Serendipitous Insights and Kairos Playfulness

Play of the Eyes

I have settled in the window seat and the plane has just taken off. I am not looking forward to an 8-hr flight and have opened a book that I will probably finish by the time the plane arrives at my destination. As I am sliding back in my seat, in an effort to find some comfort for my body, I read by holding the book at eye level. Then it happens: a small head of hair with dark eyes suddenly bobs up from the seat in front of me. But before I can have a good look, it has disappeared already. I hear a small giggle. I continue reading, but slide the book sideways when again the head of hair has appeared, this time in the space beside the seat and the window: and then I see two eyes look at me—and dash away again the next moment. I realize that I know what this is: a child has engaged me in the play of the eyes: peekaboo. As soon as I make eye contact, the eyes quickly disappear behind the back of the airplane seat. There is even more giggling. I raise the book and make myself invisible to the playful eyes. Then I slowly lower it and as I peer cautiously over the edge of the book, I am caught by the child’s eyes again. The eyes say, “I see you!” We both smile. The child’s head quickly ducks away again. This playful hiding and mutual seeking is a seeing-and-knowing-that-you-are-being-seen. After a few seconds of hiding, the child’s head appears again—but now with the eyes wide-open and accompanied by full boisterous laughter. We both laugh cheerfully, and after a few more of these “peekaboos,” I hear the mother admonish the child to sit still and not bother the other passengers. The game lapses.

Peekaboo is an infant variation on the game “hide ’n seek” that is played universally by children, though with cultural variations. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “a game played with a young child which involves hiding and suddenly reappearing, saying ‘peekaboo’” or “boo” (Stevenson & Waite, 2017, p. 1056). This showing and hiding of the eyes is generally accompanied by smiling, pulling a face, or grimacing in surprise as if one did not expect the reappearance of the face. Indeed, some developmental psychologists have explained that peekaboo proves that the young child is not yet capable of understanding the perception of object-permanency, as originally argued by the cognitive psychologist Jean Piaget and Inhelder (1969/2000). At any rate, the essential significance of these games is a dialogue of eye contact: being seen by the eyes is “being caught by the eyes.” To know you are caught is to see yourself being seen. This constant back-and-forth of appearing and disappearing, this seeing and hiding movement of peekaboo, is the essence of the meaning of play. In some fashion, play is always the movement of to-and-fro, says Gadamer (1975). Peekaboo shares this play movement of to-and-fro with hide ’n seek.

During my own childhood in a Dutch town, older children in the neighborhood spontaneously used to gather in the early evening to play hide ’n seek. The seeker had to count aloud to 10 and then shout, “Ready or not, here I come!” or “Who has not hidden, will be seen!” Meanwhile, the children scattered and quickly sought hiding places where they would not be seen. The thrill, of course, was that the seeker wanted to catch you, in other words, “see you” and loudly call your name to prove that you had been found. The other players might risk running and rush to safety, the home-base. The entire game relies on the ambivalent experience of (not) wanting to be caught by the one who is “it” (the child who plays the seeker is “it”). Everyone had to be found, and the last successful hider had won that particular turn of the game. It would be terrible for a child to be still hiding while all the other children have left. It would mean that you are not worthy to be sought and caught.

But normally, the rules of the game are clear: If the seeker sees you, he or she calls you by your name: “I see you, Jan!” Jan might sometimes wonder if he or she was really seen. But when, while peeking at the seeker, there is the clear moment of eye contact then it means that Jan is found. When the pupils of the eyes momentarily “lock” or make “contact,” then there is no denying that one is seen. The moment you are found and “look” the other in the eyes, you recognize in the experience of the mutual “touch” of the eyes that the seeker has found you or made eye contact. The term “contact” derives from contingere, which means to touch closely, connectedness. Eye contact of peekaboo is not just the indifferent glance or look as may happen when we pass someone in the street, rather the “look” of peekaboo is a to-and-fro playful but real touching and seeing the other in the pupil of the eye. The notion of the significance of the pupils of the eyes between the adult and the infant, as the eyes “touch” each other in a to-and-fro movement of showing and hiding, is a phenomenological aspect of the peekaboo game.

Seeing Where Nothing Can Be Seen

But, we might ask, more specifically, what is the phenomenology of this “touch” or “contact” of the pupils of the eyes? The philosopher-phenomenologist Jean-Luc Marion is interested in how we experience the look, as when we make eye contact with another person. He asks, “what gives itself in the look of the other?” He notes that, obviously, we cannot look at the “look.” The look is what passes between the two people who experience the crisscrossing of the eyes—but the look itself is invisible to the looking eye. Therefore, Marion says that we must look where the look gives itself, in the face of the other. But here, too, there is an ambiguous invisibility. Marion asks,

what do we look at in the face of the other person? Not his or her mouth, nevertheless more expressive of the intentions than other parts of the body, but the eyes—or more exactly the empty pupils of the person’s eyes, their black holes . . . in the face we fix on the sole place where precisely nothing can be seen. Thus, in the face of the other person we see precisely the point at which all visible spectacle happens to be impossible, where there is nothing to see. (Marion, 2002, p. 115)

What a wonderful realization: Unlike the surrounding iris, the pupil of the eye is hollow and therefore black. And yet, if we check our experience, we would probably admit that when we make eye contact, we do so with the pupil of the eye. It is in the pupil of the eye of the other person where we meet when our eyes touch. Now, there are two aspects to this observation by Marion: first, there is the insight Marion is offering about the curious phenomenon of the pupil, and second, there is the sudden serendipitous occurrence of the insight itself.

As I am interested in understanding how qualitative (phenomenological) insights are arrived at in the inquiry process, I want to ask, where or how did Marion procure this delightful insight? What kind of analysis did he perform to discover that, when we look someone in the eye, we tend to focus on the “ocular hollow” of the pupil? Obviously, this insight did not involve coding, counting, calculating, or conceptualizing. True, some might say that this is such simple insight that it seems hardly worthy of our attention. Yet, no one else has ever expressed this insight that may lead us to wonder about the significance of the invisibility of the very thing that we look at in eye contact.

So, I am curious: Did Marion have supper with his family and suddenly realize, while talking with his spouse and children and exchanging glances, that we see each other by looking in the pupils of the eyes where there is nothing to be seen? A serendipitous moment? Did Marion then rush to write down this seemingly trivial and yet striking insight? Indeed, ordinarily in a face-to-face relation, we do not just see the face, the eyelids, or the colored iris of the eyes, we make contact by looking at the pupils. Yet, as Marion observes, the pupil is black, it actually is a hollow, and there is nothing to be seen in the pupil itself. Or is there?

What is the phenomenology of the dark or invisibility of the pupil? Proverbially, the eyes are the windows to the soul. And the soul is the mysterious essence of the other person. Therefore, it is no wonder perhaps that the ultimate mystery of the other person as “other” can only be “seen” in the invisibility of the black depth of the hollow space of the pupil of the eye. It is a non-seeing seeing through the eye contact made possible by the meeting of the “nothingness” of the dark pupils. When we look someone in the eyes, we see that ultimately the other, who we may know so well, is a mystery to us. That is what the infinite darkness of the window of the pupil reveals: a strange invisibility, the familiar other as mystery. Indeed, sometimes we may experience even the person who is closest to us as stranger. Years ago, when looking at my young child asleep, or who was just about to go to sleep but needed one more hug—it happened that I was struck by this thought: here is this person who I know so well and yet who is an utter mystery to me.

Isn’t it fascinating that we make eye contact with others by looking at that part of their eyes where there is only invisibility? To be sure, when we talk with someone and when we make eye contact, then we also see the face and we may be aware of the visual surroundings and other visible things going on around us. But the point is that we make contact with the pupil. Without the pupil, eye contact would be creepy or even impossible. If we were to look someone in the eyes and there are no pupils, but just white eyeballs or only a colored iris, as in some zombie movies, then the face-to-face contact would be highly unsettling. Similarly, we may be disturbed when a photograph shows the red-eye pupil effect, when the flash or light of the camera bounces back against the retina behind the pupil, inside the eye. Therefore, there are programs available to correct this red-eye in digital portrait images or digital photos of people’s faces.

