A too long, rough first draft of a paper to be submitted to Janus Head: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenological Psychology and the Arts

GOETHE AND THE REFIGURING OF INTELLECTUAL INQUIRY:

FROM ‘ABOUTNESS’-THINKING TO ‘WITHNESS’-THINKING IN EVERYDAY LIFE

John Shotter

“There is a delicate empiricism which makes itself utterly identical with the object, thereby becoming true theory... The ultimate goal would be to grasp that everything in the realm of fact is already theory... Let us not seek for something beyond the phenomena – they themselves are the theory” (Goethe, 1988, p.307, quoted in Brady, 1998, p.98).

“Man knows himself only to the extent that he knows the world; he becomes aware of himself only within the world, and aware of the world only within himself. Every new object, well contemplated, opens up a new organ of perception in us” (Goethe, SS, p.39, quoted in Cottrell, 1998, p.257).

“In living nature nothing happens that does not stand in a relationship to the whole, and if experiences appear to us only in isolation, if we are to look upon experiences solely as isolated facts, that is not to say that they are isolated; the question is, how are we to find the relationship of these phenomena, of these givens” (Goethe in HA, 13, p.17, quoted in Sepper, 1988, p.69).

“Does Goethe’s contempt for laboratory experiment and his exhortation to us to go out and learn from untrammeled nature have anything to do with the idea that a hypothesis (interpreted in the wrong way) already falsifies the truth? And is it connected with the way I am now thinking of starting my book – with a description of nature?” (Wittgenstein, 1980, pp.10-11).

Our everyday ways of thinking are a mystery to us. How is it possible for us to understand the unique, particular circumstances we encounter and to see in them both certain opportunities and impediments to the actions that uniquely matter just to us? Why, when we look back on our lives, do we see them in terms of one-off, singular events, crucial moments in which unique, ineradicable changes occurred, specific times as occasioning specific moods (of, say, hope, fear, worry, or optimism, etc.)? How is it that we can recognizing friends and loved ones merely from the sound of their voices on the telephone , or recognize just from other people’s facial expressions as we talk to them their reactions to what we are saying to them? How can we come to know our way around so well inside familiar surroundings? How, when asked direction by a stranger, can we bring to mind just the unique directions they need to arrive at their destination? What is involved in our acquiring specialized skills and sensitivities, in mathematics, music, carpentry, literary criticism or art criticism, in discriminating shades and hues of colors as a painter, etc., etc. How, when presented with a mathematical proof, or a case in a court of law, do we recognize that what we have witnessed is in fact a proof? How do we, in hearing a piece of music, seeing a painting, or in reading a text in philosophy, say, see an important ‘connection’ between it and aspects of our lives? How, in our speech and writing, do we recognize just the right word to use in a particular context, thus to excuse ourselves of responsibility, for example, by saying ‘an accident occurred’ rather than ‘we made a mistake’. How, for that matter, do we recognize the stream of sounds coming from a person’s mouth as meaningful speech. How, as any kind of practitioner, do we recognize what the material of our practice is, how to move about within in, 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? These are the questions I want to explore below, in exploring Goethe’s “delicate empiricism.”

              In his Discourse on the Method of Properly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences of 1637, Descartes (1968) set out a characterization of our “external world,” and a method for thinking about its nature, that has influenced our thought about ourselves , our surroundings, and the relations between the two, ever since. In order, he says, not to be “obliged to accept or refute what are accepted opinions among philosophers and theologians, I resolved to leave all these people to their disputes, and to speak only of what would happen in a new world, if God were now to create, somewhere in imaginary space, enough matter to compose it, and if he were to agitate diversely and confusedly the different parts of this matter, so that he created a chaos as disordered as the poets could ever imagine, and afterwards did no more than to lend his usual preserving action to nature, and let her act according to his established laws” (p.62). Thus here, he establishes the view (which we have taken for granted ever since) that the subject matter of our investigations can be analyzed into a set of systematically related, separate, self-contained parts, subject to a certain set of laws or principles governing how they combine into larger wholes – an essentially cause and effect, mechanistic view of reality as a lifeless systematic whole exhibiting a single order of connectedness. Descartes’s world is thus a world of intrinsically unrelated things, of things which are not internally related to each other as participant parts of a larger, indivisible whole; to form a whole, they must be ‘glued’ or ‘screwed’ together somehow by third entities extrinsic to their own essential nature. It is a world to which we are related only as spectators at a distance, not as involved participants.

              What if, however, we were to imagine a very different world, an indivisible, unitary world containing within itself many continuously flowing activities which, in intermingling and intertwining with each other, spontaneously create within it, in the interplays occurring in the regions and moments of their meetings, new forms – new forms, say, like those occurring in the formation and maintenance of ox bow lakes, or, as Riegner and Wilkes (1998) describe, the many other dynamic but stable “flowforms” that can be created within the fluid medium of water: “Water adopts a host of forms,” they say, “while always remaining the same, undifferentiated substance... the forms of water showed a remarkable degree of order as if it has life and intention of its own” (p.235)? And what if, instead of merely being a spectator of this world, we were active, living, embodied participants within it? Such a dynamic world of continuously unfolding forms would, instead of world of Being, be a world of Becoming, a world in which various dynamic forms would come into existence, perhaps remain in existence (or not), and perhaps also pass out of existence again, in many different ways or styles .

              As living embodied beings, surrounded by such a world of flowing, dynamically changing forms, we could not help but to be spontaneously responsive to the changes continually occurring around us. Then, instead of a focus on the separate things around us, on their merely spatial (picture-able) relations, our focus would shift to a study of the already existing intrinsic (internal) relations existing between them. We would also be concerned, not so much with “what we do or what we ought to do, but what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing (Gadamer, 2000, p.xxviii).

              If we were to imagine such a dynamic world of flowing activities as this, then, I think, we might, perhaps, be approaching the kind of world Goethe experienced himself as living in.

              Cassirer (1963) describes Goethe’s concern with the coming into being of new forms, their creating, thus: “It was Goethe who first coined the word ‘morphology’... With Goethe’s idea of ‘morphology’, with his conception of the ‘formation and transformation of organic natures’, a new ideal of knowledge was created... To put it briefly, Goethe completed the transition from the previously generic view to the modern genetic view of organic nature... According to him, what we grasp in the [generic view] are only the products, not the process of life. And into this life process he wanted, not only as a poet but also as a scientist, to win an insight...” (pp.68-69). In other words, Goethe sought to understand, not simply already existing things, nor constructed things – built piece by piece from separate, self-contained parts – but created things, things that can come into existence (and, perhaps, pass out of existence again) as a result of meetings between forms of life with the others and othernesses in their surroundings.

              It is this, the focus – not on a world of isolated elements, their properties, and the spatial structure of their external relations at different instants in time – but on the relations between the different aspects exhibited in a dynamic, invisible world of internally inter-related, continuously changing activities, that characterizes Goethe’s concerns. “There are relations everywhere, and relations are life” (Goethe, quoted in Cassirer, 1963, p.68). The thought we apply in counting and measuring things can only be applied to dead phenomena – for counting and measuring things requires dividing things up into separate, fixed and self-contained elements of reality, and no living thing can be thus fragmented without dying. While entirely appropriate to the inanimate world, this form of thought – operating within, as I shall call it, the realm of measurement – is a form of thought quite inadequate to the understanding of life.

Living beings (bodies) and the chiasmic nature of their meetings

In making this move, from inquiring into the nature of an essentially dead world as a spectator at a distance from it, to inquiring into an (at least partially) living world as a participant within it, as Cassirer (1963) outlines, Goethe was crucially influenced by Kant’s (1952/1790), Critique of Judgment. In that work, he pointed out that: “It is quite certain that we can never get a sufficient knowledge of organized beings, and their inner possibility, much less an explanation of them, by looking merely to mechanical principles of nature” (p.54) . But such mechanical forms of order – consisting in, as Descartes said, “different parts” of matter in motion according to “established laws” – ignored the possibility of them all being already inherently inter-related, and as such, constituting an indivisible whole. In other words, in ignoring all the already existing relations between things, and the dynamics of these relations as they unfold through time, might we not be ignoring a major influence at work on us as participant parts inextricably ‘rooted’ in such a larger whole? Might we not be able to gain a sense of the organized beings around us, and a sense of their inner possibilities, from within our living relations with them? Surely, we can win an insight into the inner formative movements responsible for the emergence of such forms into existence by sensing within ourselves – from within our relations to them – the differential responses such movements occasion in us.

              In other words, says Goethe, “there is a delicate empiricism, which identifies itself with the object in the most intimate way and thereby becomes actual theory” (Goethe, HA, 12, p.435; Zajonc, 1998, p.24-25). But to conduct ourselves in this manner, we must enter into an intimate interplay with each uniquely new and particular object we encounter. If we do, we will then find that “every new object, well contemplated, opens up a new organ of perception in us” (Goethe, SS, p.39, quoted in Amrine, 1998, p.47).

              Thus, what I want to explore below, then, is precisely how we might relate ourselves to our surroundings much more than as merely uninvolved and disinterested spectators of a melee of intrinsically unrelated elements. Instead, I want to investigate the kinds of inquiry open to us as active participants (participant parts) embedded within a much larger, indivisible whole, a dynamic whole of variously intertwined, continuously unfolding activities toward which, if we are to play a ‘fitting part’ within them all, we must be much more delicately and respectfully responsive. But in doing so, I want also to explore how, in such lived and engaged ways of relating ourselves to our surroundings, a certain kind of expressive-responsive understanding becomes available to us that is quite unavailable to us as disengaged spectators – a kind of practical, judgmental understanding that, in providing us with a sense of the “inner form” of created entities, i.e., of the inner formative movements that give rise to them, can in fact afford us an anticipatory sense of how, in Wittgenstein’s (1953) terms, to ‘go on’ with them. In this kind of understanding, it is not just the static, picture-able, spatial relations between things at each moment in time that matters to us in our (principled) knowledge of them, but also our sense of their inner, physiognomic, self-differences, the changes that express the manner of their coming into being. For it is these changes which, in genetically expressing their responsive, living relations to events occurring in their surroundings over time, can give us a practical sense at least of the style or character of what next to expect – thus, it is toward a better understanding and enriching of our practices in this kind of world (rather than toward our theories about it), that we can expect this inquiry to contribute.

              Before turning more directly toward the nature of Goethe’s “delicate empiricism,” and to the very different kind of intellectual activities we must undertake in our conduct of it (when compared with our current forms of inquiry), I want to explore some of the special properties of living bodies (processes), and the very strange nature of the events that can occur in the meetings between them and the others and othernesses in their surroundings. For, it seems, something very special happens when living bodies interact with their surroundings, that we have not yet (explicitly) taken a proper account of at all in our current forms of thought or institutional practices. The resulting relations have a chiasmic, intertwined, or entangled structure (Merleau-Ponty, 1968; Shotter, 2003).

              Elsewhere (Shotter, 1980 , 1984, 1993a&b, 2003), I have explored the special nature of these events extensively. Here, let me remark very briefly on a number of their important characteristics:

•            First, due to the ineradicable, spontaneous, expressive-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.

•            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.

•            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.

•            To the extent that all the outcomes of such spontaneous, inter-activity cannot be traced back to the specif actions of any of the individuals involved, they are experienced by participants in such meetings as due to the presence of a 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..

•            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.

•            This all occurs within living meetings – and can thus, only be made sense of from within those meetings.

Central in what follows, then, will be a focus on the expressive-responsiveness of growing and living forms, both to each other and to the othernesses in their surroundings, and on their own particular and unique ways of coming-into-Being. Each requires understanding in its own way. While we can come to an understanding of a dead form in terms of objective, explanatory theories representing the sequence of events supposed to have caused it, a quite different form of engaged, responsive understanding becomes available to us with a living form. It can call out spontaneous reactions from us in way that is quite impossible for a dead form. It is this that makes these two kinds of understanding so very different from each other. While we can study already completed, dead forms at a distance, seeking to understand the pattern of past events that caused them to come into existence, we can enter into a relationship with a living form and, in making ourselves open to its movements, find ourselves spontaneously responding to it. In other words, instead of seeking to explain a present activity in terms the past, we can understand it in terms of its meaning for us, i.e., in terms of our spontaneous responses to it. It is only from within our involvements with other living things that this kind of meaningful, responsive understanding becomes available to us.

              Bakhtin (1986) has outlined for us the nature of this everyday, spontaneous kind of understanding that occurs in our speech, i.e., not within the static patterns of already spoken words, but actually in our living, embodied speaking with each other, as our utterances unfold: “All real and integral understanding is actively responsive,” he says. “And the speaker himself is oriented precisely toward such an actively responsive understanding. He does not expect passive understanding that, so to speak, only duplicates his or her own idea in someone else’s mind... Rather, the speaker talks with an expectation of a response, agreement, sympathy, objection, execution, and so forth...” (p.69). In other words, crucial in our everyday, spontaneously responsive talk, is its orientation toward the future, toward what has not-yet-happened: “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, p.280, my emphasis). It is this – the generation in us of an embodied anticipatory sense of what has not yet happened, but which is expected to happen – that I think is so special about Goethe’s methods of inquiry into the development of living forms.

Two styles of thought: ‘withness’- versus ‘aboutness’- thinking

As professional academics, we have all been trained into a certain style of ‘rational’ thought, a style modeled on thinking in the physical sciences, aimed at discovering a supposed ‘reality’ hidden behind appearances. One of the best expressions of it known to me is that outlined by Heinrich Hertz (1894/1954) in his The Principles of Mechanics: “We form for ourselves images or symbols of external objects,” he says, “and the form we give them is such that the necessary consequents of the images in thought are always the images of the necessary consequents in nature of the things pictured...We do not know, nor have we any means of knowing, whether our conceptions of things are in conformity with them in any other than this one fundamental respect”(p.1, p.2). In other words, it is a form of thought that itself works ‘mechanically’, in terms of static shapes, instantaneous configurations, patterns or forms, that can be ‘fitted’ onto or into each other. Movement is thus conceived as a sequence of minuscule ‘jumps’ from one identifiable stationary state to another. Thus, empowered by this form of thought, when confronted with a perplexing (or astonishing) circumstance in the sciences, we take it that our task is to analyze it (i.e., dissect it) into a unique set of separate, unchanging elements; to find an unchanging or fixed pattern among them; and then try to invent a theoretical schematism (functioning in terms of rules, laws, or principles) to account for the sequence of static patterns so observed. Or in the arts, we express this method by seeking ‘the content’ supposed to be hidden in the ‘forms’ appearing before us, by offering ‘interpretations’ supposed to ‘represent’ this content. In short, we formulate the circumstance in question as a ‘problem’ requiring a ‘solution’ or ‘explanation’.

              To the extent that this style of thought is based in mental representations of our own creation, it leads us into adopting a certain relationship to the phenomena before us: Instead of leading us to look into them more closely, to try to get a sense of the detailed inter-relationships in terms of which they have their unique being, we do the opposite – we at first to turn ourselves away from them while we cudgel our brains in the attempt to construct an appropriate theoretical schematism, i.e., an order of constituted of homogeneous parts into which to fit them (see Hertz above). We thus impose our own framework upon the phenomena before us, a framework that is not itself a part of nature at all, thus to eradicate all the already existing internal relations within them, and to reduce them to a (picture-able) system of parts that are external to each other. Only after we have done this do we then turn back again toward them, but now with an action in mind suggested to us by our theoretical representation of their nature, an action, as we shall see, to do only with their “mastery and possession” (Descartes).

              Such a knowledge of facts, however, is a very inadequate form of knowledge. It achieves, as Quine (1953) realizes only too well, only a very limited, selective account of nature: “the totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs... is a man-made fabric which impinges on reality only along the edges” (p.42). In the unique circumstances of our daily lives together, such knowledge, when set over against us as a mere form or shape (a picture), fails to provide us with an evaluative sense of how we should place or position ourselves with respect to it (or of it in relation to ourselves). Nor does it help us in our everyday practices when acting in relation to each other, to anticipate what next we should do for the best in our lives. We need to interpret it. But here again, we lack a shared guiding sense of how we should do this in relation to the others around us. In short, such knowledge fails to provide us with an orientation in our daily lives. On possession of it, embedded within the landscape of possibilities surrounding our lives, we remain as disoriented in relation to the others and othernesses around us as before.

