Introduction to epoché and reduction –

video transcript
[ON-SCREEN TEXT]: What do the terms epoché and reduction mean?

DAN ZAHAVI: Both of the terms are very much related to Husserl’s phenomenology. He
was the one who coined them, and he was the one who primarily used them. And it’s also
noteworthy that it was only … it was not notions that he used at the very beginning of his
work, but notions that he developed in the course of articulating what phenomenology is all
about. And there’s an ongoing dispute, lasting until today, whether these notions are really
crucial for phenomenology per se, or whether it’s only people who are kind of adhering to a
kind of Husserlian phenomenology that needs to employ them.

So, I mean, later phenomenologists have by no means use them as frequently as Husserl, and
some of the later phenomenologists have actually explicitly criticised them. So it’s very much
controversial or contentious notions that we are dealing with.

[ON-SCREEN TEXT]: What was Husserl’s approach to dealing with epoché and reduction?

DAN ZAHAVI: So I think the first thing to understand is that there are actually a number of
reductions, which of course complicates matters. And I think the most fundamental
distinction to be made is between what Husserl calls the ‘eidetic reduction’ and the
‘phenomenological reduction.’ The eidetic reduction is basically trying to aim at the eidos or
essence of the phenomena under investigation.

And so, to give a very simple example, if we want to understand perceptual experience, well,
then we are not interested in what is specific to the perception of a coin vis-à-vis the
perception of a bottle vis-à-vis the perception of a stone. What we are focusing on is what
characterises perception per se. And Husserl introduces this notion of eidetic reduction to try
to illustrate how we might get at the essence of the phenomena in the investigation.

When he talks about the phenomenological reduction, it gets a bit more complicated. Because
what Husserl is focusing on here is really his attempt to highlight to what extent
phenomenology is a specific philosophical enterprise and not merely a psychological attempt
at describing consciousness. So he thinks that phenomenology as a philosophical enterprise
really is supposed to engage with some of the most fundamental philosophical questions.
Questions such as, ‘What is reality?’, ‘What is the world?’, ‘What is knowledge?’, ‘What is
truth?’.

And for Husserl, a huge obstacle to address these questions philosophically is if we are
already implicitly accepting certain traditional metaphysical and epistemological prejudices.
So what Husserl is saying is, if we want to be phenomenological philosophers, and if we want
to address these very fundamental questions with philosophical radicality, then we need to
perform a phenomenological epoché and a phenomenological reduction. And what does that
mean? Well, the epoché basically means that we need to suspend or bracket something,
bracket our traditional metaphysical assumptions about the mind-world relationship or the
relationship between the subject and the object.

And first and foremost, we shouldn’t just assume that the world is out there waiting to be
discovered by us, as if we as cognising subjects are just photoing or photographing a pre-
existing reality. We should suspend all of those metaphysical assumptions and basically just
focus on the way in which the world appears. That should be the leitmotif, that should be the
kind of guiding line for our investigation.

So that’s the epoché, to suspend or bracket a certain preconception about reality simply being
out there independently of us. And the phenomenological reduction is then supposed to
gradually disclose and reveal the extent to which structures of consciousness or structures of
subjectivity is involved in the fundamental structures of objectivity. So the reduction is not a
kind of one-time thing. That’s a gradual process. Whereas the epoché, the suspension, is
something one is supposed to be able to accomplish in one shot, so to speak.