The Conversation

Truth, understanding, meaning and loneliness

There are a few themes that will pop up here from time to time, foundational ideas that act as attractors for my chaotic thoughts. Or maybe coat hooks, securely fastened somewhere, for me to hang ideas on and know where to look for them later. Or if you like, given the name of this blog, categories for me to put them in, names that I can call them, to help me think about them and how they relate to each other.

I plan on writing one or more posts explicitly about each idea, in addition to weaving them in to other articles, and today I’ll touch on one: the role of the conversation as a creator of meaning and understanding, and its central place in the human condition.

While the idea of a dialogue as the path to truth goes back millennia, it was Gadamer who elevated the conversation to be the source of truth and meaning rather than just the route to it. And in doing so, he claimed that the highest virtue was to be a good conversationalist, which implies listening as well as speaking.

The rationale for this elevation, and the logical consequences of it, have had a profound impact on the way I make sense of the world and interact with others in it.

Modernism – and the subsequent reactions to it – demolished the idea of objective truth and brought with it an often crippling angst over subjectivity, relativism, and authenticity. The rejection of traditional sources of authority and all manner of received dogma opened the door to various forms of nihilism and solipsism, and ultimately to the elevation of knowledge/power over truth. Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, the failure of Hilbert’s Program, and Turing’s answer to the Halting Problem, swirled together in the zeitgeist along with the many bizarre consequences of quantum mechanics and special relativity, calling into question the limits of what can be known or proven. Meanwhile Peirce was rejecting a theory of signs that admitted a sign and signified without an interpretant, of meaning without inquiry. In the post-modern world, the quest for truth, meaning and even purpose can feel hopeless.

I consider myself a practical philosopher, someone who thinks about philosophy as a practical guide to life, rather than an academic endeavor, and I find most philosophical works impenetrable and unhelpful, with the probability that one will obfuscate rather than elucidate rising by the decade the more recently it was written. So I’ll stop talking about history and theory, which I know little enough about anyway, and turn to my understanding of the conversation and its importance as a source of meaning and, more importantly, of hope. We are turning to my thinking now and I should warn you that it may be wrong (if we grant that that is a valid category) or not at all what others mean when they use the same words, but this is what I mean and I put it out there for your interpretation.

The conversation is the idea that the creation of meaning is an active process involving two parties – meaning does not exist in the object described or the words used to describe it, in the sign or the signified, nor even in the complete utterances of one party alone. Speaker and listener, author and reader, collaborate to make meaning out of meaninglessness, and the role of attention and interpretation on the part of the receiver is no less important than the choice of words or order on the part of the sender. And through repeated games of alternating communication, of pronouncement and interpretation – in other words, a conversation – we can achieve understanding, even if only partial and imperfect.

But the conversation, being a process, also implies that the work is never done – it brings us understanding, but it is always incomplete, always becoming but never quite being. Non understanding is ultimately unavoidable.

This conception has practical applications for how to make sense of the world, but it also has larger implications for how to live as a human being in the world.

Practically, it shows us the importance of dialogue and exchange in increasing understanding, which is applicable to nearly every endeavor. Too often, colleagues or teams or spouses don’t take the time to really discuss and interrogate each other, to chase down misunderstandings and align on meaning and intent. People assume “I said it, so they understood me” when so often that is not the case.

But beyond the obvious application to actual dialogue with others, I take the idea one step further and believe that we can put ideas in metaphorical conversation with each other, and create new meaning, new understanding from the exchange. A big part of a taxonomist’s job is to define and name a class or category of objects and decide which objects belong in the set – usually because they share one or more features – and which are excluded because they are not the same. By doing so, we essentially create a thesis and its antithesis and by placing them in conversation with each other, within a given context, we can possibly bring about a synthesis that brings new insights, new understanding, new meaning into the world. And so, I sometimes form speculative classes in my mind, draw distinctions between them, populate them with exemplars, place their members in opposition to each other, and let their very existence kick off an inquiry, an investigation, an interpretation of what that opposition might mean or imply. It’s not an exciting Saturday night, but it can be quite fruitful.

But taking a broader view of the human condition, we can learn something deeper about the conversation by returning to Gadamer and the idea of loneliness. The human condition is marked by a deep yearning for connection with other people, a desire to be seen and truly understood, along with a sometimes inconsolable pain when we fail. Gadamer acknowledges the futility of seeking complete connection, recognizing the fact that no conversation, short of an infinite one, can bring perfect understanding, and then only asymptotically. Missed connections and misunderstanding are an inescapable fact of life. An existential loneliness, a hallmark of the human condition, is a byproduct of that futility, those missed connections.

But Gadamer also argues that loneliness, in addition to being the consequence of missed connections, is also a prerequisite for connection and understanding. And more, he claims our inability to fully understand each other is what gives meaning to our individual existences, it’s what keeps us from being mere objects. The price of being an agent, an author, is the risk, or rather the certainty, of being misunderstood.

I think there’s something poetic and beautiful and tragic about the idea that the very thing that makes us unique and valuable and resistant to commodification – namely, our unbridgeable separateness and the incommensurability of our subjective experiences – is also the source of some of our deepest pain, the eradication of which is the object of our greatest longing.

And I think, perhaps, the recognition of that poetry offers us an escape from being crushed by solipsism or nihilism; it can console us in our loneliness and encourage us in our attempts at understanding.

So practice listening and speaking up, become a partner in creating meaning, aspire to the highest virtue of being a good conversationalist, and see the beauty in the struggle for understanding, even though we know it’s futile.

Because the conversation is ongoing and waiting for us to join.