              But there are more inadequacies to it than it merely failing to provide us with orientation. Clearly, the form of analysis to which it gives rise is a violent procedure that ignores all the intrinsic living relations already in existence in virtue of which living things grow, develop, flower, and die, only to reproduce others of their kind, to continue the unbroken stream of life on our planet. It is a style of thought that not only ignores the possibility of expressive movements by living things, but has no way at all of accounting for the intermingling, or dynamic inter-influencing, of such movements. Indeed, instead of inquiring into how such inter-influencing might occur, living wholes are torn asunder (“We murder to dissect” – Wordsworth), and all the living activities between us are excluded from our considerations. Indeed, it is a whole style of thinking that, in ignoring the expressions of living bodies, ignores the possibility that people’s meanings and understandings might be found within the inter-influences occurring in their reciprocally responsive expressions.

              In Goethe’s delicate empiricism, however, in which, to repeat, our thought “makes itself utterly identical with the object,” we do not think about an object from afar, but think with it, as if feeling over its contours, in a comprehensive, responsive exploration of its living, expressive, surfaces. In what follows below, following Goethe, while resonating also with Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, and Merleau-Ponty, I want to explore this kind of participatory thought further.

              Let me begin with Wittgenstein: having warned us that: “The basic evil of Russell’s logic, as of mine in the Tractatus, is that what a proposition is is illustrated by a few commonplace examples, and then pre-supposed as understood in full generality” (1980, I, no.38), also 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.

              Think of what might be involved in becoming an art critic or a music critic: one must learn how to actively relate oneself to a piece of music or to a painting, to compose oneself in such a way, as to first notice within one’s own living, spontaneous, inner responsive movements the subtle nuances of expression present in the work, thus later, to express them in some intelligible way to others. To do this, one must listen to many musical performances, or look over many paintings – dwell upon them or within them – to such an extent that one comes to embody a ‘something’ that acts within one as a guiding or directing agency in one’s listening and looking, a something that gives one a way of listening and looking. A ‘something’ quite other than scientific knowledge would seem to be required, a something that can be gained in the kind of philosophical inquiry Wittgenstein outlines. For, as he puts it: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about’” (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.123).

              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.

              But such embodied understandings do not develop within us in an instant, they take time. If we are to paint the scene before us, we must ‘look over’ it again and again. Merleau-Ponty (1964) discusses Valéry’s and Cézanne’s reflections on the activity of oil painting: “The painter ‘takes his body with him, says Valéry. Indeed we cannot imagine how a mind could paint. It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings... ‘Nature is on the inside’, says Cézanne. Quality, light, color, depth, which are there before us, are there only because they awaken an echo in our body and because the body welcomes them. Things have an internal equivalent in me... I would be at great pains to say where is the painting I am looking at. For I do not look at it as I look at a thing; I do not fix it in its place. My gaze wanders in it as in the halos of Being. It is more accurate to say that I see according to it, or with it, than that I see it” (p.163, p.164). Rather than looking at it, I enter into an interplay with it. In so doing, I look begin to look beyond it, or through it, to see other things in my world in its light; it can become, one could say, a guiding or directing agency in my looking; it gives me a new and unique way of looking. I look at other things now with it as my guide. This is not to say that I see other things by following its contours, but I see them in accord with the same invisible anticipations it responsively arouses in me. Thus, as Steiner (1989) suggests, “the streets of our cities are different after Balzac and Dickens. Summer nights, notably to the south, have changed with Van Gogh (p.164)... It is no indulgent fantasy to say that cypresses are on fire since Van Gogh or that aqueducts wear-walking shoes after Paul Klee” (p.188).

Withness-thinking: its foundational nature

There is, then, a form of mental activity, of intelligent inquiry, available to us of a kind quite different from that outlined by Heinrich Hertz above. In line with Goethe’s maxim, that “every new object, well contemplated, opens up a new organ of perception in us,” we find many others outlining a kind of embodied, spontaneously responsive understanding of the dynamics of events occurring around them in similar terms. I will call the kind of mental activity involved ‘withness-thinking’, to contrast it with the more usual forms of thought we pursue in our intellectual lives that I will call ‘aboutness-thinking’ .

              As I see it, withness (dialogic)-thinking is a form of reflective interaction that involves our coming into living contact with the living (or moving) being of an other or otherness – if it is a meeting with another person, then we come into contact with their utterances, their bodily expressions, their words, their ‘works’. Involved, is a meeting of outsides, of surfaces, of ‘skins’ or of two kinds of ‘flesh’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1968), such that they come into ‘touch’ with each other. They both touch and are touched, and in the relations between their outgoing touching and the resultant incoming responsive touches of the other, the sense of a ‘touching’ or ‘moving’ difference emerges. In the interplay of living movements intertwining with each other, new possibilities of relation are engendered, new interconnections are made, new ‘shapes’ or ‘forms’ of experience can emerge. These reflective encounters are thus, not just simply a ‘seeing’, for what is sensed is invisible; nor are they interpretations (or representations), for they arise immediately, directly and uniquely in one’s living encounter with an other’s expressions; neither are they merely feelings, for carried with them as they unfold is a bodily sense of the possibilities for responsive action in relation to one’s momentary placement, position, or orientation in the present interaction. In short, we are spontaneously ‘moved’, bodily, toward specific possibilities for action in this kind of thinking. They 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.

              While in aboutness (monologic)-thinking, works simply in terms of static ‘pictures’, set out in terms of separately identifiable elements and the supposed laws of their interconnection. Thus, even when we ‘get the picture’, we still have to decide, intellectually, on a right course of action regarding them. As Bakhtin (1984) puts it, in such a style of address, “(in its extreme pure form) another person remains wholly and merely an object of consciousness, and not another consciousness... Monologue is finalized and deaf to the other’s response, does not expect it and does not acknowledge in it any decisive force” (p.293). In ignoring all the already existing intrinsic (internal) relations between the others and othernesses around us, it remains up to us as isolated individuals as to how we act. But we are not, perhaps, as free to act in relation to this form of thought as it seems. We need to remember Descartes’s (1968) goal in his original outlining of his new method (of properly conducting our reason in the sciences). It was aimed at “knowing the power and the effects of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens and all the other bodies that surround us, as distinctly as we know the various trades of our craftsmen,” such that, “we might put them in the same way to all the uses for which they are appropriate, and thereby make ourselves, as it were, masters and possessors of nature” (p.78).

              And in our modern age, we have become “bewitched,” as Wittgenstein (1953) puts it, by this image or picture of what constitutes proper knowledge of natural processes: it is obtained only by proposing theories of the ‘hidden’ causes supposedly responsible for outcomes we observe, and by seeking evidence in favor of (or against) them. Goethe’s whole approach, however, is oriented toward showing us that in adopting this approach, we are misleading ourselves in ways that can in fact have quite disastrous consequences for us. Instead of us achieving that kind of easy familiarity to do with knowing our ‘way around’ inside our own activities – that kind of familiarity we can have when feel ‘at home’ in, or ‘know our way around’ inside a place or circumstance – we achieve the power of manipulation and control instead.

              While this power of mastery and control is not without its attractions, it still leaves us ignorant of the ordinary, everyday ways in which we do in fact relate ourselves to the others and othernesses around us, the ways in fact in which we first learnt to be functioning members of the everyday communities within which we live our lives. Indeed, it works to separating us from our surroundings in such a way that we cease to experience them directly, and must always, cognitively, ‘work out’ what is happening around us.

              To make this claim is not to reject the value of science in our lives. It is simply to note such facts, for instance, as the fact that parents (informally) teach their children, not only their mother tongue, but also countless other aspects of acceptable and intelligible behavior, without having any idea of the laws by which their children’s minds and bodies are governed. In the course of their everyday involvements with them, in being spontaneous responsive to their children’s actions in a living, bodily, expressive manner, parents can (but do not always do so, as is unfortunately the case currently) influence their child’s development considerably.

