“Between Eye and Eye Stretches an Interminable Landscape”: The Challenge of Philosophical Hermeneutics

Abstract

While conducting phenomenological interviews on the experience of being a parent with children in school, the author comes to a deeper, more personal understanding of the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics. How people use language—the form, content, and context of the words they use, whether in their interviews, analytic memos, or theoretical writings—is crucial to how they understand. As such, language is always communicative, relational, interpretive, and dynamic. The challenge for interpretive researchers is incorporating in their understanding of a topic the physical, emotional, situational, and relational conditions within which communication and thus understanding occur. In a series of poems, the author provides an aesthetic account of some of those conditions.