p.132-133 Our everyday
ways of thinking are a mystery to us. How is it possible for us to see directly, in the unique, particular circumstances
we encounter, certain opportunities and impediments to the actions that uniquely matter just to us?
p.133 How, as any kind
of practitioner, do we recognize what the material of our practice is, how to move about
within [it], and how to choose with any surety what it seems best to do in a particular
situation before us? How are any of these only once-occurrent, everyday understandings possible?
p.137-138
1. First, due to the ineradicable,
spontaneous responsiveness of our living bodies, when someone acts, their activity cannot be accounted as wholly their own
– for a person’s acts are at least partly ‘shaped’ by their being responsive to the
others and othernesses in their surroundings.
2. As a result of entering into interaction with each other, when
they separate, they can no longer be described as before – they are ‘infected,’ so to speak, with the ‘otherness’
of the other.
3. All such meetings, i.e., entanglements, intertwinings, or chiasmicly
structured events, are not only uniquely related to the context of their occurrence, but they also have the quality of passing
or transitory events; they are not stable, recurrent states, but only "once-occurrent events of Being" (Bakhtin, 1993) or
events occurring for yet "another first time" (Garfinkel, 1967) – thus, they cannot be described in terms of an already
existing vocabulary depicting ‘finished’ events.
4. To the extent that all the outcomes of such spontaneous, inter-activity
cannot be traced back to the specific actions of any of the individuals involved, they are experienced by participants in
such meetings as due to the presence of an invisible third agency, an ‘it’ with its own requirements – invisible
"real presences" (Steiner, 1989; Shotter, 2003) with a life of ‘their own’ can emerge in such meetings
and we can find ourselves feeling compelled to answer to the ‘calls’ they exert upon us..
5. Due to the fact that there is always a kind of developmental
continuity involved in the unfolding of all living activities, the earlier phases of the ‘its’ activity
are indicative of at least the style of what is to come later – thus we respond to ‘it’ in an anticipatory
fashion.
6. This all necessarily occurs within living meetings
– and can thus only be made sense of from within those meetings.
p.138-139 what we ignore... is the coming into being of things...
We tend to think in terms of finished things, like solid objects. We are not well versed in methods for thinking about
unfinished things, things still open to yet further development, fluid things.
p.140 As Wittgenstein (1953) notes, like Vygotsky, a picture, a
way of talking that lies in our language, can hold us captive, and we cannot get "outside of it," for our language
repeats it to us "inexorably" (no.115) – and we fail to notice the degree to which we see the world through
our ways of talking (speech). And because we have come to embody our speech by the chiasmic route outlined above,
we cannot easily untangle the inter-related processes involved by our usual analytic methods.
p.143-144 Wittgenstein... remarks that nonetheless the urge for
generality is so overwhelming within us that we are still tempted, even when everything has already been described, to say
something further: "Here we come up against a remarkable and characteristic phenomenon in philosophical investigation: the
difficulty – I might say – is not that of finding the solution but rather that of recognizing
as the solution something that looks as if it were only a preliminary to it. ‘We have already said everything.
– Not anything that follows from this, no, this itself is the solution!’ This is connected, I
believe, 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" (1981, no.314).
But how can this be? How can a mere description be of help to us?
To what kind of difficulty is a description – in which the word ‘This!’ plays a central part – the
solution? And what is involved in "dwelling" upon it?
To understand what he is getting at here, we need to understand
that the difficulty in question is more, in Wittgenstein’s (1980) sense, a matter of the will than
of the intellect, a matter of orientation rather than of information, a matter of whether, as an investigator
into an event or circumstance, one knows how to ‘orchestrate’ or ‘organize’ the complex sequence of
‘mental moves’ required within oneself, if one is to ‘see’ (i.e., experience) what humanly matters
in the sphere of one’s investigations. In other words, it is a difficulty that needs to be overcome, not by applying
an already well mastered practice to "a problem," but at a much earlier stage, a difficulty that arises in the process of
acquiring and developing the practice in the first place.
p.144 "A philosophical problem has the form: 'I don’t know
my way about'" (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.123).
p.144 Others have also explored what is involved in acquiring these
kinds of embodied, spontaneously expressed understandings. David Bohm (1965) describes the process involved as follows: "Both
in the case of perception and in that of building a skill, a person must actively meet his environment in such a way that
he coordinates his outgoing nervous impulses with those that are coming in. As a result the structure of his environment
is, as it were, gradually incorporated into his outgoing impulses so that he learns how to meet his environment with
the right kind of response. With regard to learning a skill it is evident how this happens. But in a sense the perception
of each kind of thing is also a skill, because it requires a person actively meet the environment with the movements that
are appropriate for the disclosure of the structure of that environment" (p. 211, my emphasis). In other words, if
we are to see or hear an entity as the entity it is – the unique voice of a friend, say, on the telephone –
it is not a matter of our following its contours, but of our looking and listening in anticipation
of them. Hence, the possibility of our being surprised when – if an unfamiliar voice answers
our call – events do not occur as we expect.
p.151 From within our participatory immersion in the interplay
of outgoing and incoming activity occurring between ourselves and the others and othernesses around us, ‘striking,’
‘touching,’ or ‘moving’ differences spontaneously emerge. And as I commented above, they
can provide us with both an evaluative sense of ‘where’ we are placed in relation to our surroundings, as well
as an anticipatory sense of where next we might move. It is these ‘striking’ moments that matter, for
they can provide us with the new beginnings we need if we are to enter into spheres of creative activity previously utterly
unfamiliar to us.
p.154 In attempting to understand the ‘inner’ inter-connections
and relations within them, we must take our time. For we are not seeking the solution to a problem but, so
to speak, to find our ‘way around’ inside something that is a mystery to us – an
unsolvable mystery that might remain so.
