HAUTE VOIX

Phenomenology offers a philosophical viewpoint that can explicate the nature of human experience. Its core philosophy rests on the concept of lived experience, or lifeworld, terms that are often used interchangeably in phenomenology and taken to mean the world immediately experienced (van Manen, 1997b). Phenomenology also embraces unique concepts, for example intentionality, natural attitude, phenomenological

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attitude, epoché, and eidetic intuition, which systematise ways of understanding lived experience, and are explained below.

Lifeworld has been described as ‘that province of reality which the wide-awake and normal adult simply takes for granted in the attitude of common sense’ (Schutz and Luckmann, 1973: 3). Drawing on Merleau-Ponty (1962), lifeworld is additionally ‘the world we have access to through our bodies’ (Dahlberg et al., 2001: 49). This is experience that happens in the flow of living, which ‘involves our immediate, pre- reflective consciousness of life: a reflexive or self-given awareness which is, as

awareness, unaware of itself’ (van Manen, 1997b: 35). These ways of defining lifeworld are fundamentally describing a pre-reflective way of being in the world. If one turns one’s focus onto oneself as having a particular experience, this then becomes a reflective awareness and thus removed from the immediate lived experience (van Manen, 1997b).

The application of language to describe lived experience can only happen when standing back in some way from it.

Lived experience, being pre-reflective, is also tacit. So, ‘we can know more than we can tell’ (Polanyi, 1966: 4); for example, we can know and recognise a person’s face without being able to say exactly how. This develops the idea of tacit knowledge as something that can remain hidden, despite attempts to articulate what, for example, enables a person to recognise the face of a loved-one in a crowd. It illustrates that meaning can be attached to objects without being aware of the underlying tacit

knowledge. Therefore, when making claims to describe and interpret lived experience, it is important to realise that one can only access the knowledge that is consciously available (through reflective awareness) and which is likely to comprise meanings and interpretations of lived experience.

Experience is a construction arising out of dynamics between self and world, partly expressed by the concept of intentionality. Stemming from the Latin intendere, meaning to aim in a particular direction (Gallagher and Zahavi, 2008), intentionality

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encapsulates the dynamic correlation between the person and the world. It is based on the assumption that conscious individuals are always oriented towards something, even if tacitly (Sokolowski, 2000). It links the person with the world in such a way as to make incoherent any idea of world as separate from mind. This perspective challenges Descartes’s view that consciousness is directed inwards, rather than outwards, and happens inside the confines of a boxed-in mind (Langdridge, 2007; Sokolowski, 2000). A confined mind cannot experience a world in common with others. This construction of experience lays the ground for showing how the mentor experience in the current study is philosophically interdependent with context. Later, it will be shown how Heidegger (1982) re-appropriated intentionality and replaced it with ‘comportment’, in order to better represent directed activity (rather than directed consciousness) in the world, and

facilitating further distancing from any notion of person as separate from world (Dreyfus, 1991).

In phenomenology, intentionality is related to a transitive verb. Hence, a person ‘intends’ an object or another person. Simply understood, this can mean that one is oriented towards the object. There are many different ways of intending, or having a lived experience of the same object, but it is not only material objects that can be intended (Sokolowski, 2000). Hence, intentionality can extend to abstract concepts such as empathy, trustworthiness, equipment and professional conduct. Intentionality, however, is a highly differentiated matter (Sokolowski, 2000). Considering a mentor’s intentionality relating to a patient’s wound, she can ‘intend’ not only through direct bodily perception (by looking at it or smelling it) but pictorially (studying a photograph of the wound),

through words (listening to the patient’s description of how it feels), through remembering (what it was like last week), making judgements (it is healing well) or collecting things into groups (this is a venous ulcer). ‘Intending’ can be of something that is present, but also it can express something being absent, so the mentor can have the ‘empty intention’ of noticing that there are no signs of infection. Despite the range of perceptions and

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interpretations and different modes of intending, the examples given all depict a mentor’s intentionalities of the same wound.

Through intentionality, phenomenology dynamically links person and world. The extent to which a researcher or philosopher studying different instances of a particular lived experience can separate themselves from this close interconnectedness is key to ontological and epistemological positioning when conducting phenomenology. One can take a Husserlian view that it is possible to push aside the external contaminants of a situation (for example the researcher’s assumptions about the experience based on intentionalities and interpretations from their own lifeworld) and study the experience as a sanitised account that directly represents the reported experience. Or, one can take an interpretive stance that self and world are inseparable, so that there is no question of there being an experience that is legitimately understood in any way other than as part of the presiding world of knowledge and assumptions (Langdridge, 2007). Interpretive approaches to phenomenology emerged with the work of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) who, in his development of phenomenology, focused on the problem of what it means to exist in the world (Diekelman, 2005).

