Phenomenological Reduction, Epoche, and the Speech of Socrates

99

The Southern Journal of Philosophy (2008) Vol. XLVI

Abstract

The point of the present article is to investigate whether the key
conceptions of epoche and reduction as found in Husserl’s phenomenology
can be brought to bear in a fruitful rereading of the speech of Socrates
in Plato’s Symposium.

1

In pursuit of this goal, I will begin by revisiting

the traditional reading of this speech in terms of a scala amoris in
which the erotic subject is guided from attachment to a series of
inferior objects to the Beautiful and Good itself such that the value of
all preceding attachments is suspended. The critique that this approach
to love instrumentalizes all but the transcendent Good is one that is
found both within and without the text. In opposition to this reading,
however, I will suggest that Husserl’s notions of epoche and reduction
enable us to read the speech not as an instrumentalizing scala but in
terms of a reflective distance in which our immersion in and with the
erotic object is suspended so that we might reappropriate the real
meaning of erotic engagement. According to this reading, Plato does not
negate the particular or lower forms of eros but reinscribes them with
a value derived from their position in relation to the ultimate. The
suspension of the lower forms, then, is not final but is merely employed
in order to let what occurs in erotic engagement show itself.

In perhaps one of the best known commentaries on Plato’s
theory of love, Gregory Vlastos maintains that “the individual,
in the uniqueness and integrity of his or her individuality, will
never be the object of love.”

2

Thus, while Vlastos is often critical

of the rather extreme position of Anders Nygren that reads
Platonic love as purely self-serving egotism,

3

he does insist that,

Phenomenological Reduction, Epoche,
and the Speech of Socrates in the
Symposium

James McGuirk
Bodø University College, Norway

James McGuirk received his PhD from the K. U. Leuven with a dis-

sertation entitled Eros and the Indictment of Philosophy (2004) which
dealt with the relationship between philosophical eros, ethics, and poli-
tics in Plato’s Symposium. He has recently published articles on the
philosophy of Nietzsche and on Heidegger’s reading of Plato. He is cur-
rently Associate Professor at the School of Professional Studies at Bodø
University College, Norway.

99-120McGuirk.pm

2/18/08, 1:23 PM

99

100

James McGuirk

at root, Plato’s love theory is deficient as a result of its
incapacity to recognize the value of the human other. Vlastos’s
critique has proved highly influential upon scholarship in this
area of Plato studies leading to a dominant reading in which,
for Plato, interpersonal love must be suppressed in order to
enable the relation between the soul and its true object, the
idea of the Beautiful and the Good itself. My aim in what
follows is not to entirely reject Vlastos’s reading of Plato’s love
theory in general or of the Symposium in particular. I believe
that his point about the problematic nature of interpersonal
love in Plato is not unfounded. Having said that, one of the
central planks of this critique involves a reading of the summit
of the erotic mysteries, as they are revealed to Socrates in his
reported conversation with Diotima, as a scala amoris or “ladder
of love” in which lower objects of love are replaced by higher
ones until the soul finally receives a vision of the Beautiful and
Good in itself such as reduces all previous erotic attachments to
insignificance.

4

It is my contention that this reading is overly

hasty such that it misreads the subtlety of the relation between
the Good (to agathon) and Beautiful in itself (auto to kalon) and
the lower erotic objects as they appear in Plato’s text. For Plato,
I maintain, the lower objects of erotic attachment are not so
much rejected as they are relativized in terms of the ultimate
object of love that is their ontological and epistemological
ground. In pursuit of this point, I will employ the notions of
reduction and epoche as they are used in the phenomenology of
Edmund Husserl as tools that allow some of the nuance of
Plato’s text to emerge. As such, I will argue that what appears
at first sight to be a turning away from the lower objects of love
is in fact a reflective consideration of them as “bracketed”
phenomena.

1.

In his critique of Platonic love theory, Vlastos draws as much
upon the Lysis and the Republic as on the Symposium itself.
Without rehearsing the whole of his argument, it suffices to
note that he finds in all of these texts a thorough subordination
of the particular to the universal in Plato’s ontology. Thus, it is
the ideas as the immutable and universal realities that act as
the ground through which particular things come to be or be
known, inasmuch as they can be known. This relation between
the universal and the particular is as much an evaluative
criterion as an ontological or epistemological one in the sense
that what is particular is only valued, if at all, through its
participation (methexis) in the universal. This impacts upon
interpersonal and ethical relations to the extent that, unlike
Aristotle, who recognized that when one loves another human
being truly, one wishes that other’s good for his/her own sake,

5

99-120McGuirk.pm

2/18/08, 1:23 PM

100

Phenomenological Reduction, Epoche, and the Speech of Socrates

101

Plato sees the other human being as, at best, only an instrument
that leads the soul to relation with the more lasting Ideas.
Thus, while Aristotle moves, albeit only partially, toward an
appreciation of the other as person

6

or, to use Kantian terms,

an end in herself, Plato views others as mere “place-holders for
the predicates ‘useful’ and ‘beautiful’”

7

and so utterly fails to

even raise the question of the intrinsic worth of other human
beings. Nowhere is this clearer than in the apex of the speech
of Socrates in the Symposium in which he recounts the
mysteries of love that were revealed to him by a Mantinean
priestess called Diotima. Before initiating Socrates into these
mysteries, Diotima leads the young Socrates, according to the
report, to a series of insights into the meaning of eros

8

which

include (i) that Eros is not a god but an intermediary daimon
that interprets divine messages for mortals and vice versa
(202e), (ii) that he is not beautiful and wise himself (as Agathon
had claimed [197c]) but a lover of beauty and wisdom (204b)
and (iii) that erotic activity is predominantly to be thought of as
reproduction and birth in beauty (206b), which is to say that
erotic energies are activated by something other than the lover
himself, through which he (the lover) creates and so transcends
himself by immortalizing himself. As far as the objects that
activate erotic energies are concerned, these range from the
beauty of particular bodies, through the love of particular souls
to the love of institutions, laws, literature and finally to the
Beautiful itself.

In order to explain the “correct way” (210a) of engaging

these various objects of erotic attachment, Diotima leads
Socrates though the so-called ladder of love, by means of which
she explains the importance of being introduced to the ways of
love, first through attachment to the beauty of one particular
body before being lead to the realization that what is actually
prized here is the beauty of form (210b). This being the case, it
makes no sense to value one body over all others such that the
initiate will be lead to love the beauty that can be found in all
beautiful bodies. After this, the student will realize the
superiority of the beauty to be found in the goodness of minds
(210b), which outweighs bodily beauty. This turn toward the
spiritual is, at the same time, a turning away from the physical
whose value is negated. This turn to the spiritual results in a
corresponding realization of the beauty common to all beautiful
souls such that the attachment to any single beautiful soul is
loosened. Following on from this is an attachment to a more
lasting beauty such as is found in wise laws, beautiful artworks,
and so on which leads to the spontaneous, creative production of
virtuous and wise discourses. This now constitutes a second
turning toward what we may call the spiritual infinite and
away from the spiritual finite (i.e., human souls). Finally,
having proceeded through these various stages, the lover will

99-120McGuirk.pm

2/18/08, 1:23 PM

101

102

James McGuirk

receive a vision of the Beautiful and Good in itself which was
“the ultimate objective of all the previous efforts” (210e).