              In other words, at work here in the spontaneous, living bodily interactions occurring unceasingly between them, is another kind of process of understanding, and of acting expressively, quite different from that at work when we act deliberately as scientists – a process that works not in terms of regularities, but in terms of unique, only once-occurrent events. Thus, odd though it may be to say it (as I will show in more detail below), it is our new, once-off, first-time understandings that give us not only the possibility of coming to grasp of the uniqueness of each everyday circumstance we encounter, but are constitutive for us also, of what counts as the significant, stable and repeatable forms within that flow. They provide, in other words, the “conditions of intelligibility” (Taylor, 1993) that determine what is to count for us as an action or utterance of a certain kind. Rather than an after the fact “explanation” of a phenomenon, they specific the before the fact conditions required if we are to see a fact as a fact.

              In the philosophy of science, this becomes an issue if, as Hanson (1958) notes, switch their attention from the study of finished scientific systems like planetary mechanics, optics, or electromagnetism, to the study of unsettled, dynamic, unfinished research sciences like microphysics. Then the central issue becomes, not theory-using but theory-finding, not the testing of hypotheses, but with what in fact constitutes an appropriate hypothesis in the sphere of research in question. Thus, cautions Hanson (1958), if we not to distort our inquiries into how dynamic, research sciences are in fact conducted, we must examine, “not how observation, facts and data are built up into general systems of physical explanation, but how these [general] system are built into our observations, and our appreciation of facts and data” (p.3). For in a growing research discipline, the task is, not to understand how old facts and explanations can be rearranged into new more elegant formal patterns, but the discover of new possible patterns of explanation altogether – for different thinkers can think with them, i.e., put such systems to use in their thought, in different ways.

              To bring out what he means here, he compares Mach’s use of a formulaic proposition in carrying out a calculation with Hertz’s use of it. Both would, he shows, get exactly the same answers. But while Mach “construed dynamical laws as summary descriptions of sense observations,” Hertz treated them as “highly abstract and conventional axioms whose role was not to describe the subject-matter but to determine it” (p.118) – the difference between an ‘after-the-fact’ (Mach) and a ‘before-the-fact’ (Hertz) use of the formula. This would mean that, “though they get the same answer to the problem, the difference in their conceptual organization guarantees that in their future research they will not continue to have the same problems” (p.118, my emphasis). The difference between them – to do with the connections and relations they sense as existing within the phenomena of their inquiries – would show up “only in ‘frontier’ thinking – where the direction of new inquiry has regularly to be redetermined” (p.118).

              As Hanson (1958) puts it: “People, not their eyes see” (p.6). “...there is more to seeing than meets the eyeball” (p.7). Just like Goethe’s claim that “everything in the realm of fact is already theory,” Hanson (1958) also notes that “there is a sense, then, in which seeing is a ‘theory-laden’ undertaking” (p.19). And by this, he means all our seeing, our seeing in everyday life included: “We do not ask ‘What’s that?’ of every passing bicycle. The knowledge is there in the seeing and not an adjunct to it” (p.22).

              In other words, our communal ways of acting are the source of the various normative ‘pressures’ on us that ‘motivate’ us to act in ways that are accountable to those around us (Mills, 1940, Scott & Lyman, 1968). The shaped and vectored pressures they exert on us, that Wittgenstein (1953) describes in terms of them as having a “grammar” or as “founded on convention” (no.355), function as the foundations, the grounds, in term of which we can judge each other’s actions as necessarily correct or fitting. No other deeper or stronger necessity than that which structures our spontaneous ways of responding to each other’s expressions is needed or required – for how else could we judge its validity other than by the agreements between us expressed in our shared, judgmental responses to it. So, although it may also seem odd to say it, this means that Physics does not derive its legitimacy from its rooting in physical realities, but from its rooting in agreements amongst physicists about the theoretical equations that select certain formal aspects of physical reality, i.e., those that appropriately idealize these aspects as being lawful. We work in terms, not directly of our knowledge of physical reality, but indirectly, in terms of the knowledge that depends on our ways of knowing that reality.

Withness-thinking: instead of mathematics

Cassirer (1963), in his account of Kant’s influence on Goethe, quotes Kant’s comments (in the Preface to his 1786 Metaphysiche Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft) on the relation between “real science” and mathematics: “A pure physical theory of determinate natural objects is possible only through mathematics; and... hence any theory of nature will contain only so much real science as it permits the application of mathematics” (p.62 in Cassirer). It was this aspect of Kant’s philosophy that Goethe energetically rejected: “Physics must be divorced from mathematics,” he said. “It must be completely independent, and try to penetrate with all its loving, reverent, pious force into nature and its holy life, quite regardless of what mathematics accomplishes or does” (pp.62-63 in Cassirer). But how is it possible, if reality consists only in “a chaos as disordered as the poets could ever imagine” (Descartes), to bring an order, or orderings, into our thinking? How can we guide ourselves in our inquiries, without a secure path to follow? If we are to follow “the secure path of a science” (Kant, 1970/1781, p.17), we must accept that “reason has insight only into that which it produces after a plan of its own, and it must not allow itself to be kept, as it were, in nature’s leading-strings, but must show itself the way with principles of judgment based upon fixed laws, constraining nature to give answer to questions of reason’s own determining” (p.20). Surely, we must appeal to logical schematisms or systematic frameworks to organize the otherwise kaleidoscopic welter of impressions raining in upon us from our surroundings – mustn’t we?

              But, as I remarked above, instead of leading us to look into the detailed inter-relationships in terms of which the phenomena before us have their own unique being, mathematics influences us in our inquiries to do the opposite: to turn ourselves away from them while we try to construct a theoretical framework – a framework that is not itself inherent in the phenomena at all – to impose on the phenomena before us. Thus, this Rambo-esque form of reason (mis)leads us into completely ignoring the “leading-strings” which nature itself might offer us, if only we knew how to compose ourselves appropriately to be recipients of its gifts.

              As a first step toward further outlining the nature of ‘withness’-thinking, and toward appreciating Goethe’s antagonism to the influence of mathematics in our conduct of our inquiries, consider first the simple activity of just looking over, visually, the scene before us (currently, I am in my study with my books all around me) – with the aim in mind of readying ourselves to move about within it (I want to reach a book from a shelf, say). As our eyes ‘flick’ from one fixation point to the next, looking at a distant point to the right, next at a near point to the left, we nonetheless get a sense of a seamless whole, an indivisible ‘something’ that is not just ‘there’ before us as a picture is there, but is there for us as a set of openings and barriers, of ‘invitations’ and ‘impedances’ to our actions – given our present ‘position’ within that whole. And further, in such involvements as these, we would all – more or less – see the same whole (my cramped little ‘ship’s cabin’ of a study). So that, although I might look from the window to my left to see the door to my right, and you (standing behind me) might look from the door on my right to see the window on my left, from within the overall time-space we would share, everything would be similarly ordered. While there are some books I cannot reach from where I am sitting, I can see that you can reach them, and I ask you to help me by doing so, and so on. While you might say: “Oh, go on. You can reach those.” In other words, if there are some disagreements between us over exactly what it is the scene before us, and what is possible within it, we can make use of what we do agree on to discuss the features we see differently.

              In other words, in many temporally unfolding circumstances (but not in all), there is something special in the temporal sequencing of our activities. But not so much in how we order them, as in how the ‘something’ out there requires us to order them. It is as if the separate elements we encounter seem to unfold in a special way, not just haphazardly but accordance with a certain style. They give rise in all who encounter them, spontaneously, i.e., prior to any thought or deliberation on their part, a shared (or at least shareable) sense of the shared surrounding circumstances in which all our individual actions can be seen as playing a part, as making “a difference that makes a difference” (Bateson, 1979). They are, we might say, ‘participant parts’ in a larger, living and growing whole, and it is as such that they can have meanings intelligible to others – just as my words now, in being read at this moment, can be appreciated as leading (perhaps) to some new developments in our forms of intellectual inquiry.

              As I see it, this claim – that the sequencing of our human activities is not just formless, that not just anything can follow or be connected with anything – is clearly connected with Wittgenstein’s (1953, 1974) claim, that most of our activities on investigation seem to have a “grammar” to them. And that, as he sees it, it is their shared grammar that we must observe if our expressions and utterances are to be intelligible to those around us. It is this – not the constraints imposed on us externally by a physical reality – that makes it impossible for us just to talk as we please: “Grammar is not accountable to any reality,” he claims, “it is grammatical rules that determine meaning (constitute it) and so they are not answerable to any meaning and to that extent are arbitrary” (Wittgenstein, 1974, no.133, p.184).

