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Hermeneutic Phenomenology

Paul Sharkey. (2001). “Hermeneutic phenomenology” in Phenomenology. (Robyn Barnacle, Ed.) Melbourne: RMIT Publishing.

When I ask myself why I chose to engage in a research process that was informed by the traditions of phenomenology and hermeneutics, I find myself confronted with a question like ‘Why did I marry this person and not that one?’ or ‘Why am I working in this profession rather than another one?’ Questions like these are easy to answer on a superficial level, but much harder to answer at depth.

The current reflections stem from a recent case study of educational change completed in the context of a doctoral research program. A program of change in a particular school was investigated, and the school’s mission and the professional outlook of its teachers were to the fore in the investigation. Points of resonance and dissonance between the school’s mission and the outlook of its teachers were identified during the study.

As might be imagined, there were many differences among teachers and administrators as the change process unfolded. Hermeneutic phenomenology was useful in this context because it provided a robust framework for considering the nature of the many acts of interpretation and understanding that were associated with the change process. Whilst hermeneutic phenomenology threw light onto the research process, it did not supply a set of rule-like procedures for conducting the program of research. In fact hermeneutic phenomenology does just the opposite and holds that methods in themselves do not lead to understanding or good interpretative outcomes, other factors do. These factors are variously described in the hermeneutic literature as scholarship, tact, judgement and taste.

The literature of hermeneutic phenomenology is admittedly somewhat dense and abstract but because interpretation and understanding are critical elements in any research process, the effort to penetrate the literature is richly rewarding. Many practical consequences flow from the decisions (conscious or otherwise) that the researcher makes in regard to issues that are reflected upon deeply in the literature on hermeneutic phenomenology.

For example, whilst many research approaches seek to be ‘objective’, hermeneutic phenomenology does not seek to objectify the ‘object’ of the researcher’s interest. On the contrary, hermeneutic phenomenology always seeks to open up a middle space of rich engagement between the research object and the researcher. Metaphors like play and conversation are used in hermeneutic phenomenology to describe this middle space. Dialogue partners get lost in the conversation’s subject matter in authentic conversation and it is this ‘getting lost in the subject matter’ that leads to genuine understanding and interpretation. The example of players getting lost in the playing of a game is offered in hermeneutic phenomenology as another instance of the human capacity for deep engagement and an expansion of understanding. The goal of hermeneutic phenomenology is a ‘fusion of horizons’ where the research object is understood not on its own terms, nor on the terms of

Paul Sharkey RMIT Monograph: June, 2000

the researcher, but in terms that are common to both. These common terms emerge in the context of a process of inquiry that can be characterised as being playful and dialogical.

Whilst many research approaches seek to eliminate the prior understandings of the researcher, hermeneutic phenomenology seeks to test those prior understandings. The prior understandings are seen as the prerequisite and the point of entry for any act of interpretation or understanding. The goal of the research process is not to jettison these prior understandings, rather it is to test them. This testing unfolds as a deep and genuine engagement with the object of one’s research interest. The engagement is ‘genuine’ when it is open to the possibility that ‘something else might be the case’. The implication for research is that the researcher must always remain open to having his or her current understandings confirmed or varied by what arises as the research process unfolds.

Before considering these insights from hermeneutic phenomenology in greater detail, it is helpful to consider phenomenology and hermeneutics as separate entities in their own right. The marriage that is hermeneutic phenomenology draws richly on the traditions of both hermeneutics and phenomenology in philosophy and there are many valuable insights in these traditions for the contemporary researcher. Having drawn insights from the philosophical sources, the current reflections conclude by considering some very practical issues associated with the conduct of the research program and by providing some examples that illustrate what the ‘product’ of hermeneutic phenomenology might look like.

Phenomenology

Edmund Husserl (d. 1938) was an important figure in the development of phenomenology. Husserl’s phenomenology aimed to provide a firm foundation for knowledge. He developed a method of reflection that sought to regard objects with as few presuppositions as possible. ‘Zu den Sachen!’ is a phrase that captures the impulse that drove Husserl’s phenomenology. Literally translated, the phrase means ‘To the things!’ Phenomenological reflection seeks to provide a true description of objects based on what the objects are in themselves (in contrast to a description of the objects based upon presuppositions of one type or another). In this sense phenomenology involves a disciplined and sustained attending to the things themselves and phenomenological descriptions are the outcome of such disciplined attending.

Husserl’s method for regarding things ‘in themselves’ involved a deliberate attempt to suspend one’s presuppositions about the phenomenon that one was describing. Terms like ‘bracketing’, ‘epoche’ and ‘reduction’ are all associated with the method that Husserl elaborated. The following excerpt from a lecture series given by Husserl in 1907 provides a clear indication of the impulse that drove his phenomenology.