As each stage in the “ladder of love” is reached, the previous

is apparently dismissed as worthless in the sense that erotic
focus is turned toward one object and away from what preceded
it. This includes the love that is felt for individual others such
that, as Vlastos notes, Plato fails to “make the thought of others
as subjects central to what is felt for them in love.”

9

While other

human beings are indeed loved in this ladder they are only
loved inasmuch as they possess qualities that point toward the
ideal instantiation of beauty and goodness. As such, institutions,
laws and mathematical theorems are “not only as good as
persons, but distinctly better,”

10

because these latter participate

in a purer way in ideal beauty than do humans, as either bodies
or souls. All of this seems indeed to result in an instrumentali-
zation of others in Platonic love theory in the sense that what we
tend to value about persons in our intuitions about interpersonal
love (i.e., their uniqueness) is precisely the reason they are
valued so weakly by Plato. That is to say that the particularity of
individual human beings is synonymous with the extent to
which they fail to participate in the Beautiful as such to the
point that attachment to the individual is understood as a
distraction from the soul’s true terminus.

2.

One critic, Martha Nussbaum, has claimed that this problem is
not unknown to Plato and is raised more or less explicitly in the
speech that follows Socrates’ own.

11

In her attention to the

speech of Alcibiades, Nussbaum takes a strong position on the
hermeneutic question as to the extent to which the character of
Socrates can be taken as a spokesman for Plato’s own view. She
rejects this as an unequivocal thesis, at least in the case of the
Symposium, such that she reads the Socratic scala amoris, not
as Plato’s final word on the question of eros, but as a possible
choice in the context of the pursuit of the good life.

12

The speech

of Alcibiades offers an alternate choice to be sure, but, more
importantly, it offers a searching critique of the temptation
toward a flight from the embodied condition of humanity
represented by the Socratic understanding of human love.

Alcibiades is an eminently suitable mouthpiece for such a

critique of Socrates if Plato really intends the dialogue to be read
as Nussbaum suggests. As a figure of note in contemporary
Athens, his personal history would have been well known to
Plato’s readers. So too would his connection with Socrates.

13

In

his topsy-turvy relationship with his fellow citizens, Alcibiades
was a man who was hated as much as he was loved.

14

He proved

ultimately to be a destructive force in the Peloponnesian War
from the Athenian point of view and was implicated in several

99-120McGuirk.pm

2/18/08, 1:23 PM

102

Phenomenological Reduction, Epoche, and the Speech of Socrates

103

sacrilegious acts that finally lead to his virtual banishment from
Athens in 411

BC

.

15

The fact that he was a former lover

16

and

student of Socrates would not have gone unnoticed by those who
brought the charges of corruption and blasphemy that ultimately
lead to the death of Socrates. It was most likely suspected that
Alcibiades hubris was in some way the result of the teachings of
Socrates. According to Nussbaum, by contrast, Alcibiades’ conduct
is, at least partially, traceable to the fact that he could not follow
the teachings of Socrates in relation to the good life.

In the speech itself, Alcibiades movingly recounts his

passionate attachment to the unrepeatable individual that is
Socrates as well as the latter’s cruel rejection of him as lover
(218e–219a). He (Alcibiades) recalls that while Socrates inspired
him to be “as good a person as possible” (216a), he (Socrates)
also selfishly guarded his wisdom in refusing to trade its gold
for the bronze of Alcibiades’ beauty (219a). As much as Alcibiades
struggles to express the wonder of Socrates’ character (217e–
218a), he also indicts him for his dismissive attitude toward
others (216d–e). He tells of Socrates’ lack of fellow feeling or
sympathy for the incarnate fragility of others. He presents us
with the oddity of Socrates’ character and his apparent discon-
nection from his own body. This is displayed in Socrates’ various
feats of superhuman endurance during wartime (219e–221c).
Socrates dresses the same way, winter or summer and while he
eats and drinks when food and drink is available, he never gets
drunk and nor does the lack of food appear to bother him. In
highlighting these eccentricities, Alcibiades seems to want to
make the point that part of what it means to be human is to be
incarnate so that our bodies are a crucial part of our identity as
human. But this means also to be vulnerable and capable of
suffering as a bodied thing. We suffer both from the elements
and also from one another. That we can be so deeply affected in
our embodiment by what is other entails a fragility that
suggests that we are not sovereign regarding exteriority in any
of its guises. Yet Socrates seems no longer capable of such
suffering and this throws doubt over his vulnerability and
therefore over his very humanity.

For Alcibiades, the stance of Socrates as lover is no more

than a pose that enables him to toy with others for his own
amusement. He has become entirely self-sufficient and self-
enclosed in his pursuit of wisdom, which suggests that he has
perhaps completed the erotic ascent described by Diotima. More
importantly, this suggests that this kind of self-sufficiency was
the hidden meaning of eros from the Socratic/Diotiman point of
view. From his lofty position, Socrates does not need human
intimacy and in fact is contemptuous of those who do since it
entails an attachment to the flesh and the mortal that has been
utterly subordinated in his own pursuit of philosophic wisdom
and beauty.

99-120McGuirk.pm

2/18/08, 1:23 PM

103

104

James McGuirk

For Nussbaum, the speech of Alcibiades is not simply the

story of one man’s tragedy but the tragedy of philosophy. Or
rather, it tells the tragic story of what philosophy, after the
model of Socrates, risks losing. In Socrates’ speech about eros,
he recounted the story of philosophy’s pursuit of the vision of a
beauty that is untrammeled by human limitations and contin-
gencies. In this sense, it is supra-human or transcendent. What
is more, it promises fulfillment or happiness beyond what any
finite object can offer. This seems more than enough to win us
over to the life of philosophy. What happens with the appearance
and speech of Alcibiades, however, is a warning about the
sacrifices entailed by this way of life. As much as the speech of
Alcibiades is the story of his own mistreatment at the hands of
Socrates, it is also the story of the inhumanity of philosophy.

Nussbaum appears to have a deep sympathy with the

character of Alcibiades in the dialogue and with his indictment
of the vision of the good life presented in Socratic philosophy. “If
the ascent appears remote from human nature,” she says “that
is because … it is a device for progressing beyond the merely
human.”

17

And by “beyond the merely human” here she means

other than human. Socrates is indifferent to the concerns of
ordinary human beings, not because he has realized a higher
human possibility but because he has reneged, in a certain
sense, on the human condition. Nussbaum says that Socrates
has “so dissociated himself from his body that he genuinely does
not feel its pain, or regard its sufferings as things genuinely
happening to him.”

18

Alcibiades had shown himself sensitive to

erotic affectivity in his attention to the nuanced contours of
Socrates’ (somewhat odd) personality. This oddness, however, is
more than just idiosyncrasy but the very product of the Socratic
vision of the Good life as outlined by Diotima’s ascent.

