Classic Writings for a Phenomenology of Practice

Michael van Manen, Max Van Manen, Michael van Manen, Max Van Manen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000197372
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

Classic Writings for a Phenomenology of Practice features examples of newly translated classic phenomenological texts that have been largely forgotten or misunderstood. The writings are unique in that they speak to the practice of doing phenomenological research for the purpose of gaining insights and better understandings regarding aspects of professional practice and ordinary life phenomena and events.

Phenomenology does not have to be impenetrable philosophy, dealing with tedious technical issues. Instead, phenomenology may offer relevance, value, and enduring allure to readers and researchers who are engaged with the quotidian life experiences and events of students, patients, clients, friends, and other individuals. This phenomenological approach aims to stay as close as possible to the ordinary events of everyday life: seeing the first smile of a child, feeling compulsive, being humorous, having a conversation, experiencing childhood secrecy, encountering new things—topics that span a manifold of life experiences. In this collection of classic phenomenological writings, each author is thoughtfully introduced, and each text is followed by a conversational descant: a reflection on the phenomenological reflection.

The presentation of these classic writings and their reflections aims to show us what it means to do phenomenology directly on the phenomena that we live—thus asking us to be attentive to the fascinating varieties and subtleties of primal lived experiences and consciousness in all its remarkable complexities. This book is relevant for scholars and students who are interested in human science research and the origins and practices of the phenomenological method.

1
DOING PHENOMENOLOGY

Words constitute the ultimate texture and stuff of our moral being, since they are the most refined and delicate and detailed, as well as the most universally used and understood, of the symbolisms whereby we express ourselves into existence. We became spiritual animals when we became verbal animals … Both art and philosophy constantly recreate themselves by returning to the deep and obvious and ordinary things of human existence and making there a place for cool speech and wit and serious unforced reflection.

Iris Murdoch (1999, pp. 241, 242)

This book offers translations of six classic writings that exemplify doing phenomenology directly on phenomena. The writings belong to a unique phenomenological movement, historically associated with the University of Utrecht. They were originally created by proponents of the fields of psychiatry ( Jan H. van den Berg, 1953, 1959, 1972), physiology (Frederik J.J. Buytendijk, 1947, 1970a, 1970b), pedagogy (Martinus J. Langeveld, 1953, 1956, 1972), and psychology ( Johannes Linschoten, 1951, 1953, 1987). The selected and professionally situated phenomena (as reflected in the titles of these essays) are explicated in a phenomenological manner. The writings are examples of what Herbert Spiegelberg later called “doing phenomenology on the phenomena” (1975). To be clear, these are not technical texts by philosophers writing about abstract, theoretical, or exegetical issues. Rather, the authors practised phenomenology in the quotidian sense of doing phenomenology on “the things.” Historically, this development came to be known as “the Utrecht School” or “the Dutch School” of phenomenology even though some of the authors were German or wrote in French or other languages. In hindsight, this Utrecht School of phenomenology may be considered an original contribution to the international formation of a phenomenology of practice in the professions (see also Levering & van Manen, 2002).

We call the phenomenological texts in this book “classic” not only because the majority date from the period of the 1930s to the 1960s, but also because they were inspired by the foundational works of leading phenomenologists such as Franz Brentano, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Edith Stein, Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner, and especially the French phenomenological writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Eugène Minkowski, Georges Gusdorf, and other writings that had been published in the wake of Husserl’s and Heidegger’s foundational works. However, even today these classic writings by the Utrecht School proponents tend to be overlooked or misrepresented by those who write on the basics of phenomenology. Of course, the texts were not written to be read only by philosophers. They were meant to be of value to educators, clinicians, and other professionals concerned with the experiences of children and adults. The work of the authors of these classic writings is unique in that it speaks to the practice of doing phenomenological research for the purpose of better understanding aspects of professional practice as well as ordinary life phenomena and events.

The first mention of “the Utrecht School” is probably on the back cover of Persoon en Wereld [Person and World] (1953) edited by van den Berg and Linschoten. They stated, “one could say that in the fifties at Utrecht University, a phenomenological school had emerged under the leadership of F.J.J. Buytendijk.” That is likely when and where the title “the Utrecht School” of phenomenology was coined. Van den Berg and Linschoten further declared programmatically that the phenomenologist resolves to stay as close as possible to the ordinary events of everyday life (1953). Indeed, these phenomenologists were driven by a professional and a quotidian interest in ordinary life topics, even as these topics often were born in the contexts of professional practices. That is why we now may call this approach a phenomenology of practice (van Manen, 2014).

