Bracketing (phenomenology)

Bracketing (German: Einklammerung; also called phenomenological reduction, transcendental reduction or phenomenological epoché) means looking at a situation and refraining from judgement and bias opinions to wholly understand an experience.^[1] The preliminary step in the philosophical movement of phenomenology is describing an act of suspending judgment^[2] about the natural world to instead focus on analysis of experience. Suspending judgement involves stripping away every connotation and assumption made about an object. Its earliest conception can be traced back to Immanuel Kant who argued that the only reality that one can know is the one each individual experiences in their mind (or Phenomena). Edmund Husserl, building on Kant’s ideas, first proposed bracketing in 1913, to help better understand another’s phenomena.