STUDIA PHÆNOMENOLOGICA XV (2015) 155–180

Wesen, Eidos, Idea

Remarks on the “Platonism”
of Jean Héring and Roman Ingarden
Daniele De Santis
Seattle University

Abstract: In this paper we will be discussing the “Platonism” of two former

Göttingen students of Husserl, notably Jean Héring and Roman Ingarden. By
“Platonism” we mean not simply an account of the difference between indi-
viduals and Forms. We mean a peculiar insight into what Ingarden explicitly
designates as “the content of Ideas”. Our primary concern is to emphasize a
major shift in Plato’s treatment of Forms: we will see Plato switching the focus
of his investigation from the difference between the visible world of bodies and
the invisible realm of Forms to the internal structure of the Forms themselves.
We will then discuss Héring’s Bemerkungen über das Wesen, die Wesenheit und
die Idee and Ingarden’s Essentiale Fragen in order to explain the difference be-
tween the notions of individual essence, morphe, essentiality (or eidos) and
Idea.

Keywords: Héring, Ingarden, Plato, Phenomenology, Theory of Ideas.

1. Prologue on Earth

Every philosopher, it is often said, is either a Platonist or an Aristotelian:

“Used in this way, the words refer to a difference of character or temperament
rather than philosophic belief ”1. Now, when it comes to the phenomenological
movement, such an affinity of character or temperament tends immediately to
turn into something deeper: into a philosophical affinity in which the terminological

1
Grube 1947: 15.
156 Daniele De Santis

kinship reveals a conceptual legacy. In what follows, we would like to explore

the “Platonism” of two of Husserl’s former Göttingen students: notably Jean
Héring and Roman Ingarden. This being our paper’s aim, a certain number
of problems immediately arises: the first—the most philologically pressing and
philosophically burning—is the meaning of such an alleged “Platonism”. What
kind of “Platonism” is meant here? What “Plato” will we be referring to? In the
following, we will attempt to root our interpretation in a close reading of the
Platonic writings (see §2). Three dialogues in particular will be at the center of
our attention: Phaedo, Phaedrus, Philebus. Why these three? As Wilhelm Schapp
pointed out in 1911, at the dawn of the phenomenological movement, only by
grasping the essence of phenomenology can we truly understand Plato2. Any
“phenomenological interpretation” of Plato must indeed already presuppose not
only a textual familiarity with his theia philosophia, but first and foremost a pre-
comprehension of phenomenology and phenomenological investigation. Now,
in both Héring and Ingarden we will be presented with an understanding of
phenomenology not simply as an eidetic science, but as a description of what
Ingarden would call “the content of Ideas” (der Gehalt der Idee). Later on during
this paper we will have occasion to address some terminological issues, such as
the difference between eidos and idea.
The “Platonism” we will be after boils down to working out what we might
define as the Ideas’ inner structure; a structure that undergoes a paradigmatic
shift in our chosen dialogues of Plato: we will indeed be seeing der Göttliche
(as Schopenhauer called him once) going through three different ways (cor-
responding to each of those three dialogues) of accounting for ta onta ontos
(Phaedrus, 248 E3). The Platonic texts will be paving the way for our two
phenomenologists, while the latter will retrospectively help us shed some light
on what is truly at stake in those dialogues.
But why Jean Héring and Roman Ingarden? While the former is, in effect,
mainly known for his contribution to the phenomenology of religion, the lat-
ter always presented himself as an ontologist primarily interested in recasting
the metaphysical problem of the “existence of the world”3. Indeed, the two
essays that we are going to comment on have been historically overlooked by
most scholars. Much more attention has been paid so far to other contribu-
tions, such as those from Adolf Reinach, Hedwig Conrad-Martius or Max
Scheler. Yet, under closer scrutiny we cannot fail to recognize the thematic
peculiarity of these two writings which makes them differ in one fundamental
respect from all the other texts of the early phenomenological archipelago:
both Bemerkungen über das Wesen, die Wesenheit und die Idee by Héring and
Essentiale Fragen by Ingarden do not limit their analysis to any specific onto-
logical or material region. In those two essays the descriptive task of accounting

2
Schapp 1981: 5–6.
3
Héring 1926; Ingarden 1964.
 Wesen, Eidos, Idea 157

for individual essences leads straightforwardly to sketching the groundwork of a

general theory of Ideas, regardless of any field of investigation.
The number of writings dedicated to the theory of Ideas in the Yearbook
for Philosophy and Phenomenological Research is quite limited. In the order of
time, they are
• J. Héring, Bemerkungen über das Wesen, die Wesenheit und die Idee (1921)
• R. Ingarden, Essentiale Fragen. Ein Beitrag zu dem Wesensproblem (1925)
• H. Spiegelberg, Über das Wesen der Idee. Eine Ontologische Untersuchung
(1930)
In addition to the three just mentioned, one should not forget Ideelle
Existenz by Maximilian Beck (a former student of Pfänder in Munich), pub-
lished in 1929 in the journal, edited by Beck himself, Philosophische Hefte4. If
in what follows we are going to confine ourselves to commenting only upon
Héring and Ingarden, it is not solely for pragmatic prudence or chronological
faithfulness. The philosophical reason being that Héring and Ingarden’s essays
stand in closer relation to each other than any other writings ever published in
the Jahrbuch: despite some differences in style and terminological discrepan-
cies, they might be seen as taking part in a very unique dialogue and repre-
senting a true philosophical duet (Ingarden had already read the manuscript
of his colleague’s essay in 1916 while writing his dissertation on Bergson5).
As Edith Stein related some years later in Endliches und ewiges Sein: “Héring’s
study is the more fundamental of the two. Ingarden follows Héring in this
discussion of essence and essentiality, but in his elaboration of the doctrine of
Ideas (which is only sketchily treated by Héring) he proceeds independently”6.
The present paper is divided into three sections: §2 will be a first “Pla-
tonic” part dedicated to the analysis of some crucial passages from Phaedo,
Phaedrus and Philebus. Our primary concern in this section is to emphasize a
major shift in Plato’s treatment of Forms: we will see Plato switching the focus
of his investigation from the difference between the “visible” world of bod-
ies and the “invisible” realm of Forms to the internal structure of the Forms
themselves. In §3 we will discuss Héring’s Bemerkungen über das Wesen, die
Wesenheit und die Idee, a “compact essay on neglected differences in the field
of essence”7. Our task will be to do justice to the differences between the no-
tions of individual essence, morphe, essentiality (or eidos) and Idea. In §4, the
one on Ingarden’s Essentiale Fragen, we will expound his theory of Ideas, that
is, the correlation between Ideas and relevant judgments meant to spell out
what Ingarden refers to as “the content of Ideas”.
The primary aim of the paper is not only to present the main traits of the
theory of Ideas advocated by Héring and Ingarden (and which is still partially

4
See Beck 1929 and De Santis 2014.
5
On this, Ingarden 1925: 168.
6
Stein 1962: 62.
7
Spiegelberg 1965: 223.
158 Daniele De Santis

unknown, even to phenomenological scholars), but also to bring to light a

relationship to Plato that goes far deeper than mere linguistic analogies8.

2. Prologue in Heaven

In Phaedo, this “monument to Socrates”, as Paul Natorp called it once, “the

argument for the theory of Ideas” is the truly “core content” of the dialogue: it is
“the most radical and complete proof of the theory of Ideas that we have from
Plato”9. Such a radicalism derives from Plato’s demonstration of the “absolute
immutability of purely intellectual being”10 and from the distinction between
duo eide ton onton, i.e., “two kinds of being”. “True being”, as Plato also defines
Forms, “exists by itself ”, remains the “same and never in any way admits of
any change” (metabole or alloiosis). Plato’s main argument is built on the dis-
tinction between what is “compounded” or “composed” (suntheto or suntethenti)
(Phaedo, 78C) and what is “uncompounded” (axuntheta). Plato claims that
“things which are always the same and unchanging are the uncompounded
things and the things that are changing and never the same are the compos-
ite things”. He rhetorically asks: “does each absolute essence, since it is uniform
(monoeides) and exists by itself, remain the same and never in any way admit of any
change?”. The realm of Forms is in fact always the same because, being “uniform”
(monoeides) and “uncompounded”, it cannot undergo any change whatsoever.
To briefly sum up the main differences that Plato draws between the duo
eide ton onton, we can propose the following diagram:

Form Body
Divine (theio) Human (anthropino)
Immortal (athanato) Mortal (thneto)
Intellectual (noeto) Unintellectual (anoeto)
Uniform (monoeides) Multiform (polueides)
Indissoluble (adialuto) Dissoluble (dialuto)
Always the Same Never in the Same State
(aei osautos) (medepote kata tauta)

8
The present paper has therefore the presumption to write (or, much better, to start writ-
ing) a chapter in the “history of Platonism” (by which we do not mean the history of Plato
scholarship). Nevertheless, the analysis here developed is not to be regarded as belonging to a
mere history of ideas (in this case, the history of 20th Century interpretations of Plato); indeed,
this paper entails a very specific and explicit theoretical claim: namely, that a sound phenom-
enology (as an eidetic science) requires a consistent theory of Ideas that goes back to Plato and,
as we shall see over the course of section 2, to the analysis of the inner structure of the realm of
Ideas proposed in his later, dialectical dialogues.
9
Natorp 2013: 127.
10
Natorp 2013: 140.
 Wesen, Eidos, Idea 159

The duo eide ton onton, namely the difference between what admits (the
world of bodies) and what does not admit (the realm of Forms) of any
change whatsoever is the consequence of the more fundamental distinction
between what is mono-eides and what is polu-eides or “multi-form”. The Forms
being “uni-form”, they are not liable to be decomposed: “And if anything is
uncompounded is not that, if anything, naturally unlikely to be decomposed?”
(78C)11. The Form, and along with it the soul which is akin to the former’s
pure being, is not uniform because immutable, but agenetos, anolethros,
akinetos—as Héring and Ingarden will recognize by borrowing Aristotle’s
words12—because uniform, i.e., without any composition which might be
eventually scattered via metabole.
If in the Phaedo Plato is concerned with the difference-opposition between
the realm of Forms and world of bodies, in Phaedrus we are presented with a
strong recalibration of the conceptual pair monoeides-polueides and of the axis
around which they revolve. Plato’s chief burden, as is known, is not simply
the distinction between the two kinds, but the connection between them: the
issue being that of how to make sense of the many particulars, not in contrast
to, but in the light of the “one Form”.
To do so, Plato appeals to two methodological principles. “What principles?”,
asks Phaedrus—and Socrates explains: “That of perceiving and bringing together
(sunoronta) in one Idea the scattered particulars (ta pollake diesparmena)”
(Phaedrus, 265D). The principle is that of a “synthetic” or “synoptic” vision—as
the word sun-oronta suggests—by which the particulars are brought into a unity
(eis mian idean)13. Once “the many” are led back to the “one Form”, the second
principle amounts to the twofold dialectical method of diairesis and sunagoge:
“Now I myself, Phaedrus, am a lover of these processes of division and bringing
together” (Phaedrus, 266B). While the former boils down to finding the one
Form under which the particulars are to be comprehended, the latter principle
deals with the “Form itself ” by dividing it into its sub-species14.

11
See also Theaetetus, where Socrates describes the “primary elements” (stoikheia) as “uni-
form” (monoeides) because “not composite” (axuntheton) (Theaetetus, 205 C-D).
12
From Physics (203B). Héring 1921: 528; Ingarden 1925: 175.
13
“For a human being must understand a Form [kath’eidos legomenon] by collecting into
a unity by means of reason the many perceptions of the senses [ek pollon ion aistheseon eis en
logismo]; and this is a recollection of those things which our soul once beheld, when it jour-
neyed with God and, lifting its vision above the things which we now say exist, rose up into real
being” (Phaedrus, 249B-C).
14
See Stenzel 1924: 10–14. Our interpretation of Phaedrus is based on Robin 1968: 55–58
and 64, who speaks of a “coup d’œil synoptique par lequel […] Platon caractérise le dialecticien
[…]. Il sera donc pour son compte capable: i) d’avoir sur une multiplicité dispersée une vision
d’ensemble et, en rassemblent cette multiplicité sous une seule Idée, de définir ce qui est an ques-
tion; ii) de diviser ensuite cette Idée, d’en mettre une partie à gauche, une autre à droite, puis
de tailler encore de la même façon des espèces dans l’une et l’autre partie, jusqu’à ce que, sur
160 Daniele De Santis

Hence the reassessment of the two concepts monoeides-polueides. By

considering the one Form itself under which we comprehend the particulars,

must we not consider first, whether that in respect to which we wish to be

learned ourselves and to make others learned is simple (aploun) or multiform
(polueides), and then, if it is simple, enquire what power of acting it possesses,
or of being acted upon, and by what; and if it has many Forms (pleio eide),
number them, and then see in the case of each Form, as we did in the case of
the simple nature, what its action is and how it is acted upon and by what?
(Phaedrus, 270D)

The polarity is not anymore that between monoeides (Forms) and polueides
(bodies), but the one, within the Form itself, between its being “multi-form”
or “simple”. In contrast to the Phaedo, where the Form was said to be “uni-
form” and opposed to the mutable and multi-form bodies, here the Form
itself is to be described as either “simple” or polu-eides and hence entailing
“many Forms” (pleio eide). As long as the one Form—as for example Beauty
itself—is thought of in opposition to the many particular beautiful things, it
is described as monoeides aei on, that is as “existing ever as uniform” (Sympo-
sium, 211B)15. But as soon as we take the Form itself, the polarity monoeides-
polueides is superseded by the distinction between aploun and polueides, the
Form being either “simple” or “multiform”: there is a sense according to which
what is monoeides (the asomata eide (Sophist, 246B) opposed to the many par-
ticulars16) can be said to be polueides (as “not simple”)17.
In a nutshell: being asomata (i.e. without body), and being bodies (multi-
form), the Forms are uni-form. Yet, the Forms being internally structured, they
are either multiform, that is, including several Forms in themselves, or simple18.

chacune des deux pistes, on ait fini par découvrir une forme spécifiée de ce qu’on avait envisagé
d’abord”.
15
“Nor again will our initiate find the beautiful presented to him in the guise of a face or of
hands or any other portion of the body, nor as a particular description or piece of knowledge,
nor as existing somewhere in another substance, such as an animal or the earth or sky or any
other thing; but existing ever as uniform independent by itself, while all the multitude of beau-
tiful things partake of it in such wise that, though all of them are coming to be and perishing,
it grows neither greater not less, and is affected by nothing” (Symposium, 211B-C).
16
In Phaedrus for example Socrates describes the body as multi-form: “So it is clear that
Thrasymachus, or anyone else who seriously teaches the art of rhetoric, will first describe the
soul with perfect accuracy and make us see whether it is one and all alike, or, like the body
[somatos], of multiform aspect [polueides]” (Phaedrus, 271A).
17
Indeed, according to the dialectical method, what is “undivided” (askhiston) and could
undergo a further diairesis is polueides, whereas what is “indivisible” and admits of no further
divisions (the infima species) is the atomon eidos (Sophist, 221E, 229D). On the atomon eidos,
Stenzel 1961: 54–62.
18
For a detailed analysis of the specific Platonic meaning of the notion of asomatos, in op-
position to the Pre-Socratic usage of it, see the account by Gomperz 1932.
 Wesen, Eidos, Idea 161

It is in the Politicus that Plato addresses the issue of a Form’s “internal

structure” by making a distinction between eidos (or genos) and “part” (meros).
To quote the Stranger: “[…] how can we get a clearer knowledge of class [ge-
nos] and part [meros], and see that they are not the same thing, but different?”
(Politicus, 263). To such a question Socrates replies by pointing out that “part”
is a concept wider than “Form”. If we lose sight of this distinction, then we
will “make the division as most people in this country do”: “in undertaking
to divide the human race into two parts […] they separate the Hellenic race
from all the rest as one, and to all the other races […] they give the single
name ‘barbarian’; then, because of this single name, they think it is a single
class” (262D-E). When there is an eidos of anything “it must necessarily be a
part […]; but there is no necessity that a part be also a Form” (263C). That of
“barbarian” is a part of the eidos “human race”, yet it is not itself an eidos: it is,
so to say, a “non-eidetic” part of it (or a “mere aggregate”19).
In the light of both Phaedrus’ and Politicus’ account, we are presented with
an alternative: eide are either (i) simple or (ii) made up of parts. The latter case
entails then a further differentiation: an eidos can either (iia) contain what we
called “non-eidetic” parts (like in the case of “barbarian”) or (iib) be multi-
form by including pleio eide, “several Forms”.
The following diagram represents the main distinctions we have been
expounding so far:

Form Body
Uniform (monoeides) Multiform
Simple Made up of Parts (mere) (polueides)
(aploun) Non-Eidetic Parts Multiform
(“Barbarian”) (pleio eide)

Finally, the Philebus expresses the two-fold Platonic attitude (account of

the one Form against the many particulars [Phaedo] and analysis of the many
“parts” within the Form itself [Politicus]) as that “principle” (logos) according
to which “one is many and many are one” (Philebus, 14C). Such a “marvelous”
(thaumaston) principle might be read in a twofold way, meaning either
(a) that the many are to be comprehended under the one Form and the one
Form is the many particulars of which it is predicated or (b) that the many
are the internal and articulated “content” of the one Form and the one Form
is the many out of which it is made20. This “unity and plurality in the realm

19
Miller 2004: 20, speaks indeed of “mere aggregates, without inner affinity”.
20
For this twofold interpretation, Robin 1968: 68–73. A very detailed analysis of the dia-
logue, notably of the difference between what in Philebus Socrates calls the “easy problem” (a)
and the “serious” one (b) is provided by Benitez 1989: 12–31 and 48–58: “Forms appear to be
many in virtue of the limited number of more specific Forms into which they are divisible”.
162 Daniele De Santis

of pure being”21 is, according to Socrates, “a gift of Gods to men tossed down
from some divine source through the agency of a Prometheus together with
a gleaming fire”.
As Socrates explains to Protarchus:

we must always assume that there is in every case one Idea of everything and
must look for it […], and if we get a grasp of this, we must look next for two,
if there be two, and if not, for three or some other number; and again we must
treat each of those units in the same way, until we can see not only that the origi-
nal unit is one and many and infinite, but just how many it is. (Philebus, 16D-E)

The Gods “handed down to us this mode of investigation”: we first (i) as-
sume the Idea as a “unit” and then, rather than opposing to each other what is
“divine” and what “human”, the Forms without body and the mutable world of
earthly bodies, we (ii) scrutinize its “content” so as to determine whether and how
many further Forms are contained in “the original unit”, which is hence “one”
and “many” at the same time (the b-interpretation of the “marvelous” principle22).
Such is the “Platonism” we have been looking for in the present section,
where “Platonism” means not simply the account of the difference between
the relevant mode of being of Forms and particulars, but first and foremost
the investigation of the “content of Ideas”, i.e., of the mutual relations of
their internal parts. We have to proceed, according to the Stranger, by “taking
away part after part” (meros aei merous aphairoumenous) (Politicus, 268E) so
as to differentiate non-eidetic parts from eidetic ones and pinpoint the many
Forms contained in the original unit.
Such is the “Platonism” that Héring and Ingarden take up in their essays
and develop further: the “Platonism” that both of them hold to be at the very
basis of any phenomenological research, which then becomes, in their view, a
true description of “the content of Ideas”.

3. Jean Héring and the Morpho-logy of Essences

Based upon his dissertation project on H. Lotze23 and composed between
1909 and 191424, Héring’s essay Remarks on Essence, Essentiality and Idea (whose

21
Friedländer 1960: 296–298.
22
Our interpretation is based on the recent Berti 2012: 130–132 and Stenzel 1961: 94–105
(„Absolutes Sein, Einheit-Vielheit und Methexis unter dem Gesichtspunkt der Dialektik“): „es
handelt sich in Menon darum, aus den vielen Farben die Farbe selbst, aus den vielen Gestalten die
Gestalt selbst herauszufinden, während im Anfang des Philebos ja die Aufgabe gerade umgekehrt
sich darstellt. [...] Es gibt bis zum Staate keine Stelle, in der die Teilung einer solchen Einheit,
eines holon eidos, einer ameristos idea in weitere eide Problem ist. […] Es kommt dort alles darauf
an, eine Einheit zu erfassen, die gar keine Vielheit in sich schließt“ (101–102).
23
Whose title was Die Lehre vom Apriori bei Lotze (Schuhmann 1977: 188).
24
See what Héring himself relates in Héring 1939.
 Wesen, Eidos, Idea 163

original title, changed right before being released, was Eidos und Morphe 25)
was published in 1921 in the Yearbook and is divided into three sections dedi-
cated to the relevant notions of “essence” (Wesen), “essentiality” (Wesenheit
or eidos), “Idea”. The connexio et ordo verborum mirrors the ordo et connexio
idearum: the inquiry into individual essences, that is, the question as to how
to describe the essence of any individual object, be it real like an individual red
rose or like Cardinal Richelieu’s politics, leads us to asking about the possibil-
ity of such essences: what Héring refers to as “essentialities” or eide. Finally,
the investigation into the sumploke of eide will demand the introduction of the
notion of idea as the place (in German, Ort) where the “concretization” of eide
takes place and they can be investigated.
For the sake of the argument we are going to develop, in what follows at-
tention will be paid to the concepts of essence and essentiality only in order
to make clear, on the one hand, the notion itself of Idea and, on the other, the
distinction drawn by Héring between eidos and idea.

Let us begin with a preliminary account of what an individual essence

(Wesen) is. Héring would agree with Husserl’s claim that any individual ob-
ject “has its own specific character […] which must belong to it (as the ‘entity
such as it is in itself [Seiendem, wie er in sich selbst ist]’) if other, secondary,
contingent determinations can belong to it”26. This is what Héring refers to as
the “fundamental principle [Hauptsatz] of essence”: “every object possesses one
essence and only one essence which, as its own essence, determines its fully constitut-
ing and specific character”27. Every essence is always the essence of something
and of this something only. That is to say, the essence is always the essence
of an individual object and is thereby always an individual essence. To recall
Héring’s examples, of two different yet completely similar “red roses” or two
“congruent triangles”, each possesses its own essence: that is, despite their be-
ing “red roses” or “triangles”, the essence of the one is not the essence of the
other28. The “essence” is what Héring also calls “being-thus” (So-Sein) or, in
an apparently more Aristotelian jargon, poion einai: “The individual features
of being-thus (poion einai) are thus features of its essence”29.

