“What we come to form, and thereafter understand (both the formed and the forming), emerge from us being in language in conversations in movements in relationships in culture in nature (we do not have language etc ‘in us’). The Being ‘in’ these various ins can best be understood by letting ‘the feeling that comes’ (by being in these various ins) create its own metaphors, and let those metaphors be part of the language one searches through in order to find a meaning.” (Tom Andersen, no date).
In this, Tom’s thinking was, we might say, comprehensively ‘ecological’ –
from Bakhtin (1986) – one of the originators of the whole dialogical approach to human relations:
“An utterance,” he says,
“is never just a reflection or an expression of something already existing and outside it that is given and final. It always creates something that never existed before, something absolutely new and unrepeatable... But something created is always created out of something given... What is given is completely transformed in what is created” (pp.119-120).
‘deep’ changes in that they are not just changes in what we ‘think about’, they are not to do with learning some new and previously unknown facts or bits of information, but changes in what ‘we think with’, changes in how we relate to, or orient ourselves toward our surroundings, and as a result – as Tom might put it – to find ourselves immersed ‘in’ a situation quite different from what we felt ourselves to be ‘in’ previously.
there are two kinds of difficulties we can face in life, not just one: There are those kind of difficulties that we might, following Wittgenstein (1980), call “difficulties of the intellect” (p.17). These are difficulties that we can formulate (or form) as problems and solve by constructing an appropriate theoretical system within which to ‘think them through’. But overcoming orientational or relational difficulties requires a quite different approach... and that, of course, expresses straightaway the nature of our difficulty:
What actually is involved in our approaching a situation or circumstance that we at first find quite bewildering or confusing or dis-orienting?
Wittgenstein (1980) calls these kind of difficulties, “difficulties of the will” (p.17) – making use of a word, I venture to surmise, with a very bad press among us here in this conference. But by it, he means, he says, to draw attention to “what people want to see” (p.17), what it is they look for or expect to see as they begin to try to get a sense of ‘where’ they ‘are’, and how they might ‘go on’ within the situation within which they ‘find themselves’.
a basic bodily need for orientation that is continually at work within us; we need to know ‘where’ we are, ‘what’ actually ‘is’ the situation that we are ‘in’. Thus, the “whole quest of discovery is thus initially... ‘directed’ not to get what we want but to discover what we want to get”(p.177).
[trad psycho.] It has only discovered there what happens when men are led to behave as if they are rats, machines, information channels, etc.... Constructing a true image of ourselves demands a radically different approach,”
. We need first to be ‘introduced’ to them, to meet them face-to-face’, so to speak, in order to acquire some expectations as to how they will respond to a whole range of our actions in our relations to them.
Learning theory-talk, on the other hand, is like learning a second language. It is not concerned with things and activities as they are in themselves; its function is not to help those confronted with raw appearances make a first sense of them. It is a cognitive device in terms of which things and events, which already make one kind of sense to us, may be talked of as being other than what ordinarily they seem to be – for instance, a theorist might tell us that what we talk of as ‘love’ is really ‘object cathexis’.
a theory is of use to third-person outsiders, standing over against and uninvolved in the personal situation of the first- and second-persons. Thus, rather than being context-dependent and personal, theoretical talk, strictly, must be context-free and impersonal. Consequently, these really rather strange and unusual forms of talk must always be accompanied, it would seem, by an account of how they should be understood and put to use; in other words, we must be especially taught, as specialists, to put our everyday ways of understanding and acting on one side, and to function as our theories require.
Wittgenstein,
shows us how easily we can (mis)recognize the unique what-ness of the things or events before us: how, for example, we can treat something that is a living and still developing organism as if it was something dead and finished, how we can treat something that arouses an anticipatory response in us (a tense feeling of expectation) as simply presenting us with a picture (an image, shape, or form) that requires our ‘interpretation’, and so on
Descartes:
thereby make ourselves, as it were, masters and possessors of nature” (p.78). It bothers me for one very obvious reason: It is aimed at the exploitation of Nature, not in our own interests, but for our own desires. This might be excusable in our search for energy resources, for instance, but when other people are studied for ‘the uses fro which they are appropriate’, the unethical nature of this aim is clear.
In line with our ‘separatist’, Cartesian forms of thought, it is only too easy for us to think of ourselves as occupying the world, with the earth beneath us and the sky above (as depicted in (a) above). But a world that is merely occupied, he argues, “is furnished with already-existing things;” whereas, one that is inhabited, within which we and many others exist as living beings, “is woven from the strands of their continual coming-into-being” (p.1797). He calls such a world, which, as such, is still coming into being (as depicted in (b) above), a world within which the many different flowing strands of different activity intertwine, intermingle, become entangled with each other, and then, sometimes, separate, “the weather world.” I will just call it a turbulent, not-yet-settled, dialogically-structured world, a world that is still-in-the-making.