              How does this relate to Goethe’s style of thought? Well, about his own style of thought, Goethe observed (in responding to a commentator on it): “Thus Hienroth observes properly: ‘that my faculty of thinking is objectively active [gegenständliches Denken]’, whereby he means to say that my thinking does not separate itself from its objects; that the elements of the objects, the concrete intuitions (Anschauungen) enter into that thinking and are most inwardly permeated by it in form; that my way of seeing (Anschauen) is itself a thinking, my thinking a way of seeing – a procedure said friend does not wish to deny his approbation” (in HA, 13, p.37, quoted in Brady, 1998, p.97). But here, we must add an important proviso: Goethe sees all the objects of which he speaks as created objects, so that: “If I look at the created object, inquire into its creation, and follow this process back as far as I can, I will find a series of steps. Since these are not actually seen together before me, I must visualize them in my memory so that they form a certain ideal whole. At first I will tend to think in terms of steps, yet nature leaves no gaps, and thus, in the end, I will have to see this progression of uninterrupted activity as a whole. I can do so by dissolving the particular without destroying the impression itself” (in SS, p.75, quoted in Hoffman, 1998, p.133). And in doing this, “from the mathematician,” he says, “we must learn the meticulous care required to connect things in unbroken succession, or rather, to derive things step by step. Even where we do not venture to apply mathematics we must always work as though we had to satisfy the strictest geometricians” (SS, p.16, quoted in Amrine, 1998, p.38).

              Thus, as Goethe realizes, even with something as simple as looking over a landscape, a picture, a painting, a sculpture, an art work of any kind, there are different styles of looking, different bodily ways of using one’s eyes, and ‘orchestrating’ into those movements, other basic bodily capacities. And we can in certain styles of looking allow the things around us, so to speak, to discipline our looking, so that we can allow them to teach us ideals in terms of which conduct our observations. But not all these ways of looking will allow us to see ‘in’ the objects before us the kinds of “ideal wholes” of which he speaks – for instance, what Foucault (1973) speaks of as “the clinical gaze,” would clearly preclude their emergence. For, as he notes, in being a way of looking informed by an already existing, orderly medical vocabulary, it “has the paradoxical ability to hear a language as soon as it perceives a spectacle” (p.108). Instead, we need, so to speak, disorderly eyes, mobile eyes, eyes that can enable us to move up closer to, say, a painting, or further away from it, to adopt a new angle, to pause for a moment to make a comparison (in fact or from memory), to stop looking while we ask a friend’s opinion, or to recall a textual account, and so on, and so on. And if in these movements we open ourselves to the ‘calls’ coming to us from the (created) objects as look over them, we find ourselves not so much looking at them – as in our instrumental looking (or gazing) at something – as looking, to repeat Merleau-Ponty’s (1964) term I used above, according to them.

              If we can look over them in this ‘moving’ way, then, over time, as we ‘dwell with’ such created objects, in the interplay occurring in our looking over them, in this way and then that, in accord with the ‘invitations’ they offer us, then, as I mentioned above, “real presences” may begin to emerge between them and ourselves, real presences with a life of ‘their own’, with ‘their own’ requirements, with ‘their own’ calls to which we – if we are to do them ‘justice’ – must ‘dwell with’ responsibly, i.e., answer to all the ‘calls’ they exert upon us.

              In other words, rather than following “the secure path of a science,” a path that is laid out prior to one’s investigations, if not actually in mathematical terms then at least in certain “theoretical” terms, Goethe outlines an alternative way of finding a ‘something’ to guide one in one’s investigations, a ‘something’ that can emerge if one remains ‘mobile’ or ‘flexible’ in one’s very soul. For, when facing a whole set of seemingly isolated facts, Goethe assumes that, in fact, they are not isolated, but fragmented appearances of a readily perceptible, indivisible whole, an ideal whole that can become known to us if we ‘dwell upon’ the facts appropriately.

              Thus in repudiating mathematics, Goethe was not repudiating the need for precision and rigor. Far from it. To be able, imaginatively, to move with ease, backwards and forwards, through the unbroken, developmental flow of the different aspects present in created forms, requires, Goethe claimed, a process of “exact sensorial imagination.” But to do this, Goethe notes, is not easy: “To grasp the phenomena, to fixate them into experiments, to order one’s experiences, and to come to know all the ways in which one might view them; to be as attentive as possible in the first case, as exact as possible in the second, to be as complete as possible in the third, and to remain many-sided enough in the fourth, requires that one work through one’s poor ego in a way I had else hardly thought possible” (HA, II, p.192, quoted in Amrine, 1998, p.46). But if we do develop our sensitivities in this way, then, “insofar as he makes use of his healthy sense, the human being is the greatest and most precise scientific instrument that can exist. And precisely this is the greatest disservice of modern science: that it has divorced the experiment from human being, and wants to know nature only through that which is shown by instruments - indeed, it wants to limit and demonstrate nature’s capacities in that way” (HA, 8, p.473, Amrine, pp.37-38).

Withness-thinking: ideals and Urphänomenen

To see a developing whole in this indivisible way, is to see the various possible next steps in its development as necessary steps, as being open to further specification, but only of an already specified kind, i.e., as having a certain style to them. In seeking this kind of exactitude, Goethe (like Descartes) had in mind how we think in mathematics when (as something of a mathematician) we have a comprehensive inner vision arrayed before us, all-at-once, of the sequence of steps required in arriving at a proof, as if, say, when beholding a route through a visual landscape. For, before we can be impressed by a proof, we must be able spontaneously to recognize as proof as a proof! Indeed, at this point it might be worth reminding ourselves of Descartes’s (1968) claims regarding the source of the ideals guiding our thought in achieving certainty. For, although he knows that he is in himself an imperfect being (because of his doubts), he nonetheless still finds within himself certain things “more perfect than myself,” things which he cannot conceive of doubting. He thus feels able to follow a “a general rule that the things we conceive very clearly and distinctly are all true” (p.54) – things, for instance, as the fact that when “supposing a give triangle to be given , I distinctly perceive that its three angles were necessarily equal to two rights angles, but I did not on that account perceive anything which could assure me that any triangle existed” (p.56). But, if we did not perceive anything that could assure him of the existence of any triangle, from whence could such a confidence issue? It “must have been put into me,” he claims, “by a being whose nature was truly more perfect than mine... that is to say, in a single word, which was God” (p.55).

              Indeed, although our judging that a particular thing or event is a thing or event of a particular kind is an everyday occurrence, there is still nonetheless there is something very special (and still mysterious) about how an ideal can set a general standard in terms of which a whole set of particularities can be adjudged. As Wittgenstein (1953) notes: “One has already to know (or be able to do) something in order to be capable of asking a thing’s name” (no.30). In other words, we must already know in some primordial way what, for instance, a triangle is, or what dreaming is, and be able distinguish between dreams and reality, to be able serious consider exploring – like Descartes – things we know for certain, and whether all our experience might be occurring to us solely in our dreams. One tends to forget, says Wittgenstein (1953), “that a great deal of stage-setting in the language is presupposed if the mere act of naming is to make sense” (no.257). But what can possibly be the source of such ideals?

              We have tended to believe that concepts are arrived at by abstracting what is common from a number of cases; they are empirical generalizations. And in our further inquiries in to the world around us, we have tried to extend our stock of concepts in this way. In Goethe’s time, Linnaeus’s system for the categorization of plants was strongly influential. Central to it, was the separation of plants in different categories according to the number of stamens. But, as Goethe saw it, in classifying plants in this way, much that was similar was separated, while much that was dissimilar was grouped together according to a rigid and quite arbitrary criterion. It was a way of ordering plant forms without any insight into an intrinsic unity amongst them. It was, he said, a procedure that resulted “in a kind of mosaic, in which one completed block is placed next to another, creating finally a single picture from thousands of pieces; this was somewhat distasteful to me” (Brady, 1998, pp.92-3; Goethe’s Botanical Writings, pp.159-60).

