CLASSIC WRITINGS FOR A PHENOMENOLOGY OF PRACTICE Michael van Manen and Max van Manen CONTENTS Preface Acknowledgements 1 Doing Phenomenology ix xi 1 2 Jan H. van den Berg 25 3 The Conversation: [Het Gesprek, 1953] 31 4 Descant on “The Conversation” 47 5 Frederik J.J. Buytendijk 53 6 The First Smile of the Child: [De Eerste Glimlach van het Kind, 1947] 60 7 Descant on “The First Smile of the Child” 73 8 The Experience of Compulsiveness: [De Doorleefde Dwang, 1970] 77 9 Descant on “The Experience of Compulsiveness” 90 10 Martinus J. Langeveld 94 viii Contents 11 The “Secret Place” in the Life of the Child: [De “Geheime Plaats” in het Leven van het Kind, 1953/1967] 102 12 Descant on “The ‘Secret Place’ in the Life of the Child” 120 13 The Thing in the World of the Child: [Das Ding in der Welt des Kindes, 1956] 126 14 Descant on “The Thing in the World of the Child” 135 15 Johannes Linschoten 141 16 On Humour: [Over de Humor, 1951] 146 17 Descant on “On Humour” 179 Index 186 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 2 Doing Phenomenology 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 MerleauPonty, 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. Doing Phenomenology 3 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 4 Doing Phenomenology 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 JeanPaul 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 Doing Phenomenology 5 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 that this attitude consists of a certain way of seeing, thinking, and 6 Doing Phenomenology expressing; and that it is a phenomenological attitude because it rests on the epoché and the reduction aimed at eidetic (essential) and inceptual insights into the phenomena and events of our existential lifeworld. The authors van den Berg, Buytendijk, Langeveld, and Linschoten engaged concrete and fictional experiences, pursued core meanings of a phenomenon, traced etymological origins, conversed with phenomenological insights, and so forth (see van Manen, 2014). However, we are inclined to believe that such “methods” should not be regarded as prescriptive series of steps. It is too tempting to regard technical steps as a sure promise towards productive phenomenological findings or insights. We think that the authors of these six essays did not lean on a procedural program but rather that they let themselves be guided by the phenomenological attitude. In this book, we address the methodological meaning of this attitude. We include our tentative descanting reflections on each of these essays and leave it to the reader to decide how they would otherwise interpret the implicit approaches used by the authors. Doing Phenomenology on the “Phenomena” and the “Things” Herbert Spiegelberg, the encyclopedic scholar who wrote the authoritative international study entitled The Phenomenological Movement, A Historical Introduction (1960), initially scarcely mentioned the early Utrecht School initiatives in his accounts of phenomenological developments. In this two-volume work, he only included the contributions of professional academic philosophers. And none of the Utrecht proponents started out as philosophers. But in his 1972 book, Phenomenology in Psychology and Psychiatry, Spiegelberg dedicates an extensive chapter to Frederik J.J. Buytendijk. He described Buytendijk as the “central pioneer” of the Utrecht School movement (p. 281). Buytendijk was a medically trained physician with a research interest in physiology. He received university appointments in medicine, physiology, and psychology as he gained an international reputation for his academic and clinical scholarship. Buytendijk was indeed a major proponent alongside the pedagogue Langeveld, the psychiatrist van den Berg, and the psychologist Linschoten who are included in the present collection. Spiegelberg had become famous for his encyclopedic presentations of phenomenological developments around the world. But by 1975, he had apparently become dissatisfied with the way that phenomenology was progressing and practised in philosophy. Fifteen years after the first edition of his authoritative The Phenomenological Movement, Spiegelberg published Doing Phenomenology: Essays On and In Phenomenology, in which he decried “the relative sterility in phenomenological philosophy . . . especially in comparison with what happened in such countries as France and The Netherlands” (1975, p. 25). He proposed that what was needed is “a revival of the spirit of doing phenomenology directly on the phenomena, the ‘things,’” and he spoke nostalgically of “the spirit which permeated the first generation of phenomenologists.” Spiegelberg asked, “What Doing Phenomenology 7 can be done to reawaken [this spirit] in a very different setting?” (p. 25). He advocated a reorientation of “doing phenomenology on the phenomena themselves” (p. xiv), and he urged “a fresh approach directly to the phenomena in opposition to mere meta-phenomenology through textual and historical studies” (pp. 24, 25). Although Spiegelberg spoke somewhat dismissively of “mere metaphenomenology through textual and historical studies,” there is, of course, no reason to discourage such meta-phenomenological studies, except to say that when phenomenology is practised primarily at a meta-level, then the concrete and existential levels of phenomenology, as presented in this volume, may become neglected and devalued. Ironically, by the time Spiegelberg pointed at these developments most of the leading figures had retired in the Netherlands, and by the mid-1970s, these phenomenological initiatives had eroded under the pressure of behavioural and empirical analytic science influences from the United Kingdom and the United States. It is quite remarkable that the philosopher Herbert Spiegelberg initially ignored phenomenological initiatives by scholars who were not professional philosophers themselves, but later deliberately turned towards scholars in professional fields (rather than to professional philosophers) in providing examples where the “spirit” of doing phenomenology was alive. Indeed, phenomenologists like Buytendijk, van den Berg, Linschoten, Langeveld, and others were guided by a phenomenological way of seeing while doing phenomenology on the phenomena. Someone can be occupied with writing scholarly papers and books about phenomenology, at a meta-level, but that is not the same as “doing phenomenology directly on phenomena themselves.” The difference is that one can “argue” philosophically about exegetical phenomenological issues and aim at developing philosophical systems, while being purblind to phenomenological “seeing” and failing to demonstrate a phenomenological attitude that is able to explicate sensitively and insightfully the originary meanings of selected lifeworld phenomena. Significantly, in the opening pages to his “Phenomenology as a Rigorous Science,” Husserl makes clear that he is not interested in building some “ ‘system’ for which we yearn, which is supposed to gleam as an ideal before us in the lowlands where we are doing our investigative work” (1965, p. 75, 1980, p. 47). It is indeed unfortunate that not more contemporary philosophers seek to pursue their phenomenological interests in the lower (concrete) regions of investigative work that, according to Husserl, should aim to make our lives more livable (see van Manen, 2019). In this book we like to be attentive to Spiegelberg’s phrase “doing phenomenology on the phenomena themselves” (1975) to describe the third stream of phenomenological writings that Kockelmans had identified in 1987. When Spiegelberg recommends doing phenomenology directly on the phenomena, he means not just any phenomena, but “phenomena” and “things” as they give themselves while seen under the spell of a phenomenological attitude. This is what it means to do phenomenology directly on the things, on concrete lived 8 Doing Phenomenology human experiences that are now approached with a sense of wonder regarding their phenomenality. We wonder, what really is the phenomenological meaning of “having a conversation,” “feeling compelled to do something,” “encountering humour,” “experiencing a secret place”? To approach any such topic as a phenomenon is part of the original intent of doing phenomenology. The uniqueness of the writings of the Utrecht phenomenologists from the early 1930s to the late 1960s, is that these protagonists had a dual interest: their (clinical) professional practice and their enthusiasm for phenomenology. They found in the leading phenomenologists of their time a source for deepened understandings and epiphanic insights of the meaning dimensions of their practices. Various proponents such as van den Berg, Buytendijk, and Langeveld had visited and maintained correspondences with Husserl, Heidegger, Binswanger, Scheler, Sartre, Minkowski, and Merleau-Ponty, and were closely familiar with their phenomenological developments. Seeing something phenomenologically means seeing it as a “phenomenon,” as something that appears or gives itself (in our awareness or consciousness). According to Husserl (1983), phenomenology treats everything that “appears” as a phenomenon—in its manner of givenness. We have to focus not on words, views, or opinions but on the self-showing appearance, the self-givenness of the concrete phenomenon. Put differently, we have to focus on “the whatness” and “the how” of intentional consciousness or the structures of lived experience through which phenomena are identified, encountered, or found. And yet, the vocabulary of philosophical phenomenology easily becomes a morass of abstract concepts, even to the serious reader of the interpreters of Husserl, Heidegger, Stein, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Levinas. We have “to go from words and opinions back to the things themselves, to consult them in their self-givenness,” says Husserl (1983, p. 35). Here we propose that decisive for understanding phenomenology as practised by the Utrecht proponents is to gain a grasp of the sense of attitude, attunement, way of seeing, or disposition that characterizes the methodical practice of doing phenomenology. Being Guided by the Phenomenological Attitude We suggest that a main characteristic of the classic writings included in this text is that they were guided by the phenomenological attitude in order to gain insights into the originary meanings of a phenomenon. And yet, a feature of the works of the Utrecht phenomenologists appears to be that they rarely engaged in arguing or articulating the philosophical technicalities of phenomenology for their inquiry. This absence of theorizing about methodological issues was likely a function of the fact that these proponents were all professional practitioners, often with significant clinical responsibilities. While it is evident that most of these proponents had read the philosophical phenomenological literature, apparently, they just were not that interested in philosophizing about the conditions of doing Doing Phenomenology 9 phenomenology. However, their disinterest for theorizing was also a consequence of their view of the nature of phenomenology: “the phenomenologist is obsessed by the concrete . . . he distrusts theoretical and objective observations,” said van den Berg, in his A Different Existence (1972, p. 76). One might ask, how were these individuals able to practise phenomenology in their respective fields of psychology, medicine, pedagogy, law, and psychiatry when they generally opted not to engage in exegetical studies of the foundational philosophical discourses of Husserl and Heidegger that established phenomenology? First, the answer is that they were actually engaged with the leading philosophical-phenomenological literature, and second, the answer probably has to do with a topic that is rarely articulated in the methodological literature: the phenomenological attitude. Through their familiarity with the works of Husserl, Stein, Heidegger, Scheler, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, the Utrecht phenomenologists internalized the phenomenological attitude while largely ignoring the technical philosophical discourses that preoccupied the increasing number of academic philosophers who were engaged in the exegesis and arguments about phenomenological themes, issues, systems, and theories of their time. How can the internalization of the phenomenological attitude be described? We have to begin with the “natural attitude” that we carry most of the time. Dermot Moran (2013) pointed out that the natural or naturalistic attitude is so taken-for-granted that the bearers of this attitude do not know that they have it. In contrast, phenomenologists must understand the nature of this natural attitude, and must understand the critical and methodological importance of transforming the natural attitude into the phenomenological and existential attitude that enables phenomenological seeing and intuition. The significance of the phenomenological attitude is evident already in the explications of phenomenology by Heidegger (1962), Merleau-Ponty (1962), Henry (2008), and others. Heidegger stated that Husserl’s teaching took the form of practicing phenomenological “seeing” (Heidegger, 1972, p. 78). MerleauPonty described phenomenology as a “manner or style of thinking” (1962, p. viii). And Henry put that the “transcendental possibility of experience is the original phenomenalizing of the phenomenality of the phenomenon” (2008, p. 104), which is opening the path to the meaning of a phenomenon. None of these methodological characterizations refer to the application of a technical or scientific set of procedural steps. The practice of phenomenological “seeing” is an internalized, perception-based, and creative serendipitous act. And, the methods of the epoché and the reduction are involved, in a broad sense, as the distinguishing critical feature and essence of the phenomenological attitude. While Husserl characterized the practice of the epoché and the reduction in many different ways (transcendental, phenomenological, sceptical, vocational, psychological), a key feature of the transcendental epoché is that is makes possible the transcendental reduction and a transformation of the natural attitude (1970b, pp. 148–158). It is hard to fully realize and recognize the depth, pervasiveness, 10 Doing Phenomenology and taken-for-grantedness of the objectivism, naturalism, positivism, and shallow distractionism that shapes our way of looking at ourselves and the world around us and how this has affected the ecology of the planet and human civilizations. Even expressing our naturalistic predicament like this betrays a blindness to the fact that we always already immediately see the things around us as objects and objective forces. Etymologically, the term “attitude” refers to the disposedness, disposition, posture, and fittedness of the comportment of a certain way of seeing, feeling, and acting according to the online Oxford English Dictionary. An attitude regarding an object of thought can be deliberately or even unwittingly adopted. And an attitude can also be purposefully altered or disposed. This is a key idea for Husserl’s phenomenology since it is the taken-for-grantedness of the natural attitude that prevents us seeing the so-called hidden meanings of phenomena. He defines an “attitude” (Einstellung) as: a habitually fixed style of willing life comprising directions of the will or interests that are prescribed by this style, comprising the ultimate ends, the cultural accomplishments whose total style is thereby determined . . . Humanity always lives under some attitude or other. (Husserl, 1970b, p. 280) Husserl speaks about “the natural primordial attitude, of the attitude of original natural life” (p. 281) as the attitude of the culture and the historical age in which we are born and that forms the default natural orientation to life that characterizes our being-in-the-world. Still, while the idea of the phenomenological attitude is helpful, we ought to be somewhat reserved about Husserl’s acceptance of the idea of the “natural attitude.” Ironically, the general popularity of attitude as a psychological entity seems itself to be born from the natural attitude that tends to conceive of dispositional mental phenomena as objectifying entities that can be measured, manipulated, and reduced to operations of consciousness and unconsciousness. The extensive literature about attitude as a psychological construct— in terms of attitude change, attitude functions, ego-defensiveness, etc.