No inclination is more dangerous to the ‘seeing’ cognition of origins and absolute data than to think too much, and from these reflections in thought to create supposed self-evident principles. … Thus as little interpretation as possible, but as pure an intuition as possible. In fact, we will hark back to the speech of the mystics when they describe the intellectual seeing which is supposed not to be a discursive knowledge. And the whole trick consists in this – to give free rein to the seeing eye and to bracket the references which go beyond the ‘seeing’ and are entangled with the seeing, along with the entities which are supposedly given and thought along with the ‘seeing’ and finally to bracket what is read into them though the accompanying reflections (Husserl, 1990/1907, p. 50).


Van Manen (1996) noted that many phenomenologists have now abandoned Husserl’s method involving a bracketing of presuppositions and have taken up alternative options like poetry in their efforts to describe objects in a phenomenological way. 1 For Van Manen, phenomenological texts contain ‘thickened’ language – a language that is concrete but evocative and intensified in some way. The effect of this type of language is to break through taken-for-granted meanings in everyday life to call the reader into a nearer encounter with the phenomenon. Phenomenological writing invites the reader to encounter the phenomenon in a new and fresh way.

If the description is phenomenologically powerful, then it acquires a certain transparency, so to speak; it permits us to ‘see’ the deeper significance, or meaning structures, of the lived experience it describes (van Manen, 1990, p. 122).

Crotty (1996) was highly critical of many of the research products travelling by the name ‘phenomenology.’ His criticism stemmed from the fact that they had not engaged with the philosophical tradition of phenomenology. Crotty has in mind here research approaches labelled as ‘phenomenology’ simply because they capture the ‘subjective’ experience of the actors being studied. Crotty’s reading of phenomenology as a philosophy is that it involves a commitment to describing the reality that is beneath and beyond the subject’s experience. He cited the work of Moustakas as a case in point.

What Moustakas is seeking to elucidate is loneliness and not just lonely people. His study became phenomenological as he moved from an understanding of his subjects’ individual experiences of loneliness to an insight into what makes loneliness loneliness. What it studies in the subjects is the object of their experience so that there is an objectivity about phenomenological research (Crotty, 1996, p. 35).

Crotty’s analysis is important because it invites researchers to draw deep insights from phenomenology as a philosophy. Crotty also argued that scholarship demanded that those who claim the term ‘phenomenology’ for their research ought to have engaged with the philosophy that gave rise to the term in the first place.

Those who understand the effects of history and language (and this includes Crotty) acknowledge that it is never possible to provide an ‘objective’ description of reality. The phenomenological project does not result in an objective description; rather, it is a project that seeks to move beyond the subjective experience of individuals to describe underlying structures or essences in that experience. In this sense the phenomenological project can be contrasted to the project of traditional ethnography where the intention is to describe, within their own terms of reference, the experience and culture of individuals in a particular setting.

Hermeneutics

The key figures exemplifying the synthesis that is hermeneutic phenomenology are Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur (Thompson, 1981, p. 36). Gadamer engaged in an extended analysis of the phenomenon of human understanding and his reflections have deeply shaped the research approach being described here. Gadamer was a student of Heidegger, who, in his turn, was a student of Husserl. Whilst there are some points of resonance with phenomenology in Gadamer’s analysis, there is also much in his work that is derived from alternative sources.


In the first instance, hermeneutics was a discipline that elaborated the principles and procedures that ought to be followed when interpreting texts with meanings that were disputed or not immediately apparent. Exegetes seeking to interpret the Bible had recourse to hermeneutics when they were faced with such difficult texts. Since the time of Schleiermacher (d. 1834) however, hermeneutics broadened in scope. Hermeneutics under Schleiermacher encompassed not only reflection upon the interpretation and understanding of written texts, but also upon the spoken word in discourse. At this point, hermeneutics began to address the broader concern of understanding itself and asked questions like: What is understanding? What happens when I say ‘I understand’? (Palmer, 1969, p. 68; Howard, 1982, p. xiii).

Wilhelm Dilthey (d. 1911) continued the trajectory begun by Schleiermacher and included within the locus of hermeneutics not only reflection on the interpretation of texts and discourse, but also reflection on the interpretation of meaningful human action more generally in such disciplines as history and philosophy. Dilthey was concerned that the Geisteswissenschaften 2 (the human sciences) were being denigrated as second-class academic disciplines because of the ‘rampant positivism’ of his day (Begley, 1996, p. 92). Dilthey argued that whilst the human sciences employed different methods from those used in the natural sciences, the human sciences were not less valuable as a consequence. He held that the natural sciences were concerned with ‘explanation’ and the human sciences were concerned with ‘understanding.’ (Some of these distinctions can still be found today in methodological reflection on the differences between qualitative and quantitative research in social science.) Dilthey distinguished between natural science which sought to quantify and scientifically grasp the natural world, and the modality of the human sciences which was concerned with interpreting and understanding the great expressions of human life, whether derived from law, literature or sacred scripture (Palmer, 1969, p. 41). Dilthey’s use of hermeneutics as a vehicle for reflecting on the methodological foundations of disciplines like history and philosophy widened the scope for hermeneutics beyond texts and discourse to include reflection upon the interpretation of meaningful action more generally. Gadamer’s hermeneutics continued in the vein of Schleiermacher and Dilthey.

