What might a disciplined inquiry into events occurring always for "another first time " (Garfinke... more What might a disciplined inquiry into events occurring always for "another first time " (Garfinkel, 1967) look like? Whilst traditionally, we have always sought a hidden order behind appearances, this may be a misleading aim in human affairs. In this paper I argue that this is to begin our investigations too late in the day. It leads us to think of people as being already self-conscious, self-contained individuals, acting and speaking mostly in a wilful and intellectual manner. Indeed many have interpreted Wittgenstein's later philosophy, and his claim that the meaning of a word is its use in the language, in this light: as if he was concerned with words used as tools or as making moves in a language-game according to pre-existing rules. In this view, words have meaning only if they are systematically connected with states of affairs and/or states of mind. There is, however, another side to Wittgenstein: a concem with the beginnings of language-games in our spontaneous bodily reactions, and with such reactions as being the prototypes for new ways of thinking rather than as the results of ones already in existence. Here, meaning is understood in terms of one's direct and immediate responsiveness to one's surroundings. This paper explores this side of Wittgenstein's thought, and relates it both to his claim that many events in human affairs can be 'explained' simply by giving descriptions, and to outlining a set of practical methods for beginning new practices, practices that can begin by noticing the presence within our old practices of previously unnoticed spontaneous bodily reactions.
This book is about ways of knowing in terms of feeling and feelings. When I first left school, I ... more This book is about ways of knowing in terms of feeling and feelings. When I first left school, I went to work as an engineering apprentice in an aircraft factory. Two memories of that time are relevant to its contents. One is to do with filing different metals in the apprentice's workshop.... It was as if, with the file, I could 'feel into' the very crystalline structure of the metals themselves.... The other memory is to do with the fact that we thousand or so workers trooped in at 7.30am, through a single, little door at the back of the factory, jostling and pushing each other to make sure we clocked in on time, as every minute late cost us 15 minutes pay. While the 'staff'... came in ('strolled in' we thought) through big double doors at the front, up imposing steps at 9.00am....'They' didn't just look down on 'us', 'they' treated us like about-to-be-naughty children. Such incidents as these were... an integral part of the British industrial scene, marked, as it was, by a large number of strikes, and a general level of anger, resentment and widespread bloody-mindedness expressed by all.... Then, I never thought that I would be writing a book like this, a book that in fact connects these two memories, in two different ways. One way, is to do with how i) 'feeling into' the hidden inner structure of materials through the use of a tool like a file, connects with ii) sensing the (also supposedly hidden) inner structure of the social world through the use of words-as-prosthetic-devices. But that indeed, is one thing that this book is about. The other is to do with how our lack of words to articulate the way in which ‘trivial’ but ‘touching’ things can work to influence us in our feelings as to 'who' we are, i.e., to influence us 'in' our identities, can so easily leave us with filled with self-harming tendencies. We still do not know how what one might call the self-other dimension of interaction works to 'construct' another dimension of interaction, seemingly independent of it — that between oneself as an individual person, and 'one's own world' — such that, if one feels oneself reduced as a person, one feels oneself as living in a reduced world.
In what follows below we want to try to take Barnett Pearce’s claim – that we live in communicati... more In what follows below we want to try to take Barnett Pearce’s claim – that we live in communication – very seriously. We say ‘try’ to take it ‘very seriously’, because, clearly, it is not at all easy to do so. For while we are all alone when writing or thinking, we easily act as if we are not in communication; when reflecting, in our thinking when withdrawn for action, we easily forget our communicative relations with and to the others and othernesses around us. A special kind of thinking from within our lived and living experience seems to be needed if we are to do proper justice to our lives in communication.
If we cannot give good reasons for our actions when called upon to do so by other members of the ... more If we cannot give good reasons for our actions when called upon to do so by other members of the society in which we are also a member, then we risk more than just embarrassment at appearing somewhat stupid, we run the risk of losing our status as autonomous individuals. For, human societies being what they are, if we cannot justify our actions to others, then they may find them illegitimate, irrelevant, or unintelligible even, and thus rule them "out of court"; and it is then quite legitimate for them to expect us to act as they desire rather than we ourselves would prefer. Thus to qualify as an autonomous person, not reliant like a child upon others to complete and give meaning to one's acts, having them decree the nature of one's actions, one must be able at some point in one's acting to stop and to deliberate, and, as a result, make clear to oneself (and/or to others) one's reasons for so acting. That is, one must be able to make clear in terms intelligible to other members of one's society the rational connections between what one is doing, its antecedents, and to what one hopes it might lead (and perhaps even the grounds for so hoping). So, psychologically then, if one is interested in the problem of how infants grow up to be "one of us" but also, none the less, themselves, with their own unique position in society at large, then a most interesting topic of study is the process within which the growth of deliberate action occurs; or, as one might call it, the progressive rationalization of action, or of experience.
We begin our studies in psychology from the fact that our nature as human beings is a puzzle to u... more We begin our studies in psychology from the fact that our nature as human beings is a puzzle to us. But, we may ask, is it a puzzle to us just because we have still not yet done enough research and amassed enough information about our behaviour? Or is it, perhaps, because we have no natural nature, because we are self-determining, self-defining animals? The latter notion is not such an outlandish one as it may at first sight seem; it is, after all, simply to restate the ideal embodied in the humanism of the Renaissance. If we turn to Pico della Mirandola̓s discourse On the Dignity of Man for an account of what constituted the humanistic attitude then, we find that as he saw it, our puzzle was not just a matter of our ignorance, a lack of knowledge: it was a real puzzle of a practical kind, for it was a puzzle about how we could transform ourselves from lower into higher forms.
There are certain special kinds of involved, reciprocally responsive, meetings with others which,... more There are certain special kinds of involved, reciprocally responsive, meetings with others which, when they occur, can give rise to special and distinctive feelings in us, feelings which can ‘tell’ us something about the unique nature of an other’s ‘inner world’, and which can thus shape our responses to them in ways that matter to them. In a moment, below, we would like to try to describe the special nature of such meetings or engagements, and also, to spend some time outlining some of the prior attitudes and expectations that can prevent such engaged meetings from ever taking place. For it seems to us that certain orientations — often to do with demands made on us by our training as professionals — can lead us to impose already existing demands and requirements on all our meetings, externally, and it is just these external impositions that can prevent these special kinds of engaged involvement from ever emerging.
As the chapters in this volume all attest, a broad movement is currently afoot (and has been so f... more As the chapters in this volume all attest, a broad movement is currently afoot (and has been so for some time now), not only in Academic Psychology, but in Social Theory at large. It is something to do with attempting within the Academy to overcome the lifelessness of the humane and social disciplines; it is to do with resurrecting what has until now been treated as-if-dead: people! The movement can be formulated in many different ways. Some might suggest that it constitutes an interpretative, linguistic, hermeneutical, or discursive turn; others are calling it a turn to social constructionism or rhetoric; while yet others call it a move to relational or dialogical formulations; or to the recognition of the importance of others, of Othernesses, and of difference and differences; or an appreciation of non-representational or expressivist notions of meaning; a move from centering our studies in thought to a focus on people's activities, a shift from focusing on individuals to a focus on the social; a turn away from rooting claims to knowledge in abstract theory toward basing them in our social practices; a turning away from universal principles toward a study of the concrete details of our social exchanges; an growing interest in embodiment; a return to values, to ethics, to a concern with what matters; an interest in what we might call agent's knowledge (Taylor, 1985, p.80) manifested in action rather than in the knowledge available only to uninvolved, external observers, as in the classical view... or formulate the movement in yet some other way or ways. We are even beginning to see a role for the disorderly, the chaotic, and the playful, and to find events on the boundaries between our activities as perhaps more interesting than those occurring at their centers. Whatever... the puzzle now, is how to account for our lives together as a living movement of some kind.
In psychology, it is thought 'natural' to speak of people as possessing within themselves somethi... more In psychology, it is thought 'natural' to speak of people as possessing within themselves something called their "mind," and to think that minds have their own discoverable, intrinsic principles of operation, which owe nothing either to society or to history for their nature. But the "mind" as such is, I think, a mythic entity. And attention to it diverts our attention away from the detailed social processes involved, not only in negotiating the making of common meanings, but also from those involved in the everyday methods of testing and checking we use in establishing socially intelligible and legitimate common goals. It is its failure to notice the importance of these processes of normative evaluation which is, I think, psychology's mistake. What I want to claim below is: 1) that psychology is not a natural but a moral science; 2) that instead of what might be called a theoretical/explanatory approach, aimed at producing theoretical knowledge, it must use a practical/ descriptive approach, aimed at gaining practical-moral knowledge; 3) that this aim is much more difficult to achieve than might be imagined, as more than simply academic activities are involved; and 4) that although 'social constructionist' studies are required at present, our embodied nature is what is our ultimate problematic.
What is involved in our adopting a process orientation, in practice, rather than just talking abo... more What is involved in our adopting a process orientation, in practice, rather than just talking about it in theory? Below, I explore some of the difficulties involved in terms of Wittgenstein’s (1980) distinction between difficulties of the intellect – difficulties that can be solved by rational thought – and those of the will – which require our coming to embody new ways of relating or orienting ourselves towards events happening in our surroundings. So although I begin by examining what both Whitehead (1925/1975; 1929/1978) and Bergson (1911) had to say about a process orientation, in theory, now, after Wittgenstein’s (1953, 1969) emphasis on the fact that our utterances can only take on determinate meanings within the confines of a “language-game,” I argue that our talk of various entities can only take on a determinate meaning within a particular language-entwined practice, and will remain indeterminate outside such practices.
Review of Roy Bhaskar, Reclaiming Reality: a Critical Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy, Lo... more Review of Roy Bhaskar, Reclaiming Reality: a Critical Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy, London: Verso, 1989, £24.95, paper £8.95, ix + 218 pp.
Bruner’s approach to our practices of Self draws our attention to important issues in these incre... more Bruner’s approach to our practices of Self draws our attention to important issues in these increasingly multicultural times Almost all of us are now members of more than one active culture. Thus the experience of having to ‘cross’ cultural boundaries, to ‘shift one’s stance’, to view one’s surroundings, fleeting aspect by fleeting aspect, from more than a single perspective, has become ‘normal’. We have now to make sense of our surroundings, while continually being ourselves ‘in motion’. But how should academics and intellectuals respond to the dialogical, aspectival circumstances in which we now live in order to heed the ‘practices of Self that Bruner outlines? Can we apply our old and well-tried methods to this new topic? Or must we invent novel methods, different modes of inquiry’?
Although Tom Andersen talked a great deal of the importance of his ‘inner dialogues’, he did not ... more Although Tom Andersen talked a great deal of the importance of his ‘inner dialogues’, he did not explicitly talk of himself as being a dialogical therapist. However, in trying to articulate what is important in the nature of all dialogically-structured practices, I want to use examples of his therapeutic practices, Tom Andersen’s way of being Tom Andersen, examples that in fact exhibit many relevant features of such dialogically-structured practices. Central to them all, is a move away from the Cartesian idea that events in the ‘outside’ or ‘external’ world are represented or pictured within us in some way (i.e., in our heads somewhere), and a move towards, a responsive understanding, a felt tendency or anticipation to go on in a particular way in relation to a particular circumstance out in the world at large. Something that the generalities described in theories, models, recipes, sets of principles, etc., that are common to all situations do not do so.
In setting the scene for this seminar, Franson Manjali noted the enormous scholarly interest mani... more In setting the scene for this seminar, Franson Manjali noted the enormous scholarly interest manifested in matters linguistic in the century just past, but suggests that now, these linguistic orientations are on the wane, and that other concerns and other programs, with their own self-contained agendas, have come to take their place. Cognitive science, cultural studies, and ethical-philosophical approaches have, seemingly, begun to pursue their own separate developments, and as a result, scientific disciplinary concerns and critical intellectual pursuits are now in an uneasy relationship of coexistence and mutual contestation with each other. But here, a little like Latour (1993), in his claim that 'we have never been modern', I want to claim that, rather than moving beyond the linguistic turn, we have yet to take it. We have not yet taken it because — partly due to Frege's and de Saussure's mechanistic and structuralist account of language, as an abstract, inner, mental representation which we as self-contained, intellectual beings can put to willful use in our own individual actions — we have never grasped its true nature.
A whole dialogical view of language, mind, meaning, and selfhood, focusing on events occurring ou... more A whole dialogical view of language, mind, meaning, and selfhood, focusing on events occurring out in the world between people, is slowly growing to displace the monological, Cartesian conceptions, centered in mental states and acts 'in the mind' hidden inside people's individual heads, that have dominated our thought for so long here in the West. The changes in our conceptions of ourselves and of our relations to our surroundings that it will bring, are, I think, very deep and quite astonishing - so much so that we shall find many of the conclusions reached in the chapter quite hard to accept. Many workers are contributing to this movement. Central to them all, are, I think, three major themes that I will mention straightaway: i) they all take it that there is something very special about us being alive; ii) they focus on what occurs in those living moments when we are in contact with others or othernesses in our surroundings; iii) among the many consequences of us being in the world as living, embodied beings, is the fact that we cannot not be spontaneously responsive to each other in a bodily way, prior to anything we might do deliberately and intellectually. However, Bakhtin and Voloshinov are, I think, distinct in suggesting a fourth: iv) that the outcomes of such responsive activity, in emerging from the creative bridging of the momentary 'gaps' occurring between us as we turn from 'addressing' others to 'inviting' them to address us, have a complex, open, mixed, dialogical structure to them which cannot be completely captured in any finalized descriptions.