—attests to the naturalistic assumptions of this very idea of naturalistic attitude. To reiterate, the authors of the classic texts of this book were less interested in involving themselves with methodological technicalities and abstract theories that still busy many exegetical philosophers today. However, that does not mean that these authors could not speak to the foundational methodological literature of Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and so forth. For example, Langeveld published in 1972, Capita from the General Methodology of Pedagogical Science, in which he addressed the issue of method in his phenomenological work. He suggested that one can debate Husserl about philosophical issues, and he criticized the assumptions that were introduced by Husserl’s elaborations of transcendental subjectivity (1970b). Husserl had proposed how the knowing self Doing Phenomenology 11 must experimentally annul the existence of the world, meaning annul the self as concrete subject of this knowledge of the world, by experimentally pretending that there is no world and no knowing subject. In Langeveld’s view, this sense of transcendental subjectivity abrogates the empirical “I” and the lived “world” relative to objective knowing. Langeveld asked rhetorically what the point would be of a phenomenological philosophy that only yields forms of knowing and understanding that are so detached from everyday human experience that they fail to serve the existential lives of (professional) practitioners or any other human beings? What good are transcendental truths and “pure” ideas that can neither be related to the concrete world nor to the lives of those who live in this world? Langeveld suggested that refusing to follow Husserl into this philosophy of transcendental subjectivity did not mean that one must give up on the phenomenological method of inquiry. He pointed out that in Husserl’s writings, the term “phenomenology” occurs in two meaning contexts: “to signify a method and to signify a philosophy.” Langeveld chose to use the term primarily to refer to the method and remain impartial to Husserl’s development of a phenomenological philosophy (Langeveld, 1972, p. 105). Thus, Langeveld and his colleagues seldomly addressed epistemological philosophical issues arising from the texts by Husserl and his followers. Yet, they shared an understanding of the philosophical method that lies at the core of phenomenology, and this understanding was realized through the sensibility of what may be called the “phenomenological attitude or disposition.” The Phenomenological Example Animates the Epoché and the Reduction The authors of the classic writings in this text adopted the phenomenological attitude as a tacit application or transformation of the epoché and the reduction in a broad sense. While many contemporary phenomenologists no longer mention the Husserlian terminology of the epoché and the reduction, they nevertheless seem to adopt through a process of mimesis, the methods of the epoché and the reduction when practicing phenomenology on concrete phenomena. Of course, it is entirely possible that some philosophers theoretically understand the necessity of adopting a phenomenological way of seeing and yet fail to do so since they are too preoccupied arguing about technicalities. It is hard, for them, to let go of the exegetical attitude. In other words, a philosopher may be able to expertly traverse and interpret the numerous thematic topics and inconsistencies in Husserl’s and Husserlian texts and yet strangely lack the talent or ability to adopt the phenomenological attitude required to actually write an insightful phenomenological study on some concrete phenomenon or event of the lifeworld. In Husserl’s texts, we seldom meet extended concrete examples of the practice of the phenomenological attitude. Dermot Moran said that, although Husserl’s project was ostensibly “descriptive phenomenology,” ironically Husserl’s writings are often abstract, focusing on technicalities, and notoriously “lacking in concrete 12 Doing Phenomenology examples” (2000, p. 63). In an interview, van den Berg also remarked that Husserl remained too tied to his desk and hardly moved outside the philosophical world (Kruger, 1985, p. xvi). It is well-known that even Husserl’s home was an extension of his university office when he invited students for philosophical seminars. Indeed, it might be interesting to speculate how Husserl’s followers might have been inspired and how the development of phenomenology might have unfolded in a richer fashion if Husserl himself had indulged some of the time to focus on concrete and down-to-earth lifeworld phenomena in his pursuit of a pure phenomenology. Still, van den Berg and Langeveld admired Husserl’s genius and his dedication. There is an anecdote that tells that Husserl as a young boy wanted to sharpen his knife and he kept doing it so insistently that he finally had nothing left (de Boer, 1980, pp. 10, 11). Interestingly, this story also typifies the way that the Utrecht proponents actually respected Husserl’s perfectionism and recognized his need for continuously rewriting of his manuscripts. Still, in spite of this admiration, they did not think it was necessary for them to follow Husserl into all those minute explorations of the foundational technicalities that Husserl obstinately kept pursuing. And, we too hope that more philosophically based authors may recognize the value and join the effort to do more phenomenology on the concrete phenomena of our professional and everyday lives. As an example of the phenomenological attitude, let us consider a passage from van den Berg’s book A Different Existence (1972) where he tells about an evening spent waiting for a friend to come over for a visit. He mentions a bottle of wine that he had already put on the table. It is a green bottle of red Médoc wine, and he is looking forward to a pleasant social get-together. But then his friend phones and cancels the visit. There is a snowstorm outside and it would be too difficult to make the trip. Van den Berg returns to reading his book, and then looks up and sees the bottle of wine on the table. He asks, what do I see? I see the bottle of wine and I realize that my friend will not come. What happens at this moment? Or, more precisely: what do I see when I observe the bottle of wine? The question seems trivial and the answer is accordingly simple. I see a green bottle with a white label, on which is printed a mark. At closer examination I can read the printed words. It is a bottle of Médoc. The bottle is corked and sealed with a lead capsule. I could go on this way and sum up all the details of the bottle. But it becomes obvious to me that, writing down these facts, I don’t get any nearer that which I was observing when looking up, I saw the bottle. What I was seeing then was not a green bottle, with a white label, with a lead capsule, and things like that. What I was really seeing was something like the disappointment about the fact that my friend would not come or about the loneliness of the evening. (van den Berg, 1972, p. 34) Doing Phenomenology 13 The point van den Berg is making seems certainly simple, but it is also a nice example of the epoché and the reduction: on the table stands the object, the bottle of wine. But rather than seeing the object, the bottle, van den Berg frees himself from such an objectifying perception and realizes that he really sees his disappointment. He is overcome with a mood of disappointment. But, only in asking the question, what he sees when looking at the bottle does van den Berg become reflectively aware of his disappointed self. Van den Berg has tacitly adopted the phenomenological attitude: the look, the act of “perception.” He further realizes that it is in that immediate sense of looking that we see ourselves in the things of the world. Therefore, van den Berg can say: the phenomenologist should not direct his glance “inwardly” but “outwardly,” expressed paradoxically, “we are seeing ourselves when we observe the world” (p. 130). This paradox seems like a simple phenomenological insight but it could not have been “seen” without suspending the “natural” inclination of simply seeing the object or thing (the glass wine bottle) as object. The epoché may be understood, in part, as this act of suspending the tendency of objectifying our world. And, the reduction can be understood as the discerning and lifting up of a phenomenon from unreflective or lived experience to arrive at an in-sight. When van den Berg looks at the bottle, he sees his disappointment and he sees also more than his disappointment. He “sees” or has an in-sight: that we see ourselves in the things of our world. This aspect of the reduction shows the thematic significance of the idea that the reduction involves “phenomenological seeing,” as stated by Heidegger. It also shows that a phenomenological insight is a form of in-seeing: seeing the inceptual meaning or essence of a phenomenon. The reduction is the philosophical “device” that inheres in the phenomenological attitude. It helps us to “see” something (grasp serendipitously perhaps) that we would not see if we are still in the everyday normal natural attitude. But by questioning of what we “see” when we look at the wine bottle the question turns more ambiguous and phenomenologically complicated as we sense the intentional paradoxality of the how and the what of object-perception and self-perception that the engagement of the epoché and the reduction reveals. Husserl laid the foundation for the development of phenomenology and for distinguishing phenomenology from psychology (Husserl, 1968). Psychology can be considered as an empirical social science or human science discipline. In comparison, phenomenology is regarded as an independent and autonomous human science method that can be engaged (coupled) with any academic or professional discipline such that there is phenomenological psychology, and also phenomenological sociology, phenomenological pedagogy, phenomenological health science, and, of course, even a phenomenological philosophy. Clearly, some of the authors associated with the classic phenomenological studies in the Utrecht tradition were psychologists, and others were medical specialists, lawyers, educators, and so on. Thus, the work of these professional practitioners-as-phenomenologists cannot narrowly be referred to as Phenomenological Psychology, as Joseph Kockelmans 14 Doing Phenomenology entitled his edited collection, subtitled, The Dutch School. In the present book, Classic Writings, we regard phenomenology as an independent discipline that is rooted in philosophy and in the humanities, and that is distinguished as a method characterized by a certain phenomenological mode of seeing, an essential style of thinking, and a phenomenalizing of the meanings of phenomena. We hope that the examples of classic writings in the following chapters are helpful to show and clarify the practice of doing phenomenology on the phenomena themselves. The reader will see that and how the authors of these relatively brief studies actually “practise” the epoché and the reduction in a broad sense. We also show that the engagement of the epoché and the reduction cannot be reduced to procedural or technical steps, but rather that they should be understood as something more perspectival, like adopting a phenomenological attitude or engaging a phenomenological disposition and way of seeing. We keep emphasizing these points since they have critical methodical relevance for doing phenomenological research and inquiry. Approaching Phenomenology as the “Science of Examples” Buytendijk once referred to phenomenology as the “science of examples” (van Manen, 2014, p. 257). Whether taking the form of vignettes, anecdotes, or narratives, “examples” may be understood as rhetorical and aesthetic devices for evoking phenomenological understandings or phenomenological knowledge that cannot necessarily be expressed, explained, or explicated in a straightforward descriptive or prosaic manner. The use of “phenomenological examples” is a clear feature in the classic writings contained in this book. But “examples” in this methodical sense are also found in the wider phenomenological philosophical literature: the example of “boredom” while waiting for the train in the study of metaphysics in Martin Heidegger (1995, p. 93); the example of the myth of “the Gaze of Orpheus” in the study of writing in Maurice Blanchot (1981, pp. 99–104); the example of the voyeur looking through the keyhole of the door in “the look” in Jean-Paul Sartre (1956, pp, 259, 260); “Homer’s Odysseus” as an example of The Homecomer in Alfred Schutz (1971, pp. 106–119); the example of “Morpheus” in The Fall of Sleep in Jean-Luc Nancy (2007, pp. 8, 9); and so forth. Although Husserl rarely used concrete examples to analyze and explicate the meaning of a concrete phenomenon or event, a well-known reference to the role of examples in phenomenological explication occurs when Husserl describes the cogito as act. He says, Let us start with an example. In front of me, in the dim light, lies this white paper. I see it, touch it. This perceptual seeing and touching of the paper as the full concrete experience of the paper that lies here as given in truth Doing Phenomenology 15 precisely with these qualities, precisely with this relative lack of clearness, with this imperfect definition, appearing to me from this particular angle— is a cogitatio, a conscious experience. (Husserl, 2014, p. 65) Husserl sets himself the task of describing the phenomenon of conscious experience (Erlebnis), meaning “lived experience.” According to Husserl, the cogitatio, the stream-of-consciousness lived experience, in the fullness of its unity, can be seen to give access to the essence of every lived experience. The Eidos, the pure essence, can be exemplified intuitively in the data of experience, data of perception, memory, and so forth, but just as readily also in the mere data of fancy (Phantasie). Hence with the aim of grasping an essence itself in its primordial form, we can set out from corresponding empirical intuitions, but we can also set out just as well from non-empirical intuitions, intuitions that do not apprehend sensory existence, intuitions rather of a merely imaginative order. (Husserl, 2014, p. 14) The phenomenological philosopher Edward Casey (2000, 2007) has written several insightful and eloquent phenomenological studies on topics such as places and landscapes, the glance, imagining, remembering, and map-paintings. Casey asserts that phenomenological method as conceived by Husserl takes its beginning from carefully selected examples (2000, p. 23). Note earlier that W.R. Boyce Gibson’s translation of Husserl’s Ideas reads as: The Eidos, the pure essence, can be exemplified intuitively in the data of experience. (Husserl, 2014, p. 14) Casey, however, translates this passage as follows: The eidos or pure essence, can be exhibited by example. (Casey, 2000, p. 23) With this slight but pronounced modification, Casey lets Husserl make his point even more clearly and emphatically than Husserl probably meant himself. But the point for us is that phenomenology may indeed be seen to proceed through examples. For Casey, the “example” is not only the method to carefully select his studies. He also uses the notion of “example” as a methodological device. In his study Imagining, Casey (2000) takes his own experiences as a source for constructing narrative examples to investigate the meaning of a selected phenomenon 16 Doing Phenomenology (imagining). And he affirms that it is not only fictional texts that can function as examples, but also observed and fictive objects, events, and actions. Phenomenological method takes objects, events, or acts—whether real or imagined—as exemplifying an essence or essential structure. In this way their basic constitution is made perspicuous, and examples become the specific vehicles or privileged media of eidetic insights. (Casey, 2000, p. 24) Casey wants to make the strong case that examples, that exhibit an essence or essential structure with a maximum of evidential lucidity, can achieve eidetic insights. Even carefully selected factual or empirical material may serve as phenomenological examples, but only after they have been fictionalized through the application or performance of the reduction (Husserl, 1983, p. 160). It is important to keep in mind that phenomenology does not deal with facts. Accordingly, we may need to allow that some examples only partially serve the purpose of the phenomenological reduction since while they present evidentially perspicacious examples, they may remain linguistically ambiguous or enigmatic. For the Utrecht phenomenologists the methodological power of the “example” also serves an analytic purpose. The “example” does not express what one knows through argument or conceptual explication, but, in a vocative manner, an “example” lets one experience what one does not know. There is an indirectness in the turn to the narrative meaningfulness of phenomenological examples (see also van Manen, 2014, p. 257). The example can make the singular experienceable and thus knowable as an indite method of phenomenological writing. While the methods of the epoché and the reduction are engaged in an attempt to gain insights into the originary meaning of a phenomenon, it is the indite methods, the vocative aspects of writing, that assist in bringing phenomenological insights to textual understanding. The online Oxford English Dictionary defines the term “indite” in this way: “to put into words, compose (a poem, tale, speech, etc.); to give a literary or rhetorical form to (words, an address); to express or describe in a literary composition.” So, we