No abstract

No abstract

This article explores aspects of the relation between language, meaning, and method in human science research. Phenomenology poses two distinct challenges: the thematic and the expressive dimensions of inquiry, which have implications for semantic and mantic, discursive and nondiscursive understanding. When we turn from thematic meaning to expressive meaning, then the question we ask turns from "What does the text speak about?" to "How does the text speak?" Bachelard, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Wittgenstein in different ways have employed the idea of mantic meaning to refer to that imagery of language that can bring about, in the reader, a phenomenological reverberation. The formative power of phenomenological texts lies precisely in this resonance that the word can effect. Research literature has focused primarily on the thematic aspects of human science method. Here, guiding principles of human science method will be explored that aim at strengthening the expressive-mantic dimension of phenomenology.

Phenomenology of practice is formative of sensitive practice, issuing from the pathic power of phenomenological reflections. Pathic knowing inheres in the sense and sensuality of our practical actions, in encounters with others and in the ways that our bodies are responsive to the things of our world and to the situations and relations in which we find ourselves. Phenomenology of practice is an ethical corrective of the technological and calculative modalities of contemporary life. It finds its source and impetus in practical phenomenologies of reading and writing that open up possibilities for creating formative relations between being and acting, self and other, interiorities and exteriorities, between who we are and how we act.

No abstract