In How Does Nature Speak? Dynamics of the Human Ecological Condition Chuck Dyke and Yrjö Haila (Eds.).
Duke University Press series, Ecologies for the Twenty-First Century
John Shotter
As James C. Scott (1998) documents in detail, although we try to make use of our knowledge and intelligence
and of our best academic disciplines, there is something very wrong in our current ways of relating ourselves to
our natural surroundings. As he puts it: “The necessarily simple abstractions of large bureaucratic institutions,
... can never adequately represent the actual complexity of natural or social processes. The categories that they
employ are too coarse, too static, and too stylized to do justice to the world that they purport to describe... The
lamentable fate of the vast number of these projects, whether private or public, is by now a matter of record”
(p.262, p.271). It is not simply that a few are exploiting the natural resources around us at the expense of the
many, but in the name of rationality _ a rationality which, as we shall see, enthrones a belief in mathematical
reasoning as prototypical of all proper reasoning _ they are doing it in a dangerously unreasonable, if not
irrational, manner (Toulmin, 2001)
(See footnote 1)
1
. Our methods lack prudence and justice, they treat our surroundings as alien
to us, as unable to teach us anything. In establishing the overall landscape and the horizon within which the
explorations conducted in essays in this volume should take place, Yrjö Haila posed two general questions,
within the context of an overall goal. The two questions were: 1) What does it mean for we humans to learn from
nature? And 2), in what ways is nature present in human cultural existence, and what does this teach us? While
his overall goal, was to develop a dynamic vocabulary for the understanding of humanity-nature relationships. In
this essay, I want to explore these questions in both a negative and positive way. In other words, I want to
explore both what it is that prevents us from learning what it is that nature might have to teach us, but to explore
also, in line with Haila's overall goal, what is involved in 'entering into' a conversation with nature so that we
can, so to speak, come to hear its voice and to see its face, thus to make sense of what it has to teach us.
In line with Chuck Dykes's reference (this volume, p.xx) [MS, pp.3-4] to the claim made by Goethe's
Faust _ which, incidently, also appears in the quotation I cite from Wittgenstein (1980) below _ that it was not
the word but the act, the deed, from which our understanding of things began, I also want to explore what it is to
understand the 'inner life', the 'spirit' of an Other, from participating in a joint life with them. This joint life is
such that, in Dyke [MS, 4] words, “it lives with us and we with it: in, around, and through each other in a helter-
skelter of interactivities of varying profit to us all.” As I see it then, it is our immediate, spontaneous, living
responses to the others and othernesses in our surrounding circumstances that has been completely discounted
and ignored as unimportant in our current, standard forms of rationality. In turning away from active forms of
dynamic, participatory understanding _ what I will call relationally-responsive forms of understanding _ it has
led us to focus all our attention on attaining merely a passive, uninvolved, referential-representational kind of
understanding. And in seeking such a passive, representational understanding, rather than seeking to do justice
to the othernesses around us and to let them teach us about themselves in their own terms, we have sought
mastery over them, and merely to represent them accurately to ourselves in our rather than in their terms.
I also find myself in complete accord with Oyama (this volume, p.xx) [MS, p.1], when she remarks: “If, in a systems-informed spirit, we understand our own natures and behavior to emerge in interaction rather than being 'expressed' from within; if we are understood not as cleanly bounded, fixed realities but as always changing, always situated in worlds that are stable in some respects, variable in others; if our speaking is not the conveyance of fixed packets of meaning or 'information' from one brain to another but rather is just one of many modes by which we relate to and influence each other, it may turn out that Nature 'speaks' in ways not so very different from the ways we ourselves do.” Indeed, it is just this view of communication, of language as an extension of our spontaneously expressive-responsive bodily activity, orients us away from language as consisting primarily in terms of words and word forms _ forms that can be iterated identically over and over again _ and more toward it as an elaboration and refinement of our expressive gestures: both mimetic and
indicative. Wittgenstein (1953) captures this aspect of our expressions in his remark, that “meaning is a
physiognomy” (no.568). For, as we will find, it is only within our ongoing, dynamic, responsive, living relations
to the expressions of the others and othernesses around us, that a sense of their inner lives can become present
to us in our human world. To make such a change around as this, though, is to treat our surroundings, the earth,
rather than as a dead mechanism, as an intelligent, living being. It is, as Carolyn Merchant (1983) points out, to
return to views similar to those of certain ancient Greek philosophers, or, as Levy-Bruhl (1926) suggests, to the
animistic or participatory attitudes of so-called primitive peoples.
