The Double Prison

All of the practitioners and thinkers so far discussed in these pages – Benner, Dreyfus, Shotter, Wittgenstein, Boje, Bakhtin, Stacey, Mead and Elias – are for me pointing in a common direction. They are all encouraging us towards a world in which we can move beyond the distracting fantasies, idealizations and isolating tendencies of our past, to seize and take advantage of the depth and breadth of the connections between us, so that we can put our collective energies and knowledge to work for all of the various purposes that galvanize us (in Shotter’s words, so that we can “go on” together). In different ways, each of these writers helps us to recognize the great extent of our interdependency, past, present and future, in contrast to the prevailing (and greatly limiting) view of the human person as essentially self-determining and “responsible,” above all else, for their own individual lives.