              But, as Goethe began to realize as a result of his close and intense observation of single plants as they metamorphosed in the course of their growth, the sensually perceptible form of the leaf could be seen as transforming itself into the calyx, the petals, and even into the pistil. In other words, the leaf-form functioned for Goethe, not like a reduced, abstract universal – like a right-angle triangle for Descartes – but like a concrete universal – like Wittgenstein’s (1953) notion of language being like a city, or like a game. Goethe calls such a “pregnant point” (Amrine, 1998, p.39), the inexhaustible source from which we can draw all the detailed possible examples of a phenomenon, an Urphänomen, or in the case of plant forms, the Urpflanz. In other words, such a concrete universal, rather than being the exemplar of a particular way of thinking, an abstract terminus for our thought, can function as an exemplar for a particular way of thinking; it can be constitutive of a whole practice suited to a particular circumstance. Indeed, this is exactly how Goethe expressed what he saw as the value of the Urpflanze: “The archetypal plant shall be the most marvelous creature in the world, and nature shall envy me for it. With this model and the key to it one can invent plants ad infinitium that must be consistent, i.e., that could exist even if they do not in fact, and are just picturesque or fanciful shadows, but have instead an inner truth and necessity” (Goethe, HA, 11, p.323, quoted by Amrine, pp.39-40).

              At first, as the famous story goes, Goethe thought of the Urpflanze as a archetypal form that could in fact be sensed in one’s actual experience of plant forms. Indeed, in a meeting with Friederich von Schiller in 1794, Goethe sketched out the essential structure of the primal plant as he saw it. Goethe, however, was dismayed when Schiller, a Kantian, replied: “That is not an observation from experience. That is an idea” (quoted in Brady, 1998, p.96) – seeming, once again, to suggest that Goethe had merely come up with a hypothesis, just as any other scientist might. But then, as Goethe recounts it, he collects his wits and replies: “Then I may rejoice that I have ideas without knowing it, and can see them with my own eyes” (quoted in Brady, 1998, p.96).

              In other words, what Goethe is bringing to our attention here, most importantly, is that in all our actual, everyday looking and seeing in the world – if we are not to find ourselves totally disoriented, like Sacks’s (1985) Dr.P, who had to ‘work out’, after the fact, so to speak, what events occurring around him might humanly mean – we see in accord with a precisely ordered scheme of expectations as to what we might next encounter as we look over the circumstance before us. In our growing up into the world around us, we come to embody, in Goethe’s sense, many such ordered schemes within ourselves. To repeat, as Goethe suggested: “Man knows himself only to the extent that he knows the world; he becomes aware of himself only within the world, and aware of the world only within himself. Every new object, well contemplated, opens up a new organ of perception in us” (SS, p.39, quoted in Cottrell, 1998, p.257). So the fact is, not that Goethe’s ways of looking in terms of Urphänonen is so unusual; it is what we do anyway, spontaneously, in all the special spheres of practical activity in which we gain what Polyani (1958) called tacit knowledge – it is just that he has discovered what is involved in deliberately extending and elaborating it into unusual spheres of study at will.

              Why have we been so unaware of this? Why do we still feel that when we look out on the world, we simply passively see what is there to see? Although philosophers have suggested (e.g., Brentano, 1973) that some mysterious stuff called intentionality is responsible for us actively seeing something when we look out on the world around us, they have still not said anything about why we are so unaware of its functioning in our actions and perceptions. The answer, I think, lies in the fact that, although “every new object, well contemplated, opens up a new organ of perception in us,” the contemplation in question occurs as the outcome of living, spontaneous, expressive-responsive bodily activity that is chiasmicly intertwined in with the relevant object (see above). Thus, as such, there is no way in which it can be traced back to the specif actions of any of the individuals involved. It simply appears as to me as something is presented, so to speak, anonymously, as a situation ‘given’ to me.

              Goethe’s contemporary successor, as I see it, is Wittgenstein. Like Goethe, he is not concerned with explaining phenomena scientifically. Like Goethe, his concern is with coming to an undistorted, indeed, an unfalsified sense, of the living unities in fact existing within the human world around us. Like Goethe, he feels a deep disquiet with the (in)adequacy of externally imposed explanatory theories working only in terms of what can be directly and immediately seen by spectators. He states his aim thus: “I am not interested in constructing a building, so much as in having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings. So I am not aiming at the same target as the scientists and my thinking is different from theirs” (Wittgenstein, 1980, p.7). And as I have already noted, while scientists feel it is their task to give explanations of phenomena, Wittgenstein (1981) thinks that we often wrongly expect 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” (no.314).

              We need, he feels, to “dwell upon it,” because (in our attempts to understand how our use of language works in our conduct of our affairs in our everyday lives), “main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view of the use of our words,” and such dwelling gives us a chance of arriving at what he calls a “perspicuous representation,” where, “a perspicuous representation produces just that understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections’” (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.122). Like the concept of an Urphänomen for Goethe, the concept of a “perspicuous representation” is of fundamental significance for Wittgenstein. Although it takes an event’s development of time into account, it is quite different from a theory of development: “The historical explanation, the explanation as an hypothesis of development, is only one way of assembling the data – of their synopsis. It is just as possible to see the data in their relation to one another and to embrace them in a general picture without putting it in the form of an hypothesis about temporal development” (Wittgenstein, 1993, p.131).

              A “perspicuous representation” – one that will enable us to ‘see connections’ – is a strange, synoptic entity which boggles our mind . Yet, as William James (1897/1956) points out, our sense of the space in which we live our lives, is one of “the three great continua in which for each of us reason’s ideal is actually reached” (p.264) – the continua of memory or personal consciousness being the other two. “In the realm of every ideal,” suggests James (1897/1956), “we can begin anywhere and roam over the field, each term passing us to its neighbor, each member calling for the next, and our reason rejoicing in its glad activity. Where the parts of a conception seem thus to belong to each other by inward kinship, where the whole is defined in a way congruous with our powers of reaction, to see is to approve and understand” (p.264). Our ordinary, everyday experience of a particular space – our house, our home town, a sphere of well-known practical activity – are thus, for us, paradigms of such a synoptic, concrete ideal. As is, also, the simple grasping of the wholistic meaning of a text we acquire as we read it, word by word. Such a wholistic grasp of details in a particular sphere of concern is, clearly, not a general hypothesis – a suggested explanation of already existing facts. Rather than an after the fact intellectual device, working to assimilate already existing facts to a general scheme concerned with manipulative action, it is a before the fact aid to perception, working to bring the facts of the case to our attention, as we look over the unique situation before us.

              Here is not the place to attempt a full-scale comparison of Wittgenstein and Goethe . But it is worth noting where in our current, everyday practical affairs, their methods can have important application – they can, for instance, be very helpful to us in our own human affairs when we face the task of understanding why in fact a group of people act in ways that are puzzling to us. For it is difficult not to make the mistake of thinking that their ways of thinking and acting are little different from our own. It is in the kinds of difficulties and problems we face in our ordinary everyday lives – the kinds of problems I outlined at the outset of this article – that Goethe’s delicate empiricism can find its application. It is as practitioners, not as academic theorists arguing in seminar rooms and conference halls essentially about beliefs and opinions, that we can it offering the orientation we need.

The everydayness of withness-thinking

We can get a feel for the nature of these problems of orientation, problems to do with the attitudes or stances required in approaching other people or circumstances that are strange to us, from an examination of Wittgenstein’s (1993) critique of Frazer’s Golden Bough (first vol. pub. in 1890) . “Frazer’s account of the magical and religious views of mankind is unsatisfactory,” he says, “[because] it makes these views look like errors” (p.119). And he continues: “The very idea of wanting to explain a practice – for example, the killing of the priest-king – seems wrong to me. All that Frazer does is to make them plausible to people who think as he does... But it will never be plausible to say that mankind does all that out of sheer stupidity” (p.119, my emphases). If we are to grasp what is going on here, what it is that is organizing the practice, we need another approach: we need a sense of original feelings shaping the experience of the people in question. Mere cognitively held ideas, beliefs, or opinions do not possess sufficient compellent weight to account for the compulsive power of religious ceremonies in all their strange detail. We need a sense of that power if we are to understand the source(s) of people’s detailed activities within them – the rational justifications they may offer for them after the fact, do not gives us any access to that power. Such rationalistic, functionalist explanations are, so to speak, far too ‘thin’, they do not satisfy us. “Compared with the impression which the thing described makes on us [the killing of the priest-king of Nemi], the explanation is too uncertain... No opinion serves as the foundation for a religious symbol. And only an opinion can involve error” (p.123). “Nothing is so difficult as doing justice to the facts” (p.129).