Here, I explore the moral dimension(s) of everyday social life, and what a social constructionist... more Here, I explore the moral dimension(s) of everyday social life, and what a social constructionist psychology may, or may not, have to say about it or them. The thesis that I want eventually to explore comes from Vico: social processes, he claims, are based or "rooted," not in anything preestablished in people, nor in their surroundings, but in socially shared identities of feeling they themselves create or "construct," in some sense, within the flow of activity between them. These identities he calls "sensory topics"— sensory because they are to do with shared feelings for shared circumstances; and topics (Gr. topos = place) because they give rise to "common places," to moments within an otherwise continuously changing flow of social activity, to which shared references are possible. Such topoi are the sources of shared feeling within a community, against which the adequacy of any linguistic formulations by its members can ultimately be judged as to the sense they make (Shotter, 1986,1991; Vico, 1948). Also, I shall link these claims to Taylor's (1987,1989) recent discussion of the inherent tensions in the "moral sources" of the modern self, to show the point of a social constructionist psychology in illuminating the nature of these tensions — not with the purpose of resolving them, but of understanding what, from a practical-moral point of view, is involved in living more productively with them.
As human beings, we share many historically developed, language-game interwoven, public forms of ... more As human beings, we share many historically developed, language-game interwoven, public forms of life. Due to the joint, dialogically responsive nature of all social life within such forms, we cannot as individuals just act as we please; our forms of life exert a normative influence on what we can say and do. They act as a backdrop against which all our claims to knowledge are judged as acceptable or not. As a result, it is not easy to articulate their inadequacies in a clear and forceful manner. However, within most of our forms of life, we have a first-person right to express how our individual circumstances seem to us. And by the use of special forms of poetic, gestural talk - talk that can originate new language-games - we can offer to make our own 'inner lives' public. In this paper, I want claim that this is just what Wittgenstein is attempting to do in his later philosophy: by use of the self-same methods that anyone might use to express aspects of their own world picture, he is offering us his attempts to make the background 'landscape' of our lives visible. These methods are explored below.
In our talk of meanings, we are used to thinking of them as working in terms of mental representa... more In our talk of meanings, we are used to thinking of them as working in terms of mental representations, and to thinking of such representations as passive objects of thought requiring interpretation in terms of shared rules, conventions or principles if their meaning is to be understood. Here, however, I argue that the meaningfulness of our language does not initially depend on its systematicity, but on our spontaneous , living, bodily responsiveness to the others and othernesses around us. Hence, I want to explore the realm of expressive-responsive bodily activity that 'pre-dates', so to speak, the 'calculational' processes we currently think of as underlying our linguistic understandings, the realm within which direct and immediate, non-interpretational physiognomic or gestural forms of understanding can occur. Central to activities occurring between us in this sphere is the emergence of dynamically unfolding structures of activity in which we all participate in 'shaping', but to which we all must also be responsive in giving shape to our own actions. It is the agentic influence of these invisible but nonetheless felt 'real presences' (Steiner, 1989) that I want to explore. Their influence can be felt as acting upon us in a way similar to the expressions of more visible beings. Thus within this sphere of physiognomic meanings, it is as if invisible but authoritative others can directly 'call' us into action, can issue us with 'action-guiding advisories', and judge our subsequent actions accordingly with their 'facial' expressions or 'tones' of voice. Below I will explore how this—some would say, 'mystic' (Lévy-Bruhl)—form of participatory thought and understanding can help us to understand the 'inner' nature of our social lives together, and the part played by our expressive talk in their creation.
It is in our I-You relations to our surroundings that we gain, i.e., come to embody, a sense of t... more It is in our I-You relations to our surroundings that we gain, i.e., come to embody, a sense of the contextual ‘background’, as a still-open-not-wholly-determined ‘landscape of possibilities’ within which we are immersed (along with all the others and othernesses around us), that enables us to act ‘in the moment’, in ways appropriate to each particular situation we encounter. Indeed, as Buber (1970) says about the realm of the I-You, about the dialogical, about the primordial socio-material reality within which we live our everyday lives together, “an ordered world is not the world order.” If it was an already ordered or determined world, the ethical and political issues we face daily would simply disappear; we could simply ‘calculate’ how best to act. And this, of course, is what is at the heart of our interest in robotic activities: our belief that the world is an already ordered and determined place, made up of separate, nameable parts all in motion like a machine, simply awaiting our discovery of them and their laws of motion — a view of ourselves and the world, not only central to our robotic simulations of human behaviour, but also rife in many other spheres of our professional lives today.
Selected remarks by Gadamer, Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, and Mead set the scene for the ‘dialogical, p... more Selected remarks by Gadamer, Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, and Mead set the scene for the ‘dialogical, prospective concept of the person’ I want to outline below – dialogical, because ‘I’ can be ‘me’ only in dialogical relation to ‘you’; and prospective, because as living, growing, and developing beings, able both to accumulate and to embody a shared (and sharable) cultural history, there is no end to what we as persons are and can be. In other words, the concept of the person that I what to discuss, is a concept of people as being themselves dialogically open to further exploration and development of themselves (along with the others around them), and of their concept of themselves as being dialogically open to..., and so on, and so on; as well as of them as being open also to an exploration as to why some of the changes they may seek to make to themselves are more preferable than others. I would like to end by contrasting what I will call ‘withness’-being with ‘aboutness’-being.
What might a disciplined inquiry into events occurring always for "another first time " (Garfinke... more What might a disciplined inquiry into events occurring always for "another first time " (Garfinkel, 1967) look like? Whilst traditionally, we have always sought a hidden order behind appearances, this may be a misleading aim in human affairs. In this paper I argue that this is to begin our investigations too late in the day. It leads us to think of people as being already self-conscious, self-contained individuals, acting and speaking mostly in a wilful and intellectual manner. Indeed many have interpreted Wittgenstein's later philosophy, and his claim that the meaning of a word is its use in the language, in this light: as if he was concerned with words used as tools or as making moves in a language-game according to pre-existing rules. In this view, words have meaning only if they are systematically connected with states of affairs and/or states of mind. There is, however, another side to Wittgenstein: a concem with the beginnings of language-games in our spontaneous bodily reactions, and with such reactions as being the prototypes for new ways of thinking rather than as the results of ones already in existence. Here, meaning is understood in terms of one's direct and immediate responsiveness to one's surroundings. This paper explores this side of Wittgenstein's thought, and relates it both to his claim that many events in human affairs can be 'explained' simply by giving descriptions, and to outlining a set of practical methods for beginning new practices, practices that can begin by noticing the presence within our old practices of previously unnoticed spontaneous bodily reactions.
This book is about ways of knowing in terms of feeling and feelings. When I first left school, I ... more This book is about ways of knowing in terms of feeling and feelings. When I first left school, I went to work as an engineering apprentice in an aircraft factory. Two memories of that time are relevant to its contents. One is to do with filing different metals in the apprentice's workshop.... It was as if, with the file, I could 'feel into' the very crystalline structure of the metals themselves.... The other memory is to do with the fact that we thousand or so workers trooped in at 7.30am, through a single, little door at the back of the factory, jostling and pushing each other to make sure we clocked in on time, as every minute late cost us 15 minutes pay. While the 'staff'... came in ('strolled in' we thought) through big double doors at the front, up imposing steps at 9.00am....'They' didn't just look down on 'us', 'they' treated us like about-to-be-naughty children. Such incidents as these were... an integral part of the British industrial scene, marked, as it was, by a large number of strikes, and a general level of anger, resentment and widespread bloody-mindedness expressed by all.... Then, I never thought that I would be writing a book like this, a book that in fact connects these two memories, in two different ways. One way, is to do with how i) 'feeling into' the hidden inner structure of materials through the use of a tool like a file, connects with ii) sensing the (also supposedly hidden) inner structure of the social world through the use of words-as-prosthetic-devices. But that indeed, is one thing that this book is about. The other is to do with how our lack of words to articulate the way in which ‘trivial’ but ‘touching’ things can work to influence us in our feelings as to 'who' we are, i.e., to influence us 'in' our identities, can so easily leave us with filled with self-harming tendencies. We still do not know how what one might call the self-other dimension of interaction works to 'construct' another dimension of interaction, seemingly independent of it — that between oneself as an individual person, and 'one's own world' — such that, if one feels oneself reduced as a person, one feels oneself as living in a reduced world.
In what follows below we want to try to take Barnett Pearce’s claim – that we live in communicati... more In what follows below we want to try to take Barnett Pearce’s claim – that we live in communication – very seriously. We say ‘try’ to take it ‘very seriously’, because, clearly, it is not at all easy to do so. For while we are all alone when writing or thinking, we easily act as if we are not in communication; when reflecting, in our thinking when withdrawn for action, we easily forget our communicative relations with and to the others and othernesses around us. A special kind of thinking from within our lived and living experience seems to be needed if we are to do proper justice to our lives in communication.
If we cannot give good reasons for our actions when called upon to do so by other members of the ... more If we cannot give good reasons for our actions when called upon to do so by other members of the society in which we are also a member, then we risk more than just embarrassment at appearing somewhat stupid, we run the risk of losing our status as autonomous individuals. For, human societies being what they are, if we cannot justify our actions to others, then they may find them illegitimate, irrelevant, or unintelligible even, and thus rule them "out of court"; and it is then quite legitimate for them to expect us to act as they desire rather than we ourselves would prefer. Thus to qualify as an autonomous person, not reliant like a child upon others to complete and give meaning to one's acts, having them decree the nature of one's actions, one must be able at some point in one's acting to stop and to deliberate, and, as a result, make clear to oneself (and/or to others) one's reasons for so acting. That is, one must be able to make clear in terms intelligible to other members of one's society the rational connections between what one is doing, its antecedents, and to what one hopes it might lead (and perhaps even the grounds for so hoping). So, psychologically then, if one is interested in the problem of how infants grow up to be "one of us" but also, none the less, themselves, with their own unique position in society at large, then a most interesting topic of study is the process within which the growth of deliberate action occurs; or, as one might call it, the progressive rationalization of action, or of experience.
We begin our studies in psychology from the fact that our nature as human beings is a puzzle to u... more We begin our studies in psychology from the fact that our nature as human beings is a puzzle to us. But, we may ask, is it a puzzle to us just because we have still not yet done enough research and amassed enough information about our behaviour? Or is it, perhaps, because we have no natural nature, because we are self-determining, self-defining animals? The latter notion is not such an outlandish one as it may at first sight seem; it is, after all, simply to restate the ideal embodied in the humanism of the Renaissance. If we turn to Pico della Mirandola̓s discourse On the Dignity of Man for an account of what constituted the humanistic attitude then, we find that as he saw it, our puzzle was not just a matter of our ignorance, a lack of knowledge: it was a real puzzle of a practical kind, for it was a puzzle about how we could transform ourselves from lower into higher forms.
There are certain special kinds of involved, reciprocally responsive, meetings with others which,... more There are certain special kinds of involved, reciprocally responsive, meetings with others which, when they occur, can give rise to special and distinctive feelings in us, feelings which can ‘tell’ us something about the unique nature of an other’s ‘inner world’, and which can thus shape our responses to them in ways that matter to them. In a moment, below, we would like to try to describe the special nature of such meetings or engagements, and also, to spend some time outlining some of the prior attitudes and expectations that can prevent such engaged meetings from ever taking place. For it seems to us that certain orientations — often to do with demands made on us by our training as professionals — can lead us to impose already existing demands and requirements on all our meetings, externally, and it is just these external impositions that can prevent these special kinds of engaged involvement from ever emerging.
As the chapters in this volume all attest, a broad movement is currently afoot (and has been so f... more As the chapters in this volume all attest, a broad movement is currently afoot (and has been so for some time now), not only in Academic Psychology, but in Social Theory at large. It is something to do with attempting within the Academy to overcome the lifelessness of the humane and social disciplines; it is to do with resurrecting what has until now been treated as-if-dead: people! The movement can be formulated in many different ways. Some might suggest that it constitutes an interpretative, linguistic, hermeneutical, or discursive turn; others are calling it a turn to social constructionism or rhetoric; while yet others call it a move to relational or dialogical formulations; or to the recognition of the importance of others, of Othernesses, and of difference and differences; or an appreciation of non-representational or expressivist notions of meaning; a move from centering our studies in thought to a focus on people's activities, a shift from focusing on individuals to a focus on the social; a turn away from rooting claims to knowledge in abstract theory toward basing them in our social practices; a turning away from universal principles toward a study of the concrete details of our social exchanges; an growing interest in embodiment; a return to values, to ethics, to a concern with what matters; an interest in what we might call agent's knowledge (Taylor, 1985, p.80) manifested in action rather than in the knowledge available only to uninvolved, external observers, as in the classical view... or formulate the movement in yet some other way or ways. We are even beginning to see a role for the disorderly, the chaotic, and the playful, and to find events on the boundaries between our activities as perhaps more interesting than those occurring at their centers. Whatever... the puzzle now, is how to account for our lives together as a living movement of some kind.
In psychology, it is thought 'natural' to speak of people as possessing within themselves somethi... more In psychology, it is thought 'natural' to speak of people as possessing within themselves something called their "mind," and to think that minds have their own discoverable, intrinsic principles of operation, which owe nothing either to society or to history for their nature. But the "mind" as such is, I think, a mythic entity. And attention to it diverts our attention away from the detailed social processes involved, not only in negotiating the making of common meanings, but also from those involved in the everyday methods of testing and checking we use in establishing socially intelligible and legitimate common goals. It is its failure to notice the importance of these processes of normative evaluation which is, I think, psychology's mistake. What I want to claim below is: 1) that psychology is not a natural but a moral science; 2) that instead of what might be called a theoretical/explanatory approach, aimed at producing theoretical knowledge, it must use a practical/ descriptive approach, aimed at gaining practical-moral knowledge; 3) that this aim is much more difficult to achieve than might be imagined, as more than simply academic activities are involved; and 4) that although 'social constructionist' studies are required at present, our embodied nature is what is our ultimate problematic.
