Systems thinker Tom Andersen, in being “a wanderer and worrier” (as he put it), was constantly reflecting on his own practice, on his way of ‘going on’, to further develop and refine it. Each new way came to him, he said, on reaching a ‘crossroads’, a point when he felt unable to continue any longer in the same way. But once he stopped doing what he had come to see as ethically wrong, he found, he said, that the “alternatives popped up almost by themselves”.
It is what the nature of that imaginative judgmental work feels like, looks like, and sounds like that Shotter discuss in this talk.
http://pubpages.unh.edu/~jds/
I came across Shotter while doing my MA (in Participation, Power and Social Change) and it shifted me totally into thinking of the universe as a fundamentally participatory in nature… No longer just a question of whether we participate or not (in specific processes, projects, etc.) but how we participate in existence in general… Thanks for reminding me of his work… also interesting links with what Gestes Spéculatifs was exploring…
my pleasure. he’s a very generous scholar who is doing important work that should be much better known by folks in our fields of interest, here he is with Lingis, Bert Dreyfus, and others:
http://www.focusing.org/apm.htm#Online%20Papers