              To see how misleading Frazer’s explanatory accounts are, how beside the point they are in capturing the emotional power expressed in religious rituals, Wittgenstein (1993) suggests, we can “easily invent primitive [ritual] practices” ourselves, “and it would be pure luck if they were not actually found somewhere” (p.127). For instance: “Recall that after Schubert’s death his brother cut some of Schubert’s scores into small pieces and gave such pieces, consisting of a few bars, to his favorite pupils. This act, as a sign of piety, is just as understandable to us as the different one of keeping the scores untouched, accessible to no-one” (p.127). Indeed, in acting in these different ways, we would be expressing to those around us how we stood in relation to a person’s death; we would be spontaneously ‘displaying’ certain relational possibilities to them for ‘going on’ with us, in practice; we would be offering them certain, momentary invitations, discouragements, openings, resistances, and suchlike for responding to us in this special time.

              Thus, as Wittgenstein sees it, in seeking hypotheses to explain the strange practices of other peoples, Frazer is looking in the wrong direction for the solution to our puzzlement. Instead, “one must only piece together [richtig zusammenstellen – correctly interrelate] what one knows, without adding anything, and the explanation follows of itself” (1993, p.121). Thus, instead of looking behind appearances for something hypothetical (like the people’s ‘wrong’ beliefs), Frazer should be seeking their Weltbild, the Urphänonen that ‘shapes’ of their world, as ‘shown’ in the grammar of their practices. And this got by relating or connecting the nature of their practices with certain feelings and experiences of our own: “Indeed, if Frazer’s explanations did not in the final analysis appeal to a tendency in ourselves, they would not really be explanations” (1993, p.127). And Wittgenstein demonstrates this by reference to his use of the word “ghost” in Frazer’s remark that certain superstitious observances “are dictated by fear of the ghost of the slain seems certain...” (Frazer, quoted in Wittgenstein, 1993, p.131). Frazer seems to want a solution to a mystery when he already shows in his own use of words, says Wittgenstein, that in fact he has the solution: “He evidently understands this superstition well enough, since he explains it to us with a superstitious word he is familiar with” (p.131). And Wittgenstein (1993) continues to make the point already made above, that: “If I, a person who does not believe that there are super-human beings somewhere which one can call gods – if I say: ‘I fear the wrath of the gods’, then that shows that I can mean something by this, or can give expression to a feeling which is not necessarily connected with that belief” (p.131). That is, people’s practices do not issue from any views, opinions, or beliefs that they might hold in their individual heads: Their “practice and these views occur together, the practice does not spring from the view, but they are both just there” (p.119). In other words, the Weltbilt in question is not an abstract terminus for our solving of our problems in our terms, but a point of departure for our development of a practice (perhaps of inquiry) in relation to them that we can conduct in their terms.

              But we cannot begin to introduce ourselves to such a way of thinking merely by thinking about the particular phenomena in question in terms of general schemes already well-known to us. We cannot do it by sitting all alone as a spectator at them, or merely through our contemplation of them. If we are to gain a sense of them as the uniquely created objects they are, if we are to gain a sense of the steps required for them to emerge into existence as the unique indivisible wholes they are – the steps which are not now, of course, visible – then we must find relational features or aspects within them, or between them and their surroundings, that will, as Goethe puts it, work to “open up a new organ of perception in us.” In other words, the development of a (participatory) practice is required – the chiasmic intertwining of a way of seeing, with a way of acting, with a way of thinking, all from within an embedding of ourselves in a living way in the same surroundings as the relevant phenomena, so that we too allow ourselves to be responsive in a spontaneous bodily fashion both to them, and to them in relation to their surroundings. We need to enter into the kind of engaged relationship that consists in an active interplay of activity in which, by our going out to meet them in this way and that, moving both up close and away, looking from this angle and that, and so on, and so on, so that, as Bohm (1965) puts it above, “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 [anticipatory] response” (p.211, my addition). In other words, as I noted above, such lived and engaged ways of relating ourselves to our surroundings, a certain kind of expressive-responsive understanding becomes available to us that is quite unavailable to us as disengaged spectators – providing us with a sense of the inner formative movements that give rise to them, can in fact afford us an anticipatory sense of how, in Wittgenstein’s (1953) terms, to ‘go on’ with them.

              But we cannot begin to introduce ourselves to such a way of thinking merely by thinking about the particular phenomena in question in terms of general schemes already well-known to us. We cannot do it by sitting all alone as a spectator at them, or merely through our contemplation of them. If we are to gain a sense of them as the uniquely created objects they are, if we are to gain a sense of the steps required for them to emerge into existence as the unique indivisible wholes they are – the steps which are not now, of course, visible – then we must find relational features or aspects within them, or between them and their surroundings, that will, as Goethe puts it, work to “open up a new organ of perception in us.” In other words, the development of a (participatory) practice is required – the chiasmic intertwining of a way of seeing, with a way of acting, with a way of thinking, all from within an embedding of ourselves in a living way in the same surroundings as the relevant phenomena, so that we too allow ourselves to be responsive in a spontaneous bodily fashion both to them, and to them in relation to their surroundings. We need to enter into the kind of engaged relationship that consists in an active interplay of activity in which, by our going out to meet them in this way and that, moving both up close and away, looking from this angle and that, and so on, and so on, so that, as Bohm (1965) puts it above, “the structure of [our] environment is, as it were, gradually incorporated into [our] outgoing impulses, so that [we] learn how to meet [our] environment with the right kind of [anticipatory] response” (p.211, my additions). In other words, as I noted above, such lived and engaged ways of relating ourselves to our surroundings, a certain kind of expressive-responsive understanding becomes available to us that is quite unavailable to us as disengaged spectators – providing us with a sense of the inner formative movements that give rise to them, can in fact afford us an anticipatory sense of how, in Wittgenstein’s (1953) terms, to ‘go on’ with them.

              The involvement of our bodies in such participatory practices – their spontaneous expressive-responsiveness to the events occurring around us – cannot be over emphasized. To repeat Goethe’s words already quoted above, with respect to sensing the character of passing events, “the human being is the greatest and most precise scientific instrument that can exist.” 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. As Wittgenstein (1980b) notes (quoting from Goethe’s Faust): “The origin and primitive form of the language game is a reaction; only from this can more complicated forms develop. Language – I want to say – is a refinement, ‘in the beginning was the deed’[Goethe]” (p.31). The primitive reaction here, is a bodily reaction of almost any kind, it may have been an intake of breath, an increase in heart beat, a glance, a turn of the head, a grimace, a smile, a sudden sense of relaxation or tension, we might even have spontaneously uttered a word or words, or any other expressive response. Whatever it was, what is crucial about it, is that the event provoking the response both ‘moved’ us to action, and provided us with a (at least a vague) sense of what next to expect. Thus, as Wittgenstein (1981) notes: “But what is the word ‘primitive’ meant to say here? Presumably that this sort of behavior is pre-linguistic: that a language-game is based on it, that it is the prototype of a way of thinking and not the result of thought” (no.541, my emphasis).

              What Wittgenstein sees in these primitive reactions, these prototypes for new language games, is, it seems to me, what Goethe sees in Urphänomenen. They are not just simply something with the status of an explanatory hypothesis, but something with the constitutive capacity to provide us with an embodied anticipatory sense of what might not yet, necessarily, have happened in a sphere of inquiry, but which must, sooner or later occur within it, if it is to retain its being as an indivisible, created (and still, possibly, growing) whole.

              To complete this section, let me draw attention to quite another way in which – in the light of the above remarks – we can see what we call ‘theory’ can be an influence, literally, in ‘instructing’ us, out in our practical actions in the everyday world of our practical affairs. Or, to see how the utterances or sayings of theorists can exert an instructive influence on us.

              Thinking ‘with’ an other’s voice, ‘with’ another’s utterances, in mind: As Bakhtin (1981) notes, to repeat, “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” (p.280). Considering the words of theorists, this suggests that – quite apart from the influence exerted on us by structural logic of their theories, i.e., by what is expressed in the patterns of their already spoken words – there is also quite another kind of influence their words might exert on us: in the ways in which we spontaneously respond their voicing of their utterances . Indeed, we can begin, not only to think in accord with another’s voice, but also to look over the situation before us in accord with their suggestions as to what usually unnoticed features we should now pay attention. This, I think, is the force of Wittgenstein’s (1953) “reminders” (no.127) – indeed, it is his stated aim is be “constantly be giving prominence to distinctions which our ordinary forms of language easily make us overlook” (no.132).