The various figures who have commonly been considered to belong to the Utrecht School did not really form a close-knit group. It would be an exaggeration to refer to them as “members” of a school. What they had in common was that they were not professional philosophers but rather professional practitioners who had developed deep and personal interests in philosophical phenomenological works as well as in the broader French and German existential literature of Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Marcel Proust, Herman Hesse, André Gide, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Soren Kierkegaard, and so forth. As Spiegelberg said, they were “a group of thinkers on the move” and thus constituted some sort of movement (1983, p. 295). At the time, these scholars usually did not even refer to themselves as members of the Utrecht School. And some were associated with other universities such as those found in Leiden, Amsterdam, Groningen, and Göttingen. But in hindsight, the name “the Utrecht School” became an identifier of this tradition.

In this opening chapter we show that the classic writings demonstrate a way of “doing phenomenology” on ordinary lifeworld topics arising from professional and clinical practice and ordinary life concerns. This attention to the “lifeworld” differs from technical philosophical theory in that it does phenomenology directly on the “phenomena” or on the “things” themselves. We show that and how these research studies are guided by the “phenomenological attitude” (shaped by the epoché and the reduction) to arrive at meaningful insights. And we show that this lifeworld phenomenology is rooted in concrete experience, and proceeds through “examples” that speak to so-called originary or inceptual dimensions of phenomenological knowledge and understanding.

Classic Writings in the Context of a Phenomenology of the Lifeworld

Nowadays, philosophers of various cloths and human science scholars of different disciplines pursue all kinds of topics and projects as reflected in the phenomenological, philosophical, and human science literature, and many of these are published under the flag of “phenomenology.” Even though it is a simplification, it may still be helpful to distinguish some order in these publications. In introducing a collection of phenomenological texts of the Utrecht School, Joseph Kockelmans distinguished three common streams of phenomenological publications:

Over the past decades many books and essays have been written on phenomenology. Some of these publications are historical in character and were designed to give the reader an idea of the origin, meaning, and function of phenomenology and its most important trends. Others are theoretical in nature and were written to give the reader an insight into the ways in which various authors conceive of phenomenology and how they attempt to justify their views in light of the philosophical assumptions underlying their conceptions. Finally, there are a great number of publications in which the authors do not talk about phenomenology, but rather try to do what was described as possible and necessary in the first two kinds of publications.

(1987, p. vii)

The first stream of publications is the most original, of historical relevance, and probably the most challenging. Such writings address, advance, and deepen the original idea of phenomenology. Indeed, Husserl’s and Heidegger’s works are probably among the more challenging to read and comprehend. Still, for those seriously interested in phenomenology, their writings offer fundamental insights that appear inexhaustible in their philosophical significance. Husserl’s works (1970a, 1970b, 1983) gave us the method of the reduction that must establish the phenomenological attitude; the mode of intentionality of consciousness that allows the things of the world to give themselves as phenomena; the epoché that involves the suspension of the natural attitude in favour of the transcendental reduction, the lifeworld as the source of our lived experiences, and the means of bracketing to assist in identifying eidetic aspects of phenomena. Heidegger’s works (1962, 1977, 1982, 2001) gave us the focus on the Being of being; human ontology as Dasein; the characterization of phenomenological method as to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself; his notions of zuhanden and vorhanden; and his writings on technology whereby technology is not to be understood instrumentally but as the explication of the general comportment by which technology may shape our existential ways of being. And, of course, there are other early and subsequent phenomenological publications that offer founding phenomenological ideas, such as in the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre (1956, 1991), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962), Max Scheler (1970), Emmanuel Levinas (1979, 1981), and more contemporary originary works of thinkers such as Jean-Luc Nancy (1997, 2007), Jacques Derrida (1995), Michel Henry (2008, 2009) and Jean-Luc Marion (1997, 2007) (see van Manen, 2014). These works are indeed recognized as brilliant, original, and pathbreaking texts.

As for the second stream that Kockelmans distinguishes, there is the broad scholarly literature that continues to address and explore technical, historical, and theoretical issues of phenomenology. These are publications that tend to take up in an exegetical, critical, and philosophical manner the arguments and positions of other philosophers and scholars of phenomenology. This literature is enormously variegated and extensive, sometimes offering interesting comparative studies and probing thought-provoking topics, and other times texts that are steeped in “language” and only of interest and readable by other philosophers. The etymology of the term “exegesis” borrows from Latin and Greek, meaning exposition, narrative, and explanation. Exegetical phenomenology tends to be meta-phenomenology. The general style of these publications is that they offer explanations of, theories about, comments on, and introductions to other published phenomenological works, topics, and concerns that tend to be technical and/or historical in a philosophical phenomenological sense. These phenomenological publications also include numerous texts from a philosophical psychological or other disciplinary perspective.

