This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Ordinary life, on Husserl's diagnosis, is carried out entirely within what he calls the natural attitude, a standing posture in which the world and the things in it are simply taken for granted as existing, out there, independent of any act of consciousness directed at them. We do not normally doubt that the chair we are sitting in exists, or that the street outside continues when we are not looking at it; we simply live amid things, absorbed in dealings with them, without ever making the fact of their existence an explicit object of inquiry. Husserl's phenomenological method begins by suspending this posture, not by denying that the world exists, but by setting aside, or bracketing, our habitual commitment to its independent reality so that consciousness itself, and the way it constitutes objects as meaningful, can come into view.
It is important to be precise about what this suspension, which Husserl calls the epoche, does and does not involve. He is careful to describe it as suspending a certain dogmatic attitude toward reality rather than doubting reality itself. The epoche is not a Cartesian exercise in trying to prove that an external world exists behind the veil of appearances, and it does not end in skepticism about whether there is a chair at all. Its purpose is instead described as the path leading to the discovery of correlational judgments, meaning that once the naive assumption of the world's straightforward existence is set aside, what becomes visible is the correlation between any object as it appears and the particular acts of consciousness through which it appears that way. Rather than abandoning the world, bracketing makes worldly objects accessible for philosophical inquiry for the first time, since it reveals how their sense and their given manner of appearing are constituted by consciousness rather than simply inspected by it from nowhere.
This is where the epoche connects to Husserl's broader account of intentionality, his claim that consciousness is always consciousness of something, directed at an object in a particular way. Once the natural attitude's naive positing of the object is bracketed, phenomenology can examine the structure of that directedness itself, distinguishing what Husserl calls the matter of an intentional act, which determines what the experience is about, from its quality, which determines the specific character of the intentional reference, whether one is perceiving the object, doubting it, remembering it or merely hoping for it. The same object can be given across many different acts of consciousness bearing different qualities, and the epoche is precisely what allows this structure to be studied on its own terms, rather than being obscured by the natural attitude's flat assumption that the object simply is what it is, full stop, independent of how it is given.
The stakes of this maneuver run through the rest of Husserl's philosophy. Without the epoche, phenomenology would collapse back into either a naive realism that cannot explain how objects come to mean anything for consciousness, or a psychology that studies acts of consciousness as mere natural events among others in the world, missing their distinctive character as acts directed at, and constitutive of, sense. By first suspending the natural attitude's dogmatic commitment to the world's independent existence, Husserl claims to have discovered a new field of inquiry that had been hiding in plain sight the entire time, the correlation between appearing objects and the consciousness to which they appear, a field that ordinary life, absorbed as it is in things themselves, has no occasion ever to notice.