ABSTRACT
Everybody has to start somewhere. You have your whole future ahead of you. Perfection doesn’t happen right away.
Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (2011), 506
Murakami’s view of how the future unfolds implies a hermeneutic perspective in which to make sense of our development. We might start anywhere, but over time, with a continual questioning of the present in terms of the past, and what we glimpse of the future, we can, by going back and fore, end up getting ourselves in tune to the straight and narrow. John’s intellectual trajectory is at one pole of Murakami’s insight. On the one hand, it fits, in that John’s beginnings can be found in the mainstream (though what at its time was a radical branch) of psychology: early attempts to explore how human abilities could be characterised so as to be programmed into machines. An odd place for him to have started, perhaps. But very quickly, something appeared to be amiss with this aim, in John’s view, and he turned to a wider reading of the literature on the wider dimensions of these abilities. It is here we find the ‘on the other hand’ dimension of John’s work that puts him at the pole of Murakami’s characterisation of development: somehow, John hit pay-dirt right at the start of his quest for alternative ways of going on. This chapter is structured around this phenomenon. Right at the start of the work we are celebrating here, John found the seeds and the fertile ground in which to grow them in that first burst of wide reading. These ‘textual friends’ of his have been with him from that day to this, but not everybody knows that.
