john shotter Bevægelige verdener Prospektive begreber til situerede sociale undersøgelser Forlaget Mindspace Doorways into a New ‘Fluid’ Philosophy of Communication: A compendium of prospective descriptive concepts for use in the art of situated social inquiries John Shotter “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). May 2014 Publishers foreword Moving worlds by John Shotter is written under the working title Doors. It is a title that indicates that you can enter Shotter’s work and thinking through many doors. And that Shotter’s own work constantly opens new doors and is itself in unceasing motion. By having contributors in the book that describes how their work has been inspired by his work, or by how they perceive his thoughts and concepts to think with, or to see with, to notice and attend to what otherwise might be ignored in looking at events solely through [the narrow chinks of] a particular lens, or perspective, theory or model. Each different way of withness-looking or thinking can open a door into an unending plethora of new worlds — and it is in this way that Doors relates to Shotter’s initial quote by William Blake on the doors of perception: “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). But first and foremost doors identifies that here is a practical reference book — a lexical dictionary — doors we can enter when we in language examine the meaning of the very same language, and are led to its use in our always moving social circumstances. Dictionary must be understood in this context in Wittgenstein's spirit. Not as a book of words with fixed meanings, but as a dictionary of moving concepts whose meaning is their use. Words change meaning and new meanings arise constantly. The concepts in this dictionary are both unfinished and moving. They can help us get an eye for the social scene they and we play on, and thus on our common maneuvers. Like Wittgenstein's students in the 1920s when he worked as a teacher, who were sent out to make their own collections of word-usage, you are invited as a reader also to respond and to note how you are moved by words-in-their-use and also how others are moved by them. In moving from aboutness to withness thinking, we move from seeing and thinking through the "narrow chinks of our cavern," to seeing and thinking in relation to, or by comparison with a (prospective) concept as a kind of 'orientational instrument' or 'compass', or 'sextant'. CONTENTS 1. Introduction: Our real need: not explanations but orientation 2. In the beginning: what if all is in flux? 3. The Primacy of our Engaged Involvements in ‘Worlds’ of Our Own Selecting 4. A book of fragments? – vistas, glimpses, aspects in the exploration of a landscape 5. Bringing ‘up in the air’ talk down onto the ground of our everyday lives 6. Living our talk – talking it like we walk it 7. Working on ourselves and on what we expect of ‘things’ 8. The unfathomable depth of the revolution needed XX) Accounts and accountability ............................................................................... XX) Action guiding anticipations ............................................................................... XX) Agential Realism........................................................................................................ XX) Attitudes, agency and orientation ..................................................................... XX) Background ................................................................................................................ XX) Cartesianism .............................................................................................................. XX) Coming to know how to go on ............................................................................ XX) Consciousness ............................................................................................................ XX) Embodiment: needs vs. wants ............................................................................. XX) Emergence ................................................................................................................... XX) First language learning............................................................................................ XX) From after to before the fact thinking.............................................................. XX) Having a voice............................................................................................................. XX) Joint action and the dialogical.............................................................................. XX) Knowing of the third kind...................................................................................... XX) Living moments and noticings............................................................................. XX) Living movement and expression....................................................................... XX) Meetings......................................................................................................................... XX) Moments of common reference............................................................................ XX) Musicality....................................................................................................................... XX) Occasioning................................................................................................................... XX) Orchestration .............................................................................................................. XX) Orientational difficulties......................................................................................... XX) Performative understandings .............................................................................. XX) Phronesis ...................................................................................................................... XX) Poised resourcefulness ........................................................................................... XX) Practical hermeneutics ........................................................................................... XX) Preparing activities ................................................................................................. XX) Present moment ........................................................................................................ XX) Prospective Concepts .............................................................................................. XX) Real presences and witnessable recognizabilities ..................................... XX) Relational attunements ......................................................................................... XX) Relational things ...................................................................................................... XX) Reversals ...................................................................................................................... XX) Scene setting .............................................................................................................. XX) Sensing similarities ................................................................................................. XX) Sensory topics ........................................................................................................... XX) Social ecology ............................................................................................................ XX) Spontaneous responsiveness .............................................................................. XX) Utterances, voicings, and speakings ................................................................ XX) Withness thinking .................................................................................................... XX) Wording our experiences ...................................................................................... Page 1 3 4 6 8 9 10 12 14 14 16 17 19 20 21 22 23 24 24 25 27 28 31 33 34 35 36 36 37 38 38 40 40 41 42 44 45 46 47 49 50 52 53 56 57 57 58 58 59 61 Introduction Our real need: not explanations but orientation “The preconceived idea of crystalline purity can only be removed by turning our whole examination around. (One might say: the axis of reference of our examination must be rotated, but about the fixed point of our real need.)” (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.108) 1. If our task is that of mounting inquiries relevant to overcoming some of the practical difficulties we face in the everyday living of our lives, then where should we begin? How should we begin? Currently, in almost every case, we take it for granted that if we are confused, it is because there is something that is hidden from us. Thus, if we are to overcome our perplexity, we feel that we need to explain the ‘logic’ of the cause-and-effect order that underlies or is behind appearances — a ‘logic’ we think of as having its own crystalline purity, and we begin to think about the nature of our difficulties in our intellectual reflections. We feel the need to begin in reflection. But what if our puzzlement is of a quite different kind; what if nothing at all is in fact hidden from us, but that what we lack is a capacity, a personal power (Harré, 1970; Shotter, 1974, 1984), to make sense in and of the appearances appearing around us, a capacity to understand the meaning of what we are currently experiencing, and how we should respond in relation to it? If, instead of assuming that we live in an already made world of particles of matter in motion (see entry on Cartesianism) that is hidden from us, and our task is that of coming to identify the forms or configurations they may take up, we assume that we live our lives immersed in an unending flow of intermingling strands or currents of unfolding activity — consisting in gyres, vortices, swirls, and other dynamic stabilities and turbulences of even greater complexity than those clearly active within all the great oceans of the earth. Then everything changes; we find ourselves continually immersed in an unfolding movement of activity, some of which we ourselves initiate, but much of which we find just happening to us. In such circumstances, instead of treating all the difficulties we face as problems needing solutions — as if they all like ‘brain teasers, such as: “Connect all of a 3×3 array of dots using only 4 lines,” that we need to ‘work out’ cognitively — immersed in such ‘fluid’ circumstances, our bewilderments are of a very different kind. They are much more like not yet knowing how to recognize a new acquaintance we have never met before, or of still finding the best way home when in a new city, or even more unremarkably, facing the task of grasping what a person means as they begin to speak to us. Yet, although these are all very familiar difficulties that we easily overcome, like St Augustine’s puzzle about “time” — “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know” — we often don’t find it easy, if asked, to account for how we managed to succeed in such achievements. We often begin by ‘theorizing’ and by trying to formulate a cause-andeffect ‘explanation’ of how we ‘must have’ acted in order to bring them off 2. Yet in all these cases, instead of facing the task of determining the nature of something unknown to us in terms of its orderly relations to what is already well known, we face a task of a quite different kind: that of resolving, i.e., clarifying, the nature of an at first, seemingly disorderly situation sufficiently to take a next step within it in a sure-footed manner, the task of becoming clear as to ‘where’, uniquely, we are ‘placed’, and the actual possibilities for acting that our current emplacement makes available to us. We begin as we do, by ‘theorizing’, because we still assume that we and our surroundings, and the ‘elements’ making up our surroundings, all exist as separate, self-contained entities, related to each other in terms of 1 All date only references from now on are to Wittgenstein’s works. 2 Indeed, we begin to offer what later I will call ‘after the fact’ accounts, to contrast with those needed, ‘before the fact’, that might be of help in ‘preparing’ us for such tasks. -1- a single, systematic, discoverable, but still hidden, order of connectedness. As Wittgenstein (1953) puts it, our difficulty has the form of “‘I don’t know my way about’” (no.123) — and our criterion of having resolved it, is our being able to “go on” (no.154) from within our experience it (see entry on Finding our way about). Thus in many of the bewilderments we face, our real need is not for explanations, but to gain an articulate awareness of ‘how we are placed’ within our current surrounding situation and the possibilities it makes available to us for the taking of our next step. Not, in other words, to solve problems, but to gain orientation. In other words, our task of how best to relate ourselves to the activities of the others and othernesses occurring around us, for almost more often than not, we need to act more in relation to what those activities are doing to and within us, than in terms of what we would like to do in relation to them. And in this task, we need to respond, not merely to their objective shape or form, but to the meanings of the events occurring around us. But we cannot do this merely by recognizing the word-forms used as being identical to ones already well-known to us and ‘fitting them into’ a generalized theoretical scheme; we need to understand their unique use in this particular, concrete context. And that entails, as we shall see, as a member of a social group, our coming to share with them (see entry on First Language Learning) an ability to anticipate, at least partially, how they are expected us to respond to their actions and utterances in the unique situations within which we now happen to find ourselves (Bakhtin, 1981, 1986). For if they could not arouse within us felt anticipations as to the possible next steps we might take in organizing an activity between us, coordinating our behaviour in with theirs would be impossible. This assumption of our immersion in an ongoing stream of experience (James, 1890) — in which we are subjected to experiences as much as we act as subjects — bears on a classical question about the nature of our perceptual abilities: (1) Do we perceive (are we subjected to) the meaning of things and events occurring in our surroundings in some direct, bodily manner; or (2) do we perceive them indirectly, as the result of a cognitive process in which we ‘work out’ their meaning from objective data we gather (as subjects) from our surroundings? Or, to put it differently: (1) Are the distinctive feelings or sensings aroused in us by the unique quality of the ongoing streams of activity within which we find ourselves immersed basic to our ways of making sense of surroundings; or (2) is our perception of things and objects more basic? As children react differentially to human expressions of joy and anger, friendliness and hostility before they react differentially to colours and other thing-characteristics (Koffka, 1921), it would seem to be the former. But this suggests that seemingly more complex judgments are made at an earlier age than apparently more simple ones — simpler, that is, if one holds to the classical image of people in which cognition is primary. We have assumed the primacy of cognition because, along with the ancient Greeks, to repeat, we have thought of appearances as being determined by things existing separately from ourselves, and fixed for all time, i.e., by timeless shapes and forms hidden behind them. But once we move into a fluid, flowing world in constant flux, instead of timeless forms, we need to focus on events which, because of their occurrence only as dynamic stabilities within a ceaseless stream of activity (within which we ourselves are also immersed), we will find as occurring just as much within us as around us, and furthermore, as coming into existence and passing out of again in many, many different ways. Thus, in such a constantly changing stream of experience of this, one aspect of our task of making sense of it, will that of determining which aspects of all the movements occurring within us are due to our own initiated activity, and which are due to activities beyond our control. Indeed, clearly, one aspect of our task here is that of determining which aspect of our experience can be counted as ‘outer’ or as ‘objective’ and ascribed or attributed to entities or objects out in space, and which can be counted as ‘inner’ or as ‘subjective’ and ascribed as feelings or sensings occurring within ourselves through time — and when confronted by a person it is open to us to determine this inner/outer, subjective/objective aspect of his or her behaviour similarly. The issue is, however, different in relation to other aspects of our experience. When attempting -2- to determine the characteristics of a material object it does not, so speak, answer back; it neither acts nor reacts. Thus, in this case, the categories of ‘outer’ perception can be made as determinate as we please (while our categories of ‘inner’ perception are idiosyncratic and irrelevant to all except ourselves). However, the characteristics of non-objects, other subjects, sources of expression, cannot be determined as one pleases, for they can and often do answer back. So there is an essential indeterminacy associated with categories of perception in these cases which can only be resolved