Abstract
Frankl’s existential psychology (logotherapy) generates a defensible epistemological framework for unusually personal research, including its most progressive manifestation, autoethnography. Major themes in this chapter include: each scholar’s uniqueness (based on disposition, situation, and position); valuing the particular and the general; validity; and perceptual metaphors for truth finding, including Frankl’s dimensional ontology. Border crossing, double consciousness, and intersectionality in inquiry practices are also explored from an existential framework. These concepts are explained and interpreted using examples from Frankl’s publications and the Part I Case Studies. The chapter concludes with a bulleted review and a list of existential questions for readers.
The world is really complex. And we all each only know a tiny part of it. And furthermore we see it through our own eyes. So in a way that’s a simplifying feature, because you don’t see the complexities. It’s like being in a world in black and white.
—Margaret Pabst Battin, Bioethicist, 2017
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Notes
- 1.
Questions about where these characteristics come from are better conceptualized as being part of “nature via nurture” processes than “nature vs. nurture” debate. See Ridley (2003) for an insightful and very readable overview.
- 2.
It seems that autoethnography and existential philosophy have in common a shared aesthetic sensibility (Sanborn 1968).
- 3.
Ontology is the study of the nature of being. Here we are asking, “what is it, really?”
- 4.
She now uses the name Lisa Tillman.
- 5.
She now uses the name Carol Rambo.
- 6.
Other research paradigms besides existentialism rely (at least in part) on perceptual metaphors to build their cases about the “knowability” of reality. Positivism, which in many respects is the “opposite” of existentialism, is often supported by perceptual metaphors, as are some epistemologies derived from phenomenological, constructivist, and postmodern paradigms (see Carspecken 1996).
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Esping, A. (2018). Franklian Existential Epistemology. In: Epistemology, Ethics, and Meaning in Unusually Personal Scholarship. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73718-8_7
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