Proceedings of the 8th World Conference on Qualitative Research

This presentation will explore the ideological aporia of how we can research lived experience when lived experience, as inconspicuous presencing, is lived rather than seen (objectified as an object of analysis), and actually resists or exceeds our typical ways of scientific knowing, naming, measuring, understand, seeing, grasping, and being data-ized. This dilemma sees lived meaning as intangible, immeasurable, inapparent, inconspicuous, ungraspable, invisible, irreducible, and unconditional, though ubiquitous in each and every moment of our lives. We will particularly focus on Martin Heidegger’s later thought on phenomenology-as-poetic and inceptive thinking of the inapparent and its relationship to the thought of various French phenomenologists in what is now known as the “new phenomenology”, as ways of “looking away” from things in order to “see” them; a reconfigured way of understanding the ancient wisdom of not being able to look at the gods in the face as they pass by us. In Michel Henry’s language, “Life” is experienced but not “seen” (objectified, grasped) and cannot be studied by science (natural or human)? Hence, instead of fighting for legitimization of the hermeneutical-phenomenological poet to be recognized as a scientist, with science being the only holder of Truth, we will propose the inescapable and equal necessity of phenomeno-poetic discernment of the intangibles in the tangibles as guardians of aletheia in traces, icons, and formal indications. In order to access Life, therefore, the re-searcher must be a re-ceiver, a poet, with a nuanced ‘noticing’ that simultaneously “lets be” in a clearing that welcomes the undulation of concealment and unconcealment of lived meaning. We will conclude with considerations of how to engage this kind of mysticism of what cannot be known or researched in the heart of each and every moment.