by negotiation and agreement with the sources being investigated. Thus the essential difference between the processes involved in the perception of expression and the perception of things seems to do more with the way in which these categories are made determinate than anything to do with the perceptual process itself. The criteria of ‘inner’ perception involve negotiation and agreement with the source in a dialogical back-and-forth process (see entries below on Joint action and the dialogical and on Practical hermeneutics) in which we come to an understanding of their meanings sufficient for our practical purposes at that time. While those of ‘outer’ perception, at least in their objective paradigmatic form, seem to involve no such need for negotiation. In the beginning: what if all is in flux? In other words, what we experience as a bewildering circumstance, although quite unique, is still nonetheless at first indeterminate — we experience it as a boundaryless stream of flowing activity, that presents us, at each moment, paradoxically, with a qualitatively distinct indeterminacy. And if we are to get to know our way about within it we must not, in trying to solve it as a problem, turn away from it by seeking a rational schematism of one kind or another into which simply to fit it; we must go further into it. In other words, we can, perhaps surprisingly, find the resolution of our difficulty within the bewildering situation itself. Our difficulty stems, not from its real nature being hidden from us, but from our incapacity to recognize the resources available to us within it for our use in moving on from it. Indeed, we fail even to look for them there. This is connected, Wittgenstein (1981) believes, “with our wrongly expecting an explanation, whereas the solution to the difficulty is a description, if we give it the right place in our considerations. If we dwell upon it, and do not try to get beyond it” (no.314). Thus, as he sees it, we should begin from where we are, for we are already ‘in the place’ we need to be; there is no necessity to go elsewhere in search of a ‘solution’ — for the way to ‘go on’ can be found ‘there’. Yet, all the same, as a still unarticulated, bewildering, fluid circumstance, it still seems somewhat chaotic; it is difficult to know where to start. And: “If I am not quite sure how I should start a book,” says Wittgenstein (1980), “this is because I am still unclear about something. For I should like to start with the original data of philosophy, written and spoken sentences, with books as it were./ And here we come on the difficulty of ‘all is in flux’. Perhaps that is the very point at which to start” (p.8). “When you are philosophizing,” he added, “you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there” (p.65). This is because, the process of our coming to an understanding of a bewildering situation is not a matter of our simply jumping from being confused, to our having an understanding happen to us in a sudden flash of insight. It entails imaginative work: what we need to do in coming to an understanding is imaginatively to move around within the fields of both possible previous events and possible next steps, and it is our placement of a present event within the imaginative context that emerges from the relations among the experiences arising in the course of that imaginative work, that can in-form us of the meaning of that event — we can come to see or to hear or to otherwise sense in the occurrence of present events, the possibilities (or even sometimes the necessities) for just this or that next step. This imaginative work, thus, has a developmental trajectory to it, an unfolding, flowing movement from an initially, globally diffuse but nonetheless unique circumstance, to a more richly articulated set of intra-related, i.e., internally related, mutually dependent ‘parts’, or better, identifiable ‘regions’ within the still unfolding flow of activity. -3- In other words, we must begin the developmental process involved, as Wittgenstein suggests, not with an analysis, but from within the whole flowing stream of activity itself. And in so doing, rather than beginning ‘downstream’— from within the already differentially articulated ‘after the fact’ forms that have already emerged — if we are to take seriously the unique nature of each everyday circumstance we must cope with the different ‘before the fact’ possibilities they make available to us in the unfolding of that trajectory, then we must begin our inquiries into our everyday situations more ‘upstream’ — from within the diffuse, still undifferentiated flow of their activity (see entry on From after the fact to before the fact thinking). As Wittgenstein (1981) puts it: “What determines our judgment, our concepts and reactions, is not what one man is doing now, an individual action, but the whole hurly-burly of human actions, the background against which we see an action” (no.567) (see entries on Background and on Scene setting). So, if we can teach ourselves to start our inquiries by dwelling in and thus imaginatively moving around within each situation as it initially troubles us, then, as I hope to show below, in the middle of a revolution in our thinking at least, if not more, far reaching than the Copernican revolution in our conception of the universe, and of our relations to it and our place within it. For, although in that revolution human beings and their terrestrial habitat were displaced from the centre of the cosmic scheme of things – so that after it, we could no longer think of ourselves as occupying a unique and central place in God’s creation – in our reflections we still thought of ourselves as occupying a cosmos already made up of separate, discoverable and nameable things, and still in large part do so now. It is that behavioural assumption or performative understanding, that unquestioned way of acting in conducting our inquiries into what bewilders or confuses or disorients us – to refer to it variously – that I want to ‘go into’ more deeply. What we are concerned with here, then, is a new field of inquiry with its own subject matter and its own methods or tools of inquiry — what we might call “guiding resources” — for use in the course of, and in the situation of our inquiries, enabling us to ‘see’ openings available to us for taking possible next steps in innovating new developments in our current practices within those situations. The Primacy of our Engaged Involvements in ‘Worlds’ of Our Own Selecting “We must recognize the indeterminate as a positive phenomenon” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p.6). In the past, we have found it easy to assume with Aristotle, that our capacity for deliberative imagination and our ability to carry out resulting rationally formulated projects, are what separates us from all other animals. And to go on from this, to assume that the primary function of language is the transmission of information. But in making these assumptions, we have tended to assume that all is not in flux, and that The World in which we live is already an orderly place, whose order simply awaits our discovery of it. We have not, it seems to me, attributed sufficient importance to the fact that, as human beings, we do not live in any particular ecological niche, in any particular already structured world. We seem, so to speak, to be adapted to being unadapted. As Pico della Mirandola (1487/1965) suggested long ago — in “not being satisfied by the many assertions made by many concerning the outstandingness of human nature” — that “the best of workmen decided that that to which nothing of its very own could be given should be... the moulder and maker of thyself” (pp.3-5). What Pico brings to our attention here is, that as human beings, we live in intimate, living relations to the others and othernesses around us, relations within which, as wilful and responsive beings, as agents, we can select what to be responsive to in many, many different ways. And, as Gadamer (2000) points out with respect to the languages we speak, “language is not just one of man’s possessions in the world; rather, on it depends the fact that man has a world at all... language has no independent life apart from the world that comes to language within it... To have a world means to have an orientation towards it... The concept of world is thus opposed to the concept of environment, which all living beings in the world possess” (p.443). In becoming the user of a particular language, we learn much more than merely being able to transmit (and process) information in that language, we learn to live in a ‘world’ — a -4- ‘world’ with its own special contents and callings, its own special horizon and history. A language and its ‘world’ belong together, and the ‘world’ of the painter, is not the ‘world’ of the mathematician, or the ‘world’ of physicist the ‘world’ of the medic, and so on. Further, as a language using agent, we not only have the capacity to alter our perceptual inputs at will, i.e., to organize our engagements with ‘things’ in our surroundings in relation to our own ‘ends in view’, but we also have the capacity to bring others to ‘dwell in’ the ‘worlds’ we create, and to coordinate their actions in with ours in its terms. Indeed, it is not going too far to say that different social groups with their different languages live in different worlds, with different goals in life — as fathers and mothers, as sports people, as artists, as crafts people, as professionals of various kinds, as intellectuals, and so on — and in so doing, participants go out to meet events occurring around them with different expectations ‘at the ready’. In taking a different ‘point of view’ in relation to their surroundings to members of other social groups, they act differently in relation to them. In short, they are differently oriented. As living beings, we are thus not simple input-output mechanisms, but creatures of feeling and meaning, of sensing and sense-making, of articulating and differentiating, who respond to events, both in our surroundings and within ourselves, not in a simple cause-and-effect fashion, but in terms of how the differences these events make in our lives make differences that matter to us. In our everyday lives, we are always in one kind of movement or another, in at least three senses of the word ‘in’. Besides ourselves moving around in space, and/or finding ourselves immersed in surroundings in movement, as living beings, we can also be sensed as moving within ourselves, as displaying expressive movements, even when staying steadfastly in one place. We breath, we make noises, wave our limbs about, make facial expressions, exhibit expressive movements that have distinctive, almost musical, time-courses to them. And in doing so, we can display short-term expressive movements — smiles, frowns, gestures, vocalizations, etc. — expressions of a ‘thou’, of our own ‘inner’ selves, of our own living identity, or more long term ‘inner’ movements, i.e., of our aging, of our intellectual and/or emotional development. Indeed, like all such living, organic unities, we endure through a whole continuous, sequential life process: A process that begins with our initial conception (in a two-being interaction); that leads to our birth (as an individual being); then on to our growth to maturity (in becoming an autonomous personality); and finally to our death. Yet, in all this movement, there is a kind of developmental continuity at work in such a way that — although we, and all our ‘participant parts’, are always ‘on the way’ to becoming more than what we and they already are — all the changes involved are what we might call identity preserving changes. So, although our special, living nature cannot be captured in a timeless, ‘everything-present-together’, spatial structure or a single order of logical connectedness. However, because there is a distinctive ‘inner dynamic’ to living wholes not manifested in dead, mechanical assemblages — in that the earlier phases of an activity are indicative of at least the style of what is to come later — we can come to respond to their activities in an anticipatory fashion (see entries on Living movement and expression). But even more than all this, living entities also imply their surroundings, so to speak; in their very nature, they come into existence ready to grow into their own appropriate environment, or Umwelt (von Uexkull, 1957), and to come to embody within themselves a form of life that is ‘fitted into it’ in some way. “The first principle of Umwelt theory: all animals, from the simplest to the most complex, are fitted into their unique worlds with equal completeness. A simple world corresponds to a simple animal, a wellarticulated world to a complex one” (p.11). But here we must be careful, for although many animals are social and clearly communicate with one another in many different ways, none have their world determined for them by how they communicate, by their use of language. In ignoring the importance of our relations to our surroundings, it is very easy for us to think that our foremost capacity is our capacity for reflective thought, to think that because no other animals seem able to withdraw from the world as we can, and to think reflectively about our difficulties in life, that this is what makes us so special. As a consequence, Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum — I think, therefore I am — has set the scene for our thought about ourselves for some very long time now. -5- Our ability to form theories and to begin to investigate aspects of our surroundings in their terms is truly wonderful, and we must not discount it. Yet, it is clear, I think, that that is not the primary ability that sets us apart from other animals. It emerges out of and is an aspect of a deeper and much more amazing ability, an ability to allow ourselves to become so involved, so relationally or dialogically engaged with an other or otherness in our surroundings, in many, many different living relations of a distinctive kind to it, we can come, so to speak, imaginatively to ‘see into’ its inner life — and it is this ability that sets us apart from all other animals. While we can come to an understanding of a dead state of affairs in terms of objective, explanatory theories representing the sequence of past events supposed to have caused its occurrence, a quite different form of engaged, responsive understanding becomes available to us with living beings. They can call out spontaneous reactions from us in a way that is quite impossible for dead forms. It is this that makes this kind of understanding so very different from our theoretical or rational understandings. Such understandings first ‘show up’, of course, as performative understandings (see entry on Performative Understandings), both in our observations of other people’s activities as performances with a particular ‘time-shape’ to them, and in our experiences as uniquely distinctive movements of feeling. Thus our task — if we are to explore how better, as Wittgenstein (1953) puts it, “know [our] way about” (no.123) within our own, humanly constructed ‘worlds’, and to know to “go on” (no.153) without misleading ourselves, i.e., to be sure-footed in taking our next steps — then a different kind of intellectual effort from rational reflection is needed. Wittgenstein (1953) calls them “grammatical investigations,” in what follows below, I have called it “imaginative work.” Whatever we call it, what is involved is, so to speak, interrogating ourselves as to what in detail was ‘going on’, both within us and around us, when we happened to do and/or to say something of particular interest to us in our inquiries; for clearly, there were reasons in the present circumstances for us acting as we did. My aim in all that follows, then, is the Wittgensteinian (1953) one of coming to “a clear view of our use of words” (no.122). For in our actual, intimate involvements with the others and othernesses around us in our everyday ‘worlds’ — unlike in our rationally structured reflections — the words we use in relation to the ‘things’ we experience as occurring on these worlds, come to us spontaneously, for ‘worlds’ and ‘their wordings’ are learnt in intimate relation to each other. Thus, as Wittgenstein (1953) puts it: “One might also give the name ‘philosophy’ to what is possible before all new discoveries and inventions” (no.126). “The work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose” (no.126) “If there has to be anything ‘behind the utterance of the formula’ it is particular circumstances, which justify me in saying I can go on — when the formula occurs to me” (no.154). It is a description that does justice to the particular circumstances in place at the time of a person acting that we need, if we are to ‘enter into’ their world and to understand their reasons for their actions. What it is within them that leads them to organize their relations to their surroundings in the particular manner that they do? A book of fragments? – vistas, glimpses, aspects in the exploration of a landscape The comment above, that these skills cannot be taught according to a classroom curriculum, is connected with why this book is not written as an argument, nor as a narrative with a step-by-step progressive structure, nor as a systematic theoretical treatise trying to explain (by giving cause-and-effect-reasons) how our current, specific ways of acting in our investigations came into being, and why they are, not so much mistaken, as