But in this respect, it is Merleau-Ponty (1962) who best expresses the attitude I want to adopt: “To
return to things themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always
speaks, and in relation to which every scientific schematism is an abstract and derivative sign-language, as is
geography in relation to the country-side in which we have learnt beforehand what a forest, a prairie or a river
is” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p.ix). In thinking of nature speaking to us as to an extent all living things 'speak' to
us, I will not, however, go so far as to claim that the earth is in fact a nurturing mother, or that our surroundings
are in fact inhabited by spirits and ghosts. But strangely, I will be claiming that the same strands of sixteenth
and seventeenth century thought that turned us away from thinking of our earth as alive, and from thinking of
life as something uniquely special and as yet not-well-understood, have also led us to ignore important events to
do with our own bodies, and their responsive reactions to events occurring around us. As professional academic
experts, trained (ideally!) to live in worlds of orderly and systematic theory, we have been trained to ignore the
dirty, messy, unique world of particular concrete events and living bodies, the worlds of ordinary everyday life.
It is this now strange(!) world of bodily expressions, of gestural meanings, and of our spontaneously responsive
bodily relations with our surroundings, which has become invisible to us, and to which, once again, we must
learn to attend.
As Kant (1970) described it in his Critique of Pure Reason of 1781, if we are to follow what is
accounted as “the true path of a science” (p.17), then we must accept the belief that “reason has insight only
into that which it produces after a plan of its own, [thus] it must not allow itself to be kept, as it were, in
nature's leading-strings, but must itself show the way with principles of judgment based upon fixed laws,
constraining nature to give answer to questions of reason's own determining... Reason... must approach nature
in order to be taught by it. It must not, however, do so in the character of a pupil who listens to everything the
teacher has to say, but of an appointed judge who compels the witness to answer questions which he himself has
formulated” (p.20). In other words, as Kuhn notes, a certain agreed way of doing science is now “firmly
embedded in the educational initiation” all scientists receive in their basic training. And in the western world,
currently, as Charles Taylor (1995) notes, that agreed way of doing science, indeed, all our modes of intellectual
inquiry in the Western world, are deeply and extensively shaped by the inclinations and attitudes implicit in,
what he calls, “the epistemology project.” It's effects shape “some of the most important moral and spiritual
ideas of our civilization... [Such that] to challenge them is sooner or later to run up against the force of this
tradition, which stands with them in a complex relation of mutual support. Overcoming or criticizing these ideas
involves coming to grips with epistemology” (p.8). What is this tradition?
There are many strands to this tacit background to our intellectual lives, influencing what we account
between us as properly constituted knowledge. One is, that we must conduct all our scientific inquiries as self-
conscious, rational subjects set over against a world of objects. Another is our wilfulness, our urge toward
mastery, the tendency to treat our own actions as primary, and to ignore what happens to us, events that we
ourselves are subject to that come to us from our surroundings _ our responses to nature. We think of such
responses as being merely subjective, and assign this sphere of human experience to the arts, to literature, to
poetry or painting, etc., or perhaps to the human sciences, to psychology, sociology, and linguistics. But this
leaves all our own prejudices and biases, urges and compulsions, fixations and illusions, what we take for
granted as unexceptional _ including, to repeat, all that which is “firmly embedded in the educational initiation”
we receive in our academic training _ unexamined. Indeed, we can see just these attitudes represented in the
passage from Kant quoted above. But it was the Descartes who set the whole scene for the version of rational
inquiry that motivated Kant's remarks. How?
In his Discourse on the Method of Properly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the
Sciences of 1637 (Descartes, 1968), he set out a characterization of our “external world,” and a method for
thinking about its nature, that has shaped 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). Also in establishing his
method of inquiry, as we know, Descartes excluded all our bodily activities, our bodily doings, sufferings, and
respondings from consideration: “This 'I', that is, the mind, by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from
the body,” he said (p.54).
Thus in Descartes's view of our existence, we are self-conscious, self-contained, and self-controlled,
i.e., wilful but disengaged and disembodied subjects, set over against an objective, mechanically-structured,
external world. And we must seek knowledge of it using methodical thought modeled on Euclid's geometry. For
it was Descartes's great belief that it was indeed possible to translate, methodically, all that was unknown into
the realm of indisputable common knowledge, starting from “what presented itself so clearly and so distinctly”
(p.41) to his mind, and proceeding by way of those “long chains of reasonings, quite simple and easy, which
geometers are accustomed to using to teach their most difficult demonstrations” (p.41). Thus, by the use of such
a method, “there can be nothing so distant that one does not reach it eventually, or so hidden that one cannot
discover it” (p.41). Indeed, such a method of reasoning _ in which we must “borrow all the best from geometric
analysis and algebra” (p.42) _ could, he suggested, lead us to the discovery of God's established laws, “thereby
mak[ing] ourselves, as it were, masters and possessors of nature” (p.78).
Many such Cartesian influences are still at work in our sciences. As a “form shaping ideology”
(Bakhtin, 1984, p.83), these assumptions still, it seems to me, selectively determine both our aims and the
phenomena to which we attend in many of our academic disciplines. Thus _ perhaps surprisingly, given its
success in many other of our spheres of inquiry and endeavor _ for our purposes here, of 'entering into' an
essentially communicative relation to nature, thus to 'see its face' and 'hear its voice', I want to reject this
whole approach. For, in conducting ourselves in a one-way, mechanical, input-output, cause-and-effect manner,
we eliminate from rational consideration, the two-way, dialogically-structured, spontaneously responsive
activities required for such communicative relations to be possible. They become, so to speak, rationally-
invisible to us. As I have already noted above, in leading us to ignore our immediate, spontaneous, living
responses to the othernesses in our surrounding circumstances, it prevents us from letting them teach us about
themselves in their own terms.
