Home > Philosophy > Thinking Beyond Patterns
Contents:
- A-1: Introduction
- A-2: Tracing the assumption of an imposed order
- A-3: The order of language
- A-4: Psychotherapy
- A-5: What is a situation (body, language, ..... )?
- B-1: Wider than perception and the five separated senses
- B-2: Doubling: patterns, the separation of the senses, empty
- B-3: Resolution of the Conundrum: Patterns carry forward more than patterns
- B-4: Some examples of the usefulness of these concepts
- B-5: Scientific applications and corroborations
- B-6: Within, and not within
- Works cited
1. The project: thinking with more than forms:
My project is to think — about, and with — that which exceeds patterns (forms, concepts, definitions, categories, distinctions, rules, ..... ).
Such a project currently seems impossible, and for quite strong philosophical reasons. Certain very basic assumptions need to be overcome, but without ending in limbo. That can happen only with a new thinking.
Logical forms and patterns are incapable of encompassing the intricacy of people and situations. Forms and distinctions cannot even define what forms and distinctions are. They are not clear about what clarity is; they cannot define definition. No concept conceptualizes well how concepts work, or patterns, rules, or forms. But it is a great error to denigrate precise patterns or to say that they don't work. In Section B we will discuss patterns — how they do work — never just alone. They always work-in more. We need a way to let this more function in our thinking along with the conceptual forms.
Logical forms only seem to work alone. For example, the pattern of a triangle seems to work alone when it determines its angles to add up to 180 degrees. Two and two seem to make four alone. The clear conceptual and spatial structure that used to define a hydrogen atom seemed to work-alone, and so does a clear social rule such as “Men hold doors open for women.” These forms can seem to work as stable meanings that can determine the wider intricacy of what actually happens. But — I argue — what happens can talk back. Actually it gives the forms and rules their meaning and their work. Forms never work alone, always only within a wider and more intricate order.
The question is: Can we think with this more intricate order? Can we let it function in our thinking? Can we think anything not just as formed, but also as the greater intricacy? And: Can the intricacy function in our thinking about how it functions?
A question of language arises immediately: There seems to be no way to speak and think about what is more than forms. One cannot tell about it without one or another way of construing and formulating it. (For, example, I just referred to it as “it.” That seems to give it the form of something separate to which one can point.)
Even if there is an order wider than forms, perhaps it can be said only within conceptual and language-forms. Language seems to consist just of forms, distinctions, and rules. These and other kinds of forms have already played their role in our situations and experiences even before we speak and think.
2. The problem: forms are always already at work:
The ancient philosophers knew the problem. It is the beginning of philosophy to recognize that one cannot begin by neutrally reporting observation and experience. Many cultural and conceptual forms have always already been at work in any situation, experience and thought by the time we think from it.
Explicit and implicit assumptions vary with different cultures, life-attitudes and conceptual approaches. Only by assuming some set of assumptions can one analyze the others. The result is an irreducible variety of conflicting mutual analyses.
We cannot solve the problem just empirically. That misses the fact that some conceptual and social forms have always already functioned implicitly before we observe. Ordinary empiricism cannot examine what went into the making of experience before we observe.
But then, how is a critique of forms and patterns ever possible?
3. The direction of a solution and a change in assumptions:
Thinking with more than forms is possible because the assumption is overstated, that concepts and social forms entirely determine — what shall I call that which they determine? — experience (situations, practice, the body, intricacy, ..... ). Later I will discuss my use of such a string of different words and forms in one slot.
Certainly the more intricate order includes the forms; explicit and implicit forms always play some role in it. There is always both. But we can inquire into their ways of functioning together — if we find a way to let them function together in our very thinking and saying how they function together.
Yes, the forms are always at work, but we do not always get just what can logically follow from the forms. The result can be much more, and something different. That is because what the forms work-in, talks back — not with disorder but with more precision.
The order that is more than form functions in language and cognition in many vital and noticeable ways. There will be a way to notice them and let them function in our thinking. Rather than replacing them with explications, we can let these functions continue to operate in and after our explications of them. If we can find a way to do so, then the word “explication” will change from its traditional meaning.
4. Background:
The philosophy of this project was put forth in my Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning and other writings. It has also led to applications in psychotherapy, the teaching of writing (Elbow, 1989, Perl, 1983), and other fields.
Today a thinking with more than forms is gaining ground. Although it is still widely considered impossible, more and more thinkers are calling for such a project. (See, for example, Williams' “thicker thinking,” Putnam, and Cavell.)
Many people do find the vast intricacy of experience and they know that it does not all derive from imposed forms. But then they think of it in just one way, and stop. We need a way to think further with and from it.
As set forth here, this thinking alters certain very deeply-held assumptions which inhere in the structure of most concepts and in the usual manner of using concepts in theoretical thinking.
Our task is not merely to reject these assumptions. On close examination it turns out that they are not actually believed, so it is not hard to reject them. But, for very important systematic reasons, these assumptions have been built into the structure of most of our concepts. We need to understand why. Then these assumptions will change in our way of thinking in and with the intricacy. Then Section B will show that the new ways of thinking can relate and contribute to current science.
Foremost is the assumption that order can only be something imposed on experience, that forms, distinctions, rules or patterns are the only order so that there is nothing else, no “other,” and hence no possible interplay between the forms and something more. Supposedly, nothing but disorder talks back.
The assumption of a one-way imposition was adopted to correct an earlier mistake: It corrects the mistaken view that science copies or pictures nature. The order of nature cannot be represented or approximated, because no such single formed order of nature is simply there, waiting for us to get it right. The correction assumes that nature is nothing but whatever order we impose.
But that is an over-correction: Yes, it is obvious that nature reveals itself variously in response to varying hypothetical constructions and operations. But it responds to each approach very precisely, always just so, although differently to different approaches. So this way of responding shows an order too, though it is not a set of patterns. It plays many vital roles. These are quite noticeable, but they have hardly been studied.
We have to ask: How do forms and the more intricate order work together? How does more function? And how do forms work-in a more? The second question divides:
1. How do explicit forms work — with more — even when they seem to work alone in logic and in science?
2. How do forms work when they work implicitly in experience — when they have (“always already”) gone into any experience and observation before we think? Yes, we must take account of these, but we must think how they work implicitly. We will find that their implicit working is not at all as has been assumed.2(forward)
In Western philosophy the Kant-Hegel-Nietzsche line has made this problem intractable. By systematically overstating the role of forms, it quite lost what is more than form. Nothing is considered to have an order of its own. Everything is taken as ordered by imposed forms, patterns, and rules. Most modern philosophers have utterly lost an order of nature, human nature, the person, practice, the body.
They deny that anything could have an order of its own. All order is assumed to be entirely imposed by a history, a culture, or a conceptual interpretation that could as well be different.
But what is this imposed order imposed upon? There the thinkers differ: Some say it is mere “flow”; some say it is recalcitrant disorder. Still others say it is just nothing — as for Hegel thought meets only itself. It seemed to him that distinctions march by themselves.
When only imposed forms are assumed, then humans seem to have nothing common. Few forms seem to hold across the different cultures. Some anthropologists find only one commonality: Everywhere people have proper names. That is not uninteresting. Everywhere a who looks out from behind the eyes and demands to be recognized. But, does nothing else hold across? The forms of language, religion, family, and the cultural understandings about the human body are so different, that very little universal meaning can be formulated. It is said that humans are not even one species: All the members of an animal species live in the same patterns. They all feed and sleep in the same way; they have the same mating dances and build the same shelters. Humans have no such common patterns. If only patterns make us human, then there seems to be no human nature.
So, Freud (1949) held that the ego is a product of the forms of each given society. He said that the ego has “made in Germany” imprinted on it, like a manufactured product. Aside from the socially shaped ego and super-ego there is only the id which consists of unorganized drive-energies that cannot lead to behavior without first having social patterns imposed on them. He said that the body has no behavioral order of its own. (See my “Critique of Narcissism,” also Levin, C., and Horowitz, G.)
Psychoanalytic concepts are built with the assumption that aside from the forms of the particular culture there is only autistic, primitive narcissism. Freud assumed that culture is the only human nature. America, he said, “is the worst possibility” — no single coherent culture at all, therefore no strong ego. (He hadn't visited us yet.)
Most twentieth-century thinkers have scoffed at the idea of a universal human nature. They found depth and seriousness only in the forms that culture and history impose on an otherwise mechanical body. It seemed that to be human is to be entirely artificial, no human nature, no human subject, no truth or values — only the imposed forms. And that is also the dominant view today. To overthrow this view involves a whole reorientation.
The assumption of imposed order concerns not just human nature, but also nature as a whole. Nature is said to be a mere “construction.” Some philosophers say that if the scientists would only appreciate that they postulate and construct nature, then they would surely behave more responsibly. Science is understood as arbitrary, merely political, merely the result of postulation. Because science is considered as imposed postulations, those who call them into question still find nothing under them.
Ethics also seems to depend on one or another set of postulations or impositions. Some say (with Plato's Thrasymachus and Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov) that one can do just anything. Others, (for example, Sartre) find a sense of “responsibility” for what we choose to impose. But they all seem to find only a gap where imposed forms fail.
We cannot move on any of these questions if our saying and thinking consist only of forms, distinctions, rules, or patterns.
5. Marx, Dilthey, and the Pragmatists:
If we look for more than an imposed order, then we read the earlier philosophers differently. We find that some of them made openings that have been ignored.
For example, Marx did not think that human nature is a product of the forms that each society imposes. He said that the present societies “distort” human nature, and that it is “unfinished.”
But can we think with something unfinished? Can something unfinished work as a concept in our thinking? It will turn out that we can. Yes, — knowingly and systematically — we can let something unfinished function in how we make and use concepts.
Dilthey thought of human nature as “experiencing,” and said it was always also an implicit “understanding.” He said: “In principle anything human is understandable.” Today that is made to sound naive, as if he didn't know how very different various cultures and people are. But he held this because for him understanding does not consist just of shared forms. Rather, when we pursue another's experiencing, ours becomes wider. Within this wider process we understand others more precisely than they understood themselves, and our understanding of ourselves is also widened. But he did not go very far into how what is more than shared forms functions. We want to think further with it.
The Pragmatists also did more than what is said of them today. They are said to have evaluated everything by how well it works, but without questioning the values and goals that determine this. But the criticism assumes that values have to be external criteria that must always be brought to anything from outside. Peirce, James, and Dewey sketched out how goals and criteria develop in and from practice, and how they change — not by mere imposition. Such an approach does not solve all value questions at once, but it does solve quite a lot, and it advances the remaining questions beyond the simplistic notion of externally derived values.
Let me now show how some recent philosophers pointed to a way of thinking with more than form, and where their ways stopped.
6. Wittgenstein and the use-contexts of language:
Once, when he heard that some colleagues had joined the Catholic Church, Wittgenstein (Drury 1981) said: “That is like saying that someone bought a tightrope-walking outfit.” He meant that buying the outfit doesn't give one the skill to engage in the activity. From this and many other statements (see Chatterjee) it is clear that Wittgenstein found a way to think with more than forms, but only by staying on a line: neither within the traps of language nor beyond language. He saw no way to go outside of language, across the line. But it is possible to walk this line, although that requires skill.
For him there were two ways to be inside language: misled by the concepts, or walking the line. To be misled was to think within the concepts. He showed that our explanatory concepts are misleading. How could he show it? Without going outside of language, Wittgenstein found something other than the concepts.
Wittgenstein would show for each concept he examined, that the word we use for the concept does not apply in the same way in its different instances. He would bring up not two or three, but sometimes twenty-three examples of using the word, each quite precise — and different. None would fit the concept. There must be some thousand such examples in his works, each different.
I am pointing to the fact that his examples are more demandingly ordered — more intricate — than our concepts. In my way of saying it, he ran into the intricacy. Nearly anything is far more intricately ordered than the conceptual patterns are.
Wittgenstein knew that he had thought his way to a vantage point that is superior to concepts and systems. But he stopped just on that line. No further way of thought seemed possible. The Oxford movement that wanted to follow him, actually fell back somewhat. It rightly emphasized that a word means its use in situations — the word marks or changes something in the situation in which it can be said. A word's use-contexts have no single picture or pattern in common. As Wittgenstein said, a word's situations are a “family,” not a common pattern. But then the Oxford Analysts tried, after all, to define the use of a word, if not by a concept then at least by a rule, to capture what a word marks or does. That effort failed; rules don't limit what a word can mean, either. It has led to discouragement. The intricacy Wittgenstein opened, has left in his works — seemingly only an endless number of disparate instances. The crucial question was not asked: How does implicit intricacy function? How do words work — so intricately and in novel ways that are not limited by forms and rules?
7. Husserl and Heidegger:
In the same period, a little earlier than Wittgenstein, Husserl also found (what I am calling:) the intricacy. That also led him to reject the old theoretical concepts. Husserl found that ordinary experience can give rise to very different descriptions that are also much more specific than the old theories. For example, we never see objects from all sides at once, always only from one angle, and yet they don't look flat. The actually experienced time-relations are also very different from how time is usually rendered. He also found that every event is in some ways definite and in some ways vague. Husserl found layer upon layer of further specificities in whatever he examined in this experiential way. He went far beyond all the old theories and created a vast catalogue of specific explications.
Rather than considering ourselves to be within the universe constructed by logical science, Husserl said that science is possible only within phenomenological laws.
Husserl thought he could codify phenomenological laws of how all experience is constructed. He thought he found these characteristics of phenomena. But it is obvious that he found them in response to certain distinctions and schemes which he brought to his descriptions. He didn't ask whether, when, and how any kind of finding can be distinguished from bringing. He did not ask what he would find if he began with different distinctions. For example, he began by dividing everything into three realms: perceiving, feeling, and willing. Over the years he often modified this three-way division but always, as it seemed to him, to make it more accurate. He never asked how the experiential intricacy might give different results if one first divides in some other way. So his explications do not use the capacity of intricacy to be further explicated in various ways. Nor does he let it continue to function in other ways that we will employ and examine here. He formulated a great many valuable specifics, but he did not develop a way in which implicit intricacy could function in thinking.
Why did Husserl not ask about the effects of various possible distinctions? I think it was because he was so sure — and right — that what he found was not just the result of his distinctions. He always found much more than could possibly derive just from the simple distinctions. He was not wrong, that phenomenological description differs from mere theory or speculation. His critics overstate the trouble as if phenomenology were no more grounded than any other philosophy.
Indeed Husserl's distinctions were rewarded by findings that were not the result just of his distinctions. The implicit intricacy always rewarded him with much more than he brought to it. What he did not see was that the intricacy can also reward other distinctions and divisions, yet differently. Evidently intricacy is not this or that set of distinctions.
The questions he missed and we will ask, are: How does intricacy function in response to various forms and distinctions? How can we let it continue to function in our thinking with and after the forms and distinctions?
To examine how intricacy functions, we must find a way of thinking and speaking in which the implicit intricacy continues to function along with (one or more) explications. The terms must bring the intricacy along with them, so that it can lead to further steps that are not limited by the explication.
The Phenomenologists who followed Husserl each used different distinctions and got different results. None of them asked how that was possible for Phenomenologists claiming that they were not speculating, only describing phenomena. The early Heidegger and then Merleau-Ponty did write powerfully about what is inherently implicit, pre-thematic. But they each brought to it their own conceptual patterns different from Husserl's. No one found or looked for a way to think with that which is more intricate and can respond to many different distinctions.3(forward)
Heidegger, in his early work, came close. In Being and Time (1926) he presented a fascinating “analysis” of being-in the world. It included feeling, understanding, explication, and speech. He re-understood each and showed that they are “equally basic” to each other, and always in each other. In our felt understanding (for example, in a mood) we know our reasons for an action “further than cognition can reach,” he said.
Heidegger called his terms “Existenziale,” i.e. aspects of how we exist, and said that they were not concepts. They were explications of (formed in and from) our being-in the world. But just in what way were they more than concepts? Heidegger called them “hermeneutical”: they explicate a pre-explicit, pre-thematic understanding. But he did not go further into the general notion of hermeneutics, and later rejected even that notion. How could he have failed to pursue this opening he had made for a more-than-conceptual thinking?
Like Husserl, Heidegger did not ask how other patterns could differently explicate our pre-explicit understanding. Nor did he ask how we might let the implicit understanding continue to function when we think on any topic. But his reason for not asking it was the opposite of Husserl's. Heidegger did not assume that experience can be described independently of our assumptions; rather the full opposite: Heidegger assumed that our pre-thematic understanding is always already shaped by historical determinants. Now he wanted to understand how such historical determinants arise.
Heidegger did not see in his “Existenziale” a more-than-conceptual way in which to carry on his further thinking. It seemed to him that what could be thought in them would still be determined within Western historical assumptions. How the historical determinants arise and how they could change seemed to him thinkable only on an ultimate meta-philosophical level. Therefore right after Being and Time Heidegger went on — purely conceptually! — to look for an over-arching “meta-ontology” from which the “Existenziale” would be seen as derived (1928). He discarded Husserl's renditions of experiential intricacy, and he also rejected his own precise more-than-concepts. He merged all intricacy back into a single question: If anything is inherently historical, how do historical determinants arise?
Later he also used poetic language, but always to point to that one encompassing question. For example, Heidegger said (in Holzwege) that painting does add something original, but still only within a “clearing” made by the over-arching determinants of language and history. Only by thinking the determinants as such could we hope to think the openness.
He knew two ways to think those over-arching historically given assumptions: either trapped within them, or in a way that reopens the questions they closed, so as to regain the openness which hides itself in them. In this way Heidegger was able to provide a powerful critique — he called it a destruction — of Western philosophical concepts. He made them so visible and re-opened them so thoroughly, that it has become impossible any longer just to assume them and to argue comfortably from them.
Heidegger deeply believed the dictum of his country and his period, that a genuine thinker can only be the thinker of a particular nation and culture. (For example, Ranke said that a genuine historian must be German in attitude throughout, or some other nationality, or — superficial.) What is universal in people seemed only the poorest common denominator. Heidegger did not read the part of Dilthey's work to which I referred above. He did not find the universal human nature of cross-understanding.
On the other hand Heidegger argued intensely against Nietzsche's view that cultural forms are merely imposed, and that aside from them there is only indeterminacy. Behind the forms Heidegger saw an openness from which they all arise which they hide and cover by their very formedness.
We must think of Heidegger not only as the thinker who most undermined the Western Enlightenment and brought the current relativism. He is also the thinker who most strongly opposed relativism. He insisted that if we deeply enough grasp the overarching historical forms in which we find ourselves, we can think through them to the openness that “gives” them. More recently this openness has been lost, replaced by Derrida's assertion that new distinctions simply displace old ones; no openness seems possible.
In his last works Heidegger again comes close to the more-than-conceptual thinking that opened in his early more-than-concepts with their beautiful precision. He calls for a more-than-conceptual way of thinking he called a “dwelling.” But it was to think only beyond the most over-arching assumptions. Since it had to be beyond everything, it seemed that “dwelling” could not be about anything. So it could not even begin.
Having left all but the ultimate determinants behind, Heidegger could not think how that which is more than form actually functions — as I would say — in each situation and in each moment of thinking. He did not see how any bit of life and practice can talk back more intricately so as to change the determinants which are implicitly at work in it. So he could not investigate further just how the historical determinants actually work (as I would say:) implicitly, and how they change by working-in a wider intricacy. He could not further examine the role of individual humans in the coming of new history. (See Scharff on Vereinzelung.) He could not further develop a more-than-conceptual thinking. As he would say we will reopen these questions.
One can also read Heidegger in my way: The openness is implicit in anything — and can function in our thinking further from anything. (See my “Befindlichkeit” and “Dwelling.”)
Why did it seem so impossible to Heidegger that practice and actual situations could be a source of new determinants? (See Kolb). It was for the same reason that Kant thought it so obviously impossible to get logic from experience: they both assumed that experience has always already been organized by certain determinants so that no change in the determinants can come from it. Experience can happen only within the determinants.
We need a critique to limit this “always already” and “only within.” Anything human does indeed include implicit concepts and cultural forms, but we will see that they do not work by a one-way determination.
Let us first briefly look at philosophy today.
8. Philosophy can be divided into three approaches today:
a. Philosophies of science:
Rational discourse is being freshly examined in many interesting ways, both here and in Europe.
For example, Habermas emphasizes the process of discourse, the social and interpersonal conditions that enable it to be rational. Experience is considered as a communicative interaction, rather than as mere logical forms. But it is still assumed (and I will deny) that people can communicate only within a “common store” of meaning-models (Vorrat an Deutungsmustern) which thus fills the role Kant gave to logic.
The new philosophy of science emphasizes not just the clean final product, but how scientists actually work. What I call functions of intricacy become noticeable. That also happens in the new field of “applied logic” (Hintikka 1989), which promises to become much more than a mere application of formal logic.
But rational, scientific, “instrumental” discourse cannot be treated only as if it were a separate, independent realm, as Habermas and many philosophers of science seem to want. An “instrumental” sphere cannot just be segmented off, as if it were limited merely by neighboring spheres. One cannot just speak about “coherence,” “meaning,” “definition,” “methodology,” “value-free neutrality” and so on, without questioning the schemes and assumptions that such words bring.
But a critique of science cannot be just negative. It is true that economics and politics influence science; the clean rational forms do not control their uses. But the forms and distinctions do not just break down. They also work. We must locate their work within the wider functions that are also at work.
b. The tragic view: Derrida's Deconstruction:
Deconstruction brings a constant attention to the schemes and distinctions that all words bring. (McKeon antedates it.4(forward) Hopefully it is a lasting contribution so that no one can be satisfied to stay within unquestioned schematic patterns brought by the words.
Deconstruction also shows that distinctions never give a clean result, always also what does not fit into the distinction. It is called an “excess” — as if it had no real function of is own. (See the very clarifying articles by Bernasconi.) The “excess” is considered as only a little-understood contingency or break-down at the heart of conceptual form.
This view stops far too soon. The nature of conceptual form is not understood. (It seems impossible to think about the question except in one set of conceptual forms or another). Deconstruction misses the vital functions of what is called the “excess.”
It is true that in a static moment the excess cannot be separated. One cannot have or think it just alone without the distinctions and forms. So it seems always to be just the excess-of some distinction. But this is an illusion. It is not the excess only of the form that obtains at that moment. If we pursue it through steps of thought, we see its many orderly functions in thought, and in how words move and change in meaning. (Chapter 3 will attempt to do that.)
Derrida (1981) argues that no saying can say beyond its distinctions. He says that they instantly re-surround any saying that hoped to move beyond them.
The only way he finds is to speak in a way that also crosses itself out. For example, he says that every text is a commentary on previous ones; since none are texts then also none are commentaries. The method is to say-and-cross-out. Derrida denies that he says anything beyond distinctions; he argues that it can only be a saying-and-crossing-out of the distinctions.
By both saying and crossing out, Derrida says a lot and also dramatizes the difficulty Husserl did not see. Where Heidegger (in his middle period) wrote-and-crossed-out the words “being” and “is,” Derrida tries to cross out every word. Like Wittgenstein he tries to break the distinctions and forms that language brings while still always remaining within language.
But Deconstruction also closes much of what those three philosophers had opened. Now nothing is said to be at work except the distinctions themselves. Where Husserl entered, and what Wittgenstein and Heidegger pointed to, is now said to be only a disappearing moment, tragic because it is gone as soon as it happens, the moment when a set of patterns changes — into another set.
In terms of political metaphor, the possibility of liberation is denied. The oppressed cannot come to power themselves. The classless state is not possible; the workers can only give rise to a new oppressive minority. What is other than imposed distinctions can not be said or thought; it cannot be. There is always again only an imposed form.
Similarly Foucault says that the arrangements imposed by those in power are changed only by arrangements imposed by the next group in power. Other than imposed order there is only an inchoate resistance which cannot be itself. He thinks that nothing new can ever come from the individual or the human body. Animals might have instincts, but according to Foucault (1977), the human body was utterly destroyed by history. He thinks we make ourselves as he thinks we make works of art — by imposing predetermined values and concepts on completely plastic material.
The current relativism or historical nihilism stems from this one-way direction, the assumption of imposed order.
Lacan reads Freud in this tragic way. (If Freud could place himself, it would be into the first camp: He thought that Western reason could be separated to some extent from human irrationality. He built a science of psychology with some success.) Lacan emphasizes in Freud what comes from Kant and Nietzsche: The “id” has no order; therefore order can only be something that is externally imposed. What is imposed upon is not capable of meaningful feedback. It cannot modify any form. It cannot even find that one form is more in line with itself than another. (Anything being itself is rejected as the old metaphysics of identity.) That upon which order is imposed, cannot be itself. Its desire to be itself is tragic because it must always be something else, something imposed. This heritage of imposed form from Kant and Nietzsche is certainly also there in Freud.
We notice that Deconstruction retains the old assumption that order can only be imposed. Now that the forms are said to fail, something more might seem possible. But it is made to seem tragic, only a disappearing moment, only disorder. But why? It is because imposed forms and distinctions are still assumed to be the only possible order. Deconstruction claims to overturn tradition, but actually it retains the traditional assumption that only an imposed order is possible.
We will soon turn the tragic view over: What is more than forms is not tragic or ephemeral. It is not a fleeting moment between successive forms. If anything is ephemeral, it is the forms. Our saying, acting, and thinking is the steadier of the two, always moving in, with, and after all forms. It is neither their order nor their disorder. Rather, it functions very much in its own way. We will become able to say it only along with letting it continue to function.
c. Thinking with experiential intricacy (the body, situations, practice, language, ..... ):
A great individual and social change is occurring. Today millions of people have found experiential intricacy. Business, medicine, and society as a whole are adopting experiential processes. This change began with psychoanalysis. But, whereas Freud prided himself most on his theoretical concepts, it was not the concepts but the practice of psychoanalysis that changed society. The practice opened individuals and society to experiential intricacy.
Currently more than 90% of psychotherapists the world over no longer work psychoanalytically. Although for several generations most psychotherapists were trained psychoanalytically, most of them found unavoidable reasons in their practice to reject the psychoanalytic concepts and conceptualized procedures.
Notice the relation between theory and practice which is shown by this social change: The very practice which seemed founded on certain concepts, was actually responded to by much more intricacy than could derive from the concepts. Especially, notice: The intricacy that responded to the concepts forced the rejection of these very concepts. That is one way concepts and intricacy can function. We will see that again further on.
Many psychotherapists now practice in ways that go far beyond any theoretical concepts. All therapists, including the few remaining “orthodox analysts,” know that the practice must always be permitted to surprise the theory. The process of therapy moves beyond merely imposed interpretations. The interpretation that fit so well yesterday may have worked to bring forth precisely that which changes what was interpreted.
Freud called attention to the fact that in practice the actual “working through” involves more detail than the concepts. But he thought of it as under the concepts; he thought that the concepts overarched. Not only have the concepts largely been rejected; most importantly, the mode of thinking and practice in terms of overarching concepts has been rejected.
Since the usual thinking falls hopelessly short of what sensitive therapists (and people generally) can apprehend, theoretical thinking has gotten a bad name among many people, as if it were inherently useless or detrimental. But a much more careful and precise theoretical thinking can develop also in this field from this personal function of intricacy.
This intricacy was discovered by Freud. Like Husserl and Wittgenstein, he opened the way into it. He emphasized that without dealing with it we only “rationalize.” Yet he did not think well of it. He called it “the pathology of everyday life.” In his metapsychology he treated it as mere disorder. But it is not just pathology. Most people experience it also as far healthier, more realistic, and more orderly than the imposed patterns. Today the social forms fall short of guiding what we do. Every day we must improvise and create more intricate ways to act in many situations. We do it not by just inventing, but from our sense that an unclear situation is more intricate than the known roles and concepts. Now the social forms seem primitive and simplistic.
Today it is easy to assert that experiential intricacy is not derivative just from the imposed patterns. But such a denial is simplistic too; it misses how the old concepts and distinctions do function even in our deepest and seemingly most private experience. It also misses the inherent relation between experience and concepts. Without grasping their implicit function we cannot know when we only re-instance our training and when we also move further. I will show how we can know this.
As philosophy has expanded, it has drawn in fields such as anthropology (Levi-Strauss), sociology (Habermas), literary criticism (Derrida), and history (Foucault). I have drawn on many fields including psychotherapy and I do so again here. Most philosophers have considered psychotherapy only in the form of psychoanalysis. They have not come to grips with psychotherapy, nor with the large current social-individual change.
Feminist literature is part of that social change. Some feminist authors emphasize that experiences (such as giving birth) “can be a source of empowerment, and provide a trans-historical core that can resist social pressures.” (Here we will try to supply the needed concepts for a trans-historical that is not some common form.) They speak of “new forms of psychic and bodily experience.” They say that biological bodies are not fixed machines on which meaning must be imposed; that bodily experience can provide “a theoretical basis for an active subjectivity,” a way “to think through the body.” (See Reiger, K., and Rich, A.)
Many Feminists do hold what I called “the tragic view,” but the spirit is different. Here we find thinkers lauding and featuring, the (supposedly) ephemeral moment, (supposedly) intermittent and only “hanging there” — nowhere — in limbo. It is becoming something one can feature! From here it is only a short step to asserting that, far from tragically hanging nowhere, what is more than form always functions in thinking and saying a more intricate order, not a breakdown.
Males and females differ, but the difference is not what someone defines. Even after the best explications and livable developments, let us think it as and with its intricacy. As with any topic, we can think it in advance not as distinctions alone, but as intricately capable of more.
Imposing form on mere passivity was never real. The old stereotypes can let us say that they were pretenses. It was a pretense to believe that forming is masculine, that only what is formed is real, that form is imposed on what cannot talk back, a mere recalcitrance or disorder without a nature, so that it can only be by imposed interpretation. We are much more intricate than passivity or form.
For example, Gilligan (1987) finds a mode of thinking in terms of stories and incidents. She also finds children of both sexes understanding and empathizing with others who are quite different from themselves. She rejects the old theory that we can communicate only through commonalties. But as she says, with the current concepts her findings seem “impossible … on a theoretical level.” (Her findings can be understood with the implicit function of “crossing,” taken up in Chapter 5.)
The superiority of stories over concepts shows that practice can overcome concepts. But this is not a simple superiority. Concepts guide practice too. Logical and story modes of thinking cannot be unrelated. How do they inform each other? How do they go on in each other? It is only an illusion that each can be alone. Concepts change when they work-in implicit intricacy to make new sense.
A philosophy re-positions the old words to make new sense. That is possible only because more than forms is at work in thinking. The process of making new sense involves more than new distinctions displacing the old ones. It involves functions of implicit intricacy. Most earlier philosophies did not overtly avow these functions, but no philosophy would have been exciting or even possible without them. We will think with and about them here.
9. Preview:
In Chapters 3-5 I tell some stories. They will be instances of how instances are more than generalities (forms, distinctions, rules, patterns, comparisons, members of categories, ..... ). I will discuss how my strings of different words work. How the word “instance” works will change. This instancing won't be a mere puzzle; rather, it will generate some new concepts about itself. These instances will also change the words “body,” “language,” “situation,” and “change.”
How is the body not just a fixed machine? We live in a bodily way in our situations. The words “body” and “situation” work in a new way here. More than form plays a role in how words work. Thinking with more than form will involve a re-understanding of language, the body, and situations. In Chapter 2 I trace how the assumption of imposed order arose, and the systematic reasons for it. How and why was there this loss of anything that could talk back?
Even then we cannot just assert a two-way determination — between what and what would it be? There is no permanent duality. We need to enter into how implicit intricacy functions. We need a way to let it continue to function in our thinking and saying, so that language becomes able to say how language works. In Chapter 3 we will do that, and also set up some (rather odd) concepts about how we did it.
Chapter 4 presents excerpts that show how implicit intricacy functions in psychotherapy. We see it by the transitions. In Chapter 5 our new concepts enable us to discuss: What are situations? How is new word-use possible in them? I show some functions of the body in language.
Section B shows what is involved in patterns. Then I show that our new concepts can relate directly to scientific findings.
1. The denial of a natural order:
Freud held that a newborn infant has only chaotic drive-energies without any patterns of discharge. He assumed that the body has no way in which these energies can interact with the environment, that is to say no way of behaving or interacting with others at all, until some set of social behavior patterns are imposed on it. He says that the bodily id is totally autistic except for that part of it which acquires the imposed patterns and becomes the ego. The assumption that order and interaction must be imposed from outside, is starkly built into all the psychoanalytic concepts.
But it was also Freud who discovered beneath the social simplicities that great intricacy he called “the pathology of everyday life.” He decoded the language of the unconscious and of dreams. He emphasized the “overdetermined” complexity of dreams. Yet, in his metapsychology that is all treated as unorganized.
There is a long tradition of treating what is not logic as if it were no order at all. So also did Nietzsche. He said many different things, among them that the body has a reason of its own, superior to reason. He lauded the “wisdom of the body,” and spoke of tending it like a garden. But he also called the body a primordial disorder on which order must be forced from outside. At most, one can choose what sort of work of art to make of oneself and others. In Nietzsche's work the self-creation has no feedback. The body has nothing with which to talk back to modify or further elaborate what is imposed. The self is a work of art — and art is also understood as a form-imposition without feedback.
That tradition goes further back, at least to Vico, who lovingly treats metaphor, and then also depreciates it as primitive. The order of body and metaphor is featured, but also called no order at all. Let us ask how that could have happened:
2. A critique of the “always already”:
a) The overstatement:
I will instance and assert a wider saying (thinking, experiencing, ..... ) that is not within the distinctions and social rules. Rather, the forms and rules are at work within it. Rules and forms are always at work; they are implicit in all our situations and our bodily experience — how we interact, eat, sleep, feel, and perceive. If there is a bodily order, we will see it functioning with, not without them.
From the right insight that the human bodily order is not without these forms, it is a short — but questionable — step to assume that experience is derivative, ordered only by them.
So also, it is a right (and ancient) insight that nature and nurture are not separable in humans. Language and thought-forms are not just added on; they reorganize the human animal. But, it is different and wrong to assume that the human body can not talk back in new ways to these forms.
b) The reversal:
Ordinary people might assume that concepts and distinctions are only one kind of event within a wider universe. But, Western philosophy reversed this order: The universe is supposed to exist only within distinctions, differences, forms, scientifically and culturally posited patterns. Ordinary people might not notice, but that wider, overarching universe they now think of as “nature” is, of course, the nature that science presents.
The common sense view has been reversed: The nature we seem to live in is now the scientific, political and cultural “nature.” There seems to be no nature or human nature more than that. All natural order is assumed to be an imposed order.
The notion of an imposed order splits everything into two sides: The order is considered as if it were independent. On the other side there is something passive and unordered, upon which order is imposed, something that does not feed back, because it has no order of its own.
An imposed order is the sort of order that can be the same, here or there, so that it does not depend on what it is imposed upon.
The very notion of “order” has come to mean the sort that can be imposed, that is to say it is assumed to function like a pattern. An order that can be imposed is inherently abstract, since it is the same in many places. So it is independent of the places and can omit everything that does not fit it. Therefore it can be put on something that did not have it from itself. Such an order seems to work alone. Patterns have their organizing power, seemingly alone.
I will show how patterns work-in another, more intricate order which talks back with much more than can follow from the patterns. But let us first understand why this has been considered impossible.
Let me trace how the assumption arose, that all order is imposed, and that it works determinatively so that behavior and experience can happen only within it. Let us see how this reversal came: no longer that we live and think within a wider nature, but that nature is our own construction?
If we pursue this question, we discover that it has not been asked for a long time. Let us see how the “always already” came to be assumed as totally determinative, and overarching. It happened in stages:
3. How the assumption arose:
It was not Descartes who brought the reversal. It is true that he frankly counseled imposing an order. He championed Galileo's imposition of mathematical ideas on nature. But he did not say that these constructions are nature. Rather, he knew himself to be working within the wider “natural order” as it was called — that colorful profusion which had always been known, studied, and recorded like irreducible specimens in a rock collection.
For Descartes the natural order is still there — we can see that because he refers to it and tells us explicitly to ignore it. In his “rules” in the Discourse on Method he says essentially: Even if what you study has an order of its own, impose instead your mathematical grid of clear units and logical principles. Build everything out of these. Permit nothing into your science that you have not yourself fashioned out of your own clear units. He favors “supposing an order among those things that do not naturally precede one another” (my italics).
Descartes thought of mathematics as a creation just of thought. Its patterns could exist quite alone, so that physics and everything else seemed to be derivative from them. But for Descartes this way of beginning with pure thought was one thing; nature was quite another.
For a century or more, people kept their eyes on both the elegant logical mathematical order, and the messy natural order. They thought of science not as people think of it today, as telling us the facts of nature. Rather, they thought of science as a hypothetical scheme of mathematical constructions that we invent and impose.
For example, look at how Rousseau begins the Second Essay on Inequality: For a few pages he summarizes naturalistic observations and history. Then he says: “Let us set the facts aside … as our physicists do every day … and let us proceed hypothetically.”
Then he offers a hypothetical construct system with four terms. Rousseau's readers were obviously familiar with how science sets the complex natural order aside, and imposes its own hypothetical simplicities instead. Today, people must read Rousseau's paragraph several times before they can believe that they have read it correctly. “How can he say that scientists set the facts aside?” they ask. They are accustomed to thinking of “the facts” as the scientific ones.
People have forgotten that science “sets the facts aside.” Now they think there are no facts other than scientific ones.
But, the paragraph also puzzles sophisticated philosophers. Like Descartes and Rousseau, they think of science as a construction we impose, but now they also think that nothing else is possible. Isn't anything else only a construction too? What is that, which Rousseau asks us to set aside? That natural order has been lost! Before, it was always there. In Rousseau's time it was still obvious that “the facts” are far richer and more confusing than science's clean hypothetical grids.
With Rousseau the natural order has its last moment. He strongly helped its loss along: He gave the very word “nature” to his frankly hypothetical construction, what he called “the state of nature.” For this state he posited a human body without human interaction. Society became unnatural. The body had no sociality of its own. It is from Rousseau that we have the assumption that the “natural” body is autistic, unorganized, merely “perfectible.”
Like Vico, Nietzsche, and Freud, Rousseau is famous precisely for lauding the richness of the human body's own order. He argued that education must not just impose. It must always take account of what comes from the child. Only in the move to theory, quite frankly, “like our scientists do,” does he impose from outside his hypothetical, four-way grid. Now he asserts that there is nearly no organization inside.
Rousseau did not say that there is only hypothetical construction. That reversal, to make the wild richness of experience seem derivative from the imposed forms, that came with Kant.
Kant answered the following question: How is it, that our frankly hypothetical science works? Why, by imposing hypothetical thought-grids, can nature be discovered? He solved it with this reversal: The order we impose is the objective one, he said, because the same order is imposed not just in thought, but also on experience. All order found in experience is put there in the very making of experience. Nature is a product of our thought-forms.5(forward)
Kant elevated the forms of Newtonian science to be the only organizing forms of all experience. He thought that scientists impose the same knowledge on experience, which the human mind has already imposed in making experience.
Although it is said that “we” (or “human subjects”) impose this order, this “we” is only the mathematical thought-forms. All the rest of how we know and sense ourselves is, for Kant, utterly derivative. Experience happens wholly within the kind of order that can be imposed, an order that can be analyzed separately and can be put on something without feedback.
It is elegant and exciting, how he derives a rule from the pure thought-form, then a perceptual schema like a circle from the empty rule, and then the objects from the mere schemata. But if one traces carefully, one sees each time: he allows himself to assume that experience must always fall univocally and cleanly within patterns, classes, distinctions. He deals himself an already-cut world. In the most amazing fashion he deliberately assumes that all things and all ethical situations are neatly and distinctly classifiable. Only so are they “possible.”
Why does Kant need experience to be so utterly limited within the patterns of thought? It was to explain why our hypothetical science appears to be true and objective. This was the most urgent question in philosophy from Descartes' time to Kant's, as science succeeded more and more. So the answer to this question is itself not just imposed; it is a response to the success of the scientific patterns. I argue that scientific patterns are never just imposed. But the empirical intricacy in (as, with, ..... ) which they work was only the impossible correspondence theory of copying nature. Therefore Kant's reversal was an advance, although an overcorrection: We do not copy nature; rather nature is produced by our thought-forms.
But even this reversal is not the last stage:
Kant still felt the violence of the reversal. You can see it from the humor with which he enjoys the shock value: Space, time, and objects are not real, he says over and over, clearly counting on upsetting the reader. But then, what is there other than bits of sensation and our forms of construction? Kant retains a vestige of the order of nature in that he insists that it is vital to retain the idea of an unknowable reality beyond our sensations and concepts.
Hegel finally rejected even this unknowable reality. He said that it was itself only one more concept, and even “the emptiest of all concepts.” Hegel said that thought really meets nothing but itself. It alone develops dialectically into more and more distinctions. It was the final stage of the loss of nature. Now everything was assumed to happen only within thought-forms, comparisons — the “march of differences.”6(forward)
With the Romantics and Nietzsche the assumption changed but not very much. It was still assumed that experience is produced by imposed forms, but not just by thought-forms but by the forms of culture, history and language. Again it was held that experience is possible only within these. Experience could not talk back in any orderly way of its own.
Now the human subject was considered as the product (rather than the source) of imposed order. Romantic thinkers went deeper into human subjectivity, but as they saw it, the deeper human being was always only the product of a particular culture. Whereas Kant's subject (the unity of rational forms) had seemed universal, the historically produced subjects seemed to differ in all important ways depending on the society and period of history. Since then, it is said that there is no human nature, only various historical natures.
Heidegger rejected even this inner subject in favor of in-the-world interaction.7(forward)
These are some of the steps by which the assumption of imposed order came about. With this assumption in the very structure of our concepts, the body seems to have no other kind of order. Supposedly we can only re-discover in experience what was already imposed on it from outside.
Today even to question Kant's reversal seems naive to most philosophers, as if the only alternative were to report experience naively. But we can avoid this error without the overcorrection. For humans all these kinds of forms do always function, but they are not the only kind of order.
1. In what language shall we discuss language?
We want to find a way of thinking and speaking — about thinking and speaking — in which the implicit intricacy continues to function in what we say. And, we want to become able to say how it can do that. But this is supposed to be impossible. It seems that language cannot examine itself. Anything said seems limited within (one or another set of) conceptual forms and distinctions. Let me first show this problem more fully. Then we will find a way with it.
2. Does the saying disappear in the forms and distinctions?
Let me first argue on the other side, to bring home the problem we will be resolving. The Deconstructionists would argue that the “act of saying” falls instantly into the said. The process of creating seems to turn instantly into created forms. New distinctions arise, but the arising seems to disappear, leaving only what arose. So saying seems unsayable — supposedly it becomes the said — and they take the said to be just the distinctions and forms. It seems that even the problem can be said only as some distinction; here it is the distinction between the “ing” of activity and the “ed” of a result. I want to say the act of saying, but to talk of an “act” seems to put saying into a scheme: Indeed, the word “act” brings the conceptual scheme of an act with its agent and its result. Philosophers have presented many conflicting schemes. It would not be exciting if what follows in the next pages were to render saying by one more scheme, especially the old scheme of an act. But it seems that I end in some scheme no matter what words.
Can you sense the loss that takes place here, as a conceptual form seems to take over, when what I am trying to say is the saying — whatever saying really is? See it here again: You knew what I wanted to say by “the saying — whatever saying really is.” But that, which you knew I wanted to say, is suddenly lost when we see that this phrase brings the appearance/reality distinction, the scheme of “really is” as if what I wanted to say were an object out there, to which I could point.) It seems that to distinguish the saying from a scheme — would again be just a distinction or a scheme. So they say that even the question whether there is something other than distinctions can only be one more distinction.
