Epoché: suspending judgement as a moral act
Every judgement presupposes a yardstick. We rarely ask whose it is, and still less when the yardstick is our own.
We see this clearly when we look back. Faced with a sixteenth-century man who did not share our views on slavery, or an early twentieth-century peasant who, faced with bereavement, says only that it was God's will, we immediately reach for a word: guilt, backwardness, trauma. The word arrives before the object, and it does not belong to it: it belongs to us.
This contribution begins with that gesture, so common as to be invisible, and proposes a name for what we need in order not to make it: epoché.
Presentism and its double
Historians call it presentism: judging the past as though those who lived through it had our tools, our values and our questions. Condemning a sixteenth-century man for not sharing our views on slavery or women has an obvious convenience. It assures us that we are on the right side of history, and costs us nothing.
Still less noticed is its mirror image: the version directed towards the future. When we decide today what will be good or bad tomorrow, we use the same yardstick: our own categories, projected forwards. We imagine that those who come after us will judge by our criteria, or that they ought to. It is the same mistake turned the other way. In both cases, the present appoints itself the sole measure, and in both cases no observation can refute it, because everything, past or future, is read from the standpoint it has already declared to be right.
Here the error is logical as well as moral. A judgement that always applies the same framework to any object can never be tested by that object: whatever the past shows us, the framework absorbs it. A theory that cannot be contradicted by facts can tell us nothing about facts. And there is the more uncomfortable moral error: if my yardstick is the only one, I am always right. I need risk nothing.
Borrowing a concept
For Husserl, epoché is the suspension of the natural attitude, that is, of the naive trust with which we accept that the world is exactly as it appears to us.
It is neither sceptical doubt nor an ‘I don't know’: it is a bracketing of assumptions so that we can look at the phenomenon as it presents itself, before deciding what it is.
Husserl was speaking of the existence of the world and of consciousness, not of morality. I borrow the concept and broaden it, aware that this is an extension. Yet the gesture seems to me the same: suspending the categories with which I am about to judge, my yardstick, my theory of what is right, to allow the object to show me something I had not anticipated.
This broader use has precedents. Geertz's anthropology practises it when it asks researchers to describe a culture through the meanings of those who live within it, before classifying it through their own. The famous example is the difference between a blink and a wink: the same physical movement, two entirely different gestures, distinguishable only by entering the web of meanings of the person making them. A ‘thick’ description begins with the preliminary suspension of what I already know.
A phenomenologist singer-songwriter
It has occurred to me that Fabrizio De André did this work without saying so. Take his marginal figures: the prostitute, the thief, the condemned man and the madman. He neither absolves them in the name of a more modern morality nor condemns them in the name of the morality of their time. He lets them speak, and asks those listening to understand what that life meant to the person living it, in that place, under those rules.
In ‘Testamento di Tito’, the commandments are reread by someone who has encountered them from below. The song does not say that the law is wrong. It shows that the same precept, spoken to someone who is hungry, carries a different weight from the one it carries for someone who has eaten their fill. The law is bracketed for a moment, long enough to see what it does to an actual person.
And in another line, which often comes back to me when I think about this subject, compassion is described as that which does not yield to resentment. I read it this way: compassion is an epoché. It suspends resentment, the moral category I already had ready, to make room for the other. It does not abolish judgement for ever; it defers it just long enough to see.
The future and arrival
There is a second possible use, concerning the time to come. We think of projects, careers and life choices as though their worth lay only in the destination to which they lead, and we judge them by that criterion: if I get where I said I would, it was a good thing; otherwise, it was not. It is a way of anticipating the final judgement and applying it to every step.
Suspending the category of arrival means allowing the journey to have value for what it is while we are making it. De André puts it in a phrase that has the merit of not explaining itself: the journey has its reason within itself. Here I am more cautious: this is not the same as historical presentism, and I do not present it as such. I set them alongside one another because in both cases the question is the same: which yardstick are we using, and who chose it?
Why it is a moral act
One might think that epoché is a technique, a working method that researchers adopt when they are well trained. To me it seems more than that. A technique is simply applied; epoché, by contrast, entails a risk. When I suspend my category, I allow for the possibility that the object may contradict it. I might discover that the man in the letters had no need of my word, or that my yardstick, with which I felt so sure of myself, measured me more than it measured him.
Working with people, as a psychologist and as a team leader, I see this cost every day. Giving someone a diagnosis or labelling a colleague is reassuring: I immediately know what to do. Staying a little longer with description, without a word at the ready, is uncomfortable and slow, and often leads me to get the timing wrong. But it is the only way I know of realising that the other person does not coincide with my category.
What to propose
I am not arguing that we should give up judging. I am arguing that judgement has an order: first suspension, then evaluation. And the second emerges stronger if the first has genuinely taken place. To judge without having suspended is to confirm what we already thought.
Three questions remain open, and it is towards these that I would like to steer the discussion. How do we recognise, in a text or a professional practice, the moment when a category of the present passes itself off as a universal yardstick? What distinguishes epoché from relativism, that is, provisional suspension from the definitive refusal to evaluate? And how do we teach a gesture which, by its nature, is learnt chiefly through getting it wrong?