For those who know him, he has become like the forms he

spends his time contemplating: hard, unresponsive, impassive,
and stone-like. He is an immensely impressive character, but
his wisdom has made him cold, unfeeling and disconnected.
None of this means that the truth of the ascent of Socrates and
Diotima is “untrue” but only that its truth is other than the
truth of lived experience. “Socratic philosophy,” as Nussbaum
puts it, “cannot allow the truths of Alcibiades to count as
contributions to philosophical understanding.”

19

They are an

intrusion into the world of philosophy in a way that is, according
to Nussbaum, even more traumatic than the revelation of beauty
at the end of the ascent. Even the very entrance of Alcibiades
testifies to this:

From the rarefied contemplative world of the self-sufficient
philosopher we are suddenly, with an abrupt jolt, returned to the
world we inhabit and invited to see this vision, too, as a dawning
and a revelation.

20

text

99-120McGuirk.pm

2/18/08, 1:23 PM

104

Phenomenological Reduction, Epoche, and the Speech of Socrates

105

Alcibiades’ story of his passion for an individual is incom-

patible with the erotic ascent of Socrates because it fails to
make the intuitive connection between the various instances of
beauty and so becomes what Socrates described as a “mad
attachment” (213d) to a particular. For Socrates on this reading,
Alcibiades’ attachment is both mad in the sense of frenzied and
also in the sense of disproportionate.

21

Their respective truths are

incommensurable and here, for Nussbaum, is the key to the
Symposium as a whole. She says:

There dawns on us the full light of Plato’s design, his comic
tragedy of choice and practical wisdom. We see two kinds of value,
two kinds of knowledge; and we see that we must choose. One sort
of understanding blocks out the other.

22

Nussbaum agrees with Vlastos, then, that there is

something deeply flawed in the Socratic presentation of eros.
Socrates’ vision of the Beautiful and Good in itself

23

is

intriguing but it is a vision that appears to essentially depend
as its condition upon a corresponding rejection of all lower
attachments including embodiment, situatedness and bodily
affectivity. Thus, several of the experiences that we tend to
think of as quintessentially erotic such as tenderness and the
incommunicability of the value of “this” particular other are
dismissed as worthless and pointless. Against Vlastos,
however, Nussbaum maintains that Plato himself was aware of
this and has given us the speech of Alcibiades not as an
appendix and certainly not as a resolution but as a recognition
of the problem.

3.

In spite of minor differences, both of these readings of the
Symposium share a common interpretation of the central thrust
of Socrates’ speech as a scala amoris in which the lower erotic
objects are systematically overthrown by the higher. In what
remains, I wish to offer an alternate reading of this passage in
the dialogue with the help of the notions of reduction and epoche
as used in Husserlian phenomenology.

Before doing so, however, it would be well to make one or two

hermeneutic remarks about this approach. To begin with, my aim
here is not to draw or attempt to draw lines of correspondence
between Husserl’s and Plato’s discussions of love.

24

Nor is it my

intention to sketch out the common ground between Plato and
Husserl generally such as to defend a Platonist interpretation of
Husserl or a Husserlian interpretation of Plato.

25

My aim is

simply to bring the resources of Husserlian phenomenology to
bear as methodological tools in a reading of the dialogue under
discussion.

99-120McGuirk.pm

2/18/08, 1:23 PM

105

106

James McGuirk

But what are the reduction and phenomenological epoche as

used by Husserl and how are they relevant here? To begin with
the first of these questions, both of these notions can be
understood as means of bringing about the reorientation of the
philosophizing subject from the natural to the phenomenological
attitude. It is important to note that, for Husserl, the natural
attitude is neither faulty nor in error vis-à-vis the phenomeno-
logical attitude. It denotes nothing more nor less than the
everyday attitude that characterizes our existence in the world.
The world of the natural attitude, says Husserl, is simply “there
for me continuously as long as I go on living.”

26

Furthermore,

this world is not just a world of things to be contemplated but,
with the same immediacy, a practical world of values and goods
in which I work, rest, love, interact with others, etc. (I, 53). In
other words, it is the world in which I live. In the natural
attitude, I accept the various experiences and objects that are
given to consciousness and the world as the horizon of these
possible experiences. To be sure, objects and states of affairs
(Sachverhalte) can become doubtful and even rejected as to
their real existence but none of this alters the “general positing
[of the world] which characterizes the natural attitude” (I, 57).
That is to say that while I might think I see a dog that turns
out on closer inspection to be a pile of coats, I do not, on the
basis of this, doubt whether the world exists. World-belief is the
unshakeable cornerstone of the natural attitude as Husserl
presents it here. The phenomenological attitude, by contrast,
does not aim to remain in this attitude but “to alter it radically”
(I, 57). This is achieved by means of the phenomenological
epoche. In performing this epoche,

We put out of action the general positing which belongs to the
essence of the natural attitude; we parenthesise everything which
that positing encompasses with respect to being: thus the whole
natural world which is continually “there for us,” “on hand,” and
which will always remain there according to consciousness as an
“actuality” even if we choose to parenthesise it.

If I do that, as I can with complete freedom, then I am not negating
this “world” as though I were a sophist; I am not doubting its
factual being as though I were a skeptic; rather I am exercising the
“phenomenological” epoche which also completely shuts me off from
any judgment about spatiotemporal factual being.

27

(I, 61)

It is worth quoting this passage in full because it is so dense

and has been so often misunderstood. The epoche does not, in the
vein of Descartes, involve a turn away from the world of the
natural attitude in its various uncertainties toward the apodictic
certainty of the internal contents of consciousness.

28

The “radical

alteration” that comprises the phenomenological attitude is
entirely concerned with reflection. Husserl most certainly does

99-120McGuirk.pm

2/18/08, 1:23 PM

106

Phenomenological Reduction, Epoche, and the Speech of Socrates

107

not intend that we leave the natural attitude behind for good,
something that would be neither possible nor desirable. Husserl
makes clear that we do not negate the world or doubt its factual
being and nor do we ignore it as a matter of philosophical
indifference. Rather, the epoche reaches the phenomenological
attitude precisely by turning toward the world and our
experience of it as constituted by consciousness (I, 113).

29

The

natural attitude is “discovered” after the transcendental turn in
its belief or acceptance character. Thus, while the natural
attitude is not to be rejected, it shows itself as incapable of
explaining itself or of reaching the origins of the experience of
meaning.

30

In the natural attitude, we accept the world as

“there,” and we initiate various natural and social scientific
models to explain it in terms of chemical, biological, physical,
social, and anthropological laws. In other words, we are capable
of framing the world theoretically according to various rational
disciplines. The problem arises, however, when this act of
framing disappears, as it must, from view.

31

When this occurs, it

is not uncommon for scientists and lay persons alike to attempt
to explain human being from within one or other framework or
worldview.

