Heidegger’s notion of being-in-the-world is the antithesis to the “tranquilising” – a term used by the German philosopher himself in Being and time – effect of the environing of entertainment and “idle talk” – another Heideggerian term from Being and time – that is personified in the anonymous person of the everyday: das Man, rendered as “the they” in the two published English translations of the aforementioned magnum opus – of not only Heidegger himself but of modern hermeneutics. Existentially speaking, das Man is someone but also no one at the same time: society as a faceless stream of collective tranquilisation that Dasein falls into often through curiosity, temptation and simple laziness. What wrests Dasein away from this covering over of the potential for authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) in understanding of being (Seinsverständnis) is one unique mood (Stimmung) known to all: Angst, which is not ordinary fear or anxiety, but an unnameable dread in face of the disclosure of the uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit) of being-in itself, when being-in-the-world, always taken for granted in the fore-conception (Vorgriff) of Dasein, simply stops Dasein from feeling at home. In the moment of Angst, existence itself becomes problematic. Why is there being rather than nothing? What does it really mean to be? Why live and not die instead? Is not Dasein in reality the standing place for nothingness? Instead of who, is it not nothing that is there in the “da” of this most familiar yet primordially the strangest Dasein?

Heidegger wrote Being and time to address the ancient metaphysical prejudice that being (Sein) is “the most universal and the emptiest concept” (Heidegger, 1996, p. 1). His life-long dedication to address the question of being indicates how difficult it is to overcome this Greek misconception that allowed the forgetfulness of the distinction between being (Sein) and beings (Seiende) to hold sway in the history of Western thought. Where this ontological difference is not retrieved from the history of being, the dualistic metaphysics of subject-object divide takes over the structural whole of thinking.

The uniqueness of Heidegger’s contribution to philosophy, or to thinking as such, is his expansion, through the concept of the hermeneutic circle as explicated in Being and time (1927) but already prior to that in Ontology: the hermeneutics of facticity (1923) – of the Western hermeneutic tradition to include the interpretation of Dasein and its existential temporality as the leading path to the question of being. Being, as encountered by Dasein which is itself a self-interpreting being that has understanding of being (Seinsverständnis) as its essence, is significance: the potentiality for meaning, which differs from the given, in each and every such encounter. Using also phenomenology as passed down to him from Husserl, Heidegger was able to make explicit in his hermeneutic method that understanding of being is the condition for all meaningful interpretations. Understanding of being means that, first and foremost, being (Sein) is capable of being understood by Dasein. Meaning is the existential proximity of being (Sein) to Dasein; hermeneutics is the interplay of nearness and distance in the shifting horizons of interpretation in temporality. Whether in time or in the twinkling of an eye (Augenblick), the opacity of being to consciousness is something that can be overcome; it can be said that meaningfulness becomes the fundamental feature of hope, and the driving force of Dasein‘s comportment to the basic phenomenon of aletheia.

The theme of this hermeneutic investigation is the Dasein which is in each case our own and indeed as hermeneutically interrogated with respect to and on the basis of the character of its being and with the view to developing in it a radical wakefulness for itself (Heidegger, 2008, p. 12).

In Chapter 1 of Writing in the dark, van Manen gives a phenomenological account – one that is based on “lived experience” – of writing. The Dutch-Canadian phenomenologist details how writing takes place when the writer is lost to the everyday world and instead finds himself or herself in the creative space opened up by words themselves. In other words, writing involves the phenomenon of “entering” (van Manen, 2002, pp. 2-3). This entering, van Manen observes, causes the writer’s self to be “partially erased” (van Manen, 2002, p. 2). Perhaps writing is most inspired and productive when not holding on to oneself with conscious effort and obstinacy, but surrendering it to a “special reflective mood” (van Manen, 2002, p. 2). Writing, phenomenologically speaking, is what Heidegger aptly calls Gelassenheit – release of oneself into being. Hence accomplished writers can speak of the lived experience of “creative release”.

However, being phenomenologically grounded in lived experience, van Manen has the insight to realise that in the actual practice of writing, words often do not come readily to the writer, such that the writing experience becomes one of solitude and disorientation in darkness – hence the title of the book (van Manen, 2002, p. 2). Words’ invitation to enter their space does not come readily; to put this in Heideggerian language, it is definitely not ready-to-hand.

The “hermeneutic phenomenology” claimed to be used by van Manen hence stands before the aporia of non-writing in the lived experience of writing, given how resistant words are to the appropriation, or the claiming as one’s own, by the writer as “self” or “subject”. Perhaps a question concerning methodology needs to be put: is “hermeneutic phenomenology”, which is a term not used by either Heidegger or Gadamer, hermeneutic or phenomenological enough? Given his theoretical standpoint on the lived experience of teaching, it is not surprising that for van Manen, writing, too, which like teaching is a form of skilled practice improved through experience, is a non-reflective activity that differs in essence from thinking.

