[lit-ideas] Re: Socratic Congress

WO: I don't believe that one's efforts to imagine what another is feeling, living, believing is efficacious in attaining its goal, since we have little reliable access to the inner lives of others.
We attempt to describe yet never fully succeed. I do not believe -- maybe it's an aesthetic decision? -- that we can make any absolute pronouncements about what happens *between* people or *inside* them. Rather, those areas of subjectivity are supporting our facile attempts at objective understanding. We are inside of our subjectivity. We cannot measure its bounds, and probably don't fully understand what it "means" to be inside a subjectivity. To speak of efforts to know another as "not useful" or "ineffective" is to make an unreliable absolute pronouncement.
The absolute gets surprised. A classic. When someone thinks they have understood another -- aha! all men are brothers and my brother's pain is a mirror of my own -- life hurls a huge surprise. Thought you knew but didn't. Brother X reveals an unknown aspect to his or her subjectivity ... of what it's like to be X. Surprise, your brother was a stranger. Thought you knew but didn't.
Alternately, Joe Bodymind can pass through crowds convinced of the unknowable nature of other people, and soon life precipitates another huge surprise. Didn't know you knew, did you? Joe gets some hint. Joe realizes that he isn't cut off, not set completely apart from all the private universes (c.f. Andre Maurois) booming around him. Didn't know you knew, did you? 

Unwilling to discount "empathy" absolutely,
Eric
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html

Other related posts: