Moules, Nancy J

English

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   Corresponding Author:  Dr. Nancy J. Moules Email: njmoules@ucalgary.ca Journal of Applied Hermeneutics July16, 2012 The Author(s) 2012  Editorial   Dr. David Jardine and the “Descartes Lecture”:  Twenty Years of Miraculous Returns      Nancy J Moules    In 1995, I was a master’s student in the Facul-ty of Nursing at the University of Calgary tak-ing my first graduate nursing course in quali-tative research. Our professor, Dr. Marjorie McIntyre, informed us that she had invited a professor from the Faculty of Education for a guest lecture. She had become acquainted with Dr. David Jardine’s hermeneutic en-deavor through a mutual teacher and out-standing scholar, Dr. Ted Aoki.  Dr. McIntyre advised us in advance to “expect the unexpected” and that there was the potential of our worlds being shaken up over the three hours with Dr. Jardine. On the day he was to lecture, I arrived to class early to find a somewhat unconventional looking man in leather pants and bare feet, fiddling rather ineptly with the technical equipment in the room and I wondered if he was the media person who was setting up the equipment for class. Once the rest of the class arrived, Dr. McIntryre introduced this barefooted, long haired man as Dr. Jardine and turned the class over to him. For an hour and a half, we were transfixed, gently, yet almost audaciously and sometimes boldly invited into a philosophical and historical vortex that spun us around, in-deed turning our taken-for-granted and as-sumed worlds and understandings upside down.   Dr. Jardine began the class with the read-ing of the late Bronwen Wallace poem, “Ap-peal,” taken from her collection of poetry, The Stubborn Particulars of Grace” (1987). He started by taking us into the ordinary, every-day world we all recognized and then he took us back through history to show how we got to where we could recognize such a thing and recognize such a thing differently. After a tracing of this history and an understanding of how, in fact, the natural and human sciences bifurcated and ended up in a place of shadows, truth, imitation, and certainty, we took a cof-fee break and returned to room to bring our topics to the discussion. The topics that showed up in this discussion were issues of human concern - - hermeneutics applied to the Moules  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2012 Article 7    2 worlds of practice professions: nursing, social work, education, and psychology to name a few. Dr. Jardine gently cradled our topics and with the skill of a master interpreter helped us see what was beneath the obvious, what was addressing us, what we were not hearing in the “data,” and what the topic was asking of us.   He ended the class with the final poem in Wallace’s (1987, pp. 110-111) book, called “Particulars,” the last stanza of which reads:  And to say for myself, just once, without embarrassment, bless, thrown out as to some lightness that I actually believe in, surprised (as I believe  they were) to find it here, where it seems impossible that one life even matters, though like them, I’ll argue  the stubborn argument of the particular, right now, in the midst of things, this and this.   I completed my PhD in 2000 (with Dr. Janice Bell as my supervisor), conducting a Gadamerian hermeneutic study, and like my contemporaries, like those students before us, and the many students to come, I was exquis-itely mentored by Dr. Jardine in hermeneutic understanding, tradition, and how to conduct “good” research which did not misappropriate or betray this tradition. In 2004, I began teaching the master’s level qualitative re-search course in the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Calgary, and in the same year, Dr. Dianne Tapp and I developed a course in Hermeneutic Phenomenology (Binding, Moules, Tapp, & Rallison, 2007). In 2010, I began teaching the doctoral level qualitative research course. In all of these three courses and in every offering of them, I have invited Dr. Jardine to attend as a visiting lecturer, us-ing the 3 hours to offer his “Descartes Lecture” as I have come to call it. This past winter, I asked permission to tape the lecture, had it transcribed, and suggested David submit it to the Journal of Applied Hermeneutics as an invited submission. Hundreds (if not thou-sands) of students across disciplines have heard this talk over time, some many times, as I have known of students who have taken Da-vid’s courses, and returned to audit them sev-eral times because of what they gain from them. With each offering of this lecture, the talk is somewhat different; something new emerges. I personally have heard it over two dozen times, and I am as transfixed every time, as much as I was the first time. This lec-ture is a legacy that I am proud to publish in our journal.  