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How to turn professional experience into practical knowledge? How to reflect over one’s professional practice in order to improve it? How to further develop a practitioner’s responseAbility when facing challenging situations? Already Aristotle spoke of practical knowledge in terms of prudence or practical wisdom (phronesis), a notion which is also reflected in the term Bildung. In this podcast, the hosts prof. Michael Noah Weiss and prof. Guro Hansen Helskog are examining central aspects of this knowledge form and its relevance in professional studies by talking to different scholars who made significant contributions to the field. Listeners can get hands-on ideas on how to develop practical knowledge in their own professional contexts.
Hosts:
Michael Noah Weiss & Guro Hansen Helskog
Edited Podcast Transcript:
ResponsAbility
Dialogues on Practical Knowledge and Bildung in Professional Studies
By Michael Noah Weiss and Guro Hansen Helskog
# 7 The Wisdom of Practitioners - with James McGuirk
00:00:04 Michael N. W.
Welcome to the ResponseAbility podcast. My name is Michael Noah Weiss, the host.
00:00:10 Guro H. H.
And my name is Guro Hansen Helskog, the co-host of the show.
00:00:14 Michael N. W.
Our guest today is James McGuirk. James, you are professor in philosophy and head of the center of Diakonia and Professional Practice at VID Specialized University in Norway. Before that you were head of the Center for Practical Knowledge at Nord University, also that in Norway. You have published extensively on phenomenology, hermeneutics, and practical knowledge, with a special focus on philosophy and practice research. Welcome, James!
00:00:43 James McG.
Thank you very much!
00:00:44 Michael N. W.
James, today we shall take a closer look at the wisdom of the practitioner. The first question is how would you characterize the wise practitioner?
00:00:55 James McG.
Well, the wise practitioner is one who is able to react in a way to the complexity of the situation that he or she finds himself in. Anyone involved in practice know that what is required in concrete situations is characterized by several different kinds of interests, or impulses, or pressures that are all exerting themselves at the same time. So the ability to navigate that in a way that the practitioner can orient him- or herself in the situation, is kind of a mark of a wise practitioner. I think that many will have had the experience that early in their career, that they have witnessed that, that they have seen somebody maybe more senior who they just see “this person seems to be able to move in the space in a way which is impressive and admirable, and seems to display a kind of wisdom”. So. it is difficult to describe it in more concrete terms than that, because it is a sort of complex integrated capacity.
00:02:06 Guro H. H.
With regards to wisdom and practice, you have published an article on the phenomenology of habit, and we wonder: What is the role of habit in practical wisdom, and further, what is the relationship between habitual action, reason and knowledge, as you see it?
00:02:23 James McG.
Wow, that is a big question, or two big questions. Well, what I have done in my work on habit, and I'm very much in debt to many of the phenomenologists. People know the work maybe of Merleau-Ponty on habit, and also Paul Ricoeur, Gaston Bachelard and others have written on habits quite a bit, and I have been quite inspired by that understanding. But it is also kind of an Aristotelian understanding, so, it is an older tradition and understanding of habit, and the point of that is to think of habit as a more sort of dynamic approach to knowledge.
In the time after the Enlightenment, there has been a tendency, and often we use it in in common discussion today, of thinking of habits as something as a sort of “fallen” form of knowledge. When we say “I did that through habit”, we say, in other words, “I wasn't thinking”. It was something automatized - almost like a behavioristic input and output, that there was a stimulus and then a response came from me, because it was what I am used to. And of course, we know from our experience that sometimes this can be the case. But if I am driving my car and I am used to taking a right turn at a certain crossing, but this time I have to go the other way, and I'm thinking about something else, maybe I just drive to the right because it has become kind of an automated response. But there is a different and an older tradition of thinking about habits that is actually fundamental to a more dynamic exercise of knowledge. So, an article that I wrote recently drew attention to the connection between habit and paying attention. So, what I argue for is that to develop habits is also to develop the capacity to pay specific attention to specific kind of things in specific kinds of situations. So that if I become habituated in even something like picking strawberries out in a field, that what I have learned is a very high resolution-capacity for attention to where the strawberries are, and how I should approach my task. And of course, when I have that high level of attention, other things could be in my field of vision that I am not paying sufficient attention to. But the idea is that habit is this more dynamic way in which knowledge becomes incorporated into the body, and also incorporated into to my personality and my being as a rational agent. So basically, I think about habit along those lines. So, it is kind of, along with the phenomenologists and Aristotle, to rejuvenate the idea of habit against the way that we today sometimes make a distinction between habit on the one hand and conscious thinking on the other.