use indite here to focus on the semiotic or writing practices that present the linguistic, methodological dimension to phenomenological thinking, inquiring, and writing. An “example” often takes shape as a story (as in existential literary fiction), and thus orients to the singular. Indeed, any literary story or novel is always some unique narrative that brings out the particularity or singularity of a certain phenomenon, event, or life. In the exegetical phenomenological literature, little attention appears to be paid to the methodological significance of the “example” in phenomenological essays. But, some of the leading phenomenologists commonly speak of, and reach for, an “example” when examining a phenomenon or event for its phenomenal features. Unfortunately, most of Husserl’s “examples” are seemingly overly Doing Phenomenology 17 simplistic, such as a reference to seeing a blossoming apple tree, in his explication of the noema and intentionality (1983, pp. 214, 215). But Husserl’s most famous and extended “example” is probably contained in his study of the phenomenology of internal time consciousness (1964). In his description of our inner consciousness of time, Husserl uses the example of hearing a familiar melody. In hearing a well-known musical melody, the present notes of the melody and the notes just past are retained in retention while the notes about to be heard are already anticipated as protention. Thus, Husserl explicates and shows the streaming structure of ongoing retentions and protentions as primal impressional consciousness in the exemplary experience of hearing a familiar melody. Similarly, when Heidegger (2001) reflects on the meaning of the “thing,” he uses the example of a jug. When Henry (2009) presents the aesthetic revelation of the invisible essence of “life,” he uses the paintings of Wassily Kandinsky as an example. When Sartre (1956, p. 9) discusses the experience of “negation and nothingness,” he says that he needs an example, and he describes having an appointment with Pierre in the café where they are supposed to meet at 4 o’clock. But as he arrives at the café and looks around, Sartre discovers, “He is not here.” Next, Sartre explores how it is that we “see” this absence that is a nothing (a not-being-there) and yet not a nothing (the absence of not being there) (1956, p. 10). Interestingly, all of these aforementioned examples have acquired iconic fame in the phenomenological literature. They have become classic or well-known phenomenological anecdotes, vignettes, narratives, or images, and it matters not whether they are fictional, imagined, or real, in an empirical or biographic sense. In contrast, in the traditional and qualitative social sciences, examples are usually employed as concrete or illustrative “cases-in-point” to clarify an abstract idea or theory. This commonly used form of example-as-case-in-point is meant to make theoretical knowledge more accessible, concrete, or intelligible, even though the example itself may not contribute to the knowledge. Indeed, examples are often used as informative illustrations. But, an example-as-illustration can be left out of the text without compromising the text. So, it is important to realize that “phenomenological examples” differ radically from such explanatory, clarifying, or illustrative uses of examples. The phenomenological notion of “example” is methodologically a unique semiotic figure for phenomenological inquiry. Examples in phenomenological texts have evidential significance because the example is the example of something experientially knowable or understandable that is not directly expressible—it is a universal singularity. If a singularity were to be expressed in ordinary prose, it would immediately vanish. Why? Because language cannot really express a singularity by naming or describing it. A singularity cannot be grasped directly through words because words are already generalized bits of language. Language universalizes. However, and this is paradoxical, the “phenomenological example” as story can provide access to the phenomenon 18 Doing Phenomenology in its universal singularity. It makes the “singular” knowable and understandable. Every fictional story or novel has at its core a singularity: a unique theme or signification. Each of the authors of the classic writings featured in this book employ such examples in their phenomenological texts. Van den Berg recounts the story of two cousins looking at a painting to explore the meaning of conversation, Buytendijk describes the threat of being tickled to elucidate the character of the stimulation of the smile, Langeveld tells of the gift of a feather to explore the meaning of things in the life of children, and Linschoten shows humour that gives itself without laughter in the story of the Tao student and his master. The etymology of the Greek word for model is to “show something in something and thus make it present” in an interpretive methodical sense. Günther Figal makes special use of the term “model” as an equivalent term for “example.” He says, “a model is a definitive example” (Figal, 2010, p. 29). To reflect in a hermeneutic phenomenological manner on the meaning of something is to examine it as an originary model. The model is like an incept (as opposed to a concept). It points toward the originary meaning of something. Some models are more appropriate or better suited to get at the originary meaning of something. And so, models (as examples) must be well-chosen because the essence of the matter has to be in the model. In the words of Figal, “models are supposed to be distinguished by their pregnancy; they must prove themselves as such by really letting something be shown in them” (2010, p. 30). Similarly, Giorgio Agamben uses the term “example” interchangeably with paradigm: “example” means para-deigma. Agamben says, “paradigm means simply ‘example’ . . . a single phenomenon, a singularity” (2002). A singularity is, by definition, single and unique—it does not share properties in common with anything else. In other words, a singularity has no specifiable identity (idem); it has no recognizable sameness except that it is self-same. A singularity is only identical to itself (ipseity). Interestingly, Agamben points out that a true example is neither particular nor universal (1995, p. 6). To reiterate, it would be wrong to assume that the “example” in phenomenological inquiry is used as an illustration in an argument, or as a particular instance of a general idea, or as an empirical datum from which to develop a conceptual or theoretical understanding. Rather, the phenomenological example is a philological device that holds in a certain tension the intelligibility of the singular. How can the example do this? It can do this because the example mediates our intuitive (self-evidential) grasp of a singularity, which is exactly the project of phenomenology. Again, we need to sense the paradoxicality of this explication of a critical methodological aspect of phenomenological inquiry, thinking, and writing. The singularity of the singular may show itself by way of the example. “The example lets the singular be seen,” says Agamben (1995, p. 10). But one could perhaps equally say that the phenomenological example actually reconciles the incommensurable couplet of the particular and the universal. In other words, singularity emerges in the deconstructive fusion of the particular with the universal. Doing Phenomenology 19 In this sense, the phenomenological example expresses the singular as universal. So, the example is somewhat of an enigma and contradiction. This idea may be seen as a phenomenological variation on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s notion that a lived experience originates as particularity but becomes recognizable as universal. A distinguishing feature of the classic writings by the Utrecht School related phenomenological studies is that they engaged with examples in their phenomenological explications. We showed previously how van den Berg used an anecdote for showing the meaning of phenomenological seeing with the example of the bottle of wine. Spiegelberg speaks of these anecdotes as “colorful vignettes that are characteristic of Dutch phenomenology” (1972, p. 87). In a paper called, “The Phenomenology of the Look,” Spiegelberg (1989) himself employs some colourful vignette-style expressions to provide concrete contexts for his explication of various kinds of eye contact in his phenomenological text. But he makes no effort to discuss the methodological significance of these “exemplary” vignettes. Joseph Kockelmans, too, observes how the phenomenologists of the Utrecht School frequently make use of poetry and literature. He sees three reasons: First, many “great poets and novelists have seen something very important and have spoken of it in a remarkably adequate way” that is useful for phenomenological explication. Second, phenomenologists may use literary sources “to illustrate a point on which the phenomenologists wishes to focus attention.” And third, most important, “poetic language . . . is able to refer beyond the realm of what can be said ‘clearly and distinctly’” (Kockelmans, 1987, pp. viii, ix). Experiential descriptions, in the form of colourful vignettes, should not be taken as mere embellishing or illustrative examples of points made in a text. We must avoid confusing phenomenological examples as if they are mere didactical explanations. Rather, these narrative stories should be approached as fictional vignettes or narrative anecdotes or aesthetic and poetic objects. Wilfried Lippitz (2019), who was a German representative of the phenomenological pedagogy of Langeveld, referred to “exemplary description” as a method for pedagogical understanding (1972). Phenomenology reflects on “examples” in order to discover what is originary, singular, or essential about a phenomenon or event. The example is the presencing of something experientially knowable or understandable that is not easily directly expressible—a singularity or an essence. In other words, the “phenomenological example” as fictionalized story provides access to the eidetic meaning of the phenomenon in its singularity. It makes the essence as the “singular” knowable and understandable. To reiterate, we have pointed out that the example is indeed a way that phenomenology may proceed. Buytendijk, Spiegelberg, Kockelmans, Casey, Figal, and Agamben have made clear, in different ways, that the example is a powerful methodological device to reveal eidetic and intentional phenomenological meaning. What makes the classic writings by the Utrecht proponents classic is that they perfected the use of concrete “examples” in order to evoke understandings 20 Doing Phenomenology inherent in concrete but phenomenologically universal narrative descriptions, gained from or modelled on fictional, poetic, mythological, and aesthetic sources. Putting Phenomenology Back Into Phenomenology Our aim in translating and discussing these phenomenological texts is to demonstrate the development and existence of an early and unique approach to doing phenomenology. In this opening chapter to the essays, we have highlighted that the phenomenological attitude and the use of the example are two key methodological features for doing phenomenology on phenomena as exemplified by these classic writings. As the Husserl specialist Joseph Kockelmans indicated, these collected phenomenological studies are a type of phenomenological inquiries that was intended by the founding scholars like Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and other original phenomenological thinkers. We hope that the readers of these essays will feel engaged and enriched by them. Each of the classic writings in this book is a study that explores and explicates the eidetic meaning of a singular human phenomenon. This explication gives us sensitive insights into the meanings of these phenomena: having a conversation, meeting the first smile, feeling compulsive, experiencing a secret place, the meaning of a thing for a child, and experiencing humour. The phenomenological studies in this book differ from other more theoretical and exegetical publications in the literature of phenomenology. So, when newcomers to these classic writings inquisitively turn to the multitude of other philosophic phenomenological essays in the professional literature, they may be puzzled that so often the more exegetical and critical writings (however scholarly they may be judged) evidently lack an interest in focusing on the concrete phenomena of the lifeworld themselves. We are indeed struck by the uncanny observations made by Herbert Spiegelberg who, in his later years, found that so much philosophical scholarship of phenomenology lack the vitality of what phenomenology could be. So, our aim is to try to put phenomenology back into phenomenology, by showing how this had been practised by the Utrecht proponents and how it may inspire our present-day and future phenomenological research projects. To reiterate, we propose that the classic writings presented in the following chapters, demonstrate a way of doing a phenomenology of practice on ordinary lifeworld topics. This attention to the lifeworld means doing phenomenology directly on the “phenomena” or on the “things” themselves. We also propose that these research studies are guided by a phenomenological attitude aimed to arrive at meaningful insights, sensitive to concrete experience, and proceeding through phenomenological examples. One might ask whether it is necessary to be a philosopher to do phenomenology. There are some advantages to not being a philosopher. Professional and academic practitioners may be less inclined to get stuck in irrelevant and obscure Doing Phenomenology 21 philosophical arguments because they are mostly deeply and actively interested in phenomenological issues and questions that have actual relevance to their professional fields. And yet there is value in studying and reading philosophical texts; especially by the originary phenomenologists such as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Edith Stein, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice MerleauPonty, Helmuth Plessner, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, Alphonso Lingis, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, Michel Serres, Michel Henry, Bernard Stiegler, Jean-Luc Marion, and other such original minds (see van Manen, 2014). As well, existential, literary, and artistic works are worth reading and studying, since they may function as examples and offer fascinating insights into the enigma of human existence, consciousness, ethics, technology, and inner experience. For Max van Manen (1990, 2014, 2015) these interests were sparked in his student years in the Netherlands (in the early 1960s) when initiated into the writings of Martinus J. Langeveld, Jan H. van den Berg, Frederik J.J. Buytendijk, Johannes Linschoten, Stephan Strasser, Nicolas Beets, David van Lennep, and other likeminded scholars of a phenomenology of everyday life practice (see also Levering & van Manen, 2002). So for him, doing this book with his son Michael van Manen feels like completing a celebrable circle. See Michael van Manen’s work on the phenomenology of neonatology and ethics (2019, 2021). Each of the translated classic texts is preceded by a brief (but obviously incomplete) sketch of the author and its situatedness in the Utrecht phenomenology movement. And each text is followed by a conversational descant: a reflection on the phenomenological reflection. A descant is a discourse on a theme, or a song played above a basic melody, somewhat like a method on a method that aims at revealing (playing on) the structure of the basic theme or melody without disturbing it, but possibly enhancing or enriching it. The original texts were written more than half a century ago, yet we suggest that they are especially relevant now and that they may contribute to future projects of phenomenological inquiry. They have exemplary value for the engagement of phenomenology by researchers and practitioners in the clinical and academic human science professions, for these classic writings show what it means to be guided by a phenomenological attitude and to do phenomenology on the phenomena themselves. Notes Years in square brackets are the original publication dates. References Agamben, G. (1995). Idea of Prose. Albany: SUNY Press. Agamben, G. (2002). What Is a Paradigm? Lecture at European Graduate School. Available from: www.egs.edu/faculty/giorgio-agamben/articles/what-is-a-paradigm/. Blanchot, M. (1981). The Gaze of Orpheus. New York: Station Hill Press. 22 Doing Phenomenology Buytendijk, F.J.J. (1947 [1961]). De Eerste Glimlach van het Kind [The First Smile of the Child]. Inaugural, Nijmegen University Speech. In: F.J.J. Buytendijk (ed.). Academische Redevoeringen [Academic Lectures]. Utrecht: Dekker & Van de Vegt. Buytendijk, F.J.J. (1970a). Some Aspects of Touch. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 1 (1), pp. 99–124. Buytendijk, F.J.J. (1970b). Naar een Existentiële Verklaring van de Doorleefde Dwang [Toward an Existential Explication of Lived Compulsion]. Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 32 (4), pp. 567–608. Casey, E.S. (2000). Imagining: A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Casey, E.S. (2007). The Glance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. de Boer, T. (1980). Inleiding [Introduction]. In: T. de Boer (ed.). Edmund Husserl: Filosofie als Strenge Wetenschap [Edmund Husserl: Philosophy as Strict Science]. Amsterdam: Boom Meppel. Derrida, J. (1995). The Gift of Death. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Derrida, J. (2005). On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Figal, G. (2010). Objectivity: The Hermeneutical and Philosophy. Albany: SUNY Press. Heidegger, M. (1962 [1927]). Being and Time ( J. MacQuarrie and E. Robinson, trans.). New York: Harper and Row. Heidegger, M. (1972). On Time and Being. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Heidegger, M. (1982 [1975]). The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, M. (1995). The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, M. (2001). Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper and Row. Henry, M. (2008 [1990]). Material Phenomenology. New York: Fordham University Press. Henry, M. (2009 [1988]). Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky. London: Continuum. Husserl, E. (1964). The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Husserl, E. (1965). Philosophy as Rigorous Science. In: Quentin Lauer (trans.). Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy. New York: Harper & Row. Husserl, E. (1968 [1925]). Amsterdamer Vorträge: Phänomenologische Psychologie [Amsterdam Lectures: Phenomenological Psychology]. In: Walter Biemel (ed.). Phänomenologische Psychologie, Vorlesungen Sommersemester [Phenomenological Psychology, Summer Semester Lectures]. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, pp. 302–349. Husserl, E. (1970a [1900/1901]). Logical Investigations. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press Inc. Husserl, E. (1970b [1954]). The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Husserl, E. (1980). Filosofie als Strenge Wetenschap [Philosophy as Strict Science] (Ger Groot, trans.). Meppel: Boom. Husserl, E. (1983 [1913]). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Husserl, E. (2014 [1913]). Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Kockelmans, J.J. (ed.). (1987). Phenomenological Psychology: The Dutch School. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Kruger, D. (1985). The Changing Reality of Modern Man: Essays in Honour of Jan Hendrik van den Berg. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Doing Phenomenology 23 Langeveld, M.J. (1953). De “Verborgen Plaats” in het Leven van het Kind [The “Hidden Place” in the Life of the Child]. In: Jan H. van den Berg and Johannes Linschoten (eds.). Persoon en Wereld [Person and World]. Utrecht: Bijleveld, pp. 11–32. Langeveld, M.J. (1956 [1968]). Das Ding in die Welt des Kindes [The Thing in the World of the Child]. In: M.J. Langeveld (ed.). Studien zur Antropologie des Kindes [Studies in Child Anthropology]. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 142–156. Langeveld, M.J. (1972). Capita uit de Algemene Methodologie der Opvoedingswetenschap [Capita from the General Methodology of Pedagogical Science]. Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff. Levering, B. and Van Manen, M. (2002). Phenomenology and Philosophical Anthropology in the Netherlands. In: Teresa Tymieniecka (ed.). Phenomenology World-Wide. Dordrecht: Kluwer Press, pp. 274–286. Levinas, E. (1979). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Levinas, E. (1981). Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Lingis, A. (2001). Abuses. Berkeley: University of California Press. Linschoten, J. (1951). Over de Humor [On Humour]. Tijdschrift voor Philosophie, 13 (4), pp. 603–666. Linschoten, J. (1953). Aspecten van de Sexuele Incarnatie [Aspects of Sexual Incarnation]. In: J. H. van den Berg and J. Linschoten (eds.). Persoon en Wereld [Person and World]. Utrecht: Erven J. Bijleveld, pp. 74–126. Linschoten, J. (1987). On Falling Asleep. In: J. J. Kockelmans (ed.). Phenomenological Psychology: The Dutch School. Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 79–117. Lippitz, W. (2019). Exemplarische Deskription (1984) [Exemplary Description]. In: Malte Brinkmann (ed.). Phänomenologische Erziehungswissenschaft von ihren Anfängen bis Heute [Phenomenological Educational Science from its Beginnings to Today]. Wiesbaden: Springer, pp. 315–336. Marion, J-L. (2007). The Erotic Phenomenon: Six Meditations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. Moran, D. (2000). Introduction to Phenomenology. London: Routledge. Moran, D. (2013). ‘Let’s Look at It Objectively’: Why Phenomenology Cannot be Naturalized. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 72. pp. 89–150. Murdoch, I. (1999). Salvation by Words, Blashfield Address, The American Academy of Arts and Letters Annual Ceremonial, May 17, 1972. In: Peter Conradi (ed.). Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Penguin Books. Nancy, J-L. (1997). The Sense of the World. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. Nancy, J-L. (2007). The Fall of Sleep. New York: Fordham University Press. Pallasma, J. (2009). The Thinking Hand. Chichester, West Sussex: John Wiley and Sons Ltd. Sartre, J-P. (1956). Being and Nothingness. New York: Philosophical Library. Sartre, J-P. (1991). The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness. New York: Hill and Wang. Scheler, M. (1970). The Nature of Sympathy. Hamden: Archon Books. Schutz, A. (1971). Collected Papers, II, Studies in Social Theory. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Serres, M. (2008). The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies. New York: Continuum. Spiegelberg, H. (1960). The Phenomenological Movement, a Historical Introduction. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Spiegelberg, H. (1972). Phenomenology in Psychology and Psychiatry: A Historical Introduction. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. 24 Doing Phenomenology Spiegelberg, H. (1975). Doing Phenomenology: Essays on and in Phenomenology. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Spiegelberg, H. (1983). Movements in Philosophy: Phenomenology and its Parallels. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 43(3), pp. 281–297. Spiegelberg, H. (1989). Phenomenology of the Look. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 20 (2), pp. 107–114. Van den Berg, J.H. (1953). Het Gesprek [The Conversation]. In: Jan H. van den Berg and Johannes Linschoten (eds.). Persoon en Wereld [Person and World]. Utrecht: Bijleveld, pp. 136–154. Van den Berg, J.H. (1959). Het Menselijk Lichaam [The Human Body]. Nijkerk: Callenbach. Van den Berg, J.H. (1972). A Different Existence. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Van den Berg, J.H. and Linschoten, J. (eds.). (1953). Persoon en Wereld [Person and World]. Utrecht, The Netherlands: Bijleveld. Van Manen, M. (1990 [1997]). Researching Lived Experience: Human Science for an Action Sensitive Pedagogy. London: Routledge. Van Manen, M. (2014). Phenomenology of Practice: Meaning-Giving Methods in Phenomenological Research and Writing. London: Routledge. Van Manen, M. (2015). Pedagogical Tact: Knowing What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do. London: Routledge. Van Manen, M. (2017). Rebuttal: Doing Phenomenology on the Things. Qualitative Health Research, 29(6), pp. 908–925. Van Manen, M.A. (2019). Phenomenology of the Newborn: Life from Womb to World. London: Routledge. Van Manen, M.A. (2021). The Birth of Ethics: Phenomenological Reflections on Life’s Beginnings. London: Routledge. 2 JAN H. VAN DEN BERG Phenomenology does not offer a fine theory but, rather, gives a plausible insight. Jan H. van den Berg (1972, p. 4) Jan Hendrik van den Berg (1914–2012) was a clinical psychiatrist and an extraordinary scholar. Not only did he author numerous articles and books, his writings have been translated into more languages than any other author in the Netherlands. Van den Berg was born in Deventer, a Dutch industrial town founded in the Middle Ages. As a young person he grew up near a nature reserve in a protected part of the surrounding woods that was barred to the general public. His father was the technician who had to keep the pumps going for the water towers of Deventer. In an interview, van den Berg recalled: “at the water tower in Deventer, my father was chief engineer. He was lord and master of that area. There was also our house, where my father, mother, my older brother and I lived and where no one else was allowed. It was a true dorado” (De Jong & Snel, 2001, p. 2). The young van den Berg was fascinated with the flora and fauna of the Dutch landscape, and especially with the study of insects that remained a hobby all his life. He started as a teacher but aspired to a medical career. From the money he earned teaching, he was able to pay for university and completed medical school, specializing in psychiatry and neurology. Van den Berg studied under Henricus C. Rümke who was one of the early phenomenological proponents of Dutch psychiatry. Part of van den Berg’s psychiatric training also included time in Switzerland with Ludwig Binswanger, a distinguished phenomenological psychiatrist who had studied with Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud and who was heavily 26 Jan H. van den Berg influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. It was after his preparation for psychiatry that van den Berg took up phenomenology. Van den Berg completed his doctoral work in 1946 with a dissertation on phenomenological existential schizophrenic psychosis entitled De Betekenis van de Phaenomenologische of Existentiële Antropologie in de Psychiatrie [The Significance of Phenomenological or Existential Anthropology in Psychiatry]. In 1946, van den Berg took a year of residence in Paris, while working as an assistant in a psychiatric clinic. In Paris, van den Berg connected with many influential scholars. He had conversations with the erudite Gaston Bachelard, who he described as a “a nice, jovial and enthusiastic man” (De Jong & Snel, 2001, p. 7). He interacted with the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, “a dandy” and “beau garçon” (p. 7). And he gained insights into the influence of German and French culture on phenomenological philosophy of Heidegger, Husserl, Sartre, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and others. In the interview with de Jong and Snel, van den Berg recounted the influence of Heidegger: Sein und Zeit was a revelation for me. When I received the book, I opened it and immediately put it away again. I knew it would transform me and I wanted to wait a little longer. But in Heidegger I found the précis of the answers to all the questions and problems I could think of. He showed me what holds human existence together in the innermost. In Heidegger’s works, the primordial is communicated in spite of the fact that it is the indescribable, the non-translatable. (De Jong & Snel, 2001, p. 9) This was done, said van den Berg, in a strange German, a completely unique vocabulary, in a kind of appropriated language. Heidegger had his own grammar. You had to get used to that, but then it became easy. Nevertheless, I later secretly accused him of using an impenetrable secret language. In later publications, I sometimes thought: “please, rather be clear, say exactly what matters, don’t hide behind all those neologisms.” But in Sein und Zeit that was less the case, that was as clear as a glass, at least for me. (p. 9) In 1947, upon making contact, van den Berg was invited by Heidegger to spend several days in his Hütte (a cottage in the German forest). Ah, Heidegger and the Hütte: I was kindly received. Heidegger was busy together with a chimney sweep, checking the chimney, which drew badly. But he gave me a very cordial welcome and the atmosphere remained that way. A pleasant stay, where I received responses to the list of questions I had prepared. In a relaxed mood and patiently he responded to those Jan H. van den Berg 27 inquiries. They were mainly questions about certain twists and turns, passages in which he lets a certain suspicion play a role in the text, but does not pronounce it. That hiddenness is also specific to German, in which it is quite possible to proclaim crypto-truths, but Heidegger has taken part in it considerably. We made a number of walks. During one of those trips we ended up at a farm. Heidegger was apparently at home there, because he just went inside. We entered a large room with a table and a few chairs and a wide view over the valley. Really beautiful! There he put his hand on the solid wooden table and said: “und hier habe ich Sein und Zeit geschrieben!” [and here I wrote Being and Time]. Yes, a unique moment, masterly, magnificent, really magnificent. (p. 10) Upon returning from France to the Netherlands, van den Berg received a lectorate in psychopathology in 1948 at the University of Utrecht, and later at Amsterdam University. In 1954, he was appointed to the Chair of Phenomenology and Conflict Psychology at the University of Leiden. For van den Berg, phenomenology meant to focus attention on how the world is actually present to us (Giorgi, 2015). About his work, he said, “phenomenology is here taken in the sense of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty” (1952, p. 90). However, while Husserl was a great thinker for van den Berg, he had remained too much tied to his desk and hardly moved outside the philosophical world. Even though Husserl advocated a return to the concrete, the world as lived, his work ironically lacked concrete lifeworld concerns and engagements which are an essential feature that makes human existence phenomenologically meaningful, accessible, and understandable. In interviews, van den Berg said that he believed that, “in order to become a good phenomenologist one has to have a fairly wide interest. One requires a certain knowledge of philosophy, of art and literature, of cultural history and so on” (Kruger, 1985, p. xvi). Van den Berg became particularly well-known for the development and application of a historical, phenomenological approach that he termed “metabletics,” a word derived from the Greek, meaning “to change.” In his first major work, Metabletica (1956), published in English in 1961 as The Changing Nature of Man, he described the changing relation between adults and children, neurosis and sexuality, and the phenomenon of the miracle and God. This book was provocative so that it immediately became a best seller in the Netherlands. Van den Berg aimed to show that the assumption that human beings are essentially the same through the ages was unfounded. The chapter on the adult-child relation appeared several years earlier (in 1956, 1961), than a work with a similar theme that the French historian Philippe Ariès (1960, 1965) became famous for. Van den Berg described the process of the infantilization of adulthood and the appearance of puberty as a historical and cultural phenomenon. The unique feature of the metabletical 28 Jan H. van den Berg method is that it approaches its object of study not diachronically, as development through time, but synchronically, from within a meaningful constitution of relations among different events during the same shared socio-historical period. For example, in Divided Existence (1974), he provided a detailed portrayal and a surprisingly early postmodern interpretation of the development of the human psyche by connecting it with a variety of simultaneous developments in the surrounding culture, showing how the sense of self-identity is increasingly fragmented, divided, and impacted by externals. Van den Berg’s writings were an essential contribution to the reputation of the Utrecht School movement. His phenomenological text Het Ziekbed [The Sickbed] (1952) was published in English as The Psychology of the Sickbed (1966). His book The Phenomenological Approach to Psychiatry (1955) was reissued as A Different Existence (1974), which still is an excellent introduction to the phenomenological approach. In addition to his many phenomenological studies in psychology and psychiatry, he also wrote several lucid general lifeworld studies, such as Zien: Verstaan en Verklaring van de Visuele Waarneming [Seeing: Understanding and Interpretation in Visual Perception] (1972). In his work, van den Berg was especially conscious of the historical and cultural embeddedness of phenomenological psychology. He was far ahead of the later postmodern critique of the dangers of foundationalism, essentialism, and historical and cultural universalism. He argued that the project of phenomenology was contextualized by the limits of language, culture, time, and place. According to van den Berg, phenomenological psychology and psycho-pathology does not claim to have found a universally valid approach to human phenomena; instead, it is always self-conscious of its anthropological starting point. Therefore, it is futile to speak of a general phenomenology of perception since people from different cultures “see” differently, and people see and understand their worlds differently from the ways that their close and distant forebearers did, just as their children will perceive the world differently. As an example, van den Berg criticizes such studies as the Kinsey report, The Sexual Behavior of the Human Male. He suggests that while this report might be characteristic of the North American male, it says virtually nothing about, for example, the European male. Jan H. van den Berg was without a doubt highly influential on the uptake of phenomenology by practitioners in psychology, medicine, and other disciplines. Robert Romanyshyn, a close friend and student of van den Berg, explained how he came to appreciate “that phenomenology practiced in this fashion was a work of homecoming, a work of anamnesis or un-forgetting, a work of return” (2008, p. 397). In the central park of the Dutch city of Deventer there is a dedicated plaque with the following words: In this area the physician-psychiatrist prof. dr. Jan H. van den Berg grew up (1914–2012). Here he acquired his enormous interest in nature. He gained fame, amongst other works, with his metabletica, science of Jan H. van den Berg 29 changes. The focus of this science is that a comparison of concurrent happening phenomena of different varieties can show insight into human existence and history. Notes Where an English translated publication is available for the selected works, the English publication alone is cited in the list. Selected Works Van den Berg, J.H. (1952). The Human Body and the Significance of Human Movement: A Phenomenological Study. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, XIII, pp. 159–183. Van den Berg, J.H. (1953). Het Gesprek [The Conversation]. In: J.H. van den Berg and J. Linschoten (eds.). Persoon en Wereld [Person and World]. Utrecht: Bijleveld, pp. 136–154. Van den Berg, J.H. (1955). Over Neurotizerende Factoren [On Neurotic Factors]. Nijkerk: Callenbach. Van den Berg, J.H. (1956). Metabletika [Metabletics]. Nijkerk: Callenbach. Van den Berg, J.H. (1959). Het Menselijk Lichaam: Het Verlaten Lichaam [The Human Body: The Abandoned Body] (Vol. 1). Nijkerk: Callenbach. Van den Berg, J.H. (1961). Het Menselijk Lichaam. Het Geopend Lichaam [The Human Body: The Opened Body] (Vol. 2). Nijkerk: Callenbach. Van den Berg, J.H. (1963). Leven in Meervoud [Divided Existence]. Nijkerk: Callenbach. Van den Berg, J.H. (1964). The Changing Nature of Man. New York: Delta. Van den Berg, J.H. (1966a). Concise Psychiatry. Nijkerk: Callenbach. Van den Berg, J.H. (1966b). The Psychology of the Sickbed. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Van den Berg, J.H. (1968). Metabletika van de Materie [Metabletics of Matter] (Vol. 1). Nijkerk: Callenbach. Van den Berg, J.H. (1969). De Zuilen van het Pantheon [The Pillars of the Pantheon]. Nijkerk: Callenbach. Van den Berg, J.H. (1970a). Dieptepsychologie [Analytic Psychology]. Nijkerk: Callenbach. Van den Berg, J.H. (1970b). Things—Four Metabletic Reflections. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Van den Berg, J.H. (1970c). Things. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Van den Berg, J.H. (1972). A Different Existence. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Van den Berg, J.H. (1974). Divided Existence and Complex Society. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Van den Berg, J.H. (1978). Medical Power and Medical Ethics. New York: Norton. Van den Berg, J.H. (1983). The Changing Nature of Man (H.F. Croes, trans.). New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Van den Berg, J.H. (1987a). The Human Body and the Significance of Human Movement. In: J.J. Kockelmans (ed.). Phenomenological Psychology: The Dutch School. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, pp. 55–77. Van den Berg, J.H. (1987b). Hooligans: Metabletisch Onderzoek naar de Betekenis van Centre Pompidou en Crystal Palace [Hooligans: Metabletic Research into the Meaning of Center Pompidou and Crystal Palace]. Nijkerk: Callenbach. 30 Jan H. van den Berg Van den Berg, J.H. (1996). Geen Toeval: Metabletica and Historische Beschrijving [No Accident: Metabletica and Historical Description]. Kampen: Kok Agora. Van den Berg, J.H. (2013). Op Het Scherp van de Schede [On the Cutting Edge] ( J. de Visscher and H. Zwart eds.). Kalmthout: Pelckmans Uitgeverij. Van den Berg, J.H. and Linschoten, J. (eds.). (1953). Persoon en Wereld [Person and World]. Utrecht: Bijleveld. References Ariès, P. (1965 [1960]). Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. New York: Vintage. De Jong, J. en Snel, J. (2001). Met Hartstocht en Passie in de Wetenschap Staan. Een Gesprek met Jan Hendrik van den Berg [Doing Science with Dedication and Passion. A Conversation with Jan Hendrik van den Berg]. Wapenveld, 2, April, pp. 19–26. Available March 10, 2020 from: https://wapenveldonline.nl/artikel/396/ met-hartstocht-en-passie-in-de-wetenschap-staan/ Giorgi, A. (2015). The Phenomenological Psychology of J.H. van den Berg. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 46 Leiden, pp. 141–162. Kruger, D. (ed.). (1985). The Changing Reality of Modern Man. Essays in Honor of J.H. van den Berg. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Romanyshyn, R.D. (2008). Journeying with Van den Berg. Amherst, NY: Trivium Publications. Janus Head, 10 (2), pp. 397–414. Van den Berg, J.H. (1952). The Human Body and the Significance of Human Movement, A Phenomenological Study. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, XIII, pp. 159–183. Van den Berg, J.H. (1955). The Phenomenological Approach to Psychiatry. Springfield: Charles C.Thomas Publisher. Van den Berg, J.H. (1956). Metabletika [Metabletics]. Nijkerk: Callenbach. 3 THE CONVERSATION [Het Gesprek, 1953] Jan H. van den Berg In conversation, we blend a common world. Frederik J.J. Buytendijk (1952, p. 44) If we wish to explore what it means to have a conversation, then it is advisable not to begin with the conversational element “the spoken word,” as understood in a linguistic or theoretical sense. As soon as the “word” is isolated from conversational talk, it loses all phenomenological meaning. Instead, here we start with an anecdote, a story about a conversation. To focus immediately on an enigmatic property of any conversational talk, we will immediately begin with a remarkable example of a conversation. There is a story about the poet Alfred Tennyson visiting the philosopher Thomas Carlyle. They sat the entire evening silently beside a fireplace. And when it came time for Tennyson to leave, Carlyle concluded their meeting with the following words: “We had a grand evening, please do come back very soon.” Now, no one will want to argue that these two friends were engaged in an animated conversation. Not a word was spoken! Yet, something must have happened that evening that is closely related to being engaged in a conversation. Why else would Carlyle have urged Tennyson so heartily to come back again? It occurs to me that the interpretation of this particular anecdote is this: No word needed to be spoken. The most important condition for any true conversation was so completely fulfilled that the spoken word became entirely unnecessary and could, therefore, be absent. If we ask ourselves what this condition is, then we will not be mistaken when we determine that both Tennyson and Carlyle knew themselves together in a very special way during that evening. There existed a being together that doubtlessly permitted a conversation, in an encounter that set 32 The Conversation free the spoken word, releasing the necessity to speak at all. Precisely because this being together was so exceptionally complete, a spoken word would have been a disruption of the shared silence they enjoyed beside the brightly burning fire. In one form or another, we all know this being togetherness, which gives our words freedom to be spoken or remain unspoken. These are encounters in which we feel understood. We can sit silently with the other person without sensing any tension or concern. And if we do want to speak, our words come without effort. We do not need to explain our words, and we need few words to make ourselves clear. We certainly also know—and probably more commonly—situations in which all of this does not happen. In that case, the presence of the other becomes an obstacle that we must continuously overcome with our words. This other person stands, as it were, between us and our words, as if we experience the other ready to criticize, driving a wedge between our thoughts and our words. In such situations, we have to think before we carefully speak. We are forced to weigh our words with a measure imposed on us by the other person’s presence. We sense how our wrongs must be corrected. We are constantly diligently justifying our words, so awkwardly that they seem to necessitate even more words. But all this is in vain, because the only thing that would save us is the way that the other person is listening to us, and that is precisely denied to us. There are moments in which we are dumbfounded because of a lack of mutual understanding. But it is generally the case that the more words we speak, the less the condition for a conversation is met. Where few words are sufficient, there is usually a close togetherness. So, we can say that the conversation is determined by the nature of our being together. Yet, what is this being together? Our understanding of the conversation will depend on how we answer this question. Aristotle pointed out that we cannot equate human togetherness with that of animals: “Cows are together as a herd when they graze on one pasture” (1940, p. 44). In contrast, humans can feel and work together when they do not bodily share the same physical space. Humans are probably never more conscious of their togetherness when they miss one another, when they feel lonely, isolated despite the physical presence of others. “Einsam bin ich ‘nicht alleine’” [I am lonely, ‘not alone’], says Binswanger thoughtfully, when I lovingly miss “Hinblick auf Dich” [the regard of you] (1942, p. 131). It is quite possible to feel a lack of togetherness amid a crowd. We can be alone when the other is present, even when this person addresses us, and we politely respond with answers. In other words, the physical presence of fellow human beings is no guarantee for the being together that we have in mind here, and even the exchange of words cannot be considered a guarantee for this exclusively human phenomenon of the eminently social unity of two. And because the conversation is made possible by this unity, “speaking with the other” is no guarantee for a true conversation. A conversation does not live by the grace of the spoken word. In fact, it is not The Conversation 33 rare that we experience the opposite: that the spoken word destroys virtually all chances for a conversation. We shall dwell on this last possibility in a moment. Let us imagine that a man, a resident of Amsterdam, who has the habit of visiting the art museums of his city and who has learned to admire the art collections, has invited his cousin, a contractor from a small town in the northern part of the country, to visit the capital. It goes without saying that the famous art museums are not forgotten during the visit. And so, the host and the contractor both go to the Stedelijk [Metropolitan] Museum. Soon, they stand together in front of a painting by Carel Willink, entitled De Jobstijding [Bad Tidings] dated 1932. Both look at the same thing: a picture of an almost banal part of the suburbs of a city. In front, a well-dressed man is seen walking on the sidewalk, and at the rear-left, a woman is seen running after him with a letter in her outstretched hand. The man appears unaware. But the woman seems desperate to give the letter to him. Also visible in the painting is a large pink-coloured house in the centre of the canvas. Both visitors regard these details and more of the scenery: trees, clouds, and other houses. Beyond all these details, the host sees what we could describe as “ominous tidings.” He sees a fateful inevitability that awaits the walking man who is unaware of the woman who desperately runs after him. He sees the almost ridiculous civility of the man who appears to walk with a measured stride compared to the frantic woman whose gestures already seem to reflect a resigned attitude. This scene unfolds against the ugly nakedness of the house, an impossibly pedantic tree, and heavy dark clouds that hang menacingly over the panorama. The Amsterdam host is searching for words to talk with his cousin about this painting, that is, about the mysterious inevitability of fate. But before he can utter a word, his cousin suddenly says: “Can you imagine how a roofer would so poorly install shingles to cover the roof of a house?” Now, how can we blame the host for immediately feeling sorry that he had invited his cousin? We can understand that he feels regret to have entered the museum with his cousin. This museum visit has turned out to be not a going together but rather a coincidental walk alongside each other, “like cows in the meadow.” Or even less so, because cows still graze on the same grass, while the two cousins’ eyes have completely different appetites. Upon the remark of his cousin, it becomes clear to the host that he is alone. Or better, if at that moment he had thought of his wife, with whom he learned to admire the painting, he would have felt lonely. And because he is alone, all the words that he wanted to share about this painting become meaningless. He is speechless. He knows not what to say. The cousin’s question about the poorly installed roof shingles has disrupted the hoped-for conversation. His cousin’s words unmistakably make clear that he and his cousin are not really together; therefore, it is impossible to “see” together and to “speak” together. 34 The Conversation We can analyze this whole situation with more accuracy. The art-loving host from Amsterdam entered the museum with the intent to enjoy the art on display with this cousin. As a good host, he did not just go inside. Nor did he enter for a visit by himself. Instead, he was counting on walking and talking together with this cousin and, therefore, looking at the art with this cousin. But instead, the cousin’s unexpected question made him see differently. In a manner of speaking, the Amsterdam host saw himself. He saw what he had come to see all those times when he had visited the museum and what all the literature on paintings had taught him. He saw his own art appreciation history. And he also saw more. He saw everything for which the reading of art-historical publications had opened his soul. He saw a dimension of his own personal being. The only place where one realizes oneself is where something, like this painting, draws one to really “see.” It draws so strongly that we may say that one is wholly absorbed by where one looks. Such an onlooker who is fascinated by what is observed has, in a certain sense, forgotten him- or herself. Such a person who closely examines a painting is unaware of his or her own presence, attitude, or expressivity. Instead, by being completely immersed in what is seen in the art, he or she passes beyond everything that another person might see. Indeed, it is not going too far to say that museum visitors, who allow themselves to be “absorbed” by a particular painting or another art object, have merged with the art, become one with it. From such a perspective, we understand that paintings, sculptures, and other art creations are not inflexible objects that we look at, but rather, that our looking at the exhibited art objects involves the meaningfulness that the art evokes in us. For example, when one sees a work by Peter Paul Rubens, one visitor may experience rediscovery of a fascination with the human body, another visitor may walk hastily past the abundance of flesh, while a third person tries to steer his children away from the revealing naked figures. In their response to the painting, these three visitors have exposed something about themselves. The Amsterdam host, who sees in the painting of Carel Willink the mystery of an approaching ominous fate that will overpower, also proves with this seeing who he is himself. And his observation also shows something else to him when he stands alongside his cousin in front of the painting. He sees the picture to the best of his intent, however vaguely and unconsciously, as a possibility for sharing a meaningful moment of being together. In realizing that this painting may possess the potential for a being together, he searches for words: words, which he seeks to find in the real presence of the art. These would, at first, be probing words; next, words that seem to resonate; and finally, words that reveal a shared understanding of the meaning evoked by the painting. The host searches for these words “in himself,” but because he is not really standing in front of the painting, but more in the painting where his fascination draws him, he searches the image for words. He reads them in the painting, as the