When We Must Understand Anew

What Husserl and Hans-Georg Gadamer can teach us about the lifeworld, understanding, and practical judgement

“She declines help with breakfast.”

The municipal care worker reads the sentence in the care record before ringing the doorbell. She has not met the woman before. They are going to discuss how to make her mornings safer.

At the kitchen table, she explains that the home care service can provide a ready-made breakfast. The woman draws her hands back.

“I’ve already said I don’t want that.”

“I understand, but we do need to make sure you’re eating enough.”

The woman looks towards the window. The care worker realises that her reply has closed down the conversation. She has already begun arguing against a resistance she does not yet understand.

This constructed example raises a question relevant to far more than those working in care services: what do we do when another person does not fit the understanding we bring to the encounter?

Good care requires a willingness to understand anew. Edmund Husserl helps us see how professional descriptions can lose their connection with the experiences on which they are based. Hans-Georg Gadamer shows how our own expectations must remain open to challenge when we encounter another person. Practical judgement begins here: in the willingness to examine whether we have understood the situation well enough.

The care worker looks down at the record. The sentence is brief and apparently unambiguous. Yet she knows little about what the woman actually declined, how the offer was explained, or what breakfast means to her.

She places the tablet on the table.

“I think I rushed ahead a little. What would you most like to keep doing yourself?”

“Whatever I can manage,” the woman replies.

There is a pause. Then she adds:

“I don’t want someone coming in and doing my whole morning for me.”

For Husserl, the lifeworld is the already meaningful world in which we live and act, and which scientific knowledge presupposes. In The Crisis of European Sciences, he examines how the idealisations of mathematical natural science can conceal their own experiential foundations. What is produced through a method comes to be taken for reality itself.

The care record is not a mathematical model. But we can use Husserl’s critique as an analogy: a professional simplification, too, can come to stand in for the situation it was intended to describe. “She declines help” can gradually become “She is unwilling to cooperate.” At that point, the connection with the woman’s reasons has been lost.

Simplification is necessary. No care record can contain an entire human life. The problem arises when a brief description is no longer treated as a partial account that may need correcting.

At the kitchen table, two different contexts of experience meet within a shared world. The woman knows the kitchen through years of repeated activities. The care worker knows services, professional assessments, and documentation requirements. Each has knowledge the other needs.

After a while, the woman explains that she has always begun the day by making coffee. She used to set the table for two. After her husband died, it took her a long time to stop taking out his cup.

“Now I sit here while the coffee brews. It gets me started.”

The care worker begins to understand why the offer of a ready-made breakfast felt wrong. What she had intended as relief could mean, for the woman, that yet another part of everyday life was being taken over by others.

This is where Gadamer’s thinking becomes particularly relevant. In Truth and Method, he discusses Husserl’s lifeworld as the pregiven ground of experience. Through Heidegger, he also develops the question of the historical conditions of understanding: whenever we encounter something, our understanding of it is already under way.

The care worker arrived expecting that the woman needed persuading. The care record, previous experience, and concern about nutrition had made this interpretation seem natural. Now she discovers that she was asking the wrong question. She was trying to find out how the woman might accept the service before examining whether the service addressed what the woman needed.

Gadamer uses the word prejudices to describe such anticipatory understandings. They make it possible for us to orient ourselves, but they must remain open to revision. Experience therefore has a negative dimension: something turns out to be different from what we expected. We learn when an earlier understanding fails to hold.

For the care worker, this is an uncomfortable discovery. She had wanted to be helpful. Yet she had put the woman on the defensive. Now she must tolerate losing some of the certainty she brought with her.

The question she asked matters because she does not yet know the answer. It allows the situation to reveal itself differently.

But the conversation does not remove the practical difficulties. When the woman gets up to demonstrate how she makes coffee, she steadies herself against the edge of the table. She fills the kettle almost to the top. On her way back to the counter, she has to adjust her grip.

“It’s that lift in particular that worries me,” the care worker says.

“I’ve been doing this for years.”

“Yes. But I noticed you had to change your grip. Do you sometimes spill?”

The woman does not answer immediately.

“A little.”

Now her own understanding is being challenged too. Habit tells her that this is something she can do. Her hands tell her that something has changed.

The care worker therefore needs more than empathy. She must assess a concrete risk of scalding while taking seriously what the activity means. For her part, the woman needs to be able to acknowledge the difficulty without feeling that doing so means losing the right to try.

They consider whether the kettle could stand closer to the coffee maker and whether she could use less water. A lighter jug might help. Neither yet knows whether this will be enough.

Here, practical judgement gains substance. Gadamer returns to Aristotle’s phronesis: practical wisdom concerned with how we should act in a particular situation. He connects this with application. Understanding and application belong together; what something means becomes clear through engagement with the situation to which it applies. The question has a corresponding priority: it keeps possibilities open where a settled conclusion would close them down.

In our example, “independence” cannot therefore be settled as an abstract principle. What the woman can still do, with what support and at what risk, must be explored. Nor does “safety” yield a single obvious answer. A morning in which every task is taken over may be safer in one respect and poorer in another.

This does not mean that every wish can be fulfilled. If the risk remains high, the care worker must say so clearly and explain her assessment. But she now has a better basis for proposing help that preserves more of the woman’s morning.

At the same time, the two women do not have equal power. The care worker writes the assessment and represents the service on which the woman depends. The woman may fear that information about spilling will be used as an argument for taking over the coffee-making altogether.

Openness is therefore also something the care worker must make possible. She explains what she intends to document, what alternatives are available, and what remains uncertain. She asks whether the woman would like someone she trusts to join their next conversation. An invitation to speak has limited value if the other person does not know what consequences their words may have.

Husserl and Gadamer thus offer different contributions to the same practical challenge. Husserl sharpens our awareness of the distance between a description and the lived context it describes. Gadamer draws our attention to our own participation in understanding, and to how experience can compel us to change it.

Their difference should not be turned into a division between a Husserl without history and a historically conscious Gadamer. Inherited meaning and community matter to Husserl too. Nevertheless, their emphases differ: Husserl investigates the constitution of the lifeworld and its significance for the validity of knowledge, while Gadamer explores understanding as a historical and linguistic event.

By the end of the visit, no final solution has been found. They have agreed to try rearranging the equipment and providing help with preparing bread. They will review the coffee-making after a few days.

The care worker reads the new record aloud:

“She wishes to continue making coffee as part of her morning routine. She has difficulty lifting a full kettle. We will try adapting the arrangement and follow up on how it works.”

“Write that I want help with the bread,” the woman says. “So they don’t think I say no to everything.”

The care worker adds this. Before finishing, she also writes down the question they cannot yet answer: will these adjustments give the woman a morning she can both manage and recognise as her own?