But refusing to allow ourselves to be led by nature in any way, we restrict ourselves to acting only in
terms of our own wants, desires, or reasons. We ignore as an importance source of knowledge: our spontaneous
responsiveness to the others and othernesses around us. In other words, the form shaping ideology implicitly at
work in such a one-way style of interaction with our surroundings is, as Bakhtin (1984) terms it, one of a
monological kind. In transforming the world into a representation arrived at as a result of deductive reasoning,
we “inevitably transform the represented world into a voiceless object of that deduction” (p.83). We make
ourselves “deaf to the other's response” (p.293).
I cannot emphasize enough the importance of this shift, from focusing our attention on representations
of our surroundings, to focusing on our immediate, spontaneous, bodily responses to them. It is in this latter
context that Wittgenstein's remark quoted as an epigraph to this chapter _ that meaning is a physiognomy _
should be understood. By it, he means that there is an aspect of our utterances, of our words, that makes them
like gestures, like facial expressions, like smiles or frowns, like exclamations of delight or outbursts of dismay,
which touch or move the others around us in an immediate way. So although in one sense, something is said in
the repetition of a word-form used, in our unique saying of it, in our responsive bodying of it out into the world
around us, we are spontaneously expressing something of our unique relation to those surroundings. The same
can be said all the events around us that move us, that touch, or strike us _ they too can be expressive in the
same way!
This means that we should takes our living, spontaneous responsiveness to the expressions of others
and the othernesses around us seriously, as a central aspect of us as living in a communicative relation with our
surroundings, for at least these two reasons: they provide us both with orientation, and even more importantly,
with an access to novelty, i.e., the possibility of uniquely new beginnings. I will treat both of these in turn.
Orientation: The quest for mastery is usually expressed in the desire for explanations; we seek sure-
fire ways in which we can intervene in ongoing activities causally, i.e., in a one-way, mechanical cause and
effect fashion, to influence their outcome in predictable ways. The desire to understand, however _ as a matter
of understanding how, practically to respond to the expressive, physiognomic aspects of our surroundings _ is
much harder to describe. It is not a matter of something happening to us intellectually, to do with learning a fact,
some information, or a skill. Wittgenstein (1953) tries to explicate it in practical terms. For him, in his kind of
philosophy, “a philosophical problem has the form: 'I don't know my way about'” (no.123). In other words, the
kind of understanding he seeks, shows, manifests, or displays itself in our everyday practical activities. On
being shown, for instance, how to follow a cooking recipe we cook a good meal, or on being shown how to
execute a piece of carpentry we make a useful piece of furniture, or after a music lesson we play a piece of
music well, or on having read in a book we go on to write an insightful book chapter, and so on. In all such
instances as these, as Wittgenstein puts it, we are able to justify our understanding to the others around us, by in
fact being able to “go on” with our activities in an intelligent, and intelligible, way (see e.g., Wittgenstein, 1953,
no. 154). Rather than any precise factual information, what we have gained in such an orientational-
understanding, is a sense of where and how we are 'placed' in relation to the others around us within the
landscape of possibilities within we are all acting.
In being obsessed in our intellectual lives only with objectivity, with being only outside observers of repetitive forms or patterns, we have ignored unique, once-off, novel events which have a fleeting existence only within our living relations with our surroundings, the transitory events within which we gain such orientational understandings. Not only have we dismissed their occurrence, thinking of such events as inessential variations in hidden, underlying, ideal forms. But we have also ignored the 'inner sense' we can gain from their dynamic structure, the shaped and vectored sense of the openings they offer us for our practical movements in relation to them. Yet, if we were to ignore the orientational-understandings we gain in relation to events in our practical lives _ while driving, say, or even in walking through a crowded street _ we would soon
end in a mess. Intellectually, we have persisted in acting as if we are mere spectators of a world 'over there',
upon which we act only in a one-way manipulative activities, rather than participants in a world around us
'here', to which we must spontaneously and responsively relate if we are to be 'answerable' to its 'calls' upon
us.
Novelty: Fleeting though its calls may be, we cannot not be responsive to them. And just as in our
practical- or orientational-understandings of questions posed to us, are expressed in our answers to them, so are
our relationally-responsive understandings of other events occurring around us. They too are manifested in the
responses we give to them But to the extent that such events are uniquely related to the local, particular, and
timely circumstances of their occurrence (Toulmin, 2001), they are in some way expressive of them. And in our
responsive reactions to them, we have a chance of understanding that fact. Indeed, as Wittgenstein (1980) notes:
“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). Where, by
the word 'primitive' here, he does not mean something way back in history or something simple, but something
present to us now, and, as we shall see, something in fact very complex. “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). In other words,
Wittgenstein not only sees our ability to use and understand words, as emerging out from our natural inclination
to be influenced by the gestures, the pantomimes and indications of others, but also finds in our responses to
them, the beginnings of possible new ways of acting and thinking.
