Epoché in the gallery

Edmund Husserl borrowed the word epoché from the ancient sceptics to name a deliberate act: setting aside, for the moment, every judgement about whether a thing is real or good or true, in order to look at how it actually appears. He meant it as a method for philosophy. I have used it for fifteen years as a method for coaching, and THE WALK turned out to be the hardest place I have ever had to practise it.

Here is the situation. A participant has just spent ten minutes in front of the photograph of a figure standing in still water. They come into the circle and say: "That picture was about drowning." The coach knows the image. The coach, privately, thinks it is about stillness. Every instinct trained by ordinary conversation says to offer that reading, gently, as a gift. Every principle of coaching says to do nothing of the kind.

The bracket is this: the coach's reading of the picture is simply not relevant. Not wrong, not suppressed as a courtesy, just outside the brackets. What is inside the brackets is that this person saw drowning, and the only honest question is the one that follows the person. "What did drowning look like, in it?" Or, if the coach can stay even quieter: "Say more."

The difficulty is that art invites interpretation in a way that ordinary speech does not. When a client talks about their manager, no coach feels tempted to correct their account of the manager. When a participant talks about a photograph that the coach has also looked at, the coach has their own experience of the same object, and that experience wants to be shared. Epoché, in the gallery, means treating your own experience of the picture as one more thing you bring to the room and leave at the door.

We built two safeguards into the host training for this. The first is a sentence every host says at the start of the circle: "No one here will interpret anyone else's experience, including me." Saying it aloud to a group makes it very hard to break ten minutes later. The second is a practice we call the second look. After a participant describes what they saw, the host asks one question that could only be asked by someone who had set aside their own view. "What do you notice, now, hearing yourself say that?" is one. "What else was there?" is another. If the host cannot find such a question, they say nothing and wait, and the silence usually does the work.

Epoché is not neutrality in the sense of having no view. The coach in the circle has plenty of views, about the image, about the person, about what they would do. It is the discipline of not letting any of them lead. In practice it feels like holding a door open with your foot while someone else decides whether to walk through, and resisting, each time, the urge to describe the room on the other side.

The reward is that people say things in a circle around a picture that they have never said anywhere else, and they say them because no one in the room is waiting to tell them what the things mean.