What happens in the second part of the class after the lecture is what is more difficult to describe and why we chose not to tran-scribe that part of this recent class that we recorded. The students disperse at the coffee break, heads spinning, sometimes looking like deer in headlights. They return to class after the break, with their topics of research or study trying to take hold of something, trying to find traction. It is here that we see what Wallace (1987, p. 13) wrote in Appeals:   As if they hoped to find that opening in each of us from which, long after we’d been told what happened next, they could begin  their slower, more miraculous returns.    The topics showed up: all the unsettling, upsetting, exuberant conversations about nurses working with children who die; do-mestic violence; the love of teaching children to learn to love Math; the responsibilities and decision making of nurses who work triage in emergency departments; the inescapable hu-man dramas of aging, dementia, love, death, suffering, and joys. As each topic found its Moules  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2012 Article 7    3 way into the conversation, hermeneutics joined it and, as is the case with all good her-meneutic work, hermeneutics itself disappears as the topic, and the topics themselves come to light through the delicate, rigorous, and courageous work of interpretation. This is work that makes sense only in the face-to-face encounter that cannot be captured on tape or in description; it is the real work of herme-neutics. It is the miraculous return of the topic, where there really is no “method” to it. It is the arrival of understanding that happens with an acute attentiveness to the topic, and a prac-ticed art of strengthening. The openings the students and their topics sought were portals that hermeneutics and aletheia offer - - an en-livening and remembering of something that was forgotten, lost, or left. There is a buoyan-cy in this part of the class as we realize that all of this tradition and history and oppression is, in fact, joyous, enlightening, and offers something. This second half is different every time, but there is something present that ech-oes Gadamer’s (1989) words:   …in deciphering and interpreting...a mira-cle takes place: the transformation of something alien and dead into total con-temporaneity and familiarity…that is why the capacity…to understand…is like a se-cret art, even a magic that frees and binds us. (pp. 163-164)  Like all good magic, some things cannot be explained, or should not be explained.    Dr. Jardine came to the Faculty of Educa-tion at the University of Calgary in a some-what “roundabout” way. He completed his undergraduate degree in philosophy and reli-gious studies in 1973 at McMaster University in Hamilton. His MA supervisor was G.B. Madison, who brought Hans-Georg Gadamer to McMaster while David was studying there. Professor Madison had Paul Ricouer as his supervisor in Paris. David’s PhD supervisor, Dr. Dieter Misgeld, had studied under first Gadamer and then Habermas. Dr. Jardine started at the University of Calgary in 1986. Professor Jardine has published 83 refereed journal articles, 35 book chapters, and 8 books on ecological, philosophical, herme-neutic, and Buddhist studies of various facets of educational theory and practice.   I have no doubt that Dr. David Jardine will, in time (in his lifetime, I hope) be re-nowned as one of the most astute and pro-found hermeneutic scholars and prolific writ-ers of the past three decades.  For now, I am content to proudly call David my teacher, my mentor, my colleague, and my friend.  References  Binding, L., Moules, N.J., Tapp, D.M., & Rallison, L. (2007). Hermeneutic musings on learning: The dialogical nature of teaching interpretively. Journal of Educational Thought, 41(2), 179-189.  Gadamer, H.G. (1989). Truth and method (2nd rev. ed.) (J. Weinsheimer & D.G. Marshall, Trans.). New York, NY: Continuum.  Wallace, B. (1987). Appeal. In The stubborn particulars of grace (pp. 11-13). Toronto, ON, Canada: McClelland & Stewart.  Wallace, B. (1987). Particulars. In The stub-born particulars of grace (pp. 110-111). To-ronto, ON, Canada: McClelland & Stewart.          

