EREIGNIS

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====== epoche (1996) ======

//Data: 2025-03-07 07:59//

(JPIHP)

Husserl, however, replaces the Cartesian skepticism with a mere critical suspension of judgment (**epoché**), a suspension of the validity of such judgments for the critique of cognition which may not derive from them any knowledge, any premises for its knowing, but must restrict itself to what is truly indubitable, evident, in the Cartesian cogito—the perception of lived experience in the course of such experience in simple awareness. 6

It is that much more possible to carry out a modified version of this experiment, one which does not simply cancel, deny the existence of the world, as Descartes recommends, but simply suspends its validity for our philosophical purposes, a suspension which Husserl calls **epoché**. 6

Thus the examination of internal time consciousness represents an inquiry within the **epoché**, with the confidence in objective temporal relations suspended; whatever relations may be objectively involved in the succession or in the contemporaneousness of two lived processes, the lived experience is here taken purely as it is lived, in pure perceptual evidence with those noematic correlates which intentionally belong to it with eidetic necessity. 7

Husserl’s method, his **epoché** of the belief in objective time, uncovered at a stroke, in a wholly distinctive manner, the derivative nature of the objective temporal schema and the primacy, the prevenience of an entirely different temporal structure in our lived experience: the original nonpunctile presence (which is a temporal field made up of a limiting presentational phase and a living retention, or better, a series of intentional implications animated by a presentational phase belonging to the same objectively unified whole) with the nonliving horizon of the past. 7

Without engaging in metaphysical speculations about the difference between spatial quantity and temporal qualitativeness, between spatial repetition and inner temporal fusion, Husserl, applying the **epoché**, grasps the difference between original and derivative time; a distinction similar in this respect to that at which Bergson and James were aiming with their conceptions of dureé and stream of consciousness. 7

All of Husserl’s efforts thus far consisted in seeking to show that for the universe of objects, be they material or psychological, in whatever way grounded in what preceded, there is such an inevitable foundation without which it is not possible to understand what their givenness means and thus to place on solid ground, free of the danger of skepticism (that is, scientifically), all knowledge of them—the correlative consciousness of the subject purified with the help of the **epoché** from disruptive transcendent premises. 7

The transcendence which the **epoché** had driven out of the world has reappeared at the very root of immanence. 7

This means that incarnate being is free with respect to the world, that it is not forced to accept it as finished, as it presents itself, but can also become aware how immensely it transcends everything given in that extreme distance which Husserl elaborated in his **epoché**. 7

For the **epoché** is nothing other than the discovery of the freedom of the subject which is manifested in all transcendence, most of all in temporal, presentational transcendence—in our living in principle in horizons which first bestow full meaning on the present and that, in the words of the thinker, we are beings of the far reaches. 7

At this point we need to recall certain reflections about the nature of the reductive process in its relation to reflection which Husserl elaborated in the critical effort at a phenomenology of the reduction, especially of the reductive **epoché**. 8

Now we can say that the inevitable internal division of the I in its various attitudes presents a certain philosophical possibility which we can use in service of the **epoché** and of its clarification from a new perspective. 8

With that we have reached a definition of the **epoché** in purely psychic, internal terms without involving the problems of evidence and transcendence. 8

Now the intent is to elaborate an entirely new mode and region of a consciousness for which, in contrast with the worldly I, the world and all the theses connected with the thesis of the world have no validity; clearly, a realm of consciousness so understood is truly virgin ground on which no one has yet trod because the thinkers who devoted themselves to an empirical inquiry into consciousness did not know the **epoché** while philosophers like Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, who do suspend the thesis of the validity of the world (which they take not as something given and preexisting but as something constituted in absolute consciousness), do not engage in a reflective analysis and observation of the conscious process in a purified empirical experience. 8

Husserl originally thought that the **epoché** thus defined can best be demonstrated first on individual acts, though he soon realized that the **epoché** is indivisible, having to suspend not just interest in individual acts of the observed but the entire natural attitude with all its habitualities and horizons; nor that only: it must be applied consistently down to all subjective attitudes with their modalities which occur in experience. 8

There is no modification of the subject, arising from the division of the I living in the diversity of its temporal possibilities and attitudes, that would not or need not be in principle affected by the modification of the **epoché**—only thus can we reach the universum of purified consciousness and not consciousness in a state of mere objectification. 8

This freedom manifests itself precisely in the **epoché** and in the reduction to the indubitable, that is, to what is seen as present. 8

For those who investigate the origin of objective structures, their necessary interrelation with subjective processes, must not use those objectival theses under investigation as premises, and consequently must carry out their entire reflection on the terrain of the **epoché**. 8

It is a part of this tradition not only in its humanism, but also in that, as a result of Husserl’s conception of the **epoché** as the reduction to pure immanence, the representation of the meaning of the world which his philosophy seeks to uncover on all its levels in a radical reflection never goes beyond the subjectivity which constitutes this meaning, which brings it about (“zustandebringt”). 8

Tracing out the problems of intentionality, along with the effort at a pure description of what is given in inner perception with the guarantee of evident givenness, led to the “phenomenological reduction”: first to an “**epoché**” of all transcendent knowing and then to the reduction of transcendence to “pure phenomenon.” 8