"It is not experience that organizes expression. but the other way around - expression organizes experience. Expression is what first gives experience its form and specificity of direction" (Voloshinov, 1986, p.85).

"For more clearly... in my experience of others than in my experience of speech or the perceived world, I inevitable grasp my body as a spontaneity which teaches me what I could not know in any other way except through it ... It [my body] must teach me to comprehend what no constituting consciousness can know - my involvement in a 'pre-constituted' world" (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, pp.93-95).

Below, I want to explore the question of whether there somewhere else to go beyond or after Social Constructionism? Is there yet further progress to be made? I think there is. Indeed, it is a change of a much more radical and startling kind than any in recent years: If we are to bring something new into existence - some new practices, some radically new forms of inquiry, some new ways of being - rather than trying to move forward to formulate yet further theories or frameworks, I think we must move backward. We must come to a much greater awareness of, or sensitivity to, the very strange nature of the ways of making sense of each other, and of our surrounding circumstances, that are already occurring, spontaneously, between us and the othernesses around us now, within the present moment. Indeed, there is something very special about experiencing an other's expressions and gestures (their unfolding bodily movements) in the course of their arrival. As they unfold we feel ourselves 'called' to 'answer' them in some way: we look in the direction they are looking, we attend to their cries, we see them interested in something and seek to find its source too.

As living, embodied beings (as 'open' systems) we cannot help but be spontaneously responsive to events occurring around us, both to events that we ourselves, so to speak, 'make' - by comprehensively attending to a location in our surroundings with our eyes, ears, turnings of the body, and so on - and those that just happen, that spontaneously 'call' us to attend to them. As a result of being responsive in this way, strange things happen to and within us. Not only is there a rich and 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, horizon-bound environment, i.e., a world.

The idea of 'going back' to gain an awareness of our embedding in what we might call this primordial "responsive order" (Gendlin, 1997), and the style of inquiry required if we are to do this, will be central to everything I want to say. For, as I see it, our current view - of ourselves as subjectivities viewing our surroundings as something objective - is an emergent outcome of other, prior, much more intricate kinds of involvement with the others and othernesses around us. It is the ceaseless flow of shifting, spontaneously responsive activities occurring between ourselves and the others and othernesses around us which is always already there in the background to everything we do and say, that we must now attend to and describe. For these activities are the source from which all our more self-consciously controlled activities emerge and have their being; it is also the context into which they can ultimately re-enter, thus to modify it.

To make sense of the primordial responsive order already present in the background of our lives together, we need a new kind of attention to our living, spontaneously responsive, bodily activity. For life in our moment by moment living of it is very different from how we think and talk about it, after the event, in terms of the traditional Cartesian view of it as merely a passive puppet-like host inhabited and animated by an all-powerful rational mind⁽¹⁾. Our lives are fuller, more multi-dimensional, more fluid, with fleeting, complexly intertwined shifts of energy than we are able, officially, to recognize. We can move in an instant from an outgoing focus on an aspect of one's surroundings at one moment, to an inner focus on supposings and ponderings, on rememberings, imaginings, and desirings the next, with each moment in some meaningful way interconnected with the next. There is something very special also about human moments of expression: we can see the others around us thinking, hesitating, looking, listening, wanting, trying, and so on. While the Prousts, Flauberts, and Joyces of the world might attempt to capture such moments in their novels, we do not have any established, routine ways to grasp such living moments in our ongoing, unfinished, unfolding living of them. We do not usually reflect on our expressions in the course of their expression. Indeed, we still feel that any such efforts (if made at all) rightly belong in the world of art, for they only have point for those seeking to refine their sensibilities; they are not, and cannot be, we feel, an ordinary part of daily life. Only what can be truly shared by all - properly tested and evaluated objective knowledge - can serve that function. Thus, in scientific psychology, with its commitment to being objective, we attempt try to capture life only in terms of its completed products, its outcomes, in terms similar to how we grasp actual objects in our surroundings. As a result, we try to understand our living activities - which are emergent, unitary wholes, articulated into 'parts' only within the context of each such whole - by explaining them to ourselves in terms of a set of essentially non-living, externally related, objective parts⁽²⁾, i.e., in speculative, theoretical terms, as if beneath their everydayness was something hidden as yet utterly unknown to us. Speculative theories thus come to guide our research rather than undeniable facts of our existence.

The overall thrust of my article here, is to argue that this need not be so. Recent work by Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, Voloshinov, and Merleau-Ponty, along with the earlier work of Goethe, suggest to us a quite different way of orienting ourselves toward and relating ourselves to our surroundings. As a consequence, they also suggest to us a quite different way of thinking and talking about what we mean by the words "knowledge," "understanding," and "inquiry" - and many other such words related to the nature of our intellectual lives together. The trouble is that currently, we do know how to direct each other's attention to those aspects of our activities in the present moment that matter, that make a difference in our lives. We lack the linguistic means, collectively, to point out crucial features of our interactions with each other in the course of their occurrence. As Milan Kundera (1993) puts it: "When we study, discuss, analyze a reality, we analyze it as it appears in our mind, in our memory. We know reality only in the past tense. We do not know it as it is in the present, in the moment when it's happening, when it is. Remembering is not the negative of forgetting. Remembering is a form of forgetting" (p.128).

Yet in our actual acting, the fact is that we do know in our moment by moment practical dealings with our surroundings both their subtle details and of the 'mental movements', so to speak, that we make in dealing with them. Indeed, that we do know what is going in our everyday practical dealings with each other, fleeting moment by fleeting moment, is apparent to us in any conversation of importance to us - we respond to the slight hesitations of our conversational partners, to their knowing smiles, the embarrassed flickers of their eyes, a changed rate of breathing, and so on. We feel ourselves completely immersed within a continually changing emotional ambience that functions for us as a measure of the shifting direction of our conversation, where it now is and where it appears to be heading. Indeed, conversational analysts (e.g., Ochs, Schegloff and Thompson, 1996) are currently reinforcing this claim with some very detailed and intricate measurements. So although it might seem as if there is too much going on too quickly to attend to it all, the fact is that we do discriminate many such refined nuances with very great accuracy and acumen. As Wittgenstein (1953) puts it: "If it is asked: 'How do sentences manage to represent?' - the answer might be: 'Don't you know? You certainly see it, when you use them.' For nothing is concealed" (no.435). If we fail to formulate an intelligible account of how we can and do make a unique and subtly nuanced sense to each other in a way which allows us to appreciate more explicitly our own part in the process, then that can only be due to the difficulties we face in making use of the linguistic means available to us, not in the visibility of the relevant phenomena - for, as Wittgenstein (1953, no.435) adds, "nothing is hidden."

What follows below, then, is an attempt, drawing on the work of the above mentioned writers (and many others), to overcome this lack: to use portable words, words in a decontextualized text, to point toward aspects of our lives together at crucial points from within our living of them, while trying at those points to stay within the present moment, to stay within the unceasing living flow of life.
 
 

I look across the room at a stranger, our eyes meet, they smile slightly in response, or look away again immediately. Although it is difficult to say precisely in what our sense of contact consists, our sense of being in one or another kind of contact with them is nonetheless distinct. It is visible to us in the movement of their eyes. We can see them seeing us, we can see them respond to our responses to them. Upon analysis, we might suggest that there is a sensed correlation in the interplay between our scanning of them and their scanning of us. But the character of the interplay between us is much more than merely a quantitative matter of this kind, more than merely a matter of correlations between outer features of our activities accessible to all external observers. For, just as in a handshake between friends, when I feel your hand as strong and joyous and you feel mine as limp and uncertain, so it is also from within an exchange of glances: I can gain a qualitative sense of your inner nature, a sense of who you are, while you can gain a sense of me. Just as I sense the ice on the road through the changed way my car responds to my efforts to steer it, so it is with my experience of 'you'. Your inner nature - your care and respect for me, your vigor and zest for life, your distractedness and disorientation at events in your life - they all become to an extent apparent to me through the slight variations in how you respond to the rhythm of my active hand movements with your's - as my inner nature becomes apparent to you in the same way. There is a certain 'style' or consistency in your responsive 'answers' to my 'calls': you are always just a little ahead of me, or stiffer, or slower, etc. And just as when reading we sense a meaning through the words we read, while the words themselves remain in the background, so the signs (the specific variations) in terms of which you become apparent to me also withdraw into the background. They pass unnoticed. But there is even more, something else that happens in our encounters with each other which is also utterly inaccessible to outsiders. A little world with its own requirements and understandings, a living whole which makes 'calls' on us and to which we feel 'answerable', emerges between us and around us. My keenness to meet you takes you by surprise. Your surprise disturbs me and I draw back a little. Our meeting becomes a little awkward. Something is needed to start us off again, a new beginning. You smile and say what a nice day it is, and let's walk along together for a bit, and I agree. The fall has begun and the brightly colored leaves set the scene for the character of our friendship. We feel comfortable with each other again.

But how are the knowings and understandings described above, which guide us in our practical doings, possible in the midst of all this fluidity? For they seem to involve the creative combining of two or more sources of activity to produce, not simply a merged average activity, but a distinct otherness located 'out there', a unitary whole with its own 'inner' nature, a positioned source of activity with its own unique 'style' of life. I visually scan over a scene. My two eyes return to, and convergently focus on, the same rock face, up there, again and again, as well as on possible hand holds on my climb up to it from where I now stand. But in doing this, it is not a matter of me simply integrating a sequence of separate stimuli (static pictures) provided me by a sequence of glimpses, but of me finding ways within the continuous flux of spontaneously responsive experience to orient myself in relation my surroundings by focusing all (or a number) of my sensory channels on certain invariances or stabilities within that flux to which I can return time and time again. I see what I touch and touch what I see, and hear the rasping sound of my fingers slipping on the rock as issuing from the point at which I can see them touching it. As Gibson (1979) points out: "Vision is a whole perceptual system, not a channel of sense. One sees the environment not with the eyes but with the eyes-in-the-head-on-a-body-resting-on-the-ground" (p.205). And, we might add, similarly for the auditory system: it is not an isolated channel of sense either. One hears one's environment not with the ears, but with the ears-in-the-head-on-a-body-resting-on-the-ground-facing-in-a-certain-direction; thus the two systems are not in fact physically separable from each other, but reciprocally implicated in each other's operation.

Similar to my creative discovery of a set of stable 'places' in terms of which to orient myself in my climb up a rock face, so the otherness of the other is made available to me in the same way, i.e., in the constancies discoverable in the variations between my many outgoing expressions addressed to them, and all the incoming responses from them addressed to me. They, i.e., their 'style' of being, is present to me in the differences between my expressions and their responses to them, as I am present to them in the same way.

But how can we make sense of such a creative process as this, in which a unitary whole is created to accommodate, so to speak, a set of otherwise unrelated fragments? Seven considerations (at least) are, I think, relevant:

• -1) One consideration that is crucial to the approach I shall take, is Bakhtin's (1981, 1984, 1986) claim that our living relations to the others and othernesses around us are structured neither in cause and effect terms, nor in terms of sign to meaning, but dialogically, i.e., in relationally-responsive terms, in terms of a circumstance or situation 'calling for' or 'motivating' a response from us. As he puts it with respect to our verbal utterances: "Language lives only in the dialogical interaction of those who make use of it...Dialogic relationships are reducible neither to logical relationships nor to relationships oriented semantically toward their referential object, [these] relationships in and of themselves [are] devoid of any dialogical element. They must clothe themselves in discourse, become utterances, become positions of various subjects expressed in discourse, in order that dialogic relations might arise among them. 'Life is good', 'Life is not good'. We have before us two judgments... Between these two judgements there exists a specific logical relation: one is the negation of the other. But between them there are not and cannot be any dialogic relationships; they do not argue with each other in any way.... Both these judgments must be embodied, if a dialogic relationship is to arise between them and toward them" (p.183). Thus, when these two judgments are expressed in two utterances by two different individuals, one in response to the other, then they can give rise to disagreement, to contradiction, to controversy, and so on; then they are constitutive of one or another kind of relationship between the people concerned. Indeed, more than that, as we shall see, a unified world containing the two individuals concerned also begins to come into existence, a world able to function as a context in which such a disagreement, contradiction, or controversy can make sense.
• -2) The dialogical is thus born in the space between the living, bodily expressions of one individual and the spontaneous bodily responses to them by an other. Rather than occurring in an instant, however, such dialogically-structured activity develops over time. In being neither simply caused by an external (stimulus) event (behavior), nor due to the reasons or motives of an individual (action), it falls into a special, third category of activity, exhibiting an intertwined, multidimensional complexity. Its unfolding 'shape' owes its character to its continually changing responsive relations to its surroundings as people sequentially 'answer' spontaneously to the 'calls' coming to them in turn from within their different involvements with their surroundings.
• -3) We are always involved in the world around us in one way or another. Not to be involved, not to be oriented toward our surroundings, but to be totally disconnected from them, is not, as living beings, an option for us.
• -4) Given that whatever an individual does in response to their surroundings, is both 'expressive' of their attitude or orientation to them, as well as 'calling out' an other's response. The relation of such "expression-summoned bodily responsiveness," if we can call it that, to us later being able to express meanings to each other, is well expressed by Mead (1934): He notes that: "The mechanism of meaning is... present in the social act before the emergence of consciousness or awareness of meaning occurs. The act or adjustive response of the second organism gives to the gesture of the first organism the meaning it has" (pp 77-78). 3). In other words, long before anything occurs in our heads, in our conscious experience, we can find in the very structure of our responsive bodily activities, the precursors or prototypes for what later we shall talk of in mental or cognitive terms.
• -5) This gives rise to another consideration of great importance - although it may seem very strange indeed to bring it in at this point. It is the importance of the enthymeme or enthymemic structures. In rhetoric, an enthymeme - like the two utterances mentioned above: 'Life is good' and 'Life is bad' - consists in only two propositions, and lacks the 'middle term' which joins them; if the two utterances are to be accepted as jointly making sense, then the middle term (the contextualizing world) must be implicitly and creatively supplied by all those involved. Put otherwise, an enthymeme or enthymematic structure occurs when a speaker or performer says or does something that an other who witnesses it responds to in such a way that both performer and audience agree to the resulting joint outcome (Bitzer, 1959). I mention the importance of enthymemic structures in the light of the following comment by Voloshinov (1987): "Whatever kind it be, the behavioral utterance always joins the participants in the situation together as co-participants who know, understand, and evaluate the situation in a like manner... Thus, the extraverbal situation is far from being merely the external cause of an utterance - it does not operate on the utterance from the outside, as if it were a mechanical force. Rather, the situation enters into the utterance as an essential constitutive part of the structure of its import. Consequently, a behavioral utterance as a meaningful whole is comprised of two parts: (1) the part realized or actualized in words and (2) the assumed part. On this basis, the behavior utterance can be liken to an enthymeme" (p.100)⁽³⁾.
• -6) But how are the 'middle terms' of enthymemes created? This question leads me on to a fourth consideration: As we have seen, dialogically structured, living activity cannot be described in merely causal terms, nor can it be understood logically or rationally, in terms of people's reasons for so acting. It seems to be an utterly distinct, and very strange third kind of activity, in which the individual activities involved, although they may be very different from each other, nonetheless form, for a moment, a single, true unity of internally related parts. Like the complex unity produced in the stranding and intertwining of the different instruments in an orchestra playing a symphony; with each playing its own part in a responsive relation to all the others playing their part, a dialogically-structured unity is, as Bakhtin (1984) oxymoronically puts it, "a unity of unmerged consciousnesses or voices."
• -7) But how can a unity be formed from unmerged constituents. Shouldn't we more properly call it a mixture or an amalgam? Like splitting the atom, a contradiction in terms would seem to be involved. What could a living unity of unmerged entities or activities be like? And how are living relations within such a unity different from the dead, mechanical, and logical relations we familiar with? Here, I want to draw on Merleau-Ponty's (1962; 1964) work: he 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. Indeed, from the slight variations between the different views from the two eyes, besides a left-right and an up-down dimension of relation between ourselves and our surroundings, a third relational-dimension of near and far emerges, a dimension that allows us to orient toward and act in our surroundings in a more refined way. The different arrival time of sounds at our left and right ears operates in the same way, giving us, not a merged echo effect, but the directionality of the sound.

We have taken it, then, that there is something very special about us as being living, embodied beings. Our living bodies are not just secondary things that our minds happen to animate, as in the modernist-Cartesian approach. Nor is the world around us just an inert world of things and objects 'over there' which provide us with bodily stimuli which we, in perception, must discover how to interpret. We have also accepted above, that there is something very special about those moments when we and the others and othernesses around us are in a mutually responsive contact with each other, spontaneously, i.e., immediately and unthinkingly. In such moments, as Merleau-Ponty (1964) puts it (to repeat his words from the epigraph quotation above), my body is "a spontaneity which teaches me what I could not know in any other way except through it" (p.93). Wittgenstein (1980) too expresses a similar idea in commenting that: "The origin and the primitive form of the language game is a reaction" (p.31), and in then going on to comment: "But what is the word 'primitive' meant to say here?" he asks, "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" (1981, no.541).

Thus, in what follows, we shall take what might be called the interactive moment as the primal scene of social life, and center all our inquiries within such moments.

But in so, I must repeat a warning: in focusing on such moments, we must not forget the never ceasing existence of the background flow of spontaneously responsive, continually shifting activity in which all our more self-conscious activities are embedded. We must not slip back into modern ways of thinking in which it is assumed that any process, any flowing activity simply consists in a sequence of externally related, self-contained components parts, mentally integrated into a whole in some way - like the separate frames of a movie. Our task is the reverse of this. For we must differentiate out the moments of interest to us from an otherwise rich and comprehensively mixed up whole, a unity that never ceases to be present to us as a unity throughout our dealings with it.

Such a shift in standpoint will, as we shall see, entail a radical change in how we think and talk about the nature of intellectual inquiries in human affairs. Rather than as in modernist inquiries, beginning with the formulation of speculative hypotheses meant to picture or represent the structure of 'hidden' mechanisms, and seeking to introduce new practices 'out of the blue', so to speak, our task will be very different. We shall begin with our already existing practices, and have a much more practical aim⁽⁴⁾. Given the quite distinct and specific circumstances in which we are involved, in both our everyday and special practices, and the quite specific realities of understanding that have so far developed within them, our task is to discover how our already existing practices might be further linguistically articulated and discursively understood, thus to further refine and elaborate them. But, to what features of our involvements with our surroundings should we attend? What can we count on? Where are the fixities, the anchor points, so to speak, in term of which we can speak in a sharable way with each other about our activities?

As I have already noted above, both Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty point out to us the importance of our spontaneous, bodily reactions to events - both self-made and naturally occurring - as teaching us something new. It is, as Steiner (1989) remarks: "The 'otherness' that enters us makes us other" (p.189). To their remarks above and this remark of Steiner's, I want to add another of Wittgenstein's (1953). It is simply that "our attitude to what is alive and what is dead, is not the same. All our reactions are different" (1953, no.284). We have not taken this simple distinction seriously enough. For a quite special and distinct 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 meanings for us now, i.e., in terms of the spontaneous responses it 'calls for' from us in the present moment.

Totally entranced with the modernist, Cartesian tradition, we have (in our official, intellectual dealings) ignored the knowings and understandings available to us in this everyday way. They seem to lack the proper stamp of Truth! Thus currently, when unsure of how to answer the 'calls' coming to us from our surroundings, we feel an overwhelming temptation to treat our uncertainty as a 'problem' to which must find a 'solution' in terms of an explanation. Whereas, suggests Wittgenstein (1981), "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" (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, quoted in Brady, 1998, p.98).

I cannot go fully into the details of Goethe's methods here. So let me try to bring out their responsive nature through a comparison between them 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.

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.

In other words, 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. What would the world around us look like if we were re-figure it in Bakhtin-Wittgensteinian-Goethean terms? If we were to take a number of our grand terms - like Truth, Consciousness [con=with scio=knowing], Idea, Knowledge, and so on, and see through them a new living world of unceasing, spontaneously responsive relationships, in which unities were formed and held together for a moment by their participant parts, just for a while' calling on each other, and then, at the next moment, regrouping to form new unities, 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." 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. Let the re-figuring begin....

References:

Bakhtin, M.M. (1981) The Dialogical Imagination. Edited by M. Holquist, trans. by C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin, Tx: University of Texas Press.

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

Bakhtin, M.M. (1986) Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. by Vern W. McGee. Austin, Tx: University of Texas Press.

Bakhtin, M.M. (1993) Toward a Philosophy of the Act, with translation and notes by Vadim Lianpov, edited by M. Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Bitzer, L.F. (1959) Aristotle's enthymeme revisited. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 45, pp.399-408.

Brady, R.H. (1998) The idea in nature: rereading Goethe's organics. In D. Seamon and A. Zajonc (Eds.) Goethe's Way of Science: 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.

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

Gibson, J. J. (1979) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. London: Houghton Mifflin.

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

James, W. (1890) Principles of Psychology, vol. 1. London: Macmillan.

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

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Notes:
 

1. No wonder the idea that our bodies could be 'snatched' at any moment by another alien and fee-floating mind, is a powerful fantasy for us today.

2. William James (1890) called this "The Psychologist's Fallacy:" "The psychologist... stands outside the mental state he speaks of. Both itself and its objects are objects for him. Now when it is a cognitive state (percept, thought, concept, etc.), he ordinarily has no other way of naming it than as the thought, percept, etc., of that object. He himself, meanwhile knowing the self-same object in his way, gets easily led to suppose that the thought, which is of it, knows it in the same way in which he knows it, although this is often far from being the case. The most fictitious puzzles have been introduced into our science by this means" (p.196). It leads us to think that when we speak, there must a sort of 'inner eye' that looks at our knowledge (inner mental representations) of syntax to guide us in formulating our utterances grammatically.

3. Here is a precise example of the previous point - that we can find in the very structure of our responsive bodily activities, the precursors or prototypes for what later we shall talk of in mental or cognitive terms.

4. Given our focus on events occurring within the present moment, modernist inquiries, it can be argued, are both after the fact and beside the point. They are after the fact, because in taking the modernist stance of an external observer, we divert our attention away from the fleeting complexity of those moments of responsive adjustment, within which we discover, in the present, how to tailor our actions in the course of their performance to their surrounding circumstances. And they are beside the point, because in so hiding the unfolding relation of our performances to their surroundings, we then turn our attention in the wrong direction: we inquire into supposed occurrences inside the heads of individuals rather than attending to events actually occurring between them.