The Everyday Practice of Phenomenology

Thanks for a great class last night!

In this post, I’d like us to consider what it means to cultivate a phenomenological perspective in everyday life. Last week, Mark talked to you about the hermeneutics of love and the hermeneutics of suspicion. This week, Sara blogged about the (perhaps unfounded) faith that Gadamer has in human being’s everyday ability to engage the world in an open and questioning manner--rather than simply projecting our own desires and fore-havings on to it.

At the same time as there has been a growing interest in the critical projects of unmasking every claim to truth as either ideological projection or discursive effect, North American society has come to suffer from a growing lack of social trust and solidarity. “Bowling alone” has become the North American human condition. 

Globally, the rise of various fundamentalisms--from India to Indiana, rigid claims to possession of THE TRUTH dominate social discourses.

Phenomenology returns us--in my version--to a plural world. One where my truth and your truth, through investigation, friendship, and communication, can become our shared truth--without yet wiping out the particularity of the yours or the mine.

To practice the hermeneutics of love is simply to be interested in the world, and to allow people their own experiences. Because experiences are felt, and deeply lived, it is senseless to argue about them. As Van Manen notes, they are in a certain sense “givens.” As Dewey likewise notes, every experience has a passive element of “undergoing” about it.

The hermeneutics of love does not require, however, that we suspend our inquiry into the meaning of experience, nor stop seeking ways to enrich it. Quite the opposite!!

To love the world and all the things in it means to want to constantly understand it better, to enter into dialogue with it, to have one’s self transformed by it. In that way, I believe, even our sufferings can bring us a certain wisdom (though this does not mean we should not constantly strive to prevent unnecessary suffering!!!).

If we love the world, and are relating to it deeply, we are already researching it. This is the irony of phenomenological research. “When will your research project begin,” the IRB asks. The correct answer is probably something like, “Well, I first became interested in issues of religious experience when I read Dostoyevsky and Kierkegaard in college. So my research actually began sometime in 1993 . . .”

We play the IRB game, but it does not define our ethical obligations as researchers or humans (it provides us legal protection in case something accidently goes very wrong). We should never think of “our research” as starting or stopping at specified dates, marked by when we are collecting accounts or interviews. Our everyday reading, for pleasure and for work, are endless sources of phenomenological insight. Indeed, to paraphrase Connelly and Clandinin, one mark of a great phenomenological researcher happens when you can no longer distinguish between professional and pleasure reading.

But beyond reading, phenomenological research happens through the sensitive observation of, and participation in, everyday life. Whatever it is you are interested in researching, it has potential application to every living human (that is why I ask you to frame your questions, in the first place, in the most general terms). Therefore, every day brings you the opportunity to practice your research craft.

Good luck!