A full analysis of Gadamer’s thought would demand more than a thesis in its own right. The intention in the present reflections is not to rehearse the details of Gadamer’s analysis but to describe insights drawn from his work that became important in the conduct of the research program. The following reflections draw out six Gadamerian insights and relate them to the conduct of qualitative research. The insights include the following: the status of method, conversation and play as models of human understanding, a presentation of the productive (rather than reproductive) nature of human understanding, a highlighting of the importance of prejudice, and a depiction of human understanding as a ‘fusion of horizons’.

method

A fundamental insight in philosophical hermeneutics is that the person who would understand a text 3 or another of life’s expressions, does not, in the first instance, rely upon a method. Gadamer’s analysis was intended to demonstrate the many ways in which human understanding unfolds in the context of, and is embedded in, both history and language. A central plank in Gadamer’s argument is that scientific method does not provide a means by which the researcher can escape the many effects of history and language. (Having made this point however, Gadamer is at pains to point out, particularly in later revisions of Truth and Method, that modern science is well served by methodical rigour (Gadamer, 1989, pp. xxix, 552).) He argued though that the certainty achieved by scientific method does not suffice to guarantee truth. Truth, for Gadamer, is found by entering into genuine conversation with the Paul Sharkey RMIT Monograph: June, 2000

text and knowing how to ask the right questions of it (Gadamer, 1989, p. 491) and there is no such thing as a method that tells one how to find what is questionable in regard to one of life’s expressions (Gadamer, 1989, p. 365).

Kvale (1996, p. 180) argued that there ‘are no standard methods, no via regia, to arrive at essential meanings and deeper implications of what is said in an interview.’ This approach to research is also found in Hultgren (1993, p. 29) who challenged the assumption that finding truth ultimately depends on choosing the right methodology. Van Manen (1990, p. 29) continued in the same vein when he offered his methodological text as a methodos (a way) to do qualitative research rather than a method. Van Manen contrasted his approach with ‘any tendency toward constructing a predetermined set of fixed procedures, techniques and concepts that would rule-govern the research project’ (p. 29).

Although he did not suggest that transcript-coding approaches were inappropriate for qualitative research, van Manen differentiated his research approach from the ‘analytic-coding, taxonomic, and data-organising practices common to ethnography or grounded theory method’ (van Manen, 1990, p. 29). Van Manen was wary of frequency counting or coding as a means of identifying themes in the data. ‘Too often theme analysis is understood as an unambiguous and fairly mechanical application of some frequency count or coding of selected terms in transcripts or texts, or some other break-down of the content of protocol or documentary material’ (van Manen, 1990, p. 78). Mishler (1986) is similarly critical of some coding approaches: ‘Codes are generally defined in context-free, sequence free terms. ... Although a good deal of uncertainty often accompanies coding ... statistical evidence brings assurance; significant relations are forthcoming and findings appear’ (Mishler, 1986, p. 4).

The critique of the coding as a practice in qualitative research is not offered in an attempt to denigrate the approach. There are many studies that harness the power of the computer and of the coding hierarchy to generate profound insights into the matters being investigated. The hermeneutic conviction is however that coding, of itself, does not necessarily lead to understanding or insight; rather, the disclosive power of research is animated by the researcher’s powers of observation, reflection and judgement. Gadamer’s hermeneutics

1 Notes

? There are exceptions to this observation: for example, the work of Giorgi (1994), a North American psychologist who proposed a method that stayed much closer to steps elaborated by Husserl.

2 There is no English equivalent for the collection of academic disciplines that comprise the Geisteswissenschaften. Begley (1996, p. 92) defined the Geisteswissenschaften as the ‘spiritual,’ ‘cultural,’ or ‘human’ disciplines. Palmer (1969, p. 41) described the Geisteswissenschaften as ‘all disciplines focused on understanding man’s art, actions, and writings’. Van Manen (1990, p.3) included under the umbrella of the human sciences the humanities and the arts along with symbolic interactionism, phenomenological sociology, ethnography, ethnomethodology, critical theory and gender study. Teigas (1995, p.195) defined the Geisteswissenschaften as being comprised of all the social and historical disciplines as distinct from the natural sciences. Teigas notes that the term also has a wider meaning where it includes literature, philosophy and the arts - i.e. whatever springs from the mind. He argued that Gadamer’s use of the term was narrower than this though and did not include philosophy, the arts or literature.

3 The word ‘text’ once meant printed words on a page. Increasingly though, the word is used in a broader sense. ‘Interpretation, as we understand it today, is applied not only to texts and verbal tradition, but to everything bequeathed to us by history; thus, for example, we will speak not only of the interpretation of an historical incident, but also the interpretation of spiritual and mimed expressions, the interpretation of behaviour and so forth (Gadamer, 1979, p. 111).’ ‘Text’ is used in a broader sense in these reflections and include ‘every product of culture, including non-verbal records’ (Weinsheimer, 1991, p. 5).


highlights the value of insight and reflection that lie beyond method and these values are to the fore in hermeneutic phenomenology.

conversation

Gadamer offered ‘conversation’ as an ideal for what ought to happen during the hermeneutic process (Gadamer, 1989, p. 385). Conversation exemplified the responsiveness, creativity and freedom so central in genuine understanding.