There seems to be a trick: Some thin conceptual scheme is said to be what was the whole event of saying. (This time I avoided the word “activity” but “event” brings a scheme of time.) Yes, something is lost each time, when it is made to seem that I said only the scheme. And yes, you know implicitly just what is being lost.
But, please: the problem is not a quibble. It is not just a question of being a friendly person and granting me that you know what I mean without holding me to the scheme my words bring. Just knowing what I mean might do for any one moment. But the schemes matter as soon as we try to go on. Each scheme would lead our further thinking on in certain ways, and preclude other steps of thought which might have come. Therefore it is extremely important to be keenly aware of the schemes in each phrasing. So this is no small problem.
Of course you understood implicitly that in referring to the act of saying I wanted precisely not to get caught in concepts alone. I wanted to say the saying, itself, and there is going to be a way to do that. But the phrase “the saying, itself” seems caught in the old scheme of mathematical identity, 1=1. Let us ask: Just precisely how did you know that I did not intend that scheme, and how did you know what I did intend?
In the following section I will show how more than patterns and distinctions function in language. And the language that says this will (itself!) be more than patterns and distinctions. Let us now see how that is possible.
3. A story from poetry:
The poet stops in midst of an unfinished poem. How to go on? Perhaps there is only confusion. No leads.
The poet reads and re-reads the lines. Where they end something does come! The poet hears (knows, reads, senses, ..... ) what these lines need, want, demand, imply, ..... . What the next line must say is now already here — in a way. But how to say that? What is that? It is ..... — the poet's hand is silently rotating in the air. The rotating gesture says that.
The poet tries this line and that. Many lines come. Some seem good. The poet listens into what each of those lines can say. Poets constantly listen into an unexplored openness — what can this new phrasing say? A great many such lines come and are rejected. The poet reads to the end of the written lines again and again. Each time that ..... comes.
The lines that offer themselves try to say, but do not say — that. That seems to lack words, but no. The ..... is very verbal: It knows the language well enough to understand — and reject — all the lines that come. That blank is not a bit pre-verbal; it knows what must be said, and it knows that the lines which came don't say that.
The blank is vague, but it is also more precise than the poet can as yet say. It cannot be said in common phrases. Poetry creates new phrases to say something new. This ..... demands and implies a new phrase that has not yet come. So the ..... is actually more precise than what has ever been said before in the history of the world.
Of course, in a way the blank is said by the lines leading up to it. The poet can have (get back, keep a hold of, hear, sense, ..... ) this blank by re-reading and listening to the already written lines — over and over. So they do seem to say it, or, more precisely: They have a role in saying what is further to be said.
But when the next line does come, it nearly always forces some revision of these already written lines. The written lines imply something that will revise — those very lines.
The ..... is an implying. This implying is quite noticeable, at least when one still lacks a phrasing to say what is implied.
The implying performs certain vital functions here. The most obvious is that it lets new phrasings come to say something new which is also more precise than old phrases can say.
Now I want to show that the implying does not disappear even when the words have come. The implying continues to function. It is what lets the new phrases make sense. The new phrases make sense only because they come into this implying. Taken “out of context” they would not. That is one way in which the implying goes on functioning along with the phrases.
Why can I now so comfortably make these assertions without worrying about the schemes in all my words? It is because my story of the poet's ..... is now continuing to function implicitly in what I am saying. The way something implicit functioned for the poet is now implicit also for us in our philosophical discussion of how it functioned. Our saying more comes from how it functioned, and that must continue to function to let what we further say make sense.
How is it even possible that the old words can make a new sense? Everyone knows that it is possible, but we cannot think about it further in terms of the old theories of communication and language. Their concepts make new sense-making theoretically impossible. So they cannot be very good concepts. They probably mislead us about other concerns too.
Here we will develop a whole vocabulary for thinking further about how something implicit functions and continues to function in our thinking about these functions.
4. Not just deconstruction:
We want to develop ways to think and speak beyond mere puzzles. I want more than your knowing assent to paradox. You might easily agree: Yes, the next line is implied although it does not exist and never has. Yes, to re-read and understand something written is to think beyond it. Yes, such a silence is both vague but also more precise than can be said in old phrases.
Deconstructionists might see a contradiction when I say that the..... is “vague but also more precise.” They would argue that my phrase only deconstructs the word “vague.” Usually it means the opposite of “precise.” But since I asserted both, they would argue that it only means — and crosses out — its usual meaning. They would say that by pairing it with “more precise” I have in effect both said and also crossed out, taken back, only what “vague” usually means. Then they don't want to go any further.
However, it is quite obvious that “vague” says something more than this contradiction. It says something about how a..... implies. From it we are now saying more than a contradiction. The saying more is not made by a contradiction. To say-and-cross-out is not the saying more. When Derrida says and also crosses out, something remains, even though he takes back what he said. Then he lets that ride while seeming also to make it cross itself out.8(forward)
These days many people do that too. They think that making distinctions is wrong as such. They apologize: “Excuse my distinctions; I don't mean them; I am only (!) using them to make my point.” They hurry and flinch a little as they say this, hoping that the listener won't point out the unsolved problem: If the distinctions are rejected, what is it then that lets us say what we don't reject? What remains after the crossing out? Obviously more is at work in the saying than just distinctions.
The point — which is not the distinctions — remains. Obviously the point was said. So the said is not the forms and schemes! The said does not stop being the saying after it is said. The said is the saying, still.
The saying-and-crossing-out is not what lets words say something new. And, once something new is said, one no longer needs to cross anything out. The new saying has already moved beyond the old way the distinction used to work. But it is assumed that that cannot be said.
Fortunately, the poet is not satisfied with what cannot be said. The poet works till phrases come, in and from that ..... . So let us also go on to let words work in and from that blank:
My words “more vague and more precise,” when said in that blank — how do they work? The words say more than their old distinctions, quite without a crossing out. Did you not already follow what this “vague” says here? Need we go back and cross it out, to indicate that it does not say a vagueness that can not be more precise? No, this “vague” is already more precise before I point that out.
Our word “vague” would say something new here, even if it had appeared alone, without “and more precise.” In the slot of the ..... , “vague” says this vagueness of implied phrases that have not yet come. And “more precise” alone would say this precision which is so demanding. Therefore, when I use both words about the ..... they do not cross each other out. The one word does not take back the other.
The word works newly and then, if we wish, we can also say that it did. First it actually had to work that way; we could not have legislated that it shall no longer work as it usually does. Declaring that we don't mean the word in the old way does not let it work in a new way. Its new working does not need a crossing out. Worse, the crossing out is mistaken; we need the old ways too. The word works newly only as it brings its old ways into this new slot. Therefore we cannot cross its old ways out; it wouldn't be this word without them.
Let us say still more from (and with) how it does work:
5. A language for this investigation:
It is not true that an implicit precision cannot be said. The point someone makes is what is said. What is said is the new saying of a newly working word. That is so also in our philosophical discussion here. My phrase “more vague and more precise” says with greater precision how these words themselves work now for us by coming into this blank, and into my sentence about this blank.
This greater precision is not something extra, not an unsaid halo that is only at the edge of what is said. No, it is what is centrally said (Gendlin, 1962, pp. 66-67). The greater precision exceeds only the patterns, not the saying. It is the saying. The saying is itself the precision that is greater than the patterns we could substitute.
In the realm of poetry it is gauche to ask “What does this poem mean?” There will not be a substitute. We may supply some background to the reader, and also help with various spots. Once the poem is understood, we can go on and on in other words from what the poem said. But one cannot paraphrase a poem in terms of old meanings because only the poem's own words make its new meaning. Therefore, when someone asks us: “what does this poem mean?” we answer: “The poem itself says what it means.”
In this answer about poetry, we know what we are saying although we cannot substitute patterns for it. But, in philosophy and theory we think we must be prepared to do so. If someone asks “What do you mean?” we feel a need to answer with clear categories and known meanings. We defend what we said by claiming that we “really” meant those clear categories. If we cannot say we meant them, if they don't cover what we said, then we are uncovered — naked in what we said.
Naked saying makes us uncomfortable. This philosophical discomfort is bodily, a physical sensation, isn't it? Yes, our bodies are capable of philosophical discomfort. But the word “bodily” changes in saying this.
For example, what does the phrase “philosophical discomfort” mean? Nakedly it means this, which my sentence says. But is it our old habit, or is it a fear of not being able to defend, or is it what we think philosophy should be, or what is it? We can pursue the question if we think from this discomfort and if we let it continue to function, whatever we say about it.
Let us admit naked saying, this greater precision, this implying which we have been saying.
The words “imply,” “demand,” and “leads to” have been nakedly saying how a ..... can lead to a next saying before it comes. You might ask me “What do you mean by ‘imply’?” I answer: You already have it: At first you may be just confused and stuck, but then a ..... can come. “To imply” is what the ..... does.
Someone might ask: “What is naked saying,?” It seems we should define it — we should say something else and then claim that that other thing is naked saying. Let us not do that.
Let it name itself “naked saying.” Let it set itself up in this way. Later I will discuss this setting up. By setting itself up so officially, “naked saying” does make a concept of itself, although an unusual kind of concept. It is not a separate form that covers anything. But it is a concept at least in the sense of being general: a kind of saying. All poets speak nakedly, and of course not just poets. We do it in new thinking on any topic, in any science and in everyday life, especially in difficult situations where nothing canned works. Let me — in naked sayings — expand this concept of naked saying:
a) Defining naked saying:
Naked saying is the kind of saying that we don't define in terms of the usual kind of kinds (categories, cleanly patterned distinctions, ..... ) so that we could then claim that what we meant was those. Naked saying defines itself. But how does the word “defining” change here?
b) The word is further defined by the instance:
If a word did not bring its old uses, it would no longer be that word. So of course, the old uses are implicitly at work now — in the new use. If we let words mean how they work, how they make sense, then a word is newly defined by its new use, this instance, here.
Why do I call a new use “an instance”? Isn't it just unique? No, any human sense-making has generality: How a new instance makes sense involves its implicit applying in many places and times. The meaning of a newly working phrase is an instance of this new general applying. Its use here is an instance of the sense it makes. It is an instance of itself.
For instance, the poem's next line has a universal significance even though it will have been said only once so far, for the first time.
Our word “implying” is defined (so far) by the instance of a ..... . But like other words, “imply” can work further to say more. For instance, what we say can smoothly imply our next sayings quite without a ..... . Then the word says that implying.
All this would not come to much if a word's working could be said only by that word itself, in this instance, here. Other words must also be able to tell how that word worked. Therefore let me show how, by coming into the spot of a word, other words can say more about how a word just worked, and thereby also how they can say more and more about how words work.
c) More in other words:
To say more in other words, let another word come where “precise” has worked: Where I said “the is ‘vague but also more precise’,” let us fill in another word in the spot of “precise.” Let us try “determined.” What does it say, coming into the slot where we had “precise” before?
