The phrase phenomenology of practice is meant to articulate the resolve of doing phenomenology directly on the things—especially the quotidian and ordinary aspects of professional practices. The word “practice” is used in the manner that professionals in medicine, law, and other occupations regard practice the core of their calling. The term “practice” is neither used to refer to exercise or training, nor is it used as “applied,” in relation to theory, or as a form of critical praxis. Phenomenology of practice wants to be sensitive to the concerns of practices in professional fields, and also to the personal acting and social practices of everyday living.
As well, phenomenology of practice is sensitive to the realization that life as we live and experience it is not only rational and logical, and thus transparent to systematic reflection—it is also subtle, enigmatic, contradictory, ambiguous, sometimes mysterious, and saturated with existential and transcendent meaning that can only be accessed through poetic, aesthetic, and ethical languages. Phenomenology is a perpetual practice, an eternal practicing to get, explore, and disclose meaning in all its complexity.
So, the practice of “doing phenomenology” is thinking and seeing our world phenomenologically. And to think phenomenologically is to be swept up in a spell of wonder about the originary meaningfulness of this or that phenomenon or event as they appear, show, present, or give themselves to us in experience or consciousness. In the experiential encounter with things and events of the world, phenomenology assists us by directing our gaze toward the regions where understandings, emotions, meanings and feelings originate, well up, and percolate through the porous membranes of past existential sedimentations—then infuse, permeate, infect, touch, stir us, and exercise a formative and affective effect on our being and becoming. In this sense phenomenology tells us who we are. The idea of “phenomenology of practice” is operative with respect to the everyday practice of living. In other words, phenomenology of practice is for practice and of practice.
Doing phenomenological research is making intelligible the originary meaningfulness of experiential phenomena and events that we explore in a methodical phenomenological manner through written texts. This need for intelligibility is a characteristic of phenomenology as a mode of inquiry and as an intellectual discipline. Phenomenology starts with experience. But some current phenomenological discourses are so rooted in academese and technical philosophical vocabulary and argument that they are virtually unintelligible jargon, even to well-educated readers. This has led some philosophers to urge their philosopher colleagues to practice phenomenology in a manner that is understandable to non-philosophers.