Inside Processes (Shotter, 2005)

p.166 if we are to respond appropriately to the unique events occurring around us, we need to re-relate ourselves to them in such a way that they arouse in us the uniquely appropriate “transitory understandings” (that give us a sense of ‘where we stand’) and “action guiding anticipations” (that give us a sense of ‘where we might go next’) that can enable us to ‘go on’ to respond to them appropriately.

p.167 Instead of attending to what theorists are supposedly talking about, what they are attempting to picture or represent as an essential state of affairs ‘over there’, by responding to and thinking with the relationally-responsive meanings of their utterances in mind, as “reminders,” we can perhaps use them as ‘guides’ in helping us judge how best, practically, to ‘go on’ in relation to the unique events currently occurring around us.

p.170 although we often think that our problems can be solved by doing yet more research, an important set of problems are not of that kind at all: they are orientational problems, problems of the will, to do both with how we relate ourselves to events occurring in our surroundings, and with our relations to our own responses to them. In other words, it is not because we lack knowledge, data, or information that we fail to attach ourselves to the inner becoming of things; it is because we approach them with a whole set of inappropriate, taken for granted intellectual expectations and anticipations in mind (of which we are often unaware, and remain unaware). As a result, we often ignore something that in fact is very obvious to us indeed.

p.171 there is not only a kind of developmental continuity involved in the unfolding of all living activities, but all 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). There is thus a distinctive ‘inner dynamic’ to living wholes not manifested in dead, mechanical assemblages, such that the earlier phases of the activity are indicative of at least the style of what is to come later – we can thus respond to their activities in an anticipatory fashion.

p.173-174 It is our transitory sense of this ‘future indicating shape’ that is lost in our adoption of the Cartesian-Cinematographical (C-C), pictorial way of relating ourselves to our surroundings (Bergson 1911). For strangely, an important aspect of their ‘shape’ that is lost to us, is their open, unfinished nature that ‘points’ us, so to speak, toward their ‘horizons’. Describing our surroundings solely in terms of spatial (or pictorial) configurations (mis)leads us into forgetting, not only the essential differences between dead assemblages of externally related parts, but also the essential difference between, in Bergson’s (1911) terms, changes of succession, i.e., the continuous emergence into being of a living unity, and changes of juxtaposition, i.e., the mere changes of standing side-by-side, such pictorial representations imply. And this then leads us on, only too easily, into reducing the differences between past, present, and future merely to differences of position, with ‘past’ events being thought of as lying to the left of a point representing the ‘present’, with ‘future’ events to the right. In other words, the irreversible flow of time is forgotten, and we forget that a successive or expressive movement has continually, in each of its successive moments, to struggle to come into existence – for, at each moment of its realization, it is, so to speak, a matter of navigating in an often unpropitious and often overwhelming sea of other possibilities, to all of which it must be interrelated in its own unique realization.

p.175 if I then asked: “What seemed to be involved, what movements of thought, so to speak, did you undertake in formulating your answer?” – that would be a much more difficult question to answer. About such a circumstance, in which we perform a complex action fairly effortlessly (in which in Polanyi’s (1967, 8) phrase, we show that we “know more than [we] can tell”), Wittgenstein (1953) suggests that we must start by “reminding” ourselves of what it is that we already know – where that something of which we need to remind ourselves, is “obviously something of which for some reason it is difficult to remind oneself” (no. 89).

p.178-179 in going on inside a world that is still making them whilst they are still making it, they are not able to reflect on that world as a finished object: as a consequence, people can in fact have no reflective understanding of the local conditions that determined their actions at all. They know what they are doing, i.e., they can account for it to others if challenged; they know why they are doing it, i.e., they have a reason for it; but what they still don’t yet know, is what their doing has done – it may in the end all turn out badly. It can only be seen as having resulted from a ‘correct decision’ after their actions have been taken. The fleeting joint creations, the unique, only once-occurrent events involved in their struggles to arrive at a satisfactory outcome, do not and cannot figure in any of the retrospective accounts we give others when they ask us about why we acted as we did. In retrospect, we can only formulate what we must have done in order to make our supposed ‘decision’ a correct decision.