Human Agency in the Tensional Space of Existence

Agency as Situated, Concernful Involvement

Adopting a human-oriented standpoint rooted in Heideggerian hermeneutic-phenomenology raises certain theoretical priorities regarding how agency is best understood. While this complex body of thought entails a number of concepts that help clarify what it means to be human (e.g., being-in, attunement, understanding, interpretation, discourse, fallenness, practices), they are all unified in the central notion of sorge (see Heidegger, 1962, 1985, for the original philosophical treatments of this concept) or what has elsewhere been referred to as mattering (Taylor, 1989, p. 49) or existential concern (Yanchar, 2011; see also essays in Dreyfus & Wrathall, 2005). According to this general ontological insight, human agency is understood as practical engagement that reflects what matters to an agent or what is worth doing in light of conditions that bear upon one’s involvement in a given situation and how that situated involvement fits into an agent’s larger life context. Existential concern thus refers to the meaningful ways in which humans engage in the affairs of life and press into possibilities, where the term meaningful refers to what matters or makes a difference in minor or major ways (Taylor, 1989; Yanchar, 2011). Indeed, from this perspective, existential concern is central to agency, and agency is central to human existence; thus, existential concern is an indispensable concept when taking account of human action from this perspective.

Moreover, on this hermeneutic-phenomenological account, agency as concernful involvement is best thought of as fundamentally situated (Dreyfus, 1991, 2014; Guignon, 2002; Wrathall, 2014; Yanchar, 2011, 2021), which means that existential concern should not be conceptualized as subjective contents of consciousness, occupying a self-contained interiority distinct from an external world of perceived objects, events, and people. It exists neither as mental representations caused by perceptions of external events nor as an object or entity with its own causal properties. Rather, existential concern and concernful involvement are ways of talking about the fundamental sense in which humans are beings for whom their own existence matters, and what matters in this human context always matters in relation to (or by virtue of) one’s situatedness in the world of everyday practical involvement. From this perspective, something cannot matter apart from its constituting relations with other aspects of the totality of involvements that make up the world. Agency as concernful involvement and world as a space in which concernful involvement is situated thus form a kind of unitary phenomenon, or what might be termed agency-in-the-world or an agency-world unity. In my elucidation of this hermeneutic phenomenological account of human existence, I refer to this meaningful, situated view of agency as situated concernful involvement or more simply as concernful involvement.

To offer a concrete example of this hermeneutic phenomenological notion of concern (or concernful involvement) as I use the term here, it seems obvious that the quality of one’s health would matter to most people, and that this mattering is not purely represented “in one’s mind” as a kind of internal construct and thus, in that sense, ontologically isolated from an hypothesized external world. Rather, one’s health is part of one’s in-the-world existence; and as an in-the-world phenomenon, health matters in terms of how it fits into one’s comportment with others, engagement in various practices, and how one can generally relate to the world in a myriad of ways. Indeed, being healthy (or unhealthy) only matters in relation to how it fits with and possibly disrupts one’s relatedness to whatever else matters in one’s fully embodied, in-the-world involvement. An illness, for instance, is physically embodied and as such contributes to the constitution of real-world situations in which people must cope with discomfort, limited capability, stress, and so forth, as well as situations that entail the involvement of others such as family members, coworkers, and medical professionals. Thus, when experiencing a health challenge, including a mental illness, the actual matter of concern exists in the world itself as part of one’s engaged and embodied—if troubled—involvement in the world.