25
Husserl 1968: 13–16. On this point, Schuhmann 1990: 12–13.
26
Hua III/1: 13.
27
Héring 1921: 497. As Stein 1962: 70, comments: “When Héring’s ‘principle of essence’
stated that every object has an essence, he had in mind not only objects in the narrower sense
of the world. Qualities and experiences also have an essence, and even the essence itself has an
essence. Everything has its essence. If it is a question of an individual person or thing (indivi-
duum)—for example this particular man or woman, or this particular joy (my joy)—then the
essence of this person or thing too is an individuum”.
28
Héring 1921: 497 (in footnote) and 498.
29
Héring 1921: 496.
164 Daniele De Santis

In order to make clearer Héring’s understanding of “essence” or poion ei-

nai, we must bear in mind the following main distinctions:
(a) Héring’s concept of poion einai or of being-thus does not include the
Aristotelian categories of pou and pote einai (“where” and “when” [Categories,
1b 25]) nor the poiein kai paskhein (“action and affection”) (11b 1–5). The
essence of a human being includes her being a rational being; the act of sitting
on a couch and eating right now does not belong to her essence30.
(b) Among all such “features” (Züge) not belonging to the essence, it is nec-
essary to make a sharp distinction between those features that are “completely
contingent” or “accidental” and those which, despite their not belonging to
the essence, nevertheless derive from it. As Héring himself explains: “From the
essence of a sphere with a diameter of 1 meter follows with absolute necessity
its being smaller in comparison with every cube whose edge is 1 meter long,
but this does not belong to its essence; for its essence is what it is, whether
there are other bodies”31. Even though its being smaller does not at all belong
to the sphere’s own essence or being-thus, it necessarily “derives” or follows
from its So-Sein (i.e., from its having “a diameter of 1 meter”). By contrast,
that very same sphere’s being on my table on such and such a date (pou and
pote einai) is something accidental. Or, to consider Héring’s leading example,
that Konrad Gessner was the first poet in German poetry to employ the hexa-
metron is something contingent and external to the essence or poion einai of
the hexametron itself. On the contrary, that the hexametron was mainly used
in epic poetry rather than in lyric poetry is something that, even though not
belonging to its essence, nevertheless follows essentially from it32. As a conse-
quence, the distinction between “belonging to the essence—not belonging to
the essence” (zum Wesen gehörig, nicht zu ihm gehörig) cuts across, and hence
is not tantamount to, the one between “essential—contingent” (wesentlich,
zufällig). The aforementioned examples present us indeed with two essential

30
Héring 1921: 499 (in footnote).
31
Héring 1921: 500. As Edith Stein explains: “The Russian campaign of Napoleon appears
delineated in his essence as a possibility. We can understand this undertaking as proceeding from
his essence, but we cannot say that it followed necessarily from his essence. It is conceivable
that he might have decided upon a different course of action. On the other hand, it follows
from the essence of the square that its area is larger than that of an equilateral triangle with an
identical length of its sides. It is impossible that it could be otherwise; it follows from the essence
of the square but does not pertain to this essence, because no relationship to any other object
pertains to the essence of the square” (Stein 1962: 71). Similar considerations can be found in
Fine 1994: 5 “Consider two objects whose natures are unconnected, say Socrates and the Eiffel
Tower. Then it is necessary that Socrates and the Tower be distinct. But it is not essential to
Socrates that he be distinct from the Tower; for there is nothing in his nature which connects
him in any special to it”. Our remark here, rather than suggesting an “analytic” appropriation
of Héring, is meant to be pointing back to a prehistory of certain allegedly analytic themes that
is still mostly unknown to analytically minded phenomenologists.
32
Héring 1921: 499.
 Wesen, Eidos, Idea 165

features (“being smaller in comparison with every cube whose edge is 1 meter
long”; “being used in epic poetry”) that, although “not belonging to the es-
sence”, are not at all contingent or dependent solely upon external circum-
stances33.
(c) Some individual objects, and therefore their corresponding individual
essences, also possess what Héring defines as an “essential core” (Wesenskern).
By this, Héring means the presence of a certain amount of inner and “fun-
damental features” (he speaks of a Kern von Grundzügen) that constitute the
essence’s own condition and hence bring about the essence itself as an “inter-
relation” or linkage of such and such features. In so doing, the core determines
the essence as a true “whole” based on an “inner togetherness” of features34.
In the light of a, b, c, Héring’s concept of individual essence presents itself
as having an onion-like structure made up of several progressive strata, each
successive level of which contains and, so to say, presupposes its predecessor.
The Wesen might be then represented as follows:

A = essential core
B = necessary and belonging to the
essence
C = necessary yet not belonging to
the essence
A B C D D = contingent

Now, in order to move on to introduce the notion of essentiality or eidos,

it is necessary to dwell on an ambiguity affecting the talk of essence. The
color “red”, the quality of being “soft” and “delicate” belong to the essence of
an individual rose. Let us now consider the property “being red”: it applies
to both the “rose” as a whole and its individual “coloration”. We can indeed
maintain that the rose is red as well as that the rose’s own individual color is
red. Both judgments hold true. Yet, while in the former case (“the rose is red”)
the predicate refers to one of the rose’s own qualities, in the latter judgment it

33
Héring 1921: 500. As Fine 1994: 4 explains: “I accept that if an object essentially has a
certain property then it is necessary that it has the property (or has the property if it exists); but
I reject the converse”.
34
Héring 1921: 502–503.
166 Daniele De Santis

means what (quid) the color itself is. As Héring points out, “The ‘being red’
does not belong to the color as it belongs to the rose; it belongs to the former
as the ‘being rose’ belongs to a rose and as the ‘being human’ to other relevant
beings”35. Red expresses, in the one case, the rose’s poion einai and, in the
other, the color’s ti einai (quiddity or being-such).
It is worth pointing out that it is precisely by bringing to the fore the
possibility of “being-such” that Héring will also be able to shed light on the
ultimate condition of the essence itself.
How is the ti einai to be understood? Considering again the case of “being
red” as it belongs, not to the rose, but to its color, we may inquire into what
makes the “color” this individual “red”. The answer might at first sound, at
least terminologically, strongly Aristotelian: Héring argues that it is the pres-
ence, in the individual object, of what he defines an “immediate morphe” to
make it what it is and then to determine its “whatness” (morphe deriving from
morphao , “to shape” or “to mold”).
To recall Héring’s own examples, if we ask what the being-such of an indi-
vidual “horse” is, the answer will be the presence, in the object, of the morphe
“ippotes”; in the color “red” of the morphe “eruthrotes” and in the color “white”
of the morphe “leukos”36. By such examples Héring seems to be referring to
Categories, 10a 27–34: “In most cases the names of the qualified things are
derived from the names of the qualities. From ‘whiteness [leukotes]’, ‘gram-
mar’ and ‘justice’ we have ‘white [leukos]’, ‘grammatical’, ‘just’”. How could
one deny, in effect, the Aristotelian emphasis that phrases such as ti einai and
morphe carry on with them?
Héring will immediately dissolve all our doubts; for the morphe is a two-
faced formation: if, on the one hand, it refers to the individual object it inhab-
its (and of which it constitutes the “whatness”), on the other it is the “realiza-
tion”, in the individual object, of something “non-individual” called eidos or
essentiality. The point of reference here is an hapax legomenon in Plato, where
the latter draws a clear distinction between morphe and eidos: “not only the
eidos itself has a right to the same name through all the time, but also some-
thing else, which is not the eidos, but which always, whenever it exists, has its
morphe” (Phaedo, 103E). Rather than pointing toward Aristotle, the morphe
expresses the Platonic duo eide ton onton: the morphe being the “presence”
(parousia), in the individual object, of a non-individual eidos.
To elaborate on the above examples, an individual color “red” is such be-
cause of the presence in it of an individual morphe referring to a non-individual