32

Yet since the construction of such frameworks is

the most essential human activity, this attempt leads to
naturalistic interpretations of human rationality such as reduce
what is fundamental (the constitution of meaning) to what is
anterior (i.e., the world picture of the natural or human sciences).
The epoche, then, far from turning away from the everyday as
meaningful is a turn toward it precisely as meaningful. The
world as the context of meaning is bracketed so that we might
allow the major features and sources of this meaning to show
themselves. This is nothing other than the pursuit of under-
standing of the ground of meaning or philosophy itself through
taking a reflective distance that “brackets” our prereflective
occupation with the world.

Yet how exactly the constitution of meaning comes into

view through the epoche remains unclear until it is augmented
by the notion of phenomenological reduction. Of course, the
term reduction as it is used by Husserl is extremely complex
because there are, in fact, several reductions in play in Husserl’s
writings. In essence, the notion of reduction can be a reduction
to (i) how consciousness experiences meaning, (ii) the main
features of a given experience of meaning or meanings, or (iii)
the ground of the possibility of the experience of meaning. In
his Encyclopaedia Britannica article entitled simply “Phenomen-
ology,” for example, Husserl describes a phenomenological-
psychological reduction as bringing into view “the world as it is
given in consciousness,” which is to say that objects and states
of affairs, taken for granted as “there” in the natural attitude,
are revealed as “pure phenomenon” that give themselves as
meanings to the intentional orientation of consciousness.

33

This

99-120McGuirk.pm

2/18/08, 1:23 PM

107

108

James McGuirk

phenomenological reduction reveals the essential intentional
structure of consciousness by means of which certain types of
meaning-giving or noetic acts correspond to, or uncover,
meanings or noemata. The dual concepts of noesis and noema
are linked in Husserl’s thinking through the concept of
intentionality. Though it is beyond the scope of the present
essay to offer a detailed account of the concept of intentionality,
it suffices to say here that conscious acts, or noeses, which can
be any act of perceiving, willing, hoping, valuing, etc., are
always intentionally directed toward meaningful objects and
states of affairs (i.e., noemata), which they uncover as really
present or not.

34

To take a very simple example, when I perceive

a chair, I always perceive it perspectivally and never all at once.
And yet, the noetic act of perception corresponds not to any of
the sides of the chair that become visible as I move around it
but to the chair itself as the unity of all possible perceptions of
it. This unity is what Husserl calls the “noematic core” (I, 267).
Again, this kind of analysis is not an overturning of the
meaning-giving activity of the natural attitude but a bringing to
light of what is actually going on in the natural attitude.
Following on from this reduction is an eidetic reduction that is
“exclusively directed toward the invariant essential forms” of a
given experience (P, 165). Husserl gives the example of the
perception of bodies which, in eidetic phenomenology, will not
simply report the kinds of perceptions that factually occur but
also the “invariant structural systems without which perception
of a body … would be unthinkable” (P, 165). That is, in any
eidetic analysis of the experience of a body, I must report, not
that “I saw a green box today that was two meters tall etc.,” but
rather note the features that must always be present in this
kind of experience, namely, that the box was given as something
with physical mass and that it was given in perspectives and so
forth. In this way, the various kinds of conscious experience
become explicit and determined as to what is most essential to
them.

35

Finally, the third or “phenomenological transcendental”

reduction leads, by means of its own epoche, back to the
founding source of all conscious experience whatsoever, that is
it leads back to transcendental subjectivity.

36

The point here is

that while the first two reductions remain within the horizon of
the world and the human being within the world, they can be
understood as psychological insights into the real being of the
actually existing being in the world that is the human being
herself. By contrast, the transcendental reduction parenthesizes
all “mundanization” of consciousness by leading back to

the intentional life-process wherein the entire apperception of the
world, and in particular the apperception of my mind, my
psychologically real perception-process, and so forth, are formed.
(P, 172)

99-120McGuirk.pm

2/18/08, 1:23 PM

108

Phenomenological Reduction, Epoche, and the Speech of Socrates

109

The transcendental reduction, in this sense, is a reduction to
the self-temporalization and self-actualization of consciousness
by means of which all experience is possible in the first place.
Thus, it involves penetrating the ultimate ground of conscious-
ness in which lie the very origin of consciousness’s capacity to
constitute meaning.

37

Rather than treat the human subject as a

psychological subject living within a spatiotemporal world, the
transcendental reduction leads back to the constitution of the
world picture simpliciter in its intentional structure.
Understood in this way, the reductions and epoche in Husserlian
phenomenology are not paths away from the world in its
everydayness but provide means of properly engaging with this
experience reflectively and in its entirety for the first time.

4.

We turn now to our second question of how these Husserlian
concepts can be brought to bear in our reading of the Sym-
posium. The tendency to read Husserl as a neo-Cartesian is not
uncommon in commentaries on his work, but it is a reading
that, on the basis of what we have just seen, is highly dubious.

38

Since intentionality denotes the way in which consciousness is
essentially directed toward the world, it follows that objects,
states of affairs, and the world itself are given to consciousness,
at least potentially, as they are themselves. As such, there is no
question of an inner world of representations and an outer
world of “real” beings with the attendant problem of how the
former can reach the latter. Husserl considers it one of the
fundamental errors of philosophy to assume that because
perception of a physical object, for example, is always perspec-
tival that therefore the object as it is itself remains hidden to
us (I, 94). Rather, physical objects give themselves as themselves
to intentionality, as we have noted, though perspectives (I, 96)
and to demand more than this is to contradict the sense of
perception (I, 95). Husserl’s phenomenology presents a challenge,
therefore, to the uncritical naturalist assumption common to
philosophy since Descartes of a world in which the human being
exists alongside other entities and the attendant problem of
how its interiority can really reach an outside.

39

The world is

given to the intentionality of consciousness before the Cartesian
problem can ever be raised. Through the epoche and reduction,
phenomenology sets itself the task of understanding and
making explicit how the various types and regions of meaning
give themselves to prereflective experience.

40

Yet the same type of Cartesian interpretation of Husserl is

also, very often, a feature of readings of Plato. It is assumed,
that is, that Plato rejects or turns away from the world of
appearances for a flight into the transcendent and unchanging
ideas, that is, that he turns his back on the world of everyday

99-120McGuirk.pm

2/18/08, 1:23 PM

109

110

James McGuirk

experience for a life of discarnate contemplation of static
realities. It is true that Plato assigns a higher value to the
immutable than to the mutable but is this the same as an
unequivocal rejection of the latter? With regard to the
Symposium, does Plato intend a systematic rejection of the
lower for the higher or a contextualization of the lower in terms
of the higher? Both Vlastos and Nussbaum, as we have seen,
understand Plato as suggesting that the value of the lower
erotic objects, including persons, consists only in their ability to
point the soul in the direction of its ultimate prize, the Good
and Beautiful in itself. But is this the only way to read the
passage?

Let us return to the speech itself. Socrates begins by

insisting that he will tell the truth about love (199b). As such,
he sets out to uncover the deep significance of what erotic love
means for humans. This, in turn, involves a cluster of questions
including what it means to love, the true object of love, and the
origin and end of love. In terms of the first of these questions,
Socrates points to the intentional structure of erotic love. He
does not, of course, use the word “intentionality” or anything
like it, but he does note that love is always of something or
other (199dff), that is, it is essentially a directedness beyond
itself toward some thing, or person or institution that it
“uncovers” as valuable.