But this example, and the hermeneutic-phenomenological position it instantiates, suggests more than an account of human qua agent who participates meaningfully in the world. As important as that insight may be, it provides only part of the story from a hermeneutic-phenomenological perspective; and more of the story is supplied by Heidegger’s argument that to be a human agent (as I have described it here) is to disclose world as an already meaningful space of involvement, which is to suggest that the world of one’s concernful involvement is not devoid of meaning upon one’s encounter with it, but rather is replete with cultural-historical meaning that provides a context of significance for the agent’s participation. As suggested above, this is not to suggest that mattering exists in terms of abstract propositions or representations within an interior mental space of consciousness (i.e., as meanings “in one’s head”), and would be, in that sense, fundamentally disconnected from the totality of involvements that make up the world. Likewise, this does not mean that humans qua agents cognitively construct meanings that are then projected onto, and bring order and significance to, a neutral external reality (for more on this argument see Dreyfus, 1991). Rather, this argument contends that mattering exists in and through one’s fully embodied practical engagements in the agency-world unity and is thus already situated in the midst of one’s in-the-world participation. This point, in turn, suggests that the world shows up as already meaningful to agents enmeshed in it.

From this perspective, an illness is meaningful by virtue of the difference it makes in the lives of people who experience it directly (as the ill person) or indirectly (e.g., as a family member), and that meaningfulness occurs as a part of people’s in-the-world activity. While people may bring some measure of their own meaning to an encountered illness—for example, in personal lessons learned about dealing with adversity—this more personal meaning is based on and made possible by the illness already experienced as a real-world phenomenon caused by real-world conditions (e.g., proximity to an ill person, bacterial or viral infections, strength of immune system). It might be said, in this regard, that concernful involvement allows entities to show up in meaningful ways, that is, as fitting into contexts of use in ways that make a difference to the agents involved. More generally, concernful involvement discloses the world as a space of meaning.

Agency, World, and Lived Tensions

To be true to the hermeneutic-phenomenological framework I have advanced here, however, a notion of agency qua concernful involvement should be situated in what was referred to as “average everydayness” by Heidegger (1962, p. 38) and the “rough ground” of actual human experience and practices by Wittgenstein (1958, p. 46). It is in this spirit that I wish to draw attention to what gives human life much of its rich quality and its complex meaningfulness in context—lived tensions. These are the competing demands, binds, contradictions, oppositions, strains, resistances, pushes, pulls, and so forth found ubiquitously in the midst of living and formative of possibilities regarding what one might do or who one might be. The notion of lived tensions, as I conceptualize it here, points to one central aspect of the actual spaces of meaning in which agents live out their lives.

A vivid tension of this type shows up in Sartre’s (2007) account of a student feeling simultaneous calls to care for his ailing mother and join a resistance movement. This situation might be referred to as a tension of goods—two competing possibilities regarding what he ought to do and, in an existential sense, who he ought to be (for more on “goods” in this sense, see Taylor, 1989, 1995). Other lived tensions can be seen in more mundane efforts to balance the demands of work life in ways that make sense in light of responsibilities and commitments, as when one seeks to produce quality work balanced against resource constraints. Both of these examples, and a myriad of others, involve competing possibilities and importunities that show up as mattering in everyday life within the agency-world unity.

But these lived tensions do not always show up in the agency-world unity as straightforward oppositions or dilemmas requiring resolution. They often show up as unresolvable binds that are intrinsic to an experience and grant it a particular character, or that enable the experience to exist in a particular way in a given setting. For example, a general theme in the literature of agency concerns a tension between an agent’s effort to exert control over aspects of the world and aspects of the world that resist the agent’s tacit and deliberate efforts in this regard (Yanchar, 2021). More specifically, out of an agent’s existential concern often flows a project of knowing, predicting, planning, and manipulating that would lead to a kind of mastery over whatever the agent seeks to control. As a simultaneous counterforce, however, relevant aspects of world often show up in ways that frustrate the agent’s efforts to exert this mastery, which leaves the agent’s plans in need of adjustment or possibly abandonment.

