Husserl is able to reach toward his refined sense of an idealism, which is grounded securely enough in self-evidence to provide a legitimate foundation for any possible science, by means of a specific methodology that reveals the archetypal or essential forms of the ideal objects pertinent to these sciences. This method takes place in the sphere of the phenomenological reduction, in the realm of imagination, and begins by turning the categorial intuition toward noematic-pictorial instances of relevant types of objects. For example, one could imagine a large number of different mammals, in clear and focused mental pictures, and in a playful but concentrated manner begin to alter the properties of these images in any way one chooses. We might transform the clearly lit-up image of a rabbit into an elephant by expanding the shape, size, coloring, and every other quality of the rabbit until the elephant is in intuitive view as a steadfast image. We then continue moving through a wide variety of other examples until a particular type of categorial object or conceptual framework comes into view in a higher sphere, which consists of the boundary conditions, essential determinations, and the fundamental productive notion at the bottom of every possible mammal. Because we are operating without the presuppositions of positivistic natural science, and are no longer concerned with cases of external fact as actually existent, we are permitted to stretch the fantasy as far as it takes us, while researching all of the possible species that could exist. We could imagine the Discomedusae that Haeckel illustrates from infinite angles, sizes, and profiles. We might therefore imagine some chimerical creature that does not exist, possessing the features of a sea-creature, mouse, lion, and mammoth combined. This fluidity of thought, which takes serious effort and many years to properly cultivate, then reveals the eidos. The particular images are set aside, and another self-evolving fabric of flexibility appears, which is connected to the region of thinking, and thoroughly penetrated with meaning. Husserl’s descriptions of this inner region of concept forms, which are fluid but perfectly clear, vivid, and completely near and saturated, always refer to their uniqueness. He is standing in them with the immediate understanding of their morphology, connections, significations, and boundaries, but they are like nothing seen in the sense world. He says that the images used as a basis for imaginative or eidetic variation:
"…present their essence to us; the individual intuition turns itself around, which itself is an eidetic possibility, into eidetic intuition, or into the attitude of thinking which on the ground of intuition grasps eidetic states of affairs in pure concepts and expresses them."
In an analogous way to the manner in which the noematic nucleus provides a synthetic identity to the concrete instances of meaning-intentions concerning a single theme or object, the eidos is an essential ideal form that governs any possible manifestation of particular instances. One could say that rule that governs the elements of a set contains describable features that are not found in any of the elements of the set. The wholeness of the mother is found virtually in every actual part. Furthermore, the mother can be seen with the objective Imagination faculty, or with scientific extrasensory perception. The creative power of the ‘empty category’ is the producer of its offspring, it is not the mere container in which they are gathered afterwards. In the same way, the prototypical plant-idea in Goethe shows directly, as it is intuited, that it can produce any plant from itself infinitely. For Husserl, the eidos or essence (Wesen) then can provide a universal basis for an ontological stratification that permits the determinate objects researched by the various scientific disciplines to be hierarchically arranged by category and region. For example, we discover that the intuition (whether sensible or categorial) of individual animals always contains an essential feature that clearly separates these intuitions from those of plants. This imaginative process should not be confused with the outcome of a hallucinatory fantasy. Husserl is convinced that free variation, used as a rigorous scientific methodology, can reveal the necessary foundations of any discipline. The eidetic essences reveal themselves as identical through different times and demonstrate themselves as impossible of being otherwise.
At the ground of every material science must then be the self-giving of the possible boundary forms of objective research, what Husserl calls an ‘a priori science.’ The eide are the necessary and archetypal forms of possible objects that are referred to in specific judgments and propositions, but these eidetic objects “possess after all a pure essence fixable prior to all judicative content.” One can understand, then that in terms of intentional objects discovered in phenomenology, these eidetic essences are the highest stage and final goal of meaning fulfillment in Husserl’s transcendental project. Of course, a precise scientific language will be necessary to communicate the eidetic features, but language can no more fully express the eidos, than a whole book could completely describe the minute details of the flowers, grasses, birds, and colors in a single overgrown field. Linguistic formulations and structures are necessarily grounded in the pre-linguistic noemata and eide that populate the sphere of meaning, and Husserl suggests that there is a natural connection between the linguistic expression and the essences themselves. We find the deeper cause of this if we step into the realm of spiritual science, where we discover that there is an inner word that flows through all unfolding life at all moments.
