Philosophy … leaves everything as it is.
(Wittgenstein 1963: § 124)
If … the reflection is not to presume upon what it finds and condemn itself to putting into the things what it will then pretend to find in them, it must suspend the faith in the world only so as to see it … (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 38)
Abstract
According to ‘purification interpretations’, the point of the epoché is to purify our ordinary experience of certain assumptions inherent in it. In this paper, I argue that purification interpretations are wrong. Ordinary experience is just fine as it is, and phenomenology has no intention of correcting or purifying it. To understand the epoché, we must keep the reflective nature of phenomenology firmly in mind. When we do phenomenology, we occupy two distinct roles, which come with very different responsibilities. As reflecting phenomenologists, we must deactivate all our beliefs about the world. But the only point of this is to be able to describe the experiences we have as experiencing subjects, including all those beliefs about the world that may be part and parcel of those experiences. I end by suggesting that there is a useful analogy between phenomenological reflection and the familiar practice of quoting.
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Notes
Much philosophy, it seems to me, is carried out in what Husserl calls the natural attitude.
See Heath and Heath (2007).
Searle gestures at thoughts in the vicinity, e.g. when he writes that ‘a report of how it seemed to the agent is, in general, a specification of the Intentional content’ (Searle 1983, 42). This formulation is, however, compatible with the claim that not all specifications of the content reflect how things seem to the agent.
Steeves is right to suggest that such criticisms—and the interpretations of the epoché on which they are based—have a long history within the phenomenological movement. Herbert Spiegelberg, the great historian of the movement, essentially voiced those very criticisms more than seven decades ago (Spiegelberg 1940, 93). But for some doubts about Steeves’ portrayal of Heidegger here, see Overgaard (2010). For similar doubts concerning Merleau-Ponty, see Smith (2005).
These considerations ultimately lead Alweiss to claim that, for Husserl, ‘The natural attitude is not natural at all. It is imbued with theoretical assumptions’ (2013, 459). But since she also (correctly) describes the natural attitude as one that ‘defines all aspects of our life’ (Alweiss 2013, 450), it seems the obvious conclusion to draw would not be that the natural attitude is not natural, but that certain theoretical assumptions come very naturally to us. One wonders what sort of ‘attitude’ might qualify as natural in Alweiss’ eyes, since it would apparently have to be devoid of all theoretical sedimentations. Surely, all adult experience contains sediments of years of education. Are only newborn infants in a properly ‘natural’ attitude?
Perhaps other disagreements are also worth highlighting. An anonymous referee suggests that I am lumping together two very different sorts of views under the heading of ‘purification interpretations’: on the one hand ‘reductionist’ views that reduce the experienced object to some sort of mind-dependent or immanent entity, and on the other hand ‘eliminativist’ views that think of the epoché as inhibiting or deliberately ignoring certain assumptions characteristic of the natural attitude. Only the latter, it might be claimed, truly deserve to be called ‘purification interpretations’. It seems to me that, with the exception of Burge’s, none of the interpretations I have mentioned fit the reductionist pattern, however. And even in Burge’s case, the ‘reduction’ seems merely the flipside of the ‘elimination’ of the physical environment. (To repeat: as I read him, Burge is suggesting that, since the epoché severs all bonds to the physical environment, we are only left with non-physical entities for our experiences to be experiences of. The italicized bit is the ‘eliminative’ move.) So it seems to me that I am justified in treating all the mentioned positions as examples of ‘purification interpretations’.
I am grateful to an anonymous referee for urging me to make this point explicit.
Sokolowski (2000, 190) makes the same point: ‘We must leave everything as it was, for otherwise we would change the very thing we wish to examine’.
Note that the point here is not to contest Alweiss’ interpretation of Husserl as being critical of metaphysical realism. What I object to is her interpretation of the epoché as a purification of straightforward experience, a deactivation of some presupposition inherent in it.
Compare: ‘Marry, and you will regret it. Do not marry, and you will also regret it. Marry or do not marry, you will regret it either way’ (Kierkegaard 1987, 38).
If all phenomenology were what Dennett (1991) calls ‘heterophenomenology’, then that would be the case. But this is not Husserl’s view.
Indeed, Eugen Fink referred to this Ichspaltung at the heart of the phenomenological method as a kind of ‘methodological schizophrenia’ (Fink 2004, 51). Thanks to an anonymous referee for drawing this passage to my attention.
Again, I am indebted to an anonymous referee for pressing this point.
Nor (I am happy to say) did I assert anything about the consequences of marrying or not marrying when I quoted Kierkegaard on the topic in note 11 above.
Indeed, as Sokolowski observes, one can quote ‘doubtfully, assuredly, with probability or with certainty, suspiciously or mockingly’ (1984, 705).
Which is not to say that you are not supposed to be concerned with the subject matter, but only with the person’s choice of words, for example. See the next footnote.
Let me briefly indicate one other respect in which phenomenological descriptions under epoché may be compared with quoting. Typically, when we quote someone, we are still concerned with the thing the person quoted is concerned with. That is to say, we are not focussing exclusively on what is going on within that other person’s mind, or on the words coming out of her mouth. When I quote Karen’s statement about Annie Hall, I am still dealing with Annie Hall, but as viewed through Karen’s eyes, so to speak (see Sokolowski 1984, 700). Perhaps an even clearer case is the following: ‘What did Mummy say?’—‘She said the sidewalk is slippery today’. Clearly, the point of asking the child to recount the mother’s warning is to ensure the child sees the sidewalk in a particular way—namely, as the mother sees it. The child is not supposed to become preoccupied with the mothers mental states, or with her choice of words. In a similar manner, phenomenological descriptions—as Husserl emphasizes repeatedly—do not exclude the world in order to focus on our subjective experiences. Rather, the world remains our focus, but precisely as it shows up in the experiences we are describing (for a particularly clear statement, see Husserl 1997, 494) [Smith (2007) offers a somewhat different reading here, which I do not have space to discuss.].
The quoted passages appear in a critical discussion of Ayer’s sense-datum theory of perception.
This takes care of Ayer’s objection that ‘the mere collecting’ of descriptions, ‘as a child collects sea-shells, is unlikely to be of philosophical interest’ (Ayer 1976, 242).
As argued in Overgaard (2004, chapter 2).
I am grateful to audiences at University College Dublin and the University of Hull for comments on some of the material included here. Special thanks to Lilian Alweiss, Joona Taipale, Dan Zahavi, and to two anonymous referees for this journal.
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Overgaard, S. How to do things with brackets: the epoché explained. Cont Philos Rev 48, 179–195 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-015-9322-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-015-9322-8