41

This is a largely formal point but it

corresponds quite nicely to Husserl’s first reduction mentioned
above in which “pure phenomena” are discovered through the
intentional structure of consciousness. Of course, Plato’s target
here is narrower than Husserl’s in the sense that the latter is
concerned with consciousness as a whole while Plato is
concerned here only with love. But the point remains the same
for our purposes.

42

The so-called scala would seem to lack anything like a proper

eidetic analysis, however, in the sense that while Socrates does
mention the various types of erotic object, no attention is given
to the invariant features of these experiences. Socrates does not,
that is, tell us how the experience of value in a body is perceived
or if and how this experience is founded on a prior act of
perception, etc. However, if we cast a glance back in the text, we
find an exquisite piece of what might be called eidetic analysis
in Diotima’s definition of the function of love. Against the
earlier definition of love as the desire to possess what it lacks
(202d), Diotima now maintains that love consists in “giving
birth in beauty, both in body and in mind” (206b). This is a
radical transformation, not only of Diotima’s own earlier
definition but also of the definition offered in an earlier speech
by Aristophanes that love is the desire for one’s other half
(193d). This is not to say that this insight into the nature of
love, as offered by Aristophanes, is wrong but only that it seems
to miss something crucial about erotic love. We might say that

99-120McGuirk.pm

2/18/08, 1:23 PM

110

Phenomenological Reduction, Epoche, and the Speech of Socrates

111

Diotima’s second definition involves identification of an invariant
structure of erotic loving insofar as what is most essential to all
forms of erotic love is the inspiration provided by a desirable
object to create and, therefore, immortalize oneself.

43

This is a

motive, furthermore, that is present whether we are aware of it
or not. Thus, Diotima insists that even law-givers and poets are
motivated by an erotic desire for self-transcendence (209cff.) in
giving birth to inspired and inspiring laws and works of art. By
means of this insight into the invariant structure of erotic loving,
Diotima is able to provide a richer analysis of love by extending
the term beyond the narrow confines of what is ordinarily
understood as the province of erotic love by describing what an
erotic experience is always like.

44

In other words, she actually

corrects many common misconceptions about what love is, such
as that it is itself beautiful (Agathon) or that it intends its other
half (Aristophanes), precisely by referring to how eros is, in fact,
experienced.

However, while the intentional and eidetic features of eros

testify to the thoroughness of Plato’s analysis of eros, they do
not really speak to the critiques that we have been exploring
here, namely that Platonic eros involves a systematic rejection
of the particular in favor of the universal. It is only when we
reach the third movement of Socrates’ analysis, the ascent itself
which we can read in terms of the transcendental reduction,
that a response becomes possible. From 210a, Diotima describes
the “correct way” to approach the question of love, beginning
with the love of particular bodies and ascending to the vision of
the Good itself. Far from involving a rejection of the lower for
the higher, this passage actually points to a deeper and more
profound “seeing” of the connectedness of the various forms of
beauty.

45

The transcendental dimension of this part of the speech

has to do with the question of that which grounds all experiences
of beauty as such. Thus, Diotima describes the initial attraction
to a single beautiful body that leads to the realization that the
beauty of all bodies is alike (210b). What is happening here is a
contextualization of the beauty of the single body in an ever-
deepening universal context. Diotima does speak of a sort of
rejection of the attachment to the particular body here (210b), to
be sure, but this rejection must not be understood as a rejection
per se but as a rejection of the claim of the particular to ultimacy
or to be the final destination of erotic desire. Furthermore, the
movement from attachment to bodily beauty to that of spiritual
is not described as a leap from one order to another but as a
continuous unfolding in the lover’s capacity to “see” Beauty. And
even the ascent’s final stage, which involves a transformation of
the lover’s active seeking into a passive reception of the form of
beauty (210e), must be understood as continuous with what has
preceded. Diotima initially describes this vision negatively by
insisting that this beauty will not appear,

99-120McGuirk.pm

2/18/08, 1:23 PM

111

112

James McGuirk

in the form of a face or hands or any part of the body; or as a
specific account or piece of knowledge; or as being anywhere in
something else, for instance in a living creature or earth or
heaven or anything else. (210e)

Rather, beauty appears “in itself and by itself, always single

in form” (211b). This “dereification” of beauty is, in fact, nothing
more than the vision of the beauty that has been visible all
along in partial form in its entirety. It was because of the idea
of beauty that all particular beauties appeared as beautiful
such that the idea itself is understood as given through the
various lower erotic objects instead of beyond them as it is
traditionally presented.

46

In the more traditional readings of

Vlastos and Nussbaum, the ascent is read as a kind of peda-
gogical tool that leads through a series of necessary errors that
finally allow the lover to kick off the order of finite being and
leap into the infinite. But the various lower stages are only
errors if they are identified as ultimate. The ultimate itself can
only be seen if the focus remains on the particular because it is
through the particular that the ultimate is given. This is analo-
gous to Husserl’s analysis of a perceptual object that is given as
a single unity even though it is only ever given through shifting
perspectives (I, 95).

47

In other words, the idea of beauty is not

reducible to any particular beautiful object, whether a body, a
soul, or a philosophical discourse, and yet it is only through our
attachment to these that the vision of the Beautiful is possible.
This means, in turn, that the idea of beauty, or the Beautiful in
itself, is the source of the value that is experienced as inhering
in particular things. It is what makes them visible just as they
make it visible by allowing the idea, as the very connectedness
of all beauties, to become manifest.

48

Indeed, the traditional

negative appraisal of the lower erotic objects serves only to
make the apparent sense of the ascent problematic, for if the
lower is indeed worthless in light of the higher, it becomes
difficult to see how they are connected at all or why the lover
should bother approaching the question of what love means by
beginning with objects that will later turn out to be more or
less unconnected with the idea of beauty. No, the lover begins
with beautiful bodies because it is in this most immediate of
attractions that the idea of beauty first becomes visible at all.
To be sure, the ascent leads to a gradual unveiling of the
connection between beauties, not such as leads to an unveiling
of a highest object but an unveiling of this connectivity in itself.

This analysis in the speech of Socrates is made possible by a

kind of epoche in which our erotic engagements are suspended,
not in the sense of terminated but such as will allow a critical
assessment of them. It is an epoche that allows us to “watch
ourselves” in our naïve engagement with the world such that, as
Husserl’s one-time assistant Eugen Fink describes it, “what we

99-120McGuirk.pm

2/18/08, 1:23 PM

112

Phenomenological Reduction, Epoche, and the Speech of Socrates

113

previously operated with by living it becomes an object of a
consistent reflection.”