…the self is affected in an even more fundamental way in writing. A peculiar change takes place in the person who starts to write and enters the text: the self retreats or steps back as it were, without completely stepping out of its social, historical, biographic being. This is similar to what happens when we read a story. One traverses a world that is not one’s own. Here everything is undetermined. Everything is possible. Just as one is no longer oneself when one loses oneself in a novel, so the writer, in writing, seems no longer quite this or that personal self. In a certain sense, the writer becomes depersonalized or a neutral self – a self who produces scripture (van Manen, 2002, p. 3).

In the same chapter van Manen continues as follows:

We step out of one world, the ordinary world of daylight, and enter another, the textorium, the world of the text. In this world of shadows and darkness one traverses the landscapes of language. One develops a special relation to language, a reflective relation which disturbs its taken-for-grantedness. In fact, it may happen that in the attempt to write, one loses one’s very sense of language: one finds it impossible to write. And yet one must write. One is drawn to write. One writes. One has become “one” who writes (van Manen, 2002, pp. 3-4).

It is van Manen’s reflections on text and writing that the hermeneutic inadequacy of his so-called “hermeneutic phenomenology” comes to the fore. Instead of a surrender to the opacity of the textorium, or textual darkness, hermeneutics, true to its historicity and its tradition, calls for the luminosity of understanding – a clearing of being that cannot be reached without the struggle of interpretation, which does not end easily and has a tendency to return in a spiralling movement involving shifting levels of understanding: the movement of aletheia (truth as uncovering of being) together with its shadow, lethe.

Gadamer, in bringing Vollendung to Heidegger’s hermeneutic circle of aletheia, highlights, in his paper The eminent text and its truth, the primordiality of text as the origin of hermeneutic activity (Gadamer, 1980, p. 6). In Europe in the West as well as in the “Aryanised” culture of Tibet in the East, hermeneutics came into being in order to interpret, without the chaos of spiritual degeneration, the truth of sacred texts in religion. Hermeneutics, therefore, owes its birth to the divinely inspired human effort to struggle against the demonology, or Goetia, of untruth and damnation. To quote Gadamer from the same source:

Only when the understanding of something written is disputed do we ask after the precise text or exact wording. It is in this hermeneutic relation that something constitutes itself as text (Gadamer, 1980, p. 6).

Unlike the interpretive approach of van Manen, in hermeneutics it is not accepted that writing and text are events that happen to us, or happenings without the “mineness” (Jemeinigkeit) of Dasein. Instead, hermeneutics brings the perennial human struggle for truth into the midst of the text, such that its being, or textuality, becomes a contested ground for interpretation in the temporal (zeitlich), open-ended spiralling of the hermeneutic circle. Gadamer observes, through Goethe, that writing becomes complete when its author puts a finality to it (Gadamer, 1980, p. 7). The potential perpetuity of communication through words has to end at some point in time in order for it to become Schriften – the written works of an author in either manuscript or published form. Writing is grounded in the temporality of being and its wholeness is based on it. Perpetuity of word production, in contrast, is not wholeness, because as Heidegger explains in Being and time, Dasein finds authenticity only in the finitude of its being-towards-death (Sein-zum-Tode). Writing comes into being through the mortality of its author, even if it can exist indefinitely beyond his or her death. This is the paradox of writing that establishes the existential finitude of hermeneutics.

The essence of nursing, including its theory, is in the Sorge um the well-being of the sick and the dying. As elucidated by Heidegger in Being and time, the ontological primacy of Sorge, which is primordial to nursing care, is based on the facticity (qua being-in-the-world) that it belongs to the existential structure of Dasein. Only by thinking with Heidegger can nursing theory, as reflective discourse on nurses and nursing, interrogate the fundamental meaning of care and its associated tasks, such as the “lived experience” (Erlebnis) of patients and the education (Bildung) of nurses.

With Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 having gone missing for already 15 days, the tragic story continues to occupy headlines in world media. A 22 March 2014 article from BBC provides an example, although not explicitly stated, in the hermeneutic process of evidence-based Bayesian statistical research for missing planes: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26680633. It quite clearly explains two essential aspects of hermeneutics, namely the historicity of understanding and the Vorstruktur in Dasein‘s striving for a picture that can explain a phenomenon, in this case the crash of AF447 into the Atlantic Ocean. Knowledge is not created ex nihilo: it is dependent on its own history, which includes experience. 

Quite unexpectedly in the field of computing science, also known as information science, I discovered an article today that shows a good grasp of hermeneutics by its author: Matthew Chalmers, Hermeneutics, information and representation, European journal of information systems, 13, 210-220. I shall now quote the most impressive passage in the article:

Interpretation is based on prejudice, which includes assumptions implicit in the language that the person uses. That language in turn is learned through experiences of interpretation. The individual and their prejudice are changed through the use of language, and the language changes through its use by individuals. A new word or experience is understood in relation to, and within, language and history. This endless process of seeing the part in and through the whole is the hermeneutic circle (Chalmers, 2004, 212).