However, it must be made absolutely plain that the eidetic essences are not abstract linguistic definitions that are discovered through a critical reflection (in the sense of the Kantian transcendental deduction) about what features would be essential and inessential to a particular concept. The noema is not a metaphor for Husserl. But the cave of Plato was also not a metaphor. True, Husserl does not yet see the sun outside the cave, but he begins to get close to the exit of the cave. Discovering the eidos is not a reverse deductive process taking place while one maintains the natural attitude of the positivistic sciences, and concentrates on the perceptible features of the external world, rather it is a direct experience of a lit-up object, an individual entity, in a noematic field that is arranged much like a visual field. The ray of categorial intuition is unified with an individual object in its terrain that presents itself from the ‘front’ or horizon, and although it is not an individual image, it is the malleable source for possible images. Cognizing the essences is “the acquisition of a new region of being never before delineated in its own peculiarity – a region which, like any other genuine region, is a region of individual being.” It is experienced in a full saturation of categorial intuition, analogous in its degree of saturation to watching a movie with the external senses. To be even more precise, it is essential to differentiate at this point between three regions and manners of presentation in the mind’s eye, where a mental image can come to consciousness with the eyes closed.
A) First, after closing the eyes, one can orient a primary ray of attention to a lower region of darkness in the field of the mind’s eye, while a weaker second ray of attention is simultaneously oriented toward a ‘higher’ region. This higher region is expressing the concepts that one is thinking by means of unclear images. These vague images, which often have a character determined by the impressions of memory, are experienced as unfolding outside the field of inner vision, in a sense, ‘behind’ or ‘beyond’ the primary ray of intention. It is almost as if one were buried in dirt and looking into the dark surroundings with one’s primary attention, while a barely functional periscope was turning around and surveying the air and light above the dirt. Another analogy might help. The experience of seeing someone’s hand in front of one’s face with external perception differs from the experience of feeling this same hand scratching one’s back, in that the full perceptual features are lacking in the second experience. But both experiences relate to a perception of the hand. In the same way, when the primary ray of attention is oriented toward the lower region of darkness (or toward word strings) it is as if the weaker secondary ray of attention is ‘seeing’ the images with the same degree of obscurity that one perceives a hand scratching one’s back. This is the sort of intuition of a representation or ‘mental image’ with which most people are familiar. It is for this reason that there has even been academic dispute about the image character of mental-pictures. Of course, most ‘thinking’ takes place while the eyes are open, and so the primary ray is usually oriented toward sense phenomena. This remains subjective.
B) Through inner effort and practice in precise visualization, one may shift the primary ray of attention toward the higher region described above. With concentration, a new sort of presentation of mental images becomes apparent in this region, which brings them into full relief as clearly ‘seen’ pictures. During the process of ‘thinking’ or during the explicit process of eidetic variation, one can then hold the images in view; it is the case that they now possess a subtle quality that can be compared to watching the images on a movie screen reflected in a stream of slowly moving water. In this second case, the categorial intuition of the mental images is more like perceiving the hand out in front of one’s face, or shifting the primary attention to a fully functional periscope above the ground. Some people experience hypnogogic images which unfold precisely in this region and manner. This remains subjective.
