Husserl's Epoche As Method And Truth

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to show how, contrary to some commentators, Edmund Husserl's notion of the epoche, the bracketing or suspension of naive consciousness in favor of the phcnomenologically reduced point of view, is an indispensable aspect of the practice of the phenomenological method.2 But the epoche is not merely an instrumental means. While it does function as a means, it is not merely an instrumental means because the epoche is simultaneously itself the end toward which it is a means, viz, the realization of apodictic knowledge as a lived process rather than a final solution. To treat Husserl's phenomenological reduction as merely an instrumental method for grasping and presenting the absolute essence of this or that truth would be already to have missed the subtler dimensions of both method and truth in Husserl's transcendental phenomenology. In order to adequately describe what the epoche is, in accordance with the principle of presuppositionlcssness established by the epoche, it would be necessary already to have achieved the phenomenological perspective to which the epoche leads. The epoche cannot properly be grasped from the perspective of what Husscrl calls the naive or attitude because it is precisely this kind of common-sense positivism that the epoche was designed to overcome. This overcoming is not merely an epistemological problem of perspective, of getting the right interpretative slant on the epoche, but a problem of the fundamental difference between the unreflective, objectivistic orientation of the natural attitude, and the absolute freedom from bias that is to be achieved by virtue of the transcendental reduction. Therefore, to make the epoche itself an object of investigation placed over and against the investigating consciousness, as a possibility of being grasped and