However, unlike computer science, which is founded upon formal constructs, hermeneutics, in its study of lived experiences, does not strive for what Chalmers describes as the tendency for formal language to gain situational distanciation. As Chalmers himself notes, “Hermeneutic theory is based on accepting the effect of this indefinite, inevitable and infinitely detailed situational background” (Chalmers, 2004, 211). In fact based on hermeneutics, Chalmers argues that there is no Platonic space outside language for the meta-language of formal constructs to call home; the latter has to keep referring back to the living language of Dasein in order for it to be relevant and adaptable (see Chalmers, 2004, 212). In other words, language is bound up with the temporality (Zeitlichkeit) of Dasein. User activity and utterances thrive on a system of holism and interdependence: while Chalmers is not advocating that a “hermeneutic system” will be the new be-all-and-end-all of informatics in the “shared toolkit of techniques and devices” accessible to computer scientists (Chalmers, 2004, 219), his vision for the role of hermeneutics in his scientific field is relevant to the application of hermeneutics in even human-centred fields such as nursing theory:

We adapt and strengthen the tool of hermeneutics, testing its claim to universal applicability, with each turn of our own hermeneutic circle (Chalmers, 2004, 219).

However, it may be proper to question Chalmers’ affirmation of hermeneutics as a “tool” in a “toolkit” as missing the whole point of hermeneutics, which is founded upon the fundamental ontology of ontic-ontological differentiation, as emphasised by Heidegger in Being and time? The universality of the question of being (Seinsfrage), hence hermeneutics, does not mean that it can be readily appropriated in a mode of being that is shaped by the instrumentalism of techne. In other words, hermeneutics resists being reduced to techne by virtue of its very essence. Its practical application in being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein) is in the attainment of understanding and not in its mere utility as a device or technique.

If nursing theory is to be hermeneutic, then it has to be an interplay between techne and phronesis, because nursing can be philosophically understood as needing both to be identifiable as what it is.

Max van Manen, a phenomenologist in education theory, breaks down the structure of the phenomenological method into six parts. The sixth, “balancing the research context by considering parts and whole” (30-34), is an explicit reference to the hermeneutic circle made famous by Heidegger in Being and time.

What is offered as the third way between theory and practice in teaching by van Manen – namely thoughtfulness (van Manen 1995, p. ?) – can be ontologically grounded through a hermeneutic appropriation of mindfulness (Besinnung), a very important approach to the fundamental question of being (Seinsfrage) in Heidegger’s later thinking. “Lived experience”, as the central operant in van Manen’s phenomenology, risks forgoing the ontic-ontological differentiation that Heidegger explicates in Being and time is crucial to the retrieval of being (Sein) in phenomenological thought. Grounding the naturalism of experience in hermeneutic-phenomenological formulation, say of pedagogy in van Manen’s case, limits the way of thinking to ethnography, which belongs to the ontic discipline of anthropology.

While van Manen responds with affinity to the pedagogic phenomenon of “Schön shock” in the mid-1990s (see van Manen, 1995, p. ?; and Eraut, 1995, p. ?), which revealed the crisis of the impotence of reflection in the classroom experience of a novice teacher, on the ontological level, the Dasein of teaching, which calls for oneness of theory and practice, is uniquely characterised by what Theodor Ballauf, a 20th century German thinker in education theory (contemporaneous with Heidegger), describes as an educator’s innate ability for self-criticism (Selbstkritik), which in fact forms the a priori structure of reflection (Raha, 2008, p. ?). The potentiality for reflective self-criticism makes possible the attainment of the Aristotelian-Gadamerian virtue of phronesis in Dasein – in any professional discipline where the status of novice is inherent in its understanding of development as in gaining of insight and experience, such as teaching and nursing.

Looking back at the beginnings of the workings of hermeneutic phenomenology in Heidegger before Being and time, it is evident that his phenomenological method then was a sustained response to a challenge similar to the “Schön shock”, namely Natorp’s critique of phenomenology as a self-contradiction in that reflection inevitably changes that which is reflected upon, which in Husserl’s phenomenology is the subjectivity of experience (Zahavi, 2003).

