What is Epoché ? Hopkins speaks, pt 1

At the center of Burt C. Hopkin’s article “Husserl’s Epochē: Theory, Praxis or Something in Between?”[1] is an attempt to define the epoché of Edmund Husserl and, in doing so, to reassert the foundational importance of Husserl’s phenomenological method for modern epistemology. In essence, then, Hopkins is interrogating the first principles of philosophy itself.

Husserl claimed that “phenomenology is the method of rigorous science”--and what else is philosophy? Isn’t philosophy by definition the critique of knowledge? Again, the epoché, said Husserl, is the method of phenomenology. So then, phenomenology is epistemologically dependent upon the epoché. Therefore, an analysis of the epoché is an analysis of phenomenology’s claim to be philosophy. To analyze the epoché is to raise the question of philosophical viability. Such is Hopkins’s aim. His article seeks to justify Husserl’s claims, both to be a philosopher and to provide a fundamental philosophy. Its conclusion will recommend or decry Husserl’s phenomenology for the practice of modern philosophy.

From the beginning, Hopkins endorses Edmund Husserl with the honorific "Philosopher." But on what basis? “Because,” writes Hopkins, “he did not manifest the unquestioning understanding of oneself that always exhibits a failure to comprehend one’s own presuppositions and thus a failure really to grasp what one believes one knows.” Again, in the matter of Husserl’s critique of other doctrines, Hopkins repeats:

Rather than rest content with an unquestioning understanding . . . [Husserl] tirelessly interrogated the presuppositions proper to the conceptuality of each by confronting the latter [concepts] with the contents that fill them in [presuppositions].

Thus, Hopkin’s bid for elevating Edmund Husserl to Philosopher rests on the latter’s ceaseless interrogation of the presuppositions underneath every claim of knowledge he could discover in himself and in others. Hopkin presents an epistemology.

Again and again throughout his article, Hopkin presents knowledge as an aggregate of what and how. He writes, “To ask of anything “what it is” already involves, which is to say, already presupposes, some kind of access to that which we are interrogating with respect to its what.” To ask what something is proves inseparable from the question of how such knowledge is acquired. It is a fundamental question about first principles.--No!--It is a first principle for the interrogation of any claim to know and, indeed, for recognizing knowledge when it is obtained. 'Knowledge means seeing that the contents that our concepts presuppose are in harmony with our presuppositions that our concepts really presuppose such contents.' To know is a harmony derived from the synergy between concept and presupposition. Hopkin's definition is straightfoward enough, but by praising Edmund Husserl with the laurel he risks his entire argument.

If one is a philosopher, then one has something to teach, something which can be learned. So if Edmund Husserl is a philosopher, then he must have something to teach, and Hopkin claims that he does: the epoché. But can we learn the epoché? Is it something which can be taught? And here is the risk: The answer is “yes” only if we already have access to it. Bluntly, we can only learn about the epoché if we already know it, if what it is arises from our own innate presuppositions. But this is absurd! How does one learn anything, if what is learned is already known? And what does that say about teaching? Who, then, may teach? Is Husserl such a one? Is he, as Hopkins claims, a philosopher, if not a philosopher among philosophers? Hopkins refers his readers to Plato’s middle-dialogue about human excellence, the Meno, as he begins to answer these questions.[2]

In the Meno, Socrates refuses to separate the question of what something is from the question of how it is taught. Human excellence is not just the doing of excellence the being of being excellent. They two are inseperable. The teaching of human excellence, then, is not like learning a method, but more like the invocation of a new state of being. The point Socrates is making is that only one who already possesses human excellence (through a knowledge of its form, according to Socrates: a gift of the gods) has the know-how (phronesis) to invoke it in another human being. The knower of the form, the true philosopher, can, by dialectic (ἔλεγχος), cause the hearer to recollect their own knowledge of the form. Any real understanding of things must be based on a knowledge of the universal behind them. This sounds like philosophy!

So then, Hopkin’s claim that Husserl is a philosopher is only true if Husserl is, in fact, a philosopher, where a philosopher is recognized by their ability to make others into philosophers. Picking up on the definition above, this means that Husserl should be able to make others into those who have knowledge, and thus can make proper judgments about knowledge. Husserl claims the epoché does this, and so Husserl can only be a philosopher if he can lead those seeking to become philosophers to discover the epoché already within themselves. So the field in question becomes the content of human beliefs.

At bottom, says Husserl, there is the world. The world is the thesis of human experience. The world does not show up like anything else. It is unmediated and already there, that which is native to all experience. The world is the unsurpassable horizon for all human experience and the durative element of them all. Human belief in the world is elemental, and, therefore, Husserl calls all fruits of this belief, every experience and question which assumes the world, the natural attitude.” Hopkins writes:

The existence of the world is accepted by immediate experience as both what it is, that is, as something that is “on hand” for experience, and as how it is, that is, “always already there” as the unsurpassable horizon for whatever else shows up in experience. . . . the positing of the world thesis does not show up as a presupposition, but as the way that it, i.e., the world, is. (emphases mine)

More to come...

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[1] Hopkins, Burt C. “Husserl’s Epoché: Theory, Praxis or Something in Between?” in Essays in Celebration of the Founding of the Organization of Phenomenological Organizations. ed. Cheung, Chan-Fai, Ivan Chvatik, Ion Copoeru, Lester Embree, Julia Iribarne and Hans Rainer Sepp. Web-published at www.o-p-o.net, 2003. Accessed September 1, 2005.