We say that we ‘conduct’ a conversation, but the more genuine a conversation is, the less its conduct lies within the will of either partner. Thus a genuine conversation is never the one we wanted to conduct. Rather, it is generally more correct to say that we fall into conversation, or even that we become involved in it. The way one word follows another, with the conversation taking its own twists and reaching its own conclusion, may well be conducted in some way, but the partners conversing are far less the leaders of it than the led. No one knows in advance what will ‘come out’ of a conversation. Understanding or its failure is like an event that happens to us. Thus we can say that something was a good conversation or that it was ill fated (Gadamer, 1989, p. 383).

Conversations work well when the Sache selbst (subject matter) of the conversation takes over and the dialogue partners allow themselves to be led by it. Just as phenomenological inquiry is characterised by ‘Zu den Sachen!’ a sustained return to the things themselves, hermeneutic inquiry is sustained by a responsiveness to the subject matter as it is opened up in the conversation. Conversations are thwarted when one of the dialogue partners refuses to be led by the conversation’s subject matter and seeks instead to ‘railroad’ the conversation by imposing his or her own point of view as a template for the conversation to run along. The prerequisite for genuine conversation is that the dialogue partners surrender to the ebb and flow of the conversation as its subject matter unfolds. Individuals allow themselves to be conducted by the subject matter of the conversation when they really consider the weight of the other’s opinion. The art of questioning was highlighted by Gadamer as being central to the capacity to weigh and test what the Other has to say in the conversation (Gadamer, 1989, p. 367).

... to question means to lay open, to place in the open. As against the fixity of opinions, questioning makes the object and all its possibilities fluid. A person skilled in the ‘art’ of questioning is a person who can prevent questions from being suppressed by the dominant opinion (Gadamer, 1989, p. 367).

play

Gadamer’s analysis of play complemented his reflections on conversation. Both play and conversation point to the human capacity for engagement and responsiveness lying at the heart of the phenomenon of human understanding. In Gadamer’s reflections on what it is like to be lost in the playing of a game, he argued that the game draws the players into its power and fills them with its spirit (Gadamer, 1989, p. 109). The player who refuses to ‘get into’ the spirit of the game is described as a ‘spoilsport.’ Part of the spirit of a game is that the players do not have control of the game’s outcome (Gadamer, 1989, p. 106). The whole point of the game is that the outcome is undecided – it is unclear just what will happen. In a game of chess, for example, the spirit of the game would be destroyed if the players changed the rules about how to move the pieces whenever they felt the game was not going their way (Weinsheimer, 1985, p. 104). ‘The attraction of a game, the fascination it exerts, consists Paul Sharkey RMIT Monograph: June, 2000

precisely in the fact that the game masters its players’ (Gadamer, 1989, p. 106). For Gadamer, play is as much a ‘being-played-by’ the game as it is a ‘playing’ of it. ‘Ball games will be with us forever,’ Gadamer wrote, ‘because the ball is freely mobile in every direction, appearing to do surprising things of its own accord’ (Gadamer, 1989, p. 106).

The value of play and conversation in Gadamer’s reflections is that they both point to the human capacity to become lost in the encounter so that the sense is less one of subjects doing something to objects, and more one of engagement such that the dividing lines between subjects and objects are blurred. The outcome of the genuine game is associated with none of the participants and all of them at the same time. The notion of Zwischen (middle space) was important in Gadamer’s analysis as the task of interpretation can never be framed in the terms of an event where a subject interprets a text as an object (Gadamer, 1989, p. 311). Interpretation is framed by Gadamer as an event unfolding in the middle space of encounter between text and interpreter. Various commentators on Gadamer have elaborated upon his analysis of the middle space in which the phenomenon of human understanding unfolds. Crusius (1991) located the meaning of the text ‘in “the between” among us as we attempt to enlarge our horizons by incorporating the insights of the other, even as the other is challenged by what we ask and assert’ (p. 39).

‘The miracle of understanding,’ Gadamer argued, ‘is not a mysterious communion of souls but sharing in a common meaning’ (Gadamer, 1989, p. 292). The common meaning is found in the encounter between interpreter and text. Metaphors like play and conversation point to the interactive and responsive nature of that encounter. The encounter is so engaging that the participants get lost in a creative middle space where their own ideas and horizons are brought into a creative fusion with those of the text. It is in this middle space that understanding unfolds and the text is heard for what it has to say in the context of those who seek to interpret it. The fusion of horizons between text and interpreter is a dynamic and broadening process. The hermeneutic task is not presented as one where an interpreter (with a fixed horizon) seeks to understand the fixed and objective meaning of a text (also with a fixed horizon). The hermeneutic task is presented as one where the meaning of the text opens up in an encounter that is best described as contextual, playful and dialogical. Researchers who engage in hermeneutic phenomenology take these insights seriously and seek to enter the middle space that is opened up in dialogical and playful engagement with the object of the research interest.

understanding as a productive (not reproductive) activity

Not occasionally but always, the meaning of a text goes beyond its author. That is why understanding is not merely a reproductive but always a productive activity as well. ... It is enough to say that we understand in a different way, if we understand at all (Gadamer, 1989, p. 296 – emphasis in original).