Consider, for example, a person whose efforts to achieve a healthy balance between work and family obligations are thwarted by unrelenting work demands, leading to an ongoing struggle to achieve greater harmony among these competing facets of life. In this instance, it might be broadly stated that there are multiple “forces” at work, leading to a tension that—as fundamental to a situation within the agency-world unity—cannot be neatly resolved in the life of this working professional; rather, the tension must be contextually managed in light of shifting demands and responsibilities. What this mundane example suggests is that as the world is disclosed by a concernful agent, it is disclosed not as a predictable and manipulable configuration of entities that conforms to the agent’s wishes, but rather as a configuration of synchronous tensions (viz., between the agent’s plans and resistant aspects of the world) that provides a background for the appearance of other phenomena within the ongoing flux of experience. These lived tensions cannot be fully resolved, but rather will be implicitly or explicitly in operation, contributing significantly to the agent’s experience of concernful involvement in the world.

To offer another example, consider the game of chess, which typically entails a necessary tension between offensive and defensive aspects of a player’s strategy. Effective play does not seek to eliminate this tension, but rather makes use of it by balancing offense and defense through maneuvers that fit the demands of a particular game. This tension is, in this sense, a necessary part of chess; it is central to the experience of playing, and without it, the game could not exist as it does. Even if this tension is not explicitly considered by players as they are engrossed in a game’s twists and turns, it operates as a background condition that enables the game to show up in a particular way, that is, as requiring certain kinds of attention, with certain kinds of strategies and moves, and so forth. Thus, it might be said that a chess game shows up, among other things, as a space of strategic tensions that provides possibilities regarding how one can be practically involved in the game.

These examples point to ways in which agential action discloses the world not only as a space of meanings, but also as a space of meaningful tensions that bring a particular texture to what has been disclosed—what I refer to here as agency-in-tensional-spac. As the work example suggests, one’s concernful involvement will disclose the world not only as a space of meaningful possibilities, but also as a space of control and resistance (among other things), such that what shows up as meaningful will often be experienced in these terms. Thus, the meaning of a person’s work will be experienced at least in part by what one can and cannot reasonably hope to accomplish under a given set of circumstances. Likewise, as the chess example suggests, the experience of playing is partly constituted by tensions regarding what a player must attend to (and cannot eliminate) to compete, but always in a situation that seems to call for the management of tensions in a particular way.

The core of this argument, then, is that lived tensions make possible much of what shows up in the agency-world unity as a space of meaning, which is to say that much of what shows up as mattering in the world, as disclosed by concernful involvement, is tensional in nature. In this regard, it might also be said that lived tensions typically provide an occasion for an agent’s concernful involvement in the world, in that those tensions are a significant source of what an agent will experience and what will provide the occasion for the agent’s acting, reacting, pondering, choosing, strategizing, and striving. Lived tensions thus show up in the agency-world unity as mattering in a certain way and affording certain possibilities for action, based on how the agent is involved in the world and what those tensions entail. In this sense, it might be said that any tension will exist as a kind of existential affordance that invites agential action by way of the possibilities it offers within the agent-world unity (for more on the concept of “affordance” in non-dualistic theorizing, see Gibson, 1979). Lived tensions in the workplace, for instance, afford possibilities regarding how one might make decisions, utilize resources, take action, or seek professional relationships (or not), and thus will provide possibilities regarding the stand that one can take regarding what those tensions afford and, indeed, on oneself as an agent concernfully involved in a work space of lived tensions. This means that lived tensions are experienced not only as an intersection of oppositional pulls, but also as possible ways of being involved in a situation, for instance, by relinquishing some measure of control on a work project to help it proceed more smoothly. In general, concernful involvement within tensions involves taking a stand on how those tensions matter by pressing into the specific possibilities they afford, and in so doing, taking a stand on who one is or, it might be said, on one’s own existence.