The next line is hard to get because it is more determined than the poet can say. That makes sense too, doesn't it? But now the word “determined” does not say what it usually means. Usually it would have meant that something could be derived from already existing forms, as 4 is already determined if we say “2+2.” A next step that is already determined can be found just from what is already there. But the word does not say that here. If it were more determined in that old sense, poets could infer the next line. Finishing a poem would be easier than 2+2.
Let us try the opposite: Since it is not determined in the usual sense, let us try to say: “The ..... is not determined; it is indeterminate.” That also makes sense, but again because the word's meaning changes as it comes here. Now it does not mean that the next line is indeterminate in the usual sense; if it were, then any line could fit. That way, too, poems would be easy to finish.
Nor is the next line partly determined and partly indeterminate in the usual meaning of those words. A combination of both kinds of easy surely does not say why it is so hard!
And yet, we can say any of these three, and everyone will follow us. That is because coming into this slot any word might work newly to say this, though each would then also say something of its own there, too.
We see that what words say is not just derived from the existing forms. (“Derived” usually means deducible.) We see that what words say is not constrained within existing forms. Rather, the forms work within a wider implying which functions to imply, demand, and also to let the words say something new and more precise than existed before.
But, even though “derive” usually means deducible from extant forms, note what happens if I ask, “How does the poet derive the next line?” Coming here, the word “derive” means how the poet does it. But that happens with all the words, as they come into a new slot. Soon there are no words left to take back.
None of this threatens the stability of truth. What “not derived” said earlier now stays true although to say it we must take “derived” (or some other word) in that way. You can see from this, that how we take a word, (and how you take “take” here) depends on something that functions implicitly. The (new and old) ways in which words can make sense involve very precise functions of implicit intricacy. Taking a word a certain way, and making sense (or making a point) are two functions we can grasp as they happen here.
d) To be a saying, the words must work:
Can just any word come into any slot, to say that slot? No, the word must work, must make sense, must say something.
We have seen that once some words have made a slot, more can be said in it by different words, including ones that had until then meant something else. They can surprise us when they work in a new way.
How else can we say and think about how a word “works in a slot”? It makes, finds, synthesizes, differentiates the new meaning there. These conflicting schemes do work here, but in this way — implicitly.
To come into a slot, the word must work. It must make sense, but that requires a function of the implicit intricacy of the slot, together with the implicit intricacy the word brings. These cross. You can grasp the function performed by their crossing. I say more about this crossing later.
6. How are these changed meanings derived?
The forms a word brings do not enclose its working. Rather, the implicit intricacy continues to function to imply and say something new. Anything we say, however well defined it is, can also be taken as a ..... . If what we say makes sense, a ..... can come where the word worked. Take any word out of a sentence; let ..... come, and let other words come there. What had seemed formed and fixed then shows its intricacy. Also, the newly-coming words acquire a new meaning as they come into a slot in which a word has worked.
Is it just the words that do this for each other? But there are never just words. The slot is also what we need to say (our being in the situation). The words work-in that; they say-in that. That intricacy functions to let the words come to make new sense.
What a ..... implies may not be in the culture's common store of meanings and phrases. The usual theory of communication is quite wrong, that we can communicate only in a common store of common phrases and meanings. That store is always implicitly at work, but it can be implicitly changed by being at work.
When a ..... implies something new, the common store is implicitly changed even before the words come. That becomes visible because they come already phrased in new ways. In the very coming of the ..... and all the while our hand rotated, the language was being implicitly re-worked so that now new phrases come.
Then, when the new line actually comes, its coming makes more change, and demands still more. After it, again, a further line may not be easy.
You have been following me, because my words came into the slot where “vague” and “more precise” already worked. In coming there these further words of mine came already changed. Let me point back to some of them.
The phrase “implicitly changed” says how the implying changes the next coming words before they come. I need not, but I can point out how “implicit” has changed in coming here: “Implicit” used to mean that something fully formed was hidden, folded in. My word “implicit” changed implicitly in the ..... which changes how a word will work before it comes.
The common store of phrases changes and expands as it functions implicitly. So the meaning of the italicized phrase has already changed from how it was in the store of phrases.
We see that other words can come and say more and more about how words work. They can come to develop a whole theory of language in words that do not cover up or close. Of course, sometimes we remain stuck, but if words come, they come implicitly changed, so that they say more of what was just newly said. The schemes do work- implicitly but in doing so they don't determine the new work-in of the words. The words retrieve themselves from their old schemes — by coming. What is this coming? How do the right words ..... come?
We don't control this coming. If words don't come, we have to wait for them. Later I will say more about this coming of words. It is bodily — not so different from how hunger, sexual appetite, emotions, tears, and sleep must come; we can't just will those either.
Why does just “come” come to say that? Can we say that in other words? In other words: The word and the slot implicitly change each other. That word that comes, arrives changed so that it works here, in this slot made by the other words. So we see that the coming of a word implicitly involves thousands of connections to other words that can or cannot be used and phrased along with it. They are implicitly at work when one word comes. What is the nature of this implicit working? Here “implicit” does not substitute an explicit scheme for the implicit way words work. No, what “implicit” means remains implicit. We can say a lot more from it, but in sayings and concepts in which the implicit intricacy continues to function.
The word “intricacy” retrieves itself from meaning finer distinctions. Those may come, but implicit intricacy continues to function with and after them. It is not the distinctions.
The novelty-making function of implicit intricacy is not always what one wants at every point. Much of our living needs to be done within steady existing forms. But it is important to know that this intricacy is always there. At certain junctures it is vital to let it function.
Note the precision of the implicit intricacy, its demanding exactitude. It can reject many perfectly logical suggestions. It is more demanding than logic. The working, changing, and coming of words is a function not just of extant forms but also of the implicit intricacy.
7. In a slot, each word comes after the others:
When many words come into a slot, each says the slot further and differently. For example, do “vague” and “precise” say the same? No, the precision of the ..... is not its vagueness. Once “vague” has worked, “precise” says something new and more precise. It says the precision of this vagueness. Or, if instead we say that the ..... determines the next line, it says (in other words:) that most lines will not do. But “not determined” does not contradict that. Rather, it adds that no line has yet formed. The many words might contradict if we take them out, but in the slot each says the slot and also more in its own way.
This can make a time-sequence: a word works differently if it comes into the slot after another word. So it may matter which word works first. But once they all have worked, each can come after all the others.
In history many words and schemes have no time-order. For example, Hegel came after Kant and applied dialectic to Kant's categories, so it can seem that dialectic comes after categories. But long before Kant and Hegel, Aristotle came after Plato and fashioned conceptual categories from Plato's dialectic. In all cases these have been contemporary, so that it is familiar how each can be applied after the other. A great many philosophical variants have no single time-order. Each comes after all the others. Wherever one of them can come, the others have already worked. Even when only one of them is there, the others are working implicitly. Each says the slot in which they all work.
What does a slot do to the conflicting schemes which the string of words brings? The slot unifies them (keeps them differentiated, makes them a thought, a saying, lets them function, ..... ). After all these words you could follow me even if I had no word in the slot. I could just say that a slot ..... its implicitly working schemes. After the words, the slot can do the saying even without any word in it.
The ..... is held by all the words around it. And it ..... s the schemes that work in it implicitly. This way of a slot says something of how schemes work implicitly.9(forward)
8. Retrieving all the words:
The new working of a word retrieves it from the schemes it brings. So also does the word “retrieve” retrieve itself from earlier uses.10(forward)
So far many words here have retrieved themselves by how they said: sense, follow, work, imply, require, instance, order, determine, undetermined, precise, vague, intricate, know, more, wider, new, was, after, in, saying, as well as: apply, come, come implicitly changed. More will come and be retrieved as others are implicitly changed when these say more.
These and many more words constitute a naked theory of language.
Each makes sense about how it worked, and also about how the others work.
9. Words can tell about how words work:
Suddenly there is a gigantic vocabulary with which to say how language is more than distinctions and forms. There is a language in which to discuss language. Language is not caught in misleading conceptual patterns.
10. Thought-ways and concepts:
Now we can say more about the ways of thinking in which we engaged above. First they had to happen and to say themselves; now we can say more with and from them. As with words: First a word must work (say something, make sense, ..... ) — only then can other words say how it did. Let us set out five thoughtways. In terms of them we can say what we did.
Of course, to say what we did is to do more than we did. But, seemingly innocently, let us summarize (set up, notice, plan to keep, ..... ) some of what we did in this third chapter up to now.
11. Thought-ways:
1) A string of words, each after the others:
We frequently used of a string of different words that could come into (be used in, make, re-make, say, ..... ) a slot. Each word says the whole string, and it says the ..... . Each has its own way of saying more of that slot. The slot continues to function in how we can go on to say more. For example, “imply” now implicitly says what all the other words say (need, want, demand, lead to, determine, do not determine, derive, ..... ). After it means them all, “imply” in its own way says more than the others about that ..... .
The string of words lets the ..... function as more to think further.
2) A fan of possible distinctions:
We frequently thought of something as an implicit intricacy that is capable of many varieties of further distinctions without ever being just those. For example, the ..... after a string of words is capable of all the distinctions the words bring, and yet these are not actually made. If one of them were, the others wouldn't be possible. Also, such a slot can lead to further steps that any distinction we can actually make would preclude.
To think anything as capable of a fan of fans of further distinctions is certainly not the same as actually making and keeping one or more of them. But neither is it the same as simply not making them. As is the case with all these thought-ways, this one is actually a way of thinking only if implicit intricacy functions and continues to function in our thinking.
3) Thinking an instance:
We let words be defined by how they worked in an instance. If a word made new sense, we let that be the meaning of the word.
Most people do the opposite: They lose the intricacy of an actual situation as soon as they use words. If they have a hold of something implicit, pregnant, still vague because it is new and more precise, they lose it as soon as they apply a word.
That is because they think that the word has put its old definition on what they were thinking about. Thereby they lose what they nakedly said (thought, felt, sensed, pursued, ..... ) a moment before.
A few hardy people hold on to what they had, if it would be destroyed by the old definition of every possible word. But they conclude that it cannot be said at all. Then further thinking stops.
Instead, we can let a word change in the instance. Then we can see if it makes new sense — there. We can keep this (or another) instance with us. Then its intricacy continues to function in our thinking and saying.
4) Self-instancing:
At first, all saying seemed confined within schemes and distinctions. It seemed that a word could only say those schemes, never its actual saying, its working. Since then we saw that in some phrases some words say something about their actual working. The phrase “their actual working” also says its actual working, here.
Why does “actual working” not fall into the schemes of act and actuality? Why this time does it say its actual working? It is because we let it instance its new saying. That can happen in any instance, as I said just above. But when a word works to say how it works, it redefines itself from the instance of its own working. Then it is self-instancing.11(forward)
Then they open the way for other words to say how they did.
5) Letting the more precise pattern be the concept:
Just setting out these thought-ways conceptualizes them in a way: I have outlined a pattern in each. But the pattern does not alone define a thought-way. It is also defined by strings of words, instances, and its self-instancing. In these ways these concepts of thought-ways are not only patterns. Implicit intricacy continues to function in them.