art manifests itself in this togetherness. The Conversation 35 No doubt, the reader may feel that this way of describing the museum scene is odd. And yet, it is advisable to take a very accurate account of what is actually happening. Generally, our words originate and are heard from where they are spoken. If I want to call my friend who is over there—for example, if I need to warn him or her—my words are heard in the spot where my friend finds him- or herself. If my voice can barely reach my friend, my warning cry will sound soft in my ears, as quiet as it will sound to my friend, while, “in reality” (another reality, not the phenomenological!), my voice will be shouting. If a voice from another room in my home awakens me, my answer will sound where it should be: on the other side of the door; and possibly it sounds so exclusively there that I can remain calm, so quiet, that I may even continue to sleep peacefully. The Amsterdam host in no way searches “behind his eyes,” as it were: in other words, in his brain or heart for the words that he might utter about the painting. Instead, he searches for them in the picture image, because there they will soon be born to be heard. He reads them from the aesthetic forms, textures, and colours, from the portrayals of attitudes and expressions of those pictured figures, and of course, also from all the other details of things as they are now disturbed in the failed sphere of togetherness with his cousin. Anyone who looks at the same painting, panorama, cityscape, or scene with three different people will talk about the same thing in three different ways. One knows that and how certain words are generally understood. With flawless, albeit conscious sensibility, one chooses a particular intonation and modulation of the sentences as they are pronounced. Or more correctly: with different companions, one will see various scenes in the same “objective situation.” For example, during a proverbial walk through the same forest with a forester, a timber trader, a botanist, a dendrologist, or with a romantic partner, this same forest manifests itself in an ever-changing manner of meaning, when one walks, looks, and speaks (or is silent) with this other, said Binswanger famously (1946, p. 30). This forest always shows itself differently: this forest becomes that forest, in which being together with the other becomes a real togetherness. And precisely for that reason, a conversation in and about the forest differs in all these situational examples. As multiple conversations about the same thing become possible, various ways of being together become possible—and even these ways of being together may become the subject of conversation. Commonly, the shift in the meaning of a scene takes place without one being fully aware of this change. For example, I am generally unaware of a shift in meaning when I look at a painting in a museum by myself and then look at the same picture with someone else. The changed sense of awareness is what is called non-thetic consciousness. Non-thetic consciousness is our awareness of things without consciously attending to them. It could be argued that only when such a shift in meaning is least noticeable, then the conversation is least forced. Usually, it is only later, afterwards, that one can be surprised about the new wealth 36 The Conversation of understanding that one gained about a landscape, an object, or an image from the togetherness of being with another person. So, what the Amsterdam host of our example sees in Willink’s painting is this meaning, as it unfolds in its non-thetic mood of being together with his cousin, the contractor. Standing beside his cousin, he now sees more architecture in this image than he used to see. Perhaps he sees the colours a bit more as house paint. And as his emotionality is drained, he may have erased his past shared understanding of the Willink painting with his wife, with whom he learned to appreciate it. In this encounter—which happened very quickly—he is disturbed by the brash question asked by his cousin: “What do you think of those shingles?” These words betray to the host a distance that he had not suspected. They teach him that their sense of togetherness outside the museum is no longer valid in this place. Outside the museum, his cousin, no doubt, appreciates the houses and neighbourhoods while not necessarily looking at them with “contractor’s eyes.” But the museum presupposes a new appeal, which the host now realizes with disappointment and discouragement that remains inadequately responded to by his cousin. While outside the museum, he could partially adopt the perspective of a contractor—just as his cousin could take a view of the world that let go of things that he would typically notice, but now the Amsterdam host is no longer together with his cousin. And it is precisely because he had partially denied his view of the world that the words that were about to be uttered die. He sees “nothing” that can be used to entertain roof shingles. The approaching ominous fate has no shingles. He is speechless. Perhaps he wonders for a moment whether it still makes sense to go further or even if it is not better to say goodbye. But he will immediately correct this thought. He must respond, he must give an answer if he wants to remain faithful to the invitation that came from him. He does not want to make the day for his cousin, and for him, an unsavoury memory. Therefore, let us assume that the Amsterdam host answers in this way: “Yes . . . I have never paid attention to that detail . . . but now I see it too . . . And yet, do you not think the house makes a wondrous impression?” It is worth asking what might have transpired. When his cousin came up with the question about the shingles, the anticipated plan of sharing of an aesthetic reality at the museum was destroyed, and with it the art “object,” in which the shared togetherness would have been found. This “object” was not the disclosure of fate—the Amsterdam host was too much in the company of his cousin for that—but some intermediate phase between seeing a suburban house and seeing the threat of impending fate. However, the question that his cousin posed reduced, without any doubt, the possibility of perceiving the “object” of a suburban scene (houses, trees, and streets) with the possibility of observing various details (stones, leaves, windows, chimneys, and shingles). After a moment of wondering whether he should allow this degradation, the Amsterdam host accepts his cousin with the words: “now I see it too.” The Conversation 37 Thus, he sees again with his cousin, or rather, he has given himself the freedom to see his cousin—because that is how his cousin turns out to be when he is absorbed in the image of poorly installed shingles. He accepts his cousin in the shared painting again, seeing him as the painting. After a moment’s hesitation, the conversation becomes possible again. But immediately afterwards, he tries to “move” his cousin: “And yet, do you not think the house makes a wondrous impression?” Despite everything, he remains faithful to himself; he does not want to remove himself entirely from the painting; he wants to see both the cousin and himself in the image. It is this perception: seeing both, seeing a possible “being together,” that—after the destruction of an illusionary sharing of the canvas— restores the possibility of having a conversation again. We have thus come to a provisional answer to the question about the nature of the togetherness that is constituted by the conversation. These moments of being together (together over there, together in the landscape, together in the painting, etc.) express the togetherness of being in one world. Only when we can join a world together can we be together in this world and does our speaking about this world become possible. Incidentally, we should not think that this answer only applies to an ideal conversation. Even conversations that are merely “sociable,” “pleasant,” or “kind,” and even idle talk are only possible when the points of contact lie in a design of the world that is based on togetherness. The eristic conversation presupposes a starting point that departs from a common being-by-things, just as it is the case with, for example, the friendly, practical, narrative, amorous, Socratic, neurotic, and psychotic conversations. However, it is true that the departure from a shared world, by the partners of an eristic conversation implies a focus on a goal that is hardly contained in the togetherness of the starting point itself. Søren Kierkegaard says, “Wenn es wirklich gelingen soll, einen Menschen zu einem bestimmten Ziele hinzuleiten, muβ man zunächst darauf achten, daβ man ihn da finde, woe r ist, und da anfängt” [If one is truly to succeed in leading a person to a specific place, one must first and foremost take care to find him where he is and begin there] (1930, p. 14). In the example described previously, this “where the person is” could be found in the poorly installed shingles, while the ominous quality of the painting concerned the goal to which the Amsterdam host wanted to take his cousin. It is particularly interesting to read how differently this departure from the place where the other can be found, this moving towards the other, is appreciated. Kierkegaard speaks of a “Demütigung” [humiliation] and considers humility not only necessary but also a courteous form of interacting with fellow human beings (1930, p. 15). Marcel Proust, in contrast, sees in this gesture only a betrayal committed to one’s own principles. He would undoubtedly have called the host’s response to his cousin’s remark a gross lie. It is a lie, forced by the friendship or familial bond that brought the two cousins to the museum. Proust declared, “On ment toute sa vie, même surtout, peut-être seulement, à ceux qui nous aiment” [We lie all our lives, even—especially—perhaps only—to those who love us] (1925, p. 88). 38 The Conversation No matter how misanthropic these words may sound, no matter how incorrect they are in their overall sensibility, this statement contains a core of truth. There are conversations that we have with others in which we are brought to a compromising limit of our own position. If, in those cases, we wanted to force ourselves to continue the conversation, then we would be uttering such personal lies that we could rightly feel the blame of Proust. To illustrate, consider the following experience related to me by a Parisian colleague. This colleague had invited an acquaintance for a walk through some old parts of Paris. But as they were walking, the conversation was not going very well. She tried to interest her companion in some of the peculiarities of this metropolis. She pointed to the traces that Napoleon had left in this extraordinary city; yet, Paris could not release Napoleon. She and her companion could not, for a moment, identify with Napoleon, meaning with that image of Napoleon, that Paris may offer us. And the same with the Sun King, Louis XIV. They could not find a historic Paris in their walk. It became gradually clear to my colleague that they were not in the same Paris, the cultural centre of Europe, or the wonderful hospitality that greets visitors in the smell of the metro, the sounds of the buses, and the gestures of the parishioners who pass in the streets. In hindsight, it seemed that the colleague sought in vain for her companion during their Paris walk. And this search abruptly halted, when in one of the most picturesque places of the Latin Quarter, the companion exclaimed: “They should tear down these old parts and build new needed housing.” From that moment on, the colleague felt that she was walking alone next to her companion—this “next to each other” had turned into an immeasurable distance. Their being together was in ruins, and their chances were gone for a conversation, no matter how many words were thereafter spoken. Did the companion prove with her remarks that she had searched for this Parisian colleague in Paris and that she had tired of this search? Did she also feel that about the conversation? Of course, that is entirely possible. What else does this mean then that their judgments and their observations of Paris were incompatible for each other, and so they had become disinterested in conversing with each other? Now, if my colleague had forced herself to continue the already shaky conversation, which would not have been entirely impossible, then she might have said something like the Amsterdam host in the earlier example: “I have never seen it that way, but now that you say it, yes, they should tear down the entire Latin Quarter!” But, if she had made such a statement, would she not have been obliged to find herself reprehensible? No doubt, the physiognomy of Paris would have reproached her for her unfaithfulness, that is, to this city, as it had become for her, and thus unfaithful to herself. Self-blame is always invoked from a certain view of the world. It is the “things” that we deal with, which convince us how much we are violating ourselves, how we malign ourselves, how we betray ourselves. In this regard, we have to agree with Proust: self-betrayal mainly emerges in contact with other people and then in the first place in contact with those who became somehow dear to us. There is no place where the The Conversation 39 dialectical relationship between the “I” and the “self ” reveals itself as truthfully as in relation with others. Our partners form the indicator of the peace or discontentment that we experience in our selves. In that sense, every conversation is a self-conversation. I do not mean to return to old theories of communication, but rather to rehabilitate what was seen at the time of the association or analogic theories of empathy. In our first explication of togetherness, it became clear that the condition for a genuine conversation consists of a co-constitution of the world. We can now add the following to this. While our faithfulness to the world does not get damaged in our conversational relations with others in our lifeworlds, the coconstitution of the world, being with the things of our world together with our conversational partners, presupposes the play of give-and-take. A conversation is suspended between two poles of accountability: the accountability to the conversational partner, which one should not want to lose during the conversation, and the accountability to one’s self, one’s own history, which ultimately amounts to accountability to all those who were the mediators for us in becoming who we are. Both poles of accountability translate into a single physiognomy of what is given and what orients the conversation. So, what is the conversation itself now? What is the word that harmonizes with being together and, at the same time, adds a new element to being together? What role does the spoken word play? To answer this question, we will return to our visitors of the Stedelijk Museum and consider the possibility that the cousin responds with words that were immediately appreciated by the conversational partner, the Amsterdam host. We will consider the possibility of the cousin speaking about the threatening darkness of the sky with the ominous clouds, the treacherous greenery of the trees, the purplish colour of the house that seems to express a determinate and terrible hostility. The scene is unmistakably anthropomorphized: the darkness threatens, the clouds menace, and the greenery terrorizes a person who has been able to make the world a home in a certain sense. That this anthropomorphism can be articulated proves a togetherness that permits the acknowledgement that our reality can reveal a world that is indeed ominous, threatening, terrifying. We have paid sufficient attention to all of this previously. However, the word accomplishes even more: it details. It mentions the sky, the clouds, the trees, and the house successively. The undivided being together that yielded power to the word is explicated in the spoken word. Speaking is explicating, a setting apart. And because this setting apart, this separating of aspects of the world takes place in a con-tact with the other—this setting apart is con-versant, con (together) verse (line, draw, express, poetic). Conversation is together expressing a shared world. In other words, conversation is the shaping of togetherness. “Das Mitsein wird in der Rede ausdrücklich geteilt, d.h. es ist schon, nur ungeteilt als nicht ergriffenes und zugeeignetes” [Being-with is “explicitly” shared in discourse, that is, it already is, only unshared as something not grasped and appropriated], says 40 The Conversation Heidegger (1927, p. 162). He wants to underline with this observation that the conversation does not take place in a kind of vacuum between two inner rooms, but is moving in a world of common interaction: “Mitteilung ist nie so etwas wie ein Transport von Erlebnissen, z.B. Meinungen und Wünschen aus dem Innern des einen Subjekts in das Innere des anderen” [Communication is never anything like a conveying of experiences, for example, opinions and wishes, from the inside of one subject to the inside of another] (p. 162). Although