Husserl criticizes a naïve Platonism, the idea that meanings, truths, or ideal entities exist in a detached, self-subsistent realm (a kind of “heaven of concepts”).
For Plato, the ascent is toward a higher ontological domain, the Forms, grasped by a transformed soul. For Husserl, the “ascent” is not to another world but to a reflective clarification of how any world appears at all. It’s a transcendental turn, not a metaphysical vertical one.
The image (eikoni) of our nature in its education in the cave (514a) is very powerful. It is so seductive in fact that many fail to realize that Plato replaces one set of images on the cave wall with another. There is no ascent from the cave that occurs as the result of reading this image, but its effect on the imagination can be moving. So much so that one might imagine ascending along the image of the divided line from images (eikones) in the imagination (eikasia) on up to dianoia and noesis.
The only “state of being” here is a state of one’s imagination doing exactly what the cave dwellers are doing, holding the truth to be nothing other than these images. (515c)
Are there transcendent states of being? I don’t know. What I do know is that it is Plato’s Socrates who gives us these images and he says he has no knowledge of such things. In addition, no other person, real or imagined, emerges who does possess this knowledge. Even the Oracle proclaims that no one is wiser than Socrates.
Very interesting. I believe, however, that the reasoning creates the basis for reaching the conclusion. I find the reference to identity forced. Mind does not equal brain: the brain generates the mind, just as an orchestra generates a symphony. But the symphony is not the orchestra. I see, in line with an emergentist approach, the mind as closely linked to the brain, its byproduct (the question of “universal truths” remains open). My point of view.
But I think Plato is religious — in a different way to what we now understand. After all, the Greek-speaking theologians designated the Plato, Socrates and Aristotle, along with a select few others, ‘Christians before Christ’. It is not difficult to see the Good as foreshadowing God. There are references to God and gods throughout the dialogues, which often begin with making obesiance or paying respect to the Gods.
But it also shouldn’t be forgotten that Christians eventually closed the Academy and burned down the Library of Alexandia, martyring Hypatia in the process.
So it’s actually a very complex picture. The problem lies largely with the inherited meaning of religion which is inexorably intertwined with cultural history. The strict separation of sacred and secular, not to mention mind and body, physical and mental - the whole debate has to navigate all of these historically-loaded meanings. It’s like skiing a giant slalom. Learning to look at it anew has been a life’s work for yours truly.
As I understand it, Husserl was at pains to distinguish his own position from what he calls “Platonism” in the pejorative sense — the hypostatisation of universals into separately existing metaphysical entities inhabiting their own realm. It is that hypostatisation or reification that bedevils interpretations of Plato from the outset.
As noted previously from Eric Perl:
Forms are ideas, not in the sense of concepts or abstractions, but in that they are realities apprehended by thought rather than by sense. They are thus ‘separate’ in that they are not additional members of the world of sensible things, but are known by a different mode of awareness. All too often, ‘paradigm’ is taken to mean ‘model to be copied.’
(from whence the idea of ‘a cat’ being an ‘imperfect copy’ of ‘an ideal cat’ which is how nearly everyone (mis)understands it.)
The text goes on:
But forms cannot be paradigms in this sense. Just as the intelligible ‘look’ that is common to many things of the same kind, a form, as we have seen, is not an additional thing of that kind. Likewise, it makes no sense to say that a body, a physical, sensible thing, is a copy, in the sense of a replica or duplicate, of an intelligible idea. Indeed, Plato expressly distinguishes between a copy and an image: “Would there be two things, that is, Cratylus and an image of Cratylus, if some God copied not only your color and shape, as painters do, but also … all the things you have—if he set such other things beside you? Would such then be Cratylus and an image of Cratylus, or two Cratyluses?—Two Cratyluses, it seems to me, Socrates.” He then remarks, “Do you not perceive how far images fall short of having the same features [τὰ αὐτὰ] as the things of which they are images?” (Crat. 432b5–c6, d1–3).
From ThinkingBeing.pdf
But The transcendental reduction — the epoché — must be relevant here. It is part and parcel of Husserl’s rejection of naturalism.
The epoché brackets the assumption of the ‘self-existent world’ and returns attention to the constituting acts of consciousness. And what it reveals, for Husserl, is that the world as we know it is not simply given but is the achievement of intentional consciousness — structured, meaningful, rationally ordered. Whereas the “natural attitude” that Husserl is critiquing is precisely what contemporary naturalism enshrines as its foundation. Naturalism takes the world of physical objects and processes as the unquestioned bedrock and wishes to derive everything from it — even the observer herself! Husserl says that attitude requires radical critique and suspension.