Thus, rather than seeking value-neutral, theoretical knowledge of the structure of our shared
surroundings as a passive object of thought, which we must then 'interpret' as to what its meaning is for us in
practical action, we face a different task. Our task is, I suggest, to try to make the 'being' our surroundings, as
an active, 'living agent' in our lives, 'visibly present' to us, so to speak. If we can do that, then, just as we can
keep returning to a major character in a novel who 'lives on' within us long after we have finished reading the
book, and who like a good friend responds to our bewilderments and disquiets with offers of guidance and
orientation, so we might be able to find the 'living being' of our surroundings helpful to us in the same way. We
will be able to 'hear' what its 'voice' calls on us to do, to 'see' the expressions on its 'face' to which we might
feel responsive _ the expressions of order and command, of invitation and encouragement, of reassurance and
support, etc.; as well as of pained disapproval or celebratory affirmation, of bewilderment or disorientation, etc.
_ informing us of both our current relations to our circumstances (our situation) as well as of the value of our
responses to them (the anticipated meaning of our actions). We can pursue all this with the overall aim of us
ultimately coming to know our 'way around' inside its 'workings', to apply them to current problems before us
in our consulting activities. In other words, just as we breath a sigh of relief on hearing English spoken on
returning from foreign parts _ for we know our 'way around' and feel a certain ease of movement in our own
country denied us abroad _ so we can seek a similar sense of being 'at home' in the surroundings in question.
We can find a model for such felt forms in, say, the 3-D 'spiral' that we can see stretching out in depth before us as we scan over one of the 2-D random-dot-stereograms that were popular a few years ago. We may move our two eyes over the page before us as we please, but the dots on the page are arranged in such a way that, if we can let our eyes work like a camera with automatic focus, as we look in one direction we can find a
convergent focus at this distance, in another direction at that distance, in another at another distance, and so on,
so that we continue to scan over the page, we gain in the course of our looking, the felt sense of a spiral form
before us _ a felt sense that is identical for everyone. But our embodied sense of it as a 3-D form does not
emerge in an instant. Only in the unfolding temporal course of our visual involvement with the special
patterning of the dots on the 2-D page does 'it' emerge; and it is only 'there' in our orchestrated interaction with
the whole distribution of the dots on the page, 'it' cannot be found hidden in just a selected few
(See footnote 3)
3
. It is as if we
must 'feel over' what is before us with our eyes, place by place, just as we must in feeling something with our
fingers. Rather than simply looking at it, it would be more accurate to say that I see according to it, or with it,
for 'it' is a guiding-agent in my looking.
As Merleau-Ponty (1968) puts it: “The look...envelops, palpates, espouses the visible things. As
though it were in a relation of pre-established harmony with them, as though it knew them before knowing
them, it moves in its own way with its abrupt and imperious style, and yet the views taken are not desultory _ I
do not look at a chaos, but at things _ so that finally one cannot say if it is the look or if it is the things that
command” (p.133). Indeed, if we are to see the spiral _ and this is not easy to do _ we must let 'it', the 'spiral'
to be, control our looking. And when we do see it, we locate 'it' neither 'on' the page, nor 'in' our heads, but in
fact 'out' in the space between us and the page, out in the world. For that is where, dynamically, the different 2-
D views from my two eyes cohere into a 3-D unity. But clearly such forms, apart from their moment-by-moment
emergence within the unfolding flow of activity in which they subsist, have no substantial existence in
themselves. Yet, nonetheless, in being 'out there' as distinctive othernesses in their own right, so that only if we
address them appropriately, i.e., in a way answerable to their nature, do they answer to our inquiries
(See footnote 4)
4
, such
forms have the character of a “real presence” (Steiner, 1989). But although they are invisible, and exist only in a
felt form, they are, nonetheless, 'somethings' that are independent of our wishes and opinions, of our beliefs
and desires, indeed, we cannot interpret them as we please; thus, in this sense, they are clearly real.
Although we often fail to acknowledge the fact, it is such 'somethings', such dynamic forms, that
constitute the background 'landscape', so to speak, to all our exchanges with the other people around us _
including our academic disciples. Understanding their nature affords us a sense, not only of 'who' the others
around us 'are', but also of 'where they are coming from', and of how we are 'placed' in relation to them. It is a
kind of understanding we express by saying that we are 'on a footing' with them, or that we understand how to
'go on' with them. In short, more than merely a sense of another's nature in itself, we come to a sense of their
expressions in relation to a larger landscape of possibilities, in relation in fact to the “world” within which our
relationship with them has its being.
As an example of such a world, a whole world, present to us in a brief moment, Wittgenstein (1980)
asks us to consider a circumstance in which the word “Farewell!” is uttered in a certain plaintive tone of voice.
