INTRODUCTION -

 THE DYNAMIC BACKGROUND: ITS CHIASMIC STRUCTURE

 "You really could call it [i.e., a work of art], not exactly the expression of a feeling, but at least the expression of feeling, or felt expression. And you could say too that in so far as people understand it, they resonate in harmony with it, respond to it. You might say: the work of art does not aim to convey something else, just itself” (Wittgenstein, 1980, p.58).

 “Understanding a sentence is much more akin to understanding a theme in music than one might think” (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.527).

 “I begin to understand a philosophy by feeling my way into its existential manner, by reproducing the tone and accent of the philosopher. In fact, every language conveys its own teaching and carries its meaning into the listener’s mind... There is thus, either in the man who listens or reads, or in the one who speaks or writes, a thought in speech the existence of which is unsuspected by intellectualism” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p.179).

 In what follows below, I want to explore how we can, from rare, unrepeatable, unique, fleeting, and utterly particular experiences, learn something general, something that we can carry across to other circumstances. Let me open my exploration by introducing six themes: As was perhaps already apparent in the Preface to this book, a central theme running through the whole of the work contained in it, is to do with how we might come to know a unique other or otherness as unique, as who or what they are in themselves. How can we “enter into’ their world in a way which acknowledges and respects their otherness, and allows them to express themselves to us in their terms? Or, to put it another way: How is it possible for a person (or a company, a situation, or whatever) to express their own unique individuality within a language made up, seemingly, of only a limited number of repeatable forms... or, for a work of art, to teach us a new way of looking at, or listening to, the world around us, a new way or style of looking or listening, a new sensibility?

This question is connected with another, a second theme, to do with how we might understand change: We are very used to talking of change as something that can be explained in terms of principles, rules, or conventions, of changes taking place within a reality already well-known to us, with what we might call ordinary changes. Here, however, I want to talk about surprising changes, changes that happen unexpectedly, changes that strike us with amazement or wonder, extraordinary changes, changes in the very character of what we take our reality to be – changes that Bakhtin (1993) calls “once-occurrent events of being.” In short, instead of changes of a quantitative and repeatable kind, I want to talk about first-time, unique, irreversible changes, novelties, changes of a qualitative kind.