I understand the aversion to talk of higher states in the contemporary philosophical lexicon, allthough that too is changing, as they have started to become part of the curriculum in consciousness studies often due to the incorporation of elements of Buddhist abhidharma. (An etymological note: ‘abhi’- is the Sanskrit root for ‘higher’, the same particle is found in ‘abhijñā’ which literally translates as ‘higher knowledge’.)
If the cave allegory is just an image that produces imaginative effects without pointing to anything real beyond itself, then Plato’s entire philosophical project collapses into mere rhetoric.
I understand and share much of Nagel’s point of view regarding the personal and the trouble of expressing “inner life.”
I can explore those thoughts without agreeing with Gerson that he has captured the essence of Plato.
I agree that Lloyd Gerson’s books are very difficult - because he’s constantly dealing with interpretive debates that span centuries. Many pages of Gerson’s books have a paragraph or two on top of swathes of footnotes, caveats and quailifications. Someone in the publishing industry ought to do an ‘Essential Lloyd Gerson’ for philosophy students who aren’t classics students.
Nevertheless, the trajectory of this thought can be made out. His most recent book is Platonism and Naturalism: The Possibility of Philosophy.
Gerson defines Platonism not just as the specific teachings of Plato, but as “Ur-Platonism”—a set of five “negations” of the naturalist worldview. To be a Platonist is to reject:
Materialism: The idea that only bodies exist.
Mechanism: The idea that everything can be explained by physical laws.
Nominalism: The idea that universals (like “redness” or “justice”) are just names, not realities.
Relativism: The idea that truth or morality is subjective.
Skepticism: The idea that we cannot know the nature of reality.
Naturalism, by contrast, is the “Protagorean” view that the physical world is all there is, and science is the only tool to explain it. We’re an evolved organism, and reason a tool for the propogation of the genome and subjugation of the forces that beset us.
Gerson claims that philosophy requires Platonism to exist, and that without the Platonist element, philosophy has no subject matter other than those specified by the natural sciences. (He’d get along just great with Quine 
)
If naturalism is true, then human thought is just a biological or chemical process. If it is just a physical process, it can be described by biology or physics, leaving no room for “philosophy” as a unique pursuit of truth (the subject of ‘the argument from reason).
Platonist philosophy assumes that the mind can grasp transcendent, non-physical truths (like logic or ethics). This requires a reality that transcends the material world. I mean, consider the ‘idea of equals’ - it is an idea that must be ‘true in all possible worlds’. And up until the early 20th century, that idea would be considered totally unremarkable, whereas now it is fiercely contested.
I think a problem is that Platonism was originally very much an embodied philosophy. After all the curriculum at the Academy always required athletic, aesthetic, as well as intellectual pursuits. But that has become attenuated into purely intellectual abstractions and scholastic logic-chopping (per Pierre Hadot in Philosophy as a Way of Life.)
I don’t think Gerson or anyone has the last word in the subject, but I value him because he defends what I see as an authentic Platonism and not its watered-down secularised modern versions.
However, we are bound to the level of consciousness. This is why there is a conflict in Husserl’s thought, as he cannot appeal to Platonism (a Platonism that Frege accepted without issue). For if we think the universal, does it not remain within consciousness? For me, however much we access the transcendental element of the epoché, the universal and the ideal remain bound to consciousness. That is why I asked earlier: if we access that transcendental level, does that mean that if I think of Pythagoras’ theorem in the epoché, this theorem is simultaneously thought by every other consciousness? And the answer is no. So where does the supposedly universal and ideal lie if it remains bound to a particular consciousness?
Something that happens with the universal and the ideal is that it must occur in different instances and must be ideal and universal regardless of whether he or she thinks it at any given moment. But for Husserl, it is still consciousness that constitutes the ideal and universal objects. Is that not a form of Idealism? Yet Husserl also tells us that ideality and universality have the inherent possibility of being reactivated in different consciousnesses. Does this not suggest that the ideal and the universal transcend consciousness in order to be transmitted to other consciousnesses? Husserl seems to oscillate between objective Idealism (Platonism) and subjective Idealism. The universal and the ideal possess a dual nature that justifies this oscillation: universality is both within a consciousness and outside it at the same time.
Husserl’s philosophy does not resolve the problem of universals. It thrives and flourishes within that problem, whilst taking care not to fall into naive Platonism (naive metaphysics).
