Dear Harvey,

Yes, I am with you here in that I too feel the need to include myself in my 
enquiry into nature and human nature. Such self-enquiry is very much what 
Jack Whitehead's 'living educational theory' or 'living action research' is 
all about. More generally it is about including the tool or method in the 
enquiry.

One of the ideas I have been developing from inclusionality is that of 
'complex self' or 'self as neighbourhood' whereby the subtlety, complexity 
and 'context-dependence' of our behaviour can be understood in terms of a 
highly variable inner-outer dynamic mediated though dynamic boundaries.

Yes, I think there is indeed a yawning gap between 'how we think we are' 
objectively and 'how we actually are' inclusionally. Maybe our 
'aim-oriented rationality' and associated predisposition to conflict is 
predicated on the former, whilst our relational experience arises from the 
latter.

Sadly such considerations appear to be 'outside the remit' of FoW, however.


Best


Alan






--On 18 October 2006 15:42 -0500 Harvey Sarles <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Alan,
> I think we are close-r. My primary point about "man the measurer,"
> includes the notion that we have to be engaged in observing the world -
> not just infer from other's thoughts and experience. But I also include
> the study of "myself" - this being which has been poorly explored in the
> actuality and history of thought.
>
> I am not only (an engaged) observer, but I am very active in the
> observations, in the doing which "objective" observation necessitates - I
> think it/we are much more complicated and different from how we been
> described.
>
> My (only?) question, has to do with whether our ideas about others and
> the world, might have been derived to whatever extent from "how we think
> we are" more than how we "actually are." Maybe not, but...?
>
>
> A quote from John Dewey which might express this better than I:
>
> “No one would deny that we ourselves enter as an agency into whatever is
> attempted and done by us. That is a truism. But the hardest thing to
> attend to is that which is closest to ourselves, that which is most
> constant and familiar. And this closest ‘something’ is, precisely,
> ourselves, our own habits and ways of doing things as agencies in
> conditioning what is tried or done by us...the one factor which is the
> primary tool in the use of all these other tools, namely ourselves, in
> other words, our own psycho-physical disposition, as the basic condition
> of our employment of all agencies and energies, has not even been studied
> as the central instrumentality.” (Dewey, John, “Introduction” in
> Alexander, Frederick Matthias, Constructing Conscious Control of the
> Individual, New York. E.P. Dutton, 1923. xxxii)arvey  On Oct 18, 2006, at
> 2:30 AM, A.D.M.Rayner wrote:
> Harvey
> Dear Harvey,
>
>