Donna Frost

Chapter 3 64 with concrete professional situations. Heidegger, and more specifically Gadamer, also prompted me to pay attention to language, including everyday speech. I was aware that events and speech as they occurred in practical situations would reveal understandings, beliefs and ideas about aspects of our being-in-the-world which we took for granted as we got on with our lives and our work. Merleau-Ponty’s ( 1958 / 2006 ) philosophy, on the other hand, reminded me that we experience and respond to more than we can, or perhaps need to, express linguistically, and that meaning making begins in the pre-reflective experience. Levinas ( 1951 / 1989 , 1969 ) reminded me that our encounters with each other, even the ordinary every day encounters, transcend our comprehension. There is more happening within the potential of the encounter than that which can easily be grasped or understood: attention must be given then to taking hold of aspects of the ineffable. Furthermore, the encounter with the other demands from me a responsibility to view the other not as object, but, in his or her being, as more than can be comprehended. Embodied selves We engage with the world as embodied beings (eg. Merleau-Ponty, 1958 / 2006 ; Gadamer, 1975 / 1989 ). In other words, our knowledge of the world is created and acquired in and via the experience of our bodies (in the world). This standpoint emphasizes that we do not merely ‘have’ a body, we are a body, and it is in this incarnation that we are so deeply enmeshed in our worlds and engage in our hermeneutic processes of understanding (Merleau-Ponty, 1958 / 2006 ). As Dewing ( 2011 ) explains, within Merleau-Ponty’s view “human action and behaviour […] cannot be understood as a simple mechanistic response to defined stimuli but is instead best understood as active embodied perception, problem-solving and meaning making” (p. 66 , my emphasis). This active perception, problem-solving and meaning making is not always an intellectual activity; ‘perception’ is in the first instance the pre-reflective experience of being-in-the-world. Placing our embodied perception of being-in-the-world at the forefront of our gaining access to that world and coming to know and understand it Merleau-Ponty ( 1958 / 2006 ) describes four fundamental life-world themes, or ‘existentials’, that make up the lived experience: corporeality (lived body), relationality (lived human relation), spatiality (lived space) and temporality (lived time). Althoughwe can use these existentials as heuristic devices to explore and reflect on human experience (Dewing, 2011 ) it should not be forgotten that we each engage with, act within and come to understand the world in the way that suits us, in a way