The Reduction
On: van Manen 2014; Chapter 8
N Friesen Jan. 21, 2015
• Heuristic Reduction
• Eidetic Reduction
• Bracketing the Self – self and other in language
• Ethics of the reduction
• Merleau-Ponty and “intersubjectivity”
“Natural Attitude” and the Heuristic
Reduction
• “the lifeworld, for us who wakingly live in it, is always there, existing in
advance for us, the ‘ground’ of all praxis, whether theoretical or
extratheoretical. The world is pregiven to us, the waking, always somehow
practically interested subjects, not occasionally but always and necessarily
as the universal field of all actual and possible praxis, as horizon. To live is
always to live-in-certainty-of-the-world.” (1970, p. 142)
• “Phenomenology is the method to break through this taken-for-grantedness
and get to the meaning structures of our experiences. This basic method is
called the reduction.” (van Manen, 2014)
• In wonder we see the unusual in the usual, the extraordinary in the
ordinary. (van Manen, 2014; examples of “wonder?”)
Heuristic Reduction: van Manen
• But it requires that the various dimensions of lived meaning of some
selected human experience are investigated for their various sources
and layers of meaning, rather than being overlaid with a particular
frame of meaning.
• Most theories contain some phenomenological material, or they are
built on certain intuitions that presume phenomenological
understandings.
• It may be necessary to explicate assumptions and interests to
“exorcise” them, in an attempt to let speak that what wishes to speak.
Eidetic Reduction: Husserl
…we vary the perceptual object, table, with a completely free
optionalness, yet in such a manner that we keep perception fixed as
perception of something… [E.g.,] by fictively changing the shape or the
color of the object quite arbitrarily, keeping identical only its perceptual
appearing. In other words: Abstaining from acceptance of its being, we
change the fact of this perception into a pure possibility, one among
other quite ‘optional’ pure possibilities - but possibilities that are
possible perceptions.” (1970, S. 70-71).
Eidetic Variation: Example
“Imagine a situation in which two mothers are speaking to one another by
telephone. Their respective children are playing together in an area between
their two houses. As neighbors, both mothers can watch the children through
their own open windows. The subject of the telephone conversation is the
behavior of the children at play and the behaviors of the children in general.”
“Imagine an altered situation in which the two mothers have opened the
windows and are calling back and forth. In reference with the objective aspect
of space, this structure of social praxis is labelled, face-to-facecommunication- from-a-distance.”
Calling across to one another through the open window obviously includes
the acoustical space in between.
Linguistic Variation and Analysis
• Secrecy, privacy, reserve, stealth, furtiveness, solitude,
isolation, covertness,
• Tact - reserve: privacy, protection, “giving” space, neglect,
freedom, independence, dependence, afar, near, .
• Online, offline; virtual, real, physical; cyberspace, meatspace;
asynchronous, realtime (Echtzeit); on the screen, presence,
distance, etc.
• Videoconference, online conference, chat, (threaded)
discussion,
Bracketing the Self
• To do this I need to bracket my self, and at the level of
intersubjectivity ask, "How does childhood remembrance appear in
consciousness or show itself in lived experience?"
• And I will have to observe that this memory is contained or held in
the "things" (in this case, my experience of the autumn leaves), and I
need to realize that memories are released by sensory organs and
limbs (touch, sound, smell, vision). In other words, when I ask,
"where and how do childhood memories show themselves?" then I
have to describe how "the memories are experienced in the things
and the spatial contexts of our world, and we may release them with
our bodies. However, this is a contingent event.”
Friesen on 4 relations to “Self”
(Irrgang, 2007)
1. The first-person perspective of the “I,” which corresponds
to subjective knowledge;
2. The second-person perspective of “you,” which corresponds to
ethical concerns;
3. The third-person perspective of “it” or “one,” corresponding to
objective knowledge;
4. The first-person plural perspective of “we,” corresponding to
intersubjective knowledge.
Ethical Dimension
• “…phenomenological meaning and understanding have to be
produced constantly anew by the writers and the readers of
phenomenological texts and other media.” (van Manen, 2014)
• “This also means that the writer needs to become aware of the
potential effects of the text on different readers.”
• “In other words, it is also possible to experience the other in the
vocative: as an appeal, as someone who stirs and touches me. This is
especially true of situations where we meet the other in his or her
vulnerability, as when we happen to be handed a hurt and helpless
child or when we suddenly see a person fall in front of us.”
Ethical Dimension
• Peppers (2006) explains that we “is a dangerous pronoun
when it hides histories of internal conflict under false or
superficial commonality.” Leaving little or no opportunity for
confirmation or qualification, saying “we” in a text often
simply assumes that the reader is a part of the superficial
agreement. It tacitly but unmistakably asks the reader to
align. In doing so tacitly or implicitly—rather than forthrightly
or explicitly—it does not readily allow for conflict and
disagreement. By using “we” in this book, I am aware of this
dilemma.
Merleau-Ponty on Intersubjectivity
• The phenomenological world is… the sense which is revealed where the paths of
my various experiences intersect, and also where my own and other people’s
intersect and engage each other like gears... It is thus inseparable from subjectivity
and intersubjectivity, which find their unity when I either take up my past
experiences in those of the present, or other people’s in my own. …We witness
every minute the miracle of related experiences, and yet nobody knows better
than we do how this miracle is worked, for we are ourselves this network of
relationships. (2002, p. xxii)
• Intersubjectivity, as Merleau-Ponty indicates, designates the intersection,
“blending,” or mutual conformity of plural subjectivities (2002, p. xii):
“perspectives blend, perceptions confirm each other, a meaning emerges” (2002,
p. xxii).
Merleau-Ponty on Intersubjectivity
• We witness every minute the miracle of related experiences, and yet
nobody knows better than we do how this miracle is worked, for we
are ourselves this network of relationships. The world and reason are
not problematical. We may say, if we wish, that they are mysterious,
but their mystery defines them: there can be no question of dispelling
it by some “solution” (2002, p. xxiii, emphases added)
• Friesen: “Phenomenological writing as an ethical engagement; we
address the other as ‘you’ in saying ‘we.’”
E. Husserl
Edith Stein
Martin Heidegger
Michel Foucault
O.F. Bollnow
H-G Gadamer
Eugen Fink
Hannah Arendt
M. Merleau-Ponty
B Waldenfels