The performance of the epoche is part of that reduction, although because of the complexity of the issues surrounding the epoche it will be explained as if it were separate. Husserl characterised the epoche differently throughout his career, and philosophers differ as to how Husserl should be read regarding his ideas on the epoche, about what we are to understand the epoche to be doing.
Having concluded that ‘natural facts’ discerned from the sciences, ‘facts’ that form our metaphysical and epistemological assumptions with which we approach the world, what he called the natural attitude, Husserl now needs some method to make sure such beliefs do not play a part in constitutive phenomenology, and that method is the epoche. Husserl begins to explain the new method of the epoche in Ideas I:
“We put out of action the general thesis which belongs to the essence of the natural standpoint, we place in brackets whatever it include respecting the nature of Being: this entire natural world therefore which is continually “there for us”, “present to our hand”, and will ever remain there, is a “fact-world” of which we continue to be conscious, even though it pleases us to but it in brackets.” (Husserl, 1913/31/p110)
As Soren Overgaard points out, “few philosophical notions are as controversial as Husserl’s “epoche” ” and it is has been prone to much misinterpretation. The misinterpretation arises from an overemphasis being placed on the similarity between Husserl’s epoche and Descartes method of doubt. This similarity is all too easily made by Husserl’s use of the world Ausschaltung ( German for “switching off ”), as if one were “switching off” the world in the same way one does a CD player, the music has stopped and it no longer there. Also Husserl’s own comparisons between his method and Descartes do not help:
“We can now let the universal epoche in the sharply defined novel sense we have given it step into the place of Cartesian doubt.” (Husserl, 1913/1931,p110)
Or from Cartesian Mediations where he aligns his project with Descartes:
“As one who in meditating in the Cartesian manner, what can I do with the transcendental ego philosophically? Certainly his being is, for me, prior in the order of knowledge to all Objective being: in a certain sense he is the underlying basis on which all Objective cognition takes place. But can this priority rightly signify that the transcendental ego is, in the usual sense, the knowledge-basis on which all Objective knowledge is grounded? Not that we intend to abandon the great Cartesian thought of attempting to find in transcendental subjectivity the deepest grounding of all sciences and even of the being of an Objective world. If we were to abandon that thought, we should not be following Cartesian paths of mediation at all; our divergencies would be more than modifications prompted by criticism. But perhaps, with the Cartesian discovery of the transcendental ego, a new idea of the grounding of knowledge also becomes disclosed: the idea of it as a transcendental grounding.” (Husserl,1950/1993, p27)
Despite all this to would be inaccurate to assume that Husserl argument is Cartesian. There are broadly two readings of the epoche which are based on as overly Cartesian reading of Husserl. The first claims that in performing the epoche Husserl rejects the existence of the world, and the following critique is common language:
“The epoche is a unique reduction over against every other. To underscore its radicality, Husserl says that the epoche “annihilates” the world. Effecting this reduction, the world is no longer there for us as it was in the natural attitude; strictly speaking, it no longer exists.” (Brainard, 2002,p69)
This is simply not true as the beginning of the quote from Ideas I given at the beginning of this section clearly states:
“…this entire natural world therefore which is continually “there for us”, “present to our hand”, and will ever remain there, is a “fact-world” of which we continue to be conscious, even though it pleases us to but it in brackets.” (Husserl, 1913/31/p110).
Husserl goes on to elaborate by saying:
“I do not then deny this “world”, as though I were a sophist, I do not doubt that it is there as though I were a sceptic; but I use the “phenomenological” reduction , which completely bars me from using any judgment that concerns spatio-temporal existence (Dasein)’ (Ideas I, 1913/31`, p110-111).
Returning to pain, for Husserl we are conscious of the world, the world exists, but whilst performing the epoche one cannot make judgments about the world or objects within it. This might include the exact nature of the objects of consciousness. During the epoche, all one can say is that are world exists and I am consciousness of it. The world may not be separate from me, exterior, as it is certainly not experienced as a separate entity. So we can say that ‘I am sitting on a chair’ or ‘I am in pain’, but we may want to be cautious about any claims to an exterior, for we can judge so little about with certainty.
Secondly, since it is ‘me’ that is experiencing the pain, pain is self-experience par excellence. In pain we are not experiencing an outside force or another person, but our own self. As such it pain may be considered to be auto-affective, it constitutes subjectivity through self-affection. This is not to claim that we have complete knowledge of we what experience, that it can become an object of knowledge, just that it is not because the experience is excessive that we do have such knowledge. This is an ambitious claim which I shall not fully outline here, except to say that it is based on the work of Michel Henry on Descartes, Husserl Heidegger, amongst others. For Henry, the focus of the world is a best premature if not unimportant. What interests him is how the self is constituted without the appeal to externality.