49

Thus, at 206c, Diotima attributes divinity

to sexual intercourse—often considered the very lowest of erotic
activities in traditional readings—because it involves a creative
activity in the presence of the harmony of the beautiful. The
point is that sexual reproduction, conversation between beautiful
souls, and the contemplation of beauty in works of art or philos-
ophy are all ways in which we spontaneously “experience” beauty
and do not require the assent of the philosopher. In Husserlian
terms, these are all natural attitude forms of the constitution of
the idea of beauty. Yet it is only in the deep reflection of the
philosopher that what is really going on in these various activities
can be made explicit. This can be made clearer by means of an
example and I will take the first stage of the ascent to do this.
In the case of sexual attraction understood on this Platonic
model, the eros of the self becomes activated by what is other
than it, that is, the other. Eros desires, then, not to possess—
though it can become this—but to give of itself to the other and
to receive from the other. The issue of this is the third, as child,
through which the intimacy of the two re-emerges into the
world.

50

Thus community is engendered anew on the basis of a

pre-existing community and human erotic activity is marked by
retreat and re-emergence. A similar pattern is found in all
examples of erotic activity as described by Diotima. Thus, the
notions of epoche and reduction allows us to read the speech as
bringing to light what actually occurs in erotic activity and
what this might mean. The diffidence and apparent coldness of
Socrates, therefore, is merely a function of his withholding the
title of ultimacy from lower manifestations of eros and seeking
to understand them in a wider context. It is not an outright
refusal of these lower erotic targets.

As for philosophy’s mindful appropriation of eros or, what we

have suggested is a kind of phenomenological reflective
distance, it does not mean that only the philosopher communes
with the Good but that only he is mindful of this fact. And
again, if this does imply superiority through greater wisdom, it
is on foot of a wisdom that gives him a sense of the depth of his
indebtedness and of the value of plurality of otherness.

The ascent in the Symposium, from this point of view, is not

an attempt to reject or annul the lower objects of erotic
attachment but to understand their true significance.

5.

Where does this leave us with regard to the essence of Vlastos’s
critique of Platonic love theory? I believe that this reading of the
Symposium, using the resources of Husserlian phenomenology
allows us simply to modify Vlastos’s reading. The ascent passage
must be read as more than a rejection of the lower for the higher

99-120McGuirk.pm

2/18/08, 1:23 PM

113

114

James McGuirk

but must be understood as a search for the transcendental
ground of the experience of beauty and an ever greater setting
into context of the various manifestations of this beauty. In this
regard, interpersonal love is understood through the ideas of the
Beautiful and the Good just as the Beautiful and the Good are, at
least partially, understood through interpersonal love.

As we mentioned at the very beginning, however, this can

only be a modification of the critique insofar as there remains
something unsettling about the emphasis on the universal in
the Symposium’s account of love even if, in the context of Plato’s
writings as a whole, it is an emphasis that is significantly
displaced in the Phaedrus. And yet, even here, might we not
wonder, along with Martha Nussbaum, what the uniqueness so
prised by Vlastos actually comes to in the end?

51

This is an

important point in the sense that any theory of the value of
other persons must seek to give reasons for why others are or
should be esteemed. To point to pure particularity is to point to
pure contingency that, even if it were considered an explanation,
does not constitute a ground. Nussbaum asks here whether the
experience of particularity is simply a subjective impression
based on an inability to grasp all the properties of the loved
other? Yet this is to suggest that the surplus of our ethical
experience is grounded in an epistemological deficit that is
deeply unsatisfactory. Instead, we have suggested that the
experience of uniqueness should not be set in such opposition to
the universal but that the two should illuminate one another
for Plato, just as they do for Husserl. As in the Cave Allegory of
the Republic, where the Good does not overwhelm the visibility
of the particular but allows it to be seen as particular, so here,
the final vision of the Beautiful is what allows the particular to
emerge in a context in which its full meaning and value can
shine forth.

Notes

1

Plato, Symposium, trans. and intro. Christopher Gill (Middlesex:

Penguin, 1999). All future reference is to this edition. Reference to the
Greek text is taken from the Loeb edition of the dialogue, Plato III:
Lysis, Symposium, Gorgias, trans. Walter Lamb (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1996).

2

Gregory Vlastos, “The Individual as Object of Love in Plato” in

Platonic Studies (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1973).
Reproduced in Alan Soble, ed., Eros, Agape and Philia: Readings in the
Philosophy of Love (St. Paul, MN: Paragon Press, 1989), 110. Hence-
forth IOL.

3

Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros (New York: Macmillan, 1953).

4

The image of a scala or “ladder” is used more or less explicitly by

Diotima at 211c.

5

See Aristotle, Rhet. 1380b35–1381a1, in Complete Works of

Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1984).

99-120McGuirk.pm

2/18/08, 1:23 PM

114

Phenomenological Reduction, Epoche, and the Speech of Socrates

115

6

Vlastos acknowledges that the notion of “person” is not a Greek

idea and has its roots rather in the Hebraic and Christian traditions
(IOL, 111). As such, it is inappropriate to use it in relation to Aristotle.
However, the point here is that Aristotle moves in the direction of
valuing the other person in his insight that the other should be loved
for their “own sake, not for ours” (IOL, 98). As such, he goes some way
toward developing a sense of the other as a center of value.

7

Vlastos, “The Individual as Object of Love in Plato,” 107.

8

The word “eros” will appear in lower case except at the beginning

of a sentence or where it specifically refers to the mythical character
Eros.

9

IOL, 111.

10

IOL, 108.

11

Martha Nussbaum, “The Speech of Alcibiades: A Reading of the

Symposium,” in The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek
Tragedy and Philosophy (Chicago: Cambridge University Press, 1986),
165–99.

12

Ibid., 198.

13

In an unpublished doctoral dissertation entitled Eros and the

Indictment of Philosophy (Leuven: Belgium, 2004), I read the Sym-
posium as an exploration of precisely this question of the hubris of
philosophy. In this regard, I read not only Alcibiades’ speech but also
that of Aristophanes as putting forward important critiques of the
Socratic understanding of eros and its implications for human social
and ethical relations.

14

Various useful accounts of the life of Alcibiades can be found

amongst the ancient sources. See, for example, Plutarch, Selected Lives
and Essays, trans. Louise Ropes Loomis (New York: Walter J. Black
Inc. Press, 1951), 195–234, and Thucydides Peloponnesian War, ed.
Robert B. Strassler (New York: Simon and Schuster Inc., 1996), bks. 5–
8. For a more modern treatment, see Walter M. Ellis, Alcibiades
(London: Routledge, 1989).

15

The incident in question involved the parodying of the sacred

mysteries of Eleusis as well as desecration of the faces and genitals of
the Herms. Accounts of this incident can be found at Plutarch’s
Selected Lives and Essays, chs. 19–22, and Thucydides, Peloponnesian
War, bk. 6. However, while widely suspected, these charges were never
explicitly brought against him. Instead, he was to be indicted for his
role in an unsuccessful military expedition in Sicily. However, he never
returned to Athens to face his accusers.

16

For a treatment of the Greek attitudes about homosexual

relationships, see Kenneth Dover’s Greek Homosexuality (London:
Duckworth Press, 1978), passim, and H. I. Marrou’s A History of
Education in Antiquity, trans. George Lamb (London and New York:
Sheed and Ward, 1956), ch. 3.

17

Nussbaum, “The Speech of Alcibiades,” 181.

18

Ibid., 183.

