Interstanding

I read the word 'interstanding' in a piece about disability and I think that the sense is that where one person cannot fully inhabit the world view of the other, where they do not share vast solid grounds of shared experience, there is great value in focusing on the relation between them: in forming a process of communication and collaboration while accepting difference; in valuing the uniquely subjective stance of the other without, to use Keats' terms on negative capability, without 'any irritable reaching after fact & reason', or, in this case, without an irritable grasping after shared or exact objectivity.

Once again, an article on Aeon synchronistically addressed something very similar. The writer, Carmen Lea Dege, is currently writing a book about uncertainty. Her piece was about Karl Jaspers, who sounds fascinating. I have come across his name a few times before and felt a certain resonance with the ideas quoted. This article doesn't, for me, completely satisfy, but I found it interesting - especially in the light of what we are considering here.

First of all, I like the way that he emphasises connection - as does Beauvoir when talking of the other. Dege writes:

[Jaspers] repeatedly insisted that ‘I do not accomplish my freedom. I did not make myself. I do not exist by my own means.’ Rather, I depend on the freedom of others and the complex makings of a fragile world. Only because our lives are contingent and vulnerable can we experience love, freedom and purpose as something meaningful. The attempt to prove love or catch the ephemeral presence of beauty would likely take away the experience. [...] While order and stability are necessary for human existence, they alone would turn us into machine-like puppets. What we come to understand in moments of happiness, loss and tragedy is that we cannot possess meaning, we cannot own who we authentically are or determine our identity. Uncertainty was not something to overcome for Jaspers. He rather considered it the ground of ideas such as freedom, truth and justice that can be defined only negatively, through what they are not, or not yet.

Jaspers was adamant that science cannot create values and that everything we see is seen through the lens of our values. Thus he said that truth is relative. I don't think we have here the 'slippery slope' of relativism as it's often understood. I don't think he's saying, because Mayans thought human sacrifice was a good thing, it thus was a good thing for them. I think that he's saying that we have to appreciate why they thought that if we are to be able to have any communication with them. Of course, we can't. Not with the Mayans. But, the point is that we have to be able to look across the space that divides us and see that there was something that mattered to them (in their case, I think it was about appeasing the gods). We see then that perhaps the Mayans were seeking to find a solution for uncertainty. We stand on completely different ground in terms of our values and beliefs - but we see through this how the desire to control what cannot be controlled, to make certain what is inherently uncertain, takes the Mayans to sacrifice and us to scientism, fundamentalism, polarisation and libertarianism.

The message from Jaspers, it seems, is the demand to accept what cannot be known and to try to communicate across the divide, to allow others, instead of trying to control the uncontrollable, to relax into a state where non-knowledge, where non-control, is less terrifyingly damaging.

Although I think that I have maybe misinterpreted, there is something in this which seems important to me. Life is not in our control. Knowledge is not absolute. So much is dependent on and circumscribed by where we are and what we can see from that perspective.

Sometimes - often - we can't know how another person is feeling. Maybe we never can. (This relates to my frustrations in sharing my deepest worries and fears, as I expressed here.) It may be that the other is basing some of their responses on false premises, of course, but often a fact of the world can be experienced very differently by two people*. From my vantage point, there is a cliff. You, on the other side of this upland, see a gentle rise. We are both right, from where we are. And from where I am, your assurances that getting to the top will be easy are self-evidently false for me. But, of course, how can you know that, as you seek to encourage me, telling me that of course I am fit enough and brave enough to make the climb?

Often the assumption seems to be - and it is not a bad one - that we are more alike than we are different, that we share more attributes and values than we disagree upon. This is sensible and practical: it allows the assumption that we can all communicate and collaborate, come to some understanding. Another assumption may be that there is one objectively correct perspective, and if only we can be rational enough, we can find it. But I wonder how much of this is optimistic rather than realistic? And if if either are the case, it may be that attempting to start a process from such a place inhibits the chances of reaching the same destination.

Take the mountain. There is one mountain. You know that it is possible to scale it. You know the objective fact of the matter. But if you are to persuade me, you have to encourage me to join you where you are at the bottom of that gentle rise, not try to force me to scale the cliff from where I am. This means that you have to know that my perspective is utterly different, not wrong, but lacking something that you know about which I cannot know from where I am.

If forces prevent me, however, from getting to where you are - say social injustice, early life deprivation, cognitive limitations, whatever - then even if I come to accept that it is possible to climb from where you are, such an opportunity is denied to me. Whatever you say. So even if the mountain is objectively able to be climbed, it might yet remain the case that I cannot do it.

In the article that I referred to yesterday and the David Heyd paper that the writer, Corina Stan, linked to, there was another aspect of tact that struck me as interesting. Heyd says that tact can’t be a matter of silence or silencing – it’s not strictly the avoidance of awkwardness. Certainly, there is a turning away from what’s too raw, but there’s also a gentle turning toward what might need to be said. The tactful person creates an opening that encourages the other, or rather, perhaps, that permits the other, to be vulnerable. We often consider tact to be a closing, but it might instead offer crucial openings. At the right time, in the right place - using its own phronesis.

This seems to be developed in what Stan reports about Roland Barthes and Theodore Adorno. The latter claims that denying the ‘strangeness’ of the other amounts to a ‘supreme wrong’. The other’s strangeness is everything that is hidden in them, everything that is theirs alone, their subjectivity and interiority. We can’t just ignore it, push it aside and silence it – and yet we can’t share it or ‘understand’ it. Thus comes the concept of a kind of distance – a place where we let the other be. If they are not forced into disclosure, they might be granted the safe space in which to allow themselves to disclose.

In this vein, Adorno criticises the concept of intimacy – as it can seek to smother or overshadow, subsume or dominate. Merging doesn’t valorise the differences that confer upon us our individuality.

It’s worth mentioning here that Julian Baggini suggests that the use of the word ‘intimacy’ in Tom Kasulis’s conception of the cultures of intimacy and integrity is ‘unfortunate’, and, taking on board what Adorno is saying here, I think he’s right. Kasulis is not advocating or intending to express any kind of homogeneity: he’s praising relatedness and connection, a feeling of the other mattering, not the other being absorbed in any sense.

As for Barthes, he suggests ‘a conjoining of distances’. We don’t smooth out so much that we promote a sort of flattened out human universality, buying connection at the cost of uniqueness. Instead, to approach the other without invalidating their subjectivity, he seems to suggest at a kind of self-removal. Precisely what Murdoch mentioned: unselfing. (Funnily enough, I called the post in which I reflected on this 'Creating space'.) We create space for the other by putting our presumptions in abeyance; we let them be themselves without trying to force understanding. This seems to me to be a way of, well, understanding what interstanding might be.

The space of interstanding is the intimate distance between us where our differences are at play. It’s where tolerance and communication is not shaped by the dominance of one perspective.

In a wood the other day, I saw an oak tree that must have been a sapling when the fir tree next to it too was but a willowy breath of pine. In the intervening years the fir shot up, straight, strong, huge, dominating the space and the soil and the sunlight. The oak, at a height of about a metre, veered off at about ninety degrees and then rose, its branches reaching around the fir’s huge trunk, balancing itself by the weight of branches bearing back against its direction of growth. The fir was like some dogmatic, self-interested being, looking out for itself. The oak adjusted, accepted, tolerated and found if not mutual interstanding a way to stand inter alia.

NOTES

*This reminds me of that complicated post on ontology.