Dealing with Problems by Ignoring Them—Part IV
There is No Such Thing as the Situation
Introduction
Problems are headaches, but having a problem is not like having a headache. It is more like having an opinion. Situations are not givens we need to address. How we address a situation determines what the situation actually is—for now. If we want the situation to be different from what it is now, we have to address it in a very different way from the way we have been addressing it.
—Ellen and James
Dealing with Problems by Ignoring Them—Part IV: There is No Such Thing as the Situation
Problems as Provisional Assessments
The problem is changing all the time, from the first moment we start to consider it. The reason for this is simple: the problem is not a unitary given thing out there in the world, but our personal assessment of a lot of different matters.
The problem includes at least all of the following:
what it is we are trying to achieve—our desired ends;
how we have framed or construed it,
including our ever-provisional and ever-evolving inventory of what we think might be involved and
what we think it will take to reach a solution;
what we are actually doing in the effort to solve it (the “trying” part);
what happens in response to our efforts when we deploy those particular expedients;
how we read and account for their failure and assess the implications for our next move;
and much more besides.
Any given problem is, if you like, our assessment of our situation, framed in such a way that we can begin to construct a solution, which as we saw last week is the whole point of “having” a problem in the first place.
And just as problems don’t drop into our laps fully formed or come knocking at our door but are always something we choose to frame one way rather than another, so “the situation” is always, always, always a negotiable matter—up for grabs.
Situations as Proposals
For there is, after all, no such thing, objectively speaking, as ‘the situation’—it is how I happen to situate myself, in the course of acting or preparing to act.
My situation comprises my best take on what is salient in figuring out what to do and whether (and why) to do one thing (try one way) rather than another.
The “situation” is merely a proposal, explicit or implicit, to consider matters, construe matters a particular way.
But it is only one such proposal, only one single map out of a multitude of possible maps.
And the map is not the territory.
The possibilities abstracted in my one map never exhaust the possibilities potentially available. The situation may include certain givens, but is never itself a given, nor does it have to include any given set of givens.
Now we only ever have occasion to refer to “the situation” at all when we are seeking, in deliberation, to relate actions, present and planned, to the circumstances deemed relevant to the attainment of a particular desired state-of-affairs.
This is when we are fathoming means and ends, helps and hindrances, or else, after the fact, in trying to reconstruct what those deliberations might have been, as an historian or biographer or detective or Monday morning quarterback might do.
Since, again, my situation comprises my narrative selection of the considerations I take to be salient in figuring out what to do—whether, and why, to do one thing rather than another—the situation in which I act forms part of my action. “The situation” is something merely abstracted from my action as part of its context, and it (effectively) defines the respects in which my action is deemed to be deliberate, reasoned—a sensible and constructive thing to do.
Situations are decided upon, not encountered. Asking, “what’s the situation?” is more like asking “what are you planning to do today?” (perhaps at 9.00am on a Saturday before you have yet made any plans for the day) and less like asking, “who are Chelsea playing today?” as you peruse the today’s matches online.
Your telling me “the situation” can never be more than telling me what you (for now) take the situation to be, and although it is never possible to be right about your situation, or mine, or hers or ours, it is, as we shall see, all too easy to be wrong.
And so my deciding what my situation is bears less resemblance to the meteorologist’s deciding what the weather is like by deliberating over the readings on his instruments, and bears more resemblance to my deciding what the weather is like by sticking my head out of the window and then dressing accordingly and sauntering purposefully out-of-doors on an iffy day.
In deciding that “my situation is this. . .” I am implicitly, and by implication, committing myself to a certain range of courses of action.
I cannot now shrink from that commitment, on pain of being accused of self-contradiction or weakness of will, or alternatively, of having changed my mind about the nature of my situation, or else it might be assumed the circumstances have meanwhile altered.
Next week: The Art and Science of Circumventing Problems
© Copyright 2010, 2023 Dr James Wilk
The moral right of the author has been asserted