 220a
204
Ibid., 221e
205
Ibid., 222b
206
Plato. The Symposium, 201d

sleeping, with the gods.”207 She admonishes Socrates for failing to recognize that Love is
interconvertible with Wisdom208, and Goodness.209 Hence, for his final initiation into the ‘mysteries of
love’, Diotima guides Socrates up a “heavenly ladder” to a “wondrous vision” of everlasting Beauty,
beyond all words, knowledge, and existence: he must first “fall in love with the beauty of one
individual body”; then the similitude of beauty shared between bodies; then become “the lover of
every lovely body”; then to the “special lore that pertains to nothing but the beautiful itself”210; and
“see the heavenly beauty face to face.”211 It is precisely at this moment that Plato, far more than
Heidegger, exceeds the enclosure of beings in ontology. The interconvertibility of Beauty with
Goodness and Goodness with Being implies that this mediation of Beauty is ultimately a form of the
mediation of being-in-and-for-itself. Thus Diotima’s ladder also elevates the being-for-another in-
itself that is absolutely beyond Being towards nothing less than a theophantic revelation of an
originary co-belonging of Being suspended by Love in its inner differentiation and reflection from the
presence of Beauty itself.
Once the First Epistle of Saint John had described how “God is love” because God has “sent his Son
to be the propitiation for our sins”212, Saint Augustine of Hippo re-conceived of Plato’s co-belonging
of Love and Beauty by the Light of the free and non-reciprocal gift of Christ that may irreversibly
restore the broken mediation of love between God beyond being and man in being. Catherine
Pickstock comments that “as Plato saw [friendship], it is cosmic and ontological [but] if this has been
hidden, then it is re-instated when, in the Incarnation, God is shown to be charity or friendship in His
own inward being.”213 In the Trinity, Augustine described how, because man is made in the image of
God, this gift of ‘spiritual love’ uniquely illuminates “human sight” so that we may “see God who is
love itself, with the inner sight by which He can be seen.”214 Where Plato’s embedded narratives
reflect the orality of living discourse on a dialogic ascent from bodily beauty to heavenly Beauty,
Augustine’s prayerful reflection on the unimaginable ‘mansions of memory’ infinitely saturates his
inner sight of recollection, not with the ‘physical light’ of the Sun, nor even that ‘spiritual light’ of
Platonic Ideas, but even further beyond them towards the most originary Light of the Father, the Son,
and the Holy Spirit, who “are not three lights but one light.”215 Augustine describes how these “things
that are brought to light” are “brought forth” by “coming to birth”, not from the philosophic
midwifery of Socrates, nor even from the primordial birthplace of Heidegger, but rather only through
the Light of the Incarnation that reflects – for the eyes of faith – the absolutely differentiated but
equally intermediating and co-belonging Love shared in the Trinity.216 Where Plotinus may have
understood this onto-noetic ascent to be possible by the innate power of the mind alone, Augustine,
more humbly, reports that it is not merely he himself but God alone who perfectly beholds the co-
belonging of all lovers through that Love of the divine persons:
207
Ibid., 202e-203a
208
Ibid., 204b
209
Ibid., 204e
210
Ibid., 211c
211
Ibid., 211e
212
1 Jn. 4: 8-9
213
Pickstock, Catherine. “The Problem of Reported Speech: Friendship and Philosophy in Plato's Lysis and
Symposium”, Telos, no. 123, 2002, 62
214
Augustine of Hippo. The Trinity, VIII: 5, 12
215
Ibid., VIII:6
216
Ibid., IX:3