What is involved in our adopting a process orientation, in practice, rather than just talking abo... more What is involved in our adopting a process orientation, in practice, rather than just talking about it in theory? Below, I explore some of the difficulties involved in terms of Wittgenstein’s (1980) distinction between difficulties of the intellect – difficulties that can be solved by rational thought – and those of the will – which require our coming to embody new ways of relating or orienting ourselves towards events happening in our surroundings. So although I begin by examining what both Whitehead (1925/1975; 1929/1978) and Bergson (1911) had to say about a process orientation, in theory, now, after Wittgenstein’s (1953, 1969) emphasis on the fact that our utterances can only take on determinate meanings within the confines of a “language-game,” I argue that our talk of various entities can only take on a determinate meaning within a particular language-entwined practice, and will remain indeterminate outside such practices.
Review of Roy Bhaskar, Reclaiming Reality: a Critical Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy, Lo... more Review of Roy Bhaskar, Reclaiming Reality: a Critical Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy, London: Verso, 1989, £24.95, paper £8.95, ix + 218 pp.
Bruner’s approach to our practices of Self draws our attention to important issues in these incre... more Bruner’s approach to our practices of Self draws our attention to important issues in these increasingly multicultural times Almost all of us are now members of more than one active culture. Thus the experience of having to ‘cross’ cultural boundaries, to ‘shift one’s stance’, to view one’s surroundings, fleeting aspect by fleeting aspect, from more than a single perspective, has become ‘normal’. We have now to make sense of our surroundings, while continually being ourselves ‘in motion’. But how should academics and intellectuals respond to the dialogical, aspectival circumstances in which we now live in order to heed the ‘practices of Self that Bruner outlines? Can we apply our old and well-tried methods to this new topic? Or must we invent novel methods, different modes of inquiry’?
Although Tom Andersen talked a great deal of the importance of his ‘inner dialogues’, he did not ... more Although Tom Andersen talked a great deal of the importance of his ‘inner dialogues’, he did not explicitly talk of himself as being a dialogical therapist. However, in trying to articulate what is important in the nature of all dialogically-structured practices, I want to use examples of his therapeutic practices, Tom Andersen’s way of being Tom Andersen, examples that in fact exhibit many relevant features of such dialogically-structured practices. Central to them all, is a move away from the Cartesian idea that events in the ‘outside’ or ‘external’ world are represented or pictured within us in some way (i.e., in our heads somewhere), and a move towards, a responsive understanding, a felt tendency or anticipation to go on in a particular way in relation to a particular circumstance out in the world at large. Something that the generalities described in theories, models, recipes, sets of principles, etc., that are common to all situations do not do so.
In setting the scene for this seminar, Franson Manjali noted the enormous scholarly interest mani... more In setting the scene for this seminar, Franson Manjali noted the enormous scholarly interest manifested in matters linguistic in the century just past, but suggests that now, these linguistic orientations are on the wane, and that other concerns and other programs, with their own self-contained agendas, have come to take their place. Cognitive science, cultural studies, and ethical-philosophical approaches have, seemingly, begun to pursue their own separate developments, and as a result, scientific disciplinary concerns and critical intellectual pursuits are now in an uneasy relationship of coexistence and mutual contestation with each other. But here, a little like Latour (1993), in his claim that 'we have never been modern', I want to claim that, rather than moving beyond the linguistic turn, we have yet to take it. We have not yet taken it because — partly due to Frege's and de Saussure's mechanistic and structuralist account of language, as an abstract, inner, mental representation which we as self-contained, intellectual beings can put to willful use in our own individual actions — we have never grasped its true nature.
A whole dialogical view of language, mind, meaning, and selfhood, focusing on events occurring ou... more A whole dialogical view of language, mind, meaning, and selfhood, focusing on events occurring out in the world between people, is slowly growing to displace the monological, Cartesian conceptions, centered in mental states and acts 'in the mind' hidden inside people's individual heads, that have dominated our thought for so long here in the West. The changes in our conceptions of ourselves and of our relations to our surroundings that it will bring, are, I think, very deep and quite astonishing - so much so that we shall find many of the conclusions reached in the chapter quite hard to accept. Many workers are contributing to this movement. Central to them all, are, I think, three major themes that I will mention straightaway: i) they all take it that there is something very special about us being alive; ii) they focus on what occurs in those living moments when we are in contact with others or othernesses in our surroundings; iii) among the many consequences of us being in the world as living, embodied beings, is the fact that we cannot not be spontaneously responsive to each other in a bodily way, prior to anything we might do deliberately and intellectually. However, Bakhtin and Voloshinov are, I think, distinct in suggesting a fourth: iv) that the outcomes of such responsive activity, in emerging from the creative bridging of the momentary 'gaps' occurring between us as we turn from 'addressing' others to 'inviting' them to address us, have a complex, open, mixed, dialogical structure to them which cannot be completely captured in any finalized descriptions.
Here, I explore the moral dimension(s) of everyday social life, and what a social constructionist... more Here, I explore the moral dimension(s) of everyday social life, and what a social constructionist psychology may, or may not, have to say about it or them. The thesis that I want eventually to explore comes from Vico: social processes, he claims, are based or "rooted," not in anything preestablished in people, nor in their surroundings, but in socially shared identities of feeling they themselves create or "construct," in some sense, within the flow of activity between them. These identities he calls "sensory topics"— sensory because they are to do with shared feelings for shared circumstances; and topics (Gr. topos = place) because they give rise to "common places," to moments within an otherwise continuously changing flow of social activity, to which shared references are possible. Such topoi are the sources of shared feeling within a community, against which the adequacy of any linguistic formulations by its members can ultimately be judged as to the sense they make (Shotter, 1986,1991; Vico, 1948). Also, I shall link these claims to Taylor's (1987,1989) recent discussion of the inherent tensions in the "moral sources" of the modern self, to show the point of a social constructionist psychology in illuminating the nature of these tensions — not with the purpose of resolving them, but of understanding what, from a practical-moral point of view, is involved in living more productively with them.
As human beings, we share many historically developed, language-game interwoven, public forms of ... more As human beings, we share many historically developed, language-game interwoven, public forms of life. Due to the joint, dialogically responsive nature of all social life within such forms, we cannot as individuals just act as we please; our forms of life exert a normative influence on what we can say and do. They act as a backdrop against which all our claims to knowledge are judged as acceptable or not. As a result, it is not easy to articulate their inadequacies in a clear and forceful manner. However, within most of our forms of life, we have a first-person right to express how our individual circumstances seem to us. And by the use of special forms of poetic, gestural talk - talk that can originate new language-games - we can offer to make our own 'inner lives' public. In this paper, I want claim that this is just what Wittgenstein is attempting to do in his later philosophy: by use of the self-same methods that anyone might use to express aspects of their own world picture, he is offering us his attempts to make the background 'landscape' of our lives visible. These methods are explored below.