, if I was allowed only one word in which to express what I think to be most important in our lives together, it would be the word: responsiveness. But if I was allowed to add another word to it, I would say spontaneous responsiveness, or to offer a whole phrase, I would say that it is the way that our living, bodily responsiveness to the movements and activities the others and othernesses around us that is expressive of the meaning of those movements and activities to us, and thus crucial to our being able to communicate with each other
- That there are two kinds of difficulties in life, not just one, and that before we can turn to solving problems, we need to gain orientation, to gain a sense of what in fact is the situation we are in;
- That the search for repetitive patterns can be misleading, each new circumstance we confront is uniquely itself and we need to meet it face-to-face, so to speak, to become acquainted with it; 4. That as result of the spontaneous responsiveness of our bodies, we can learn about events and happenings in our surroundings that we can learn in no other way;
- – but we must be careful, words are not innocent, and no single metaphor can capture all its aspects (and metaphors conceal as well as reveal);
- That, as a consequence of all of this, we must give up Descartes’ nice clear and distinct idea of a world of ‘matter in motion according to laws’, and embrace the very strange, flowing, turbulent world of our everyday lives in which we, like plants growing from a seeds, have our existence within a special confluence of flowing streams of energy and materials that our bodies are continually working to organize, to intertwine or to ‘orchestrate’ into the unbelievably complex forms of our human achievements and behaviours to come.
- All his life, Tom retained his disquiets with what seemed to be finished and finalized stabilities in our treatment of others: What other ways might be open to us? What might we do instead? And those disquiets have motivated me also – and indeed, I venture to suggest, that same restlessness, that need to know: “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” (Gauguin’s questions) still sits with us all here in this hall, now.
Difficulties of the intellect and difficulties of the will
So, although such inquiries cannot offer anything objective, anything that can easily be pointed at and described, nor can they offer us any techniques for immediate practical application. They can in fact offer us something of much more value to those of us as professional practitioners who must act in the moment, from within the midst of complexity. All objective approaches tell us only of what we already know how to inquiry into; they lead us only towards the continual re-discovery of sameness, simply the elaboration of the cognitive knowledge we already possess – they cannot inform us of the distinctively different, invisible, possibilities for action available to us in each new and unique situation we occupy. In exploring it – the choice to stop doing something along with the spontaneous emergence, i.e., the non-choice, of a better alternative to it – I want to distinguish between two kinds of difficulties we can face in our practical affairs: What Wittgenstein (1980) called difficulties of the intellect, and difficulties of the will (p.17) I want to stick with talk of difficulties instead of talking of problems, for as we shall see, talk of problems is much more to do with arriving at answers to clear questions, while talk of difficulties is more to do with overcoming confusions and disorientations in practical life.
We can formulate difficulties of the intellect, then, as problems which, with the aid of clever theories or appropriate frameworks of thought, we can solve by the use of reasoning, by rational methods. Difficulties of the will, however, are quite different. For they are to do with how we need to find a way of relating ourselves (bodily, i.e., sensitively and emotionally) to the others and othernesses around us, how we orient ourselves or take up an attitude or stance towards them, the ways in which we see them, hear them, experience them, value them – for it is these ways that determine what possibilities for action we can perceive in the situation we are in, they determine or ‘give shape’ to the lines of action we finally resolve on carrying out. And unlike the static contemplative thinker, we must do all this from within our engaged activity with the others and othernesses we encounter within the situation of our action, either actual or imagined.
> (1) First, problem-solving: Approaching a newness or strangeness as a problem to be solved requires us to first analyze it into a set of identifiable elements; we must then find a pattern or order amongst them; and then hypothesize a hidden agency responsible for the order (call it, the working of certain rules, principles, or laws, or the working of a story or narrative). We then seek further evidence for its influence, thus to enshrine it in a theory or theoretical system. We go on to make use of such theories in giving shape to our actions. In other words, we manipulate the strangeness (now known in terms of the theory) to produce an advantageous outcome which we call ‘the solution’ to our problem, and we then turn ‘to apply’ the theory elsewhere.
As investigators, we ourselves remain unchanged in the process; we remain outside and separate from the other or otherness we are investigating; rather than being engaged or involved in with it we are ‘set over against’ it; in acquiring extra knowledge about it – in the form of facts or information – we gain mastery over it. // in fact no
(2) Alternatively, in resolving on a line of action: Instead of immediately trying to analyze it into its elements, we can treat the other or otherness as a being that is still radically unknown to us, and, by ‘opening’ ourselves to being spontaneously ‘moved’ by it, we can ‘enter into’ a living, dialogically-structured relationship with it – In other words, we can become involved or engaged in an active, back and forth relationship, with it, a relationship in which, if we go slowly, and allow time for the imaginative work that each response can occasion to take place, we can gain a sense of the ‘inner landscape’, the ‘invisible landscape of possibilities’ confronting us to become “visibly-rational” (Garfinkel, 1967, p.vii) to us.
