p.2 we are searching for a new way of understanding our relations
to our surroundings while still moving around within them, instead of viewing them intermittently from
fixed points of view – a new way of understanding that takes the ‘shaped’ sequencing of events
in time, rather than the patterning of forms in space, as crucial.
But, as Bergson (1911) remarks, none of our current intellectual
habits of mind seem suitable to this task. Our intellects are oriented towards the ends of our actions, ‘thence
it comes also that only the goal where our activity will rest is pictured explicitly to our mind: the movements
constituting the action itself either elude our consciousness or reach it only confusedly’ (p. 299)
p.2 We need to accustom the intellect ‘to install
itself within the moving’ (p. 343), to teach ourselves thinking in duration (Chia 1998: 359), that is, to
think of living events that occur in time, not as a sequence of separate immobilities like beads on a string,
but as exhibiting an indivisible flow of activity in which each phase is novel in some respects while retaining the unity
of living being’s expression and identity.
p.7-8 central among the many other features of such responsive talk is its
orientation toward the future: ‘The word in living conversation is directly, blatantly, oriented
toward a future answer-word; it provokes an answer, anticipates it and structures itself in the answer’s direction.
Forming itself in an atmosphere of the already spoken, the word is at the same time determined by that which
has not yet been said but which is needed and in fact anticipated by the answering word. Such is the situation
of any living dialogue’ (Bakhtin, 1981; 280, my emphases)
p.8 In other words, we not only hear the sounds made by another person as
a response to our sounds, we hear them as sounds of agreement, of objection, of compliance, and
so on. We have both a transitional understanding of what they have said (the semantic
aspect of their utterance) and an action guiding anticipation of how to respond (the
orientational or relational aspect of their utterance).
p.9 all complex human activities which involve in their organization both
the sequencing and the simultaneous combining of a whole multiplicity of different, (often) individually performed activities,
requires... the continually re-orienting and re-relating of these many different activities with each other.
p.12-13 it becomes clear that there are two very different kinds of difficulty
we can face in our attempts to understand something expressed in language: there are those difficulties we can call
problems because we can arrive at a solution to them by the application of
a method or process of reasoning (often conducted within a theoretical framework or schematism of some kind), and
those that here I will call difficulties of orientation or relational difficulties, difficulties
in which we need to resolve a line of action, a style, an approach, or way of
proceeding with respect to an other or to a circumstance – Wittgenstein calls these difficulties, respectively,
difficulties of the intellect and difficulties of the will
p.13-14 the criteria relevant for judging whether a difficulty is
difficulty of the intellect or of the will can only be judged in terms of how an interaction plays out in practice... it
is absolutely crucial that we identify such relevant criteria, for it is only too easy to let ourselves fall back into the
same... trap as before: that of giving a retrospective account of a circumstance in terms of its current form or patterning...
instead of providing a prospective account of it that can arouse action guiding anticipations within us of possible future
ways of 'going on' within the circumstance.
Indeed, to the extent that Wittgenstein saw these kinds of
difficulties as orientational difficulties, rather than as problems to be solved by reasoning, he wrote of
them as having the form: 'I don't know my way about' (no. 123). Thus one's need in such circumstance
is not to be able to say, 'Now I see it' (i.e. the solution to the problem), but to be able to declare to
others, 'Now I know how to go on' (no. 154). For 'to see' something is to be able to assimilate
it to an already existing and known category, which in most practical situations is to ignore its unique and often important
deviations from the already well known. While being able to 'go on' is to be able to do something for a first time. In other
words, the resolution of an orientational difficulty is achieved, not at an intellectual level, as something
one can talk about to others, but at a practical level, as something that is manifested or shown in one's unique way
of being responsive to the unique details of a situation by one's actions within it.
p.14 it is only after we discover a way of relating ourselves
to our surroundings, a way of organizing or orienting ourselves to attend to certain aspects of our surroundings rather
than others, that the data relevant to our achieving our goal can be brought to light (and then, and only then, can our problem
solving reasoning as such, if still necessary, be applied).
p.17 when we act in a spontaneously responsive manner in relation
to the sayings and doings of those around us, it is not a matter of our first acting, individually and independently
of these others, and then of them replying to us by also acting individually and independently. We all act jointly,
as a collective-we, and we do this bodily, in a 'living' way, without our first having ‘to work out’
how to respond to each other (Shotter 1980).
p.19 paradoxically, unlike the gaze, a glance does not
‘take in’ an immobility in an instant, but provides us with all the complexity of a duration
(Casey 2000).
p.20 with respect to Wittgenstein’s (1980) remarks quoted above –
that ‘the origin and primitive form of the language game is a reaction’, and that such bodily reactions can function
as ‘the prototype of a way of thinking’ (1981 no.541) – we can now note the importance
of events that ‘strike’ us, events in which an otherness (that might not be previously
known to us) can call upon our attention spontaneously and elicit a reaction from us spontaneously. For it
is only as a consequence of such events as these that the kind of re-orientation Chia describes – of learning
to think in duration – can begin.
p.20 But if we are to do more than just begin, if we are to feel
‘at home’ in thinking from within such a polyphonically organized world of activities, to ‘know our
way about’ with it, then there is a major tendency in our current forms of thinking that we must overcome. For as Bergson
(1911: 299) notes: ‘The function of the intellect is to preside over actions’. Thus our whole way of acting
in the world currently is to attend from these vague, inner, feelings of tendency, ‘often so
vague that we are unable to name them at all’ (James 1890: 254), and to attend to ‘the qualities
of things outside’ (Polanyi 1967: 14) that these effortful inner movements ‘point to’ or
anticipate. What we must resist is the temptation of thinking (and talking) as if our still embryonic feelings of
tendency need to be completed to be grasped intellectually. For the difficulties we face are orientational
difficulties, not intellectual ones. Thus, as Wittgenstein (1981) notes, we often mislead ourselves by ‘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. The difficulty here is: to stop’
(no. 314). There is no need to ‘go beyond’ our present circumstances – for the way to ‘go
on’ must and can be found ‘there’.
p.20 We cannot re-relate or reorient ourselves towards the relevant phenomena
by the application of a process of reasoning.
p.20 we cannot continue thinking in terms merely of causing
re-arrangements in a set of inert and separate elements. We must teach ourselves to think not only dialogically,
but polyphonically. That is, we must think dynamically, in terms of anticipating the responses to our actions
p.21 rather than logical, systematic, theoretical structures ‘picturing’
puzzling states of affairs, our texts must have ‘eventness’ – they must provide
us, not with solutions to problems, but with possibilities for the resolution of orientational or relational difficulties.
We must be able to sense in them possible first time understandings of ‘how to go on’ in otherwise disorienting
or bewildering circumstances
p.21-22 ‘What is most difficult here,’
said Wittgenstein, ‘is to put this indefiniteness, correctly and unfalsified, into
words’ (1953: 227). But if we can do this, then more than being mere neutral thoughts residing
‘in our heads’ as ‘pictures’ (propositional representations), we will be able to allow that
our ‘thoughts’, as voiced words, to arouse within us, in the same way as the
actual voices of others, action guiding anticipations constitutive of that not-yet-fully-determined ‘world’
on the horizon, within which our present actions will have their meaning.
