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The marriage of memory and method in philosophy has been a notably uneven event. The unevenness is dramatically evident in the differences between Plato and Husserl regarding the relation between method and memory. These two most profound of philosophical Eidetikers, deeply allied in their common concern for securing insight into essential structures, are just as deeply devided when it comes to the role of remembering in philosophical method. This is not to deny that each is obsessed with devising the best possible method for attaining an apodictically certain grasp of essences, and there are important formal similarities in their respective conceptions of method. For instance, in both cases a stagewise procedure is advocated, whether this be in the form of moving step-by-step up the divided line (as outlined most completely in The Republic 509–11) or as a matter of executing successive "reductions" (i.e., philosophical, eidetic, phenomenological-transcendental, as presented most accessibly in Ideas). Indeed, Platonic dialectic and Husserlian reduction can be said to possess the same view of the primary task to be accomplished in such stepwise methods: namely, the overcoming or suspending of the stranglehold which common belief or opinion brings with it. Doxa and the "natural attitude" are seen as at once inevitable qua starting-points and evitable by the proper pursuit of a prescribed philosophical method, which promises to cleanse their cloying effects.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-010-9612-6_3

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