Paper give at International Society for Theoretical Psychology Conference, Istanbul, 22-27 June, 2003, Symposium on Agency

PARTIAL, PARTICIPATORY AGENCY

versus

AGENCY ‘AS MASTERY AND POSSESSION’

John Shotter

University of New Hampshire

U.S.A.

ABSTRACT: Descartes (1637) offers the great hope (in his Discourse) that, if we were to adopt the methods of rational thought he proposes, then, “knowing the effects of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens and all the other bodies that surround us... we might put them... to all the uses to which they are appropriate, and thereby make ourselves, as it were, masters and possessors of nature.” But this dream of ‘sure-fire’ agency depended on another assumption of Descartes’s, that the matter composing his God-created world was made up of separate, corpuscular parts which God then agitated “diversely and confusedly,” and then set in motion “according to his established laws.” Such a view of human agency as acting on an external world is present, not just in “rational choice theory,” but in almost all applications of work in the social sciences in which it is thought “the plans of experts” can be “applied” in the solution of “social problems” – usually, with the production of disastrous results. But what if, instead of a world consisting of “separate elements of reality” all related to each other in a ‘picturable’ spatial configuration, we think of the human realities within which we live our lives as being structured as Saussure (1911) suggests language is structured: “... in language,” he says, “there are only differences without positive terms” (p.120). Then we have a world within which the differences of importance to us are not of the kind that become apparent to us by bringing two separate elements of reality into an external, spatial relation to each other, differences between positively existing terms. They are differences of quite different kind. Consider a ceaseless flow of activity, a succession of events in which each event ‘slides’ into the next, so to speak, without it being possible to fix a ‘before’ and an ‘after’, external to each other in identifying the character of each event. In such a circumstance, each event can only be identified in terms of its internal relations to those within the rest of the flow as an indivisible, temporally emerging whole. Only here can there be a system of differences without positive terms. But once within such a scheme of things as this, the whole nature of our agency changes – we ourselves become merely a participant part of a larger whole with its own character. Thus we can only act in accord with the providential (Vico) opportunities for action it makes available to us. I will explore these issue further in my paper for the conference.

“... it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language-game” (Wittgenstein,1969, no.204).

Descartes (1651) offers the great hope (in his Discourse) that, if we were to adopt the methods of rational thought he proposes, then,

“knowing the effects of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens and all the other bodies that surround us... we might put them... to all the uses to which they are appropriate, and thereby make ourselves, as it were, masters and possessors of nature.”

But this dream of ‘sure-fire’ agency depended on another assumption of Descartes’s, that the matter composing his God-created world was made up of separate, corpuscular parts which God then agitated “diversely and confusedly,” and then set in motion “according to his established laws.” Such a view of human agency as acting on an external world made up of separate parts is present, not just in “rational choice theory,” but in almost all applications of work in the social sciences in which it is thought “the plans of experts” can be “applied” in the solution of “social problems” – usually, with the production of disastrous results.

              But what if, instead of a world consisting of “separate elements of reality” all related to each other in a ‘picturable’ spatial configuration, we think of the human realities within which we live our lives as being structured, as Saussure (1911) suggests, like a language is structured: “... in language,” he says, “there are only differences without positive terms” (p.120). Then we have a world within which the differences of importance to us are not of the kind that become apparent to us by bringing two separate elements of reality into an external, spatial relation to each other, differences between positively existing terms. They are differences of quite different kind.

              Consider a ceaseless flow of activity, a succession of events in which each event ‘slides’ into the next, so to speak, without it being possible to fix a ‘before’ and an ‘after’, external to each other in identifying the character of each event. In such a circumstance, each event can only be identified in terms of its internal relations to those within the rest of the flow as an indivisible, temporally emerging whole. Only here can there be a system of differences without positive terms.

              Once within such a scheme of things as this, the whole nature of our agency changes – we ourselves become merely participant parts of a larger whole with its own character. Thus we can only act in accord with the providential (Vico) opportunities for action it makes available to us.

