In the Euthyphro, Socrates and his eponymous interlocutor discuss holiness and unholiness. The topic is not very interesting, but there is something vaguely pleasing in imagining Socrates as he dismantles Euthyphro’s boorishly crude notions about what it is to be holy. “Alright come on, let’s see what we mean then,” he says and proceeds to sift through the others’ truistic phrases. Holiness is dear to the gods: it is that which is dear to all the gods, unanimously: it is that which is dear to all the gods, unanimously, but it is so because it is holy, so the fact that it is dear to the gods is not getting at what it is that makes it dear to them, unanimously, in the first place: no, rather, it is service to the gods: fuck Socrates, you have wasted enough of my time. Socrates, it seems, does not think that Euthyphro has discovered what it is that determines whether a given thing is holy or unholy, and it is tempting to read a certain smugness in his self-professed ignorance. Being neither holy nor unholy does not seem to be an option that either Socrates or Euthyphro consider, but that is another topic.

Socrates is interested in the thing that makes a given act, such as persecution of one’s father for the murder of a slave, holy or unholy; he wants to find the the eidos of holiness. The eidos of holiness, or whatever else, is the a determinate quality that all things that are holy, or whatever else, share, and in virtue of it they are whatever they are. By looking at or considering any given thing, if we had appraised the unifying aspect that bound all things of a certain sort together, we would know whether or not it fulfilled the requirements to be counted among them. This is an enticing notion, but it is also perilous. It can lead us to ignore the subtle differences that also are inherent in things united by eide, and to ponder the world of formal characteristics as if they were things unto themselves that stood over and against history, immutable.

But the notion of the eidos need not be removed from the flux of human life. This becomes apparent if we take under consideration not a rarefied notion like holiness but something as simple as what it is that unifies cups: that which determines whether or not a given object is a cup. When we proceed this way, we see that an eidos is not some thing that exists in an absolute world of ideas and that determines the objects of this world of phenomena, but that it is a determinate part of this world, an aspect or quality that unites two or more objects as a set. Every time we see two objects that are united in this eidetic similarity, and identify this as something that they must have shared, we sense a sort of eidos, albeit one that Socrates or Plato may not have identified. This eidos is one that is bound to the flux of time and that of necessity is caught up in the process of consciousness, the work of sensing things as similar and drawing this similarity out and working to understand it as such. The work of this task Husserl called eidetic intuition, though he qualified it one step further.

For an eidos is not simply the similarity shared by two experienced objects which are identified to be of the same sort; it describes a universal aspect by which we can judge every single possible object and determine if it falls within a set. In this sense it is not contingent upon experience. It is prescriptive. Husserl contends that we can discover these pure universals by taking up objects and subjecting them to ‘free variation’:

With this, we wish to indicate that we appropriate, directly and as itself, a common and general moment of as many examples as desired, seen one by one, in a manner wholly analogous to the way in which we appropriate an individual particular in sensuous perception: although, to be sure, the seeing is more complex here. It is a seeing resulting from the actively comparative overlapping of congruence. This is true of every kind of intuitive apprehension of commonalities and generalities, tough where a pure eidos is to be seen as an a priori, this sense has its special methodological form — precisely that which has been described, namely that indifference with regard to actuality which is generated in variation, whereby what presents itself as actual acquires the character of an arbitrary example, an indifferent point of departure in a series of variations. (EnJ, sec. 88)

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