I would rather say we are bound to a level of consciousness — as there are various levels. I argue that ‘being modern’ is itself a state of consciousness, delimited by the things which ‘everyone knows to be true’ — nowadays, mostly scientific in nature.
On the contrary, universals are ‘the same for all who think’.
I’m going to repeat a post I made recently in another thread:
But this also doesn’t mean the concept of triangularity exists as an ‘abstract object’ in an ‘ethereal realm’.
Think of it more as a normative constraint on the operation of reason: the formal representation of a flat plane bounded by three intersecting straight lines.
As Russell says “universals are not thoughts, though when known they are the objects of thoughts.”
This is why I say there’s an implied dualism in the usual analyses. Culturally, I think there’s an implicit acceptance that ‘the physical’ is ‘what really exists’, and ‘the mental’ is ‘what is in the mind’ (hence the rejection of ‘mentalism’ in interpretations of physics.) But this is where hylomorphism (matter-form) is completely different to Cartesian dualism (matter-mind) - there’s no ‘mental stuff’ in hylomorphism. There are forms - which are not shapes but something more like ‘principles’ - and the ability of reason to grasp them. But there are neither disembodied minds nor mindless bodies in this philosophy.
Yes it is - and something that Husserl has been criticized for by many since. And while I accept that my reading of Husserl is scanty on this point I’d like to think I have an intuitive affinity with his ideas.
The following is from a review of a textbook Phenomenology, Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics:
Husserl called his position “transcendental” phenomenology, and Tieszen makes sense of this by claiming that it can be seen as an extension of Kant’s transcendental idealism. The act of cognition constitutes its content as objective. Once we recognize the distinctive givenness of essences in our experience, we can extend Kant’s realism about empirical objects grounded in sensible intuition to a broader realism that encompasses objects grounded in categorial intuition, including mathematical objects.
The view is very much like what Kant has to say about empirical objects and empirical realism, except that now it is also applied to mathematical experience. On the object side of his analysis Husserl can still claim to be a kind of realist about mathematical objects, for mathematical objects are not our own ideas (p. 57f.).
This view, Tieszen points out, can preserve all the advantages of Platonism with none of its pitfalls. We can maintain that mathematical objects are mind-independent, self-subsistent and in every sense real, and we can also explain how we are cognitively related to them: they are invariants in our experience, given fulfillments of mathematical intentions. The evidence that justifies our mathematical knowledge is of the same kind as the evidence available for empirical knowledge claims: we are given these objects. And, since they are given, not subjectively constructed, fictionalism, conventionalism, and similar compromise views turn out to be unnecessarily permissive. The only twist we add to a Platonic realism is that ideal objects are transcendentally constituted.
We can evidently say, for example, that mathematical objects are mind-independent and unchanging, but now we always add that they are constituted in consciousness in this manner, or that they are constituted by consciousness as having this sense …. They are constituted in consciousness, nonarbitrarily, in such a way that it is unnecessary to their existence that there be expressions for them or that there ever be awareness of them. (p. 13).
So - do you see the resonance between Russell and Husserl? That ‘the idea of whiteness’ or ‘the idea of triangularity’ is necessarily the same for all who perceived them, but can only be grasped by thought. And that is the meaning of ‘transcendental’. But that dimension of thought is in conflict with empiricism, which gives primacy to the objects of experience, not to the content of it.
What the review refers to as the ‘pitfalls’ of Platonism is precisely the tendency to view universals as ‘existing things’. Like, ‘well, there are white things, is “whiteness” another thing in addition to white things?’ My attitude is: no, but it never meant that in the first place. The reason that misunderstanding came about is because of the loss of an hierarchical ontology within which there are different levels of reality or existence. Without that background, attempting to understand metaphysics is like those ancient paintings which lack the depth dimension. Universals are intelligible realities but not existent as phenomena.
But we’re still talking about a particular consciousness, aren’t we?
But Russell’s Platonism is widely known.
“Numbers, the Homeric gods, relations, chimeras and four-dimensional spaces all have being, for if they were not entities of a kind, we could make no propositions about them.”
The Problems of Philosophy, 1912
But ‘grasping’ them is precisely the problem. Because that presupposes their existence prior to thought or instances in thought. Once again, Platonism rears its head.
