Video: The Phenomenological Epoché and Reduction | Husserl

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welcome to back to the text themselves a series on phenomenology today's video covers sections 8 to 11 a hussarels Cartesian meditations

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up to this point we have established what it means to become a beginning philosopher which is someone who throws off all judgments beliefs or claims that

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are not necessarily certain we then consider the idea of science as a pursuit of evidence through the Fulfillment of judgments by a given State of Affairs different kinds of

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evidence were identified the kind of evidence required for a universal grounded science is apodictic wherein it is impossible to imagine a situation in which such evidence could even be

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doubted though the existence of the material world might seem to provide such evidence it was determined that such evidence is in fact contingent upon sensation which itself is subject to

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doubt yet this encounter with certainty and doubt offers a clue for where to turn next for there's something that certainty and doubt themselves are

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predicated upon which is the experience of certainty and doubt by in experiencing subject or what is called the ego and so in this video we'll address the following topics one the

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phenomenon of the world versus the being of the world to the phenomenological method of epoke and reduction three the difference between adequate evidence and apodictic evidence

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though subtle the distinction between assuming the being of something versus experiencing a phenomenon of being is a critical one here regardless of whether I eventually decide that the world

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exists or determine it to be an illusion the phenomenon remains and forms the basis for such subsequent decisions the phenomenon of the world is continuously there for me always available in the

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Stream of experience most often and most originally as a conscious perception but also in conscious memory which recalls my past perceptions of that world this

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distinction between the phenomenon of the world and the being of the world can be a little confusing and so I'm going to provide another example one drawn from my book that I think helps to

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illustrate this point and really starts to get us into the implications of this phenomenological attitude that we're trying to present here when one doubts only a call is doubted not the facticity

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of the appearance itself I may have mistakenly believed I was being chased only to discover it was a dream what I doubt is not the happening itself that indeed I was affected in some manner

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instead I doubt the dreams ontological status meanings and causes upon Awakening I ask myself whether it really happened that is whether the experience

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occurred in waking or dreaming I Ponder the meaning and source of the dream perhaps it represents an unconscious conflict a working out of the day's worries or simply random neural firings

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and yet each time I doubt I direct it at everything except the appearing of the dream itself and no amount of post-hoc explanation can dissolve this unbidden

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arising one may doubt interpretations knowledge and understanding about the appearance but not that the appearance happened thus what has served as the greatest source of skepticism the

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appearance is indeed the indubitable possibility of thought and what has often been conferred the greatest certainty the explanatory power of theoretical reason is the most dubious

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of all to put this example back in hussaro's language the experience of the dream has an apodictic evidence that all other abstractions theorizing causal explanations and ontological

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determinations lack and this helps to get us thinking about the difference between the appearance and its indubitability and the existence of

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something the ontological status of it and to be clear though I haven't quite explained why yet this is not an appearance as opposed to reality dualism a phenomenon as opposed to the Newman

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but the appearance is the thing itself as it gives itself in appearance and we'll see later on why that is the case despite Hero's thought seeming to be

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highly abstract itself it is in fact aimed at returning to the most tangible thing of all the pure experience of the ego in its self-experiencing of the world as it appears or perhaps more

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accurately since we're not speaking literally about visual sensation here as it gives itself to me the ego is the constant feature of all these manners of experiencing the world the same ego that

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withholds belief in that world and who comes to believe in it despite this shift in Attitude everything this ego experiences remains untouched in withholding my claims toward the

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ontological status of the world the world doesn't suddenly disappear instead the philosophizing ego merely practices abstention concerning all the meanings and judgments that could be leveled

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against that world everything these meanings and judgments are directed toward the meant and the judged are fully retained as they are except for having undergone will hostile cause an

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acceptance modification being a mere phenomenon rather than taking for granted their ontological status now this can all be fairly strange to one's ears because we can ask did I just say

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that hustra is trying to get at the most tangible thing of all and yet here histro is communicating in a way that seems very far removed from our initial experience of things however this is due

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to our first conscious awareness of our experience inevitably being filtered through theoretical formulations in our naive first-person experience there is no initial immediacy of peer experience

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only mediation it's why something like Wilhelm voon's introspectionism which marks the beginning of psychology as a science or to take a more contemporary example many of the experiential

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exercises in writing assignments that are highly prevalent in colleges today are not phenomenological in this sense and this is because such naive reflection remains far too imbued by

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abstraction in other words we relate to our world primarily through abstract Concepts rather than the things themselves and so something like Common Sense experience is fundamentally abstracted from reality rather than

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being closer to it a kind of Habitual way of abstracting you might say this is the potential Pitfall of those who wish to do phenomenology without the rigors of some method that method which was

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Role developed and which was designated to enact this acceptance modification and lead us to the grounding certainty of an experiencing ego he called the epok and the reduction the two concepts

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are often thought of as synonymous yet in fact they represent distinct but inseparable steps in arriving at the ego the phenomenological epoke or parenthesizing hisseral describes as the

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universal depriving of acceptance this inhibiting or putting out of play of all positions taken toward the already given objective world and in the first place all existential positions those

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concerning being illusion possible being being likely probable Etc Hospital's approach demands the EP okay which can begin to peel back these layers of abstraction by bracketing or