The lack of the dialectics of aletheia in van Manen’s appropriation of Heidegger is the fundamental weakness in his search for a “method” in what he terms “hermeneutic phenomenology” – a term which is absent in Heidegger’s writings, but which is used by Benner and Plager in Interpretive phenomenology (1994) to introduce Heidegger into nursing theory and to secure his hermeneutic circle as research methodology that has its own rigorous standard and requirements. However, while understandable as a rhetorical device to highlight the humanisation of nursing theory through resistance against and overcoming of the history of the holding sway of natural sciences in this academic discipline in the English-speaking world, in terms of methodology, the expression “hermeneutic phenomenology” is a tautology that does not add meaning to Heidegger’s Werke. This is because in Heidegger, hermeneutics already implies an understanding of phenomenology as a universal ontology to which the historicity of existence, or the ontological historicity in the meaning of Dasein, is integral. In his discussion on phenomenology in Being and time, Heidegger warns as follows:

The idea of an “originary” [ursprünglich] and “intuitive” grasp and explication of phenomena must be opposed to the naïveté of an accidental, “immediate”, and unreflective “beholding” (Heidegger, 1996, p. 32).

While intuition is an inherent ability of the human mind, originary or primordial thinking is based on an understanding of being (Seinsverständnis) as being (Sein) and not merely as beings (Seiende): it calls for an awareness of the ontological difference between the two, or the ontic-ontological distinction in methodological thinking. As Heidegger puts it: “As the fundamental theme of philosophy being [Sein] is not a genus of beings [Seiende]; yet it pertains to every being” (Heidegger, 1996, p. 33). Phenomenology is ontology of ontological difference. This means that a reflective or philosophical discipline to resist the ensnarement of the obvious, or the present-at-hand (Vorhandensein), is required; in his later writings Heidegger describe this as mindfulness of being (Besinnung), such that Dasein is understood as a mindful (besinnend) kind of being. Through being mindful of being, Dasein is a being that, in having its being as a primordial question, stands in a clearing of being (Lichtung des Seins) in the manifold world of physis. Dasein, despite its embodiment, is never purely physical but essentially philosophical, which means that it can never be on either side of the nature-culture divide. (Grounded theory, in its complete reliance on the socialisation of human beings, obscures their potentiality-for-being – Seinkönnen – as Dasein. Dasein cannot simply be understood through observation of its core process as appropriation by society, as if its essence can only be objectified this way through what grounded theorists call the “core variable”).

This is why Heidegger can state that there is an ontological priority to hermeneutics.

For a student nurse to succeed becoming a nurse, a self-understanding of work is an area of educational reflection in nursing pedagogy. Nursing is commonly understood to be “hard work”: long hours of mentally, physically and emotionally demanding toiling that can only be sustained with proper understanding and sincere dedication. The everyday understanding of work as a necessity in life – to earn a living, to be a useful member of society, to develop self-esteem in the complex web and networks of Mitdasein – is, as Todd S Mei points out in Heidegger, work, and being (2009), hermeneutically inadequate (Mei, 2009, 3). Mei proposes using Heidegger to bring about an “ontological transformation” of work that allows Dasein to participate in the question of being, which is fundamental to the very notion of ontology and may overcome the modern obsession with “utility” and “necessity” in work (Mei, 2009, 2-3). In the case of a nurse, she finds authenticity in her self-understanding as Dasein in what she does and learns as a nurse, which is always enmeshed in the well-being of patients under her care, which is a unique Mitdasein determined by healing or palliative care, either of which in turn determines the meaning of being in nursing. Nursing with self-understanding is essentially Dasein becoming aware of itself as Mitdasein seeking what is whole and hale. It fits in with what is described in Rauschenbach (2000, 115 ff) and is cited in Fleckinger (2013, 16), a MA thesis on Ehrenamt in palliative care, as “ein tätiges, gemeinwohlorientiertes Engagement”. Also relevant and highly poignant is a quotation from Cicely Saunders, the founder of the modern hospice movement, cited in Fleckinger (2013, 44): “We are concerned with persons and we are concerned as persons” (Saunders, 1972, 275). Such interconnectedness of care forms the hermeneutic circle in nursing.

Being (Sein) qua being (Seiende) determines Dasein‘s encounter and understanding of beings in the world (with Dasein itself as a being-in-the-world in its fundamental mode of being, inalienably and absolutely) and defines its circumspect (umsichtig) way of going about things in its everyday existence as its pre-philosophical, if not vague, interpretation of what is right (was zu Recht kommt) about reality. This unreflective, if not innate or “natural”, hermeneutic relation between being and beings qua Dasein‘s making of it covers over an essential ontological difference between the two and places Dasein in a position of incompleteness in its understanding, hence limiting the interpretative power of its circumspection (Umsicht). God, as an observer of Dasein, may well ask, “Whereto goes this Dasein?”

Phenomenology rejects the metaphysical dichotomy of essence and appearance: phenomenon, by its very definition, is what it appears to be. The same phenomenon may have this or that appearance to Dasein at different times – the temporality of perception, hence of circumspection, is none other than the time of the existential projection of Dasein as a future-oriented (zukünftig) being in its being-toward-death (Sein zum Tode).