Being deep in thought

why should we need to know the answer of the Life, Universe, and Everything. The giant supercomputer "Deep Thought" has already spent six and half million years to get the answer for us. But nobody understands what the answer means. http://benchu.com/blog/?cat=9
Based on FluidityTheme Redesigned by Kaushal Sheth

My first run through my three Findings chapters was literally just that - or at least a brisk jog to gather together the data and developing understandings under the main themes. It was a way of 'getting it all together' as simultaneously as possible in order to be able to grasp the whole. The 'whole' was not just my interpretations of the mentor experience, but also the underlying philosophy that underpinned the research. It was a mad dash to have the 'whole' in my hands before being freed up to consider the parts again. I felt subject to considerable momentum, always wishing I was writing the next chapter.

Now that I'm writing about what I actually did, and am still immersed in doing, I'm suddenly paralysed and thrown into a state of deep thought. I read about the experiences of other phenomenological researchers and how the very act of putting 'what you did' into words becomes paradoxical because of the very unmethodical nature of coming to grasp the essence of experiences. I revisit my findings and themes - how did I get to that point? No amount of accounting for ways of working with the data can quite represent my mental processes and the experience of intutively feeling one's way through.

Heidegger: out of the fog

Reading Heidegger does't plunge me into fog in quite the same way as it used to. There must be some understanding of phenomenology percolating its way into me. I'm thinking of using these two extracts to head up my chapter on using phenomenology in my research:

The question of the meaning of Being is the most universal and the emptiest of questions, but at the same time it is possible to individualize it very precisely for any particular Dasein. If we are to arrive at the basic concept of ‘Being’, and to outline the ontological conceptions which it requires and the variations which it necessarily undergoes, we need a clue which is concrete. (Heidegger, 1962: 63)


Thus, to give a phenomenological description of the ‘world’ will mean to exhibit the Being of those entities which are present-at-hand within the world, and to fix it in concepts which are categorical. (Heidegger, 1962: 91)

From vagueness to distinctness

I'm glad I read Robert Sokolowski's book "Introduction to Phenomenology".  I can feel myself moving from a position of vagueness to a position of distinctness, although I am still on that journey - I haven't arrived yet.   Vagueness can be characterised by half-formed thoughts that are inchoate - somewhere between ignorance and error.  "Contradiction deals with the form of judgements, incoherence deals with their content, and both can occur in the fog of vagueness" (p107). The good thing about this is that it is normal to move from a position of vagueness on the way to distinctness. As one continues to grapple with a domain of knowledge, the contradictions and incoherences are flushed out and one's thinking and reasoning becomes distinct.

Different data types telling different stories

As I was preparing a presentation talking about my use of "rich pictures" in my PhD research, it occurred to me that I had a good example of an event that was represented in quite different ways by the different methods of data collection.  My participant had described what happened in writing in her event diary. She had also drawn a picture of the event, in which she had drawn herself and the other parties along with some of the details of what the event was about.  I also had interview data in which she re-told the story of what happened as well as explaining the contents of the rich picture.    Putting extracts of all three data sources side-by side gave quite an astonishing contrast between them. The event diary entry was quite factual and matter-of-fact in the way the event was described.  The interview revealed a few hesitancies over whether or not a colleague could be fully trusted to carry out a certain delgated responsibilty.  It made the situation as originally described not quite so clear cut.  The picture presented the event from quite a different perspective.  It revealed even more misgivings about the situation. 

The other thing I've noticed when looking at the rich pictures is that the participants drew themselves in the picture.  This wasn't at all a surprise, as they were all clearly part of these events, but it does offer unexpected opportunities to consider what this might tell me about their personal and professional identities, and also that of their colleagues sometimes.  It also brings the body into focus.  the body is often overlooked when people talk about their practice, but it is clearly visible in the pictures I've been given.

Space and place

Yi-Fu Tuan is a human geographer and philosopher who caught my attention for the first time last summer when I picked up his 1997 book "Space and Place: the perspective of experience" in the Open University library. As I've been considering the experiences of my mentor research participants in terms of spaciality in the context of the lifeworld existentials, this seemed an important text for me to study, and it didn't disappoint.