              As living, embodied beings (as ‘open' systems) we cannot help but be spontaneously responsive to events occurring around us. And as a result of being responsive in this way, strange things happen. Not only is there a complex intertwining of our own outgoing responsive activities with those coming into us from our surroundings, but within this intricate intertwining, a ‘space’ with a ‘depth’ (of human possibilities) to it is created around us. At the point of contact between two or more different forms of life with each other, yet another (collective) form of life emerges, a form of life with its own unique world and character. Our surroundings become a world with a culture to it. This ‘creation of a world’ involves the creation of: 1) ethical and other normative requirements; 2) a vocabulary of motives – and also quite specific ‘situated callings’; 3) ways of being a person {Geertz}; 4) agreements in judgments; 5) a shared background containing “extremely general facts of nature {LW: nos.142; p.n56, p.230; Z. no.355, 374}; 6) shared ‘ways of seeing’; 7) shared practices {ways of acting}; etc....

              In other words, as I see it, our current view of ourselves – as subjectivities viewing our surroundings as something objective – is an emergent outcome of other, much more intricate kinds of involvement with the others and othernesses around us. It is the ceaseless flow of spontaneously responsive activity occurring between ourselves and the others and othernesses around us which, I think, is always already there in the background to everything we do and say. This “responsive order” (Gendlin, 1997), as we might call it, is the source from which all our activities emerge and have their being, and the context to which they ultimately return to modify.

              Wittgenstein remarks on the importance of our embedding within such a responsive order in a number of ways. I will mention two here. One simple and crucially way in which he draws our attention to its importance for us, is in noting that:

“When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there” (1980, p.63).

And he goes on: “It’s only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems” (1980, p.75). In other words, what Wittgenstein notes here, is that we must not impose our own orders on what is around us; we must let ‘it’, so to speak, tell us about itself.

              Indeed, this leads on to my second example. In our embedding in spontaneously responsive order, he notes:

“Our attitude to what is alive and what is dead, is not the same. All our reactions are different” (1953, no.284).

It is the character of our living reactions to events occurring in our surroundings that matters, if we what to understand its nature better. For a form of engaged, responsive understanding becomes available to us with living forms quite unavailable to us with dead ones.

              While we can only study dead forms from a distance, seeking to understand the pattern of events in the past leading up the present form of their existence, with living forms, we can enter into a relationship with them, and, if we open ourselves to their movements, find ourselves spontaneously responding to them. 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 the spontaneous responses it ‘calls for’ from us in the present moment.

              But such activity as this cannot be described in merely causal terms, nor can it be understood logically or rationally, in terms of people’s reasons for so acting. As an utterly distinct third kind of activity, dialogic or dialogically-structured relations are, as we shall see, very strange. They are relations of a two-way kind which can arise only between the outgoing activity of a living, embodied being, and the responsive results coming back to it from its surroundings. They become especially strange when they occur between two or more human beings. Then, although all the individual involved may be very different from each other, they can nonetheless form a true unity. However, as Bakhtin (1984) oxymoronically puts it, it is “a unity of unmerged consciousnesses or voices.”

              It is like the complex unity produced in the intertwining of different instruments in an orchestra playing a symphony; each plays their own part in responsive relation to all the others playing their part.

              But how can a unity be formed from unmerged constituents. Shouldn’t we more properly call it an amalgam? Like splitting atoms, a contradiction in terms seems to be involved. What could a living unity of unmerged entities or activities be like? And how is a living relation different from the dead, mechanical, logical relations we familiar with?

              Merleau-Ponty (1964) takes the spontaneous intertwining of the two monocular views from our two eyes as a paradigm for what can happen when two separate activities intertwine in a living relation to each other. As we know, in the intertwining, rather than a blurred and averaged, and still two-dimensional view, we become the beneficiaries of a three dimensional, binocular view of the scene before us, not blurred but one with a greater resolution to it. We can pick out details in it more easily because in fact we see ‘a space in depth’.

              This, I think, is amazing!

              Rather than simply standing over against a static and dead 2-D picture at which we can only stare blankly, as we look over the scene before us, we find our bodies spontaneously constructing for us, a shaped and vectored sense of how we are placed in relation to a whole range of other possible places in our surroundings that we might be. Indeed, more than that, as we all know from our experience as car drivers, not only do we find the space around us offering us ‘openings’ for our movements, but we also find it issuing ‘compellent calls’ to us to act - ‘avoid that car which is coming toward us too fast and over the center line’ – ‘calls’ to which we spontaneously react. More than just being a space of possibilities open to our actions, it also has its own requirements.

              This difference – between standing in front of a 2-D picture, which we must actively, cognitively interpret as meaning something to us, and spontaneously finding ourselves required to answer the ‘calls’ coming to us from our surroundings – can give us a clue to the re-figuring of our forms of inquiry.

              Currently, as Wittgenstein (1981) remarks, we feel an overwhelming temptation, when unsure as to how to answer the ‘compellent calls’ coming to us from our surroundings, to treat our uncertainty as a ‘problem’ to which must find a ‘solution’ in terms of an explanation. Whereas, he suggests, “the difficulty... 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... 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).

              In other words, when faced with a disorienting circumstance, a circumstance in which we do not know how ‘to go on’, rather than turning away from it, and burying ourselves deep in thought in an attempt to mentally and imaginatively construct a way to explain it in ways already familiar to us, we should stay ‘with it’. We should look it over as we look over a painting or a sculpture in an art gallery. We should respond to it from up close, from a distance, from this angle and that, until we can begin to gain a shaped and vectored sense of the space of possibilities it opens up to us in the responses it ‘calls’ from us. And we should do this in collaboration with the others involved with us in the practice in question.

              This kind of collaborative ‘surveying’ of our activities and practices from within our conduct of them is a quite different kind of activity from thinking about them theoretically. It leads also, to a quite different way - a way I have in fact been using - for us to communicate between us about our practices. To allow ourselves to be influenced in this way, is to follow an utterly different set of methods. It is to follow a set of methods first developed by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe [1749-1832].

              Descartes (1968) in 1651 had talked of us as making ourselves “masters and possessors of Nature” (p.78). While in 1781, Kant (1970) urged that we must function only as “an appointed judge who compels the witness to answer questions which he himself has formulated” (p.20), and to refuse to be led by nature’s “lead-strings,” if we are to ever follow to true path of science. Goethe, however, saw Descartes’s and Kant’s scientist as “the task-master of nature, [who] collects experiences, hammers and screws them together and thus, by ‘insulating the experiment from man,... attempt[s] to get to know nature merely through artifices and instruments... [and never leaves] the gloom of the empirico-mechanico-dogmatic torture chamber” (Goethe, quoted in Heller, 1952, pp.17-18).

              Goethe sought a more gentle approach, a less Ramboesque way of conducting our intellectual inquiries. As he put it, he sought “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).

              I do not have the time left to go fully into the details of Goethe’s methods. So let me try to bring out their nature by a comparison between their responsive nature, and the sequence of steps derived from the dominance of Rampant Reason in The Classical Tradition.

              The sequence of steps in the classical tradition goes like this:

‒            i) Treat any newness or strangeness as a problem to be solved;

‒            ii) analyze it into already known elements;

‒            iii) find a pattern or order in them;

‒            iv) hypothesize an agency responsible for the order (call it, say, some such mysterious ‘stuff’ as ‘THE MIND’);

‒            v) find further evidence for THE MIND;

‒            vi) enshrine it in a theory;

‒            vii) manipulate the strangeness (now known in terms of our theory of mind as INNER MENTAL REPRESENTATIONS) to produce and advantageous outcome.

We thus arrive at what we call a ‘solution’ to the problem – the sequence listed above is related to the “whole trick of proving the hegemony of the spirit in history” outlined in Marx and Engels (1970, pp.66-67). Following Bakhtin (1984), we could call this process; the continual, monological rediscovery of sameness.

              The sequence of steps followed in the less rampant, more delicate empiricism of Bakhtin and Wittgenstein, perhaps under Goethe’s influence, goes like this:

‒            i) treat the othernesses one encounters as radically unknown to us - approach, not like an appointed judge, but with care, respect, and anxiety;

‒            ii) ‘enter into’ dialogically-structured, reciprocally responsive relations with it;

‒            iii) we must be ‘answerable’ (partially) to its calls, just as it is (partially) answerable to ours - we must allow it to display its being to us;

‒            iv) an ‘it’ appears between us, produced neither solely by us or by the otherness - the ‘it’ is our it: poiesis is at work between us - the sensed creation of form;

‒            v) the form has a shaped and vectored sense to it - we can develop a sensitivity or sensibility of the other’s responsive relations to us;

‒            vi) as we continue our commerce with the otherness, there is a gradual growth of familiarity with its ‘inner shape or character’;

‒            vii) as we ‘dwell on, or within’ our relations with the otherness, we gain a sense of the value of its yet-to-be-achieved aspects - the prospects it offers us for ‘going on’ with it.

Rather than a solution, rather than further information, what gain in this process is orientation: We gain a shaped and vectored sense of how ‘to go on’ in relation to the otherness concerned. Indeed, rather than bringing what was ‘a problem’ to us wholly to an end, the process above gives us only beginnings and beginnings without end – with solutions to this to that particular problem, but no overall final solutions, in principle. But gradually, with patience and persistence, we can come to feel more ‘at home’ with what was at first a radically strange other or otherness. We can come to feel ‘at home’ in the primeval chaos of everyday life!!!

              The Ramboesque application of the classical tradition in so many spheres of our relations to the others and othernesses around us, has produced a dominant world-picture of only dead and mechanical things, in which nothing new ever occurs – the continual rediscovery of sameness – a world picture of this kind, says Heidegger (1977), “when understood essentially, does not mean a picture of the world, but the world conceived and grasped as a picture” (p.129), i.e., as a configuration of essentially independent entities that can be rearranged into new configurations.

              What would the world around us look like if we were re-figure it in Bakhtin-Wittgensteinian-Goethean terms? What if we were also to take a number of our grand terms – like Agency, Mind, Knowledge, Feeling, Attitude, Inclination, Consciousness [con=with; scio=knowing], and so on – and see through them (i.e., our new images of them) a new living world of unceasing, spontaneously responsive relationships, in which unities were formed and held together just for a moment, by their participant parts ‘calling on’ each other in their ‘meetings’, and then, at the next moment, regrouping to form new unities in new meetings, and so on.

              What an amazing world!!

              The re-figuring of all of our grand terms in dialogic-poetic terms would, I think, awake us (as William Blake put it) from “single vision and Newton’s sleep” (put me right if that is slightly off). And this is the crucial point in my talk today - if we can just desist for a while from asking questions as ‘appointed judges’, and allow ourselves to be responsive to the others and othernesses around us, the world suddenly becomes a wondrous place. Is there still a task for university intellectuals in all of this? You bet! But rather than the noble seclusion of the ivory tower, they will have to open themselves up to world around them if they are to undertake it. Researches in human inquiries must become co-participants with those into whom they are researching .... Let the re-figuring of all our constructs, and the inquiries they inform, begin...

Rough Refs:

Bakhtin, M.M. (1984) Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Edited and trans. by Caryl Emerson. Minnieapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Brady, R.H. (1998) The idea in nature: rereading Goethe's organics. In D. Seamon and A. Zajonc (Eds.) Geothe's Way of Sceince: a Phenomenology of Nature, pp.83-111. Albany, NY: State University of New York.

Descartes, R. (1968) Discourse on Method and Other Writings. Trans. with introduction by F.E. Sutcliffe. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Heidegger, M. (1977) The age of the world picture. In Heidegger, M. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc.

Gendlin, G. (1997) The responsive order: a new empricism. Man and World, 30. pp.383-411.

Heller, E. (1952) The Disinherited Mind: Essays in Modern German Literature and Throught . Cambridge: Bowes and Bowes.

Kant, I. (1970) Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith. London: Macmillan's St Martin's Press.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964) Sense and Non-sense. Boston, MA: Northwestern University Press.

Wittgenstein, L. (1953) Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.

Wittgenstein, L. (1966) Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett. Oxford: Blackwell.

Wittgenstein, L. (1980) Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vols. 1 and 2. Oxford: Blackwell.

Wittgenstein, L. (1980) Culture and Value, introduction by G. Von Wright, and translated by P. Winch. Oxford: Blackwell.

Wittgenstein, L. (1981) Zettel, (2nd. Ed.), G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H.V. Wright (Eds.). Oxford: Blackwell.