35
Héring 1921: 506–507.
36
Héring 1921: 508–509. It is worth noticing that Héring uses German words to refer
to individual objects and Greek ones only to speak of the relevant individual morphai or non-
individual essentialities. Of course, as stressed by Stein 1962: 85: “The term morphe (form) is
here used in a broader sense than Aristotle, who means by morphe merely the inner form of an
object, i.e., of an independent and real entity.”
 Wesen, Eidos, Idea 167

eidos. Or, to put it differently, “red” is such because of an eidos being “realized”
in the individual morphe of an object. Now, if the object and the morphe are al-
ways individual, the corresponding eidos is by contrast always non-individual:
it is the “redness in itself ” or “whiteness in itself ” (kath’auto). As Héring goes
on to claim: “Were there no essentialities, there would be no objects. Only
because there are essentialities can there be possible morphai giving in general
the object both its content and ti.”37 These essentialities or eide are “the ulti-
mate conditions of possibility of objects and of the morphai themselves”.
Such a Platonic stance on essentialities leads Héring to provide a true Pla-
tonic overturning of the following passage from Categories (2b 5) where the
Stagirite utterly claims: “were there no primary substances, nothing else could
so much exist (me ouson oun ton proton ousion adunaton ton allon ti einai)”. Now,
since the non-individual “essentialities” are “the ultimate conditions of possibil-
ity”, eide and not particulars (o tis anthropos he o tis ippos) are protai ousiai 38.
To sum up: the ti einai, or quidditas, is due to the presence in the individual
object (for example a “red color”) of an individual morphe (eruthrotes) “realizing”
a non-individual eidos (“redness in itself ” or kath’auto). Now, considering our
starting example of a “red rose,” we cannot lose sight of the red color’s belong-
ing, as one of its qualities, to that “red rose” itself. If the color is, as Héring
claims, the “primary realizer” of the eidos “redness in itself,” being the former
one of the rose’s moments, the rose itself can be said “secondary realizer” of that
very same eidos. The essentiality is thus “primarily” realized in the morphe of the
individual “red color” (ti einai) and “secondarily” in the individual “red rose” (as
part of its poion). This relation might be represented as follows:

(A) eidos “redness in itself ”

morphe “individual red color” “individual red rose”

(primary realizer) (secondary realizer)

While the morphe eruthrotes is the “immediate morphe” of the individual

red color, it can then be defined as the “mediate morphe” of the individual red
rose to which it belongs as a moment. In such a way the relation between ti
einai and poion einai is finally intelligible: the individual object’s poion einai is
nothing but the sumploke of all the “mediate morphai”. In other words, the So-
Sein is the object’s partaking in all the immediate morphai of its moments39:

37
Héring 1921: 510.
38
Héring 1921: 522. Contra Héring’s conception of essentiality as prote ousia, Metzger
1925: 665, who denounces a “mythologization of essentiality [Mythifikation der Wesenheit]”.
39
Héring 1921: 511–512.
168 Daniele De Santis

the eruthrotes, “as a direct form, constitutes the color’s ti and, as an indirect
one, the rose’s poion”40.
To make all of this clear, we will develop (A) a little bit further:

(B) eidos’ eidos’’ eidos’’ eidos’’’’

primary realizer morphe’ morphe’’ morphe’’’ morphe’’’’

(ti einai)

secondary realizer individual object as a whole

(poion einai)

Now, phenomenology—as an eidetic science—is primarily interested in

describing morphological connections not as realized in individual objects but
as realizations of non-individual eide. To this end, Héring goes on to distinguish
between three main possible types of morphological relations:
(1) the lowest level is that where the connection between the morphai is
itself solely a contingent one, the sumploke taking place only at the level of the
individual objects in which the individual morphai happen to be empirically
realized together. Héring’s example is that in which the morphe “horse” is
joined together with the morphe “domesticated animal” in a tode ti. Now, even
though the two morphai are de facto connected, there occurs no relation at the
level of eide or essentialities. To the individual morphological sumploke there
corresponds no non-individual eidetic sumploke. That is why Héring speaks
here of a “conglomerate of morphai”41;
(2) the situation is different if we turn our attention to the morphai “color”
and “extension”. Here the sumploke takes place not solely at the empirical level
of individual morphological connections, but already at the non-individual
level of essentialities or eide, that is to say, the eidos “extension” “necessarily
demands” the corresponding eidos “color”;

40
Héring 1921: 511. As Stein 1962: 85 explains it: “The color of the rose bears within itself
a morphe which makes it red, and it thereby partakes of the essentiality redness. The morphe of
the color is not directly the morphe of the rose, but indirectly or mediately it has a share in the
structure of the rose. Héring therefore calls this morphe the immediate morphe of the color and
the mediate morphe of the rose, and he correspondingly designates the rose as the mediate and
its color as the immediate carrier of the morphe”.
41
Héring 1921: 513, 521–522.
 Wesen, Eidos, Idea 169

(3) there is finally the case of the morphai “color” and “red”. In such a
paradigmatic example of genus and differentia specifica the morphe “color” is
“included” in the morphe “red” and the latter seems, so to say, “to spring from
the former”42. (In both [2] and [3] we are presented not solely with empirical
conglomerates of morphai contingently realized together in an individual object,
but with a non-individual compounding of essentialities [sumploke of eide]43).
If Wesen means individual essence and eide are by contrast always non-
individual formations, what are Ideas? Héring would agree with Lotze, that
“there are Ideas […] of everything which can be thought in universal form,
apart from the particular perceptions in which it is presented”44. In this sense
there are Ideas, as universal “paradigms” (paradeigmata), of everything that
exists: while Ideas are prototypes of all their individual instances, the objects
are “exemplifications” of Ideas45.
Yet, we must carefully distinguish between the notion of essentiality, also
referred to as eidos, and idea: if the former is the non-individual “quality”
realized in an individual morphe of an individual object, the latter is the
universal form to which the phenomenologist turns her attention in order
to pinpoint the morphological structure of all the relevant beings falling
under it. “The Idea, according to Héring, is the very place [Ort] where the
concretization of eidos in morphe finally obtains”46.
To make it clearer, we will have to distinguish between two possible cases.
There exists no eidos or essentiality “horse” or “domesticated animal” (there is no
non-individual horse or “horsenness,” as claimed against Plato by Antisthenes).
On this point, following Socrates, Héring would answer Parmenides’ tricky
question in the negative: “And are you undecided about certain other things,
which you might think rather ridiculous, such as hair, mud and dirt, or
anything else particularly vile and worthless? Would you say that there is an
eidos of each of these?” (Parmenides, 130C-D). If there exists no relevant eidos,
there is nevertheless the idea “horse” or “domesticated animal”. Yet, such an Idea
presents us exclusively with “conglomerates of morphai” and with no eidetic
sumploke: the Idea including, in other words, only an “empirical” content47.

