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.