00:04:59 Guro H. H.
And can you elaborate a little bit about the role of reason? Because often those two – habit and reason- are treated in a dichotomic way.
00:05:09 James McG.
That's right. And again I suppose it has to do with a certain kind of prejudice that we have in a post enlightenment world of thinking of reason as a kind of a distant performance where I take a step out of the world and reflect on how things are and how they should be, and so on. So you have a lot of philosophers, people like Heidegger also, who talks about the way in which we have a tendency to just kind of go along with things, and we do what everybody else does, and we say what everybody else says. So there is this need to kind of withdraw ourselves in a certain sense in order to be able to reorient ourselves as individuals and as rational agents through this business of a kind of a critical and very conscious form of thinking. And we have to have that tendency to distinguish that from more embodied forms of knowledge, more practical forms of knowledge, more incorporated forms of knowledge. But the argument would be not to turn the dichotomy upside down, because that's not the point. The point is rather to say that reason is realized in a multiplicity of different ways. Through conscious thinking and abstraction - absolutely. It is very important that we do that from time to time. In certain situations, it is absolutely essential, and some of our work, our scientific work and so on, relies on that form of approach, but there is also ways in which knowledge is realized through embodied action, habit and so on.
00:06:42 Michael N. W.
Well connected to what you just said, I would like to take a closer look now on ways of understanding knowledge. Today we find three forms of learning outcomes in any kind of study plan in Europe after the Bolognia process, namely knowledge, skills and competence. The latter, by the way, was replaced with responsibility and autonomy in in the European Qualifications Framework in 2017. These three categories of qualification can be argued to go back to Aristotle's three forms of knowledge, which are episteme, techné and phronesis. How do you understand these three forms of knowledge?
00:07:23 James McG.
And it was very interesting actually, that you made the connection with the learning outcomes. I haven't thought about that, but I suppose it does go to the point which I was talking about a moment ago, about the way we have in our modern language a tendency to narrow what we mean by knowledge. And now in one sense, I think it is intuitively obvious to us that there are different forms of knowledge. We do, nevertheless, often speak about knowledge as cognitive performance, something that is in my head - what philosophers often call propositional knowledge - things I can speak about and tell, you know. So sometimes if we say that someone is a very knowledgeable person, what we mean is that they know a lot of things. Of course that is a very important form of knowledge, and Aristotle would absolutely agree with that. But the point of his distinction is also, again as I mentioned, to make the argument that knowledge is multiply realized through practical forms as well as more theoretical forms. And I think, also the fact that those all go under the branch or the umbrella of knowledge is also important. It is important in terms of terminology, because whereas we can maybe acknowledge that there are practical forms of skills and general confidence, when we distinguish them from knowledge, the problem can be that we keep on repeating that sort of narrowing of the idea of knowledge. So that is one important point to say initially about what Aristotle is doing. Another thing which I think is also very important for anyone who is looking at this Aristotelian distinction, is the fact that what Aristotle calls forms of knowledge are not necessarily contents of things that we know. They can imply that, and that can be part of the knowledge picture. But they are also first and foremost dispositions of character. So, they are ways in which we orient ourselves towards the world. They are sort of aspects of the world that we kind of engage with or uncover through our activity, whether it be our thoughtful activity, or our practical activity. And I can just say one more thing on that, that whereas we can make a distinction between three different knowledges that he mentions - as you say, episteme, techné and phronesis, that can also be understood as a division between theoretical knowledge on the one hand, and practical knowledge on the other hand, where techné and phronesis are both forms of practical knowledge, whereas episteme is more a form of theoretical knowledge. With the Greeks, in the Greek sense, the word theory is connected with the word “to look at”, “to see”. So the theoreticians in in ancient Greece world were people that would go around and observe the way in which the festivals were held in different cities. They would go and watch. They would look, they wouldn't take part, they would just look at in order to gain insight into how the gods were worshipped and so on in different places. So theoria was very much of a looking, observing kind of activity, whereas on the other hand, there is practical forms of knowledge which are more action oriented, and connected with what we do.
