p.1 This book is aimed at trying to understand our activities and practices from within
our doing of them. It is thus a book for practitioner-researchers, for everyday work people who want to inquire into
what is involved in having to think 'in the moment,' while 'in motion,' both from within the midst of complexity, and in relation
to unique, never before encountered first-time events.
p.10 like someone walking alone in the dark, our task is that of learning how to proceed step by
step, feeling around in the course of each step, to gain an awareness of the guidance available to us from 'being in touch
with' our immediate local circumstances.
p.11 it is only after we discover how to relate ourselves to our surroundings,
how to organize or orient ourselves to attend to certain aspects of our surroundings rather than others, that the
data relevant to us achieving our goal can be brought to light (and then our problem solving reasoning can, if necessary,
be applied).
p.11 Wittgenstein... is suggesting that a "philosophical problem" is not a problem with a solution that
can be 'worked out' within the framework of a theoretical scheme... the crucial event to focus on is our "going on"
in a way that the others [in the] world around us find intelligible - for we must take our relations to them into
account in our "going on."
p.20 In our everyday relations to the others and othernesses around us, we do not need to be able
to explain all our everyday actions scientifically, that is, analyze them into a certain set of elements that combine
in repetitive patterns to produce observed outcomes, to be able through everyday reflection and inquiry to improve them. Often,
we simply need an unconfused sense of where - that is, in what space or 'landscape' of possibilities and whereabouts
in it - we are currently placed; a sense of what possible responses are open to us; and, if we are to judge
between them, a sense of their possible outcomes and why some are better for us than others.
p.25 at work in the flow of our practical understandings of the living, human activities occurring around
us as we ourselves continue our motions, are both a set of transitional understandings (to do with
our sense of how we are 'placed' in our relations to the others and othernesses around us) and a set of action
guiding anticipations as to 'where' (within the 'landscape' of these relations) we might go next.
Indeed, what is crucial to our relating ourselves appropriately to the events occurring around
us within the flow of our everyday practical activities, is the orientation provided us by the transitory
understandings and action guiding anticipations occurring within us due to our spontaneously responsive embedding
within that flow of activity.
p.58 we cannot prevent ourselves from being spontaneously responsive to events occurring
in our surroundings; we react to them and to each other's activities... in a 'living' way, spontaneously,
without our having first 'to work out' how to respond to them... when someone acts, their activity cannot
be accounted for as wholly their own activity - for a person's acts are inevitably 'shaped' in the course
of their performance partly by the acts of the others around them, that is, each individual's action
is a joint creation, not the product of a sole author.
p.69-70 The special nature of these spontaneous reactions cannot be emphasized enough...
such events are of a very intricate kind. Indeed, more than in merely looking or gazing, when one is searching for
something with an already fixed idea of what that something is like, strangely, something can occur in a
glimpse, a glance, a striking event, that is surprising, an 'otherness' that can change us in our very being:
"The 'otherness' which enters into us makes us other" (Steiner, 1989, p.188). This, as Casey (2000) puts it, is "the primary
paradox of the glance: namely, the fact that something so diminutive in extent and bearing can provide such far-reaching
and subtle insight."
p.80 My concerns now are much less to do with knowing our 'way around' inside our more
orderly achievements and more to do with how we might come to know our 'way around' inside the disorderly streaming
world of dialogically structured, chiasmically intertwined, continually developing, once-occurrent events of Being.
p.95 we must begin to teach ourselves how to think and to talk and to characterize our understandings of
our circumstances while in motion.
p.96 I will list some of the changes, some of the re-orientations, the rethinkings entailed in how we think
about a range of crucial notions currently very familiar to us:
things - will be known by the 'place' or 'position' in a dynamic complex of unfolding interrelations
(a 'landscape' or 'ecology'), instead of their 'natures' being known 'in themselves,' in terms of their 'properties.'
time - in participatory time-space, everything remains 'present' in the moment and it all, irretrievably,
'laters' together... instead of time passing on and events passing us by as if 'moments of time' are 'spatialized' for us
like beads on a string.
space - in participatory time-space, everything is related to everything else, our expressions
(thoughts) produce responses, instead of separate, discrete, and unrelated events, spaces, and objects.
thinking - is always thinking with another, as if in an inner dialogue with them, instead of it being thought
of as a matter of our own, individual, inner calculation ('figuring things out')
knowledge - comes to be a practical matter of 'knowing one's way about' (where to go, what to do
next), instead of being able both to 'picture' a future state of affairs and to argue convincingly in favor of acting to bring
it into existence.
perceiving (our ways of seeing) - comes to be expressed in our immediate bodily responses to our circumstances,
instead of being deliberately thought out as cognitive interpretations.
