The epoche
from 1913 Husserl's Ideas I; the term is borrowed from ancient scepticism
Put the question of whether it is real to one side, deliberately and temporarily, and describe exactly what was experienced.
- Active
- from 1913
- Where
- Gottingen
- Also
- epoche
- Status
- In use
- Tradition
- Continental procedures
What it is
The epoche suspends judgement about whether what appears actually exists. Not denial — suspension. The question is placed in brackets so that the experience itself can be described without the description being shaped by a verdict on its object.
Husserl's claim is that we normally cannot see experience at all, because we look straight through it at the world. Bracketing the world is what makes the looking-through visible.
How it works
Take the experience. Set aside every question about whether its object is real, caused, or veridical. Describe what is given: what appeared, in what order, with what sense of certainty, against what background. Resist explanation — the moment you say why, you have left the description.
The last instruction is the discipline and it is very hard to keep. Description slides into explanation without the describer noticing.
The moves, in order
- Take the experience as it was lived
- Bracket the question of whether its object exists
- Describe what was given, in the order and manner it was given
- Include the background and the sense of certainty
- Stop before explaining
The procedure
Proposition The near-miss report should record what the operator experienced, not what was there.
- The investigation has stalled on whether a person was actually in the blind spot, and the two accounts cannot both be right.
- Bracket that question. It is not being denied, and it will be settled later by the camera footage.
- What is given in the operator's account: a movement at the left edge of vision, taken immediately as a person rather than as a shadow, with no moment of uncertainty; the brake applied before any thought; the certainty persisting after the machine stopped and nobody was found.
- What is given in the spotter's account: no movement seen, attention on the load, and a first awareness of anything wrong when the machine stopped.
- Described this way the two accounts do not conflict. They are accounts of two different experiences, and only one of them is about the blind spot at all.
Therefore The report should record both experiences as given, because what the investigation actually needs is that the operator's immediate certainty was produced by something at the left edge — which is a fact about the sightlines whether or not a person was there.
Bracketing did not settle whether anyone was in the blind spot. It stopped that question from destroying the evidence, which was about how the machine's sightlines produce certainty in an operator.
What it is good for
Anywhere the report of an experience matters independently of whether the experience was accurate — incident investigation, clinical history, usability work, testimony. It is the discipline of not letting a verdict contaminate a description.
Where it fails
Nothing checks the description. Two practitioners bracketing the same experience can produce incompatible accounts and there is no procedure for deciding between them — no measurement, no third party, no repetition. Husserl wanted phenomenology to be a rigorous science and the method supplies no test at all, which is the objection that never went away.
Whether the bracketing can be done is also disputed. Heidegger, Husserl's own student, held that we are so thoroughly involved with the world that stepping back from it is not an available move, and that the attempt produces an artificial experience rather than a purified one.
Common misconceptions
That it means doubting the world. Husserl is explicit that nothing is denied and no scepticism is involved — the existence question is set aside for the duration and picked up again afterwards.
Where it came from
Husserl's Ideas I of 1913, borrowing the term from the ancient sceptics who used it for suspension of judgement, and turning it to the opposite purpose.
What became of it
Modified almost immediately by Heidegger and abandoned by Merleau-Ponty, who said the chief lesson of the reduction is the impossibility of a complete one. It survives most robustly outside philosophy.
Lasting influence
Phenomenological method is now standard in qualitative research, nursing, psychiatry and human-computer interaction, usually with the metaphysics stripped out.
Why it still matters
More used today in applied research than in philosophy.
Put another way
Photographing the window instead of the view.
Texts
Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology
Sections 27 to 32 set out the natural attitude and its suspension. Everything else in phenomenology is downstream of these few pages.
Where to start
Merleau-Ponty's preface to Phenomenology of Perception is the clearest account of the reduction, and it explains why he thinks it cannot be completed.
The surprising bit
The method's most enduring life is in nursing research and usability studies, where practitioners bracket routinely and would not recognise Husserl's name.
In their own words
The greatest lesson of the reduction is the impossibility of a complete reduction
Who held it
the ancient sceptics
Connections
- Influenced
- Eidetic variation, Existential analysis
- Parallel to
- Ceteris paribus
The verdict
A genuine discipline of attention with no way of telling a good description from a bad one.