For Gadamer, understanding takes place as a fusion of horizons: a fusion between the horizon of the interpreter and the horizon projected by the text. Because the horizon projected by the text is always understood within the context of the interpreter, the hermeneutic process cannot be one of reproducing the mind of the text’s author but rather, one of engaging with the text in a spirit of openness so that what it has to say finds expression within the horizon of the interpreter. Whilst Schleiermacher portrayed the hermeneutic task as being one of reconstructing what was in the mind of the author as a means to understanding the meaning of the text, Gadamer argued that hermeneutics was always a productive, rather than a reproductive, activity because the meaning of a text is always co-determined by both the hermeneutic situation of the interpreter and the horizon that the text projects. There are Paul Sharkey RMIT Monograph: June, 2000

implications for the process of deriving meaning of texts when the task of interpretation is understood in this way.

... the artist who creates something is not the appointed interpreter of it. As an interpreter he has no automatic authority over the person who is simply receiving his work. Insofar as he reflects on his own work, he is own reader. The meaning that he, as reader, gives his own work does not set the standard. The only standard of interpretation is the sense of his creation, what it ‘means’ (Gadamer, 1989, p. 193).

This is not to suggest that texts are meaningless, or to assert that the expressions of life have every meaning attributed to them by those who interpret them. Gadamer’s argument is rather that there is no meaning of a text already-out-there waiting to be plucked like an apple from a tree by an interpreter. The act of interpretation is co-determined by the horizons of both the text and the interpreter. Understanding is the culmination of a journey of interpretation that is codetermined by the hermeneutic situations of all involved.

Insofar as the meaning of a text is rendered autonomous with respect to the subjective intention of its author, the essential question is not to recover, behind the text, the lost intention, but to unfold, in front of the text, the ‘world’ which it opens up and discloses. In other words, the hermeneutical task is to discern the ‘matter’ of the text (Gadamer) and not the psychology of its author (Ricoeur, 1981a, p. 111).

Because the act of interpretation is the act whereby the interpreter enters the world that the text discloses in front of itself, the text, once written, has a career (Ricoeur, 1981c, p. 201) that escapes the finite horizon lived by its author. The text ‘transcends its own psycho-sociological conditions of production and thereby opens itself to an unlimited series of readings, themselves situated in different socio-cultural conditions’ (Ricoeur, 1981b, p. 139).

Gadamer (1989, p. 374) held that his aversion towards method in hermeneutics along with his acknowledgment of the productive nature of human understanding did not necessarily lead to an arbitrariness of interpretation. Gadamer offered a number of criteria for the strength of interpretations (Bildung, tact, judgement and the sensus communis) but these lie beyond the scope of the present reflections and are dealt with elsewhere (Sharkey 1997; 1999). For his part, Ricoeur argued that the text provides a ‘limited field of possible constructions’ and that some interpretations were superior to others. The task of interpretation is not to arrive at a possible reading of a text but to justify why the preferred interpretation is more probable than its alternatives (Ricoeur, 1981c, p. 213). Tracy (1981, p. 407) argued that ‘relative adequacy’ was all that one could hope for when it came to interpretation. There was no such thing as the absolutely true interpretation, rather one can only hope to develop an understanding that was more relatively adequate than any of the alternatives. Lonergan (1971, p. 162) set a high benchmark when he held that the best interpretation was one that ‘meets all relevant questions so that there are no further questions that can lead to further insights and so complement, qualify, correct the insights already possessed’.

prejudice

While Gadamer affirmed the open-ended, dynamic nature of human understanding, he also, somewhat paradoxically, affirmed prejudice as the precondition for understanding.

‘The recognition that all understanding inevitably involves some prejudice gives the hermeneutical problem its real thrust’ (Gadamer, 1989, p. 270). For Gadamer, any analysis of the phenomenon of human understanding always needed to take into account the effects of Paul Sharkey RMIT Monograph: June, 2000

history. Human understanding does not happen in a vacuum: it happens rather in a historical and cultural context and the effects of that context cannot be ignored. This historical context ‘prejudices’ the interpreter in various ways. When an individual seeks to understand one of life’s expressions, he or she brings a certain orientation or pre-understanding about the expression that is to be interpreted and this orientation, or pre-understanding (or prejudice in Gadamer’s terminology) shapes the interpretive process. The life expression is understood in a particular way because of the specific questions and pre-understandings brought to the event of understanding by the interpreter.

One response to prejudice is to seek to nullify its effects.

A person who believes he is free of prejudices, relying on the objectivity of his procedures and denying that he is himself conditioned by historical circumstances, experiences the power of the prejudices that unconsciously dominate him as a vis a tergo. A person who does not admit that he is dominated by prejudices will fail to see what manifests itself by their light (Gadamer, 1989, p. 360).