C) To reach Husserl’s logical vision it is necessary to go one step further. In the phenomenological shift, which orients itself in order to register or grasp the eidos itself, a second ray of attention must move toward an examination of what is trying to assert itself through (or beyond) the images that are being transformed by the primary ray. The eidos stands forth as a proto-structural principle especially clearly when the primary ray of attention (in situation B) begins to retreat into the background by dropping the persistent tendency of the mind to insert images from remembered experience into this mold or prototype. This is a form of eidetic reduction, in which the presuppositions about what should appear as the essence are dropped, and the inherent biases present in the self are partially set aside. By setting some of the presuppositions out of play, the essence is allowed to self-present its own ideal formal and dynamic element without residue or remainder.8 This reduction then allows the phenomenological researcher to stand in “a world of absolutely pure possibility.”9 This virtual field has an immediate light character and an immediate meaning element within every little eddy or stream of it. The particulate flowing mental image shifts on its own, as it arises out of the imageless concept of immediately understood meaning ‘behind’ it.
In my experience, this world of pure possibility shows different qualities than the normal field in which noematic images are perceived (in the clearly evident ‘higher region’ in situation B). This step-C experience is made of an illuminated, malleable substance, and displays a coordinate of ‘grids’ stretching in many different dimensions, that can analogously be compared to the illustrations of curving space in Lobachevskian geometry.
This ‘game board’ is filled with repetitive streams of colors, and tiny elements that can take on a variety of forms, perhaps like some of Kandinsky’s paintings. This malleable substance seems to naturally take on shapes and impressions, as if it were the film receiving the impressions of light in an analog camera. It is obvious that such a vision inspired Harris’ illustration of the essential components of the second degree of Freemasonry that ends this chapter. It might be worthwhile to ponder this connection further. This is not yet the soul experience of the astral watery-light that Steiner calls the strata of mobile or flowing sensitivity (fließende Reizbarkeit), but it is instead made up of the dying grid of the reproduction of form in the etheric formative forces entering and surrounding the head.11 To move beyond this and cross into the soul and spiritual worlds, one must deal with the moral exposure of the impersonal fields which threaten to snuff out all sense of individuality, sense, and wakefulness. One has to behold the monsters that live in oneself, to truly perform the ‘spiritual reduction’ (could we call it level D? Yet the linear progression must end at level C). Of course, in Husserl’s sense, it would also be possible to perform an intuition of the eidos with the physical eyes remaining open, but the entire process becomes tainted by the overpowering influx of percepts from the external world. Regardless, this is a problem that has to be solved individually by each serious spiritual scientific researcher.
Steiner also often suggested using a type of imaginative variation to grasp the universal or general concept as a mobile creative element:
"But we can also take the triangle as a starting-point, and allow each side to move in various directions and at different speeds…in this way we really do lay hold of the triangle in its general form; we fail to get there only if we are content with one triangle. The general thought, ‘triangle’ is there if we keep the thought in continual movement, if we make it versatile."
He indicates that through this transformation of the static forms of species into the underlying generative movement, one is able to penetrate into the living spiritual process that creates the individual forms. The pulsing flux, which is the mother of all triangles, can be seen in the same place where one sees concepts. Goethe, by using such a method, was able to discover the prototypes of plants and animals, which Husserl would call their eide. Husserl does seem to have been able to penetrate fully to level C, but he was focused more on the meaning elements, logical connections and formal ramifications, rather than the organic living power or image character of what was revealed. Steiner calls this noematic element or proto-structural flowing entity, “the living element which ramifies through the whole evolution of the animal kingdom, or the plant-kingdom, and creates the forms.”13 Yet, eventually there is some level at which the spirit of the triangle is just as living as the spirit of the flower. Thus, humans move in a living organic math as the plants grow in the life that underlies the Fibonacci stream. To cross into the spiritual world proper, one has to become the triangle (and yet remain oneself). Then one can see the dying grid from the outside.