19

Ibid., 186. As “untrue to lived experience,” however, Nussbaum

does not make clear in what sense it could still retain the title of truth.

20

Ibid., 184. At the earlier suggestion of one of the symposiasts,

Eryximachus, the banquet had been a relatively sober affair (176e).
With the appearance of the drunken Alcibiades, the whole event
descends into an orgy of drinking. At a deeper level, Alcibiades can be
seen as a Dionysius figure who, as predicted earlier by Agathon (175e),

99-120McGuirk.pm

2/18/08, 1:23 PM

115

116

James McGuirk

judges the wisdom of Socrates.

21

The calm, impassive self-control of Socrates here seems to

contrast greatly with the divine madness that accompanies eros in the
Phaedrus in which it is the madness of divine enthusiasm that enables
eros to reach its goal in the superuranian ideas and the vision of the
Beautiful and Good itself. At Phaedrus 244a, Socrates claims that “the
greatest of blessings come to us through madness.” And at 251aff., he
describes the mad erotic passion born in the interpersonal through
which alone ascent to the vision of the Beautiful in itself is possible.
This contrasts strongly with the relatively passionless language of the
speech of Socrates here.

22

Ibid., 198.

23

Although eros is predominantly concerned with Beauty, Socrates

tends to use the terms Beauty and Goodness interchangeably in the
dialogue, starting at 204e.

24

Husserl’s discussions of love are rather sporadic though when he

does discuss the matter, his thought is not incompatible with the main
lines of Plato’s thinking. For a discussion of the theme of love in
Husserl, see James G. Hart The Person and the Common Life
(Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992). See also Ullrich Melle “Edmund Husserl:
From Reason to Love,” in Edmund Husserl: Critical Assessments of
Leading Philosophers, ed. Rudolf Bernet, Donn Welton, and Gina
Zavota, vol. 5 (New York: Routledge, 2005).

25

Given the fact that Husserl is often described as a Platonist on

account of his interest in eide, it is odd that there are so few works
devoted to the ways in which his work can shed light on Plato’s and
vice versa. One important recent exception to this is Burt C. Hopkins’s
“Husserlian Transcendental and Eidetic Reductions and the Interpre-
tation of Plato’s Dialogues,” in Bochumer Philosophiches Jahrbuch für
Antike und Mittelalter 7 (2002): 81–114.

26

Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer Reinen Phänomenologie und

phänomenologischen Philosophie: Erstes Buch (Husserliana III), hrsg.
von Karl Schumann (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), trans. Fred
Kersten as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a
Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1983),
54. All future reference is to the English translation. Henceforth I.

27

Husserl’s own emphasis.

28

Husserl does speak of the apodicticity of the contents of con-

sciousness and the corresponding “absoluteness” of consciousness vis-
à-vis the world. In § 49 of the Ideas, for example, Husserl claims that
while “the being of consciousness … would indeed be necessarily
modified by the annihilation of the world of physical things its own
existence would not be touched” (I, 110). However, the point of this
entire discussion about the absoluteness of the contents of conscious-
ness is merely to highlight the difference in modes of givenness between
the immediacy of immanent content and the mediate perspectival
nature of the givenness of the transcendent. It does not mean that the
latter is judged deficient in the light of the former. Thus, as Søren
Overgaard has observed, the “world annihilation” thought experiment
is not an experiment that leads us from the natural to the phenomeno-
logical attitude but one that presupposes the latter. Overgaard’s claim
is that the certainty that this experiment points to (vis-à-vis the cogito
and its cogitationes) is one of the implications of the transcendental
reduction, but it is not equivalent to the reduction itself. See Søren

99-120McGuirk.pm

2/18/08, 1:23 PM

116

Phenomenological Reduction, Epoche, and the Speech of Socrates

117

Overgaard, “Epoche and Solipsistic Reduction,” in Husserl Studies 18
(2002): 211–12. For the meaning of the notion of absolute in Husserl,
see Robert Sokolowski’s The Formation of Husserl’s Concept of Consti-
tution (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), 126. Further, according to
Rudolf Bernet, the “world-annihilation” experiment that has been so
much commented on was actually a formulation that Husserl would
later come to regret. See R. Bernet, “Husserl’s Concept of World,” in
Crises in Continental Philosophy, ed. Arleen B. Dallery, Charles E.
Scott and P. Holley Roberts (New York: SUNY Press, 1990), 6.

29

Husserl notes that, in bracketing the world, we “have not lost

anything but rather have gained the whole of absolute being which,
rightly understood, contains within itself, ‘constitutes’ within itself, all
worldly transcendencies.” Thus, we do not turn away from the world
but toward it as constituted. On this see Sokolowski, The Formation of
Husserl’s Concept of Constitution, 119. With respect to this, it would
seem that the very notion of “world-belief ” itself as characterizing the
natural attitude is an unfortunate formulation of Husserl’s since it does
seem to suggest that the phenomenological attitude, as a suspension of
the natural attitude, should be characterized by a lack of belief in the
existence of the world. In fact, what world-belief really signifies, as
Eugen Fink suggests, is a captivated self-forgetfulness in which the
world as “there” is simply taken for granted. The suspension of this
position is, therefore, none other than the philosophical pursuit of an
ultimate ground. See Eugen Fink, Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The
Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method, trans. Ronald Bruzina
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 14, 42.

30

Husserl discusses this point in some detail in the 1911 Logos

essay “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science.” See Husserl, Phenomenology
and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans. Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper
and Row, 1965), 71–147. See especially 87ff., where Husserl discusses
the inability of natural science to account for itself.

31

This disappearance of the transcendental activity of constituting

is analogous to the “forgetfulness of Being” that Heidegger discusses in
Sein und Zeit. Just as familiarity with the use of the verb “to be” leads
us to pass over the mystery of its meaning, so for Husserl, our active
engagement in and with the world leads us to lose sight of the fact
that all of these engagements are driven by consciousness’s capacity to
be meaningful. For both Husserl and Heidegger, the point of phenome-
nology is to bring to light what we actually do in our everyday, natural
or pretheoretical existence. This would suggest that Heidegger’s critique
of Husserl’s natural attitude as too theoretical and not “natural” enough
is problematic. This issue, however, is beyond the scope of this paper.

32

One might think here of scientists such as Richard Dawkins who

tends to interpret the being of the human entirely in terms of evolu-
tionary biology. As such, he completely ignores the fact that the very
pursuit of scientific truth through the evolutionary biological model is
a way of being-in-the-world for a human being that cannot, in turn, be
reduced to the model to which it gives rise. Of course, inasmuch as
Dawkins interprets what it means to be human in his various writings,
he actually leaves natural science behind and replaces it with bald,
uncritical philosophical assertion. For a detailed discussion of the
inconsistency of this kind of philosophical naturalism, see Husserl’s
“Philosophy as a Rigorous Science,” passim.

33

Husserl Edmund, “Phenomenology” in Psychological and

99-120McGuirk.pm

2/18/08, 1:23 PM

117

118

James McGuirk

Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger
(1927-31), trans. and ed. Thomas Sheehan and Richard E. Palmer
(Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Press, 1997), 163.
Henceforth P.

34

One of the best recent explanations of intentionality as it used

by Husserl can be found in Dan Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology
(California: Stanford University Press, 2003), 13–22. Zahavi rightly
insists that even when the object of an intention does not exist, such
as when I think of a unicorn, what is intended is a nonexistent tran-
scendent thing rather an immanent idea or representation. Robert
Sokolowski also discusses the importance of intentionality as
undermining a picture theory of consciousness in his Introduction to
Phenomenology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 8–16.

35

One of the greatest advantages of this kind of analysis is its

initiation of the notion of “regions” of being such as allow us to avoid
the kind of category mistake that occurs when one tries, for example,
to explain ethical experience in naturalistic terms. Of course, Aristotle
had already realized the inappropriateness of applying a natural
scientific epistemological model across the board, see Nichomachean
Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indiana: Hackett, 1985), 1094b12ff.
However, the notion that meanings are given “categorially” in Husserl
powerfully highlights the futility of seeking to explain meaning in
terms of perceptual data alone. For Husserl’s discussion of the notion
of categorial intuition, see his Logical Investigations, vol. 2, trans.
John Findlay (London & New York: Routledge, 2001), 269ff.

36

The rather awkward title of “phenomenological transcendental”

reduction is justified when one considers that the point is that this
reduction is not simply a reduction to a transcendental sphere but to a
transcendental sphere that is intentionally structured. Thus it is
analogous to the “psychological phenomenological” reduction that
discovered intentionality but wider in scope. I will henceforth refer to
the phenomenological transcendental reduction as merely the
transcendental reduction to avoid this awkwardness.

37

On the various “ways to reduction” in Husserl’s thought, see Iso

Kern’s “The Three Ways to the Transcendental Phenomenological
Reduction in the Philosophy of Edmund Husserl,” in Husserl: Exposi-
tions and Appraisals, ed. Frederick Elliston and Peter McCormick
(Indiana: Notre Dame Press, 1977), 126–49. On the notion that
transcendental subjectivity is itself constituted as temporality, see I,
193.

38

Most of these readings can ultimately be traced back to the

influence Heidegger has exerted on presentations of the essence of
phenomenology. Cf., for example, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des
Zeitbegriffs (GA, 20), trans. Theodore Kisiel as History of the Concept
of Time: Prolegomena (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992),
130. Heidegger is careful not to draw a simple correlation between
Husserl and Descartes but he does insist that, at bottom, Husserl’s
problematic is identical with Descartes’s. For counterpoints to this
view, see Ludwig Landgrebe, “Husserl’s Departure from Cartesianism”
in The Phenomenology of Husserl, ed. R. O. Elveton (Seattle: Noesis
Press, 2000), 243–87, and also Burt Hopkins, Intentionality in Husserl
and Heidegger (Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer, 1993).

39

Martin Heidegger dismisses this whole discussion as a pseudo-

problem in his analysis of truth in Sein und Zeit 18 Aufl. (Tübingen:

99-120McGuirk.pm

2/18/08, 1:23 PM

118

Phenomenological Reduction, Epoche, and the Speech of Socrates

119

Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2001), 212–30, trans. John Macquarrie and
Edward Robinson as Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 256–
73.

40

It should be noted that Husserl himself laid the ground for many

misinterpretations of his work by speaking of a reduction to the
immanent contents of consciousness and also by stressing his fidelity
to Descartes, see his Cartesian Mediations, trans. Dorion Cairns (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 7ff. However, a closer inspection of his
work proves that his understanding of consciousness is not the same
as the one generally found in the Cartesian/Lockean tradition. While
the latter operates on the assumed strong distinction between the
material and the spiritual as different substances, Husserl includes
the kinaesthetic within his conception of consciousness. As such, his
understanding of consciousness is broader to the point of being of a
different order.

41

The notion of “uncovering” is taken from Heidegger’s account of

truth (SZ 212–30) in which assertion points out and points to the real
being of a thing or relation. In terms of Socrates’ speech, the word
seems appropriate as a way of characterising the resourcefulness of
Eros in discovering the things that it lacks, cf. Symp. 203e.

42

Of course it is arguable here that there is, in fact, a deeper

connection between intentionality and eros in the sense that eros, for
Plato is never a theme amongst themes but the very motivational
force of thinking in general. This is why love, or eros, is the one notion
regarding which Socrates claims expertise. See for example Lysis 204c,
Symposium 177d, and Theages 128b. In this regard, eros as the
motivation of our orientation toward the world could be understood as
a way of understanding intentionality.

43

For a useful phenomenological account of eros that largely echoes

this Platonic account, see Emmanuel Lévinas, “Phénoménologie de
l’Eros” in Totalité et Infini (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961), 286–
99, trans. Alphonso Lingis as “The Phenomenology of Eros” in Totality
and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 256–66.

44

Diotima makes this point explicitly at 205d when she claims that

love’s desire for happiness “can be approached by many routes.” This
entails (i) that even if philosophy is a pristine form of erotic loving, it is
not the only one, (ii) the paradox that even when erotic energies are
activated by money or honor, the necessary result is a giving of self
that cannot, in any simple way contra Nygren, return to itself.

45

John Sallis notes that, for Plato, the true lover is able to see the

nature of the beautiful itself in particular sights and sounds in a way
that one focused on these sights and sounds alone cannot. As such he
is concerned with both beauty itself and beautiful things. See John
Sallis Being and Logos: The Way of Platonic Dialogue (Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 1975), 385–88.

46

This point is expertly explored by Burt Hopkins in his discussion

of the inseparable being together of visible and nonvisible elements in
phenomena. See, for example, “Husserlian Transcendental and Eidetic
Reductions and the Interpretation of Plato’s Dialogues,” 101.

47

Of course we must be careful here given that there is the

suggestion of a mystery at the heart of the transcendence of the
beautiful for Plato that is never the case in Husserl’s analysis of
perceptual objects. It is here that Plato and Husserl part company
while the kind of transcendence intended by Plato here is taken up

99-120McGuirk.pm

2/18/08, 1:23 PM

119

120

James McGuirk

again in phenomenological contexts by thinkers such as Emmanuel
Lévinas and Jean-Luc Marion.

48

On this point, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Plato as Portraitist”

Continental Philosophy Review 33 (2000): 245–74. See especially 257–
63. There Gadamer argues that the shining forth of the individual being
understood through the Platonic conception of methexis alerts us to
the responsibility of thinking rather than motivating a flight from
thought (272).

49

Eugen Fink, “Operative Concepts in Husserl’s Phenomenology,”

in Apriori and World: European Contributions to Husserlian Phenome-
nology, ed. and trans. W. McKenna, R. M. Harlan and L. E. Winters (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), 63.

50

I do not wish to give the impression, though, that the third is the

sole motivation of eros since might seem to entail the instrumentali-
zation of one of the original two. The desire of the two for intimacy is, of
course, just as important in eros.

51

Nussbaum, “The Speech of Alcibiades,” 166.

99-120McGuirk.pm

2/18/08, 1:23 PM

120