This notion of agency-in-tensional-space is prefigured in the work of both Heidegger and Sartre, who observed a fundamental tension between Being and non-Being (Heidegger, 1962) or the for-itself and in-itself (Sartre, 1953) at the root of human existence; and these fundamental tensions give rise to a host of other, more apparent tensions encountered in everyday living. Thus, as one theorist stated rather straightforwardly, “Tension is not an option; it is a ‘given’ of human existence” (Wahl, 2003, p. 266). As others have contended in various ways (e.g., van Deurzen, 2002; Yalom & Leszcz, 2020), and as I have suggested above, support for this claim can be found in the midst of human life itself, which presents agents with an inevitable churn of interrelated and oppositional demands. As Wahl reflected,

The question, What is the nature of tension for human beings? strikes me as being almost as basic as the question What is it like to exist as a human being? I think this is so because tension is perhaps the most basic feature of human existence. (Wahl, 2003, pp. 266–267; Italics in the original)

In making this claim, Wahl located these tensions at a fundamental level of human existence and, in so doing, implicitly offered an account in which tensions are fundamentally connected with human life. This is not to suggest that tensions exist as metaphysical forces separate from agents and situations, and somehow exert a determinant force upon them, but rather that agents within the agency-world unity will encounter the complexities of life as immanent tensions. To be concernfully involved in a space of tensions, then, is an unavoidable and intrinsic condition of human existence; and because this is so, the pursuit of total balance among tensions, or the elimination of all tensions, is an unfulfillable quest.

Inquiry Regarding Agency-in-Tensional-Space

As I noted above, some qualitative researchers have included tensions in their descriptions of human phenomena, and in so doing provide a glimpse into the rich complexity of human life as lived. As I also noted above, agency is sometimes included as a concept in qualitative investigations of various types, which helps place phenomena being studied in a more recognizably human context. In an effort to extend human-oriented work of this sort, my principal contention has been that a perspective which explicitly combines agency with lived tensions—that is, a concept of agency-in-tensional-space—offers a useful theoretical resource not typically seen in human-oriented literatures. With regard to qualitative research, this perspective emphasizes the exploration of agential involvement with a phenomenon in a way that identifies tensions for careful analysis; or stated differently, researchers investigate a given phenomenon by studying the tensions in which it is enmeshed, and a better understanding of those tensions provides a better understanding of the phenomenon being examined. In this sense, an explicit conceptual connection between agency and lived tensions provides a certain type of human-oriented, tension-focused research strategy.

Given what I have thus far argued, the notion of agency-in-tensional-space provides a kind of guide to inquiry. By virtue of concernful involvement, agents press into possibilities in terms of what matters or makes a meaningful difference, and from this perspective, lived tensions are a significant part of what matters; they make a difference in the contexts that agents concernfully navigate, create possibilities regarding how agents may participate in the intricacies of those contexts and, in that sense, function as contextual, tensional affordances of meaning and possibility. Something matters the way it does, from this perspective, because of how it fits into the tensions that an agent encounters and the possibilities they bring. Thus, as a guide to inquiry, this notion of lived tensions allows aspects of the agency-world unity to show up in a certain way, with a particular meaning and set of possibilities, that might otherwise be missed.

Practically speaking, this perspective calls for an investigation of a given phenomenon in light of its fit within the interplay of agency and surrounding tensions. This emphasis suggests the relevance of certain kinds of questions that can be asked about lived tensions in particular settings, to understand any difference that those tensions might make in the lived experience of an agent. This would include questions such as:

Data analysis guided by questions such as these can help researchers query further into the meaning and significance of tensions and, I suggest, reveal significant insight regarding phenomena being studied.

Lived Tensions in the Experience of Persons With Parkinson’s Disease

I now present a study that provides an example of research with this tensional emphasis. The study I present, conducted by Machalaba and Sass (2020), was concerned with the experience of having Parkinson’s disease, including learning of the diagnosis, living life under this condition, and coping with its effects. In presenting this example, I wish to be clear that the authors did not report using anything like the agency-in-tensional-space perspective that I have offered here. Nonetheless, they employed a hermeneutic-phenomenological research strategy that foregrounded agency and tensions in a manner consistent with what I advocate and, I contend, provided significant qualitative insight by doing so.