42
Héring 1921: 512–513.
43
In his book Wesen und Wesenserkenntnis, Wilhelm Pöll (a former student of Pfänder and
Geyser) makes the point that in Héring, even though the expression Wesen technically means
the same as poion einai (So-Sein), it mainly refers to the essence not solely as an enumeration
of features but as a true “unity”. Thereby we can distinguish between empirical essences (as
mere conglomerates of morphai) and eidetic essences (eidetic unities), whose possibility derives
from the connections of eide prior to any realization (see Pöll 1936: 56: “Das Wesen ist nicht
einfach das Sosein, sondern mit (individuellem) Wesen wird das Sosein nach seiner Einheit
[…] bezeichnet”).
44
Lotze 1912: 507 (§314).
45
Héring 1921: 527.
46
Héring 1921: 529.
47
Héring 1921: 535.
170 Daniele De Santis

By contrast, there are Ideas whose content is determined by morphai as

concretizations of eide, such as the Idea of a sound with a definite pitch,
duration and loudness. In this case, we can speak of closed or “unitary” Ideas
displaying several eidetic relations or, as Socrates put it, pleio eide48.
In so doing, Héring proposes a distinction between eidos and idea which
is far from being fully Platonic49. Indeed, while the former can eventually
be lacking (like in the cases of “domesticated animal” or “mud”), the Idea is
always present: “everything that can be said of an Idea has eo ipso value for
every being belonging to its sphere”50. This is why Héring says that Ideas are
not to be understood as a specific kind of being next to individual objects and
non-individual essentialities, as if the Platonic duo eide ton onton turned into
tria eide ton onton, “three kinds of being”.

Moving forward we develop (B) as follows:

(C)
eidos’ eidos’’ eidos’’’ eidos’’’’

idea
concretization of
eidos in morphe

phenomenology

exemplification individual object

48
Héring 1921: 535.
49
On many occasions, Plato seems, indeed, to make no distinction between ousia, eidos and
idea (as for example in Meno, 72A-C): this is why, in §2, we made no conceptual distinction
between the manner in which Plato employs eidos and idea respectively. For a more detailed and
philologically based reconstruction of the philosophical difference between those two concepts,
see Ritter 1910.
50
Héring 1921: 526.
 Wesen, Eidos, Idea 171

The phenomenologist is interested neither in individual essences nor

exclusively in non-individual essentialities, but in describing the content of
Ideas so as to verify whether the compounding of eide (as described in 1, 2, 3)
correspond to the morphological relations constituting individual essences
and to distinguish empirical Ideas from eidetic ones. That is to say, Ideas
including eidetic sumplokai from those made only of empirical relations. As
Plato claims in the Politicus, when there is an eidos it must necessarily be a
“part”, namely a morphe of the content of the relevant Idea (to the individual
“red” corresponds the essentiality “redness kath’auto”) but there is no necessity
that a morphe be also an eidos (there is no eidos “horse” or, to recall Socrates,
“barbarian”).

4. Roman Ingarden and the Content of Ideas

Published in 1925 as Habilitationsschrift, Essential Questions is the essay

where Ingarden paves the way for his future metaphysics of the world: indeed
the text presents itself as a metaphysical as well as gnoseological meditation
addressing issues such as the status of purely intentional objectualities, of ideal
objects and that of the role intentionality plays in the process of knowledge51.
Yet, as was already the case for Héring’s, the book’s main concern is to outline
a consistent theory of Ideas as the basis for making sense of the possibility of
individual essences. Moreover, as the title itself suggests, the Essentiale Fragen
are first and foremost an inquiry into the way one can ask about essences and
Ideas (“essential questions” meaning hence questions about essence).
This being stated, Ingarden’s overall project might be construed as a
development of two distinct, yet closely related, problems. On the one hand, he
is taking Héring’s concept of Idea to the next level by offering a more detailed
description of the different categories of Ideas. On the other, he is further
developing the Husserlian formal description of Ideas as “subjects of possible
statements”52. For, if it is the case that Ideas are subjects of possible statements,
then the ontological inquiry into their content is to be accompanied by a parallel
logical analysis of the relevant statements spelling out that content itself.
In what follows, we will be offering only a brief presentation of Ingarden’s
theory of judgments, confining our analysis to two specific judgments and only
to these insofar as they have a direct bearing on his general stance on Ideas.
As Gilbert Ryle, in his review of Ingarden’s book, summarizes its project:
“For example, we may wish merely to identify a presented object, and our
question should be put ‘Which is that?’ or ‘Whose is that?’ or ‘Why is that
there?’. Or we may wish to be told some of the marks, adjectives or relations

51
On Ingarden’s later self-assessment, Ingarden 1992: 187–209.
52
Hua-Mat VII: 87. Even if only in a rudimentary manner, that definition could already be
found in the Second Logical Investigation (§27).
172 Daniele De Santis

of an object, taking its Essence as either known or, for the business in hand,
not worth knowing”53. If then, in Ingarden’s words, we wish to know what
an object with which we are not yet acquainted really is, we will ask “What is
that?”. This is the first “essential question” Ingarden sets forth on his way to
work out a theory of Ideas. To this question there corresponds, as an answer,
a judgment that he refers to as an “identification judgment” (Bestimmungs-
Urteil)54. If then the question reads “What is that?”, the answer will have the
form “That is…an X”. For example, to quote Ingarden’s own examples: “that
is a triangle”, “that is a rose”, “that is a hawk”. What is such an identification
judgment really about? What does it convey?
In answering these questions, Ingarden will base his own interpretation
upon Alexander Pfänder’s analysis of judgments in his 1921 Logik (published
in the Yearbook).
In that handbook, Pfänder divides and classifies all our judgments
according to the kinds of states of affairs they posit55. There are two main
distinctions: “The first major group of states of affairs are those that lie within
the object itself: the second major group are those that extend beyond the object
and involve other objects”. Ingarden will mainly focus on the former division,
which in turn—in Pfänder’s view—includes three different types of judgments
concerning, respectively:
(i) the object in regard to its own “whatness (Was)”;
(ii) the object in regard to its “attributes in the broadest sense, of which
some express the essence of the object, while others belong to the object more
or less accidentally”;
(iii) the object in regard to its “kind of being, its real or ideal existence in
the widest sense”.
Pfänder goes on to describe (i) as identification judgments (Bestimmungsurteile),
(ii) as attributive judgments (Attributionsurteile) and (iii) as existential judgments
(Seinsurteile). Let us set aside the latter type of judgments, which tell us the
subject’s kind of being: yet “Being, ‘existentia’, is no ‘whatness’, but is essentially
distinct from every ‘essentia’”56.
Let us consider then the difference between (i) and (ii). Already at first
glance, it is apparent that Héring’s poion einai corresponds to (ii): the Wesen
embraces the “attributes in the broadest sense, of which some express the
essence of the object [what Héring means by B], while others belong to the
object more or less accidentally [what he means by C and D]”. As Pfänder
describes attributive judgments, whose leading example is “sulfur is yellow” (or
“the rose is red”): “This judgment does not answer the question ‘What is it?’
but ‘How is it?’. By means of the copula ‘is’, it not only refers the yellow to

53
Ryle 1927: 366.
54
Ingarden 1925: 148 (§6).
55
Pfänder 1963: 44–49. Ingarden 1925: 208–210.
56
Pfänder 1963: 48.
 Wesen, Eidos, Idea 173

the sulfur in an assertive manner, but also posits the two as standing together
in the characteristic unity that an attribute has with a material object”. In so
doing, attributive judgments “posit a different material unity in the state of
affairs than is posited by identification judgments”.
What are “identification judgments” if they are to serve as answers to
the first essential question? Identification judgments, according to Pfänder,
“determine the subject by stating its ‘whatness [Was]’. They answer the
question, ‘What is it?’. This question can never be answered by listing the
attributes of the object, no matter how many we include”57. Identification
judgments cannot be reduced to attributive ones: for, no matter how many
characteristics we can enumerate, they will never express what an object is.
Rather than explaining the latter, the former presuppose it58.
Unlike Héring, who started out from the poion einai and thus moved on
to the ti einai, Ingarden is fully aware that solely by asking first about the
proteron phusei (what the object is) can we also understand what is proteron
pros hemas (the object’s poion einai): “In identification judgments, therefore,
the copula not only carries out the general function of relating the predicate-
determination to the subject […] but posits, at the same time, that material
unity [sachhaltige Einheit] which exists between the object and its ‘whatness’.
Identification judgments are thus understood correctly only when this unique,
material unity is co-posited along with them.”59
How is then that “material unity” to be understood? What does such a
“materiality” refer to? As Ingarden goes on to say: “By identification judgment
we mean solely those judgments in which the predicate-determination refers
the subject-determination to its individual and constitutive nature”60. In other
terms, by answering the question “What is… that?” with the judgment “that
is… an X,” we refer the individual object, not to its Wesen in Héring’s sense
as a group of attributes or “being-thus” (as it indeed happens with attributive
judgments), but to its ti einai (“whatness” in Pfänder’s language, or “quiddity”
according to Héring). Yet, the answer just provided immediately turns into
a new enigma: what is in effect an “individual and constitutive nature”? The

57
Pfänder 1963: 46.
58
As Ingarden 1935: 53–54, remarked: “Es besteht ein radikaler Unterschied zwischen den
Fällen: (1) ‘Dieser Tisch da ist braun’ und (2) ‘Dies da ist Mont Blanc’ sowie endlich (3) ‘Dies
ist (ein) Tisch’. Im Falle (1) wird einem individuellen Gegenstand eine Eigenschaft zuerkannt.
Es wird festgestellt, dass er eine Beschaffenheit ‘hat’. In den Fällen (2) und (3) dagegen wird ein
bestimmter individueller Gegenstand genannt, d. h., als das aufgefasst, was er in sich selbst ist.
[…]”. For what concerns (3), “Mittels eines in seiner Natur enthaltenen Moments ‘Tischheit’
und des individuierenden Zusatzes ‘dieser da’ deuten wir auf ihn als auf ein bestimmtes, durch
die ‘Tischheit’ konstituiertes Etwas hin. Die braune Farbe kommt dem Tische zu, aber die
‘Tischheit’ kommt weder dem Tische noch dem ‘dies da’ zu. Das Tisch-sein ist keine Eigen-
schaft des ‘dies da’, sondern es macht es erst zu einem Tische.”
59
Pfänder 1963: 47.
60
Ingarden 1925: 209.
174 Daniele De Santis

solution will solicit an inquiry into the concept of Idea: for the constitutive
nature is nothing else than the individualization of what Ingarden (following
Héring) designates as the “immediate morphe” of the corresponding Idea’s
“content”. Let us explain it with Ingarden’s example.
If the first essential question is “What is that?” and the relative answer
(identification judgment) yields “that is a square”, then we could further ask
(this is the second essential question): “What is a square (in general) then?”.
The answer cannot be another identification judgment, but rather what
Ingarden refers to as a judgment of essence (Wesensurteil), whose general form is
“X is Y with the properties a, b, c…”61. In the case in question it would read:
“the square is a parallelogram with four equal sides and four right angles”.
Such a judgment does not refer an individual object to its individual nature,
but spells out the content of the relevant Idea under which the object falls and
in virtue of which it is such or such an object. Now, in order to understand
which elements can occupy the positions Y, a, b, c, we have to provide an
overview of Ingarden’s own classification of Ideas.
The Polish philosopher divides all Ideas into three main categories:
(a) Inexact Ideas, namely Ideas “whose content’s direct morphe is just a
conglomerate lacking any internal unity”62. The content of these Ideas does not
contain any concretizations of essentialities: it is the retroactive grouping by an
empirical synthesis of all the individual objects so far experienced. Ingarden’s example
is the Idea “plate”: we do frame the latter on the basis of our ongoing empirical
experience of individual plates. In this case, “the constitutive nature is not solely a
conglomerate, but also a contingent one63. Inexact Ideas—which Ingarden seems
to hold as “subjective” because they depend on our own experience—embrace
what Héring refers to as (1): all those cases in which the many morphai happen to
be empirically joined together in an individual object64.
(b) Exact Ideas, whose content is “the concretization of non-individual
essentialities”65. Unlike inexact Ideas—whose content is empirically based on
our experience—exact Ideas include essential sumplokai between the content’s
elements. Given a morphe as a concretization of a non-individual essentiality, it
is thereby given also a system of properties essentially derived from the former.
The example is the Idea “square” whose content’s morphe is the concretization
of the essentiality (eidos in Héring’s Platonic jargon) “squareness” (Quadratheit)
and the corresponding system of properties includes “four equal sides and

61
Ingarden 1925: 220–263 (“The Judgment of Essence and its Ontological Basis. The Real
Definition”).
62
Ingarden 1925: 221.
63
Ingarden 1925: 223.
64
Ingarden 1925: 245
65
Ingarden 1925: 225. It is worth stressing that Ingarden systematically avoids the words
eidos and idea and confines himself to the German Wesenheit to mean non-individual essentiali-
ties.
 Wesen, Eidos, Idea 175

four right angles”. In other words, if something is a square (or falls under
the Idea whose content is the concretization of the essentiality “squareness”)
it must also have “four equal sides and four right angles”. The latter flow
from the former. Exact Ideas embrace both Héring’s (2) and (3) and all those
cases in which a non-empirical and non-individual sumploke of essentialities
corresponds to the individual morphological connections66.
(c) Simple Ideas, to whose content there corresponds a non-individual
essentiality, yet no system of properties. Ingarden’s examples (to which
we cannot pay our attention here) are “some objectual Ideas” such as the
geometrical notions of “point”, “line” or “surface”67. Despite their being
non-empirical (like exact ones) these Ideas have no inner articulation, the
essentiality itself being simple.
We might summarize Ingarden’s Ideenlehre as follows:

Exact Idea Inexact Idea Simple Idea

Concretized
Concretized in the Idea’s
Essentiality in the Idea’s
Content
Content
Content Articulated Articulated Simple

System of Derived from the Empirical

Properties Essentiality Conglomerate

Given this partition, we can finally come back to the judgment of essence
and cast some light on the logico-ontological correlation between its formal
structure and the content of Ideas. It has to be remarked, however, that a
judgment of essence can be employed only with respect to “inexact” and “exact”
Ideas, but never to “simple” ones. As for the latter, the one and only possible
answer to the second essential question, (“What is… X?”) is a tautological
judgment “A is A”68. If we employ a judgment of essence to answer a question
bearing on inexact Ideas, namely on Ideas whose content entirely depends
upon the in fieri and open process of our empirical experience up to now, then
the number of positions referring to the system of properties (a, b, c...) will
be an indefinite one. If, by contrast, the judgment refers to exact Ideas, the
number of properties will be not solely a finite one, but entirely determined
by the essentialities concretized in the content of the Idea in question.