One might counter that, physiologically, the pupil is not really empty as it is covered by the lens that projects images through the pupil’s transparent chamber to the retina behind it. However, we do not normally see the retina, situated deeply behind the pupil, when we make eye contact. True, we may be struck by the aesthetic beauty of the iris. Different people have differently colored irises, but the ocular pupil at the center of the iris is always black, a black or dark hollow. In this all people are alike. Visually, we orient to the pupil when we look someone in the eye. But the pupil is a dark entity: The ocular pupil is where the invisible parts of the eyes cross and make contact.

When looking the other in the eyes then this is experienced as highly personal and sensitive to a person’s core being. We soon look away, as looking the other in the actual pupil of the eye for more than a brief moment is like encountering and entering his or her very intimate essence—it might be felt as an intrusion, as if we enter the other’s inner soul. Therefore, when a person is dead, we close the eyelids, to give dignity, respect, and peace to the face and to show that no contact is possible any longer, as no light will enter or leave the pupils after passing. I invite you, the reader, to be attentive to the presence of the pupils when having face-to-face encounters with others in our everyday lives. Even when the pupils are hardly visible, they are experientially still “seen” and fill the important function of making eye contact possible. It is a liminality of seeing and invisibility. Without the pupils, eye contact would not be possible.

Eye contact is not necessarily the same as face-to-face contact. When we recognize a person from a crowd at the airport, it is the body schema, idiosyncratic movements, personal gestures, and the unique physicality and physiognomy of the face that make it possible to distinguish and recognize one person from thousands of others. Of course, this unique physiognomy is true, and it is quite remarkable that we can pick out the singular identity of a person’s face from a million others.

Facial recognition is presumed to involve face-to-face contact. Yet, facial recognition is a superficial meeting of the other. Emmanuel Levinas (1985) pointed out that it is not the physicality of the facial features but the “naked face” that is the primal quality of the physiognomic face and that is the place where we might truly see the otherness of the other. The otherness (ethical alterity) of the other is (in)visible to the seeing eye, as the naked face cannot be reduced to a set of facial recognition data points.

Normally, all seeing is essentially appropriation, says Levinas (1985). In the look of my seeing I take possession of the world. And in describing the things and people of my world, I reduce them to my own perceptions and conceptions. But the naked face of the other cannot be reduced to the self—it is invisible to the seeing eyes of the person who has appropriated the image of the other as his or her personal possession. Levinas points out that when we focus on the external features of the face of the other then we do not really “see” the otherness of the other. Therefore, when we are struck by the beautiful shape of the eye of the other person, or when we cannot help but notice the striking color or presence of the iris of the eyes, then we are still centered in our own self. But when we suddenly see the “naked” face of the other—such as when we experience the vulnerability of the other person who makes an ethical demand or appeal on us—then we no longer notice the outer physiognomy of the other’s face. Thus, in this sense, the invisibility of the look in the pupil is related to the invisibility of the phenomenon of the naked face, when we truly make contact with the alterity of the other.

In our technological screen-dominated world, true eye contact should not be taken for granted. Skype, FaceTime, and similar face-to-face social networking programs do not really allow us to look each other in the eye in the sense of real eye contact. Such programs allow us to see each other’s faces but this is not real pupil to pupil eye contact—it is facial recognition but not soul recognition. Of course, facial recognition is now used as a key to unlock the software of a computer screen. You can look directly at the camera of your computer or your smart phone so that the other sees you looking directly at them (or so it seems)—but there (in the camera lens-eye) you will not meet the pupil of the other. With smaller screen where the camera is located closer to the center of the screen, there may be the impression that you are looking directly in the other person’s pupils. But, short of new technologies that might actually provide the experience of a genuine “locking of the pupils,” it would appear that real eye contact is at best always technologically simulated.

Now, with this insight, the game of peekaboo also acquires new phenomenological significance. Indeed, peekaboo is a game of the pupils of the eyes: to see each other directly, in the invisible hollow of the pupil. It is the contact that the eyes of the child make with the eyes of the adult. Peekaboo is often played by young children from the safety of the mother’s or father’s presence with a stranger, as happened to me in the airplane. And yet, in the to-and-fro, back-and-forth playful meeting of the facial glances, there occurs a contact that is given meaning by the innocent play character of the game. Eye contact occurs when the pupils of the eyes touch each other. Peekaboo can only work when the pupils of the eyes make contact.

