The Epoché

Apodictic Evidence and the Natural Attitude The existence of the world is evident. But it is not adequately evident, or apodicticly evident. The non-being of the world is not inconceivable. Because of this “The experienced world must…be deprived of its naïve acceptance” (18). “[T]he evidence of world experience…need[s] to be criticized with regard to its validity and range, before it could be used for the purposes of a radical grounding of science” (17). So the assumption, the one that everyday life and all the sciences presuppose, that the world un-problematically exists must be put out of play. This realist assumption characterizes the natural attitude.

The Epoché How do we put aside or suspend the natural attitude? By performing a free act called the Epoché. In this act we undertake a “universal depriving of acceptance, [an] ‘inhibiting’ or ‘putting out of play’ of all positions taken toward the already given objective world . . . (those concerning being, illusion, possible being, being likely, probable, etc.) (20). This putting out of play does not “leave us confronting nothing” (20). For “the world experienced in this reflectively grasped live goes on being for me (in a certain manner) ‘experienced’ as before; the only difference is that I, as reflecting philosophically, no longer keep in effect…the natural believing in existence involved in experiencing the world—thought that believing too is still there” (19-20).

The Epoché is not Cartesian Doubt Doubting something is taking a position on its existence or reality. One can be: 1) certain it is true, 2) certain it is false, 3) find it likely, or 4) find it doubtful. In doubting something I posit a reality, but hold that reality to be doubtful. In the epoché is suspend all position taking. I hold what is given in ‘suspended animation’ so as to examine it in its giveness qua givenness. Through this modification, instead of taking the world as something that is, we regard it as ‘a phenomena of being’ or ‘only something that claims being’; and the point of doing this is to focus exclusively on what is given just as it is given. It entails a change of attitude to reality so as to examine it, not its exclusion.

The Epoché and the World When we perform the epoché it might seem that we turn inward and just examine our subjective mental representations. But the notion of an ‘inner’ representation is something we get from prior theorizing. So we must put it aside. We must just describe what is given. Under the epoché something still appears to us. Performing it “does not leave us confronting nothing. On the contrary we gain possession of something by it: and what we acquire by it is my pure living, and with it all the pure subjective processes making this up, and everything meant in them, purely as meant in them, the universe of ‘phenomena’” ( 21). Any description of what is given in my experience is inadequate unless it includes the phenomena of which it is an experience. When I apprehend my conscious experiences, I apprehend myself apprehending the world as it is meant by conscious experiences. Mental life is intrinsically intentional, directed to the world. We shall come back to this at length.

Transcendental Subjectivity By means of the epoché “we” follow Descartes and “make the great reversal that…leads to transcendental subjectivity” (18). “The epoché can…be said to be the radical and universal method by which I apprehend myself purely, as ego, and with my own pure conscious life, in and by which the entire objective world exists for me and is precisely as it is for me” (21). But what I apprehend here, myself and the world that exists for me, “derives its whole sense and its existential status, which it has for me, from myself, from me as the transcendental ego” (26) “The crucial transition effected by the…epoché is not the Cartesian idea that perhaps the world does not exist but to the Kantian idea that the world is in every respect something for me. We thereby make possible the distinctively ‘transcendental reduction’ which consists in a shift in focus to, or regress to, the subject for whom there is a world given as it is given in everyday positional consciousness” (Glendinning, 52).

Transcendental Subjectivity Again Subjectivity is transcendental because “the being of the pure ego and his cogitationes…is antecedent to the natural being of the world. Natural being is a realm whose existential status is secondary; it continually presupposes the realm of transcendental being” (21). This is a form of Idealism. Being is dependent on Thought. But how? It is sense-dependent. For the world to have sense it must be something for me. Is it existence dependent? Scholars disagree.

Differences between Husserl and Descartes For Descartes, the point of his method of doubt is to find an absolute point to ground the sciences. It is to defeat skepticism and make objective knowledge possible. The priority of consciousness is a means to an end, to grounding a universally structured science. For Husserl the epoché is not meant to defeat skepticism or ground objective knowledge of the world. “The point is not to secure objectivity, but to understand it’ (Crisis: 189). He is not interested in proving that intentional experiences correspond to the world, but to explicate what those experiences mean for a conscious subject. For Husserl, the point of the regression back to the Ego is not to find a ground for all science, but rather of finding a new science that makes the ego its theme. The ego is not ‘from whence’, but the ‘about which’ of the science.

The Misleading Nature of Meditation 1 Husserl’s First Mediation seems to be a Cartesian search for apodictic knowledge. Evidence of the world is not apodictic, but grasp of our own subjective states is. But in reality, the focus on the apodictic is continually delayed in favor of a description of the realm newly discovered by phenomenology, which may or may not be apodictic. “Instead of attempting to use ego cogito as an apodictically evident premise for arguments . . we shall direct our attention to the fact that phenomenological epoché lays open (to me, the meditating philosopher) an infinite realm of being of a new kind, as the sphere of a new kind of experience, transcendental experience” (27).

Husserl’s Critique of Descartes For Husserl, Descartes thinks of consciousness as “a little tag-end of the world” (24). While consciousness is not comprised of material substance, it is still a substance, a thing, mental substance. Husserl’s method remains aloof from these ‘ontic’ concerns. Rather, he “accept[s] nothing but what we find actually given…in the field of the Cogito, which has been opened up to us by Epoché, and…accordingly assert nothing we ourselves do not ‘see’” (24). Descartes goes beyond the given, beyond the realm of what appears, and makes assertions about the existence of the things that appear. In doing so he goes beyond the transcendental realm to the psychological realm.

The Psychological and the Transcendental Psychology, like phenomenology, is a science of subjectivity, but “the science of Objective subjectivity . . . a subjectivity that is part of the world” (30)—a thing like all other things. But the epoché prohibits “acceptance of any Objectively apperceived facts, including those of internal experience” (25). So I must “reduce my natural human Ego and my psychic life—the realm of my psychological self-experience—to my transcendental- phenomenological Ego, the realm of transcendental- phenomenological self-experience” (26) 1) Empiricist introspection (we look inside and see atomistic impressions and ideas). But examine yourself right now, do you find such items? Why did theorists ever think that our psychology was made up of items lie that? Because they read into experience theoretical results that do not come from experience. They are committed to corpuscular form of explanation generally, so our psychology must be the same. 2) Physiological psychology: the psyche is will admit of a naturalist explanation. The psyche and its capacities will be explained in a way similar to all other things in space and time.

Introspection Psychology proceeds through introspection. Introspection is a mental operation that enables us to make reports about our own current mental states. ‘I am now thinking of a blue whale’ is based on introspection. But phenomenology is not interested in what a subject is now thinking, but in the essential structures of constituting subjectivity, not private thoughts but necessary modes of manifestation or appearance. We can get at such necessary modes through imaginative variation (see bottom of 27).

Eidetic Reduction