Dr. David Jardine and the "Descartes Lecture": Twenty Years of Miraculous Returns

Nancy J Moules

Directory of Open Access Journals

 
 
 
Corresponding Author:  
Dr. Nancy J. Moules 
Email: njmoules@ucalgary.ca 
Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 
July16, 2012 
The Author(s) 2012 
 
Editorial 
 
 
Dr. David Jardine and the “Descartes Lecture”:  
Twenty Years of Miraculous Returns 
 
 
 
 
 
Nancy J Moules 
 
 
 
In 1995, I was a master’s student in the Facul-
ty of Nursing at the University of Calgary tak-
ing my first graduate nursing course in quali-
tative research. Our professor, Dr. Marjorie 
McIntyre, informed us that she had invited a 
professor from the Faculty of Education for a 
guest lecture. She had become acquainted 
with Dr. David Jardine’s hermeneutic en-
deavor through a mutual teacher and out-
standing scholar, Dr. Ted Aoki. 
 
Dr. McIntyre advised us in advance to 
“expect the unexpected” and that there was 
the potential of our worlds being shaken up 
over the three hours with Dr. Jardine. On the 
day he was to lecture, I arrived to class early 
to find a somewhat unconventional looking 
man in leather pants and bare feet, fiddling 
rather ineptly with the technical equipment in 
the room and I wondered if he was the media 
person who was setting up the equipment for 
class. Once the rest of the class arrived, Dr. 
McIntryre introduced this barefooted, long 
haired man as Dr. Jardine and turned the class 
over to him. For an hour and a half, we were 
transfixed, gently, yet almost audaciously and 
sometimes boldly invited into a philosophical 
and historical vortex that spun us around, in-
deed turning our taken-for-granted and as-
sumed worlds and understandings upside 
down.  
 
Dr. Jardine began the class with the read-
ing of the late Bronwen Wallace poem, “Ap-
peal,” taken from her collection of poetry, The 
Stubborn Particulars of Grace” (1987). He 
started by taking us into the ordinary, every-
day world we all recognized and then he took 
us back through history to show how we got 
to where we could recognize such a thing and 
recognize such a thing differently. After a 
tracing of this history and an understanding of 
how, in fact, the natural and human sciences 
bifurcated and ended up in a place of shadows, 
truth, imitation, and certainty, we took a cof-
fee break and returned to room to bring our 
topics to the discussion. The topics that 
showed up in this discussion were issues of 
human concern - - hermeneutics applied to the 
Moules  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2012 Article 7    2 
worlds of practice professions: nursing, social 
work, education, and psychology to name a 
few. Dr. Jardine gently cradled our topics and 
with the skill of a master interpreter helped us 
see what was beneath the obvious, what was 
addressing us, what we were not hearing in 
the “data,” and what the topic was asking of 
us.  
 
He ended the class with the final poem in 
Wallace’s (1987, pp. 110-111) book, called 
“Particulars,” the last stanza of which reads: 
 
And to say for myself, just once, 
without embarrassment, bless, 
thrown out as to some lightness 
that I actually believe in, 
surprised (as I believe  
they were) to find it 
here, where it seems impossible 
that one life even matters, though 
like them, I’ll argue  
the stubborn argument of the particular, 
right now, in the midst of things, this 
and this.  
 
I completed my PhD in 2000 (with Dr. 
Janice Bell as my supervisor), conducting a 
Gadamerian hermeneutic study, and like my 
contemporaries, like those students before us, 
and the many students to come, I was exquis-
itely mentored by Dr. Jardine in hermeneutic 
understanding, tradition, and how to conduct 
“good” research which did not misappropriate 
or betray this tradition. In 2004, I began 
teaching the master’s level qualitative re-
search course in the Faculty of Nursing at the 
University of Calgary, and in the same year, 
Dr. Dianne Tapp and I developed a course in 
Hermeneutic Phenomenology (Binding, 
Moules, Tapp, & Rallison, 2007). In 2010, I 
began teaching the doctoral level qualitative 
research course. In all of these three courses 
and in every offering of them, I have invited 
Dr. Jardine to attend as a visiting lecturer, us-
ing the 3 hours to offer his “Descartes Lecture” 
as I have come to call it. This past winter, I 
asked permission to tape the lecture, had it 
transcribed, and suggested David submit it to 
the Journal of Applied Hermeneutics as an 
invited submission. Hundreds (if not thou-
sands) of students across disciplines have 
heard this talk over time, some many times, as 
I have known of students who have taken Da-
vid’s courses, and returned to audit them sev-
eral times because of what they gain from 
them. With each offering of this lecture, the 
talk is somewhat different; something new 
emerges. I personally have heard it over two 
dozen times, and I am as transfixed every 
time, as much as I was the first time. This lec-
ture is a legacy that I am proud to publish in 
our journal. 
 