One always understands an expression of life from within the context of a finite historical situation. One cannot know everything prior to the encounter with the text and nor can one approach a text from every angle and every perspective during the interpretative process. One approaches a text, rather, from a particular place with particular pre-understandings and questions. The situatedness of interpreters and the orientations of their questions shape what is known and understood during the interpretive process. Unless one acknowledges the situated and finite place that provides the context for one’s knowing, one experiences the power of unacknowledged prior orientations, assumptions and judgements as a vis a tergo - literally a ‘force from the back’ – which catch the interpreter unawares and influences the process of interpretation accordingly.

Gadamer argued that prejudices or prior understandings of the phenomenon being interpreted are not necessarily wrong, they are simply untested. He presented the hermeneutic task as one where ‘productive’ prejudices are sorted from those that are unproductive. There is no way to separate in advance the productive prejudices that enable understanding from the unproductive prejudices that hinder understanding or lead to misunderstanding (Gadamer, 1989, p. 295). Gadamer acknowledged that the process of understanding may well be one where the interpreter unmasks and rejects a prejudice that was mistaken in some way, but the process may also result in an affirmation of the understanding that one began with. ‘Reflection is not always and unavoidably a step toward dissolving prior convictions’ (Gadamer, 1967/1976, p. 289).

The phenomenon of understanding, as it is described here, is an open, dynamic, and interactive process. There is a movement to-and-fro, a movement from what the text seems to be saying back to the prejudices that one had about the subject matter of the text. There is a preparedness to believe that ‘something else might be the case’ (Van Ghent in Tracy, 1981, p. 102). The to-and-fro of the process of human understanding has characteristics that are not unlike play or the ebb and flow of conversation.

understanding as a fusion of horizons

Gadamer described the phenomenon of human understanding as a fusion of horizons (1989, p. 306). Understanding takes place as a fusion between the horizon of the interpreter (always in a process of formation) and the horizon projected by the life expression being interpreted. For Gadamer, real understanding – the fusion of horizons – meant regaining the concepts of a Paul Sharkey RMIT Monograph: June, 2000

historical past ‘in such a way that they also include our own comprehension of them’ (1989, p. 374). Gadamer’s insight is developed in the present reflections so that the fusion of horizons is a process that results in a new creation, a fusion created out of the encounter between the interpreter and the text being interpreted. Gadamer argued that the fusion of horizons is like a conversation where ‘something is expressed that is not only mine or my author’s but common’ (1989, p. 388).

It is true to say that hermeneutic research seeks to understand the horizons being projected by the people and texts encountered in the field, but this in itself is not the whole project of hermeneutic research. Hermeneutic research is faithful to the horizons of the texts in the field, but it is also inclusive of the researcher’s own comprehension and interpretive insight. Worthwhile hermeneutic research engages genuinely (dialogically and playfully) with the research texts and aims to produce something of value and insight ‘that is not only mine or my author’s but common’.

Why hermeneutic phenomenology?

The central task of phenomenology – to describe the phenomenon underneath subjective experience – remained a point of challenge for me throughout the program of research. I felt enervated by the prospect of breaking through taken-for-granted meanings to encounter the phenomenon in a new and fresh way and then to convey the freshly encountered phenomenon to the reader via thickened and evocative language.

I found the writings of hermeneutic phenomenologists like Gadamer and Ricoeur very challenging. They were challenging in their difficulty but they also became challenging at the level of the foundations of the research process and in regard to the manner in which research ought to be conducted. The engagement with Gadamer in particular led into a fertile complex of questions and insights. Some of the alternative descriptions of qualitative research began to seem superficial when compared with what was being opened up in the conversation with philosophical hermeneutics.

The engagement with Gadamer did not immediately lead to outcomes at a methodological level. In fact the paradox was that Gadamer was principally concerned with how to overthrow the tyranny of method in his own discipline. I found this paradox intriguing and, eventually, enlightening. What was at the heart of good research was not, in the first instance, a method or a procedure. Worthwhile research demanded that the researcher engage with the expressions of life being investigated and to be reflective and responsive in that engagement in a way that culminates in understanding and insight. Van Manen called this capacity ‘scholarship’. Gadamer used words like ‘tact,’ ‘judgement,’ and taste to refer to the qualities that he believed were associated with authentic acts of interpretation and understanding.

The insight that the meaning of the expressions of life have careers that go beyond the intentions of their authors seemed stimulating and worthwhile to me. The project of entering the world that a text would open up in front of itself was far more stimulating to me than the task of simply describing the world behind the text – the world of the author. The author’s intention when writing the text is important enough, inasmuch as it can be grasped, but just as significant are the new meanings emerging during interpretation – meanings that are codetermined by the horizons of both the text being interpreted, and the horizons of those seeking to interpret and understand them. The researcher enters into conversation with the Paul Sharkey RMIT Monograph: June, 2000

texts of the field in order to understand them. The researcher’s understanding is not reproductive or mimetic, but productive and creative, culminating in a fusion that includes the horizons of both the interpreter and the texts, but somehow is more than just the sum of these constituent parts.