              For instance, take the following reminder: “Our attitude to what is alive and to what is dead, is not the same. All our reactions are different” (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.284). While on the one hand, it is utterly vague – no specific living beings or dead things are identified – on the other, it alerts us to attend to the distinctions already present, but not previously noted, in our own responses to dead and to living things. The purpose of such a reminder here, then, is not (as in science) “to hunt out new facts; it is, rather, of the essence of our investigation that we do not seek to learn anything new by it. We want to understand something that is already in plain view. For this is what we seem in some senses not to understand” (1953, no.89).

              But as I pointed out above, sometimes we do need to learn something new, not new facts, but a new orientation, a new attitude toward those we are studying (with). Thus with the help of such reminders, we can begin an intensive, i.e., an extensive in detail, exploratory interaction with a circumstance in question, approaching it in this way and that, allowing it to ‘move’ us to respond in this way and that, in accord with the ‘instructions’ or ‘directives’ provoked in us, both by Wittgenstein’s ‘reminders’, or by those issued to us by others as a result of their explorations. In other words, instead of our turning away from a circumstance that troubles us, and burying ourselves in thought in an attempt to fit it into an appropriate theoretical schematism in order to return to it later, to manipulate it in terms already well know to us. We can turn ourselves responsively toward it immediately. Looking into it with another’s words in mind – indeed, with the very words in mind of those who are already involved in the relevant situation, perhaps – we can begin to look into it in a thoughtful, feelingful way, a way that allows us to sense the power of some of the same expectations, the same hopes and fears guiding their actions, that they feel. It is a feelingful way of seeing and thinking that brings us into a close and personal, living contact with our surroundings, a way that allows us to relate to them in all their subtle but mattering detail, but also to gain a sense of the larger, indivisible whole in which they are all participant parts.

Conclusions: from ‘aboutness-thinking’ to ‘withness-thinking’

There are two ways in which we can respond to a difficulty: cognitively or bodily. Cognitively, there is a tendency to treat circumstances we find bewildering or disorienting, situations that are strange and new to us, as posing a problem for us. Thus cognitively, we respond to such events by seeking a solution to them, by trying to explain them. The solution consists in a sequence of steps: We begin by analyzing ‘the problem’ into already readily identifiable, self-contained elements, elements that stay identifiable as the elements they are, irrespective of where they are ‘placed’ with a larger whole. We then seek a pattern among them. On finding an order in that pattern, we hypothesize an agency responsible for it (we often say that ‘rules’ or ‘principles’ are at work in its production). We enshrine them, both rules and elements, within a general theory or theoretical framework that allows us to make predictions, and we now seek to find further evidence in their support. Such frameworks work for us in terms of ‘pictures’, representations, to which we can refer whether in the presence of the relevant phenomena or not. In existing prior to our inquiries, they can become central in giving shape to our actions, and can work to concentrate our “gaze” (Foucault, 1973) so that we attend only to the features relevant within the already adopted framework.

              But let us also note this about such a process: As far as we as investigators are concerned, we remain unchanged as the people we are in the process. We remain ‘set over against’ or ‘outside’ the other or otherness we are inquiring into; we are not engaged or involved with it. We acquire extra knowledge about it in the form of facts or information, with the purpose of gaining mastery over it. We do this by searching for regularities in its behavior, by establishing a single order of connectedness among what we take to be the stable, identifiable elements making up its nature. But these stable ‘elements’ are parts of a cognitive framework of our own creation that we impose on the phenomena in question from the outside. As such, they have their being for us within the already well-known realm of measurement, thus to elaborate it further. But also as such, it is a form of thought that eliminates the inner dynamics, inner complexities, and internal relations in terms of which both created and self-creating beings come into existence, and have their being there. Such reductions of complexities to simplicities can sometimes occur in an instant, in a flash of insight!

              In Goethe’s “delicate empiricism,” however, there is an altogether different way of responding to the difficulties and disquiets facing us: Instead of treating the phenomena in question as consisting in only in configurations of separately existing parts, they are treated as created or self-creating entities. As such, they possess a kind of indivisible wholeness denied to configurations of separately exiting parts. It is this that is crucial. For a certain kind of expressive-responsive, bodily understanding becomes available to us in relation to such wholes that is quite unavailable to us as disengaged spectators – a kind of practical, judgmental understanding that, in providing us with a sense of the “inner form” of such created entities, i.e., of the inner formative movements possibly giving rise to them, which can ‘teach us’ an anticipatory sense of how to ‘go on’ with them. But we can only gain this embodied, anticipatory sense by ‘entering into’ a dialogically- or chiasmicly structured relationship with them. And, as we ‘dwell upon or with’ them for a while in this manner, we can gradually gain an orientation toward them as their ‘inner nature’ becomes more familiar to us. But this kind of understanding cannot be acquired in a flash of insight. Much as we get to know our ‘way around’ inside a new city which is at first unfamiliar to us, say, by exploring its highways and byways according to the different projects we try to pursue within it, we must take the time required to approach the phenomena of our inquiries in many different directions. 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.

              In becoming familiar with something in our surroundings in this way, we can come to know, not just their inert, objective nature, but to know them in terms of a whole realm of possible responsive, living relations that we might have toward or with them. We can orient toward them in terms of their yet-to-be-achieved values, the (grammatical) ‘calls’ they might exert on us to ‘go on’ with them in one way rather than another. The development of a sensitivity to such calls is not a part of the problem-solving process.

              In this approach, the approach of a delicate empiricism, rather than regularities, “once-occurrent events of Being” are crucial – single, unique events that make a difference, or that strike us, are central. Instead of working from within the already well-known realm of measurement, it works ‘on the frontiers’ (Hanson, 1958), at the boundaries between the radically unknown and the realm of the known to expand its boundaries. But to repeat, rather than establishing single, systematic, logic orders of connectedness, it works to establish a multiple, complexly ordered sense of connectedness among the perceived aspects of the other or otherness – in Wittgenstein’s (19xx) terms, it provides a “synopsis of trivialities.” Further, we ourselves are changed in such encounters. We become involved with, immersed in, the ‘inner life’ of the others or othernesss we investigate. Indeed, to the extent that everything we do – in being (at least partly) a response to what others might do – can be shaped by them. Thus, while we think about the others and othernesses around us in solving the problems, in the rest of our activities, we can think with them, not in terms of mental pictures or images of them in themselves, but in terms of feelings of expectation or anticipation of how next we might ‘go on’ with respect to them. In short, rather than knowledge of their nature, we gain orientation toward it. Although we might at first be ‘bewitched’ by their ‘voices’, as our familiarity with them grows, their voice can become one voice among the many other voices of influence at work within us. Although at first, they (their voices) may gain a mastery over us, we can never gain a mastery over them – they can still surprise us, no matter how familiar to us they may have become.

              Although Goethe, in introducing his idea of a delicate empiricism, wrote that it was an “enhancement of our mental powers [that] belongs to a highly evolved age” (Goethe, 1988, p.307, quoted in Brady, 1998, p.98), as I see it, the kind of withness-thinking, withness-seeing, and withness understanding and action to which it gives rise, is in fact an everyday affair. But what Goethe – along with Wittgenstein – shows us, is how an already spontaneously executed everyday inter-activity can be instituted between us deliberately. To many, there are only two categories of difficulties facing us in the world: problems which can eventually be solved, and mysteries which cannot – and as Wittgenstein (1922) suggested in the Tractatus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” (7, p.180). But what Goethe and the later Wittgenstein show us, is that there is a third category: mysteries that we can ‘enter into’ and begin to find our ‘way around’ inside of. And that there is a ‘poetic’ way of talking and writing here – what we might call ‘withness’-writing (see Shotter, 2004) – within which we can express what we find our criss-cross jouneyings over these often befogged landscapes. Ways or talking and writing that, like signposts erected at recognizable landmarks, that can ‘point to’ what next to expect out in the world of our everyday, practical affairs.

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