Phenomenology of Practice

Meaning-Giving Methods in Phenomenological Research and Writing

Max van Manen, Max Van Manen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781611329438
• eBook ISBN: 9781315422633
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Research & Methodology in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Max van Manen offers an extensive exploration of phenomenological traditions and methods for the human sciences. It is his first comprehensive statement of phenomenological thought and research in over a decade. Phenomenology of practice refers to the meaning and practice of phenomenology in professional contexts such as psychology, education, and health care, as well as to the practice of phenomenological methods in contexts of everyday living. Van Manen presents a detailed description of key phenomenological ideas as they have evolved over the past century; he then thoughtfully works through the methodological issues of phenomenological reflection, empirical methods, and writing that a phenomenology of practice offers to the researcher. Van Manen's comprehensive work will be of great interest to all concerned with the interrelationship between being and acting in human sciences research and in everyday life.

Max van Manen is the editor of the series Phenomenology of Practice, https://www.routledge.com/series/PPVM

Phenomenology of Practice

Max van Manen

DOI: 10.4324/9781315422657-1

This text is an invitation to openness, and an invitation of openness to phenomenologies of lived meaning, the meaning of meaning, and the originary sources of meaning. The phrase “phenomenology of practice” refers to the kinds of inquiries that address and serve the practices of professional practitioners as well as the quotidian practices of everyday life. For example, a thoughtful understanding of the meaningful aspects of “having a conversation” may be of value to professional practitioners as well as to anyone involved in the conversational relations of everyday living. My personal inspiration for the name “phenomenology of practice” lies in the work of scholars such as Martinus Langeveld, Jan Hendrik van den Berg, Frederik Buytendijk, Henricus Rümke, and Hans Linchoten who were academics as well as clinicians and practitioners in fields of pedagogy, education, psychology, psychiatry, and health science. However, they did not use the phrase “phenomenology of practice” in describing their work.

This phenomenology of practice is also operative with respect to the everyday practice of living. In other words, phenomenology of practice is for practice and of practice. Jan Patočka, an early student of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, already spoke of the essential primacy of practice that lies at the proto-foundation of thought, of consciousness, of the being of human being. When we understand something, we understand practically. For Patočka this means that phenomenology needs to “bring out the originary personal experience. The experience of the way we live situationally, the way we are personal beings in space” (Patočka, 1998, p. 97).

More specifically, this phenomenology of practice is meant to refer to the practice of phenomenological research and writing that reflects on and in practice, and prepares for practice. A phenomenology of practice does not aim for technicalities and instrumentalities—rather, it serves to foster and strengthen an embodied ontology, epistemology, and axiology of thoughtful and tactful action. In this text, I explore the works of a variety of philosophers and human science scholars in a broad and practical manner: to serve a phenomenology of practice that does not get trapped in dogma and over-simplifying schemas, schedules, and interpretations of what is supposed to count as “true” phenomenological inquiry. Phenomenology is usually described as a method. This text aims to describe a variety of phenomenologies that may be regarded, in a broad philosophical sense, as meaning-giving methods for doing inquiry. These phenomenologies are derived from the works and texts of leading phenomenological thinkers and authors.

My aim is to encourage readers to receive their insights and inspiration from original phenomenological sources. For that reason I constantly try to turn to primary texts. Some beginners to phenomenology may be a bit overwhelmed by the multiplicity and variety of themes and notions discussed in the following pages. For a more initiatory guide, I refer to my earlier Researching Lived Experience (1997), which contains a workable outline of human science pointers, principles, and practices to conduct a phenomenological research project.