Kockelmans’ third stream of phenomenological literature is neither primarily presenting new phenomenological foundations nor presenting arguments or developing theories about phenomenology and technical philosophical issues and themes. Rather, the third stream is composed of phenomenological texts, such as the Utrecht works, that actually practise or do phenomenology on concrete topics of the lifeworld. They try to do, as Kockelmans says, what was described as possible and necessary in the foundational and theoretical forms of phenomenology. They “do” what the works of the two streams of founding originators and subsequent commentators are suggesting or implying is the possible and necessary task of phenomenology. Developing phenomenological insights into human existence may even be considered the original and primary task of phenomenology. In the contemporary phenomenological literature, these are phenomenological studies of topics that may be of interest and relevance to everyday life and to the working lives of professional practitioners. For example, in philosophy there are publications such as The Glance by Edward Casey (2007), Abuses by Alphonso Lingis (2001), The Thinking Hand by Juhani Pallasma (2009), The Erotic Phenomenon by Jean-Luc Marion (2007), The Fall of Sleep by Jean-Luc Nancy (2007), and The Five Senses of Veils, Boxes, Tables, Visit, Joy by Michel Serres (2008), and others that offer surprising and fascinating phenomenological insights into the meaning of concrete everyday human experiences and lifeworld events. Of course, in addition one might distinguish publications that seem to comprise foundational and exegetical literature. For example, a text such as Derrida’s On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy (2005), is a genre of phenomenological philosophical thinking that transposes the apparent exegetical style of interpreting Jean-Luc Nancy’s texts to a level of originality and fascination that does not only clarify but that (re)invents.

This book, Classic Writings for a Phenomenology of Practice, is primarily concerned with this third stream of a phenomenological lifeworld practice. The Utrecht studies were probably among the first to focus on the practice of actually doing phenomenology on mostly ordinary phenomena of everyday and professional life, as van den Berg and Linschoten indicated. We believe that these writings are challenging and demanding, not only because of their scholarly resourcefulness, but also because of the required talents for perceptive phenomenological insights of these early leading proponents. Readers may benefit from these classic examples for their own interests and for gaining an understanding of these features of insightful inquiry for their own possible phenomenological projects.

Of course, the reader may wonder how this book, Classic Writings for a Phenomenology of Practice, fits into the various streams as identified by Kockelmans. We do not see ourselves performing exegesis on technical philosophical positions and arguments. This book is about the puzzling process of aiming to let phenomenological meanings of the topics of these featured classic phenomenological texts appear into view, hopefully helping us to gain a sense of how phenomenological inquiry and research may be pursued and practised when performed directly on the phenomena and the things. We discuss and reflect on methodological ideas, such as the phenomenological attitude and example, that are crucial for phenomenological inquiry and research while doing so in a manner that shows phenomenologically how phenomenology is done (rather than abstractly theorize about phenomenological themes).

We selected these essays for their variety of subject matter as well as the differing ways the authors engaged a phenomenological method. We aim to show that these authors and essays were driven by the phenomenological attitude. “Phenomenology is a method; it could be called an attitude,” said van den Berg (1972, p. 77). But in what sense could it be called a phenomenological attitude? We aim to show ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Doing Phenomenology
• 2 Jan H. van den Berg
• 3 The Conversation: [Het Gesprek, 1953]
• 4 Descant on “The Conversation”
• 5 Frederik J.J. Buytendijk
• 6 The First Smile of the Child: [De Eerste Glimlach van het Kind, 1947]
• 7 Descant on “The First Smile of the Child”
• 8 The Experience of Compulsiveness: [De Doorleefde Dwang, 1970]
• 9 Descant on “The Experience of Compulsiveness”
• 10 Martinus J. Langeveld
• 11 The “Secret Place” in the Life of the Child: [De “Geheime Plaats” in het Leven van het Kind, 1953/1967]
• 12 Descant on “The ‘Secret Place’ in the Life of the Child”
• 13 The Thing in the World of the Child: [Das Ding in der Welt des Kindes, 1956]
• 14 Descant on “The Thing in the World of the Child”
• 15 Johannes Linschoten
• 16 On Humour: [Over de Humor, 1951]
• 17 Descant on “On Humour”
• Index