Husserl and Steiner will both agree that the concept of the triangle that you think of, is at bottom, the exactly identical one in the concept world that I think of. There is only one Washington Monument, likewise there is only one concept of leaf, zebra, circle, beauty, war, and so on. The psychologism that Steiner found in Logical Investigations became less prominent in the later Husserl. For Husserl, the eidos was the essential interior of the Washington monument. To think together is to plunge into the same ocean. Humans are able to comprehend that they are accessing the same essence in two different experiences. When we intuit the eidos of ‘mammal,’ or form the proposition ‘The katydids are singing’ at two different times, a scrupulous awareness toward the original sense convinces us, with adequate evidence, of their identity. This numerical identity guarantees univocity of meaning, and thus the possibility of coherent communication altogether. Of course, the essence is not the representation and it is not grasped in subjective thought. As the post-structuralists aptly demonstrate, this essential unity does not mean that the meaning-life of the eidos cannot grow and change. It is virtually alive after all, and contains formlessness at the bottom of its spiritual roots. It is a pulsing formless self-differentiation that undergirds identity. Only I outside myself can know it and become it. But this différance is a positive phenomenon, since it allows you and I to create individual meaning elements and imaginative forms out of the identical-difference living in the underlying spiritual formlessness. Thinking is the feature that the formless Spirit creates in man, as Steiner points out.
From Steiner we discover that there are other beings, forces, and active elements that can be spiritually seen that exist beyond what Goethe or Husserl were able to intuit. The etheric, astral, and spiritual worlds are full of elements and beings that become slowly apparent to the spiritual researcher. Furthermore, as we cross from the elements of color and form, and begin to see ourselves objectively from the outside with all of our moral failings and instinctual motivations, we must first begin to read the colors and forms of the spiritual world, but then begin to set them aside altogether. We are also split into an apocalyptic zodiacal multiplicity. Steiner says the following in his esoteric lessons, which must be received in a gentle and open way, in order to truly begin to understand and experience of what he speaks:
"The spiritual world is first of all, completely colorless, lightless, soundless and so on. All the colours we see, for example, are not spiritual, but come from our own inner being, and they indicate those qualities which we do not yet have, which we still have to attain. If, for example, we see a red color, it means that we do not yet have love in us, that we have to develop it in ourselves. If we see purple, it means that we must acquire devotional piety. When we hear tones like earthly sounds, it is not something spiritual, but something that comes from ourselves. If someone has an appetite for a certain food, for example, or if someone starts to eat vegetarian food, but still has the inner, bodily inner desire for meat, even if he does not become aware of it, this appetite sounds out in tones, in discordant tones. All these tones and sounds are only the occult crowing of ravens! If a figure from earlier times appears to the disciple and he wants to interpret it in the same way, it is completely wrong. He must be able to wait with the interpretation. The pupil should not interpret in the present, but only later. If such an image comes before our soul, it is destroyed as soon as we come up with our thoughts. But if it is a real picture, it will appear again later and then rest in its true form, and we will know what it means. But we must be able to wait, wait and be silent. Just as we ourselves should not approach the experiences with our own thoughts, we should talk about them much less. We should consider and treat our whole spiritual life as something sacred. With all these experiences of sounds and colors and so on we must tell ourselves that they do not come from the spiritual, but from our own inner being, from our own self, which receives waves from the sea of desires and passions, as Noah's Ark was propelled by waves over the sea. And we must live in the conviction that all these experiences and appearances are not spiritual. By saying this very clearly and relentlessly to ourselves, we must, as it were, surrender our ego, give up the desire of our ego to experience content, to let it fly away, as the dove was let away from Noah's Ark and did not return. But then another occult experience of the disciple comes later. When we have realized that there is nothing, nothing spiritual about those experiences of sounds and colors, when we have realized with inner strength that the spiritual world is completely empty for us, then we realize that those experiences have a meaning after all, a meaning for ourselves. The colors come to warn and advise us then; they tell us what we do not yet have, what we still have to achieve. From the tones we recognize that they reflect bodily desires. And when the images that we have calmly let work tell us their meaning, then the soul is enriched by such experiences. This is like the second dove that was sent forth from the Ark and returned with the olive branch, the symbol of peace."