misleading. As I intimated above, the task is one of taking capacities that we already possess, naturally, and through the use of language inter-, or better, intra-twined activities, try to help readers organize these capacities within themselves, into personal powers. Thus, fundamentally influenced by, among many others, Wittgenstein’s (1953) methods for, so to speak, bringing into rational visibility what ‘everyone knows’ but usually goes ‘without saying’, I want to articulate a fragmentary set of ‘linguistic tools’ that might be of use to us in this task of bringing into the foreground what is usually -6- left in the background 3 to our thinking and acting – our unquestioned attitudes, our behavioural assumptions, the performative understandings implicit in shaping what we look to see in our surrounds, and how, consequently, we come to expect our actions will achieve certain results. Thus it has the form more of a lexicon, of a specialized dictionary containing a vocabulary of terms with at least following three, if not many more, major functions: 1) they are, in Wittgenstein’s (1953) sense, “reminders” (no.127) 4, whose function is simply to remind us, in this, that, or some other particular sensed circumstance, to search for similar experiences within ourselves – to see whether we can “resonate” 5 to it or not and thus respond to it in a similar fashion – an exploration that we might otherwise forget to do 6; but 2) besides sending us back into past experiences, they can also send us out into the present moment, out into the circumstances around us with expectations as what to look for there, to draw our attention to events, and to instruct us in “seeing connections” (no.122) within them, that we might otherwise miss. 3) Another major method of Wittgenstein’s (1953) is, so to speak, to ‘make trouble’, to create ‘deconstructive moments’ within our everyday, routine practices: by the use, sometimes, of unexpected comparisons, unusual contrasts, seemingly stupid questions, the presentation of an ‘out of the ordinary’ circumstance, we can be brought up against a felt-not-rightness in relation to some of our otherwise reflectively inscrutable behavioural assumptions 7. For what is crucial to all his investigations, to use a phrase of William James (1890), is our “acutely discriminative sense” (p.253) of the ‘where-next’ tendencies that an utterance or action, of our own or another, can arouse in us in our everyday affairs – and whether it is ‘pointing’ us toward a real possibility in that situation or not, i.e., misleading us. But how can a set of worded fragments be of any help to us? Well, just as in listening to someone portraying the details of a scene as they sequentially utter a flowing stream of words, as Gadamer (2000) outlines, “we accept the fact that the subject [the scene] presents different aspects of itself at different times or from different standpoints, [and we also] accept the fact that these aspects do not simply cancel one another out as [the account] proceeds, but are like mutually exclusive conditions that exist by themselves and combine only in us” (p.284). In other words, we come to an understanding within a backand-forth, part-whole/whole-part flow of hermeneutical activity, in which an initial global, but unique whole, is gradually verbally articulated into an increasingly more precisely detailed whole — where the identifiable ‘regions’ into which it is, or can be, articulated are not, so to speak, distinctions of existence, but meaningful distinctions to do with the role played by the region in constituting the whole. Thus it is that Wittgenstein (1980) remarks: “Anything your reader can do for himself leave it to him” (p.77). For although “language presents us with [the results of our inquiries] in countless fragments” (p.78), to the extent that the results are all aspects of the same, holistic, landscape of possibilities of language use, they can combine within us to provide us with a unitary (but albeit, still unfinished) sense of that landscape. The idea for the ‘architecture’ of this book of this kind came from my reading of Raymond Williams’ important book, Keywords, of 1976. He began his interest in inquiring into the different uses to which different social groups put certain crucial words when — in talking with a friend on coming out of the army after the second world war — he and his friend found themselves in a new and strange world. 3 “Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning” (1980, p.16). 4 “We feel as if we had to penetrate phenomena: our investigation, however, is directed not towards phenomena, but, as one might say, towards the ‘possibilities’ of phenomena. We remind ourselves, that is to say, of the kind of statement that we make about phenomena” (1953, no.90). For instance, we know that our friends are likely to be hurt by our criticisms, unless we are carefully diplomatic in their utterance, or that our children will be encouraged by our smiles and kind words. 5 About a work of art, Wittgenstein (1980) remarked: “You could say... that in so far as people understand it, they ‘resonate’ in harmony with it, respond to it. You might say: the work of art does not aim to convey something else, just itself” (p.58). 6 Specific deviations from such resonances are, of course, also of great importance in our sensing the uniqueness in our current experiences. 7 “It is only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems” (1980, p.75). -7- Although everyone around them was still speaking English, they still felt the need to say to each other: “The fact is, they just don’t speak the same language.” The people around them seemed to be ‘seeing’ different ‘things’, making different ‘connections’ between them, expecting different next steps from each other. And this is also my motivational starting point: Very little of what I hear many people around me saying — politicians, social policy experts, health-care and education planners, social scientists, neurocognitive-scientists, economists — makes any kind of human sense to me anymore. I cannot, so to speak, find myself in their remarks. In a money-measured world, little imaginative work seems to go into thinking-through the human consequences — the expected responses of ordinary, everyday people to having (suddenly, in many instances) to re-orient themselves to living in changed circumstances not of their own making (never mind their own choosing) — in the authoritarian implementation of such plans. But why? Is it really the case that: In the beginning was the word? Must we begin with verbal expressions of our ‘ideas’, of our ‘theories’? Or is it the case that: In the beginning was the deed (Goethe, Faust, Part I In the Study)? “The origin and primitive form of the language game is a reaction; only from this can more complicated forms develop. Language — I want to say — is a refinement, ‘in the beginning was the deed’” (1980, p.31). Immersed within the whole hurly-burly, we must begin, not with our words, our sayings, but with our responses, our living, bodily responsiveness to things happening to us in our surroundings, responses that are expressive to the others around of our feelings — of surprise, interest, pain, joy, bewilderment, confidence, suspicion, etc., etc. Bringing ‘up in the air’ talk down onto the ground of our everyday lives “Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it” (1953, no.124). So, what is at work in such situations where we recognize perfectly well the words being said to us, when we understand what all the words mean, but we simply don’t find their words ‘touching’ us or ‘moving’ us in any way — when we feel that they are ‘living on a different planet’ from us? In my experience, this is a common happening. We listen to experts, often called “analysts,” as they conduct their analyses, and we experience their assessments as issuing from a place ‘over there’, at a distance from us — from a ‘somewhere’ place that we have never lived in. We nod our heads; what they say sounds coherent; it makes intellectual sense to us; it gives us the feeling that there is a still hidden something, somewhere, that it refers to; but nothing in our lives changes. Out in the real world, for us, it’s ‘business as usual’. And activities that make no sense to us continue to occur — the gross inequalities between people, the exploitation of the environment, the demeaning contempt for ordinary people, ‘investment’ banking conducted only for the short-term personal profit of bankers, the gradual replacement of all living human values 8 simply by money values — all contributing to the growth of an explosive potential of anger and resentment that, one day, we feel, will/must reach ignition point. Surely they can see, can sense, the consequences of their actions for us — can’t they? A dull, nagging apprehension saps our joy in life. We can’t go on like this — can we? Their words do not arouse any sense of previously unforeseen possibilities of a better future within us. There is, I think, something very wrong with what we currently take to be the relation of people’s words to or with their worlds, and the relation of their/our words to or with their/our actions. For it is far too easy for us to think that our language is a neutral medium for describing the world, the one single, actual world, and expressing our own individual thoughts about it, and thus consequently, it is far too easy to think that language – our eloquent speaking of ‘the Truth’ – is all important. So important that we 8 In short, per impossible, the replacement of everything ‘relational’ by separate, ‘countable’ things. -8- cannot proceed to act until we have debated or deliberated amongst (or within) ourselves, in words, in language, as to what the Truth is, if we are to decide how best to act in relation to it. But what if our sense of ourselves, of our world, and our sense of the working of words in our ways of talking, are all intertwined or entangled in such a way, that we and they all come to life for us at the same time? What if the world as it is for us in our talk of it – which is shaped by the embodied attitudes which we go out towards it our looking and acting towards it – only gradually emerges as such from within our involvement in a whole intermingling amalgam of different (and similar) everyday activities and practices? Then as these activities and practices change, so will our embodied ways of responding to events in our surroundings change – and like Raymond Williams and his friend, we can find ourselves living in a strange new world without our quite knowing how it has come about. It is too easy to forget that most of what we do, most of what we say, we just do and say, spontaneously, without deliberating in advance as to its appropriateness. Metaphorically, in much of what we do, we simply do what we are ‘called upon’ to do by our circumstances, and express ourselves accordingly. If it really is the case that “in the beginning was the deed” (... im Anfang war die Tat), not the Word, then although it seems obvious to us that we can plan our actions ahead of time by verbally setting out a step-by-step course of action to follow, our plan (usually written rather than simply spoken) will, inevitably, be deficient. For as such, as the articulation merely of an intention, excluded from it are all the factors outside the words used that can effect their meaning – whether they are being expressed in an intimate conversation with close friends, or publicly to an audience of listeners unknown to the speaker, whether we speaking on impulse, on careful consideration, or as part of an obligatory ritual, whether we are teaching a pupil, giving a stranger information, or reminding someone of something they should already know, and so on, and so on. These features of our talk are expressed in our tone of voice, our word choice, our emphases, pauses, facial expressions, hand gestures, etc., etc. But even more than this, what is also crucially excluded/ignored, are the surrounding influences that will be at work in shaping our actions as they try to realize our planned intentions. As Voloshinov (1986) makes clear: “The understanding of any sign, whether inner or outer, occurs inextricably tied in with the situation in which the sign is implemented... It is always a social situation. Orientation in one's own soul (introspection) is in actuality inseparable from orientation in the particular social situation in which the experience occurs... Complete disregard of social orientation leads to a complete extinguishment of experience...” (p.37). Clearly, our real life utterances are immeasurably more complex and dynamic things than they appear when considered merely as a sequence of meaningful words. Living our talk – talking it like we walk it “The truth can be spoken only by someone who is already at home in it” (1980, p.35). Truth, it would seem, is something that has to be expressed from within our living of it; it has to be lived before it can be spoken. And this is the kind of revolution that is needed: not a revolution in the thoughts or theories we espouse, prior to our acting upon them. Far from it. It is in our living, in the unquestioned ways of talking and acting we adopt — a revolution in what I have called above the behavioural assumptions or performative understandings we exhibit in our inquiries into everyday human circumstances in which we find ourselves bewildered — that is needed. But it hasn’t happened yet. And it cannot happen as long as we continue to assume, while ‘in the thick’ or ‘in the midst’ of a confusing everyday situation, that that cannot be the very point at which, and in which, we must start our inquiries. As soon as we say to ourselves: “Oh, it’s far too confusing to start here, and turn away from it, and try to start by thinking about it,” then we are lost, literally. We lose contact with where we are in order to relocate ourselves in a place in general, nowhere in particular. In vacating the very surroundings giving rise to the uniquely detailed nature of our confusion, and by turning, intellectually, to ‘explain’ it in terms -9- of a general theory, we are abandoning the practical task of resolving how to act in it in a uniquely fitting way. But more than that: as thinkers growing up in the West, when we turn to reflect on the world within which we live, we do not, as became clear above, reflect on it as it actually is for us in our daily affairs. We reflect on it in terms of various traditional behavioural assumptions (performative understandings) about its basic nature. We take it as obvious, that it is a place full of already existing, separate, nameable things which, when we look into them further, i.e., conduct an ‘analysis’, they seem to be structures of even more basic components. Indeed, as we continue our analyses, we assume we will find structures of a (possibly) limited number of even smaller, basic (‘atomic’, i.e., indivisible) entities from which everything must be/can be constructed 9. We haven’t discovered them all yet, but one day we will, and the search continues. But is reflection as such adequate to the task we face? For reflection is re-flective, a bending back. It comes ‘after the fact’ to look back at something that was, for us, already in existence. Thus in our reflections, we already prejudge what we will find: each of us, as individual, subjective minds, will find a world of already existing, objective things, available for appreciation as such in relation to, we say, our own ‘point of view’. We talk of adopting a ‘perspective’ towards them, of seeing them in terms of an orderly arrangement of some kind. And we will then turn to the task of ‘picturing’ in words what we can ‘see’ our reflections. And, then, to the extent that what we see can be ‘analysed’ into a set of quite specific and nameable elements – and we can gather evidence in experiments that these ‘elements’ when brought to inter-act in certain ways produce predictable results – we will make (misleading) claims that these ‘elements’ are in fact basic to the realities within which we live our lives. Reflection is thus a secondary process which comes after our first acquaintance with things. But is this – can this? – actually be so? We talk of ‘seeing’, of ‘speaking’, of ‘thinking’ even, of ‘mind’, ‘consciousness’, ‘perception’, and ‘motivation’, and so on, as if all these ‘things’ or ‘processes’ are separate things that can be named and treated as shared ‘topics’ (topoi~places) of research to which all investigators can make a contribution. For, after all, in talking like this we are all talking about the same things, aren’t we? But what if, instead of our talk coming first, we were to ‘look into’ our talk entwined acting, ‘into’ our talk entwined seeing, and ‘into’ talk entwined thinking – ‘into’ the felt, detailed, dynamical sensings unfolding/emerging in the relational intertwining of our outgoing exploratory activities towards our surroundings and their incoming results – and after that, into what it is in these sensings that suggests to us the application certain particular words to them rather than others? Then we would find the opposite state of affairs. Rather than a word always naming ‘the same things’, we would find that each of the words we use here – seeing, thinking, mind, consciousness, etc. – had countless different uses, different uses in different particular situations. We sometimes express our everyday awareness of this by remarking that, if we want to say something in a way that appears to be true or real, then “we need to talk the talk and walk the walk” – although it might be better to say, “talk it like you walk it” — let your talk be guided by your lived experience, for you must “let the use of words teach you their meaning,” says Wittgenstein (1953, p.220). We need to learn to think while walking around within our surroundings, not while standing still within them. “Think of the law of identity, ‘a = a’," Wittgenstein (1965) asks us to imagine, “and of how we sometimes try hard to get hold of its sense, to visualize it, by looking at an object and repeating to ourselves such a sentence as ‘This tree is the same thing as this tree’. The gestures and images by which I apparently give this sentence sense are very similar to those which I use in the case of ‘Only this is really seen’. (To get clear about philosophical problems, it is useful to become conscious of the apparently 9 Unless, that is, you are thinking of ‘fractal’ structures, in which complexity increases as scale decreases – although fractals are still made up of separable elements, not dependent upon their context for their character. -10- unimportant details of the particular situation in which we are inclined to make a certain metaphysical assertion. Thus we may be tempted to say ‘Only this is really seen’ when we stare at unchanging surroundings, whereas we may not at all be tempted to say this when we look about us while walking.)” (p.66). Our practical task in walking around in the world is not simply to see what is around us – the see objects – it is to get oriented, to know where are and what possible ways forward are available to us for our next steps. No wonder Wittgenstein (1953) remarks: “...it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language-game” (1969, no.204). Working on ourselves and on what we expect of ‘things’ “Working in philosophy – like work in architecture in many respects – is really more a working on oneself... On one’s way of seeing things. (And what one expects of them.) (1980, p.16). What, then, do we have to do if we are to successfully mount inquiries aimed at overcoming some of the practical difficulties we face in the everyday living of our lives together? As we have seen, if it is not a matter of discovering something hidden from us, but of our lacking the powers required to make sense in and of the appearances arrayed before us, then we need to understand how we might acquire these powers, these personal powers (Shotter, 1974) — they are closely allied, as we have seen, not simply to our learning language, but to our learning many very different uses of language, many different ways of talking with the others around us. For unlike animals, each kind of which, we say, has its own habitat, we have a ‘world’ or ‘worlds’ – I say, ‘worlds’, because clearly, the world of a painter, of a baker, a carpenter or stone mason, a mathematician or physicist, a clinical as opposed to an experimental social psychologist, a Wittgensteinian as opposed to an analytic philosopher, are all very different from each other. Thus, as Gadamer (2000) very nicely puts it: “Language is not just one of man’s possessions in the world; rather, on it depends the fact that man has a world at all. For man the world exists as a world in a way that no other being in the world experiences... [further] language has no independent life apart from the world that comes to language within it. Not only is the world ‘world’ only in so far as it comes into language, but language, too, has its real being only in the fact that the world is presented [brought to presence] within it” (p.443). And we can bring it to presence for ourselves in many, many different ways. Thus if I am asked ‘what is it like 10 to be you?’ – as a father, as a philosopher, as a shopper, as a bank user, as a money earner, as a Western ‘atomic’ thinker, as an Eastern ‘holistic’ thinker, as someone puzzled about the workings of language, etc., and so on – I can at least begin to reply by listing for each of these different identities, my different worlds: $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ i) the ‘things’ I perceive as central to it; ii) the relations I perceive between them, iii) the values I attach to them, iv) the spontaneous reactions I have towards them; v) the opportunities for action and understanding they afford me ‘in my world’; vi) the nature of my rights, duties, privileges and obligations in relation to the significant others around me ‘in my world’; vii) the ‘grounds’ to which I appeal for the power and the authority of these rights and duties (do I find them ‘in’ myself, or ‘in’ my community of which I am a part, or for some, in both places?); viii) my world’s ‘horizon’, i.e., what is not actually at the moment ‘visible’ to me in my situation but to what I can point to as being reasonable for me to expect in the future, along with what is still ‘in a fog’ for me; ix) plus the fact that at any one moment, ‘my world’ is ordered perspectivally in accord with what I take to be the ‘point’ (on the horizon of my current landscape of action) constituting what the 10 Here, I have in mind, Nagels’ (1974) important paper: What is it like to be a bat? -11- ‘end in view’ is of my current action (my ‘intention’, my ‘aim’, the ‘point’ of my acting in this way). But I can only have different particular worlds like this to the extent that I can relate myself to my surroundings in different particular ways, that I can take a different particular attitude towards them; that I can exhibit in my actions, different particular behavioural assumptions or performative understandings; and, my surroundings are open to me acting in all these different ways on different particular occasions. Where, on each occasion, my task is to go out into the situation I share with the others around me, and to act into it in a way that does justice to its uniqueness, that takes its never to be repeated details into account. So what can guide me in doing this? How can I go out towards my surroundings with various appropriate expectations ‘at the ready’, so to speak, thus to be able to ‘gauge’ or ‘measure’ the degree to which I am ‘on the way’ towards my goal, or properly playing my part in our joint endeavour, or am ‘way off target’ and must modify my behaviour accordingly? What use can my past experiences be to me here? How can the process begin if no past experiences seem to be of use to me? The fact is, that as living, wide awake beings, we are always in a spontaneously responsive relation with our surroundings. Whether we like it or not, events around us affect us. Thus, to repeat, as Wittgenstein (1980) put it: “The origin and primitive form of the language game is a reaction” (p.31). We hear a noise, we turn to look in its direction; as a baby, we see someone else turn to look in a particular direction, we turn to look too; they smile at us, and we tend to smile back; “it is a primitive reaction,” as Wittgenstein (1981) points out, “to tend, to treat the part that hurts when someone else is in pain; and not merely when oneself is” (no.540). “But what is the word ‘primitive’ meant to say here?,” he remarks, “Presumably that this sort of behaviour is pre-linguistic: that a language-game is based on it, that it is the prototype of a way of thinking and not the result of thought” (no.541). We can begin here, then, with our animal instincts: Language need not “emerge from some kind of ratiocination” (1969, no.475). Pre-linguistic, ‘primitive’ forms of communication — gestural movements, facial expressions, tones of voice, all subtleties of expression — all function to communicate in one way or another, and just as much in adult communication as with infants (in-fans ~ without speech). But at the heart of our being able to move around in our surroundings as adults, as and when we want to, not just in spontaneous response to happenings outside of our control, seems to be a power to organize a set of sequentially sensed differences into a distinctive whole. And later, after having done this in many past situations, to sense similarities (and differences) between such organized wholes and current sequences of experience, thus to find ourselves being continually reminded of previous experiences with, so to speak, the same ‘music’ to them – experiences that unfold around us with similar ‘expressive movement-contours’ which arouse similar ‘feeling-contours’ within us 11. Thus in judging how to act in ways fitting to our circumstances, we seem able to make continual use of, as Wittgenstein (1953) puts it, of “objects of comparison.” Where an object of comparison can function “as, so to speak, a measuring-rod; not as a preconceived idea to which reality must correspond. (The dogmatism into which we fall so easily in doing philosophy.) We want to establish an order in our knowledge of the use of language: an order with a particular end in view; one out of many possible orders; not the order” (nos.131, 132). The unfathomable depth of the revolution needed “A truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves” (1980, p.56). 