This way of conceptualizing is one more thought-way. Let me set it out:
In its old meaning a concept was thought to be only the conceptual pattern. All further steps could come only from the pattern's logical implications. We still want those further steps of logic, and what they open on any topic. But we do not want to give up the further steps to which implicit intricacy can lead (both before and after patterns).
Many people treat concepts as if they were a separate world, a world of theory. They drop all of their naked understandings the moment they turn to theory. They try to operate just with formed conceptual patterns. But without their own naked understandings they can think nothing new. They can only rearrange concepts that are available in the library. And even these can be understood only very thinly in this way. But if we take the implicit intricacy along, as scientists in the laboratory do, then even the purely logical steps are powerful because they work in it. But we can do more:
At any juncture of logical progressions we can also institute these thought ways. They can be used before we move logically, at any point along the way, or at the end of a long progression of logical steps. Although many assumptions and schemes have gone into the logical steps, we have seen that further steps in these thought ways are not necessarily constrained by them.
We want the use of both logical moves and the thought-ways set out here. The sharper and more complex the conceptual patterns are, the more do they enable logical steps that go far into whatever we study. Then our thought-ways can move from such far-in points. Conversely, these thought-ways can lead to new conceptual patterns:
I will now show that patterns drawn from naked saying tend to be more complex than the usual ones. They have more cutting-edges. So they tend to be more precise even just as patterns. But they are not just patterns. They also bring the implicit intricacy along. So they are more precise (and vague) in this way too. For both reasons these will be better concepts. They can open more, without limiting us just to what their patterns open.
This concept of making concepts has a more complex pattern than the usual one which seems to lose the functions of implicit intricacy.
Let me further use these thought-ways to set up a cluster of five concepts that have already emerged:
12. Five concepts:
a) Implying:
We said that the ..... implies the next line. And what we said can also (differently) imply what we say next when it comes smoothly (without a ..... ). We let these ways of implying be themselves. We let this implicit functioning define our concept of “implying” — together with the pattern of a saying and a next saying.
b) Carrying forward:
When the line has come, the poet says: “This is the line that was implied all along.” But what can it mean to say that? The vague demanding blank did not contain the words. How was it the implying of those words? There is no commonality between the fuzzy blank and the later line. We cannot even say “The line is like the blank.” A likeness is some similar pattern. We cannot say: “See, this pattern in the blank is the same as in that new set of words.” There can be no question of a “congruence” as between two forms, since the implying is not a form but a ..... . Perhaps more than one right line is possible.
Let us make a concept of this relation between the implying and its explication; it is more complex than congruence:
To say that it “was implied” does not mean nothing. It means that this line has a special relationship to the blank. Other lines suggested themselves; they too came from (into, with, ..... ) the blank — yet it rejected them. Shall we say that they too were implied? No, the poet does not say that. But they are part of this pattern, here, which is more complex than our usual concepts. Many next steps were offered, but only a special one was implied. How did the poet know which one?
First consider a rejected line. The poet listens into it, and finds perhaps that it is quite good. But what does it do to the ..... which comes at the end of the already written lines? Ah … it is still there; it implies, demands, and rotates the poet's hand just as before, despite the suggested line. So the poet rejects that line.
Such a rejected line may have had some effect: it may have made the ..... shrivel a little, or become dimmer. Perhaps the poet had to re-read the written lines again. But, when it is back, it is the same implying as before. It still wants what it wanted before. So the suggested line is rejected for this poem, even if it is such a good line that the poet writes it down to save it. And so it goes with one suggested line after another.
Which line is accepted? It is one that does not leave the ..... still hanging and wanting as before. After this line the ..... never goes back to hand-rotating. This line has changed the ..... but not into something else. Can there be a change that is not into something else? Is it a contradiction: the same and not the same? No, rather it is a more complex pattern. Let us set that pattern out:
After the special line has come, the ..... no longer implies as before, but not because it has gotten dim or different. Rather, the ..... no longer implies as before because what it implied has happened. The ..... was carried forward by this line.
The poet can still remember the hand-rotating of the ..... but now it is only a memory. After every other suggested line that hand-rotating returned. Now it never will again.
Let us not be afraid of the complexity of this pattern, nor by the fact that implicit functions are involved. Let us permit it to be a concept:
Implying implies something that will change the implying — not into something else — but changes it in that special way in which it then no longer implies as before because what was implied has occurred; the implying has been carried forward.
c) The implicit work of forms can change them:
Forms and patterns do not work alone, even in pure logic. In application they work-in more (the slot, the situation, ..... ). But forms are always at work, at least implicitly.
In our instance the poet's ..... comes at the end of the already written lines. So the forms of these lines are at work in it. How do existing forms work implicitly?
We see that here. When the next line comes, it usually forces a revision in the already written lines. The already formed lines were at work in the implying of — a change in themselves.
Forms can work without putting themselves on what is implied. They can work implicitly without making what follows consistent with themselves. Instead, their implicit work can change them.
Indeed, we can say of all formed things in advance, that they imply more than can be consistent with their seeming form or definition.
The word “form” has changed in working here. Notice, please, that this change in the forms cannot be credited just to the forms in their old meaning in which they were assumed to work alone! In their old meaning the forms could only force consistency, or break and leave us in limbo.
When forms work implicitly they do not work alone, and that is why they can work so as to change in the process of working. Surely we want to think about that way forms can work, that pattern here — which involves more than the pattern. Let us let that more complex one be a concept: Forms can change in their very working.
d) Implicit novelty:
In ordinary use the phrase “it was implied” can work in many ways. It can say “The person was too polite to mention it directly.” It might mean: “I had a feeling, but I ignored it,” or, quite differently, “I didn't know, but I should have known.” There is a gamut of kinds of “was implied.” A whole fan of distinctions opens here.
What we have once thought explicitly can become implicit when we stop thinking about it. Much previous thought is also implicit; it has been built into our situations and our lives although we have never thought it explicitly ourselves. But in our instance (of a poet), what was implicit can be new to the world. Let it stand that something quite new can have been implicit. Let it be a new concept (which was implicit in our instance.)
e) Two pasts:
Implying can imply something new of which we then say that it was implied. That is not wrong; rather this temporal relation works backwards into time in a way that it does not work forwards.
The ..... did not contain the line. Now, from the arrived line backwards, the blank was the implying of that line. But it is not an error. The poet remembers the hand-rotating. It is not a confusion of memory.
The usual time-model is reversible: It assumes that the past from now is only what the future was, from then. That assumption in the usual time-model is not just about time; it limits how we think about human events. If we now say that a past event “was” more and different than it seemed, we seem forced to believe that it must have then been as is now revealed. As if everything, were already finished, as if nothing ever really happens!
Instead, let us take the more complex time-pattern we have found: There are two pasts, two ways the word “was” can work: One is the retroactive past, made from the carrying-forward occurrence of what was implied. The other is the remembered past behind us on the linear track.
Certainly, sometimes we do confuse these two. And, that is just because they are not the same. We might remember wrongly, but to carry forward is not to remember wrongly.
The Soviet Encyclopedia lies: what it says was, was not. But, by lying it now shows what the Soviet Revolution really was. There are two pasts: An event can be remembered as it was. But a human event is always also how it implies further events. Since it does not contain these as finished events, it requires them to happen before it becomes what (we then truly say) it was. Therefore explicating makes two pasts, both truly.
But can all later events be said to show what the past was? Of course there are many later turns and changes that were not implied by the event. To think about those that were implied we need to think the special relation of the poet's line by which an implying is carried forward.
As we go further, this dual time-pattern will work and expand. Let this more featured time-pattern stand in its own right. Let it be a concept.
These concepts did not need to be five. Some of the phrases that told about them can be set up as additional concepts. Or, some can be merged since all of them are implicit in each. That is because the definition of each depends on the instance of how the ..... implies, and they were all implicit in that. When we use one of these concepts, the others are implicitly at work in it as well.
Each of these concepts brings that implying, and is about how it functions. The patterns and the implicit intricacy will continue to function as we use these concepts to go further.
We can think of anything as an implicit intricacy — no matter how distinctly formed we might also find it. Many steps of explicating may have happened, but in further thinking it can bring a ..... that implies more.
Of course no may come; we may just be confused. But if a ..... does come, it implies a further step which will carry the implying forward. In such steps the forms we know can be at work so as to change. Later, when the further step has come, we say that something new was implicit. But this was in the retroactive past, not the remembered past in linear time.
I just used our five concepts a) - e) from chapter 3. They are a cluster: We can think them as “carrying forward” what was implied which could be new and change the forms. Later I will expand the cluster with concepts f) - n).
Since more intricate further steps can come, it is wise to think and treat anything — in advance — not just as it is now formed, but also as an implicit intricacy capable of such steps. But intricacy functions variously in different fields. How can we make all these generalizations? The same sentence says something different in different fields. So the sentences do not assert a common form across these fields. Later I will show what these sentences say in poetry and in psychotherapy. I will show how such seemingly general sentences do work — by a cross-applying that is more intricate than commonalities. Therapy is certainly special in how it opens implicit intricacy, but so is every other field and thing.
Before I turn to therapy let me show implicit intricacy where it might seem least likely:
1. Photographic realism:
Watson (1987), a philosopher and a photographer, makes pictures with an unclassifiable intricate texture. He works to show people this intricacy. There it is, before you — photographed! How can you not believe it? Easily — by not seeing it. He complains:
I should not be distressed, when visually sophisticated people look at my work and ask “What is it?” … I am distressed when those who can see don't see because aesthetic theory blocks their vision.… It tells us what can be, what can't be, and what must be. It tells us this by studying dead things, things that have lost their power to transform.… The living are (taken as) simply cases of what is, what can be, or what must be; that is, the living is an instantiation of theological structure of the world.
Like some other current philosophers, he rejects the notion of a world as given, out there, as objects. But for him this rejection does not lead merely to contradicting forms or a gap. Rather, he pleads: Please look!
No gap! Rather: intricacy. In Watson's words, the intricacy is “alive” because “it can transform” — and in his textured pictures it does that right in front of you, if you look and let it happen.
As it moves, you see: the forms are not just given; they form from intricacy, dissolve into it, and reform from it. Intricacy is not these or those forms. It is not a gap between forms. Intricacy is alive.
2. Stories from psychotherapy: The bodily ..... :
In my therapy class we work on ourselves without saying anything about just what personal difficulty we are working on. In this example I listened to a student. Bit by bit, I said back only the crux of what she said, in order to show that I closely followed. I wrote this example down after class.
She said: “If I even try to think about it for a moment, right away I get overwhelmed. It is too sore to touch at all.” I responded and then she was silent.
..... (silence)
“But if I say, ‘well, wait,’ uhm; I've waited all my life. I've done so much waiting! If I tell myself to wait, I get depressed right away.
(Breath) “I just can't say ‘wait’ to myself any more.” I responded to show that I followed.
..... (silence)
“There's no place to stand. I can't wait and I can't touch it either. I'm so tense! It's very uncomfortable. I'm all anxious and tense. It's, uhm, there's nowhere to be with it. I, uh.”
I said back only what she said, but I did it very slowly, so that she would have my company in this place of “no place to stand.” That can help one to stay, and then a step can come.