Reality of the Real

Some fifty years ago, the mathematical physicist Sir Arthur Eddington (who provided observational proof of Einstein’s theory of relativity) wrote, “The motions of the electrons are as harmonious as those of the stars but in a different scale of space and time, and the music of the spheres is being played on a keyboard 50 octaves higher” (1988, p. 20). More recently, astronomers have discovered that there is indeed resonant sound inside stars, and so the music of spheres is not just a prescientific idea. And at the subatomic level, the new physicist model of deep matter is one of field vibrations. It seems that the further and deeper science penetrates the nature of physical matter, the less there seems to remain of physical reality in the way we would have pictured it as primal objects. In earlier days, one still thought of the fundamentals of nature in terms of molecules, atoms, protons, electrons, and quarks. But this is less the case now. Particles and waves seem to dissolve into one another. The new language of quantum physics is abstract, but also metaphoric and mythic. Contemporary physics and astrophysics describe deep physical reality in terms of strings, forces, chaos, antimatter, dark energy, and field vibrations. New theory aims to explain how the cosmic macroscopic reality emerges from the strange behavior of the microscopic quantum reality. And physicists attempt to trace the origin of matter back to pure energy or the elusive Higgs boson particle, which is really thought to be a vibration in a field, as are all particles.

Ultimately what contemporary science seems to leave us with are mathematical spheres. But it should be said that for some physicists these mathematical realities are beautiful, elegant, and strangely harmonious. And so, if you engage in scientific research, and you seem to penetrate the final matrix of matter, it is as if you are listening to a beautiful flute-play. But what you hear is the cosmic sound of a flute without a player. The music is melodious, magnificent, and mysterious. But you never discover the musician. This scientific view of physical reality is formidable and even frightful. As we gaze seriously at nature, its substantiality seems to dissolve into giantism and nothingness, dark matter and antimatter—what remains is an eerie absence, a visibility that constantly withdraws into invisibility, an audible presence without an origin, a dark reality on the other side as we think it must be.

There is something provocative in this image of physicists who appear so utterly serene with an understanding of inquiry into the “real” that would be intolerable for metaphysically insecure minds. Even in the domain of qualitative human science, it is disappointing how it often seems to result in reality constructions that become more real than real. It is true, inquiries—such as deconstruction, social constructivism, gender analysis, postmodernism, and chaos theory—have been formulated to break the shackles of foundationalism, positivism, and modernism. But even the supposed relativism of, for example, social constructivism or the absolutism of new speculative materialism seem to lead to imperatives that are hard to shake. Like Pygmalion, we fall in love with our own fabrications even if we know these are also edifices and only “real” in a certain metaphysical sense. Thus, our languages and practices turn addictively polemical. We think we know why other people are philosophically, psychologically, or ideologically trapped in a circle of a pity perspectives, since we ironically believe that we have a larger view that can reduce everyone else’s view to a mere “perspective.”

Enigma of Meaning

The image of matter as field vibrations and dark or antimatter should not be strange. The new compelling images of physical reality, that reverse visibility into invisibility, resembles the primal impressionality of consciousness with Edmund Husserl, the originary inceptuality of Martin Heidegger, the murmur of the il-y-a in Emmanuel Levinas; it echoes the idea of wild being in the phenomenology of prereflectivity in Maurice Merleau-Ponty; and it resonates with the originary materiality of the affective flesh of life in Michel Henry, the obsession with singularity and the absolute secret in Jacques Derrida, the ancient ontology of technics in Bernard Stiegler, and the invisibility of irreducible saturated phenomena, in the work of Jean-Luc Marion.

Just like the physicist is driven by a certain pathos to penetrate the cosmicquantum secrets of the physical world, so the phenomenologist is driven by a pathos to discern the primordial secrets of the living meanings of the human world. While discussing the depthful thoughts of Teilhard de Jardin’s phenomenalism, Merleau-Ponty talks about a pathos for the mystery of life that always transcends our normal sensibilities—a mystery of the sensible that “entirely grounds our Einfühlung with the world and the animals, and gives depth to Being” (2003, p. 312). Both natural science and human science are driven by a pathos for the enigma of the real meaning and the sources of meaning, but the basic heuristic differs: While natural science inclines to mathematics, phenomenology gravitates to meaning and reflectivity. The latter is caught up in a self-reflective pathos of reflecting, discerning meaning in sensing the world of things, others, and self.

Meaning is not something that can just be scooped up from the spoils and layers of debris of daily living. Meaning is already implicated in the mystery of prereflective reflection of seeing, hearing, touching, being touched, and being-in-touch with the world, and the enigma of reflecting on the phenomenality of all this. New experiences may grant us unsuspected encounters with significances that we did not know before. Thoughtful reflections may bring ancient and novel sights and insights into perspectival view. The phenomenological pathos is the loving project of bringing all the living of life to meaningful expression through the imageries and languages of phenomenological writing, composing, and expressing.