What happens in the second part of the 
class after the lecture is what is more difficult 
to describe and why we chose not to tran-
scribe that part of this recent class that we 
recorded. The students disperse at the coffee 
break, heads spinning, sometimes looking like 
deer in headlights. They return to class after 
the break, with their topics of research or 
study trying to take hold of something, trying 
to find traction. It is here that we see what 
Wallace (1987, p. 13) wrote in Appeals:  
 
As if they hoped to find 
that opening in each of us 
from which, long after we’d been told 
what happened next, they could begin  
their slower, more miraculous 
returns.   
 
The topics showed up: all the unsettling, 
upsetting, exuberant conversations about 
nurses working with children who die; do-
mestic violence; the love of teaching children 
to learn to love Math; the responsibilities and 
decision making of nurses who work triage in 
emergency departments; the inescapable hu-
man dramas of aging, dementia, love, death, 
suffering, and joys. As each topic found its 
Moules  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2012 Article 7    3 
way into the conversation, hermeneutics 
joined it and, as is the case with all good her-
meneutic work, hermeneutics itself disappears 
as the topic, and the topics themselves come 
to light through the delicate, rigorous, and 
courageous work of interpretation. This is 
work that makes sense only in the face-to-face 
encounter that cannot be captured on tape or 
in description; it is the real work of herme-
neutics. It is the miraculous return of the topic, 
where there really is no “method” to it. It is 
the arrival of understanding that happens with 
an acute attentiveness to the topic, and a prac-
ticed art of strengthening. The openings the 
students and their topics sought were portals 
that hermeneutics and aletheia offer - - an en-
livening and remembering of something that 
was forgotten, lost, or left. There is a buoyan-
cy in this part of the class as we realize that 
all of this tradition and history and oppression 
is, in fact, joyous, enlightening, and offers 
something. This second half is different every 
time, but there is something present that ech-
oes Gadamer’s (1989) words:  
 
…in deciphering and interpreting...a mira-
cle takes place: the transformation of 
something alien and dead into total con-
temporaneity and familiarity…that is why 
the capacity…to understand…is like a se-
cret art, even a magic that frees and binds 
us. (pp. 163-164) 
 
Like all good magic, some things cannot be 
explained, or should not be explained.   
 
Dr. Jardine came to the Faculty of Educa-
tion at the University of Calgary in a some-
what “roundabout” way. He completed his 
undergraduate degree in philosophy and reli-
gious studies in 1973 at McMaster University 
in Hamilton. His MA supervisor was G.B. 
Madison, who brought Hans-Georg Gadamer 
to McMaster while David was studying there. 
Professor Madison had Paul Ricouer as his 
supervisor in Paris. David’s PhD supervisor, 
Dr. Dieter Misgeld, had studied under first 
Gadamer and then Habermas. Dr. Jardine 
started at the University of Calgary in 1986. 
Professor Jardine has published 83 refereed 
journal articles, 35 book chapters, and 8 
books on ecological, philosophical, herme-
neutic, and Buddhist studies of various facets 
of educational theory and practice.  
 
I have no doubt that Dr. David Jardine 
will, in time (in his lifetime, I hope) be re-
nowned as one of the most astute and pro-
found hermeneutic scholars and prolific writ-
ers of the past three decades.  For now, I am 
content to proudly call David my teacher, my 
mentor, my colleague, and my friend. 
 
References 
 
Binding, L., Moules, N.J., Tapp, D.M., & 
Rallison, L. (2007). Hermeneutic musings on 
learning: The dialogical nature of teaching 
interpretively. Journal of Educational 
Thought, 41(2), 179-189. 
 
Gadamer, H.G. (1989). Truth and method (2nd 
rev. ed.) (J. Weinsheimer & D.G. Marshall, 
Trans.). New York, NY: Continuum. 
 
Wallace, B. (1987). Appeal. In The stubborn 
particulars of grace (pp. 11-13). Toronto, ON, 
Canada: McClelland & Stewart. 
 
Wallace, B. (1987). Particulars. In The stub-
born particulars of grace (pp. 110-111). To-
ronto, ON, Canada: McClelland & Stewart. 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 


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Dr. David Jardine and the "Descartes Lecture": Twenty Years of Miraculous Returns

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