11 As we saw above, it is in a person’s living expressions that we can sense their uncertainty, their lack of confidence in what they are saying or doing, their joy or exasperation as they try to achieve their goal, and so on: “One speaks with a feeling of conviction because there is a tone of conviction. For the characteristic mark of all ‘feelings’ is that there is expression of them, i.e., facial expression, gestures, of feeling” (1981, no.513). -12- For us, we think, the law of non-contradiction – that a statement portraying a state of affairs, a proposition, cannot be both true and false at the same time – must be true. For out in the real world, a state of affairs cannot possess two or more contradictory natures at the same time. Can it? 12 Consequently, in our everyday practical affairs we tend to think that there must be a single ‘right way’ of doing things, and the purpose of arguments and debates is to resolve seeming contradictions and conflicts in our efforts to arrive at it. Thus we often sit in argumentative conversations with friends and colleagues talking about (we think) important ‘things’ like ‘education’, ‘the government’, ‘society’, people’s ‘attitudes’, their ‘feelings’, what goes on in their ‘minds’, and so on – as if we all know precisely what we are talking about, as if ‘the things’ we are talking about are already ‘out there’ in existence, and we are each merely picking out which of their properties, features, or characteristics we feel needs to be emphasized the most. But what if there are no such already, separate, already existing ‘things’, wholly in themselves as such, out in the world to reflect upon and to refer to linguistically in this way? What if , in fact, all is in flux, and it is just that we – not you or I individually, but we as a social group who share a way or a set of ways of actively relating ourselves, bodily, both to each other and to our surroundings – that we expressively respond to and act in relation to aspects, features, or distinctive movements that we attend to from within our involvements in that flux? What if all things are what they are for us – even tables and chairs, sticks and stones, and so on – in terms of their relations to their surroundings? Then maybe, by acting as if the ‘things’ we give names to, remain as such once named everywhere and for all time, we are ‘imprisoning’ ourselves in our reflections within an illusory world of our own making. Now it is not that we want to put a stop to the powerful methods of scientific investigation which make use of theories and hypotheses. But it is necessary to be critical of ungrounded, ‘up in the air’ talk, such as, Daniel Siegal’s (2007), for instance, who in wanting to correct “the erroneous idea that the mind is created by the brain” (as he puts it), also claims that “the mind can actually use the brain to create itself” (p.48) — as if the mind and the brain are two separate things on a par with each other, and in the past, we were all party to the mistake that ‘the brain creates the mind’. Whereas now, “this [new, bidirectional] perspective is consistent with the scientific state of our understanding of how mind and brain are related” (p.49). We now know, scientifically it seems, that mind and brain co-create each other. “The insidious thing about the causal point of view,” says Wittgenstein (1980), “is that it leads us to say: ‘Of course, it had to happen like that’. Whereas we ought to think: it may have happened like that – and also in many other ways” (1980, p.37) — Siegal writes above as if he has established a new scientific fact, when he has only in fact, very vaguely, suggested a possibility. What is lost in this kind of, literally, care-less or ground-less talk – in talk that is guided more by a speaker’s own aims and concerns, than by their acquaintance with a ‘something’ they care about (Frankfurt, 1998) – is the precise nature of the speaker’s point in uttering these words in the circumstances in which they are uttered. It is not that speakers who speak carelessly are lying or practising deceit; it is not that what they are saying is untrue or false; it is, says Frankfurt (1998), that they are offering “a description of a state of affairs without genuinely submitting to the constraints which the endeavour to provide an accurate representation of reality imposes” (p.125). It is not that when we hear such words that we cannot imagine a specific meaning for them — they are not wholly lacking a sense. To repeat, they arouse the feeling in us that there is a still hidden something, somewhere, that they refer to. But what is lost when speakers try to use everyday words in a wholly general fashion, outside of a particular, shared circumstance, is what they actually mean in saying them in relation to that shared context; for it is how they are uttered — intoned, paced, emphasized in responsive relation to events in their surroundings — that allows listeners to orient and thus to adopt a point of view in relation to them, thus to give them a determinate meaning within that context (see Voloshinov, 1986, p.37 & p.93, quoted above) 12 Yet Charles Dickens begins his great novel, Tale of Two Cities, with the phrases: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,...” Can these opposites both be true? Of course. -13- In short, although meaningful their words are empty, devoid of a precise use in the context of their utterance. Here, then, we might reformulate a famous contrast of Kant’s (1929/1970) — that “thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind” (p.93) — to take language into account. For ‘putting our thoughts in to words' is not as simple a matter as it might seem. Thus restated, we might say: “Words without lived experience are empty, experiences without words are blind.” But this would still not take into account the importance of our responsiveness to the particularities of situations we share with our listeners in our utterances. Trying always to speak in de-contextualized generalities, from a causal point of view, means that, says Wittgenstein (1980), that “when we think of the world’s future, we always mean the destination it will reach if it keeps going in the direction we can see it going in now; it does not occur to us that its path is not a straight line but a curve, constantly changing direction” (p.3). We find it very difficult to accept the truly apocalyptic view: that things do not repeat themselves. Our concern here, then, is to bring back our use of words from their emptiness, from their ‘over there’ distance, when uttered in a care-less fashion, when we do not have to be responsive to our listeners’ responses to them as we utter them — to situate them back into the everyday situations within which they once again come alive for us. For if we are unable to anticipate, at least partially, how the others around us will respond to our words and actions in each of the unique situations within which we happen to find ourselves, organized social life would be impossible. We would have no sense of what, sequentially, should follow from what — no sense that particular expressions should be responded to in particular ways — and thus, no capacity as members of a social group, to coordinate our activities in with those of others. Without their embedding within that larger flow of everyday activity, their own particular, unique meaning is lost — for its otherwise indeterminate meaning is only made more determinate, hermeneutically, by its particular placement within that larger flow. Unless a person’s words can arouse in us, a qualitatively unique felt sense of an aspect of the situation we share with them, then literally, we cannot find a basis within ourselves to “go on” (1953, no.151) with them, to take a next step with them, in a way intelligible to us both. Thus for Wittgenstein (1953), his “Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything,” and, as he goes on to add, “one might also give the name ‘philosophy’ to what is possible before all new discoveries and inventions” (no.126). This not to replace science, but to avoid drawing misleading (and sometimes quite crazy) conclusions from its ‘downstream’, ‘after the fact’ discoveries and inventions. For, to repeat, our concern here is not with discovering objective facts but with sensing ‘before the fact’ possibilities for taking steps forward in our everyday, social affairs that were previously unnoticed. §§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§ -14-