Doing Phenomenology

In 1975 Herbert Spiegelberg seized a title for a text on phenomenology that still speaks to the pragmatic sensibilities of many of my colleagues and graduate students. A visitor glances at my bookshelves and notices Spiegelberg’s title Doing Phenomenology; the book is pulled and perused. Some of the section headings make attractive promises: “A new way into phenomenology: the workshop approach,” “Existential uses of phenomenology,” “Toward a phenomenology of experience,” and so on. But after a bit more browsing, the book is returned to the shelf, without comment. Never has anyone asked to borrow it. And yet, Doing Phenomenology seems to be a text with commendable ambitions. In it, Spiegelberg decries “the relative sterility in phenomenological philosophy . . . especially in comparison with what happened in such countries as France and The Netherlands” (1975, p. 25). In his essays, both on and in phenomenology, he suggests that what is needed is “a revival of the spirit of doing phenomenology directly on the phenomena.” And he asks: “What can be done to reawaken [this spirit] in a very different setting?” (1975, p. 25). Spiegelberg sketches an example of the workshop approach consisting of “a small number of graduate students who would select limited, ‘bitesize’ topics for phenomenological exploration” (1975, p. 26). It is difficult not to feel the hope that speaks in the pages of this book.

In spite of its promising title, Spiegelberg’s Doing Phenomenology did not turn into a helpful phenomenological tutor. His philosophical essays on and in phenomenology failed to exemplify doing it, if “doing phenomenology,” as Spiegelberg suggests, means engaging students to explore “bitesize topics” from the lifeworld. So Spiegelberg’s book still signals a rarely mentioned issue in phenomenological circles: how to make phenomenological philosophy accessible and do-able by researchers who are not themselves professional philosophers or who do not possess an extensive and in-depth background in the relevant phenomenological philosophical literature.

In the fifties and sixties, there were several developments that may not have been exactly what Spiegelberg had in mind but that might have pleased him nevertheless. Interest in phenomenology had indeed awakened in a very different setting—the domain of public policy and professional practice. These domains are characterized by priorities that arise from everyday practical concerns and experiences, not necessarily from abstract scholarly questions that are inherent in the traditions of phenomenological philosophy. In the professional fields, context sensitive research seems to have become especially relevant. It requires approaches and methodologies that are adaptive of changing social contexts and human predicaments. And that is perhaps how we may explain emerging nonphilosophical trends in phenomenological developments.

Other philosophers also have urged that philosophy should find a way of making phenomenology more accessible to professional practitioners and researchers who would be interested in phenomenology but who do not possess a strong and deep professional philosophical background. Some of the various “introduction to phenomenology” texts available in the literature are helpful for developing preliminary understandings. To “introduce” means to bring into a circle of knowledge. But introductions are often regarded as simplifications or popularizations of the ideas of great thinkers. When introductions are simply palatable versions of the real thing, then they may slide into seductions. Seducing, sēdūcĕre, is to lead away: to tempt, entice, and also to beguile to do something wrong or unintended. So, sometimes introductions may not be adequate for the tasks of entering a phenomenology of practice.

Perhaps, a new direction needs to be sought: an agogical approach to phenomenology, as Spiegelberg urged. The term agogic derives from Greek, ἀγωγός, meaning leading or guiding. It is the root word of pedagogy and andragogy—agogy means pointing out directions, providing support. Agogical phenomenology aims to provide access to phenomenological thinking and research in a manner that shows, in a reflexive mode, what the phenomenological attitude looks like. The OED shows a relation between agogics and paradigm: to show through example is to be paradigmatic. An agogical approach tries to be an example of what it is showing—a writing practice for those who are interested in doing phenomenological research and writing. An agogical approach to phenomenology aims to guide the person to the project and pathos of phenomenological inquiry and to help stimulate personal insights, sensibilities, and sensitivities for a phenomenology of practice.

