Book Review: "The Responsibility to Understand: Hermeneutical Contours of Ethical Life" by Professor Theodore George

This article is a review of Dr. Theodore George’s new book, The Responsibility to Understand: Hermeneutical Contours of Ethical Life (2020) from the viewpoint of applied hermeneutics and practice professions, especially nursing. I highlight aspects of the book that speak most directly to applied hermeneutics, including Figal’s version of objectivity, and the need to allow displacement to open space for new understanding. I discuss points that I think are open to continuing debate, including the question of whether hermeneutics is being presented as an ethics in itself, or as a gateway to ethical decision making that has to be determined by other values. For practice professions that are conspicuously bounded by regulations of various kinds, it is a feature of ethical life that has to be taken into account. Another question, is whether George’s analysis of solidarity, pushing back against impersonal, calculative values penetrating modern life, sufficiently captures the fervour of closed solidarities that have sprung up as reaction and adjunct to those same values. I suggest that George’s chapter on translation could provide a stimulating starting point for a hermeneutic analysis of “knowledge translation” in research. The conclusion is that George’s book is an excellent addition to the hermeneutic literature, post-Gadamer, that extends a welcome to those of us working in applied hermeneutics, inviting us into a thought provoking and creative conversation.  Keywords  Hermeneutics; ethics; practice professions; objectivity; solidarit

Imagination, Application, and Ethics: A Review of a Collection of Writings by Richard Kearney

Littlejohn, M.E. (Ed.). (2020). Imagination now: A Richard Kearney reader (M.E. Littlejohn, Ed.). Rowman & Littlefield.  (pp. 364, $54.50 CAD, pbk) This is a review of a new collection of writings by Richard Kearney, from 1988 to 2019. The volume is organized around the overarching theme of the role of imagination in hermeneutics and ethics. It has four thematic sections, focusing on poetics and culture, carnal hermeneutics, religion, and politics, followed by a recent interview with Kearney. The review is written from a viewpoint of applied hermeneutics. It is a rich and complex collection from which I highlight threads of narrative imagination, self and other, discernment, and the relationship between phenomenology and hermeneutics. Two examples pertinent to nursing practice are explored in relation to themes in the book as a way of showing its potential for contributing to applied hermeneutics and the concerns of those in practice professions.  Keywords  Hermeneutics, phenomenology, narrative, imagination, ethics, Richard Kearney &nbsp

"The Pure Guidelines of the Monastery Are to be Inscribed in Your Bones and Mind" Dogen (2010, p. 42): Mental Health Nurses'™ Practices as Ritualized Behaviour

Forms of practice among nurses on acute care mental health units present a way of revealing how different traditions and values are in play between nurses and also within nurses.  This paper represents one interpretive theme from a larger, hermeneutic study of nurses’ experiences of nurse-patient relationships on acute care mental health units, using Buddhist perspectives as a resource for interpretation of interviews with nurses. Understandings of ritual in the Zen Buddhist tradition and Catherine Bell’s (2009a) concept of ritualized behavior enabled an interpretive analysis of nurses’ activities as the expression and reflexive reinforcement of underlying traditions, values, and beliefs. In particular, nurses’ preferences among ways of relating with patients evinced contrasting background traditions of confinement and therapeutically directed engagement.AcknowledgementsNo hermeneutic work belongs wholly to its author, and I wish to acknowledge Dr. Shelley Raffin-Bouchal, my doctoral supervisor, and Dr. Nancy Moules, who was a very active member of my supervisory committee for all their guidance and support in conducting the study from which this paper emerged.A version of this paper was presented by the author at the Canadian Hermeneutic Institute, Halifax, Nova Scotia, May 23, 2012.  

Compassion, Necessity, and the Pharmakon of the Health Humanities

Health humanities is an emergent interdisciplinary field drawing on existing traditions of using resources from the arts and humanities in the education of health professionals. Cultivation of compassion is often cited, though not without some debate, as a fit goal for the health humanities. In this paper, I undertake a critical reappraisal of the presumed link between health humanities and compassion. Firstly, I propose a model of the health humanities that takes up Derrida’s figure of the pharmakon, as polyvalent medicine or poison (among other meanings). Unlike Derrida, however, I treat the pharmakon as a substance, even when referring to arts and humanities. I then offer examples of negative effects of the pharmakon that both attest to its potency and unsettle comfortable assumptions that it is necessarily benign. Finally, I take up themes from Simone Weil’s reading of the Iliad to propose that necessity may be a useful alternative, or addition, to the ways we think about the goals of the health humanities

Editorial: CHI 2018 - The Politics of Displacement

Today, in light of increasingly coercive conformism, it is more urgent than ever to heighten heretical consciousness. (Byung-Chul Han, 2017, p. 83

Touching From a Distance: Nursing and Carnal Hermeneutics

Carnal hermeneutics represents a new development in hermeneutic thinking, extending Merleau-Ponty’s work on embodiment. It is potentially useful for applied hermeneutics in nursing, which is a discipline of caring for and with bodies. In this paper, I take up key essays by Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor that establish themes in carnal hermeneutics, exploring them in relation to nursing. In the first part, I focus on medical nursing using an example from a student nurse’s practice to look at some of characteristics of nursing using a carnal hermeneutics lens. In the second part, the focus is on mental health nursing, considering how Treanor’s field of “new realism(s)” can help to give a fuller account of the physicality inherent in what has become conventionally separated off as “mental” health.

Invited Guest Editorial: Nursing as Interpretation

In this editorial, the context of a graduate class on hermeneutic research is described. Two papers were selected from the class that represent one of the course assignments that requires students to write a written response to the statement: "Nursing is an interpretive practice." The papers that correspond to this editorial are discussed and an interpretation of the master's students' efforts to take up the statement brings us back to the intent of the course

Editorial: Catching Hermeneutics in the Act

http://hdl.handle.net/10515/sy53n20w

Encountering the Great Problems in the Street: Enacting Hermeneutic Philosophy as Research in Practice Disciplines

In this paper, we speak to tenets of Gadamerian hermeneutic philosophy that “guide” our hermeneutic inquiry in research that seeks to understand the complexity of human experiences. In our conduct of hermeneutic research, we grapple with “great problems” and encounter the human difficulty of topics such as childhood cancer, grief, mental illness, education and schools, arts and humanities, and other topics that show up in practice professions of nursing, teaching, social work, or psychology. 

New Realities and Tsunamis: A Nurse's Interpretation of a Family Navigating Cancer

This short paper was written for a hermeneutics research course from the perspective of the first author in response to the statement “Nursing is an interpretive practice.” A narrative account of caring for a young adult with hematologic cancer and his mother is provided to offer understanding on how cancer is an interpreted experience with a relational backdrop of family, and nursing is an interpretive practice situated within this relational complexity. Gadamer’s ideas around horizon of understanding, experience, and conversation are utilized to present a nurse’s interpretation of this family navigating the “new realities and tsunamis” and overturning of their lives by hematologic cancer. Given the interpretive nature of understanding in nursing work with families, it is proposed that hermeneutics, as an interpretive inquiry, offers a meaningful approach to understand family experiences of cancer in nursing research