“'A whole world of pain is contained in these words',” he comments. “How can it be contained in them?,” he
asks. “It is bound up with them. The words are like an acorn from which an oak tree can grow” (p.52). But to
return to Kuhn (1970) for a moment. In discussing why he introduced the difficult to define term “paradigm” to
designate what it is that the practitioners in a particular field of science are trained into, he notes: “Though there
obviously are rules to which all the practitioners of a scientific specialty adhere at a given time, those rules may
not by themselves specify all that those specialists have in common. Normal science is a highly determined
activity, but it need not be entirely determined by rules. That is why at the start of this essay, I introduced shared
paradigms rather than shared rules, assumptions, points of view as the source of coherence for normal research
traditions. Rules, I suggest, derive from paradigms, but paradigms can guide research even in the absence of
rules” (p.42). And we can perhaps now, see why the term 'paradigm' caused Kuhn so much trouble
(See footnote 5)
5
. He too
faces the task of trying to articulate how a whole world can be present, as an invisible but real presence just to
insiders within a social group. For what is important in a paradigm, exists for members of the group only when
in interaction with each other, but is utterly indiscernible by others, by objective external observers outside the
group.
Someone who struggled with the difficulties of giving expression to such dynamic forms, was William James. In his famous “The Stream of Thought” chapter (James, 1981), he discussed their nature in a way similar to the discussion above, and pointed out a number of mistakes we tend to make _ if our thoughts have in fact such a character _ in trying to describe them. We fail, he suggested, to register “the transitive parts” of the stream and succumb to an “undue emphasizing of [its] substantive parts [i.e., its resting-places]” (p.237), i.e.,
we focus on static or stable forms in the flow and ignore its relationally-responsive movement. Indeed, in so
doing, we tend to confuse “the thoughts themselves... and the things of which they are aware... [But, while] the
things are discrete and discontinuous... their comings and goings and contrasts no more break the flow of
thought that thinks them than they break the time and space in which they lie ” (p.233, my emphases). In other
words, he suggests, we should think of the variations within the stream of thought as the truly important parts,
but they are, regrettably, “in very large measure constituted of feelings of tendency, often so vague that we are
unable to name them at all” (p.246).
James's comments here about our vague feelings of tendency are, I think, of great importance. And,
except that the momentary dynamic forms I want to focus on are not hidden in a stream of thought inside
people's heads, but are out within the larger flow of inter-activity between them and their surroundings, I want
to follow his promptings. Once we make this move though, we should note that, vague though the feelings of
tendency may be that emerge in our interactions with our surroundings, to the extent that all can adopt a similar
way of responding to them, all _ as in seeing the same '3-D spiral' in a random-dot-stereogram _ can orient
toward the same real presence. Again, we can draw on Kuhn (1970, pp.190-191) to reinforce this point. He
discusses the relations between: 1) Galileo's seeing of a ball rolling down a slope and up to the same height on
the opposite slope, as related to the swing of a pendulum; 2) Huygens's solving of the problem of a pendulum's
center of oscillation by imagining it as being composed of point-pendula, like Galileo's balls rolling down a
slope and up the other side; and 3) Bernoulli's use of these “ways of seeing” aspects of the physical world to
solve the problem of “the speed of efflux” of a jet of water from a tank as a function of the descent of the center
of gravity of the water in tank and jet. He gives his reason for the example thus: “[It] should begin to make clear
what I mean by learning from problems to see situations as like each other, as subjects for the application of the
same scientific law or law-sketch. Simultaneously it should show why I refer to the consequential knowledge of
nature acquired while learning the similarity relationship [as] thereafter embodied in a way of viewing physical
situations rather than in rules or laws... [This] sort of learning is not acquired by exclusively verbal means.
Rather it comes as one is given words together with concrete examples of how they function is use; nature and
words are leaned together ” (pp.190-191). In other words, it comes, as we shall see, from the fact that, as Kuhn
notes, we enter into a dialogically-structured form of participatory, relationally-responsive understanding with
certain crucial, initial concrete exemplars.
From argument to dialogue: If we are interested in adopting a more participatory approach in our inquiries, as arguers and debaters, concerned only to criticize the systematic theories of others and to replace them with our own, we arrive on the scene too late, and then look in the wrong direction, with the wrong attitude: too late, because we take the 'basic elements' in terms of which we must work and conduct our arguments to be already fixed, already determined for us by an elite group of academically approved predecessors; in the wrong direction, because we look backward toward supposed already existing actualities, rather than forward toward possibilities; and with the wrong attitude, because we seek a static picture, a theoretical representation, of a phenomenon, rather than a living sense of it as an active agency in our lives. Or, to put it another way, this kind of critical concern with theories, is both beside the point and after the fact. It is
beside the point, as our aim is to understand the (as yet non-existent) activities involved in approaching nature
differently, and that cannot be done simply by proving a theory true. It is also after the fact, for in orienting us
toward regularities, toward already existing forms, it diverts our attention away from those fleeting moments in
which we have the chance of noting new reactions in ourselves, previously unnoticed responses that might
provide the new beginnings we seek.