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parenthesizing all that cannot be led back to the experiencing ego but the leading back is not exactly the same as the parenthesizing the phenomenological method seeks not only to brackets or put

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on whole judgments about the world but also requires a being led toward what is firm and indubitable this is what is meant by the reduction the epok and reduction are too distinct but

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Inseparable steps toward achieving what hostile cause transcendental subjectivity which itself entails one's pure conscious life that delivers everything experienced and accepted by

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me in the manner I experience it whether by perceiving remembering valuing Desiring Etc the term transcendental is applied here because this domain of subjectivity is thought to logically

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precede and have no dependence upon everything that it experiences and for this reason the fundamental phenomenological method is described as the transcendental epoke and the

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transcendental phenomenological reduction but having achieved transcendental subjectivity through the epok and reduction does this then lead us to what

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we're ultimately after here which is apothetic evidence hussarel says it might seem not for in asserting the apodicticity of the ego one has to ask themselves whether this would include

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the egos past a past that seemingly is inseparable from it yet the kind of evidence available to memory itself is seemingly not apodictic and here we have to make a distinction alluded to in the

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previous video but never quite made explicit the distinction between apodictic evidence and adequate evidence when something appears in full adequacy it means that the thing being judged

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fully appears to me in its embodied actuality various examples could be conjured up by plotting the two kinds of evidence along orthogonal axes like this so for example I suppose I make a

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judgment my daughter is in her room I go there and lo and behold there she is a perfectly fulfilling Intuition or adequate evidence for my judgment from within the frame of my situation it

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makes little sense to doubt the adequacy of this evidence it fulfills every aspect of my supposition concerning her whereabouts yet this evidence is not Apple dictic for if I was to rigorously

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apply the app okay I can imagine a situation in which I was mistaken perhaps it was someone only appearing as my daughter but was in fact an imposter however absurd that might sound the

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point here is not that I'm doubting it's my daughter only that such a possibility of having been mistaken is logically conceivable and does not meet the Criterion therefore of an absolute

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grounded science that can take Primacy over all other Sciences but now let's take another kind of example the Pythagorean theorem one thing I know from this theorem is that the third side

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of a perfect right triangle is always and necessarily obtainable when I have the measurements of the other two sides even though in fact I had never had a direct experience of such a triangle

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except as a theoretical ideal and indeed ideal objects have their own kind of evidence and one of historo's major contributions has been to broaden the concept of the object beyond the

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constraints of what has temporal and spatial coordinates that is material reality and this is in part what got us role into philosophy I believe which was his interest in establishing the

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legitimacy of mathematics as a field as real and grounded as the Material Sciences and so in one sense this ideal perfect right angle triangle gives nothing there is no perfectly adequate

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evidence no fulfilling intuition yet theorem provides what is closer to apadistic evidence because it is nearly impossible to imagine a scenario area in which it could be doubted though Descartes does provide the idea of the

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Evil Genius here to doubt our ability to do math and geometry but the point here is just to show that there are different kinds of evidence and I should add here that the evidence of the theorem itself is not primary since its apothetic

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evidence depends on establishing preceding evidence that itself is also appredictic and that is the ego the one who must be present to behold the theorem and its evidence in its formal

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abstract quality so in a certain sense there is no Pythagorean theorem without a conscious ego beholding it and this will get us into the notion of sub-system which hostile will talk about a little bit later what is most

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important here is that we have established the difference between adequate and apodistic evidence and that the apothetic ego doesn't need to be given inadequate evidence to preserve

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its appendicity though I had no certainty of whether my memory of a past moment is accurate there's no adequate evidence that is nonetheless I have a kind of apodictic evidence that I am

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directly accessing my living present as it is directed to the activity of remembering and just like as previously mentioned I had some experience we call a dream that itself is not to be doubted

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even if we could doubt its accuracy in terms of meanings causes and explanations with the phenomenological method of fok and reduction I suspend judgment upon the world and I'm LED back to the

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apothetic evidence of my own experiencing ego which is always a consciousness of something the transcendental ego is not the same as my natural human ego it's not reducible to

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psychic life which is in fields such as psychology treated as a piece of the world rather than radically preceding the world altogether and I think it's important here to emphasize that we are speaking about proceeding in the sense

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of logical time rather than our ordinary understanding of time in regards to causality cause and effect time the world precedes me historically of course even as logically speaking my

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Consciousness logically precedes or is a precondition for there being anything like a historical world in the first place and this will be a source of tension within the phenomenological tradition which we'll have to return to

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it some point but it's also an issue that hussaro himself is not unaware of and he will address this matter later on in this work it will become especially important as we consider an important distinction he makes between what he

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calls static phenomenology and a genetic phenomenology a final point to emphasize here is that in performing the F okay in reduction nothing changes I do not lose my world I do not lose my empirical

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psyche they remain there just as they always were found there there is only the modification I have undergone concerning my attitude toward them which rather than closing me off from what

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they have to offer will in fact expand what I can see of them and this hearkens back to the epic's roots in ancient Greek philosophy expressed by the

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concept of ataraxia whereby one frees oneself from the agitations of mental attachments that narrow our range of vision and so through ataraxia we

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achieve sort of equanimity toward all of reality letting it speak to us in the diverse manifolds of its appearing if you found this video helpful and it's within your means please consider making

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watching and until next time be well

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