When Phenomenology Came to the Social Welfare Office

On Gadamer, Existential Philosophy, and Encounters with People at the Edge of Existence

In the early 1980s, I read Hans-Georg Gadamer’s essay “The Phenomenological Movement.” I was a newly qualified social worker and had begun my first job at a social welfare office. There I met what we used to call real clients. Not constructed cases from the classroom. Not human beings neatly arranged within theoretical categories, but people who lacked money, housing, employment, health, or hope—and often several of these at once.

They sat on the other side of the desk. Some spoke at length. Others answered in short sentences. Some were angry. Some were ashamed. Others had given up trying to explain themselves, perhaps because they had told their stories so many times that the words no longer seemed to mean anything. They had been registered, assessed, and placed within administrative categories. But they were also human beings living at the edge of what they could endure.

It was into this experience that Gadamer’s essay entered.

Knowledge Is Intuition

The essay was written in 1963 and later included in Philosophical Hermeneutics, an English-language collection of texts drawn from Gadamer’s Kleine Schriften. The collection was edited and translated by David E. Linge and published in 1976, with the first paperback edition appearing in 1977. “The Phenomenological Movement” is not merely a historical account of the development of phenomenology. It is also the story of a transformation in philosophy’s very way of attempting to see the world.

Gadamer summarizes a fundamental phenomenological insight in the words: “Knowledge is intuition.”

The English word intuition can easily be misunderstood. Gadamer does not mean intuition in the sense of a gut feeling, a spontaneous impression, or an inexplicable ability to know what another person is thinking. The word refers to the German Anschauung: an intuition or direct apprehension in which something is allowed to emerge and show itself as it is given in experience. In direct perception, Gadamer writes, this means the direct givenness of what is known.

Phenomenology sought to return to the phenomena themselves. Before explanation, before theory, and before classification, one had to try to see what was showing itself.

This idea had an immediate significance for me as a social worker. At the social welfare office, there was never a shortage of knowledge about the client. The files could be filled with information: income, debts, diagnoses, employment history, marital status, previous interventions, and new administrative decisions. Everything in them might be correct. Yet the person could still remain invisible.

Phenomenology posed a simpler and, at the same time, more difficult question: What is actually showing itself here?

Seeing Before Explaining

The strength of phenomenology did not lie in its rejection of science. On the contrary, Husserl wanted to establish philosophy as a rigorous science. Gadamer writes that Husserl possessed a genuine missionary consciousness. He regarded phenomenology as more than one philosophical school among others. It was a calling to begin again, to free knowledge from inherited constructions, and to return to the things themselves.

This missionary passion spread to an entire generation. A movement arose around Husserl, not merely a school. Max Scheler examined how values and feelings could themselves be forms of cognition. Alexander Pfänder developed a precise descriptive phenomenology. Heidegger adopted the questions of phenomenology but carried them in a new direction. The decisive question was no longer merely how something is given to consciousness, but how the human being already finds itself within a world that it understands and interprets.

Human beings do not stand outside the world and observe it. They are thrown into it. They have a history, a body, a language, relationships, and limited possibilities. Before we begin to explain the world, we have already understood something of it. Before the social worker asks the first question, both the social worker and the client bring their own histories into the room.

This was what made phenomenology relevant to practice. It did not teach me a new method that could be entered into a form. It taught me to question the assumption that the form could contain the human being.

A client is never merely the problem that the social welfare office has the authority to address. The unemployed person is not merely someone without work. The person burdened by debt is not merely their financial situation. The sick person is not merely their diagnosis. Behind the information in the file is a human being who has already interpreted their own situation—and who may have experienced the interpretations of others as carrying greater authority than their own.

To see phenomenologically is therefore also to hold back one’s own explanation for a moment.

From Phenomenology to Existential Philosophy

Gadamer shows how phenomenology, after the First World War, could no longer remain an investigation of the structures of consciousness. A generation that had experienced the devastation of war could not be satisfied by the abstract epistemology of Neo-Kantianism or by philosophy’s attempts to secure the foundations of science. Philosophy once again had to ask what it means to exist.

It was here that Heidegger and Karl Jaspers introduced what Gadamer calls the philosophy of existence—existential philosophy.

The distinction is important. Existential philosophy is not quite the same as the existentialism that later became associated especially with Sartre and the French post-war period. In Heidegger and Jaspers, the primary concern is not a doctrine of the free individual who creates himself. It concerns the situatedness, finitude, and vulnerability of the human being—a life that can never be observed completely from the outside.