This tension concerning the extent to which understanding lived experience should be based on interpretation or objective description is also partly explained with respect to the natural or phenomenological attitudes. The phenomenology of Edmund Husserl (1859-1939) is based on a distinction between the natural attitude and

phenomenological attitude, in which there is an assumption that a person adopting the phenomenological attitude can condition themselves into seeing ‘the things themselves’ rather than a more naturalistic interpretation (Gallagher and Zahavi, 2008). The natural attitude is the mode in which lived experience happens, in which someone as intending agent, is actively and immediately, yet unnoticingly immersed. Thus, the

phenomenological attitude demands a disciplined approach studying the unnoticed intentionalities themselves, rather than the whole worldly context (Sokolowski, 2000). It is

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interested in how things appear – their modes of appearing – rather than what they are (Gallagher and Zahavi, 2008).

It is postulated that a skilled philosopher can adopt the phenomenological attitude and pass through a ‘philosophical gate of entry’ (Zahavi, 2003: 46), having suspended the presuppositions and theoretical commitments that might guide their expectations in the natural attitude. This procedure is known as ‘the epoché’ (Zahavi, 2003). It is likened to standing back from the immediacy of the natural attitude in which things are already interpreted and given meaning and yet simultaneously tacitly invisible. In conducting the epoché, we do not dispense with the natural attitude, but hold it in suspense (‘bracketing’ it), in order to maintain an open attitude towards the phenomenon being studied

(Dahlberg et al., 2001; Zahavi, 2003). However, the extent to which this is achievable, even by the most accomplished philosopher, is a matter for debate (Crotty, 1996; Paley, 1997; van Manen, 1997b). This debate challenges the legitimacy of the epoché as a tool for empirical research, especially if accepting Crotty’s (1996: 171) relatively extreme assertion that the phenomenological attitude also needs to be adopted by research participants as co-researchers, and that ‘everyone involved in phenomenological research has to be a phenomenologist’.

Developing the discussion of intentionality further, phenomenologists are also interested in eidetic intuition, insight into an essence, which is ‘a special kind of

intentionality’ (Sokolowski, 2000: 177). This is significant empirically because, as will be shown later, phenomenological research seeks to discover the essence of particular experiences or objects. Phenomenological ‘essence’ is very close in meaning to the everyday understanding of the term. Therefore, a philosopher asking ‘what is the essence of mentoring?’ would want to know what distinguishes mentoring from some other similar activity such as teaching or parenting, as well as establishing its

particularities. Eidetic intuition involves synthesis and a move into imagination

(Sokolowski, 2000). For example, a mentor might contemplate the essence of being a student attending their first ward placement. Moving from an observation that such

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students seem to find everything unfamiliar and that the end of the course is far from sight, after experiencing several students with similar characteristics, she might confirm that this intuition is indeed a generalisable feature. The last stage is imaginative

variation, or ‘armchair philosophising’, in which the limits of this intuition are tested (Sokolowski, 2000: 178-179). So, she might ask herself whether some things but not others are unfamiliar – for example, the students might be familiar with some of the equipment, but only in a classroom context. She might reflect on how the students feel about the time ahead of them. Eventually, she may conclude that the essence of being a student on their first ward is ‘needing to become familiar with routines and everyday equipment in the ward context, and a little in awe of the long road ahead to qualifying’.

Crowell (2004) claimed that eidetic intuition was central to all phenomenology and that although ‘phenomenology might begin with an example drawn from experience, (…) its goal is not an exhaustive description’. It is, instead, the insights that are important. Gendlin (1965: 243), however, has signalled a limitation of phenomenology by

questioning the relationship between ‘the thematized description and the nonthematic character of the given’. By this, he means that imposing structures on phenomenological descriptions through applying a philosophical approach can only ever result in a

simplification of the experience as it is lived.

In summary, phenomenology offers a framework for articulating and

understanding different ways of being in and knowing the world (Sokolowski, 2000). Five fundamental features are lived experience as a pre-reflective way of being immersed in the world, intentionality as different modes of awareness of objects, the natural attitude of lived experience, the phenomenological attitude (via the epoché) for systematically studying the knower and the known, and the eidetic intuition of essences. In this context, Husserl proposed that experience should be studied free from personal assumptions, whereas Heidegger supported the view that experience includes interpretation, to which assumptions are integral. In the next sub-section, phenomenological concepts will be

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differentiated further to show how they can support understanding of practice as lived experience.