Machalaba and Sass’ methodological approach involved interviews with three Parkinson’s patients combined with four written accounts found in the medical literature. Through the course of the study, these researchers provided insight into the experience of living with this disease, viewing agency (i.e., meaningful ways of being involved in the world through autonomous, volitional action) as central to how patients made sense of their experience and, ipso facto, treating agency as central to how they made sense of patients’ experiences. The four themes they presented—“Denial,” “Emotions and Symptom Expression,” “Volition and Spontaneity of Movement,” and “Alteration of Temporal Perspective”—offered a rich account of this topic, including insights pertaining to tensions that seemed unavoidably connected to the effects of Parkinson’s disease and a sense of meaningful volition. Moreover, these researchers interpreted several of their findings, including important lived tensions, in light of concepts drawn from existential phenomenological philosophy, which enabled deeper insight into the meaning of being an agent with Parkinson’s disease than would have been gained by descriptions of participant experiences alone.

The third of Machalaba and Sass’ themes offered a clear example of how lived tensions accompanied agency, contributing significantly to the meaning of the experience and creating contextual possibilities for action. In brief, they described a tension between acting volitionally, which they take to be the ordinary capability of a human agent, and bodily movement (e.g., shaking, stiffness, impaired balance) reported to be outside of volitional control or, in other cases, movement that could be controlled only through “deliberate concentration and effort” (p. 31) and special “tricks,” for example, waking with a cane in each hand (rather than using a walker) to control leg speed.

A relatively simple account of this spontaneous movement would have presented it as an unavoidable symptom of Parkinson’s disease that patients must somehow manage with medical care. But Machalaba and Sass viewed spontaneous movement in a more insightful way, namely, in terms of a tension that centrally involved people’s experience of being an agent accustomed to exercising bodily control versus a countervailing “force opposing their will” (p. 34). Descriptions offered by these researchers were multifaceted, focusing on different aspects of this phenomenon, but all concerned a tension that involved the exertion of control versus being controlled, or, stated another way, a tension between the body as a part of willful, meaningful subjectivity and the body as a brute object to be overcome. In this regard, borrowing Sartre’s notion of the body-object, the authors suggested that patients were caught in a kind of self-objectification; that is, they were paradoxically made to feel like objects by virtue of their own embodied experience rather than by virtue of any objectifications leveled by others. Participant experience was thus interpreted as a kind of self-alienation, with their bodies taking on a “sense of otherness,” perceived as “a kind of alien thing” (p. 34). Ultimately, according to Machalaba and Sass, for these patients the body was often experienced as a kind of foreign entity with its own will, and Parkinson’s disease was experienced as an opponent to be reckoned with—“something to combat and control” (p. 32). Machalaba and Sass’ analysis thus pointed to a sort of war of wills that raised possibilities regarding what it means to be, and how one might be, a Parkinson’s patient—for example, as an object, a victim, a prisoner, a trickster, and a fighter.

What makes this finding particularity relevant for present purposes is the emphasis it placed on the meaning of a significant tension explicitly concerning the agency of people with Parkinson’s disease. The tensional relationship between spontaneous movement and agential action mattered in a rich way and created a meaningful context of possibilities for patients to press into. In this respect, spontaneous movement showed up in patients’ experience as more than a limiting physical condition; it created a meaningful (if challenging) existential condition understood in terms of various significant possibilities through which patients could exercise their agency.

In studying the experience of having Parkinson’s disease, however, Machalaba and Sass presented another finding—thematized in terms of “denial”—that offers a possibly richer and more illuminating example of the perspective I offer. In this theme, Machalaba and Sass focused on a kind of self-deception in which people with Parkinson’s disease opted to ignore the possible severity and future struggles associated with the diagnosis as a kind of coping strategy. Patients did not deny the diagnosis per se, once it was officially presented by a physician, but rather resisted identifying with the disease by refusing to acknowledge the progressively significant impact it would have on their lives. The purpose of this self-deception, of course, was to perpetuate the meaningful sense of autonomy and freedom they experienced prior to symptoms and which insulated them from the difficulties associated with being a Parkinson’s patient for as long as possible. Caught in a tension between the meaning of the disease and the meaning of a positive, autonomous future, patients pressed into the latter.