“I see love, and, as far as I am able, I gaze upon it with my mind, and I believe the Scripture, saying,
that God is love; and he that dwells in love, dwells in God; but when I see love, I do not see in it the
Trinity. Nay, but you see the Trinity if you see love.”217
The salvation of phenomenology from its unmediated inward divisions may perhaps only come from
a reflection of this Love that is shared in the Trinity, because it alone is the absolutely originary
Difference through which all differences may be sempiternally reflected into the Identity of the
Godhead. John Milbank has described how the requirement for mediation reflects a pneumatic
‘surplus’ from the ‘first difference’ of the Father from the Son into the ‘second difference’ of the Holy
Spirit to the Father and the Son.218 Conor Cunningham had further argued that when phenomenology
neglects this ‘second difference’ of the Trinity, it cannot adequately think of any difference that
escapes collapsing “within a univocal plane of immanence.”219 Only Trinitarian theology may
adequately think difference “because God is difference, yet this difference is a unity” and only this
absolutely originary Difference is “the difference of divine sameness.” (2001 298, 303) But Plato has
already provided the scattered seeds for a reformulation of phenomenology when he illustrated, in the
Lysis, how the inmost differentia of the pre-determined beings of phenomenology are divided,
opposed, and reflected back by mutual attraction into the mutual co-belonging of friendship; and how,
in the Symposium, the love of beauty may guide the lover of wisdom to ascend towards a heavenly co-
belonging of being-for-another with the Beauty of Being itself. Augustine has finally revolutionized
Plato’s logic of phenomena by suspending the ‘first difference’ of the Being from beings from a
‘second difference’, in which the differences of all differentia are folded back into the inner relations
of the Trinity, in which being-for-another in-itself is absolutely exceeded and suspended by that
Beauty which knows and loves all beings even as it knows and loves itself Beyond all beings.
V. After the Apocalypse of Phenomenology
Husserl had forewarned of the apocalypse of the social world constructed by secular reason and
positive science, but Heidegger had even hastened to fulfil its destruction by fermenting the most
terrible of all conflagrations yet seen upon the earth. Secular reasoning conceals this crisis, and
phenomenology carries along its nihilistic agony within its pre-determined beings. Phenomenology
could not succeed in saving science from collapsing into scepticism, because every ontological
construction must collapse into an imploding singularity. Heidegger’s solution was to infinitesimally
individuate and infinitely reiterate Husserl’s imminently collapsing ontologies to prepare the
possibility for a palingenetic re-construction of an alter-modern ontology of Dasein. But by
compressing Husserl’s paradoxical ontophenomenology into an even more tightly knotted paradox of
phenomenontology, Heidegger prolifically pollinated all phenomena with the inner annihilation of its
imploding singularity. Contrary to every naïve attempt at theological correlation, Heidegger has not
saved but annihilated phenomenology. For phenomenology to once more breathe life into the empire
of technology, requires a radical reconception its own basic concept of the phenomena: it can no
longer conceive of the phenomena as merely given pre-determined beings; but can only conceive fo
them as they have been discursively constituted by reflecting the divine radiance of the Trinity into all
phenomenality. Where phenomenology has doomed itself by compressing its inherited epistemic
217
Augustine of Hippo. The Trinity, VIII:12
218
Milbank, John. The Second Difference: “For a Trinitarianism without Reserve”, Modern Theology, vol.
2, 3, 1986, 229-230
219
Cunningham, Conor. “The Difference of Theology and Some Philosophies of Nothing”, Modern Theology 17,
3, 2001, 297

