Risking Encounters

One thing that bothers me in Van Manen is his tendency to glorify parenthood. As if people who can’t have children, or choose not to have children, are somehow less ethical than those who do.

Of course, I hope it’s clear to you that phenomenology has a completely pluralistic vision of the world. When we say that we seek “the good of the child,” we are not speaking of some Platonic essence--unchanging across time, circumstance and place. No, we are saying that there are better and worse outcomes for us as humans. We are simply saying that our lives matter!

Neither, when we seek the universal essence of a phenomenon, are we saying that everyone experiences things the same way. No, we are saying that as human beings, it is possible to build a shared world, and that we really can learn from others!

Yet Van Manen again and again wonders--reflecting, you will note, on his own fears when he was a young man--why it is that some people risk the “existential encounter” with a child, while others don’t. 

There is no doubt in my mind that having a child is a life-changing event. It is a transformational gift, as Van Manen points out again and again. Yet I’m pretty sure that transformation can happen through other means as well. 

Two of our readings this term asked us to think about life as a dialogue between dwelling and possibility. This dialogue was represented in the research manuscripts that challenged us to learn from our children and to learn from our elders. I suspect, at this point in my life, that what really matters is that we RISK such genuine, transformative encounters with dwelling and possibility. At times, such risking might even require us to abandon conventional notions of “morality” and “the good.” 

Hence, I think we have to be careful with the judgmental tendency that Van Manen exhibited in Chapter Six of his book.

So it is certainly legitimate for Van Manen to ask: What’s all this academic writing for?

If we take seriously the notion that our lives are a text, and that they communicate meanings just as clearly as our writing, then we have to admit that there is a moral problem when we cannot write in ways that are commensurate with our lives outside of academia. And these problems, of course, can be just as much about what the institution demands of us as any personal moral failings as individuals!

Since Heidegger, phenomenology has been built on a foundation that questions what has happened to us in a technocratic, scientific and rationalist culture. In that way, it has a tendency to be backward-looking, to glorify the past.

That tendency to glorify the past is itself problematic. 

Van Manen gets it right when he points to the essential mystery of life, the ineffable at the heart of every experience. 

The essential correlate to phenomenology’s injunction to listen: Be humble in the face of life!