Writing the Phenomenality of Human Life

The more human science becomes qualitative and expressive, the more it needs to ask what is required of writing and of language. What are the possibilities of writing and what are its limits? Qualitative writing that addresses itself to the phenomenality of phenomena of everyday life is surprisingly difficult. The more reflective the process becomes, the more it seems to falter and fail. Sometimes the difficulty of writing tends to be explained psychologically as a lack of creative thought, low motivation, poor insight, or insufficient language ability. Solutions to the difficulty of writing have been explicated pragmatically in terms of linguistic rules, inquiry procedures, reflective methods, scholarly preparation, and so on. But perhaps it is neither primarily the psychology nor the technology of writing that lies at the root of the challenge.

The difficulty of writing has especially to do with two things: First, writing itself is a reflective component of phenomenological method. Phenomenological writing is not just a process of writing up or writing down the results of a research project. To write is to reflect; to write is to research. And in writing we may deepen and change ourselves in ways we cannot predict. Michel Foucault expressed this well:

I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know what will be the end. (Foucault, 1988, p. 9)

Second, the pathic phenomenality of phenomena and the vocative expressivity of writing involve not only our head and hand, but our whole sensual and sentient embodied being. So, writing a phenomenological text is a reflective process of attempting to recover and express the ways we experience our life as we live it—and ultimately to be able to act practically in our lives with greater thoughtfulness and tact.

Meanwhile, writing as a cultural practice seems to be increasingly displaced by other forms of media. Are new technologies and media altering the nature of writing or displacing the process of writing altogether? These are questions that are pursued in the works of media scholars such as Vilém Flusser (2011a, 2011b) and Michael Heim (1987). They may have import for phenomenology as a writing practice and as the composing of phenomenological meaning through devices and gestures that extend the reach of traditional philosophical or rational discourse. Even though the medium of writing seems to be increasingly displaced by popular media of visual images, blogs, podcasts, and self-made movies (such as on YouTube), Flusser argues that the gesture of writing possesses culturally habituated and historically embodied structures that are so unique that they cannot really be substituted without a certain loss of reflectivity, expressibility, and the meaning associated with literacy (Flusser, 2012).

Just as we take for granted the material reality of the things of our physical world, so we take for granted the reality of the “things” of our mundane, symbolic, and spiritual world. It would be correct and yet silly to say that this table or this plate from which I eat my food is, at the subatomic level, largely composed of empty space and particles, and thus does not really exist in the way I know it in my daily life. Just as it would be silly to say that the look, the touch, the love, or the responsibility that I experience in my relation with others does not really exist. They are just the elusive and illusory constructions of an ineffable mind. And yet, the various qualitative inquiry models largely take the reality, the existence, and the meaning of these phenomena for granted—it is precisely the sensibility or meaning of this experiential reality that is at stake in phenomenological inquiry. In daily life, when I speak or write the names of my children, my spouse, or friends, I call their presence into being as it were. And this is true also of language in general. When I call someone a “friend” or “loved one,” then I call into being a certain relational quality of friendship or love that pertains between this person and me. However, when I reflectively write this word “friend” or this word “lover,” then a strange thing happens. The word now gazes back at me, reminding me that it is only a word. As soon as I wrote or pronounced this word, the meaning that I aimed to bring into presence has already fallen away, absented itself.

Hegel wrote that the biblical Adam, in naming the things and creatures of his world, actually annihilated them (Hegel, 1979). In the act of naming and gaining knowledge, we cannot help but rob the things that we name of their existential richness. And so, while trying to become sensitive to the subtleties, nuances, and complexities of our lived life, writers of human science texts ma...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Phenomenology of Practice
• 2. Meaning and Method
• 3. Openings
• 4. Beginnings
• 5. Strands and Traditions
• 6. New Thoughts and Unthoughts
• 7. Phenomenology and the Professions
• 8. Philosophical Methods: The Epoché and Reduction
• 9. Philological Methods: The Vocative
• 10. Conditions for the Possibility of Doing Phenomenological Analysis
• 11. Human Science Methods: Empirical and Reflective Activities
• 12. Issues of Logic
• 13. Phenomenological Writing
• 14. Draft Writing
• References
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• About the Author