The emphasis Gadamer placed on the pre-understandings of the interpreter also seemed insightful and important. The task of interpretation is not one of jettisoning one’s prior understandings, it is rather one of discovering them and testing them and rejecting them or affirming them in the dialogical play of interpretation. New understandings inevitably emerge during the genuine conversation with the text, just as they do in the conduct of worthwhile programs of research.

Finally, the presentation of understanding as a ‘fusion of horizons’ threw light onto the goal of the research process. As the researcher seeking a fusion of horizons, I was challenged to present an understanding that was not mine alone, nor the property of those I was ‘studying’ but an understanding that was common to us both – a new understanding that emerged in the middle space as the conversation that was the research process unfolded.

Moving from philosophy to engaged research

A distinction needs to be made between philosophical concerns and the engaged issues one faces as one actually goes to ‘do’ the research. For example, van Manen (1996) distinguished between phenomenology as a branch of philosophy and ‘engaged phenomenology’ as a social science endeavour. Those wishing to do engaged phenomenological research are advised by Van Manen to read good phenomenological texts so that they can see what perceptive phenomenological material looks like. There is little chance that researchers will be able to engage in phenomenological research if they don’t know what it looks or feels like.

However, even after the researcher has developed a feel for the qualities of the phenomenological research end-product, many decisions still need to be made in regard to the process of the research. The researcher has to settle upon on a research question, engage with the appropriate academic literature, locate possible sources of data relevant to the investigation, consider the ethical issues, establish rapport with any people involved, devise and maintain appropriate record keeping practices, design and execute a data collection plan, conduct the analysis, draw conclusions and then represent the findings for the readers. There is a philosophical dimension to each of these tasks, but there are many practical dimensions as well.

When it came to dealing with the practical questions associated with the conduct of the research, I found it instructive to engage with the more general qualitative research literature beyond phenomenology (e.g. Miles & Huberman, 1994; Denzin & Lincoln, 1994; LeCompte, Millroy & Preissle, 1992). I found these texts particularly useful in regard to thinking through issues associated with participant observation at the research site and also in regard to the setting up and execution of research interviews. The advice given about record keeping during the research process was also most helpful.

Whilst I found it helpful to engage with the standard qualitative research literature, I also sought to stay closely connected with the goals of hermeneutic phenomenology. This was not always a straightforward matter. As the engagement unfolded, there were some


contradictions that required resolution. As the contradictions were resolved, the methodological framework for the research was constructed.

An example will help at this point. Miles and Huberman have been described as being at the ‘scientific’ end of the qualitative research spectrum (Pitman & Maxwell, 1992, p. 732). The following exhortation that Miles and Huberman gave provides an example of their ‘scientific’ approach: ‘... the log is crucial. The dictum is this: If it isn’t on the documentation form or your original worksheets, you didn’t do it. Avoid ‘laundering’ or retrospective enlightenment. Do not let incomplete documentation forms pile up – that defeats your purposes. Do them as you go’ (Miles & Huberman, 1994, p. 286). Whilst Miles and Huberman insist on the researcher avoiding ‘retrospective enlightenment’, the whole point of the research approach advocated by a hermeneutic phenomenologist like van Manen is to achieve such enlightenment.

My own approach was to follow the disciplined participant observation note-taking procedures outlined by methodologists like Miles and Huberman, but to use those notes as grist for the phenomenological mill that turned throughout the program of research. The field notes and interview transcripts became increasingly important to me as the six-year research program unfolded, because they kept me close to the immediacy of what I saw and heard in the field. As I moved into the reflective mode of the analysis phase of the research program, I found it helpful to keep returning to the details of the places, events and people encountered in the course of the research.

Many programs of qualitative research aim to faithfully represent what was found in the field. This form of qualitative research is essentially mimetic, as it seeks to reproduce for the reader what happened in the field. Phenomenological research seeks to move beyond the individual occurrences of a phenomenon to describe the phenomenon itself. Hermeneutic research understands that interpretation is always productive (rather than reproductive) and envisages the research process as culminating in a fusion of horizons – a fusion between the horizons of the texts being interpreted and the horizon of the interpreter. The fusion is creative and always holds more than the sum of both parts alone.

Hermeneutic phenomenology challenges the researcher to reflect deeply on what it is that the texts of the field have to say. The researcher is called to play with the texts – to get lost in deep conversation with them. The goal of this type of research is not to clone the texts of the field for the reader of the research but to invite the reader to enter the world that the texts would disclose and open up in front of themselves.

This is not to denigrate mimetic forms of research which seek to reproduce the world of the field as accurately as possible for the reader. It is, rather, to describe a research approach that operates in a different mode of accuracy. The reader of phenomenological research is invited to transcend what is experienced on the surface to open up the universal quality or essence of the experience being depicted (van Manen, 1990, p. 97). Dening (1996, p. 110) distinguished between what ‘actually’ happened and what ‘really’ happened: ‘I do not care so much about what really happened. About what actually happened, I do’. For Dening, the ‘real’ was like stilled frames on a film whereas the ‘actual’ is given in a processual and unfinished mode where the researcher’s interpretation is voiced and discernible in the foreground of the research narrative.