This is not to dismiss the importance of the scholarly work that has been done so far in the academies.
Indeed, all the attempts to represent nature as crucially exhibiting this or that order or organization, have exerted
a tremendous influence, not only on what we think of as being its character today, but also on the openings we
can still see for its possible further structuring. But none of them have been wholly successful. Kuhn's (1970)
work, as already mentioned above, being here just such a case in point. Yet, as he himself notes: “By focusing
attention upon a small range of relatively esoteric problems, [a] paradigm forces scientists to investigate some
part of nature in a detail and depth that would otherwise be unimaginable” (p.24). And, as I indicate above, this
has been of great importance.
However, while such work has brought to our attention detailed features of our surroundings that we
would never have noticed otherwise, in another role, that of influencing social and environmental policies for
implementation by central, state governments, this kind of theory-driven, systematic science has been disastrous
(Bernstein, 1984; Berlin, 1962; Scott, 1998). Why? Because in line with theme 3, when such theory-driven
work is applied in the world outside the research community, it is not passed on in terms of its “paradigm”
within the research community, but only in terms of a set of principles, i.e., a linguistic account of a single order
of connectedness. Instead of the “real presence” of a historically rich, shared landscape of research possibilities,
what is passed on is a set, to repeat Scott's (1998) phrase, of “necessarily simple abstractions” (p.262). No
wonder, as Sir Isaiah Berlin remarks, that while many of our “great liberating ideas” initially open up a surge of
new opportunities, they “inevitably turn into suffocating straitjackets, and so stimulate their own destruction by
new, emancipating, and at the same time, enslaving, conceptions” (Berlin, 1962, p.159).
From an explicit, single order of connectedness and sublime essences to “real presences:” Currently
in our academic inquiries, we feel under a compulsion to seek a systematic or logical framework, an accurate
cognitive view, in terms of which to conduct our reasoning as to what, in particular practical circumstances, we
should do. Thus at the moment, it seems perfectly rational to us to turn away from the practical contexts in
question, to convene meetings in conference or committee rooms, and to hold “decision making meetings.” And
in such meetings, as we have noted above, to conduct debates as to which system of principles, which
theoretical structures, we should attempt to implement. A number Wittgenstein's remarks are apposite here. One
is: “Giving grounds, justifying the evidence, comes to an end; - but the end is not in certain propositions striking
us immediately as true, i.e., 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). In other words, he is trying to remind us here, as Kuhn is in his
talk of paradigms, that theoretical structures alone cannot shape our actions _ indeed, it is only in the context of
shared practices that a theory can be applied without misunderstanding. Such shared practices _ what Kuhn
(1970) later came to call, as we noted above, a “disciplinary matrix” _ while leading us to respond
spontaneously to events around us in certain, standardized ways, also carry with them certain irresistible urges,
cravings, inclinations, and compulsions to respond events also in self-misleading ways.
Central among such cravings is our “craving for generality” (Wittgenstein, 1965, p.17), or, “the contemptuous attitude [we have] towards the particular case” (1965, p.18). Bewitched or charmed by the methods of science, “we are under the illusion that what is sublime, what is essential, about our investigation consists in grasping one comprehensive essence (Wittgenstein, 1981, no.444) (See footnote 6) 6 . The tendency to generalize the case seems to have a strict justification in logic: here one seems completely justified in inferring: 'If one proposition is a picture, then any proposition must be a picture, for they must all be of the same nature'. For we are under the illusion that what is sublime, what is essential, about our investigation consists in its grasping one comprehensive essence” (Wittgenstein, 1981, no.444).. We must, we feel _ as professionals trained into a discipline _ seek regularities, patterns, or orderliness, if we are properly to understand a phenomenon. Rorty (1989) also notes something similar in talking of our compulsive need, as he puts it, to “eternalize” or “divinize” the ideology of the day in a quest to find a basis for our actions somewhere “beyond history and institutions” (p.198). In other words, what Wittgenstein and Rorty are noting here, is the powerful influence that the linguistic generation of a “real presence” can exert on us in our exchanges with each other. But when words
are used in this way, in a purely speculative or theoretical fashion, without being (mimetically) responsive to the
contours of a practical context of use, or (indicatively) pointing to any of its features, then, we might say,
following Wittgenstein (1953) that language has gone “on holiday” (no.38).
From theoretical “real presences” to real “real presences:” While we still may feel that, nonetheless,
all the talk and writing of theoreticians must represent something that is real, we need to remember that,
whatever it is, it is connected to our natural surroundings only discontinuously, in terms of a number of points.
Or, to put it another way, a theory, in being tested in a series of discrete experiments, gives rise to a knowledge-
framework which, as Quine (1953) has put it, is “a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along
the edges” (p.42). The possibility of people being 'present' both to each other and to their surroundings, and of
being touch with all the unique 'contradictory' complexities of each, is eliminated in this discontinuous, 'out of
touch' approach to the acquisition of knowledge. We need a way of being in a more continuous contact with the
others and othernesses around us; we can only gain the kind of understanding we need, in dialogically-
structured circumstances
(See footnote 7)
7
.