For Henry, Heidegger is right to take Husserl to task over his commitment to a Cartesian inspired philosophy of consciousness which inevitably leads to the ‘leaping over’ of the world, but for different reasons. Whereas Heidegger objects to a philosophy of consciousness, indeed to the phenomenological reduction because it makes impossible any exterior to the conscious ‘I’, Henry objects because such a reduction, commits Husserl to what he calls ontological monism, which according to Dan Zahavi is:
“[T]he assumption that there is only one kind of manifestation, only one kind of phenomenality. It has thus been taken for granted that to be given is to be given as an object.” (Zahavi, 1999, p51)
Phenomena appear or manifest themselves to us as objects for us. Ontological monism is the doctrine that phenomena only manifest themselves in one way, as an object.
Husserl falls foul of ontological monism, through his conception of consciousness being bound up with his
notion of intentionality, if consciousness is always a conscious-of an object, “Consciousness is actually nothing other than the relationship to the object.” (Henry, 1963, p85) Thus consciousness is representational, as it represents phenomena which will only appear in one way, as objects. Hence Husserl’s conception of consciousness falls foul of ontological monism.
“Consciousness signifies the essence of manifestation according to the fundamental presuppositions of monism….Consciousness is thus understood in the light of the central concept of intentionality. Every consciousness is consciousness of something. Insofar as it is intentional, consciousness is the surpassing which give access to things. Final progress in the ontological determination of the concept of consciousness resides in the affirmation that consciousness is nothing other than this surpassing. Thus the Being of consciousness is truly identified with the ontological process of reality, it ceases to be the determined Being of a subject opposed, as a given reality, to the reality of the object, so that it may become the principle of reality as such. Consciousness is no longer predicate nor even the essential attribute of the substantiality Being of a subject.” (Henry, 1963, p76& 88-9)
Consciousness understood through the idea of Intentionality becomes that which gives the subject access to objects, it as stated above that nothing but relationship between itself and the represented object. Thus the idea of their being a subject or a human being that is conscious, or has consciousness is lost, the subject that possess consciousness becomes a mere relation to the object. It is on this back of this critique of the philosophy of consciousness that Henry goes on to critique Heidegger’s criticism of Husserl that what is lacking in Husserl is an exteriority, a world. For Henry, this is simply the wrong move. To make this move is to overlook more worrying problems with Husserl’s phenomenology. For Henry:
“…Husserl plays with different and incompatible forms of transcendence and immanence in order to stabilise phenomenalisation into an object and subject thus missing its radicalism. The transcendence suspended by the epoche is only of one, special variety, namely the ‘empirical world’, with the ‘psychical ego [moi] inscribed with in it. An outside, albeit empty, world remains - one that Henry emphasises as a specular, as a ‘view’. The idea of immanence concomitant to this empty but still present outsideness becomes that which is in the empirical world but which it aims at it emptily. This is a mitigated half-immanence, not immanent enough” (Mullarkey, 2006, p51)
For Henry, focus on the exterior or ‘the world’ is misguided because it ignores problems within the idea of phenomenology. Even though ‘empirical world’ has been suspended by the epoche, another remains, that of the transcendental world, empty of objects, but there nonetheless, immanent to the transcendental I. Given this a rush to form a conception of the exterior is premature since simply forming a conception of the exterior will not necessarily resolve this problem of how the world appears to us. Instead, Henry believes we should be examining how the subject’s manifests itself (self-constitution in Husserl’s terms), which Henry believes will be achieved through immanence and radical interiority. If we are to be ‘in-the-world’ we must first ‘affect’ ourselves, that is, the subject manifests itself as an absolute subject through Affectivity.
“Affectivity reveals the absolute in its totality because it is nothing other than its perfect adherence to the self, nothing other than its coincidence with self, because it is the auto-affection of Being in the absolute unity of its radical immanence. In absolute unity of its radical immanence, Being affects itself and experiences itself in such a way that there is nothing in it which does not affect it and which is no experienced by it, no content transcendent to the interior experience of self which constitutes this content” (Henry, 1963, p858-9)
Thus through self-affection, the subject manifests itself as absolute, that is to say unified, non-ecstatic, with no ‘outside’ and certainly no excess.
How can we imagine Henry be applied to pain? Pain, is proposed above is self-experience par excellence as such it as a painful self, that the self can experience as a self at all. Without this internal experience the possible of an ‘exterior experiences’ of walking, talking, hitting are no possible since such sensory experience has Affectivity as conditions of possibility, all affections are only made possible through self-experience, the self’s experience of itself.
In this paper I have not meant to advance a phenomenological theory of pain, although I would admit that I am attracted to ‘Immanence theories’ but I recognize the shortcomings of Henry. I do believe any theory of pain has to in some way pay attention to its internal nature, that it is a self-experience. My only questions here is why should accept Levinas over any of the other theories briefly outlined here.
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