McCaffrey, Graham

Moules, Nancy J

English

University of Calgary Journal Hosting

  1 University of Calgary, Faculty of Nursing  Corresponding Author:  Nancy J. Moules, RN PhD Email: njmoules@ucalgary.ca Journal of Applied Hermeneutics January 11, 2015 ©The Author(s) 2015    Editorial:  Catching Hermeneutics in the Act     Nancy J. Moules1 & Graham McCaffrey1   As 2014 came to a close, we sent to publication with Peter Lang publishers a book manuscript entitled “Conducting Hermeneutic Research: From Philosophy to Practice” (Moules, McCaf-frey, Field, & Laing, in press). As we await publication, we have been reflecting on the very intense, important, and exceedingly difficult work of writing this particular book.  We had the privilege of Dr. John D. Caputo writing a foreword to the book and he offered this remarkable comment saying that the book…   catches hermeneutics in the act. It brings home in the most vivid way just what herme-neutics really is – in the concrete. Its authors are concretely engaged and hermeneutically enlightened practitioners who are describing the difficult and delicate conditions under which concrete hermeneutical work takes place. (Caputo, in Moules et al., in press)  These are humbling words that could not more clearly elucidate the difficulties that writing the book held – it was difficult and delicate work and, at times, it was wordless work, a challenge when you are trying to write a book! Catching something is tricky business and especially tricky if what you are after is the exact opposite. We did not want to catch and entrap hermeneutics as a research “method” – we wanted to catch it “in the act” of the world – in the ways it allows things to act and exposes the action that is often just “lost to the work of simply getting by” (Wallace, 1987, p. 12).  Caputo’s words go to the heart of the enterprise of applied hermeneutics and are an encouraging reminder of the newness and excitement of what that represents. Caputo, as well as Dr. Richard Kearney and Dr. Nicholas Davey, have come to the annual Canadian Hermeneutic Institute to share their expertise as hermeneutic philosophers, steeped in a long and profound tradition. In each case, they have told us that they approached the invitation with curiosity as to what scholars and practitioners in practice professions both wanted to hear from them, and what we could have to add to that tradition. Each time, they have shared their knowledge, ideas, and thinking with Moules & McCaffrey  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2015 Editorial 1     2 exceptional generosity and they have “got it” – they have quickly seen that the interpretation of human encounters in the context of practice professions is as much a fit object for hermeneutic study as an artwork, a poem, or a religious text. Having a glimpse of applied hermeneutics through the eyes of philosophical experts is at the same time gratifying and a stimulating re-minder that we are working fresh ground, and it behooves us to keep working to be as exacting as we can about what we do. It is in this spirit that it felt timely to undertake to describe the work-in-progress that is applied hermeneutics in the fleshed-out form of a book.   We proposed the book because we believed that something had to be articulated about how hermeneutics, particularly Gadamerian philosophical hermeneutics (1960/1989), had something to say to practice professions about a way to approach research around human concerns. Four academics (three nurses and one educator) endeavored then to find language that was “concrete” enough to be understood but did not fall into the trap of offering a prescribed method of conduct-ing hermeneutic research. In Chapter Four of the book, we took up this issue of method as, rather than a set prescription, it is instead an act of being methodical and following leads. In his fore-word, Caputo reminds us of the etymological meaning of method: meta as making one’s way along a particular path (odos). Gadamer (2007) suggested that “understanding is an adventure, and like any other adventure, is dangerous” (p. 243), but, in this book, we tried to suggest that understanding is the ultimate hermeneutic wager: that understanding matters and will make a difference in matters of human consequence of living well in conditions where suffering often exists. We tried to offer a prompt to conduct research that touches on human conditions of living: illness, schools, children, health, relationships, suffering, healing, and hope.  This was hard work. Balancing a description of how to conduct something without offering a map, guide, baton, or train engine conductor cap is challenging. In many ways, the work of hermeneutics as a research approach is somewhat intuitive, but we also believe it is something that can be taught, learned, and definitely practiced. Writing the chapter about conducting interviews was an act of trying to capture the complexity, contingency, and fluidity of the interview. It is deeply responsive - - as is hermeneutics. There is no guide for an interview, no prior questions determined that will protect one from what is going to come in the interview. It is like describing art – here is how it appears right here and now, but if you turn to look at it from another angle or through another eye, its meaning changes. Conducting an interview in a respon-sive mode requires tact, discretion, discernment, and skill. It requires a turn of head and turn of eye and ear. It is not easy to do and even harder to describe or teach.   The chapter on analysis stopped us in our tracks. We know what we do when we are into the deep work of interpretation and we so often talk with students about how to begin this deep and involved work. Interpretation is skilled, complex, and exciting work. To find language, though, to describe this practice was very difficult. We needed language that was at once concrete and yet complex. Hermeneutic analysis (i.e., interpretation) is not easy; we could not sell it off as such, however we had to present it as something that is “doable” and something that can be learned and practiced.  Data analysis, like so much in hermeneutics, is most purely caught on the wing, in the intense back and forth of making sense of particular human situations. Beneath the dry research termi-nology of data, are the stories, memories, thoughts, and feelings of people often recalling mo-Moules & McCaffrey  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2015 Editorial 1     3 ments of extremity in their lives. We bear a responsibility to hold those data and make good use of them, transforming them without traducing them, in our interpretations. That is the ethical heart of hermeneutic work.  Approaching the chapter on rigor and integrity of hermeneutic research felt like a revisiting of every proposal we have ever written, every presentation to scientists, or die-hard quantitative researchers, and a recalling of trying to defend something without being defensive (see for e.g., Moules, Jardine, McCaffrey, & Brown, 2013). Writing it, finding the words though, despite the difficulty, proved to be particularly affirming. We were not simply arguing for the rigor but really seeing it and, for once, actually believing in it with a conviction we had been shy about before. The same happened in the “so what” chapter – the understandable demand that the work matters and addresses what is at stake. What surprised us was the discovery that what is really at stake in this work is that it compels us to live in the world differently:   The knowledge of knowledge compels. It compels us to adopt an attitude of permanent vigilance against the temptation of certainty. It compels us to recognize that certainty is not a proof of truth. It compels us to realize that the world everyone sees is not the world but a world we bring forth with others. It compels us to see that the world will be differ-ent only if we live differently. It compels us because, when we know that we know, we cannot deny (to ourselves or to others) that we know…(This) implies an ethics that we cannot evade…an ethics that springs from human reflection and puts human reflection right at the core as a constitutive social phenomenon. (Maturana & Varela, 1992, p. 245)  The “so what” of hermeneutic research is inherently a social endeavor. Though questions that guide hermeneutic research are vitally important, no less important is to answer these questions - - tentatively, openly, and with the hermeneutic humility that recognizes that no one question can be answered definitively once and for all.  Rather, hermeneutics “concentrates on the question of what happens to us when we ‘understand’” (Davey, 2006, p. xi). Hermeneutics compels us as researchers and users of research to live in the world differently, to realize that understanding is not, as Davey (2006) invoked, just about interpreting the world but also about changing it. (Moules et al., in press)  Hermeneutic questions are hard questions; hermeneutic understanding is hard understanding. Yet, at the heart of it is the capacity to know and live differently- - to find language that works. We believe this book will make a contribution to our practices but we also believe it made a differ-ence to our thinking and what is yet to come. Applied hermeneutics, hermeneutics as a way of conducting research, is in one sense well established – there are many published studies, there are variant approaches in the literature (to which this book makes a substantial contribution), but set against the centuries-old traditions of interpretation of religious texts, or the philosophical development of hermeneutics it is still a new adventure. Each publication in a practice discipline that stakes a claim as hermeneutic is still perceptibly defining the field. There is a degree of exposure in this – we have encountered scholars in the humanities who look askance at our travails in the world of hermeneutics, just as we are familiar with the objections of those who fetishize the scientific method in our own disciplines. It is only a hermeneutic truism, however, to say that there is more to learn, more to be done, and that even as we have tried to articulate how far we have come, the way ahead lies open.  Moules & McCaffrey  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2015 Editorial 1     4  In this book, we strived to conserve the human conditions and sensitivities of our topics and, according to Caputo, we offered “what the philosophers call the ‘hermeneutic situation’ in the concrete, glowing white hot and jumping off the pages of the philosophy books” (Caputo, in Moules et al., in press).   References  Caputo, J.D. (in press). Foreword: The wisdom on hermeneutics. In N.J. Moules, G. McCaffrey, J.C. Field, & C.M. Laing, Conducting hermeneutic research: From philosophy to practice. New York, NY: Peter Lang.   Davey, N. (2006). Unquiet understanding: Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. New York, NY: SUNY.  Gadamer, H-G. (1960/1989). Truth and method (2nd rev.ed., J. Weinsheimer & D.G. Marshall, Trans.) New York, NY: Continuum.  Gadamer, H-G. (2007). The Gadamer reader: A bouquet of the later writings (R. Palmer, Ed. & Trans). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.   Maturana, H.R., & Varela, F. (1992). The tree of knowledge: The biological roots of human understanding (rev. ed.). Boston, MA: Shambhala.  Moules, N.J., Jardine, D.W., McCaffrey, G., & Brown, C.B. (2013). “Isn’t all oncology herme-neutic?”. Journal of Applied Hermeneutics, Article 3.  http://hdl.handle.net/10515/sy5w95141  Moules, N.J., McCaffrey, G., Field, J.C., & Laing, C.M. (in press). Conducting hermeneutic research: From philosophy to practice. New York, NY: Peter Lang.  Wallace, B. (1987). Appeal. In The stubborn particulars of grace. Toronto, ON, Canada: McClelland & Stewart.          

Editorial: Catching Hermeneutics in the Act

Nancy J Moules

Graham McCaffrey

Directory of Open Access Journals

 
 
1 University of Calgary, Faculty of Nursing 
 
Corresponding Author:  
Nancy J. Moules, RN PhD 
Email: njmoules@ucalgary.ca 
Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 
January 11, 2015 
©The Author(s) 2015 
 
 
 
Editorial: 
 
Catching Hermeneutics in the Act 
 
 
 
 
Nancy J. Moules1 & Graham McCaffrey1 
 
 
As 2014 came to a close, we sent to publication with Peter Lang publishers a book manuscript 
entitled “Conducting Hermeneutic Research: From Philosophy to Practice” (Moules, McCaf-
frey, Field, & Laing, in press). As we await publication, we have been reflecting on the very 
intense, important, and exceedingly difficult work of writing this particular book. 
 
We had the privilege of Dr. John D. Caputo writing a foreword to the book and he offered this 
remarkable comment saying that the book…  
 
catches hermeneutics in the act. It brings home in the most vivid way just what herme-
neutics really is – in the concrete. Its authors are concretely engaged and hermeneutically 
enlightened practitioners who are describing the difficult and delicate conditions under 
which concrete hermeneutical work takes place. (Caputo, in Moules et al., in press) 
 
These are humbling words that could not more clearly elucidate the difficulties that writing the 
book held – it was difficult and delicate work and, at times, it was wordless work, a challenge 
when you are trying to write a book! Catching something is tricky business and especially tricky 
if what you are after is the exact opposite. We did not want to catch and entrap hermeneutics as a 
research “method” – we wanted to catch it “in the act” of the world – in the ways it allows things 
to act and exposes the action that is often just “lost to the work of simply getting by” (Wallace, 
1987, p. 12). 
 
Caputo’s words go to the heart of the enterprise of applied hermeneutics and are an encouraging 
reminder of the newness and excitement of what that represents. Caputo, as well as Dr. Richard 
Kearney and Dr. Nicholas Davey, have come to the annual Canadian Hermeneutic Institute to 
share their expertise as hermeneutic philosophers, steeped in a long and profound tradition. In 
each case, they have told us that they approached the invitation with curiosity as to what scholars 
and practitioners in practice professions both wanted to hear from them, and what we could have 
to add to that tradition. Each time, they have shared their knowledge, ideas, and thinking with 
Moules & McCaffrey  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2015 Editorial 1    
 
2 
exceptional generosity and they have “got it” – they have quickly seen that the interpretation of 
human encounters in the context of practice professions is as much a fit object for hermeneutic 
study as an artwork, a poem, or a religious text. Having a glimpse of applied hermeneutics 
through the eyes of philosophical experts is at the same time gratifying and a stimulating re-
minder that we are working fresh ground, and it behooves us to keep working to be as exacting 
as we can about what we do. It is in this spirit that it felt timely to undertake to describe the 
work-in-progress that is applied hermeneutics in the fleshed-out form of a book.  
 
We proposed the book because we believed that something had to be articulated about how 
hermeneutics, particularly Gadamerian philosophical hermeneutics (1960/1989), had something 
to say to practice professions about a way to approach research around human concerns. Four 
academics (three nurses and one educator) endeavored then to find language that was “concrete” 
enough to be understood but did not fall into the trap of offering a prescribed method of conduct-
ing hermeneutic research. In Chapter Four of the book, we took up this issue of method as, rather 
than a set prescription, it is instead an act of being methodical and following leads. In his fore-
word, Caputo reminds us of the etymological meaning of method: meta as making one’s way 
along a particular path (odos). Gadamer (2007) suggested that “understanding is an adventure, 
and like any other adventure, is dangerous” (p. 243), but, in this book, we tried to suggest that 
understanding is the ultimate hermeneutic wager: that understanding matters and will make a 
difference in matters of human consequence of living well in conditions where suffering often 
exists. We tried to offer a prompt to conduct research that touches on human conditions of living: 
illness, schools, children, health, relationships, suffering, healing, and hope. 
 
This was hard work. Balancing a description of how to conduct something without offering a 
map, guide, baton, or train engine conductor cap is challenging. In many ways, the work of 
hermeneutics as a research approach is somewhat intuitive, but we also believe it is something 
that can be taught, learned, and definitely practiced. Writing the chapter about conducting 
interviews was an act of trying to capture the complexity, contingency, and fluidity of the 
interview. It is deeply responsive - - as is hermeneutics. There is no guide for an interview, no 
prior questions determined that will protect one from what is going to come in the interview. It is 
like describing art – here is how it appears right here and now, but if you turn to look at it from 
another angle or through another eye, its meaning changes. Conducting an interview in a respon-
sive mode requires tact, discretion, discernment, and skill. It requires a turn of head and turn of 
eye and ear. It is not easy to do and even harder to describe or teach.  
 
The chapter on analysis stopped us in our tracks. We know what we do when we are into the 
deep work of interpretation and we so often talk with students about how to begin this deep and 
involved work. Interpretation is skilled, complex, and exciting work. To find language, though, 
to describe this practice was very difficult. We needed language that was at once concrete and 
yet complex. Hermeneutic analysis (i.e., interpretation) is not easy; we could not sell it off as 
such, however we had to present it as something that is “doable” and something that can be 
learned and practiced. 
 
Data analysis, like so much in hermeneutics, is most purely caught on the wing, in the intense 
back and forth of making sense of particular human situations. Beneath the dry research termi-
nology of data, are the stories, memories, thoughts, and feelings of people often recalling mo-
Moules & McCaffrey  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2015 Editorial 1    
 
3 
ments of extremity in their lives. We bear a responsibility to hold those data and make good use 
of them, transforming them without traducing them, in our interpretations. That is the ethical 
heart of hermeneutic work. 
 
Approaching the chapter on rigor and integrity of hermeneutic research felt like a revisiting of 
every proposal we have ever written, every presentation to scientists, or die-hard quantitative 
researchers, and a recalling of trying to defend something without being defensive (see for e.g., 
Moules, Jardine, McCaffrey, & Brown, 2013). Writing it, finding the words though, despite the 
difficulty, proved to be particularly affirming. We were not simply arguing for the rigor but 
really seeing it and, for once, actually believing in it with a conviction we had been shy about 
before. The same happened in the “so what” chapter – the understandable demand that the work 
matters and addresses what is at stake. What surprised us was the discovery that what is really at 
stake in this work is that it compels us to live in the world differently:  
 
The knowledge of knowledge compels. It compels us to adopt an attitude of permanent 
vigilance against the temptation of certainty. It compels us to recognize that certainty is 
not a proof of truth. It compels us to realize that the world everyone sees is not the world 
but a world we bring forth with others. It compels us to see that the world will be differ-
ent only if we live differently. It compels us because, when we know that we know, we 
cannot deny (to ourselves or to others) that we know…(This) implies an ethics that we 
cannot evade…an ethics that springs from human reflection and puts human reflection 
right at the core as a constitutive social phenomenon. (Maturana & Varela, 1992, p. 245) 
 
The “so what” of hermeneutic research is inherently a social endeavor. Though questions 
that guide hermeneutic research are vitally important, no less important is to answer these 
questions - - tentatively, openly, and with the hermeneutic humility that recognizes that 
no one question can be answered definitively once and for all.  Rather, hermeneutics 
“concentrates on the question of what happens to us when we ‘understand’” (Davey, 
2006, p. xi). Hermeneutics compels us as researchers and users of research to live in the 
world differently, to realize that understanding is not, as Davey (2006) invoked, just 
about interpreting the world but also about changing it. (Moules et al., in press) 
 
Hermeneutic questions are hard questions; hermeneutic understanding is hard understanding. Yet, 
at the heart of it is the capacity to know and live differently- - to find language that works. We 
believe this book will make a contribution to our practices but we also believe it made a differ-
ence to our thinking and what is yet to come. Applied hermeneutics, hermeneutics as a way of 
conducting research, is in one sense well established – there are many published studies, there 
are variant approaches in the literature (to which this book makes a substantial contribution), but 
set against the centuries-old traditions of interpretation of religious texts, or the philosophical 
development of hermeneutics it is still a new adventure. Each publication in a practice discipline 
that stakes a claim as hermeneutic is still perceptibly defining the field. There is a degree of 
exposure in this – we have encountered scholars in the humanities who look askance at our 
travails in the world of hermeneutics, just as we are familiar with the objections of those who 
fetishize the scientific method in our own disciplines. It is only a hermeneutic truism, however, 
to say that there is more to learn, more to be done, and that even as we have tried to articulate 
how far we have come, the way ahead lies open.  
Moules & McCaffrey  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2015 Editorial 1    
 
4 
 
In this book, we strived to conserve the human conditions and sensitivities of our topics and, 
according to Caputo, we offered “what the philosophers call the ‘hermeneutic situation’ in the 
concrete, glowing white hot and jumping off the pages of the philosophy books” (Caputo, in 
Moules et al., in press). 
 
 
References 
 
Caputo, J.D. (in press). Foreword: The wisdom on hermeneutics. In N.J. Moules, G. McCaffrey, 
J.C. Field, & C.M. Laing, Conducting hermeneutic research: From philosophy to practice. New 
York, NY: Peter Lang.  
 
Davey, N. (2006). Unquiet understanding: Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. New York, 
NY: SUNY. 
 
Gadamer, H-G. (1960/1989). Truth and method (2nd rev.ed., J. Weinsheimer & D.G. Marshall, 
Trans.) New York, NY: Continuum. 
 
Gadamer, H-G. (2007). The Gadamer reader: A bouquet of the later writings (R. Palmer, Ed. & 
Trans). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.  
 
Maturana, H.R., & Varela, F. (1992). The tree of knowledge: The biological roots of human 
understanding (rev. ed.). Boston, MA: Shambhala. 
 
Moules, N.J., Jardine, D.W., McCaffrey, G., & Brown, C.B. (2013). “Isn’t all oncology herme-
neutic?”. Journal of Applied Hermeneutics, Article 3.  http://hdl.handle.net/10515/sy5w95141 
 
Moules, N.J., McCaffrey, G., Field, J.C., & Laing, C.M. (in press). Conducting hermeneutic 
research: From philosophy to practice. New York, NY: Peter Lang. 
 
Wallace, B. (1987). Appeal. In The stubborn particulars of grace. Toronto, ON, Canada: 
McClelland & Stewart. 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 


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