In our talk of meanings, we are used to thinking of them as working in terms of mental representa... more In our talk of meanings, we are used to thinking of them as working in terms of mental representations, and to thinking of such representations as passive objects of thought requiring interpretation in terms of shared rules, conventions or principles if their meaning is to be understood. Here, however, I argue that the meaningfulness of our language does not initially depend on its systematicity, but on our spontaneous , living, bodily responsiveness to the others and othernesses around us. Hence, I want to explore the realm of expressive-responsive bodily activity that 'pre-dates', so to speak, the 'calculational' processes we currently think of as underlying our linguistic understandings, the realm within which direct and immediate, non-interpretational physiognomic or gestural forms of understanding can occur. Central to activities occurring between us in this sphere is the emergence of dynamically unfolding structures of activity in which we all participate in 'shaping', but to which we all must also be responsive in giving shape to our own actions. It is the agentic influence of these invisible but nonetheless felt 'real presences' (Steiner, 1989) that I want to explore. Their influence can be felt as acting upon us in a way similar to the expressions of more visible beings. Thus within this sphere of physiognomic meanings, it is as if invisible but authoritative others can directly 'call' us into action, can issue us with 'action-guiding advisories', and judge our subsequent actions accordingly with their 'facial' expressions or 'tones' of voice. Below I will explore how this—some would say, 'mystic' (Lévy-Bruhl)—form of participatory thought and understanding can help us to understand the 'inner' nature of our social lives together, and the part played by our expressive talk in their creation.
It is in our I-You relations to our surroundings that we gain, i.e., come to embody, a sense of t... more It is in our I-You relations to our surroundings that we gain, i.e., come to embody, a sense of the contextual ‘background’, as a still-open-not-wholly-determined ‘landscape of possibilities’ within which we are immersed (along with all the others and othernesses around us), that enables us to act ‘in the moment’, in ways appropriate to each particular situation we encounter. Indeed, as Buber (1970) says about the realm of the I-You, about the dialogical, about the primordial socio-material reality within which we live our everyday lives together, “an ordered world is not the world order.” If it was an already ordered or determined world, the ethical and political issues we face daily would simply disappear; we could simply ‘calculate’ how best to act. And this, of course, is what is at the heart of our interest in robotic activities: our belief that the world is an already ordered and determined place, made up of separate, nameable parts all in motion like a machine, simply awaiting our discovery of them and their laws of motion — a view of ourselves and the world, not only central to our robotic simulations of human behaviour, but also rife in many other spheres of our professional lives today.
Selected remarks by Gadamer, Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, and Mead set the scene for the ‘dialogical, p... more Selected remarks by Gadamer, Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, and Mead set the scene for the ‘dialogical, prospective concept of the person’ I want to outline below – dialogical, because ‘I’ can be ‘me’ only in dialogical relation to ‘you’; and prospective, because as living, growing, and developing beings, able both to accumulate and to embody a shared (and sharable) cultural history, there is no end to what we as persons are and can be. In other words, the concept of the person that I what to discuss, is a concept of people as being themselves dialogically open to further exploration and development of themselves (along with the others around them), and of their concept of themselves as being dialogically open to..., and so on, and so on; as well as of them as being open also to an exploration as to why some of the changes they may seek to make to themselves are more preferable than others. I would like to end by contrasting what I will call ‘withness’-being with ‘aboutness’-being.
Taking a social constructionist approach but of a practical rather than a theoretical kind - I sh... more Taking a social constructionist approach but of a practical rather than a theoretical kind - I shall discuss the processes within which people, between themselves, construct 'organized settings' of enabling/constraints 'into' which to direct their future actions. Such settings give rise to imaginary, and indeed, often impossible objects which have no real existence, and which 'subsist' only 'in' people's social practices. However, to the extent that we can talk about them, they can inform and structure our behaviour. The most important 'object' of this kind is what we each are pleased to call our 'self'. Such imaginary objects play important roles, both in maintaining the multiple, partial structurings of daily life, and in maintaining its openness to further articulations. Any attempt to complete them as real objects destroys their nature, and can lead to an enclosed (mechanical) form of social life.
My overall thesis is: that what we have got in current forms of globalization, is the global inst... more My overall thesis is: that what we have got in current forms of globalization, is the global institution, mostly through the global market, but also at a deeper level, of a quantitative, mechanical form of connectedness, a form of Cartesian, spatialized thought, characterized in the business world by the phrase “all being on the same page.” It is a ‘view’ of the world – and its pictorial quality is one of its most significant features – embodied in Euclidean geometry and Newtonian mechanics. Heidegger (1977) captures this in his essay, The age of the world picture, in his comment that what he means by the term “world picture,” not “a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as a picture” (p.129). Such a style of thought is a static style, one that can only encompass change as a series of discrete steps, of jumps from one static configuration to another. It is the view that “the universe is a pack of cards, that is, an aggregate of distinct entities persisting through time without any intrinsic change” (Capek, 1961, p.127). Such “single orders of connectedness,” as I will call them, when used as the means for coordinating and developing human affairs – as living, growing, and developing inter-activities – in essentially an inert, material world, are bound to lead to disaster.
If our task was simply that of theorizing process, then there are many brilliant writers and thin... more If our task was simply that of theorizing process, then there are many brilliant writers and thinkers in the recent past to turn to. But as I see it, these writers are mostly oriented toward helping us think about process " from the outside, " about processes that we merely observe as happening 'over there'. But if we are to rethink appropriate styles of empirical research, then we need a different form of engaged, responsive thinking, acting, and talking, that allows us to affect the flow of processes from within our living involvement with them. Crucially, this kind of responsive understanding only becomes available to us in our relations with living forms when we enter into dialogically-structured relations with them. It remains utterly unavailable to us as an external observer. I will call this kind of thinking, thinking-from-within or withness-thinking, to contrast it with the aboutness-thinking that is more familiar to us. I will draw on the work of Bakhtin and Wittgenstein (with a touch of Vygotsky, Merleau-Ponty, and Polanyi) in my initial explorations of it. For, as I see it, they can most immediately help us gain an understanding " from within, " of those processes in which we ourselves are, or can be, involved, and which, because of our involvement, we can affect. In other words, as Bergson (2002/1946) puts it, " instead of trying to rise above our perception of things [they can much more directly help us] to plunge into it for the purpose of deepening and widening it " (p.134). And as we plunge into it, we can gain, in Polanyi's (1958) terms, a subsidiary awareness of certain " action guiding feelings " that can play a role in giving us an anticipatory sense of at least the style or the grammar of what is to come next in the ongoing process in which we happen to be involved. " When we speak of the classical picture of physical reality, we are indicating by the very choice of the word its most significant character: its pictorial nature " (Capek, 1961, p.3). " We perceive duration as a stream against which we cannot go. It is the foundation of our being, and, as we feel, the very substance of the world in which we live.
“How – with no preparation – can this singular, short-lived event constituted by the appearance o... more “How – with no preparation – can this singular, short-lived event constituted by the appearance of an unusual poetic image, react on other minds and in other hearts, despite all the barriers of common sense, all the disciplined schools of thought, content in their immobility?” (Bachelard, 1992, p.xiv-xv, my emphasis).
“... philosophy ought only to be written as a poetic composition” (Wittgenstein, 1980, p.24).
“The way music speaks. Do not forget that a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information” (Wittgenstein, 1981, no.160).