If we are ever to mount the required form of participatory inquiry, instead of a single order of
connectedness, supposedly proved to be true by a small group of experts to the exclusion of everyone else, a
dialogically-structured community is needed. Indeed, just as Kuhn (1970) claims for a shared paradigm, which
is taken by a scientific community, for a while at least, as giving it correct answers to what its fundamental
research objects are, so we might say about a shared, dialogically-structured, living 'truth' within such a
community: it too may determine for a whole community what, simply, its reality “is.” Indeed, in this
connection, Bakhtin (1984) notes that: “It is quite possible to imagine and postulate a unified truth that requires
a plurality of consciousnesses, one that in principle cannot be fitted within the bounds of a single
consciousness, one that is, so to speak, by its very nature full of event potential [sobytiina] and is born at that
point of contact among various consciousnesses. The monologic way of perceiving cognition and truth is only
one of the possible ways. It arises only where consciousness is placed above existence. (p.81). And further,
such a shared and living truth, in being full of event potential, does not, like value-neutral, theoretical
knowledge, require interpretation if we are to implement it in practical action. In giving us a living sense of the
actualities of our lives, it shows us their partial, still uncomplete nature, and thus their openness to being further
specified by us. Indeed, such a 'truth', as a real presence, as an agent in our actions, acts as a powerful other
embodied within us, and 'calls' us into action, issues 'action guiding advisories' along the way, and then judges
our subsequent actions accordingly by the 'facial' expressions it directs toward us after their completion.
But if we are ever to mount the required dialogical form of inquiry, how can we do it? For, as
Bernstein (1984) notes, all attempts to implement “the idea that we can make, engineer, impose our collective
will to form such communities [have been] disastrous... [for] the coming into being of community already
presupposes an experienced sense of community” (p.226). James C. Scott (1998) adds a rider to such
comments, to explain why such centrally imposed plans are so often disastrous: “It is,” he suggests, “a
characteristic of large, formal systems of coordination that they are accompanied by what appear to be
anomalies but on closer inspection turn out to be integral to that order... [a] nonconforming practice is an
indispensable condition for formal order” (Scott, 1998, pp.351-352). Indeed, it is precisely the “specific
variability
(See footnote 8)
8
” in a human order that allows us still to sustain it in the face of quite unpredictable circumstances.
So how can we begin to help dialogical communities develop, if we cannot do it through deliberate planning
and the implementation of principles. What way or ways are available that will not prove disastrous?
The role of exemplary conversations in constituting shared practices: While Kuhn's limited focus on ideally scientific contexts can be criticized (see Fuller, 2000), what he says about the role played by concrete examples in our learning of scientific practices is, I think, important. He notes, to repeat, that learning to perceive “similarity relationships,” is “embodied in a way of viewing physical situations rather than in rules or laws,” and that this “sort of learning... comes as one is given words together with concrete examples of how they function is use; nature and words are leaned together” (p.190). Indeed, Wittgenstein (1969) makes a similar remark: “Not only rules, but also examples are needed for establishing a practice. Our rules leave loop-holes, and the practice has to speak for itself” (no.139). In other words, a shared practice arises in a set of shared circumstances in which a group of people exhibit a set of shared responses to a set of shared events. It is the function of a set of shared examples or exemplars to evoke such a set of shared responses _ the examples give orientation in the learning, as Wittgenstein (1953) puts it, of a “technique.” Where, “to understand a language
means to be master of a technique” (no.199).
Such examples are not illustrative of the practice in question, but constitutive of it, in the sense that
they, spontaneously, call from us the new responses required for us to begin new language-games, new ways in
which we may make sense together of whatever it is that our forms of shared expression are responsive to.
Is there a classical example here to which we can refer as a signpost, so to speak, pointing out to us the
direction in which we must go? Yes, there is: Goethe's study of plant forms. As is well-known, Goethe claimed
_ but not as a matter of actual fact, but as a way of orienting oneself toward entities in one's surroundings with
the aim of acquiring a sense of 'their' life _ that all the organs of plants (from cotyledons to stem leave, stem
leaves to sepals, sepals to petals, petals to stamens, and so on) are leaves transformed. To acquire this sense, to
be able, imaginatively, to move backwards and forwards, through the unbroken, developmental flow of plants
forms with ease, we must, Goethe claimed, understand the overall movement of a plant's growth through a
process of “exact sensorial imagination.” Goethe outlined the nature of this process thus: “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” (quoted in Hoffman, 1998, p.133). Such a process is, he says, “a
delicate empiricism which makes itself utterly identical with the object, thereby becoming true theory.” To
which he adds the comment: “But this enhancement of our mental powers belongs to a highly evolved age”
(quoted in Brady, 1998, p.98). This is where finally, we must come to a reconsideration of our first theme
above: our traditional orientation to an encountered other or otherness as a 'problem' to be solved by being
explained.
