Yes, Peter is right. Epoche (with a line over that final e) comes from the
Greek and became a term of art in phenomenalism through Husserl. Experience,
runs the argument, is made up of two things: (a) the impacts made by stuff
upon your consciousness (noemata; to you they seem objective, even when they
aren't, so even hallucinations are noemata), and (b) how you handle those
impacts subjectively, self consciously, by intending acts such as inquiring,
perceiving, believing, remembering desiring and so forth (noeses).
Well, says Husserl, I'm a phenomenalist so it's all first person to me.
External existence, the distinction between stubbing my toe on a fake stone
and stubbing it on a real one, doesn't matter for the moment. It merely gets
in the way. Only as and when I have sorted this other stuff out shall I be
strong enough to consider it. Existence? Confound it! Ein halber Hund kann
nicht pinkeln, as mein Mutter used to say. How can I think with only half my
attention? I shall *bracket* it (grand sweep of the methodological wand)
with epoche, suspending my belief in it forthwith. Existence? Pfui! So where
was I?
And here is Castaneda's Husserlian Yaqui Indian: 'Don Juan stated that in
order to arrive at *seeing* one first had to *stop the world*. *Stopping the
world* was indeed an appropriate rendition of certain states of awareness in
which the reality of everyday life is altered because the flow of
interpretation, which ordinarily runs uninterruptedly, has been stopped by a
set of circumstances alien to that flow.'
By lifting the term as I did I wanted to convey a sense of how, in reading
and in writing, one's own belief in existence (not one's suspension of
disbelief in plot, characters or what a poem has to say) is at stake. There
is an immanent morality in a novel, an implicit social structure: *ought*
presented as *is*. In order to read the novel, you accept some sort of
compromise in how you look at things. In poetry, or at least in what I
called 'lyric address' your *world* is further *stopped* in a much more
radical fashion: it isn't the poem's morality but its _ontology_ that takes
(temporary) precedence over yours.
CW
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'What's the point of having a language that everybody knows?'
(Gypsy inhabitant of Barbaraville)
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