The social sciences: their most important practice might seem to be their explicit 'methodology':... more The social sciences: their most important practice might seem to be their explicit 'methodology': they are built upon the supposedly firm foundations of rational inquiry, the assumption that (proper, scientific) knowledge is only acquired as a result of systematic thought and orderly investigation. But in fact, this 'methodology' only has sense, and only makes sense, in a context of many other activities and practices. Central among these (although later I shall have something to say about face-to-face talk and debate) is the production of written texts - texts in which what is said, but not the saying of it, is 'inscribed'. Professional social science moves from text to text, usually beginning with the reading of already written and published texts, and ending in the writing and publishing of further texts.
The structure of my paper is: 1) To take disturbing statements; 2) to go back to their assumption... more The structure of my paper is: 1) To take disturbing statements; 2) to go back to their assumptions; 3) to find what is lacking/missing in them; 4) formulate alternatives that fill out the gaps; 5) and then to look at the original statements now in the light of the alternatives " We reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may conquer them " (C.S. Lewis, 1978, p.43).
Influenced by Macmurray's (1957, 1961) explorations, I first attempt to distinguish three forms o... more Influenced by Macmurray's (1957, 1961) explorations, I first attempt to distinguish three forms of order, each consisting of a system of interrelated descriptive categories: the mechanical, the organic, and the personal. Second, I shall discuss in the course of the account the different standpoints we might take while studying human beings in relation to these three forms of order. My point in doing this will be to introduce a new form of psychology, psychology as a moral science of action rather than a natural science of behavior. In this project, the discussion of standpoints — how we 'position' ourselves in relation to what we are studying — is perhaps even more crucial than that of the forms of order, as it has to do with the criteria we use in assessing the value of the accounts we produce. We may take a standpoint as an individual, as an external observer or spectator, and use only observational and formal criteria in testing theories for their truth or accuracy. Or we might instead, although it is not a part of science yet to do so, take a standpoint not as external observers but as agents, involved as participants in the action we are studying, referring not to observational but to experiential criteria in testing our claims to truth. We might go even further and take a standpoint, not just as individual agents, but as socially responsible agents, judging our actions by criteria shared by all others in our community. Here we would be concerned not solely with truthfulness, but with rightness or wrongness in a moral sense: with whether we do justice, so to speak, to ourselves, whether our accounts adequately capture what it is for us to be human, or whether they reduce us to something less. The move to being socially responsible agents, would shift the classical starting point for any sort of theoretical account of things, first from thought to action, and then from an egocentric to a social standpoint — a shift in standpoint, from one in scholarly reflection to one in everyday practices.
Here's the beginning bit of the new writing that I'm doing... I think its going to be a short boo... more Here's the beginning bit of the new writing that I'm doing... I think its going to be a short book... but the major point in the bit I'm posting here, is that we cannot start our inquiries with theories, models, or principles ... with reflections on the ways we already make sense of ‘things’.... like Heidegger, I want to distinguish between ‘big B’ Being and ‘little b’ beings, and to point out that we continually ignore the original openness and unfinishedness of overall world processes, and continually act as if all ‘things’ have already been determined and are simply awaiting our discovery of them... instead, we must start with where we are now, with our usually, unnoticed, taken-for-granted, background ways of thinking and talking, and the ways in which they pick out for notice certain dynamic stabilities in the overall flow of activities within we are immersed and have our being... it is really strange to say it, but our spontaneous, unconsidered ways of talking are much more basic than we have ever thought... Aristotle said it, Heraclitus said it (listen to the Logos), Vico said it, Heidegger said it, Gadamer says it, Wittgenstein says it... but we too often think that we can just think afresh, and lead everyone else to think in the new ways that we, as individual intellectuals, think is best... what arrogance... switching to this new starting point in the Logos, in our everyday, spontaneously responsive ways of speaking, shifts the whole ‘centre of gravity’ of social inquiry away from the general and eternal, to the particular and practical, to the situated and timely, and to the need, always, to consider the overall human cost of our attempts to better ourselves.
“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For... more “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern” (William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1793).
“... the mass dehumanization which characterizes our time, the simplification of sensibility, hom... more “... the mass dehumanization which characterizes our time, the simplification of sensibility, homogenisation of experience, attenuation of the capacity for experience [currently at work in our societies] continues apace. Of all fields in the community of scholarship, it should be psychology which combats this trend. Instead, we have played no small role in augmenting and supporting it” (Koch, 1964, p.37).
I want just to move around inside the world of human possibilities, and to explore a number of di... more I want just to move around inside the world of human possibilities, and to explore a number of different examples of communication difficulties in which people experience, i.e., sense, a certain anxiety — to do with anticipating a damage to themselves caused by other people’s responses to them — that leads them, literally, to shy away from making the effort to communicate. For communicating with others is not done easily; it requires labour on our part to ‘shape’ our expressions to fit both our own needs, and the requirements of our circumstances. Indeed, opening our mouths to speak in public is not easy for any of us. How will we be judged; how will we be made to feel by how others respond (or not) to us? Our very being-in-the-world is at stake.
Let me say, right from the start, that what I have to say may seem very strange to a University a... more Let me say, right from the start, that what I have to say may seem very strange to a University audience. For the last 15 years or so, I have gradually been trying to ‘cure’ myself of being an academic, concerned with trying first to justify my claims in within the terms of an academic discipline of some kind – psychology, communication, education, philosophy, or what ever – with the idea that later, once justified, I could later apply them our in the world of everyday life. I now think that there are good reasons for why that kind of approach can never succeed – and at some point today, I’ll try to give those good reasons, but to try to give them now would be to imprison myself once again in the very prison I want to avoid. Instead of fellow academics, I have instead begun to orient myself toward the worries and concerns of practitioners, of everyday people who have to think ‘in the moment’, while ‘in motion’, both from within the midst of complexity, and in relation to never before encountered, ‘first-time’, unique events.
As soon as I begin an interchange of looks with another person, and I sense them as looking towar... more As soon as I begin an interchange of looks with another person, and I sense them as looking toward me in a certain way (as they see me looking toward them in a particular way too), a little ethical and political world is created between us. We each look toward each other expectantly, with anticipations, some shared some not, arising from what we have already lived through so far in our lives with all the others around us. Indeed, to put the point more generally, in any living contact between any two or more human beings, in the meetings between us, at least two things of importance occur: (1) Yet another form of life emerges between us, a collective or shared form of life with its own unique character and its own unique world, in whose terms, for the duration of our meeting, we can mean things to each other. But also, within this world, (2) we are ‘present’ to each other as who are, at least to a minimal extent, we can ‘see into’ each others ‘inner lives’ – hence, if it is a stranger with whom we have become involved, we quickly look away again, lest we reveal too much of ourselves unnecessarily. In our living contacts with an other or otherness, then, our mere surroundings are transformed into ‘a world’, or at least, into a partially shared world that we sense ourselves as being in along with the others and othernesses around us. And besides having an ethics and politics to it – besides our having expectations within it as to how the others around us should treat us and are likely to treat us – our partially shared world has, we feel, a unique culture to it.