66
Ingarden 1925: 244.
67
Ingarden 1925: 230.
68
Ingarden 1925: 251–258. We cannot focus on Ingarden’s interpretation of tautological
judgments.
176 Daniele De Santis

In the case of judgments of essence referring to exact Ideas, there is a perfect

correspondence with the content itself: the X means indeed the “immediate
morphe” concretizing an essentiality (in this case, the essentiality “squareness”),
specifying in its turn a higher or more general Idea (Y) and thereby bringing
about a fixed system of properties (a, b, c…). To recall the above example:

“The square is a parallelogram with four equal sides and four right angles”

“X is Y with the properties a, b, c…”

In the aftermath of this account of the judgment of essence, Ingarden,

unlike Héring, yields two different definitions of what an “individual essence”
(Wesen) amounts to:
(a) following his French colleague, he first characterizes the essence in a
broad sense as the sum of all the individual features or being-thus (Sosein) of
the object, regardless of the latter’s falling under an exact or inexact Idea;
(b) yet, there is a narrow or strict concept, “according to which only
some individual objects have an essence in this new sense: only those whose
individual and constitutive nature includes in itself the concretization of
essentialities”69. Or, to quote Plato, only those objects whose nature is spelled
out in a judgment (logos) expressing ton eidon sumploke (Sophist, 259E). In this
case, then, we will not only comprehend the essence as a sum of features (like
in [a]), but we grasp the latter as deriving from the non-individual essentialities
concretized in the Idea’s content.
In this respect, Edith Stein’s comment, according to which “an ‘essence-
less [wesen-loser]’ object is therefore inconceivable”70, holds true for (a) yet
not for (b): only about the former can we indeed claim that “without essence
it would no longer be an object but only the empty form of an object”. A
“plate”—paradigmatic example of inexact Ideas—has no essence in the strict
sense (b) (there is no “essentiality” or eidos “plateness”) but it is not at all just
the “empty form of an object” (it still possesses [a]). The ontological difference
between (a) and (b), i.e., between a broad (Héring’s) and a narrow (Ingarden’s)
meaning of essence parallels Ingarden’s logical distinction between, on the
one hand, attributive judgments and, on the other, the tandem identification
judgments–judgments of essence as bearing upon exact Ideas.
According to the strict sense, then, the Wesen is conveyed by the system of
properties occupying the positions a, b, c… in a judgment of essence and as
derived from the essentiality expressed by X. Only objects falling under exact
Ideas have therefore an essence.

69
Ingarden 1925: 250.
70
Stein 1962: 69.
 Wesen, Eidos, Idea 177

We are now in a better position to understand why Ingarden, unlike Héring,

has started out from asking about the ti einai and not from the poion einai: for
we have to first classify different types of Ideas so as to differentiate features
that might derive from empirical experience (and making up exclusively
inexact Ideas) and those flowing from essentialities and characterizing thereby
exact ones. Otherwise, we might run the risk of mistaking an empirical feature
for a non-empirical eidos or essentiality and thereby assuming—as belonging
to the essence of an object in the strict sense—also features pertaining solely
to objects as falling under inexact Ideas.
Before moving on toward the conclusion, let us provide one more diagram
to help the reader have in view the parallels between Plato’s, Héring’s and
Ingarden’s classifications.

Simple Made up of Non-Eidetic Made up of Eidetic

Plato
(aploun) Parts Parts (pleio eide)
Conglomerates of
Héring Sumplokai of eide
morphai

Ingarden Simple Ideas Inexact Ideas Exact Ideas

5. Conclusion

The main purpose of the present investigation was to display the “Platonism”
of two Göttingen students of Husserl, Jean Héring and Roman Ingarden. By
“Platonism” we mean not simply an account of what is usually considered
the difference/opposition between particulars and universals (or, in a Platonic
terminology, between the mutable world of bodies and the immutable realm
of heavenly Forms). Rather, we mean a peculiar insight into what Ingarden
explicitly calls “the content of Ideas”. We have indeed followed Plato’s (§2)
account of the differentiation, within the realm itself of Forms, between (i)
“simple” Forms, (ii) Forms including either “non-eidetic parts” (being “mere
aggregates”) or (iii) further Forms (being in this case “multiform”).
After the opening Platonic section, we discussed Jean Héring’s short, yet
rich essay, Remarks on Essence, Essentiality and Idea (§3). We strove to clarify
the distinctions between the notions of individual essence, morphe, essentiality
or eidos and idea: in the process we shed light on Héring’s account of
individual essences in terms of inter-relations between what he calls individual
morphai, namely, concretizations in the individual objects of non-individual
essentialities. In so doing, the essence turns out to be an interweaving of
morphai and the analysis itself of the essence to be a morphological investigation
meant, on the one hand, to bring to the fore all the dependences governing
the morphai themselves and, on the other, to verify whether to such individual
178 Daniele De Santis

and morphological relations there correspond non-individual ones in the

realm of essentialities. Toward the end of §3, we elaborated on the distinction
between eidos and Idea: whereas the former is held to mean non-individual
essentialities (Héring sometimes also says “qualities”), the latter is the ideal
“place” where the concretization of eide occurs and their interweaving can be
investigated.
If in Héring the analysis bears on ontological problems, in Ingarden’s
Essential Questions (§4) we also meet with logical concerns: their main goal
being to exploit the logico-ontological correlations between, on the one
hand, essences and Ideas and, on the other, different kinds of judgments.
If his arguments parallel Héring’s ontological distinctions, the Polish
philosopher is also interested in the different ways we can ask about essences.
He distinguishes, on the one hand, between two different kinds of essential
questions (one bearing on individual formations, “What is that?”, and another
concerning Ideas, “What is… X?”), and, on the other, between attributive
judgments (referring to the poion einai), identification judgments, “that is…
an X” (spelling out the whatness or ti einai) and judgments of essence, “X
is Y with the properties a, b, c…”. As we discussed toward the end of §4, a
judgment of essence is a judgment meant to express what Ingarden refers to as
the content of Idea. As a consequence, the account of the judgment’s formal
structure requires an insight into the different types of Ideas: inexact, exact
and simple Ideas. The formal structure of the judgment of essence mirrors the
inner articulation of Ideas, their being constituted either by conglomerates of
morphai or by concretizations of essentialities.
The latter case, as we have seen, leads Ingarden to provide a strict concept of
individual essence: Wesen is not just the So-Sein as a collection of features that
we may enumerate over the course of a description. In the strictest sense, only
those objects whose individual and constitutive nature is the concretization of
an essentiality can be said to have an essence.
In spite of the different trajectory and route—from a broad concept
of individual essence to Ideas (Héring), from Ideas to a narrow notion of
individual essence (Ingarden)—for both of them the task of phenomenology,
as an eidetic science, is not to describe individual essences, but to bring to our
attention Ideas built up of non-individual and non-empirical sumplokai so as
to differentiate them from those including only clusters of empirical morphai.
Both agree on conceiving phenomenology as an investigation into the Ideas’
content and both share Parmenides’ concern about eide when the Venerable
one (in the most enigmatic of Plato’s dialogues) asks Socrates: “Then what will
become of philosophy? To what can you turn, if these things are unknown?”
(Parmenides, 135C)71.

71
I am very grateful to the Mit-Phänomenologen M. Tedeschini and G. Di Salvatore for
their remarks and help improving the present text.
 Wesen, Eidos, Idea 179
“Guarda quante ce ne sono, oh. Milioni di milioni di milioni di stelle.
Ostia ragazzi, io mi domando come cavolo fa a reggersi tutta sta baracca.
Perché per noi, così per dire, in fondo è abbastanza facile, devo fare un palazzo:
tot mattoni, tot quintali di calce, ma lassù, viva la Madonna,
dove le metto le fondamenta, eh? Non son mica coriandoli”
Federico Fellini, Amarcord

Daniele De Santis
1222 E Madison #221
Seattle 98122
WA, USA
desantid@seattleu.edu

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