The play between emotion and cognition have never been far from my mind, and in this book Tuan provides a comforting, very simple, model for understanding how these "ways of knowing" help us to make sense of the world. I like the way he said that "emotion tints all human experience, including the high flights of thought" (p8). And likewise, physical sensations such as pleasure pain, heat, or cold are qualified by thought.

The orientation of the human body can also be significant when thinking about the experience of space and how time comes into the picture. Tuan said "on a temporal plane frontal space is perceived as future, rear space as past." (p40) . He goes on to talk about dignity being signified at the front and the human face commanding respect. In this one idea concerning the orientation of the human body, one can see the convergence of spatiality, temporality, corporeality and relationality. One really needs to take a pause for thought here at the interconnectedness of this human geography perspective with lifeworld studies. I have found so many useful ideas in the book. Another idea that resonates well for me in terms of understanding the place of spaciality in lived experience, is this "The world feels spacious and friendly when it accommodates our desires and cramped when it frustrates them" (p65). I know that I've heard many tales of frustration in the process of data collection, so this provides another way of understanding and expressing feelings of frustration. There are other elements of space and place that I know I'll find useful in my thesis, including the experience of distance and intimate experiences of place.

In his Dear colleagues section of his personal website Tuan said recently 'No matter how miserable or happy I am, someone “out there” has not only experienced it but has written it down and published' (http://www.yifutuan.org/dear_colleague.htm). In many ways, this sums up why I'm doing my research - to be able to write down and publish the lived experience of being a mentor for student nurses so that others can read it and know that they're not alone in their experience (which is a mixture of happy and miserable and much more, of course). It's the same, too, in my teaching role. I've recently recorded an audio resource in which students share their experiences of writing essays, and my main aim was to make the everyday, usually private activities of student writing open to others.

Husserl and Heidegger

Something that's bugging me at the moment is the idea that the rhetoric mostly assumes that if you go with Husserl you follow one discrete path and if you go with Heidegger you follow a completely different path, and so on. However, I don't see the two as mutually exclusive, but rather as giving two different sides of the story. So, in the context of my PhD looking at the lived experience of mentors, I could use a Husserlian perspective to say what mentoring students is (and isn't - I have some data where the participants have talked about other mentoring activities that are different) and to describe the lifeworld. Perhaps this is getting at the essence of the experience. Then, taking a Heideggerian approach, I can then get into what it means to be a mentor.

I'd always thought I would take a Heideggerian approach, or at least a hermeneutic or interpretive approach, which then brings me to Gadamer too. I've made heavy use of Max van Manen, who seems quite eclectic in how he draws on the different philosophers.

I've been reading Dan Zahavi's book "Husserl's phenomenology" which seems to be very clear in setting out how Husserl's thinking has progressed and where misrepresentations are sometimes made with regard to the transcendental nature of Husserl's phenomenology. The idea of transcendence comes in useful when talking about self and Other or objects, and moving from there to intersubjectivity. It is also useful for accounting for phenomena such as empathy. Surely when it comes to interpretive and hermeneutic phenomenology, transcendental intersubjectivity is part of the world we describe and interpret.

A way I sometimes use for myself to make sense of the different approaches is to say that with Husserl we are asking the question "how can I know the world" and with Heidegger it is more about "What is it like to exist or 'be' in the world ". My research question addresses the latter, but surely the path to finding this out is also to pay attention to the former.

I've used a number of different approaches to data collection - up to three interviews per participant, in which they lead on the description of their experiences mentoring, reflect on events they have written up (and/or drawn a picture of), guided by me, and reflect on an initial draft of themes. I've also applied a well-being measure in the form of a mood questionnaire for work, mentoring and the events.

I've done quite a bit of work mapping the data and ideas to the four lifeworld existentials temporality, spaciality, corporeality and relationality, and this does create a convenient way of thinking about the mentor lifeworld. But the whole notion of lifeworld seems to cross the boundaries between the different disciplines in phenomenology, so this also leaves me feeling slightly adrift when trying to nail my colours to the mast.