Jaspers wrote about boundary situations: suffering, guilt, struggle, and death. These are situations we cannot solve in the same way that we solve a practical problem. We cannot place ourselves outside them. They bring us to a boundary where our familiar explanations and ways of acting no longer suffice.

At the social welfare office, I met people who lived within such borderlands. Their difficulties were, of course, also practical. An unpaid bill had to be paid. Housing had to be found. An administrative decision had to be made. Social work cannot replace concrete action with philosophical reflection.

But the practical problem could simultaneously contain an existential question. What happens to a person who can no longer support himself? What does dependency do to one’s sense of self? What does it mean to have to ask a stranger for money to buy food? How is a person’s relationship with himself changed when his life becomes an object of control, documentation, and assessment?

The system dealt with the application. The human being lived the situation.

The Client as Phenomenon

The word client was already an interpretation. It made the person comprehensible within the language of the institution. As soon as someone had passed through the door, their life was translated into the categories of the social welfare office: eligible or ineligible, able or unable to work, cooperative or difficult, temporarily or permanently in need of assistance.

Such categories are necessary. Without them, a public service can neither make decisions nor distribute resources fairly. But categories can also conceal what they were intended to help us understand. Once a person has been defined as difficult, everything they do may be interpreted as confirmation of that difficulty. Anger becomes a failure to cooperate. Silence becomes resistance. Failure to attend an appointment becomes a lack of motivation.

Phenomenology asked me to pause before completing that conclusion.

What if the anger was not primarily aggression, but a final remnant of dignity? What if the silence was not unwillingness, but shame? What if the failure to attend did not result from a lack of motivation, but from the fear of once again being assessed and found inadequate?

I could not know this through intuition understood as a gut feeling. I had to ask. Listen. Look again. Allow my first understanding to be corrected.

The phenomenological attitude does not relieve us of the responsibility to think critically. It makes criticism more demanding. Even what appears to show itself directly is seen from a particular position. The social worker brings an education, institutional power, and expectations. The client brings a history and previous experiences of those who have tried to help. Neither enters the encounter empty-handed.

Here phenomenology passes into hermeneutics. What we see must be interpreted, and interpretation always takes place within a history. Understanding does not mean eliminating all prejudgments, but becoming aware of them and allowing them to be tested in the encounter with the other.

When Theory Met a Face

When I read Gadamer in the early 1980s, I probably did not understand the full implications of all this. I did not yet have a long professional life through which I could read the text retrospectively. But the essay made a profound impression on me because it gave words to something I had already begun to sense.

My education had given me theories, laws, and methods. At the social welfare office, I discovered that no theory could tell me fully who the person before me was. Theory could help me to see, but it could also determine in advance what I was able to notice.

Gadamer opened another possibility: knowledge does not always begin with distance. Sometimes it begins with attentiveness.

This does not mean that the social worker should abandon professional knowledge and simply be compassionate. It means that professional knowledge must withstand the encounter with the individual human being. Knowledge that cannot be corrected by the experience of the other hardens into power. A method that already knows the answer ceases to ask questions.

Practical philosophy begins precisely here: not in a choice between theory and experience, but in the question of how knowledge should be applied in a concrete situation that is never entirely identical to any other. The right action cannot be mechanically deduced from a general rule. It requires judgment, and judgment requires us to see what kind of situation we are actually facing.

At the Edge of Existence

The people I met did not live outside society. Rather, they stood at a boundary where society’s fundamental conditions became visible. Those who have money seldom reflect on what money means. Those who have a home do not have to experience every day what it means to have a place in the world. Those who are listened to do not always notice how crucial it is to be believed.

The person at the edge therefore reveals more than their own vulnerability. They reveal something about the world in which we all live.

Perhaps this was the deepest effect Gadamer’s essay had on me. Phenomenology taught me that the client was not merely a person about whom I was to acquire knowledge. The encounter could also reveal something I did not yet know—about the institution, about society, about myself, and about what it means to be human.

Knowledge was not merely something I brought with me into the room. It could arise between us.

Husserl wanted to return to the things themselves. Heidegger asked what it means to be. Jaspers showed how human beings encounter themselves in boundary situations. Gadamer carried these questions forward into the space of understanding and conversation.

At the social welfare office, these words acquired a concrete meaning. A human being sat on the other side of the desk. I had a file, a body of regulations, and an education. The other person had a life that could never be fully contained within the file.

My first professional task was to know what I should do.

My first human task was to see who had come.