dualisms into its auto-annihilating phenomena, Christianity shares in the suffering of its self-
dissolution so that it may share in the glory of its inner differentia reflected into the essential identity
of the Trinity. Since only Christianity promises to individualize, dissolve, and restore the total of logic
of phenomena, it seems that nothing less than an uncomprisingly Trinitarian phenomenology may
succeed in escaping from the apocalypse of phenomenology.
The Trinity may uniquely promise to illuminate all phenomena by dissolving every unparticipative
pre-determination into the abyss of its own auto-annihilation and reflecting the resulting plenitude of
contingent beings into the supersaturated Being of its incarnational centre. The supersaturated beings
that pour forth from this reflection are irreducibly distinct from Jean-Luc Marion’s unilaterally given
‘saturated phenomena’ because, contrary to Marion, being is not merely passively received but
discursively constituted by thinking modelled on the inter-relationality of differentia reflected into the
Trinity (imago trinitatis). Marion performs a triple ‘phenomenological reduction’ by firstly reducing
the ‘matters of fact’ to Husserl’s noematic objects; secondly, by reducing these noematic objects to
the self-reflexive beings of Heidegger’s Dasein; and third by “radicalizing the pure reduction of the
given as such” that is “no longer as object or being” but only as “the phenomenon first gives itself.”220
Where for Fichte and Husserl the active intellect intentionally synthesizes all phenomena into
concepts, Marion conversely prioritizes the passive reception of the phenomena where “all the activity
falls to the phenomenon and to it alone.”221 But by prioritizing a purely passive reception of the
phenomenon, he effectively surrenders the active distinctions drawn by the discursive intellect. Since,
moreover, his triple-reduction of phenomenology remains within the genealogical maelstrom of the
unparticipative and pre-determined beings, every one of his distinctions (e.g. subject/object,
intention/intuition, gift/recipient etc.) totters on the brink of collapse before the same unthinkable
nothingness. The annihilation of these distinctions threatens to falsify Marion’s sublime vision of
‘supersaturated phenomenon’ and recast its semblance of transcendent miracles as little more than the
transcendental mirage of Husserl’s ‘synthetical object’ and Heidegger’s ‘primordial phenomenon’.
From a pre-modern reflection upon the post-modern problematic of the possibility of writing, Plato
points towards the possibility of a theological reformulation of phenomenology, not only in his
dialogic form of ‘living writing’, but, perhaps more importantly, in the reflexive participation of all
differentia in a mutually co-belonging, self-mirroring, and intermediating logic of phenomena. This
logic of phenomena remained, however, abstract and alien so long as it could be naively objectified as
an impersonal system of logic, being, and ontology. Once thought had been objectified into the Ideas,
and all Ideas constructed into a grand noetic ontology, Platonism had inadvertently petrified thinking
as an inscrutable riddle for itself. Then the philosophers' ‘golden dream’ of ascending from the cave
of unknowing to a blessed life of the Ideas themselves became a miserable slavery to a totally alien
architectonic. But by the Johannine identification of ontology with the Logos, and the Logos with
Christ, the crucifixion of Christ betokens - for the eyes of faith - a new subjectivity of thought that is
eternally and presently dynamized into thinking that dissolves every constructed ontology and every
fixed epistemology of pre-determined phenomena. The Resurrection similarly betokens a new
objectivity in which the scattered contingency of all ontological constructions and epistemological
perspectives are reflected back into the icon of the risen Christ. This radically incarnational mixture of
subjectivity and objectivity may once again breathe its free pneumatic surplus into a petrified planet
by dissolving and reflecting all contingent differentia into the triune God. Such a Trinitarian
phenomenology of the future should, for this purpose, begin in ecstatic humility before the presence
of that supersaturated being, which, like the parable of doubting Thomas, illuminates the
220
Marion, Jean-Luc. Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, 2002, 2-4
221
Ibid., 226

phenomenality of thinking even as it exceeds the grasp of our every thought. It must begin, less like
Heidegger and more like Augustine, with the most unasked question of the possibility of faith in the
discursive constitution of the meaning of beings:
“Turn us toward yourself, O God of Hosts, show us your face and we shall be saved; for
wheresoever a human soul turns, it can but cling to what brings sorrow unless it turns to
you.”222
222
Augustine of Hippo. The Confessions, Bk. IV ch.10

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Plato Against Phenomenology A Genealogic

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Plato Against Phenomenology: A Genealogical Critique

I. The Crisis of Phenomenology

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II. Plato's Logic of Phenomena

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IV. Love Between The Difference of Phenomenology

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V. After the Apocalypse of Phenomenology

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Aquinas, Thomas. De Ente et Essentia. Accessed November 23, 2015.

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Inwood, Michael. Heidegger Dictionary. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1999.

Moran, Dermot. Introduction to Phenomenology. London: Routledge, 2000.

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Rose, Gillian. Hegel Contra Sociology. London: Athlone, 1995.

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