[2] Cf. Peter King's introduction to his translation of Augustine: Against the Academicians and The Teacher (Hackett, 1995) as well as his article, "Augustine on the Impossibility of Teaching". Also Michael Mendelson ""By the Things Themselves": Eudaimonism, Direct Acquaintance, and Illumination in Augustine's De Magistro" Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.4 (Oct. 2001) and Han-liang Chang "Paradox and the Elenchus in Plato's Meno, Augustine's De Magistro,and Gongsun Long's Jianbailun (Discourse on Hardness and Whiteness)" (Chinese characters might jam pdf).

Note the previous entry in this series, What is Epoche? The Greek Skeptics

What is Epoché ? The Greek Sceptics.

Arcesilaus was the sixth head of Plato's academy, who turned the academy in a sceptical direction. After Plato's death, the headship of the academy passed to a series of men who developed metaphysical and ethical systems inspired by the positive arguments contained in dialogues such as the Republic and the Phaedo. Arcesilaus, however, turned away from such system-building and instead spent his energies in attacking the arguments of others. According to Cicero, the aim of such attacks was to produce epoché, or suspension of judgment.

Epoché (ἐποχή) in Greek philosophy means suspension of judgment, a principle originally espoused by the non-dogmatic tradition of sceptical philosophy at the ancient Greek Academy. Sceptics adopted an attitude where, by opposing appearances (objects of sense-perception) to judgments (objects of thought), they sought a moderate approach to the problem of knowledge which would allow them to obtain a life characterized by peace of mind. Against the dogmatists, philosophers who claimed to know the truth (where even pure nihilism is a dogmatic position), sceptics held all truths gingerly. They believed the problem of knowledge to be insoluble. Therefore, they changed every truth into a proposition or hypothesis. They arrived at this attitude by contemplating antitheses. Given a proposition, they would oppose an equal proposition. The resulting collision would serve to banish dogmatism and cultivate doubt. As Sextus Empiricus wrote: "The main basic principle of the Skeptic system is that of opposing to every proposition an equal proposition; for we believe that as a consequence of this we end by ceasing to dogmatize."

Now the moment of opposition, the moment that, when controversy arises, all actions are suspended for the sake of contemplation, that moment they called epoché. In that moment, an attitude of noninvolvement should be adopted. There is suspension. Within the epoché, the skeptic avoids affirming or denying the truth of any statements about the actual nature of things. The epoché highlights the difficulty of passing judgment on the sense-impressions and ascertaining which of them are true and which false. One may be able to say what something appears to be, but cannot make any judgments about what actually is the case. In this sense, the epoché is a realization of existential freedom.

Freedom, then, is a healthy scepticism against every demand made upon personal judgment by the sensate world of appearances. Sceptics considered the hesitation arising as a result of the epoché an enlightened state of being-in-the-world. By abandoning the desire of a self with selfish actions and motivations, paradoxically, one gains everything one thought was given up by abandoning the nurture of the self (i.e. love, money, happiness) in the pursuit of mere-appearances. (In this sense, the epoche is the realization of what modern existentialism would call the "being-in-the-world.") That is why the sceptics considered the epoché to be the proper state from which to judge the relationship between appearances in order to gain peace of mind for daily living. Indeed, the scepticism that comes upon the heels of the epoché, explained Sextus, is not to shrug one's shoulders in indecision regarding competing claims. To understand suspension this way is to see skepticism as a wholly negative position. There is an essentially constructive character of sceptical argument which requires a subtler understanding of suspension. To suspend judgment in this sense is to refuse to assent to a position, while refusing to assert its negation, since either assertion would commit one to a false or misleading metaphysical presupposition. To suspend judgment is to refuse to enter into misguided discourse.

To refuse judgment is also to be free of illness. Sextus regarded scepticism not as a nihilistic attack on our cognitive life, but rather--he used a variety of medical metaphors--a form of philosophical therapy to cure us of the cognitive and emotional ills born of extreme metaphysical, moral, or epistemological positions. The sceptic wishes, from considerations of humanity, to do all he can with the arguments at his disposal to cure the self-conceit and rashness of the dogmatists. And so, just as healers of bodily ailments keep remedies of various potency, and administer the powerful ones to those whose ailments are violent and the lighter ones to those with light complaints, in the same manner the sceptic, too, propounds arguments capable of forcibly removing the condition of dogmatist self-conceit. Quoting Ludwig Wittgenstein: "The philosopher's treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness" (Philosophical Investigations 255). Summed up by Sextus Empiricus:

Those who say that "the Sceptics abolish appearances," or phenomena, seem to me to be unacquainted with the statements of our School. For, as we said above, we do not overthrow the affective sense-impressions which induce our assent involuntarily; and these impressions are "the appearances." And when we question whether the underlying object is such as it appears, we grant the fact that it appears, and our doubt does not concern the appearance itself but the account given of the appearance,---and that is a different thing from questioning the appearance itself. For example, honey appears to us to be sweet (and this we grant, for we perceive sweetness through the senses), but whether it is also sweet in its essence is for us a matter of doubt, since this is not an appearance but a judgment regarding the appearance. And even if we do actually argue against the appearances, we do not propound such arguments with the intention of abolishing appearances, but by way of pointing out the rashness of the Dogmatists; for if reason is such a trickster as to all but snatch away the appearances from under our very eyes, surely we should view it with suspicion in the case of things non-evident so as not to display rashness by following it. (Outlines of Pyrrhoism Bk. 1: "Do the skeptics abolish appearances?")