Two excerpts are provided below as examples of the hermeneutic phenomenology being described in these reflections. Both excerpts are taken from Sharkey (1999). The first excerpt contains two of a series of vignettes that were developed from research interviews Paul Sharkey RMIT Monograph: June, 2000

conducted with 19 teachers about their experiences as educators. The second excerpt is taken from a case narrative where the researcher reflected at length on his experiences as a change agent in a particular school.

Excerpt 1 – a pleasing teaching experienceTeacher 1 I saw him walking around in the middle of the quad, just going round in circles. He had not long returned to school after an illness. This was after lunch. So I picked him up. When we sat down and went into details, he was talking about the fact that he was being bullied and how he was being bullied. I grabbed about forty kids from the year level that I had identified one way or another and I just told them the story as it was about the student’s illness and how it had affected his life. There was absolute silence and the bullies identified themselves. And the positive part about it was that one of the kids came back to see me the next day and he was in tears and he had me in tears and he said I wouldn’t have done it if I had known about the boy’s illness.

Teacher 15 Normally students don’t like doing theory because they see art as a practical subject but I remember this little kid when we were discussing something about an artist. His eyes just widened as if his eyes were going to pop out of his face, and his whole body motion came up and he might have even gone ‘WOW’. This moment happens very rarely where you can just see inspiration being just sucked in by the student. It was wonderful.

Excerpt 2 – the experience of being a change agentAfter some work, we (the Anglesea people) felt that we were ready to run a training program for our leading teachers. Each campus was asked to make arrangements for the release of its leading teachers for the Friday of our training program so that they could spend it with us at a conference centre handy to the school. Not long after the staff release request had been issued, I was walking past the daily organiser’s office on some errand or other, and I was beckoned inside. The Daily Organiser asked for a list of the teachers from our campus who were to be taken away from the school for the training program. When I went through the names with him, he became concerned. ‘How am I going to be able to cover the 21 teachers who will be absent from school on that day?’ he asked me. No answer came immediately to mind so I agreed with him that it was going to be difficult and conducted a strategic retreat. The Daily Organiser indicated that he would be taking the matter up with the Head of Campus.

The Head of Campus held his nerve and so arrangements were made for the teachers to be released. Very soon after the letters of ‘invitation’ were sent out, one of the Heads of Department wrote a terse and sarcastic letter to the Director of Studies pointing out that the seminar day would take him away from his teaching right at the time when his students needed to be revised for the end of year exam. He asked whether he could be excused from attending the training program. The Director of Studies shared her annoyance with me at the tone of his letter and she indicated that she was going to take the matter up with the Principal. The Principal called the Head of Department in and told him that the priority was for him to attend the conference.

At around the same time, I was at a meeting on a completely unrelated matter and the Daily Organiser from one of the other campuses asked me whether it was possible for three teachers to be released for the seminar rather than the seven that we had asked for from his campus. He claimed that they would have to close their school for the day if all seven were released. I referred the matter to the Director of Studies who was also at the meeting. She indicated that she would add that to her list of agenda items for her meeting with the Principal. A few days later I received a phone call from the Head of Campus of the school in question and he gave me the names of five teachers who were being released. Although we had asked for seven teachers, I decided at that point to cut my losses and accept the list he had given me.


After all of the problems we had in actually signing people up for the program, it was something of a relief when we were actually able to focus our energies on the program itself. The week leading into the seminar was an ‘Exeat’ weekend which meant that the Monday and Tuesday were school holidays. This bunched up the organisation a little but we got there. On the program itself there was a good feeling among the presenting team with people taking initiatives easily and appropriately. The various presentations were well done with individuals obviously having put some thought into their examples. There was an effective use of humour and the content was stimulating in my opinion.

In both of these excerpts the intention was never to present verbatim sections of the interview transcripts or entries from the field notes. Rather, the intention was to invite the reader to enter the world that these texts would open up. This involved a ‘thickened’ type of writing (van Manen, 1996) that sought to evoke the underlying essence of the phenomenon as it was encountered in the field. In the first excerpt each vignette was a brief paragraph that was distilled from many pages of interview transcript. The goal was to write a paragraph that communicated the soul of what it was that the teacher had to say. The goal was the same in the second excerpt. The case narrative, again sought to get to the soul of the experience but this time the initial data for the phenomenological reflection were participant observation field notes, rather than transcripts of research interviews.

Dening (1996) described the research process as culminating in a work of fiction. What he meant here was that researchers inevitably highlight certain events and leave other events out of their research narratives. The events of the field are selected according to some schema, seen from some vantage point and presented in a certain way. In this context, research is properly described as fictional, but it does not have to degenerate into fantasy. Research in the tradition of hermeneutic phenomenology seeks to genuinely engage with what happened in the field and to communicate the meaning and truth of what was encountered in that disclosive engagement. As such, it is a research approach that can be richly rewarding for those who embrace it.

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