2.36
Trying to see how another form of living sees is fraught with difficulties. There are many dangers: removing agency; trivializing; over-glorifying; understanding or attributing the wrong things, or the right things but in the wrong way; claiming full understanding. As with any phenomenon, some aspects are shown, and some pull away.
The urge may arise to fully and authentically experience another’s way: as though one could, with or without leaving behind one’s world and metaphysics, fully immerse oneself elsewhere. This is impossible, so one smuggles one’s world into the other’s or assimilates the other, sets up foreign standards for authenticity from one’s own disclosure, and then purports to understand the other (even as the other supposedly can’t fully access one’s own world). One doesn’t notice the caricaturizing reduction of the other.
The opposite urge may arise: ‘I’m not that; I can’t possibly know what it’s like. I’ll leave it as it is, I’ll be as I am, and we shall part ways.’
This opposite urge, like the first one, is over-hasty. While it masquerades as coming from a place of respect, it reveals a different underbelly: laziness, indifference, superiority, rejection, maybe even disgust or hatred. That is, ‘I can’t possibly understand that way of being, so why bother?’ (Huntington’s clash of civilizations.[1])
Respect, while letting the other be, is intertwined with listening. Phenomena want to be heard: while sometimes they demand seclusion, often they demand attention. Phenomena continuously show themselves, showing that we haven’t got it right (we can always do better).
Here, we encounter the asymptotic limit of truth (§2.14): asymptotic because of the ongoing interplay in the call and response of things. Calls demand response but there’s no response that can address all aspects of a call.
No matter how good one thinks one is at listening, phenomena can demand a different focus. They reach out and demand listening: the fact of listening, how, and to what. There is an ethics of listening: there are better and worse ways. One learns from different ways of being.
It’s mysterious how phenomena demand attention, especially when they don’t ‘speak’ with human language (§2.20).
[1] Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?,” Foreign Affairs 72.3 (1993): p. 22–49.