I seem to detect a problem of induction here. For if these are principles derived from experience, passively, their universality is never properly established. We can only say that in each case the objects are the same, but they are always the same for a single mind. It is not, however, stated that these are objects which persist even when no one is thinking of them. It is precisely this latter point that constitutes their true universality.
However, they can only be grasped by a mind. That is why they’re called intelligible objects. Whomever thinks of them, can only think of them one way, which is why they’re ‘normative’. And also, I note again the inherent problem of naming them as ‘objects’, which is strictly metaphor i.e. ‘object of thought’. They’re not objects in any other sense.
Perhaps this is true for Platonism and Neo-Platonism but not for the writings of Plato. Just as the mathematician uses images to aid his reasoning, Plato gives us images to aid our reasoning.
Plato’s stories of transcendence are not revealed truths, they are just that, stories. Stories were at the heart of Greek education. The poets, the makers of music and images, first among them Homer and Hesiod, were their educators. And like the poets Plato inspires us. The would be philosopher is inspired to pursue the true, the just, the beautiful, and the good.
The aspiring philosopher is not satisfied with stories, however inspiring they may be.
These may be things you believe but they are not things you know. Failure to make this distinction is the reason why you think Plato “is religious”.
But the problem remains. If we are not dealing with ‘objects’ belonging to a Platonic realm, there is no justification for something like Pythagoras’ theorem to persist (to retain its meaning) beyond anyone who thinks it. And we can no longer appeal to a constitutive consciousness if we wish to avoid Idealism.
Your position on this point does not seem clear to me. Calling them ‘normative’ raises more questions than it answers. What do you mean by ‘normative’?
We have argued about Gerson’s argument extensively in the past. It is a little weird to be given a quick primer of his view by you as a reply.
The website just asked if I wanted to speak privately to you rather than put in a public comment.
I feel like a visitor to Borges’ library now, roaming from one room to another, reading books that only I can remember reading before.
What I mean by normative is only the definition:
In philosophy, normative refers to standards, rules, or ideals that prescribe how things ought to be, rather than describing how they are. It focuses on evaluating, guiding, and justifying actions, beliefs, and values, distinguishing right from wrong or desirable from undesirable.
So, in respect of formal logic, arithmetic and the like, the rules of those disciplines are normative for thought. You can’t devise your own numbers or rules. They are real for any rational operation of thought. So they’re not subjective, in the sense of pertaining to an individual subject. But they’re not objective, in that they don’t exist in the phenomenal or sensory domain.
So read again this excerpt given above:
We can evidently say, for example, that mathematical objects are mind-independent and unchanging, but now we always add that they are constituted in consciousness in this manner, or that they are constituted by consciousness as having this sense …. They are constituted in consciousness, nonarbitrarily, in such a way that it is unnecessary to their existence that there be expressions for them or that there ever be awareness of them.
Compare from Frege:
What these passages are saying, is that there are necessary forms of thought - that there are intentional structues of ideation which are true for anyone who thinks. But as they’re not physically existent, it is the natural tendency to regard them as being in the mind of the individual. I think this is how you situate these ideas, which is why ‘mentalism’, ‘idealism’, and ‘platonism’ are rejected by you, on the grounds that they’re ‘subjective’.
But here I’m arguing that they’re not subjective in the sense of ‘pertaining to the individual mind’. They are uniform structures of ideation that will be understood by anyone capable of grasping them. And they are real.
But we are still faced with the same problem. Ideation means constitution (in Husserl’s sense). If ideal objects are constituted in and for intentional consciousness, it cannot be said that this consciousness grasps them. On the contrary, it presents them to itself as ideals. Ideality is constituted, meaning it does not belong to the object proper but is something added by the act of noesis. It is a form of Idealism, where subjectivity constitutes the universality of the objects given to thought. But universality is not fully realised: one cannot say that ideal objects subsist independently of consciousnesses. These consciousnesses constitute them ideally. There is therefore a tension (or contradiction) between grasping and constitution. This is the same tension that Husserl faced. He ended up accepting subjective idealism: consciousness doesn’t grasp ideality, constitutes it. But what about you? It is not clear to me.
I don’t think Husserl is regarded as a subjective ideaist.
‘For Husserl, transcendental constitution is not creation. The world doesn’t spring into existence because a subject thinks it; rather, constitution is the process by which the world comes to have meaning and intelligibility for a subject. The objects themselves, in their full-blooded sense, are not reducible to mental contents — they transcend any individual act of consciousness even while being necessarily correlated with consciousness in general.
