The paper explores Mollenhauer's turn from a critical and explicitly emancipatory emphasis to one more affirmative of traditional approaches to educational theory and practice. This turn is accompagnied by a methodological shift from a more ideological-critical perspective to one more hermeneutic and experientially-oriented. Through his working-out of hermeneutics as both subjectivity and method, Mollenhauer also sketches out a refusal of or warning about phenomenological access to the subjective and aesthetic, particularly as it might relate to children. He is otherwise concerned with delimiting the boundaries of intersubjective description and recognition by emphasizing the mutual exclusivity of subjectivity on the one hand, and intersubjective communication and access on the other.