When talking conversationally together, the moment of eye contact may occur in various guises. Often, people are engaged in conversation and yet hardly look each other in the eye. They may sort of quickly or fleetingly look at each other while talking but not in a direct and candid manner. Some people are even in the habit of closing their eyes for moments while relating a memory or telling a story. Other people may converse while looking up and away from their interlocutor. Some people actually may be doing something else while talking, such as checking their mobile, making a sandwich, or looking at something or someone else. But then there is the person, who, while talking with you, looks your straight in the eyes. This is real eye-to-eye contact, really looking the other in the eyes. Anyone who has paid attention to these different conversational modalities may have been struck by the compelling, gripping, and candid directness of the affect and quality of the straight and unguarded look of the open eye-to-eye contact of such moment. When really looking someone in the eyes, the open and straight look gives an uncanny authenticity and power to the pupil-to-pupil contact of the eyes.

Phenomenology of Play and Peekaboo

To sum up, in further interpreting the meaning and significance of Marion’s realization of the pupils of the eyes in eye contact, I have tried to offer some additional phenomenological insights: that peekaboo can only work when the pupils of the eyes momentarily lock, make contact; that the phenomenology of the pupil may give the familiar other as mystery; that the experience of otherness in eye contact is only possible because in this contact, there is nothing to be seen; that without the dark pupils, eye contact is not only impossible but even highly unsettling (as attested in Zombie images); that the invisibility of the pupil is analogous to Levinas’s phenomenology of the naked face; that the look of eye contact is encountering and entering the other person’s very essence; and that the open and unguarded straight pupil-to-pupil contact of the eyes may be experienced as compelling, direct, and powerful.

To the extent that these insights are worth expressing, I have to engage in phenomenological writing, such as in the above paragraphs. It should be clear, however, that even these few paragraphs were not the result of systematic and calculative qualitative analysis at my computer; rather, I needed at times some withdrawing from my keyboard. Perhaps it is not wrong to say that there was a kind of playfulness in this writing: reminiscing, pausing, reflecting, and returning to the writing of this text. It is the same kind of to-and-fro movement of inquiry that Gadamer describes as belonging to the essence of play.

The term “play” and “playful” is used in many broad contexts to refer to actions, movements, and operations; to certain free or unimpeded motions and conditions; and to moments of joy, spontaneous diversion, and related dimensions. Here I use the term “play” broadly and narrowly to refer to the experiential sense of human actions and activities that carry the inner phenomenal purpose of play and playful existence. But I do not mean to use the notion of play in qualitative inquiry as just any kind of human action that actually may contain external purposes beyond the experience of play itself. When we see a leaf on a tree flutter and frolic with frivolity and free movement, we call the movement of the leaf playful. Or we may say that the wind is playing with the leaf, because all real play is always play with something or someone. But not all playful movements are necessarily structured like play.

For example, the behaviors of young children often give the appearance of play. And yet, we have no difficulty distinguishing moments of real play from other activities. For example, a child may be playing car-racing with a self-made car from a kitchen utensil, but when a “wheel” gets sticky or falls off then the relation to the car changes from play-thing to a thing that needs fixing. The play object is a utensil again. Now the child stops playing and looks at the utensil with investigative eyes: what is the problem? When a child examines a thing to see how it works or what is wrong with it, then the child is not playing, but is back in the real world. In fact, after half an hour of trying in vain to fix the problem, the child may protest to the interfering parent “I have not played yet.”

In her early studies of children playing, the phenomenological psychologist Vermeer warned already that too often play is used by adults for children to learn something. The toys become instruments that are meant for the child to practice certain skills and acquire certain knowledge. Thus, play becomes confused with other kinds of activities and experiences. Eugen Finke already had made this warning in 1960 in his famous German text, Play as Symbol of the World. Many modern educators flounder, says Fink (2016), because they are not able to distinguish the meaning and pedagogical significance of “play” from “the playful” (p. 269). Playfulness may merely mean to be fond of amusement, light-heartedness, but it may not mean the playfulness of true play. For example, when a child is teasingly trying to make another child cry but is claiming to be “just playing” then this is not play in the phenomenal sense of play as described in this text.