00:10:38 Michael N. W.
Since the topic of our episode today is the vice practitioner, how would you describe phronesis? You were already a bit into it, but what does it mean for you? There are many different translations. For example, McEvilly calls it mindfulness, while Shawn Gallagher, in his hermeneutics and education, speaks of self-knowledge, and so on. But what does it mean for you?
00:11:04 James McG.
I mean, I think again it is interesting, because of the way that it is something almost of a different level than the two other concepts, episteme and techné, which are closer to contents that we know. I said that all three were dispositions of character rather than things that we know, but both techné and episteme are closer to sort of contents and things that we know, whereas phronesis is very much. I mean, Aristotle calls it a virtue, and I think that really is the best way of understanding it, at least if we understand virtue in the way that Aristotle describes the term as a way of being attentive, a way of being oriented. So, I suppose in that sense, mindfulness is somewhat connected, but to me, the notion of mindfulness has too many associations today, so I would kind of avoid that term. For Aristotle, we must remember, phronesis is both an intellectual and a moral virtue, something he uses in terms of his explanation of ethics, and also in terms of his explanation of knowledge. It is in that sense a capacity, a capacity to orient ourselves, as I say, to a way of manifesting our rational nature, and a way in which we are capable of integrating different knowledge branches, different kinds of considerations, and to bring those things into a responsive modus to the concrete situation that we are in.
And I think that very much connects back with what I spoke about in terms of the wise practitioner, because one of the things that we see not just in contemporary society - it has been going on for some time, but what is a kind of a nervousness about practitioners and performances. So, we are concerned about, and often rightly so, we are concerned about the possibility of corruption, we are concerned with the possibility of blind spots, we are concerned with the possibility of bias and so on and so forth. So, we attempt to transform the whole landscape of practice into something that is governed by rules and systems and guidelines and evidence, and I do not want to speak against that because I think a lot of those impulses are fine. But regardless of how much of that we do, we are always going to have practitioners that are in positions where they need to respond to the unique constellation of factors. Now maybe this situation is similar in terms of a pattern to what they've seen before, but it is something that they need to be able to respond to there and then. The question is: How are they doing that? What kind of resources can they can they bring to bear on that?
So my argument would be that in terms of wisdom and phronesis and practice, there is a sense in which this is always going to be something we need in our welfare practices and other kind of practices.
00:14:03 Guro H. H.
I think it seems like this connects to your work on values in institutions. Maybe you can continue by reflecting a bit on that?
00:14:17 James McG.
