The Meaning of Understanding and the Open Body: Some Implications for Qualitative Research

Abstract

I would like to develop some thoughts on the question of ‘what it means to understand’ as an important guiding principle for qualitative research. I believe that addressing this question can tell us important things about the purpose and aims of qualitative research and that it can also help to refine our methodological sensitivity and procedures. In this pursuit, I am indebted to the broad tradition of phenomenology and, specifically, particular strands of thought that run through Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Merleau-Ponty. I use these great thinkers inspirationally as a psychologically oriented person with a pragmatic interest in qualitative research. And in this concern to meditate on the theme of what it means to understand, I then move to an emphasis on embodiment as a remedy to a Cartesian tradition that may have overemphasised the ‘cognitive’ and the abstract dimensions of understanding. Here, the relationship between experience and language becomes a pivotal enquiry. This task is helped centrally by the work of Eugene Gendlin, and I spend time unfolding some of his key thoughts on the matter as well as some possible implications of this for the practice of qualitative research. In this regard, I draw generously on his passion to show how we use much more than our thoughts when we think and how the lived body is full of fertile excess, intimate with crossings and bridges, textures and relationships that are the ‘stuff’ of understanding.