In the true play-world, objects are not what they are in the “real” world. In the real world, a thing is only what it is intended or meant to be: a chair is a chair for sitting, a bowl is a vessel for storing, a fork is a utensil for picking food, and so on. But in the play-world, these things can turn into imaginary things that have no determinate or intended meanings: a chair can be turned over and become a castle, a bowl becomes a flying saucer, and a fork turns into an animal. For the child, the magical power of play is still unexhausted (Fink, 2016). Yet, the play-world needs the real world for its backdrop and design. The world of play is always projected onto the everyday familiarities of the real world and thus play is characterized by double meanings, ambiguities: a table can be a table, but because it is a table, it can also be a dwelling to hide under, or a ship on a journey to magical lands. Play challenges us to dwell on the meaning of things and events. Indeed, the central method of the phenomenological epoché and the reduction consists in the insightful search for meaning through the practice of variation in imagination. But play does not have to be lighthearted, amusing, and easy.

Play is a luring of some other or some-thing into a sphere of openness: to be surprised, touched, moved, and engaged. In everyday life, objects have relatively fixed meanings, while in the play-world, they have “possible” meanings. A table is a table, a chair is a chair—objects with certain characteristics. But, when the chair or table becomes objects of play, they change into undetermined, changeable things. Things become images that tempt, entice, and allure the players into intimations of variations of meaningful imaginations and insight.

Play as Method

So, now I will try to further address the issue of the rationality of the qualitative inquiry process of gaining phenomenological insights (van Manen, 2014). Does the phenomenology of play help us understand the phenomenology of encountering qualitative insights into the meanings of our lived experiences? Several phenomenologists (Fink, 2016; Gadamer, 1975; Vermeer, 1953) have made the point that there is no purpose outside the experience of play. Instead, play has only inner purposes. Activities that serve external functional purposes are not experienced as play proper, but play may be experienced as pleasure, surprise, satisfaction, and inner accomplishment. If playful reflections yield serendipitous insights, then this is the fortuitous karma of play.

the immanent purpose of play is not, as with purposes in the rest of human activities projected out toward the highest ultimate purpose. The activity of play has only internal purposes, not ones that transcend it. And where, for instance, we play “for the purpose” of training the body, of martial discipline or for the sake of health, play has already been distorted into an exercise for the sake of something else. (Fink, 2016, p. 20)

There are different kinds of play and I think it might be provocatively argued that phenomenological method is some kind of scholarly form of play. Phenomenology is the dis-position of a kind of method that is not driven by the desire for production-like outcomes in the sense of empirical generalizations or workable constructions, conceptual schemas, and hypotheses. Rather it is at times driven by internal purposes of scholarship that serve the inherent pleasure of gaining meaningful insight into our human existence. Famously, Heidegger pointed out that phenomenology is not something with which you can “do” something like building a better bike or constructing a better system of production. Rather he suggested that we need to ask, not what we can do with phenomenology, but what phenomenology can do with us, with our being. Also, phenomenology is not a problem-solving type of inquiry; rather Heidegger suggests that phenomenological thought compels us into a basic disposition of wonder, amazement. Phenomenology wonders: what is the lived meaning of this phenomenon or event? Wonder is a disposition that has a dis-positional effect: it dis-locates and dis-places our naïve or taken-for-granted understanding of the world (Heidegger, 1994).

Some forms of play share this exalted state of wonder. In Eugen Fink’s words, “play is activity and creativity—and yet it is near to eternal and tranquil things. Play ‘interrupts’ the continuity and context of our course of life that is determined by an ultimate purpose” (Fink, 2016, p. 21). Unfortunately, play is often misunderstood and undervalued as something childish and trite in the human scheme of things. But I hope to have shown that even an infant playing the game of peekaboo has surprising significances. Uncovering such significances through qualitative writing involves the play of inseeing: experiencing an in-sight.

Phenomenological insights are meaning insights; they grasp the inner meanings of things. Thus, the term insight is related to inseeing and ingrasping. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1964, 1987) provides a vocative description of the sudden moment of inseeing:

If I were to tell you where my greatest feeling, my universal feeling, the bliss of my earthly existence has been, I would have to confess: It has always, here and there, been in this kind of in-seeing, in the indescribably swift, deep, timeless moments of this divine seeing into the heart of things. (Rilke, 1987, p. 77)

The experience of inseeing is the depthful sight of insight. Rilke’s description of inseeing as that fleeting swift moment of seeing into the heart of things can be regarded as a vocative poetic description of the phenomenological method of the reduction: perceiving the phenomenal meaning (essence) of something (a phenomenon or event). The insight of inseeing is “seeing” the primal structure of meaning of something. But the insight of phenomenological inseeing must be distinguished and not be confused with the more common definitions of insight as suddenly seeing the solution to a problem. There are problem insights and cause and effect insights; then there are meaning insights.

Problem solution insights tend to occur when experiencing an impasse in solving a previously puzzling or incomprehensible problem. Sometimes, after a period of incubation, a solution will suddenly occur as an “eureka” moment or an “aha” epiphany. A famous example of a problem insight is the eureka moment that occurred to Archimedes when he suddenly realized how to measure the volume of an irregular object or body in his bathtub. A cause and effect insight also is characterized by a sudden comprehension after a period of incubation. The cause and effect insight occurs as suddenly seeing the causal nexus of a physical, psychological, or an epidemiological situation. A famous example of the cause and effect insight is Newton seeing an apple fall and discovering that the cause of the fall is gravity.

Indeed, there exists extensive literature on the philosophy and psychology of insight (e.g., see Crowe & Doran, 1992; Klein, 2013; Kounios & Beeman, 2015; Sternberg & Davidson, 1995), yet almost all these sources are concerned with problem solutions and cause and effect insights. As well there are numerous studies that focus on the role of serendipity in learning and research. But published studies of serendipity too are almost exclusively focused on problem-solving discoveries, design solutions, and technological innovation investigations, strategies, and practices (Acosta, 2018; Fine & Deegan, 1996; Newman & Jai-Persad, 2014; Wills & Kolodner, 1994). There are also studies of serendipitous browsing, monitoring, and Internet searching (Arnold, 2012; Hauff & Houben, 2018). In addition, there are therapy-oriented serendipity studies of practices such as mindful walking for meditation and healing purposes (Jung, 2013). Accordingly, serendipitous insights tend to be considered cognitive outcomes and information encounters in the form of chance occurrences of surprise solutions to research problems and knowledge building.

But, here I am using the notion of serendipity not for chance scientific problem solutions and discoveries, but for chance meaningful insights. Phenomenological research is concerned with primal meanings and meaningfulness. Meaning insights are different from problem solutions, cause and effect insights, and mindful meditations. Primal meanings are sought, not in some abstract theory, coded scheme, a list of themes, some set of concepts, or meditative mental relaxation, but in the primordiality of lived experience itself. In this sense, Rilke’s inseeing is an evanescent instant of inceptual luminosity. Inceptuality refers to the unfolding of the beginnings of originary meanings. For Heidegger, the notion of inceptuality assumes critical significance in his later work (Heidegger, 2012, 2013; Polt, 2006).

Now, phenomenology is a method that aims to disclose the lived meanings of possible human experiences. The lived meaning of almost any experience can be made the topic for a phenomenological study as it thrives on meaningful insights and understandings of the living sensibilities of human experiences and events. Without meaningful insights, a phenomenological study is probably of little or no value. The entire endeavor of phenomenological inquiry, the point of phenomenology as qualitative research method, is to aim for originary and inceptual insights or understandings: to bring the primal experiential meaning of a phenomenon or event to reveal itself. Phenomenology is the name for this “method,” but it should not be understood in a technical, procedural, or instrumental manner. The basic method of phenomenological reflection consists of the epoché and the reduction—but the epoché and the reduction cannot be folded conveniently into a qualitative program or scheme of determinable strategies, calculative steps, coding practices, and analytic technicalities that will produce or deliver some “productive phenomenological outcomes.”

As I hope to have shown, in passing, with the peekaboo example, phenomenological insights or understandings are not likely “technically derived” but rather given, encountered, granted, found, or even fell upon it in the context of a dispositional sphere of the imaginary. The famous methodological couplet of the epoché-reduction may be understood as a playful dispositional practice of non-objectifying contemplation on the living meanings of the phenomena that one is studying. In scholarly activities, the joy and satisfaction of thinking, writing, and dialoguing is not unlike the joy and pleasure of reading a piece of literary fiction, novel, or short story. The internal purpose of reading is not some product or functional outcome, but the intrinsic meaningful experience of reading itself. This inner effect of texts is even more significant in writing. Roland Barthes (1975) called this writerly pleasure of the text, juissance, orgasmic bliss.

The phenomenological method is a reflective writing practice, guided by the methodological couplet of the epoché-reduction. The epoché is the dispositional attitude of suspending and letting go of the taken-for-granted knowledge and (pre)judgments that ground the certainties of our daily existence (van Manen, 2014). In turn, the method of the reduction presumes the practice of the epoché to allow a meaningful insight or understanding to play its part. Indeed, the practice of epoché-reduction is more like imaginative play than like production-oriented work. The basic method of phenomenological analysis consists of the epoché and the reduction—finding the open space for phenomenological reflection—no matter how the openness and reflection are understood. A meaningful insight may come to us when suddenly remembering the name of someone or something. Other meanings are less like names but more like memories that present themselves like an eidetic anamnesis, reminiscences of essences of our fundamental humanness. These may come to us when most unexpected, and yet they require a charged preoccupation, being haunted by the need to understand or “see” something for what it is or for how it gives itself. Therefore, it is wrong to try to reduce and manage the qualitative research method of phenomenology with technicalities and calculative procedures.

When examining contemporary conference programs for qualitative research and research methods, the qualitative research programs are increasingly advertised in terms of labor-like operations: skills and tool sets that are designed for making the processes of data collection, coding, qualitative interpretation, and analysis more efficacious, efficient, and easy! What such methodology fails to see, however, is that technical approaches and related computer software are based on algorithmic programs that actually hinder or block our sensitivities to meaning and meaningfulness.

I hasten to point out that “work” can also be understood in a creative and aesthetic sense. Thus, we can speak of the “work” of a great philosopher or artist that actually might be driven at times by the inner power of play rather than by the intent of making and producing. But I am not further exploring this theme of work here.

Kairos: The Divinity of Playful Temporality

It is ironic that playfulness (being gratuitously engaged) is an attitude that fortuitously may give rise to phenomenological meaning insights. Of course, insights do not likely occur when playing the game of ping-pong or tennis; but more likely in moments of passive play as doing nothing purposeful in particular: going for a bike ride or taking a walk. An insight may present itself in a moment of playful doodling, stirring one’s coffee, contemplatively looking out of the window, or seemingly absentmindedly engaging in some exercise, or, in contrast, pulling the covers while intending to go to sleep. Strangely, it is in moments of seeming inactivity (the active passivity of doing nothing) that sudden insights may come to us.

These are Kairos moments. Kairos, the Greek god of playful time, always shows himself in the fleeting instant of a moment. When such meaning insight occurs, then one should quickly take note of it, write it down, or commit to memory. This moment can be life-altering for the person who encounters Kairos and understands the importance of just this moment (see also Hermsen, 2014; van Manen, 2015). Kairos is a rather strange and complex figure of temporality. He was the youngest and most rebellious son of Zeus, and grandson of the god Chronos, his grandpa. Chronos is the god of time, often depicted as an aged bearded male god holding an hour glass by which he measures time. Chronos is also known as an ancient god who devoured his own children to control his fate. Chronos time is portrayed in the movement of coming and going, of aging, growth and deterioration, harmony, and disintegration of forces. Chronos time is plannable, measurable, reproducible, controllable, and predictable.

In contrast, Kairos time is creative and improvisational rather than procedural. Kairos is bald except for long forelocks of hair growing from the front part of his skull or around his face. He holds a razor, or else scales balanced on the sharp edge of a knife—illustrating the fleeting instant of a moment when Kairos may appear and disappear. You can see that he is double-winged at his shoulders and his feet, indicating that a Kairos moment is fleety, evanescent, propitious, and serendipitous. Kairos time is the moment of the living now. The instant of the living moment. In such Kairos moment, time often seems to stand still. We are in timeless time. Since ancient times, a Kairos moment has been described as a transformative happening of chance, depending on our ability and willingness to recognize this moment and to seize the opportunity that is offered in it (Hermsen, 2014; Marramao, 2007; Murchadha, 2013).

It is in these Kairos moments that we may be surprised by an insight that we did not know we had. These are pure, perfect, unpredictable, and uncontrollable moments that possess possibility. Kairos may spontaneously jolt us into a moment of wonder and awe at something we thought we knew. Also, Kairos demands the right thing at the right time of us. Only the right action at the right time will do. If you hesitate, then the Kairos moment has passed and all you will be left with is regret, leaving only the surprising view of the back of Kairos’s head, bald and ungraspable. In short, Chronos time is continuous, it steers us into forms of thinking that are quantitative, calculative, and, like laborly work, oriented to goals and external purposes, while Kairos time is discontinuous and serendipitous and, like play, thriving on internal purposes.

The Ancient Significance of Play as Kairos Method

Gadamer (1975) points out that the person who plays “knows very well what play is, and that what he is doing is ‘only a game’; but he does not know what exactly he ‘knows’ in knowing that” (p. 92). The understanding and sense of play that predominates in our society today is cheerful idleness and the recovery, relaxation, pastime, and the refreshing pause that interrupts the work day or is an activity for holiday. And play is often seen by early childhood educators, not necessarily as an activity that has value in its own right, but as an educational practice that serves the purpose of specific learning objectives and outcomes. In the contemporary world, the ancient temporality of Kairos has largely given way to preoccupations with time management, making, and producing. We are forgetting the ancient wisdom of the existential significance of Kairos time, that in-seeing, in-sight, and the in-grasping of inner meaning is also part of human existence.

Play is now principally taken to be a complementary phenomenon, an ingredient, a supplement for a lifestyle determined by serious business. That implies that play is not grasped in its very own positivity; it is misinterpreted as an interlude between the serious activities of life, misinterpreted as a “pause,” as a way of filling up free time. (Fink, 2016, p. 231)

However, for Fink, play is of existential import. Note how he describes play in a manner that invokes a sense of phenomenological search for meaning. Fink (2016) says,

Human play has world significance, has a cosmic transparency—it is one of the clearest world-figures of our infinite existence. While playing, the human being does not remain in himself, does not remain in an enclosed domain of his psychic interiority—rather, he ecstatically steps out of and beyond himself in a cosmic gesture and interpret the whole of the world in a manner that is suffused with sense. (p. 46)

Fink aims to show that play is an ancient and fundamental phenomenon of existence, just as primordial and independent as death, love, and work. However, it is not directed, as with the other fundamental phenomena, by a collective striving for the final purpose. Play stands over and against such external goals (Fink, 2016). When the contemplativeness of thought comes over us, we fall away from former certainties; we no longer know who we are, what a human being is, what custom and right, thing and world are, says Fink (2016). This not-knowing is the space of the epoché that opens the inquiry into possibilities of meaningful insights. We may create such space of the epoché in Kairos moments of active passivity such as when simply going for a walk. Walking may become a kind of “peripatetic thinking” when insights may strike us (peripatetic means “given to walking about”). Philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Heidegger, and the musician Mozart are famous for their liking to go for walks. That is when they did their creative thinking and that is when an insight would occur to them. Mozart used to go out for an evening walk and write a whole symphony in his inner being. Then he quickly wrote the whole thing from his walk; his first draft was often almost perfect.

Phenomenology is a philosophic way of orienting to the human lifeworld for insights into its lived meanings (van Manen, 2014). Philosophers and phenomenologists such as Eugen Fink, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean-Luc Marion are Kairotic figures. Their writings often display a mental playfulness. We can enjoy their phenomenological insights through their sharing them with us, and by being inspired by them to further playfully pursue insights into the phenomenology of phenomena and events ourselves such as I tried in the opening parts of this text. Thus, from a phenomenological point of view, inquiry into the meanings of our experiences such as the playful moment, when a child engages us in the game of peekaboo, must include the recognition of a Kairos method that is sensitive to the play of insights that may occur to us in fleeting, serendipitous moments of inceptual in-seeing and in-grasping: momentarily “seeing” the meaning of an experiential phenomenon. Phenomenological writing is rarely easy: insights are gained, not through procedural analytical methods, but through a patient and attentively alert surrender to Kairos time and serendipitous moments.