All our higher mental functions are mediated processes, says Vygotsky (1986), and signs are the b... more All our higher mental functions are mediated processes, says Vygotsky (1986), and signs are the basic means used to master and direct them. But how can this be if our words and other signs work only in a purely representational, ‘picturing’ fashion, for they still need interpreting as to their meaning? The ‘inner observation’ problem remains unsolved. Our significant expressions must also work on us in another way: by the living expressions of others producing spontaneous bodily reactions from us. Thus the relation between thought and language is not to be found in patterns discoverable in transcripts of already spoken words, but in the dynamic influences exerted by our words in their speaking. Vygotsky (1986) speaks of our utterances as having an affective-volitional intonation in their voicing, while Bakhtin (1993) talks of them as having an emotional-volitional tone. This means, as I will elaborate in my talk, that not only it is possible to possess a transitional understanding of ‘where’ at any one moment we are placed in relation to another person’s expressions, but to possess also at that moment an action guiding anticipation of the range of next ‘moves’ they may make. Thus, as I see it then, thinking and consciousness is a socially responsive elaboration of our animal sensitivities to, and awareness of, events occurring in our relations to the others and othernesses in our surroundings.
“Every new object, well contemplated, opens up a new organ of perception in us” — Goethe
‘Withne... more “Every new object, well contemplated, opens up a new organ of perception in us” — Goethe
‘Withness’-thinking is the kind of thinking we require in dealing with the unique people and unique difficulties we meet in our everyday lives. It is not a new and special kind of thinking that requires special training to learn. We in fact already do it. It is the kind of thinking we employ everyday when someone says to us – from in the middle of our doing something with them – “Well, I don’t see how you can do that! And we reply say to them, to them, “Simple, like this,” and show them how by our own example, or say to them, “Well, look at it this way,” and go on to give them a verbal image or picture of some kind – and they say, “Oh, I see,” and now go on to act with either the example of our own action in mind, or with the image we’ve given them in mind, to guide them. Even when we have to work in more abstract terms, doing calculations, say, even here we work-with, think-with, certain basic, taken-for-granted, hemeneutically-structured understandings to guide us.
“When we conceptualize, we cut out and fix, and exclude everything but what we have fixed. A conc... more “When we conceptualize, we cut out and fix, and exclude everything but what we have fixed. A concept means a that-and-no-other. Conceptually, time excludes space; motion and rest exclude each other; approach excludes contact; presence excludes absence; unity excludes plurality; independence excludes relativity; 'mine' excludes 'yours'; this connexion excludes that connexion — and so on indefinitely; whereas in the real concrete sensible flux of life experiences compenetrate each other so that it is not easy to know just what is excluded and what not” (James, 1909/1996, p.254).
“If man is to find his way once again into the nearness of [big B] Being he must first learn to exist in the nameless” (Heidegger, 1977, p.198).
What kind of expressions, what kind of utterances, can produce, as Wittgenstein (1953) puts it, “... more What kind of expressions, what kind of utterances, can produce, as Wittgenstein (1953) puts it, “just that understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections’” (no.122)? – where by ‘seeing’ here, I take him to be meaning just that kind of immediate, perceptual ‘getting it’ as in my chess example – a kind of knowing from direct acquaintance, got by having lived in a sphere or arena of activity for a period of time, that does not involve having ‘to work out’ anything, cognitively. It is this issue of saying to show, of speaking with people in such a way that they come to realize how to do something that previously they had not only not previously known how to do, but it had not even occurred to them that this was something that they could do, that I want to explore here today.
Over the last 15 years or so, my major interest has been in trying to spell out in some detail, w... more Over the last 15 years or so, my major interest has been in trying to spell out in some detail, what life is like for us from within the “interactive moment,” what it is like for us to be acting dialogically, to be reacting in a spontaneous and bodily way to the expressive-responsive activities of the others and othernesses around us. Today, however, I want to focus on just one aspect of our lives within such dialogical involvements: what is life like for us as speaker-actors within them? What is going on inside us as speaker-actors within the moment of speaking and acting? How might we chart or map the ‘inner movements’ occurring within us as we give ‘shape’ to the contributions we make to the activities in which we are participating?
Currently we are worried that somehow trust between both individuals and groups is eroding. Hence... more Currently we are worried that somehow trust between both individuals and groups is eroding. Hence our feeling that, if we studied it more, if we researched into its nature further, then we might be able to do something about our predicament, for it is our failure to grasp its true nature that prevents us from acting correctly - or at least, this is what we feel the case to be. There is something deeply wrong with approaching problems in this sphere in this ‘problem solving’ way. For problems to do with the nature and existence of trust are to do with the very structure of our relations to each other, and the problem-solving approach forgets the prior necessity for all those proposing such concepts or theories to be participants in the same cultural community, or (to use some expressions of Wittgenstein’s, 1953), participants in the same language-game along with its interwoven form of life.
“Though he was trained both to develop such models [of his country’s economy] and to evaluate the... more “Though he was trained both to develop such models [of his country’s economy] and to evaluate the models others developed, he [Fernando Flores] seldom found time to do this work. Instead, he was constantly talking: he explained this and that, to that and this person, put person A in touch with person B, held press conferences, and so forth... Because he was sensitive to [this] anomaly [i.e., to the fact that his work was not producing any abstract or concrete thing but that he was working nonetheless], it lead him to take a course on the theory of speech acts, and in that course he found the key to the anomaly... He saw that work no longer made sense as the craftsmanship of writing this or that sentence... but that currently his work was becoming a matter of coordinating human activity - opening up conversations about one thing or another to produce a binding promise to perform an act” (Spinosa, Flores and Dreyfus, 1997, pp.45-46).
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“... philosophy ought only to be written as a poetic composition” (Wittgenstein, 1980, p.24).
“The way music speaks. Do not forget that a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information” (Wittgenstein, 1981, no.160).
‘Withness’-thinking is the kind of thinking we require in dealing with the unique people and unique difficulties we meet in our everyday lives. It is not a new and special kind of thinking that requires special training to learn. We in fact already do it. It is the kind of thinking we employ everyday when someone says to us – from in the middle of our doing something with them – “Well, I don’t see how you can do that! And we reply say to them, to them, “Simple, like this,” and show them how by our own example, or say to them, “Well, look at it this way,” and go on to give them a verbal image or picture of some kind – and they say, “Oh, I see,” and now go on to act with either the example of our own action in mind, or with the image we’ve given them in mind, to guide them. Even when we have to work in more abstract terms, doing calculations, say, even here we work-with, think-with, certain basic, taken-for-granted, hemeneutically-structured understandings to guide us.
“If man is to find his way once again into the nearness of [big B] Being he must first learn to exist in the nameless” (Heidegger, 1977, p.198).
like for us from within the “interactive moment,” what it is like for us to be acting dialogically, to be
reacting in a spontaneous and bodily way to the expressive-responsive activities of the others and
othernesses around us. Today, however, I want to focus on just one aspect of our lives within such
dialogical involvements: what is life like for us as speaker-actors within them? What is going on inside us
as speaker-actors within the moment of speaking and acting? How might we chart or map the ‘inner
movements’ occurring within us as we give ‘shape’ to the contributions we make to the activities in which
we are participating?