As Goethe makes plain, rather than problems requiring explanation, thus to add yet more knowledge to
what we already are. The shift or move we require, is to turn such encounters into opportunities to acquire a
sense, so to speak, of the unfinshedness of our surroundings, and of the openings they offer us to become more
than we already are. Thus, as he puts it, our task is: “Whatever great, beautiful, or significant experiences have
come our way must not be recalled again from without and recaptured, as it were; they must rather become part
of the tissue of our inner life from the outset, creating a new and better self within us, forever as active agents in
our Bildung [self-development]” (quoted in Brady, 1998, p.109).
Alternatively, however, in seeking a participatory, orientational-understanding, the sequence of steps we would follow would be quite different: We would begin by treating any otherness we encounter as radically unknown to us - we would approach it, not like Kant's “appointed judge,” but with care, respect, and anxiety. We would then 'enter into' dialogically-structured, reciprocally responsive relations with it. To do so, we must (partially at least) be 'answerable' to its calls, just as it (partially at least) would be answerable to ours. As a result of the interplay between us and it, another 'it', a real presence would appear between us, produced neither solely by us or by the othernesses, an 'it' within which both they and we have our being. This 'it' is not my it, but 'our' it. Thus I do not gaze at it as I might at an object for use, I do not see it as having a place within an ordered perspective. My looking wanders around within it, in accord with the 'calls' I receive at each point of fixation to move my looking next to its neighbors _ and where, like the two 2-D monocular views from our two eyes are merged into the unity of a binocular view with depth to it, so all of these points of fixation merge into
the unity of a world. 'It' directs my looking as must as I do myself. Rather than simply seeing 'it', I see 'with'
its help. Thus, just as a person's facial expression, which with its smile gestures us to approach or with its scowl
repels us, has a similar 'directive' or 'instructive' physiognomy, so we can develop a sensibility of, or
sensitivity to, many other 'its' that can emerge in our responsive engagements with our surroundings. And I can
do this because “my body is not only an object amongst all other objects,... but an object which is sensitive to all
the rest, which reverberates to all sounds, vibrates to all colors, and provides words with their primordial
significance through the way in which it receives them.... [The body] is that strange object which uses its own
parts as a general system of symbols for the world, and through which we can consequently 'be at home in' that
world, 'understand' it and find significance in it” (pp.236-237).
And as we continue our commerce with the othernesses around us, there can be a gradual growth of
our familiarity with the 'inner' shape or character of the real presences created between us. And as we 'dwell
on', or 'within' its nature, we can gain a sense of the value of its yet-to-be-achieved aspects _ the prospects 'it'
offers us for 'going on' with it. We come to feel 'at home' with it, to 'know our way around' within it, in the
way we find our way around inside towns of houses familiar to us. Thus what we gain here, rather than a
solution, rather than further information, is a shaped and vectored sense of how 'to go on' in relation to the
otherness concerned, and be 'answerable' to the mute judgements of the living world around us _ a sense that
cannot be measured by any mechanical instruments, which is available to us only in our living, moving,
responsive engagements with our surroundings.
Above, then, I have explored just some of the possible features of a participatory way of thinking _ as
distinct from the disengaged or detached forms of thought and discourse we currently employ in the academic
and intellectual spheres of our lives _ which gives us a chance of the 'face' and the 'voice' of our natural
surroundings becoming present to us. But I say only a chance, as such a full responsiveness is not easy to
achieve. Only if we are prepared to return, like little children, to our primordial commerce with the world, to a
pre-Cartesian way of being in the world in which we approach it not as self-conscious, self-contained,
individual thinkers and deliberate actors, but as living responsive, participant parts of a larger whole. Aware of
the Cartesian dangers we have been exploring above, Merleau-Ponty (1968) attempted to describe a new task
for philosophy. Noting that modern philosophy “prejudges what it will find” (p.130), he suggested that to
overcome this tendency, philosophy “once again... must recommence everything, reject the instruments
reflection and intuition had provided themselves, and install itself in a locus where they have not yet been
distinguished, in experiences that have not yet been “worked over,” that offer us all at once, pell-mell, both
“subject” and “object,” both existence and essence, and hence give philosophy resources to redefine them”
(p.130).
But to make such a change as this _ which is, as Wittgenstein (1980) remarks, “a difficulty having to
do with the will, rather than with the intellect” (p.17) _ is not at all easy. For, as the whole tenor of this chapter
suggests, it is not an intellectual change that is required, but a bodily one _ a very different kind of project for
those of us used to “the life of the mind.” Above, I have tried to answer Haila's questions and to suggest
something of what is needed, if we are to fashion the kind of vocabulary needed to relate ourselves,
dynamically, to the dynamic phenomena around us. But if we are to walk the walk of this new and changed way
of talking, major changes in the whole institutional life of academe are required. Only if we can learn to see the
'face' and to hear the 'voice' of our own current, local, intellectual institutions, will we each be able to see the
particular and unique openings they offer us. To act globally, we must each act in our own precisely local ways,
as the 'voice' and the 'face' of nature allows.
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Notes: