Phenomenology and Bracketing the Familiar

Edmund Husserl (1859 – 1938), the main founder of phenomenology, emphasised the importance of the first step that a phenomenological philosopher must take to investigate the interrelation of the world and us as experiencing subjects. He called that first step epoché – suspending or placing into brackets. What should we bracket? Our natural attitude – the familiar, pre-theoretical, uncritical attitude towards reality which takes it for granted that the world we experience simply exists that way, independent of us. Instead, through bracketing, a philosopher should adopt a phenomenological attitude that will bring to attention how the objects present themselves to us and how we are involved in constituting that presentation. In his book, “Phenomenology: The Basics”, Dan Zahavi explains:

“On the contrary, if we are to adopt the phenomenological attitude and engage in phenomenological philosophizing, we must take a step back from our naive and unexamined immersion in the world, and suspend our automatic belief in the mind-independent existence of that world. By suspending this attitude, and by thematising the fact that reality is always revealed and examined from some perspective or another, reality is not lost from sight, but is for the first time made accessible for philosophical inquiry.”

_{Zahavi (2019, p. 36)}

Almost a century after Husserl expounded his ideas, in an exciting shift of focus in her book “Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others” (2006), Sara Ahmed asks if there is something important in the familiar we might be missing by placing it into brackets?   

Bracketing the familiar as a fantasy of transcendence

Referring to Husserl’s idea that phenomenology must suspend or bracket the ‘given’, the familiar assumptions about ordinary perceptions, to achieve as unbiased a view on presented phenomena as possible, Sara Ahmed writes:

“What does it mean to assume that bracketing can “transcend” the familiar world of experience? Perhaps to bracket does not mean to transcend, even if we put something aside. We remain reliant on what we put in brackets; indeed, the activity of bracketing may sustain the fantasy that “what we put aside” can be transcended in the first place. The act of “putting aside” might also confirm the fantasy of a subject who is transcendent, who places himself above the contingent world of social matter, a world that differentiates objects and subjects according to how they already appear.” 

_{Ahmed (2006, p. 33, emphasis added)}

Why is it a fantasy? Since our consciousness relies on all the bodily and social contingencies, it cannot transcend them to a ‘pure’, objective state by putting what it depends on in brackets. In a note to this section, Ahmed elaborates that her view is aligned with Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s criticism of Husserl’s phenomenology on similar grounds, “In other words, giving up the fantasy of the bracket turns phenomenology toward hermeneutics, with its emphasis on interpretation as a stance that shapes what is apprehended in the first place” (2006, p. 184, emphasis added). We might say that the phenomenological and hermeneutical attitudes should combine into one approach to philosophical analysis. 

Therefore, Ahmed suggests a more realistic and helpful goal for phenomenology that is very close to the project of contemporary critical phenomenology as well as, more broadly, feminist philosophy: “Rather than the familiar being posited as that which must be suspended in order to see, we might consider what “it” is that we “overlook” when we reside within the familiar” (2006, p. 34). 

It is a more embedded and relational approach to understanding our situatedness in and interrelation with the world. As envisaged by Ahmed, phenomenology puts the familiar into focus and critically attends to it instead of bracketing it to transcend it.

Familiar as the unseen background 

Ahmed wants to focus her attention on exploring that which Husserl’s phenomenology aims to bracket – the familiar, the unnoticed background. She writes, “Husserl’s approach to the background as what is “unseen” in its “thereness” or “familiarity” is extremely useful, even if he puts the familiar to one side. It allows us to consider how the familiar takes shape by being unnoticed” (2006, p. 37, emphasis added). 

In focusing on the familiar, on what we perceive as ‘given’ mainly because we do not notice its development and all that it takes for ‘it’ (whatever that is) to be ‘there’, Ahmed defines the concept of background as follows: “a background is what explains the conditions of emergence or an arrival of something as the thing that it appears to be in the present” (2006, p. 38). 

Importantly, these conditions refer not only to the thing’s arrival to its present state (as the ‘object’ of my perception) but also to my arrival to the present state and act of perceiving (as the ‘subject’ who perceives). How I perceive the ‘object’ depends on both its background and mine and on how they interact. The background of my perception (the conditions of its present state) consists of the intertwined histories of the object’s and subject’s arrival. 

This critical recognition of the historicity and contingency of things as they are now brings phenomenology in close interaction with hermeneutics and Derrida’s criticism of metaphysics that privileges the presence (e.g., the idea of a ‘pure’ present meaning). 

The illusion of a thing ‘in itself’ cut off from its background

Ahmed observes the effect of cutting an object off from its background of arrival: “The object is “brought forth” as a thing that is “itself” only insofar as it is cut off from its own arrival. So it becomes that which we have presented to us, only if we forget how it arrived, as a history that involves multiple forms of contact between others. Objects appear by being cut off from such histories of arrival” (2006, p. 41).

Similar to Derrida’s criticism of a ‘pure’ present meaning, Ahmed argues that perceiving an ‘object’ as it is ‘in itself’ is an illusion or a fantasy caused by our forgetting that all things have a background; they arrive and are not simply ‘given’. The conditions of the ‘object’s’ arrival, consisting of the various contacts with others, are inseparable from what the ‘object’ is, its identity:

“The object is not reducible to itself, which means it does not “have” an “itself” that is apart from its contact with others” 

_{Ahmed (2006, p. 43)}

We can apply the same line of thought to persons and our identities, our sense of self. It supports the case for understanding identities (of objects, people, meanings etc.) as narratives broadly construed to include and highlight the importance of their histories of arrival. 

keep exploring!

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