Husserl’s preferred way of putting it was that his idealism is transcendental, not psychological or empirical. The transcendental ego that does the constituting is not the everyday psychological self — it’s the formal structure of intentional life as such which is why he could say, without contradiction, that transcendental phenomenology is actually compatible with the empirical reality of the external world.’
This very much what I argued for in my essay The Mind Created World from which:
…there is no need for me to deny that the Universe is real independently of your mind or mine, or of any specific, individual mind. Put another way, it is empirically true that the Universe exists independently of any particular mind. But what we know of its existence is inextricably bound by and to the mind we have, and so, in that sense, reality is not straightforwardly objective. It is not solely constituted by objects and their relations. Reality has an inextricably mental aspect, which itself is never revealed in empirical analysis. Whatever experience we have or knowledge we possess, it always occurs to a subject — a subject which only ever appears as us, as subject, not to us, as object.
I think what that passage I quoted above your reply means is that when an ideal object is comprehended or grasped, then its meaning is understood. And also that for universal concepts, that this meaning is invariant. Which is why the thread started with the concept ‘equals’. Regardless of the context and subject matter under discussion, the concept ‘equals’ remains invariant. Which typifies why mathematics can be rightly designated ‘a universal language’ (which of course is highly contested by some empiricist philosophers despite seem self-evident to others.) Its terms are not constituted by individual minds but can only be grasped by a rational intelligence. Hence their traditional designation as ‘intelligible objects’.
So the question I raise is the same: how would you make sense of the world, or even offer an argument, without relying on universal ideas? They are the constituents of rational thought and inference.
I think it is the misapplication of naturalism, to say that reality is what persists in the absence of the observer. Nobody will ever truly grasp what persists in the absence of the observer, although we can safely infer many things about it. So I still say we’re sub-consciously influenced by the division between the objective world ‘out there’ which is the object of naturalism and the subjective world ‘in here’, which scientific thought has attempted to bracket out. That was the modern (post-Galileo) meaning of objectivity as the criterion of veracity. That is the worldview that Husserl is challenging by drawing attention to the ineliminable nature of the subject.
But constitution remains an act of subjectivity. For Husserl, constitution refers to the process by which consciousness bestows meaning (Sinn) and a mode of presentation (Gegebenheitsweise) upon that which is presented to it. Yet it remains an act of consciousness in which something is bestowed upon the object that is presented. That is why it is Idealism, and it is rooted in subjectivity, even if it is not a psychological or empirical subjectivity. It is still a subjectivity that bestows meaning and the mode of presentation. If ideality is this mode of presentation, then ideality is conferred by consciousness. We cannot say that the object that presents itself possesses ideality in itself, but rather that its ideality is given by consciousness. Universality is constituted by consciousness.
It seems to me that there is no turning back from subjective Idealism (understood not as creation but as the constitution of the world). Ideality and universality no longer belongs to the object.
OK!!! That’s what piqued my curiosity. But you’ll understand that this wouldn’t be a Husserlian position.
And what might ‘the object’ be, without or outside that?
Taking the ‘inextricably mental’ phrase out of its context changes the meaning. The other parts of that paragraph are what I mean by ‘inextricably mental’. I’m not making a statement about the objective constituents of objects.
Towards the end of that essay I quote Dan Zahavi:
‘Ultimately, what we call “reality” is so deeply suffused with mind- and language-dependent structures that it is altogether impossible to make a neat distinction between those parts of our beliefs that reflect the world “in itself” and those parts of our beliefs that simply express “our conceptual contribution.” The very idea that our cognition should be nothing but a re-presentation of something mind-independent consequently has to be abandoned.’⁸
What do you make ot that?
What are these studies? What are these truths and what is the organ by which these truths are seen? You seem to have pulled this out of context.
According to Husserl, there is hyle, which refers to the sensory contents immanent to consciousness: data relating to colour, sound, touch, etc., insofar as they are experienced (not insofar as they are properties of the physical object). They are the ‘raw material’ that noesis will intentionally shape.
I believe that language itself precludes a purely transcendental reduction. Based on the notion of the ‘sign’, I believe that language and writing are conditions of ideality and universality (Husserl, incidentally, also believed this at “the origin of geometry”). And I believe that this means the sign operates within consciousness, and indeed constitutes it as such (Based on the Signic Structure of consciousness Temporality) . If we consider the issues of the reactivation and transmission of meaning, language and writing have the power to reactivate meaning within consciousness by consigning it. Which is precisely a property of universality: to function beyond consciousness.