this view creates the atmosphere in which an understanding of the meaning of conversation can be freed from all solipsistic obstacles, it is too absolute to not immediately provoke some contradiction. Heidegger’s term “never” should probably be substituted for “also.” No matter how much I am engaged in conversation with the other person, I always know that it is him or her, who is there next to me, who speaks. Time and again, I am forced to understand his or her words as expressing an audible inner self. Anyone who could have watched the two cousins in the museum would have seen that both of them turned their gaze now and then from the painting to each other, as if it were to establish that they were standing there and expressing with one another words that reflected what they were experiencing, of what went on inside of them. Sartre (1943), who is undoubtedly more a psychologist than Heidegger, explains in his L’Être et le Néant [Being and Nothingness] that every human phenomenon can manifest itself in three fundamentally different ways. First, the human being is the world. We usually “forget” ourselves when involved in an activity that is part of a daily task. The steps of the staircase teach the person the size of feet and steps; the bicycle proves that he or she has two hands; and, the hand shows the turning of the doorknob. Yet, the foot itself and the hand itself are constantly unnoticed, “passed over” as Sartre says, passé sous silence [passed over in silence]. Second, this same person walking up or down the stairs, riding a bicycle, or opening or closing a door can be observed by other people, and for those who see this person engaged in these activities, things look different. It may be that for the person engaged in activity, the door is easily or routinely opened, but to the onlooker, it shows that the person is intent on entering the room. It may be that the landscape simply proves to the walker how to move his or her legs in reaching a destination. Still, when I see the walker walking in his or her environment, then I have to assume that there is a motivation that inhabits the walker and controls his or her body. For me, as the one who (unnoticed) watches the walking person, the centre from which the actions are determined is not the world in which he or she lives, but the head and heart, that directs the hand and steps. Third, when the other person notices that I see him or her, he or she can experience my gaze as positive or as a hindrance; in both cases, the centre from where his or her actions are given becomes my gaze. We will not further explore this third dimension, which has given a special meaning to the understanding of a disturbed conversation—think of stuttering, falling over words, talking down to The Conversation 41 people. The conversation is not only the sharing of a common view of the world but also a participation in each other’s inner self. The conversation is, therefore, the most immediate, intimate contact between people. The question about the relationship of the mystery of head and heart, and the disclosure thereof through the spoken word leads to the question of participation. Let us imagine that we have acquired a good knowledge of Willink’s painting, De Jobstijding, and that this knowledge asks us what we think of it. Quite possibly, this question will embarrass us slightly. What shall we say: “It is beautiful”? This answer would be too vague and too banal. It does not reflect enough how the painting so eloquently or compellingly addresses and speaks to us. We want to let the panorama speak for itself, and to that end, we point to the details that most speak to us: the “ominous cloud,” the “treacherous greenery,” and the “hostility of the purplish colour house.” We may want to leave it at that. However, can we be satisfied with this description? Hardly. The quality of the green is undoubtedly insufficiently characterized by the adjective “treacherous,” and the colour of the house is more than just “hostile.” And yet these words satisfy us when we speak them while being together in conversation and when we trust the other to receive our words. We count on it as it were that the other adds to it, what we would add to it—whatever the lake we visit means to us, that the clouds, the greenery, and the flowers make us feel good. Only when being together gives a fiat to our word can this word express the appreciation that we mean. If being together has been realized in an optimal way, a comment can easily suffice that we would carefully avoid in other contexts. We then possibly say, “It is beautiful.” We trust in the being together, and that speaks for itself. Is not this being together for the time being concretized as a painting, which now lets us say, “It is beautiful?” Without this trust, our word would be defective. That is to say: our communication is always communicating with an appeal to a mutual understanding that the word itself can never guarantee. Our communication is always indirect. We say, “treacherous greenery,” but we mean more than what the picture convinces us of. The conversation is an indirect communication. With this conclusion, we have approached the conviction of Jaspers (1935, p. 378) and Gusdorf (1918, p. 187) that talk, when it is more than just reporting (and every conversation is more than that), is an indirect statement. The conversation communicates the hidden. What is this hidden? Our answer must be formulated in two very different ways. Marcel Proust (1927) describes how, when he found himself in an open rural field, he suddenly felt the desire to see a farmer’s daughter, to hug and hold her in his arms. The moment that this wish was most vivid, the landscape changed its character: “(Ce désir) ajoutait pour moi aux charmes de la nature quelque chose de plus exaltant” [(This desire) added for me something more exalting than the charms of nature] (p. 225). He sees this added aspect in the colour of the roof tiles, in the herbs that grow around him, and he sees it lying on the village, dreaming in a 42 The Conversation blue distance. He does not know how to name what has been added to the landscape, and he is fully aware that it would vanish if he looked at nature around him objectively. This added something is nowhere and, at the same time, everywhere. It imposes itself on him as the wish itself. Proust does not know what to say with regards to where this wish is most manifest: in himself or in the new aspect of the landscape. He is surprised that this new aspect continues to fuel his desire. What else could Proust mean than that the sudden emerging desire reveals a landscape of love? The landscape anticipates the loving togetherness, concretized in the colour of the roofs, in the herb of nature, and in the azure distance. The added something, for which he cannot find words and which he nevertheless communicates flawlessly to us, is nothing but the realization of the being together of love. This addition remains hidden: no word can speak it directly. But had the farmer’s daughter appeared before him, as his wish evokes imaginatively, then he would have been able to point at this landscape. He could have spoken to her about the details of this landscape, and she would have understood him. True, even then, the added aspect itself would not have materialized in words. His talking would have been a simple talk of the greenery and the colour of the roof tiles. Nevertheless, with these inadequate words, he could have made clear to her what the landscape had become for them both. His words would indirectly have communicated this something that was added, this hidden, this new aspect of things; in other words, his love. He probably could not have found a better way of expressing to convince her of the special kind of being together. We can, therefore, say that the hidden, which indirectly communicates the word, is what is added to the objectively given. This added is the visible realization of the being togetherness. The hidden is the quality of being together, which is visible in the things that the conversation is about. The “changed aspect,” the quality of the topic of conversation, proves to me how I “stand” with the other and to the other, how I stand in relation to him or her. Our words circle this quality; they are nourished by it, yet are never really filled by this secret hidden. Precisely because what is hidden remains hidden, no conversation can exhaust its subject. What we are talking about always turns out to be infinitely more than what we can bring to words. A conversation is infinite. It can only come to a satisfactory end when being together silently approves of our words. It is incorrect to believe that all of this only applies to those conversational relations where some kind of friendly bond exists. Indifference, irritability, and hatred can also show themselves to be added to the topic of a conversation. The colour of the roof tiles, which Proust (1927), in his pinkish fantasy, simply calls “pink,” can turn pale-pink or even poisonous-pink in another context of togetherness. If we first established that being together is the condition for the conversation, we can now translate this determination: the visible that is added, the hidden in the things that the conversation is about, that which feeds our words. While The Conversation 43 we first articulated the conversation as the communication of a shared world, our understanding is now this: the conversation is the direct communication of being together, which appears in the world as a visible excess. Yet, an imperfect answer has been given to the question about the nature of the hidden, that constitutes the conversation. As a mirror image of the mere indirect communication only, this hidden is also (and equally really) within us, within us as the secret of our heart. Kierkegaard formulated both answers in an inimitable way when he described the urge to communicate with oneself, which the walker experiences when he leaves the noisy street and suddenly finds himself in the countryside: Wenn der Wandrer von der lärmenden Landstraβe in die Stille tritt, dann ist’s ihm (denn die Stille ist ergreifend), als müβte er sagen, was in der Tiefe seiner Seele verborgen liegt; es ist ihm, nach der Erklärung der Dichter, als wollte sich etwas Unnennbares aus seinem Innersten hervordrängen, jenes Unaussprechliche, für das die Sprache keinen Ausdruck hat; denn auch die Sehnsucht ist nicht das Unaussprechliche selbst, sie eilt ihm nur nach. Was die Stille aber bedeutet, was die Landschaft aber mit dieser Stille sagen will,—das ist eben das Unaussprechliche. [When the wanderer comes away from the much-traveled noisy highway into places of quiet, then it seems to him (for stillness is impressive) as if he must examine himself, as if he must speak out what lies hidden in the depths of his soul. It seems to him, according to the poets’ explanation, as if something inexpressible thrusts itself forward from his innermost being, the unspeakable, for which indeed language has no vessel of expression. Even the longing is not the unspeakable itself. It is only a hastening after it. But what silence means, what the surroundings will say in this stillness, is just the speakable.] (1930, p. 18) The walker experiences two things that are essentially identical: the landscape wants to tell him something for which no words can be found, and, from his innerness, something emerges for which language has no expression. The visible mystery of the landscape is, at the same time, the secret of our inner self. Every conversation can convince us of that, when (this is the rule) we focus our gaze from the “landscape” to the other, who speaks about this landscape. At that moment, we experience the secret mystery of the other—this is the secret being of being different. If we take Kierkegaard’s words literally, then we must conclude that there is an immeasurable distance between this secret and the expression. The expression remains estranged from the secret; the words are an alienation of what seeks expression. So, one can sigh with Schiller: “Spricht die Seele, so spricht ach! schon die Seele nicht mehr” [If the soul speaks, then, alas, it is no 44 The Conversation longer the soul that speaks] (1837, p. 96). Then it becomes understandable that so many writers consider the spoken word an unfaithful interpreter of thought. Bergson says: Le mot aux contours arrêtés, mot brutal, qui emmagasine ce qu’il y a de stable, de commun et par conséquent d’impersonnel dans les impressions de l’humanité, écrase ou tout au moins recouvre les impressions délicates et fugitives de notre conscience individuelle. [The word with its fixed contours, the brutal word, which stores what is stable, common, and therefore impersonal in human impressions, crushes, or at least covers over, the delicate and fleeting impressions of our individual consciousness.] (1888, p. 100) If, however, at the very moment that we face the other, we remain with this other on the topic of the conversation, then his or her words do indeed reveal the secret of his or her inner self, even though the secret itself remains hidden. We must realize that this secret keeps the conversation with the other going. What should we discuss if words do not constantly point to an area that exceeds words and their significance? How could our interest stay awake if the other did not remain a secret for us? Not because he or she likes to hide him- or herself from us, but because every word points to the secret that is (in) the other person. Thus, the other remains a “stranger,” a “newcomer,” an alter for which our interest never diminishes. The condition of the conversation is the secret of the other. This secret is the secret in him or her that the conversation indirectly communicates. And herewith, the second answer is provided to the question of the nature of the hidden, that makes the human being a communicating being: We speak because there is something to communicate. We speak because the essence of our being is ineffable. Those who do not have a secret have nothing to say. “If you know a man too well, you don’t want him to kiss you,” Lawrence let one of his protagonists say (1947, p. 112). We could equally assert that it would be difficult for us to speak to someone and listen to an answer if we knew this person completely—which, incidentally, is never the case. Every friendship, every love, every marriage lives by the grace of the secret that one remains for the other. Likewise, we can only hate or despise the other on the ground of something hidden that is abject, and that appears only indirectly in his or her words. Here we arrive at a final (paradoxical) definition of the condition of a conversation: The condition of every conversation is the secret of the other. The conversation is born by a never satisfied, and at the same time, always satisfied, “wondering” about the secret of the conversational partner. The condition of the conversation is the unfamiliarity of this partner, the inequality of two people who The Conversation 45 talk to each other. The condition of the conversation, we can finally say, is the asymmetry of the speakers. If there is a typical asymmetry of the conversational partners, then the conversation has a typical character. No one will call the conversation of two lovers common: yet it is supported by the typical asymmetry of two people in an erotic situation. The teaching conversation is also not common: it is fuelled by the unique asymmetry of teacher and student. The asymmetry of doctor and patient makes it possible for the conversation to possess a disclosing quality, and, therefore, many social norms can be put aside. The psychiatrist makes use of the special asymmetry of the mentally ill and him- or herself to assist the patient in finding a way to a healthy world. The conversational modalities in these and so many other professional contacts are entirely determined by the particular forms of asymmetry of the two speakers in conversation. We come across a strange fact here, which we do not want to elaborate on, but that we need to mention because it is probably characteristic of the fundamental nature of human existence and the conversation. We found that the condition of the conversation is the unfamiliarity of the conversational partners: their being different. Therefore, the condition of friendship, marriage, or the intimate human relation is the mutual alterity of the partners that is never boring, never coming to an end, and accordingly has no end. Notes 1. This text has been translated and edited by Max van Manen and Michael van Manen. 2. From: J.H. Van den Berg (1953). Het Gesprek [The Conversation]. In: J.H. van den Berg and J. Linschoten (eds.). Persoon en Wereld [Person and World]. Utrecht: Bijleveld, pp. 136–154. References Aristotle. (1940). Nicomachean Ethics, Book IX, 10. Cf. Paris: Garnier. Bergson, H. (1888). Essai sur les Données Immédiates de la Conscience [Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness] (36th ed.). Paris: Alcan. Binswanger, L. (1942). Grundformen und Erkenntnis Menschlichen Daseins [Basic Forms and Knowledge of Human Existence]. Zürich: Niehans. Binswanger, L. (1946). Ueber Sprache und Denken [About Language and Thinking]. Studia Philosophica, 6, pp. 30–50. Buytendijk, F.J.J. (1952). Phénoménologie de la Rencontre [Phenomenology of the Encounter]. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer. Gusdorf, G. (1918). La Découverte de Soi [The Discovery of the Self]. Paris: Presses University. Heidegger, M. (1927). Sein und Zeit [Being and Time]. Halle: Niemeyer. Jaspers, K. (1935). Psychology Weltanschauung of the Gene [The Psychology of Worldviews]. Berlin: Springer. 46 The Conversation Kierkegaard, S. (1930). Die Unzulänglichkeit des Nur-Menschlichen [The Inadequacy of the Human]. In: Religion der Tat: Sein Werk in Auswahl [Religion of Fact: A Selection of His Work]. Leipzig: Kröner, pp. 1–85. Lawrence, D.H. (1947). The Blue Birds. In: The Portable D.H. Lawrence. New York: Viking Press, p. 121. Proust, M. (1925). Albertine Dispame II (A la Recherche du Temps Perdu) [Albertine Dispame II (In Search of Lost Time)]. Paris: Gallimard. Proust, M. (1927). Du Coté de Chez Swann [Swann’s Way] (Vol. 1). Paris: Gallimard. Sartre, J.-P. (1943). L’Être et le Néant: Essai D’ontologie Phénoménologique [Being and Nothingness: Essay in Phenomenological Ontology]. Paris: Gallimard. Schiller, F. (1837). Schillers Sämmtliche Werke [Schiller’s Collective Works] (Vol. 1). Paris: F. Locquin. 4 DESCANT ON “THE CONVERSATION” What is more valuable than gold? Light. What is more precious than light? Conversation. Johann W. von Goethe (quoted by Kaplan, 2005, p. 311) On his deathbed in Weimar, while dying from heart failure, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s final words were told to have been “Mehr Licht!” [More light!] (Vogel, 1833). Surely it was Goethe’s studies of colour and light that had made him famous. And yet, above gold and light, Goethe valued conversation. While Goethe would have us wonder how the conversation is so supremely valuable, Jan H. van den Berg makes us wonder about the nature of the conversation in a phenomenological manner. Van den Berg draws us into the phenomenological attitude that forces us to let go of our common view of a conversation as something consisting of spoken words and to wonder about its originary meaning. The phenomenological text, “Het Gesprek” [The Conversation] (1953), shows van den Berg’s compelling talent for drawing phenomenological reflections from everyday, concrete moments. He does not engage in an empirical or speculative exploration of the use and meaning of conversation in our modern age, nor does he engage in technical philosophical explanations. Instead, he begins with an ordinary narrative example—as he often does in his phenomenological essays—about an evening visit of the poet Alfred Tennyson with the philosopher Thomas Carlyle. As the story goes, the two friends shared their evening, steeped in silence, and when the evening had passed, and the friends finally parted, Carlyle urged Tennyson to come back soon. Note that this anecdotal vignette is only three short 48 Descant on “The Conversation” sentences long. And yet, van den Berg immediately creates a vivid and concrete image of an experience of togetherness of these two friends. To begin, we could say that the anecdotal example of Tennyson and Carlyle sitting in silence beside a fire, and yet something resembling a conversation transpiring, is paradoxical. After all, the common view is that the basic meaning of a “conversation” is that it consists of words. The central term in Dutch for conversation is “spreken,” meaning “to speak.” So, for van den Berg to suspend the idea that the essence of a conversation lies in spoken words would seem an even more radical application of the epoché than it might be in the English language. Indeed, the Dutch dictionary equivalent for the term “the conversation” literally is “the speaking.” Now, van den Berg is intrigued with the Carlyle-Tennyson anecdote, and he wonders if this was not such a perfectly shared togetherness that words were not necessary—a conversation without words. Can one have a conversation without words spoken? In a phenomenological fashion, van den Berg helps us to wonder: What is really at the heart of a conversation? What is it that makes a conversation a unique and particular human phenomenon? Common sense seems to say that a conversation consists of talk, words spoken, and no doubt, this is superficially true. But are words the essential (eidetic) feature of a conversational relation? Throughout his phenomenological essay, van den Berg engages, in a writerly manner, the devices of the epoché and the reduction, without mentioning these terms. He simply asks his readers to be willing to be open and consider, counterintuitively, that “words” are not be the essential component in the conduct of conversation. He asks his readers to be open to the seemingly bizarre proposition that the essence of the conversation does not inhere in the talking, arguments, or chatter that we usually associate with having conversations. Next, van den Berg draws on a second anecdote as an experiential ground for reflecting on the quotidian meaning of a conversation. He tells us the story of a resident of Amsterdam inviting his cousin, a contractor from a small town in the northern part of Holland, to visit the Stedelijk Museum. Although the two are positioned in front of the same painting, De Jobstijding by Carel Willink, they see the picture differently. Togetherness is disturbed, and the possibility for conversation seems ruined. Van den Berg offers additional reflections including short phenomenological reflections on the experience of an awkward talk, of viewing a painting or other art object, of finding the space and source for words to speak, of sharing in a walk, of looking at a countryside, and so forth. Van den Berg’s phenomenological analysis (reduction) aims to show that a genuine conversation depends more fundamentally on the blending as well as the separating of the subjectivities of two people into the special conversational sharing of a common world. A good conversation is a hermeneutic, says Gadamer, that bridges the distance between minds and reveals the foreignness of the other mind. Whatever says something to us is like a person who says something. It is alien in the sense that it transcends us (Gadamer, 1976, p. 100). Van den Berg Descant on “The Conversation” 49 wrote this essay some decades before Gadamer addressed the phenomenology of conversation as central to hermeneutics (1975). His explorations for the phenomenological meaning of the phenomenon of the conversation are layered on reflections of descriptive examples and thoughtful observations allowing him to draw original phenomenological insights: the meaning of a conversation as expressing a certain mode of relational togetherness, of sharing a common world, of experiencing a shared sphere, and each other’s being present that makes a conversation what it is. Van den Berg explores the phenomenological features of this conversational space. He suggests that we all know this kind of togetherness where we feel so understood that our words are given freedom. We can speak, or we can be silent, because we feel completely comfortable in this shared conversational space. Van den Berg deepens our understanding of conversational togetherness without ever becoming lost in abstraction. He is doing phenomenology on the phenomenon. In other words, all of his reflections are constantly grounded in reflections on the concrete, the world as lived. We can appreciate the eidetic explications as he freely varies the details of his anecdotal examples: “let us assume that the Amsterdam host answers in this way . . .” and also offers an example of an antipathetic exchange about a scenic setting in Paris. Here we find the eidetic reduction in the phenomenological writing of van den Berg at the service of explicating the life meaning of a seemingly everyday human experience. We do not need to question the validity of these stories for their empirical truthfulness because it is the plausibility of these exemplary stories that provides them with self-evidentiality. The ground for van den Berg’s reflections is what the reader in some way already knows, the possible experience of the conversation. We appreciate the breadth of his knowledge of art, literature, and philosophy. Van den Berg draws on aphorisms from Aristotle, Kierkegaard, Proust, and also the philosophical writings of Heidegger, Sartre, and Binswanger, and he explicates phenomenological terminology when necessary for his reflective text. In doing phenomenology, he shows to be steeped in the philosophical phenomenological literature. And yet, it would be hard to identify any single passage as being overly philosophically technical or abstractly theoretical because his writing is always a play between concrete examples of experiential life stories and phenomenological reflections on the meaning and subtle aspects of the phenomena of human existence. So, when van den Berg arrives at his final reflections, they are not abstract but rather embedded in the reader’s empathic understandings of van den Berg’s words: Here we arrive at a final (paradoxical) definition of the condition of a conversation: The condition of every conversation is the secret of the other. The conversation is born by a never satisfied, and at the same time, always satisfied, “wondering” about the secret of the conversational partner. The condition of the conversation is the unfamiliarity of this partner, 50 Descant on “The Conversation” the inequality of two people who talk to each other. The condition of the conversation, we can finally say, is the asymmetry of the speakers. For Gadamer too, the conversation is a dialogue that lies at the core of coming to an understanding in the hermeneutic process of questioning. And vice versa, Gadamer points out that “every sudden idea has the structure of a question” (1975, p. 329). Gadamer’s primary interest in the conversation is the hermeneutic interest of coming to an understanding. The reader may still feel somewhat unsatisfied about the final paragraphs of van den Berg’s phenomenological essay. The reason is that van den Berg has actually “shown” more insight into the meaning of conversation than he seems to capture in his brief concluding words. But, interestingly, van den Berg provides insight into this unsatisfaction as well. He describes how he needs to be open to the other. In Gadamer’s words, “[Openness to the other] involves recognizing that I myself must accept some things that are against me, even though no one else forces me to” (Gadamer, 1975, p. 361). The point is that van den Berg has created a conversation with the reader, and the ultimate phenomenological meaning of this conversation lies in the meaningfulness of the world that gives meaning to the in-between togetherness as well as the separated difference of the conversational relation. Maurice Blanchot expresses phenomenally how the conversation plays with the secret and otherness of the thoughts of self and other. Note how Blanchot is writing this recollection as a vignette or anecdote—or as we suggested in the opening chapter, as an example: I recall being present at a conversation between two men who were very different from one another. One would say in simple and profound sentences some truth had taken to heart; the other would listen in silence, then when reflection had done its work he would in turn express some proposition, sometimes in almost the same words, albeit slightly differently (more rigorously, more loosely or more strangely). This redoubling of the same affirmation constituted the strongest of dialogues. Nothing was developed, opposed or modified; and it was manifest that the first interlocutor learned a great deal, and even infinitely, from his own thoughts repeated— not because they were adhered to and agreed with, but, on the contrary, through the infinite difference. For it is as though what he said in the first person as an “I” had been expressed anew by him as “other” [autrui] and as though he had thus been carried into the very unknown of his thought: where his thought, without being altered, became absolutely other [l’autre]. (Blanchot, 1993, p. 341) Blanchot reflects on the (fictional or real) conversation he had witnessed. He says, these two men had in a certain sense nothing in common, except the movement Descant on “The Conversation” 51 (which brought them very close) of turning together toward the infinite of speech, which is the meaning of the word conversation. In a sense, Blanchot confirms van den Berg’s phenomenality of the conversation when the latter says, “we speak because the essence of our being is ineffable. Those who do not have a secret have nothing to say.” And he concludes, “it is the mutual alterity of the partners that is never boring, never coming to an end, and accordingly has no end.” Van den Berg shows us the paradoxical character of conversation: it is a relational space that unites and separates. It unites in that it blends us together in a common world, but it also separates us in recognition of the secret and otherness of this other with whom we share a conversational world. The conversation is a relation, but it is also a nonrelation in the sense that the other remains a secret and must remain a secret to give meaning to the asymmetricality of the conversation. Van den Berg reveals the paradoxical limitation and the richness of language and linguistic silence underlying the shared space of the conversation. Language and silence constitute the paradoxical human medium that blends and separates, that shows sameness and difference, that shares and hides what is the absolute secret in the other. If van den Berg’s explication of the conversation is successful in a phenomenological sense, then the reader has been able to grasp the elusive meaning of the condition of paradoxical in-betweenness on which every conversational experience depends. Finally, in the closing paragraphs van den Berg briefly explains how professional practitioners, such as nurses, physicians, educators, and psychologists, may want to understand the nature and significance of the asymmetry when engaged in conversational dialogue with their patients, students, and clients. Phenomenology is not a technology and does not produce “fine theories,” as van den Berg says, rather it gives us meaningful “insights” into the phenomena of human existence (1972). Such phenomenological insights may be relevant for the conduct of conversation in the professional fields of pedagogy, nursing, pediatrics, medicine, psychology, counselling, and also the practice of conversation in everyday life. Van den Berg’s 1972 book, A Different Existence: Phenomenological Psychopathology, is an excellent (nontechnical) study of the neurosis of mental illness. It is also an excellent text demonstrating the method of the phenomenological attitude in the significance of conversation in psychiatry. A major theme that may strike the reader of A Different Existence echoes van den Berg’s phenomenology of the conversation: when a patient, suffering from neurosis, says that he does not dare to go outside because the houses are falling down, then the psychiatrist must believe the patient. The houses are indeed falling down for the patient. Van den Berg shows what it means to take the experience of the patient’s world seriously. Psychologically and phenomenologically it does not make sense to try assure the patient that the houses are fine and that they are not falling down. Rather, phenomenology must start with the question of how a mental illness is experienced. Gaining phenomenological insights into phenomena contributes to the depth of professional wisdom. To put it differently, this import of phenomenological insights for the 52 Descant on “The Conversation” professions is at the level of thoughtfulness and tact (see van Manen, M.A. 2019; van Manen, M. 2014, 2015). Notes All unmarked quotes are taken from the preceding essay on “The Conversation,” by Jan H. van den Berg. References Blanchot, M. (1993). The Infinite Conversation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gadamer, H-G. (1975). Truth and Method. New York: The Seabury Press. Gadamer, H-G. (1976). Philosophical Hermeneutics. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Kaplan, A. (2005). Emerging Out of Goethe: Conversation as a Form of Social Inquiry. Janus Head, 8, pp. 311–334. Van den Berg, J.H. (1953). Het Gesprek [The Conversation]. In: J.H. van den Berg and J. Linschoten (eds.). Persoon en Wereld [Person and World]. Utrecht: Bijleveld, pp. 136–154. Van den Berg, J.H. (1972). A Different Existence. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Van Manen, M. (2014). Phenomenology of Practice: Meaning-Giving Methods in Phenomenological Research and Writing. London: Routledge. Van Manen, M. (2015). Pedagogical Tact: Knowing What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do. London: Routledge. Van Manen, M.A. (2019). Phenomenology of the Newborn: Life from Womb to World. London: Routledge. Vogel, C. (1833). Die letzte Krankheit Goethes [The Last Illness of Goethe]. Journal der Practischen Heilkunde.