I said something like: “Right here you have no place to stand. It's too sore to touch, but if you think of leaving it, you get depressed. You can't go in and you can't not, either.”
..... (long silence)
Then a between-place came: (breath) “I, uhm, I think I can, uhm, be with it like putting both hands around a rope, not touching the rope, just letting my hands surround it without touching it.”
(silence)
“Yes, (breath) I feel some easing. I can be with the problem this way. I don't have to stay away from it any more. It's right there; I am not avoiding it: I am with it (breath), surrounding it; that way it feels OK.”
In therapy it is often a major matter whether or not one senses a problem directly in a bodily way. Of course one knows about a problem; one can think about it. But therapy requires paying attention to the unclear sensation of the problem in the middle of one's body. Most people must first learn this direct bodily sensing, before therapy can progress.
Notice that there is a very distinct space in which one moves toward or away from the direct sensing a problem. One may touch it or not. It is not just an image space, but a far-near dimension of the bodily sense of that problem.
Next, notice that even if one is familiar with this bodily sensing, it is not always possible. In this example touching it is too sore.
We have learned that a little-known middle spot which is not at first there, can come; from it one can bear to sense what could be overwhelming.
Notice that a step can come where at first there is no way. That step came from the..... .
The step — “surrounding it without touching it” is not a commonly known meaning or phrase. Everyone understands that something can be too urgent to avoid and yet also too tough or too sore to face. But suddenly there came an alternative which is not a common way, not a common meaning. In this meaning the phrase is not in our common store of meanings. If someone says I can't wait and I can't work on it either, we cannot just say: “Well, surround it.” She did not know this meaning before it came.
The step is more intricate than the common meanings. Holding one's hands around something without touching it is more intricate than touching. It is also spatially more than just toward or away; it is all around. It also includes a carefulness — as close as possible but without touching.
It is a metaphor from holding — or rather, from not holding — a rope in a gymnasium. If the rope is held too tightly one burns one's hands as one slides. Right now it is too hot to hold at all, but one can speculate that the metaphor promises getting safely to the ground eventually, with just the right balance between looseness and tightness.
Actually it is much more than a metaphor. It is also a physical way of sensing and relating to something that is still too sore to bear. It is a step of bodily carrying forward, a new energy, a new way of being and living further where before there was no way.
Such a step leads to many more steps from the next ..... and the next.
3. Another example: Bits of change in therapy:
In philosophy it is sometimes claimed that an explication did not change what it explicated. Or one wishes that it didn't. In psychotherapy it is the opposite: Since the patient comes in order to change, few therapists are sorry that explication changes — carries forward — what it explicates. Steps come and also bring a new ..... , even when the therapist adds nothing, only says back exactly what the patient said — the crux of what the patient wanted to convey.
Now let me give an example from another person from the middle of therapy. Notice again the role of the silent ..... between each step and the next:
C: I want to leave Chicago. The noise outside bothers me.
T is silent.
C: You don't think that's real. I can tell.
T: The noise is crowding in on you, coming into your far-in place.
C: It's like darts hitting my body. I can't stand it.
T: It really hurts!
C: (silence) ..... I keep feeling a sense of no meaning in my life.
C: (silence) ..... I just want to leave everything. It's that same spot where I want to die. My wanting to live and to die are so close, these days. That's why I haven't been able to touch this place. It gets misty there, still. It's real foggy.
T: You can feel wanting to live and, also, wanting to die, both right there, in the same inside spot, and that spot gets foggy, too.
C: (silence) ..... I don't want to relate with anyone. I wish there were no people to see [at her work place]. They don't mean anything to me. There is no meaning. When will my life ever have meaning? It feels like it never will. And I need meaning, right now.
C: (silence) ..... I also feel hesitant about relating to you. I know you're there for me, but it's like I'm not allowed to want that.
T: Is that, what you said before, about your father?
C: (silence) ..... No, uhm. But I am glad you said that about my father, because, uhm, I can feel that this is not with him. This is different. It's not like with my father.
T: It is not about him.
C: (silence) ..... uhm, I can hardly touch it. It's — I can't want my mother. I, I can hardly say it.
T: You can't want — her.
C: (silence) ..... That is where I feel the noises like darts.
C: (silence) ..... It's real early, real early.
T: It feels like a very, very early experience.
C: (silence) ..... I can't want — anything.
C: (silence) ..... This needs to rest, and it can't. If it lets down and rests it will die. It needs to keep up its guard.
T: There is such a big need and longing, to rest, to let down, to ease, but somehow also, this part of you can't rest. It feels that it will die if it stops being on guard.
C: (silence) ..... What comes is: maybe it could — if I could trust something.
T: It could rest, if you could trust something.
C: No, no: Maybe it could rest, if I could trust something.
T: It's important to say “maybe.” Maybe it could rest, if you could trust something.
C: (silence) ..... Now, suddenly, it feels like a house on stilts that go into the earth. All of me on top, where the noise is, that's a house and it's on stilts. It got lifted off of this sore place. Now the sore place is like a layer, and it can breathe. Do you know those steel posts they put into the ground, to hold up a building? [T: Uhuh] These stilts are like that. All the noise and coming and going is in the house, and the house is on stilts, lifted off, and the stilts go into the ground.
T: Those steel stilts go into the ground. You feel them lifting the whole house up, off of you. And underneath, that sore place can breathe.
C: (silence) ..... Yes, (breath), now it's breathing.
C: (silence) ..... It's bathing in warm water.
Notice that the stilts were not just an image; along with the image a new bodily state came, a new physical way of being, described as “now it's breathing,” and “it's bathing in warm water.”
Later, she said:
C: When I was little I played a lot with stilts. I used to go between the power wires on them. It was dangerous, but it was play! I used to make taller and taller ones, and go on them there. Stilts! I haven't thought of those for years. Play, and danger. How does this process do that? It uses all these things to make something that wasn't there before.
1) How the past functions in new steps:
Note that the intricate new steps come each time from the silent ..... which precedes each step. Such steps are not imposed by the therapist, nor do they already exist in the patient. They are not the common social forms. Steps of this sort occur in all types of psychotherapy if feedback from the patient's bodily sense is looked for.
The steps can include much from the past. Here the problem with mother, and the play with stilts in the danger zone are from the past. But notice: the past doesn't merely repeat; it functions in new steps. What made her play with dying when she was a child is surely present here. But the past is not only what it was. It also functions in the present, and in that functioning its form can change. The wanting which was then blocked and stopped, is now carried forward in a new present which carries forward the implicit intricacy which the past also was (our second sense of “was”).
2) The truth and value direction is carried forward within the process:
A step is not determined just by external values brought to it: For example, is it good to give relief to this part of herself? I say yes, but such a step can come also when one's stated value would lead one to call it a weakness that should not be coddled. Yet the values one brings to it are not just lost. The step would intricately show how it is not coddling.
What about value-questions concerning suicide? The values are not brought from outside to such a step. Rather, internal to the step everything is far more intricate than any either/or, and more intricate than the way in which values are thought about.
For example, is it good to be off the ground? Perhaps we value being on the ground more and would want her to feel herself directly on the ground. But the step that comes with such good new bodily energy lifts “her house” up on stilts, and yet these go deep into the ground. That might conflict with formed and stated values, but it is more intricate.
How does such a step affect oppressive social values? A week later she still had the breathing-space under the house on stilts. She felt peaceful and strong even in planning a meeting with her boss. “The boss can talk to my house,” she said, laughing.
If one thinks of values only as independent external criteria, then of course one finds only relativism. One longs for, and fails to find the impossible simplicity of separate values that can be brought in to solve all problems at once. When we notice how values actually arise within a process of steps, it does not solve all value-questions. But it does change how the remaining questions have to be posed. For example, in exactly what ways can we rely on the values within such a step? Now what “rely” means is not single. We pursue many senses of “rely” for which the answers differ. A fan of distinctions — and answers that open further investigations: Can we rely, instead of having to choose and insist on the values we bring? No. The does not come unless we let it come from, with, and by staying true to our insistences. Then it can intricately change them. Can we rely on just this step's values? No. Some others can emerge in further steps. This client much later went through a long and very touchy process which she called “coming down to the ground.” Can we rely on the steps not to change truth and value arbitrarily? Yes. They have an experiential continuity (very different from Hegel's “aufheben”). I will show it later.
3) Intricacy:
But notice: She is not just floating. These stilts are not just off the ground. They are like steel girders that go far into the ground. As in the earlier examples, the step is more intricate than either on or off the ground.
4. One more story from psychotherapy: Tracing the progression of steps:
In my next example a client talks about a man she has been seeing for several years. He wants to marry her. Here is her initial statement:
I've been holding him off. But he is really very special, and nobody's perfect. I'm impossibly demanding. It confuses me .....
Here she says that she is confused. But if it remained just confusion, the next step would not come. Rather a ..... comes and implies a next step. Such a step often makes a great change in what the topic seems to be.
We all know this topic: “nobody's perfect.” One should not wait for a perfect mate. That is “too demanding.” I have sat with patients for a lot of therapy hours on the issue, round and round. A long and circular discussion could have arisen at this point.
Instead, when therapy is going well, the progression is different. From the ..... she does not move as she would from following the topic. Instead, she moves from the phrase “it confuses me,” or more exactly, she moves from the ..... which came there:
Look at the progression in her first two statements:
I've been holding him off. But he is really very special, and nobody's perfect. I'm impossibly demanding. It confuses me. .....
(silence) ..... He says be cares about me, and I know he does, but I also doubt it. Uhm .....
The ..... produced a step that changed the whole topic. Now it turns out the trouble isn't demanding a perfect mate. No, it's rather that she isn't sure he really cares for her. The step changes what had seemed to be the problem. And, that happens again and again, as she goes on — with a continuity given not by the topic, but by each new ..... :
Here is the whole segment (my responses are left out):
I've been holding him off. But he is really very special, and nobody's perfect. I'm impossibly demanding. It confuses me. .....
(silence) ..... He says he cares about me, and I know he does, but I also doubt it. Uhm .....
(silence) ..... (sigh) No, he cares. I don't doubt that. I see it in his eyes. When I pull back even a little, he looks so hurt. It's me, I have trouble letting someone care about me .....
(silence) ..... (sigh) It's not the caring that gives me trouble. It's that when someone cares for me, that is when I get this confusing feeling .....
(silence) ..... He says he cares about me and what I need. And he wants us to be together. But it seems like he doesn't want to see what's true, what isn't working in our relationship. And it is mostly this not wanting to see, which is what's not working. But if he doesn't care about that, then it seems like he doesn't really care about me-me. It's like he wants me, but only if I'm quiet and feel weird, like not-me. So he doesn't care about whether our connection is real or not. But it makes me feel crazy. Does it sound crazy to you?
At the end I asked her: “Would it feel better if he said those things separately, something like: ‘I want you for me. I try to care about what's good for you, and I want to think I do. I'm scared of seeing anything about us, or about myself, that would get in the way’?”
Yes, it would feel better if he said that.
We can follow the progression of these steps although they do not follow logically. The steps surprise us, yet we see how each could follow from the previous. I will say more of this kind of following.
Now, as a different