As part of this tensional complexity, one patient disclosed that talking to other people about the experience of having Parkinson’s disease jeopardized their denial strategy, as those other people would seek to support and reassure in ways that underscore the reality of the disease’s progressive condition and, as a result, belie the self-deception at play. Patients would thus seek to deceive others or invite them into the self-deception, suggesting, for example, that they would all learn more about the disease and its possible effects at a later time. Interestingly, Machalaba and Sass suggested that this self-deception could be seen in terms of Sartrean good faith in which patients took up a kind of existential freedom to escape the loss of autonomy they would otherwise encounter or anticipate in the face of their diagnosis and, of equal importance, to deny the strong possibility that they would, in time, identify primarily as Parkinson’s patients.

While Machalaba and Sass did not explicitly interpret the phenomenon of denial in terms of lived tensions, it seems clear that such tensions were at play in the phenomenon as described in the report, which can be seen in the stark opposition between the reality of the patients’ medical situation and their strong desire to maintain a sense of health and autonomy. A realistic assessment of their situation would leave little doubt regarding the eventual course of the disease, which created a strong existential pull away from what was perhaps most cherished by the patients, and toward which they strived in various ways—personal autonomy and its meaning in their lives. Ultimately, the Parkinson’s patients could not escape the implications of the disease, and in a sense, the possibilities it created and eliminated; but neither could they forsake their own agential desire to press into more sanguine possibilities. In this regard, the meaning of Parkinson’s disease as an existential threat, and the meaning of one’s agential pressing into a (falsely) brighter future, created a significant tension with its own possibilities (as the authors suggested)—acceptance, confrontation (i.e., significant commitment to medical intervention and fighting the disease), or the denial that was commonly pursued. Pressing agentially into any one of these possibilities meant pressing into the tension itself and in some way living out what it offered. In this regard, a significant aspect of the meaning of having Parkinson’s disease was bound up with this tension between medical reality and agential desire, all of which led to a self-deceiving form of existential freedom.

It is important to note an additional tension related to patient denial, this time concerning patients’ efforts to avoid social interactions that would expose the self-deception they strived to maintain. This was a tension concerning relations with others that could prove beneficial in the long term, but which would simultaneously undermine the sense of autonomy that patients deeply desired. For instance, one participant reported that he lied to his wife about his symptoms to deflect attention away from his condition (which was reported in the theme on spontaneous movement). Here again, the tension at play figured significantly into patients’ experience and formed a meaningful context in which they would wrestle with their possibilities: either opting for honesty and support, which would come at the cost of desires for autonomy and the meaning it had in one’s life, or denial and secrecy, which would allow for an agential pursuit of freedom (to live, to plan, to be happy), but come at the cost of being deceitful to others and sacrificing supportive interactions. Patients could not have it both ways and felt the pressure of this tension as a central part of the experience.

This example study suggests how the complexity of human agency is situated in a space of tensional meaning and possibility. These researchers generated themes (i.e., spontaneous movement and denial) that emphasized agency-related lived tensions to make sense of the experiences and offer rich descriptions—one of which found a meaningful sense of volition to be challenged by non-volitional movement, and one of which found patients pulled away from the meaningful possibilities and goals they hoped to pursue (i.e., what mattered to them) by way of a daunting future. In both cases, the patients qua agents wrestled with tensions by striving in a desired direction, and in that sense, took a stand on who they would be in light of their medical condition. It might thus be said that these Parkinson’s patients did not merely encounter physical symptoms, experience emotional responses, seek medical care, and act in accord with certain role descriptions; rather, they participated in a space of lived tensions that formed highly meaningful possibilities to be navigated and through which they took a stand on who they would be as agents. Ultimately, from this standpoint, what these patients faced could not be adequately understood without awareness of the tensions at play and how those patients were situated in the meanings and possibilities those tensions afforded.