learning - becomes something that happens incidentally and effortlessly in participatory context... instead
of requiring self-conscious, effortful attention to a teacher's instructions in a classroom.
teaching (of practices) - becomes (as in Wittgenstein's 'teachings') a matter of pointing out previously
unnoticed details in concrete contexts and providing concrete examples of right practice, instead of the enunciation of abstract
general principles, a matter of more 'coaching' than of classroom exposition.
p.97 valuing (judging) - comes to be manifested both in one's responsivity, and the addressivity one adopts
towards the others and othernesses around one, instead of a cognitive judgment, calculated in terms of a fixed set of dimensions.
p.97 theory - will come to be expressed in the form of an (often, narrative) account (Shotter, 1984), working
in a practical, relationally responsive manner to influence how persons responsive to it will orient or relate to events in
their surroundings, instead of being presented in terms of a single, systematic order of correctness, working in a cognitive
representational-referential manner to determine a specific course of action.
anticipating the future - will come to be seen as undertaking certain preparations... adopting certain stances...
instead of requiring planning
p.101 I have tried to bring into intellectual visibility the fact that there are, within the
flow of our practical understandings of our own and others' living activities as they unfold, sets of transitional
understandings (to do with 'where' we now are in our relations to the others and othernesses around us)
as well as action guiding anticipations as to 'where next' (within these relations) we might go.
p.132 For these living anticipations to be accessible to us in our understandings of events, we have to
approach or to address the relevant events in a certain special way. We cannot simply look out at them in
a one-way fashion as simple objective forms whose moment-by-moment static shape can be integrated by us into a single,
systemic order of connectedness that matters to us. Instead, we must treat them as living, still unfinished, still
developing, expressive beings capable of occasioning within us (even if they remain quite static in space) characteristic
'inner movements' occurring over time - during which some aspects of these inner movements occur as a result of our acting
out toward them... we have continually to adjust our way of relating ourselves to them as they reveal each
new aspect of themselves to us.
p.146-147 In cognitive science, for instance, we can find Haugeland (1993) suggesting, in a comment on the
fact that artificial intelligence didn't originate with computers or with advances in technology, that within "a central tradition
in Western philosophy, thinking (intellection) essentially is rational manipulation of mental symbols (viz., ideas)"
(pp.3-4). Accepting this as true, he then goes on to suggest that to the extent that computers can manipulate arbitrary 'tokens'
in any specifiable manner whatever, "we need only arrange for those tokes to be symbols, and for the manipulations to be specified
as rational, to get a machine that thinks... Indeed, if that traditional theory is correct [that intellection is
essentially the rational manipulation of symbols], then our imagined computer ought to have 'a mind of its own': a (genuine)
artificial mind" (Haugeland, 1993, p.4).
p.172 One's task is, somehow, to offer possibilities to do with how to 'go on' in the present moment,
not to lay down rules, principles, or laws stipulating that the future must follow lines drawn from the past.
p.187 Being able to 'go on' in a particular circumstance is quite often, as I termed it earlier,
a matter of orientation, of being able to relate oneself to a collection of unrelated facts in such a way as to
see them as an interrelated whole, as a 'something' that, as an expressive being, spontaneously
calls out a living response from one.
p.188 It is a question, as Wittgenstein (1953) sees it, of having the right
to claim that 'Now I can go on,' and: "It is particular circumstances, which justify me in saying I
can go on - when the formula occurs to me" (no. 154, italics in original)... we must be able to justify our
claims in some way to those around us who may challenge them in various ways. Indeed, a major way in which
we can 'prove' to others that we have 'got it' is being able to explain it to them, to teach it to them, in such
a way that they too 'get it' and can 'go on' in what we can count as the 'same way.'
p.215 when lost, when confused, when we don't know our 'way about', it [Withness (dialogic)-thinking] is
a way of thinking/talking/looking/ and so forth that is constitutive of a way of seeing our circumstances for the
first time.
p.216 [Bakhtin quoted] The exact sciences constitute a monologic form of knowledge: the intellect
contemplates a thing and expounds upon it. There is only one subject here - cognizing (contemplating) and speaking (expounding).
In opposition to the subject there is only a voiceless thing. Any object of knowledge (including
man) can be perceived and cognized as a thing. But a subject as such cannot be
perceived and studied as a thing, for as a subject it cannot, while remaining a subject,
become voiceless, and, consequently, cognition of it can only be dialogic.
p.218 we are not seeking to explain anything, but to leave everything as it is. Our
task is simply to notice what has not been noticed before, and in doing so, to understand how it can be transfigured.
p.219 Let me repeat: our task has been to try to understand how to understand first-time, unique
events, and what can usefully be expressed in relation to them, without "losing the phenomenon," that is, without
losing the novelty expressed in first-time occurrence by assimilating it to already existing rules, principles, or conventions.
