REFERENCES
"But in the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity, so
remote from ourselves, there shines the eternal and never failing light of
a truth beyond all question: that the world of civil society has
certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be
found within the modifications of our own human mind."
(Vico, 1744/1948: #331)
"Sithen I recouered was, haue I ful ofte
Cause had of anger and inpacience,
Where I borne haue it esily and softe,
Suffringe wronge be done to me and offence,
And not answerid a[gh]en but kepte scilence,
Leste [th]at men of me deme wolde and sein,
'Se howe this man is fallen in a[gh]ein.'"
(Hoccleve, ca. 1420/1981: 81)
Introduction
In his article Making sense on the boundaries: on moving
between philosophy and psychotherapy, Shotter (1994) interprets
three clinical examples from the perspective of Wittgenstein's
thinking about language and grammar. He articulates very crisply
the figure of `psychotherapy' as a reshaping of conversation. I
want to extend his perspective on 'making sense on the
boundaries' to the ground or social context of 'psychotherapy'.
How does philosophy connect to 'boundary' in this wider scope?
REFERENCES
Formation of society by social conditioning
Our commonplace has that some external circumstance, be it
'nature' or 'nurture', is the origin of social phenomena, and the
pursuit of specialists in attending to such matters. Shotter
(1994: 55-56) characterizes this thematic approach thus: The
'way of thinking about human activities in terms of practitioners
putting theories of professional experts into practice' is
entirely inadequate. Rather, people are 'involved' in what they
do. "The world of civil society has certainly been made by men,"
and this obvious truth governs how we know things. Shotter
(1993) describes a 'knowing of the third kind', or knowledge from
direct involvement such as is appropriate for people
understanding civil society given that people in fact made it.
Here I'm going to discuss some of the complexity of
involvement as a process and will extend the implications of
'knowing from being involved', as I would put it. I "cannot avoid
some working decision about the various phenomena intended by the
term 'rationality'," as Garfinkel (1967) has it. This
'rationality' will have to illuminate the immanent experience of
knowing. And part of what involvement entails is that sometimes
we get terribly close to, or 'tangled up in' this immanent
experience.
Vico's metaphor of Jove brings us to the immediate
experience of originary social conditioning. "When at last the
sky fearfully rolled with thunder and flashed with lightning .. a
few giants .. frightened and astonished by the great effect whose
cause they did not know .. raised their eyes and became aware of
the sky .. and because .. their nature was that of men all robust
bodily strength, who expressed their very violent passions by
shouting and grumbling, they pictured the sky to themselves as a
great animated body, which in that aspect they called Jove."
(Vico, 1744/1948: #377) The mind-boggling experience of pairing
the lightning bolt and the 'Jovian sky' shapes language, the very
tropes of our expression, our 'social poetics' (Shotter, 1995a)
itself. Shotter (1991: 4) describes the experiencing of this
learning in the language of rhetoric, as a sensory topic. It
feels like "a sensuous totality, combining thunder with the
shared fears of the limits of one's being, along with the
recognition of the existence of similar feelings in others
because of shared bodily activities."
In order to comprehend fully the motion between philosophy
and 'psychotherapy' on the 'boundaries', we should look at the
prototypical 'boundary' situation that arises in the intense
involvement above. At the point of social conditioning itself,
how does the 'boundary' appear? Is it fair to say that the
boundary is that traumatic understanding, is that limit we are
thus conditioned to? How are we bonded to the conditioning? In
Gestalt terms, if the conditioning is figure, what about its
ground?
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The alien experiment
Suppose that an alien team, for whom that Vichian fable of
Jove is a commonplace, seeds an uninhabited planetary area with
'first people' who are sentient beings without language. These
beings happen to be insect-related sapients whose biology is to
show fear by their chittering antennae. Thus when the
thunderbolts inspire a mutual recognition of fear and situation,
it is the motion of the antennae which is the visual cue of the
emotional response. So the first difference from Vico's 'giants'
is in the cognition that accompanies the sensual experience of
'Jove'.
Now suppose that the unseen alien team adds another twist,
that after the thunderstorm, piles of chocolates are found in
special locations. Here on top of pairing 'Jovian sky' and
'lightning bolt' we tack on a pairing with 'chocolates'.
Thereupon, following Vico's model, the common sense of this
'first people' is subject to a manipulation of timing by the
alien team. In knowing social reality from involvement, they
stand to be 'blindsided' because in fact they have more than the
direct 'Jovian event', as such, to deal with. The chocolate-
covered origin of this 'first nation' is totally originary for
its people and a total artifice for the alien team.
How, in such a case, is everyday reality to be understood?
How are any arcane phenomena to be figured out? Vico (1744/1948:
#381) talks about the "theological poets, or sages who understood
the language of the gods expressed in the auspices of Jove; and
were properly called divine in the sense of diviners, from
divinari, to divine or predict. Their science was .. defined by
Homer as the knowledge of good and evil; that is, divination." In
present-day terms, we are looking at the identification of the
'ontological difference' (Grassi and Lorch, 1986). That is, there
is knowing from the 'calculus of beings' to explain the sensory
topics (egoism) or there is direct connection to the Being of the
situation (vision). Do you 'see' past the originary social
conditioning, or are you its devotee? And what do you do about
those piles of chocolates?
Thus, if the Jovian fable is metaphor for the origin of a
social institution, then we must allow that there is a level in
it where desultory aspects of the figure of the conditioning
situation, such as the chittering antennae, not just the
lightning bolt, becomes part of the originary material. If the
possibility of artifice is also considered, then the way we are
involved itself becomes problematical. As a crude approximation,
the Aztec culture of human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism is so
remote from us as to seem an alien design (Jennings, 1982). In
fact, however, each social institution arises from a specific,
unique context apart from itself. The task becomes that of
divining in the murky circumstances aspects of the rationality
and irrationality of origin. We conclude that the knowing
experience itself has turned out to be invested with troublesome
proclivities, to be wildly out of control!
Now we look at the self in the Vichian framework. His
"first men, who spoke by signs" (Vico, 1744/1948: #379) remind us
of G.H. Mead's (1934) metaphor of the two dogs fighting. Mead has
it that the one dog sees itself, sees its self, in the way its
gestures are responded to by the other dog. Their social
condition is grasped as 'other', inasmuch as it is the ground of
the second dog's action. In the case of the alien experiment, we
must ask how it affects the `generalized other' for the 'first
men'. When they perceive the lightning bolt, they imagine Jove
and thereby impose a figure/ground construct on reality. The
sight of the chittering antennae is particular to their figure of
reality; it serves as an aspect of their 'calculus of beings'.
As we said, the kind of self that these 'first men' make
may go beyond the egoism of involvement with beings to the vision
of divining such as the mystery of the piles of chocolates. The
quality of 'generalized other' they attain varies accordingly.
The artifice of the experiment (thus, by extension, the condition
of formation of a social institution) imposes a profound
irrationality on their social condition. The kind of
'generalized other' appropriate to the visionary self is
overwhelmed by irrationality, thus perforce mad. Consequently,
the question of what we mean by 'boundary' in the context of this
experimental manipulation becomes if anything more problematical.
When the other gets tangled