Yeah, so the stuff I did on values in institutions was also maybe a historical way of thinking about the way in which wise practice takes place. The argument there was that values are segmented practical knowledge that is formed over time in our institutions. Again, the point is not to be in an either-or mode, but sometimes we have a a tendency in modern discourse to be very skeptical towards institutions. We talk about the ways in which they have been biased or corrupt and so on. And again, I think there are many good arguments to be made for that. But the argument that I was trying to develop there was that our institutions are also the sedimentation over time of a kind of practical knowledge and of values that become embedded in practices. So, the example I gave when I worked on this topic was the school and the classroom setting. Here there are a certain kind of logic in the very physicality of the classroom. First, you have the fact that it is an enclosed space, so that we are sort of withdrawing ourselves from the world to be in this space of learning. Second, there is a meeting of different generations – an older generation represented by the teacher, and the younger generation represented by the students. Third, the younger generation outnumbers the older generation, so they sort of bring back a kind of a balance into that, even though the older generation speaks from authority. The older generation are the ones who are presenting it. As much as the classroom is a withdrawal from the world, the teacher is also bringing the world back into the classroom by presenting something that the students and the teacher will look at together - photosynthesis in plants or French grammar or something like that. Following Hannah Arendt, she talks about this, that the teacher represents a kind of love of the world. So, this love of the world is brought and put before the students - love of the world in specific concretized tasks. As I said, French grammar, photosynthesis, whatever it might be.
So, my point with all of that was to say that there are kind of clues in the very physical landscape and in the institutional history that manifest both sets of values that we value- love of the world. We value understanding. We value also bringing the younger generation into the future through this practice of teaching and so on. And that none of that is intended to argue in a sort of a naive way, as though all classrooms work wonderfully and all schools are fantastic places or institutions of learning. Of course, there are a myriad of problems that we can point to in terms of the way the school operates now, and in the way that it has operated in the past. But the point was to rather argue on the one hand that this kind of sedimentation of practical knowledge and of values has taken days, and secondly that sometimes it is when we go back to that and bring forth these issues through analysis that it can actually nourish a more critical perspective. So, it is through that sense of what the classroom is intended to be, this meeting between the old and the young, the love of the world materialized in certain contexts -it is through becoming aware of all this, that we can also say that in this situation this is working very badly. This is not working. This is not how it should be. This is a fall away from that or a form of corruption. That is roughly what I am arguing, and I am interested in developing those perspectives even more.
But just one more thing about that would be to say that in as much as I think knowledge gets sort of materialized and sedimented over time. I also think that happens with values too. Sometimes value is a very common term that is used in modern discourse. We always talk about what are our values, what are my values, what are your values and so on. But it can be somewhat abstract, and it is a sort of disconnected way of thinking about morality as far as I am concerned, because I can have values in the sense that I speak these values, I say these are the things that are important to me. But it is also important to look at how values have come to be - how have they been born in the world? How have they become materialized in the world? So, I take the similar kind of approach both to the question of knowledge and to the question of value.
00:18:54 Michael N. W.
Thank you very much! Guro and me we are working in teacher education, and with that as a background we would like to ask you how can students of professional studies become wise practitioners? You already said a bit about phronesis, and also this responsibility towards the given situation that this is a part of being wise, but how can you integrate it into professional studies?
00:19:19 James McG.
It is a difficult question. As you know, for Aristotle, it is absolutely something that we can learn, but he thinks about it in a much broader sense and not in the way in which we think of teaching and learning today, which again is often narrowed in the same way that I argue that the knowledge concept gets narrowed. So, there is also teaching and learning understood as something that happens in school, whereas Aristotle would say no, it is part of the way in which families and communities bring up individuals. And one of the more important points for him, there is this idea of imitation, of seeing this being enacted by someone, and the notion of the way admiration draws us into the action of imitating, which is a very interesting thing in itself, because to imitate is actually in that context, not just to do exactly the same as the person, because that is not what attracts our interest. If you see, let us say, if you witness a teacher. And I think even the pupil might witness the teacher modelling a form of orientation towards something, a kind of curious stance with regards to something. And that is something that at the level of schooling, I think, can incorporate that idea that the sort of phronetic action that the teacher acts as a model as a way in which the pupils see, OK, this is a way I can approach things that I do not understand. This is how I can identify the problem by analyzing it, and so on. And then they can be a model for my own schooling, my own action as a pupil. And I think that it can happen for me, that it can also be multiply realized one way through the modelling of the teacher, but also sometimes when we read a text or if we see a film or something like that, there can also be mediated forms of role modeling that can be very, very important in the way that it works in the school.
If I could mention something else, which is kind of on a different track in terms of wise practitioners: I worked for many years at the Center for Practical Knowledge in Nord University, and we had a PhD program and also a master's program. Our master students were all experienced practitioners. It was a part time masters program, and according to our regulations, they had to have a minimum of three years experience. The most had closer to 15 years experience. One of the things that we did was to let them formulate a narrative based in something from their own work experience that had stayed with them and maybe had affected them in some way. We did not specify it anymore than that. It did not have to be something positive or negative or something that they thought was a problem or something like that, but just a memory that they had that had stayed with them. They would then write out a description of this experience, and then that story that they told operated almost as a laboratory for investigation. We could ask questions like “what was going on in the experience?”. “what is it that was at stake here?2, or “why was this action more important to do at that time rather than some other?” And we could also then bring in theoretical resources to come into dialogue with the kinds of things that they were writing about, and the reason I mentioned this is that because of the fact that phronesis is a capacity and orientation or something like that, it just is not something that lends itself to being written down as a sort of a recipe- “First you do this and second you do that and third that”, and so on. So. if we are able to learn from it at all, if we are able to put words on it in any way, it has to be through in a different kind of writing – a form of writing which is more like picturing. So telling a story which presents a kind of a linear account which it's linear in one sense. But it also takes account of the various different things that were going on at the same time. So we start to see just an image and like a vignette or a practice situation that allows us to deepen it through different kinds of questioning and different kinds of theoretical resources. So those would be two ways I think you can think of how phronesis. It is not something that we can we. It's not something we can turn into a course. You can not have a 5 CTS course in front of us when students come in without it and they come out with phronesis at the end of it, that's not working. And also then to have a kind of a renewed faith in the possibility that we can have both pupils and practitioners and so on that are well equipped to take account of the kind of complexity that they simply will meet in their in their working lives.
00:24:21 Guro H. H.
One thing is educating wise practitioners. Another thing is researching practice and practical knowledge and practical wisdom. In your chapter in the anthology on humanistic research approaches to professional practice, you give some phenomenological and hermeneutical considerations regarding the use of stories and experience in empirical research. Would you give us a brief introduction to your thoughts on this as well?
00:24:51 James McG.
Yeah, and that, I suppose, is following on from what I just said. So, it is the idea that the story, and here I am following Paul Riceour, that through the business of telling and of narrating and of speaking, I am interrupting the flow of my experience. And when I have written down an episode that I experienced, it has become a written text. There is a process of alienation, if you like, in the sense that the text separates itself from me. It is not something I am speaking about in a verbal way, but something which has now been written in a way which becomes a product that other people can also engage with. The intention is not that you as a reader will just take that as a testimony from me that this is something I experienced, but rather, that the text can become an object of common investigation, for you, as someone on the outside, and also for me myself.
Maybe that sounds a little complicated, but then I can see, “OK, well, I have written this in a spontaneous way, but I have chosen certain kind of words. I have emphasized some aspects in the story and not others”, and so on. And through that process of writing becomes something that we can use in what I call the laboratory. Again, I am following Paul Ricoeur in the idea that the text becomes something that can be studied, and it can be unfolded in terms of the meaning that is present in it.
That does not mean that the text is a testament to my fantastic wisdom. It can be that it shows a blindness in what I did. This is something we often experienced with our students as well, that they would be picturing practical wisdom in a way which is quite interesting and exciting, and through the process of reflecting and working on the text, students often said that “I wrote something in the introduction to my story that is important, but I ignored it because I was focused on something else. I was convinced that the situation was about this, when in fact it was about something else”.
So, the process of engaging with stories can open up aspects of our experience which are surprising for us ourselves. So, I used to say to the students that “if you are not surprised by things that emerge out of your story, then you haven't gone deeply enough into it”.
00:27:51 Michael N. W.
In relation to what you just explicated on using stories and narratives as a starting point for research, I would like to ask you, are there any distinctions or differences in researching narratives phenomenologically and hermeneutically, or is that more or less, I do not want to say that it is the same, but are there any differences and distinctions between a hermeneutical approach and a phenomenological approach?
00:28:22 James McG.
My background is as a philosopher, so I read the phenomenologist and the hermeneutics quite a lot. For me, one of the things which took me a little time to navigate, is when I started to see that this was being reflected in qualitative research, and often there were very strong distinctions being made between phenomenological and hermeneutical approaches. For me, this was puzzling, because if you just look at some of the figures, the main figures: Husserl, we know, is often called the father of phenomenology, but even some of his analysis are quite kind of hermeneutical in the way that he speaks about the way that perception is we are seeing something as something. It is in a context. It appears through both perception and expectation and so on and so forth. Heidegger says that the only way for phenomenology to work is as a hermeneutics. Paul Ricoeur has a short essay on how phenomenology and hermeneutics are basically sort of two sides of the same coin. You find the same in Gadamer and other thinkers, so I am often a little bit skeptical of making that kind of a distinction between a phenomenological and a hermeneutical approach. I think there were certain kinds of analysis, certain kinds of experiences, which maybe a more pure phenomenological approach works better for, and others which a more hermeneutical approach works better for. But really, I think the same kind of motives and intuitions are lying behind both traditions in a way which really makes them inseparable.
I mean, Husserl will often give very specific, perceptual examples of how when I look at a chair, I see one side of it, and I can move my body around and realize other sides of it. And I saw that the object presents itself as a unity to me, but also through a multiplicity of possible perspectives, and it is situated in an outer horizon of the room that it is in, or something like that. So those kinds of analysis are not the most useful when, let us say, someone is giving an account of a classroom situation. So, there something more like a hermeneutical approach makes more sense. Maybe I am avoiding the question a little bit, so I apologize for that, but I just I dislike the sort strong distinction between those two terms.
00:30:46 Guro H. H.
You also argue that using your own experience and your own narratives is just as legitimate as using the narratives of others also in the form of interviews when you do research, and Michael and I agree with that, of course, but we would really like to hear you explicate your arguments for your stance.
00:31:08 James McG.
Again, this was something that was very much phenomenologically inspired, and then through the work with practical knowledge that we did in Nord University that was built on that kind of phenomenological insight. And the point of that is that in a way, it has to do with, if you kind of take a step back and say, “well, what is coming to expression in the experience? What does it mean to look at experience, let's say from a research point of view, from a qualitative research point of view?”
And there are different ways you can answer that question. You could say that we could be interested in someone's experience in order to get their testimony. So, we know how doctors think about treating cancer, but what do the patients think? What do the family think? So, you can look at experience in ways of representing different groups or different voices. And I think that is a very legitimate way of thinking about research. But the phenomenological approach to experience of the one that we used in practical knowledge. And also here at V2 is one that thinks about experience as something which has a kind of a deep logic and a structure, and often what the structure that's present in our experiences is something which is not immediately obvious to us, it is not explicitly obvious to us because it contains all of these dimensions that we have to take for granted in order to be able to act. So, one thing that using one's own narratives can also be connected with is the approach of auto ethnography, which has become more popular within qualitative studies. Recently, my approach that has always been a little bit ambivalent, to be honest, because what I have seen in a lot of foundational text and over without graphy is it's almost a kind of an alternative to scientific thinking that the idea is that there is sort of objective knowledge on the one hand, and then there's auto ethnography on one's own experience and to sort of map that by writing it out. And that can be some value in that again. But the idea of using narratives in the way that, that I have used them and that the way that we use them in the educations that I have been part of is actually to see it as something that becomes an object of study and therefore something that can generate knowledge which is resonant across subjects. In other words, that we find we find patterns in our own experience, which matches on to the patterns that other people find in their experience, so that through an explication of my experience in a phenomenological way, it will also be something that is recognizable to others, and that is the ambition of that kind of phenomenological approach to. It is not an approach whose intention is to lay out my particular subjectivity, but rather through my subjective perspective, to see something which is patterned and that is accessible across subjects.
To try it and trying to give it an example of that, but maybe even I went back to the school situation that there are so many kind of axiomatic levels in our experience that make it possible for us to have the specific day-to-day experience that we have, but we can often then become blind to those that deep structure in our experience and the phenomenological approach is that can bring our attention back to that. It is a form of learned naivety in order to look at, well, what exactly is the is the deep structure of my experience, what is, what kind of time experience is at play? What is the role of the body in this? So, in all of the ways in which in our everyday experience I perceive the world from my body, but it is very rare that I my attention is turned back towards my body unless something happens. I stubbed my toe, or I get sick, and all of a sudden my body becomes an object of my own attention. But generally, it is the ground of my tension. Similarly, the kind of material, let us say the classroom or the situation we are in, is something we take for granted and we look outwards from that, but maybe to turn the attention back in as phenomenologists do and allows us to gain deeper insights into the meaning of our experience. And so that is why I would argue that one's own experience can be as important as the experience of another. So, the first person perspective as well as the second person perspective can, and you know sometimes they will uncover different aspects of the thing, but that both of them can be very worthwhile avenues into understanding.
00:35:49 Michael N. W.
James, before we come to the end of this episode, I would like to ask you a last follow up question. What you just explicated, and because you started with the characterization of the wise practitioner and at a certain point you said that you have seen somebody doing something and you were kind of looking up to that person, imitating what he or she was doing in a particular situation. And this is a way you can develop towards becoming a wise practitioner, and in that respect, when it comes to response-ability, as we call it in this podcast, phronesis, in terms of the practical wisdom. I was wondering about how you were describing how to develop that kind of wisdom or response-ability. It seems to me, and maybe I understood you wrong, that you can develop that more through research than through teaching, if you understand me right. You said that you have to investigate your own experiences, you have to investigate narratives, and for me it almost sounds a bit like that these aspects of investigation and research is key to develop phronesis.
00:37:02 James McG.
Well, I am glad you asked that question, because I am very unfortunate if that was the impression I gave. I think in fact the opposite is the case. I think the fact that we are able to investigate, that we are able to research is predicated upon the fact that the phronesis already exists.
So, the phronesis has a developmental logic which precedes asking questions. There is a quotation from one of the commentators on phenomenology, Robert Sokolowski, which I often use. He says that one of the greatest contributions of phenomenology is the acknowledgement that truth has already been achieved prior to the business of reflection. That's not an exact quote, but the point being that it is because of the fact that we are able to make subtle distinctions in the world, that we are able to navigate the world, that we are able to be response-able in your sense, that they were able to respond either in moral situations or in knowledge situations. Those things are already realized in the world. They are already there, and because they are there, narratives, phenomenological reflection and so on has a material to work with.
So, it does not generate wisdom through reflection. It does not simply reflect it either. There is, I think, there is something new happening at the level of the reflection and the writing and the narrative work, because again, my students will often say that they found what they discovered in reflecting on their own experience surprising. But it is surprising in the sense that it is at a different register. It is at the register of speech and writing and maybe something that they weren't able to put into words before. But again, it is first something that is happening- the ability to distinguish, the ability to see, the ability to respond, and so on.
Again, I want to make sure that I am understood here. I do not mean that practitioners are always doing the right things. They are not, but there is in practice this realization of both a genuine and also a defensible and worthwhile form of response-ability. And because that is present, then we can do the research that we can do. So, certainly it was not my intention to give the impression that it is the other way around - that the research is from us producing it's not.
00:39:29 Michael N. W.
I think that with that we have come to the end of this episode. Thank you very much for joining us. James. It was an inspiring and a good conversation, very insightful. And we would also like to thank our listeners, and would be happy to welcome you again in some of our other episodes. And with that, we can only say thank you, and goodbye.