What Husserl calls the “eidetic” reduction is much closer to what
Aristotle called “abstraction,” notwithstanding Husserl’s rejection of the
Stagirite’s substantialist metaphysics, the source of “many prejudices”
(Ion 142 ). For example, Aristotle claims that one should produce “well
formed phantasms” in order to facilitate insight into the essence of an
object. Indeed, it was the gifted teacher, he remarked, who could hasten
such insights by means of powerful examples. Eidetic reduction is a
method of gaining a direct or intuitive grasp of an intelligible contour or
“eidos” or essence of an object by the “free imaginative variation of
examples.” Like Molie`re’s Monsieur Jordain, the philosophical novelist
Sartre had been anticipating eidetic reduction without knowing it, which
is probably what made his encounter with phenomenology in his
cocktail conversation with Aron so dramatic. Thus if someone wanted
to grasp the essential feature of our perception of a material object such
as a cube (Husserl’s example), by imaginatively adding and subtracting
alternative descriptions one could arrive at the insight that a material
object “must present itself to perception in profiles.” One cannot per-
ceive all its sides at once. In other words, one simply “sees” that this is
not only how it happens to be at the moment until one can get a better
view, but how ithas to be, in the case of perceiving material objects. That
is what moves the inquiry from fact to essence, from “the probability that
it will repeat itself next time” to the insight that this is in the nature of
the case and not simply an empirical, datable fact. The insight is “a
priori” in the transcendental sense of “necessarily and universally” valid.
For this reason, despite appearances, eidetic reduction is not similar to
what empiricists call “inductive generalization.” Reduction is not induc-
tion; optimally, it does not settle for a degree of probability.^8
Of course, this sounds like mathematics (Husserl’s doctorate was in
mathematics), and eidetic insights are most comfortably illustrated by
geometrical examples such as our perception of the cube. Descriptive
geometry offers us examples of relationships that are both necessary and
universal. But similarly, a careful description of our imaging conscious-
ness such as we shall witness Sartre undertaking inThe Imaginarywill
Lester Embree, “Constitutive Phenomenology and the Natural Attitude,”Encyclopedia of8 Phenomenology,^114 –^116 , as well as Spiegelberg,Phenomenological Movementii:^479 –^497.
For Sartre’s thoughts on this distinction in Husserl’s thought, seeL’Imagination( 1936 )
(Paris: PUF/Quadrige, 2003 ), 140 ; hereafterIon.
The Imagination 81