- We enter a new situation; (3 secs)
- We are confused, bewildered, we don’t know our way about; (3 secs)
- However, as we ‘dwell in’ it, as we ‘move around’ within the confusion, a ‘something’, an ‘it’ begins to emerge;(3 secs)
- It emerges in the ‘time contours’ or ‘time shapes’ that become apparent to us in the dynamic relations we can sense between our outgoing activities and their incoming results; (3 secs)
- An image comes to us, we find that we can express this ‘something’ in terms of an image; (3 secs)
- But not so fast, for we can find another, and another image, and another – Wittgenstein uses a city, a toolbox, the controls in the driving cab of a train, and many different types of games, all as metaphors for different aspects of our experiences of the use of language (3 secs)....
Having gone through a number of images, we can come to a sense of the landscape of possibilities giving rise to them. Indeed, we can gain a sense of familiarity with such landscapes, that we can come to feel confident of knowing our way around within them, and of being able to resolve on ways of going on within them.
But the process of resolving cannot simply be a matter of calculation, it involves judgement, a moving around on the landscape of possibilities, being spontaneously responsive to the consequences of each move, and judging which one (or combination of moves) best resolves the initial tension aroused in one’s initial confusion – for, to repeat, we are operating here, not in the realm of actualities but of possibilities.
while we can decide very precisely what not to do, resolving on a new line of action, gathering together all the relevant features of the now new situation one faces, takes judgement – for, to repeat, we have to consider, not facts, but possibilities. And a moment of judgement – the 3 to 5 second ‘present’ moment of a judgment (Stern, 2004) – entails, I want to suggest, some judgemental work, work in which we go out, imaginatively and feelingfully, to relate ourselves to various aspects of our current circumstances, aspect-by-aspect, sequentially, over time, with the aim of gathering them all together into what we might call an inner landscape of possibilities. Only once we have done this, only when we know our “way about” within such a landscape can we feel some confidence in “going on” (Wittgenstein, 1953).
It is what the nature of that imaginative judgmental work feels like, looks like, and sounds like that, if time allowed, I would like to discuss further. For, I would want to claim, that coming to act in a way that seems to be for the best in a particular situation is not something we can decide upon simply within ourselves, we must turn towards the now new situation to which we have chosen to relate ourselves, and open ourselves to being spontaneously responsive to it – if we can do that, we will then find that various crucial happenings simply will occur quite spontaneously in the complex processes at work in the emergence of alternatives.
So, although such inquiries cannot offer anything objective, anything that can easily be pointed at and described, nor can they offer us any techniques for immediate practical application. They can in fact offer us something of much more value to those of us as professional practitioners who must act in the moment, from within the midst of complexity. All objective approaches tell us only of what we already know how to inquiry into; they lead us only towards the continual re-discovery of sameness, simply the elaboration of the cognitive knowledge we already possess – they cannot inform us of the distinctively different, invisible, possibilities for action available to us in each new and unique situation we occupy.
, we need to recognize that we face two kinds of difficulty in our lives: those of the intellect and those of the will (Wittgenstein, 1980), difficulties we can formulate as problems which we can solve by creating a priori frameworks or perspectives in terms of which to ‘work out’ solutions, and orientational or relational difficulties require a different, hermeneutical-phronetic approach, aimed at resolving on a line of action. Resolving or overcoming difficulties of this kind requires us to exercise judgment in conducting a kind of inner imaginative work, work aimed at exploring the unique details of our current situation in terms of criteria appropriate to the different dimensions of our concerns, and with gathering them all together into a common focus. Such work involves a process to do both with ways of paying attention (listening, noticing, being open to being ‘touched’, etc.) to contextual details, and with negotiating, in dialogue with others, a line of action recognized by them to be both intelligible, legitimate, and ‘fitting’ in the situation in question.
Attention to such issues as these is not at all easy to sustain, for it entails our trying to capture things ‘in motion’, which means trying to capture them while they are on the way to being other than they already are – in other words, we cannot easily name the things of our concern, for they have the character of, as William James (1890) put it a long time ago, “signs of direction in thought”.
However, although we cannot easily name them, we “nevertheless,” says James, “have an acutely discriminative sense” (p.253) of their direction and ‘shape’. Indeed, as I have outlined elsewhere (Shotter, 2005), they continually give rise both to the happening of “transitory understandings” and “action guiding anticipations.”
Indeed, once we turn in this direction, once we adopt this practice-based approach – and move away from the static thinking subject towards the active, moving around agent – we realize that we can face a kind of difficulty very different from that of solving intellectual puzzles. The image we need is, I think, something like this: It is as if we are living and trying gain our orientation, our ‘at homeness’ in our surroundings, while always living within a thick fog, and we must work like blind persons in terms of ‘touchings’ rather than in terms of ‘seeings’. However, what we have to gain a sense of through our touchings and feelings, is not of what actual objects are there before us, but of the possibilities these actualities present to us for our next possible steps.
In exploring the character of this tense restlessness further – and the way in which it involves the choice of stopping doing something, along with the non-choice, spontaneous emergence of a better alternative to it – I want explore what Wittgenstein (1980) calls difficulties of the intellect, and difficulties of the will (p.17) further – and I want to stick with talk of difficulties instead of talking of problems
: the need to work within a landscape of possibilities, as well as actualities
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