Implications of a Tensional Focus for Psychological Research

Space constraints disallow a detailed elaboration of future possibilities for research with this conceptual emphasis. However, I briefly note two major directions forward in this regard. The first concerns study of the often-complicated configurations of tensions in the agency-world unity that enable phenomena to show up as they do in the first place. One general phenomenon that could be understood more fully by way of lived tensions is human agency itself. There is relatively little scholarship pertaining to agency qua agency-in-tensional-space, suggesting a gap in the literature that could begin to be filled by investigations of how these tensions create contexts of possibility for meaningful action and how particular tensions give rise to certain kinds of possibilities for action and experience. A myriad of other phenomena related to human embodiment, relationality, moral action, lived space, lived time, purposive strivings, and psychological disturbances could all be explored in ways that yield deeper insight into the tensional nature of human agency.

Another direction for research with this tensional emphasis concerns the nature of lived tensions themselves, for example, how they exist and show up in agential action, how different kinds of tensions might be categorized, how they intersect and interact in complex ways, the kinds of contextual conditions that certain tensions create, how they might be navigated in ways that are or are not conducive to human flourishing, and how they intersect with moral issues in the midst of everyday life. It would seem that explorations of this sort could be expanded by examining lived tensions in conjunction with other guides to phenomenological reflection, such as well-known lifeworld existentials (e.g., embodiment, spatiality, temporality, and relationality; for more on these existentials, see Heidegger, 1962; see also Ashworth, 2006; Van Den Berg, 1972; van Manen, 1990). Moreover, even if a qualitative study is not explicitly conducted using a tensional frame of reference, the concept of lived tensions may provide a useful methodological resource for researchers to engage with as they identify a phenomenon for investigation, formulate a research question, interpret findings, and so forth. As Churchill (2022) noted, authors can speak to the theoretical literature when situating their findings in a relevant scholarly conversation. In this regard, literature on the concept of lived tensions could be used as one theoretical source for these kinds of engagements.

In calling for a tensional frame of reference, however, it is also important to offer a cautionary note. While I have argued that human agency exists in a space of tensions and that a tensional focus can be fruitfully employed to study human phenomena in the agency-world unity, I do not mean to suggest that the concept of tensions be forced onto data and seen as central to a given phenomenon when other conclusions are more justified. While I suggest that agential human action typically occurs in a tensional space of meaning and possibility, even in banal settings associated with average everyday existence, I do not mean to suggest that every phenomenon must necessarily be interpreted in tensional terms. When lived tensions can be reasonably identified by way of carefully applied human science research strategies, and when they can reveal something insightful about the phenomenon to be investigated, then what I have described would seem to be warranted. Indeed, given that any study will be based on some underlying assumptions about the target subject matter and production of knowledge about it (for more on this argument, see Danziger, 1985; Gadamer, 1989; Slife & Williams, 1995), the assumption that tensions are often at play in the meanings and possibilities faced by human agents would seem to be as justified as many other assumptions, for example, those associated with existentials such as embodiment and temporality. Nonetheless, the concept of lived tensions should be treated as a way to understand phenomena only when supported by a reasonable examination of the data. More insight regarding appropriate uses of a tensional frame of reference may be produced through continued efforts in this direction.

Finally, I wish to suggest that there is no single, appropriate way to conduct research with an emphasis on concernful involvement in a space of lived tensions. While the example study I presented was hermeneutic-phenomenological in nature, other research strategies that fit within the broad phenomenological, hermeneutic, and existential traditions of psychology could be used in this way, provided that they are attuned to the tensional complexities of agency as they show up in various practices and contexts. Innovative work in this direction could help provide methodological resources by which this tensional emphasis can be effectively brought to bear on investigations of human phenomena.