The other day, I was browsing some Facebook profiles and saw a question that intrigued me. It was a question about whether or not one can truly “know” someone else. I wrote a somewhat lengthy response that got cut off for the most part due to an unannounced character limit, but as it piqued my interest, I thought I’d explore that notion in some depth, or at least on a level past a simple yes or no.
Looking at perhaps the first criterion, I would have to say “no” to that answer simply on the grounds that two people virtually cannot be together their entire lives. Thus there are pieces of history that we cannot attest to apart from hearsay evidence. To truly know others on that level, a full and complete record of their life histories are in order.
OK, so perhaps it need not go that far. After all, most of us have lots of repetitive patterns from which we rarely deviate. We usually call this a routine, where a semi-conscious order of events takes place such as when we prepare for going to work or school, prepare meals, watch television, or are getting ready for bed. This would be some kind of shortcut to the whole history paradigm. I suppose that over an extended period of time, most or all of these routines will manifest themselves.
However, I suspect that is not what is really being asked. Probably what the question seeks to know is can we understand another person’s inner being, a soul if you will. That is, can intimacy reach a point that what constitutes another person’s soul be fully realised? As to how others see it, I don’t know what point is sufficient to them, but I’ll analyse it in my own rational way.
There is really only one way that on the whole yields information about another person, and that is language. I do not limit my definition to spoken or written language, but also to more subtle forms such as body language and even the routines that someone exhibits. This is how I communicate with the world, and I suspect that holds true for everyone else.
However, language is a limited concept. If we take for example the spoken languages of the world, the concepts that one language permits expression of do not equate to those of another. Spanish is simply not English with different words, so thoughts in Spanish are different than those in English. A very good example of this can be seen in the history of the Roman Empire, where the Greek-speaking eastern half would be engaged in subtle fine points over philosophy and theology that would literally baffle the Latin-speaking western half. To a large extent, this is why there are separate churches in Europe, Catholic (plus Protestant) and Eastern Orthodox.
I postulate that within each and every one of us, we have our own unique system of internal communication. As we are not born knowing any of the world’s languages, this internal system pre-dates whatever spoken system learnt later on. True, we tend to exhibit similar body responses to external stimuli just after birth, but the body and the mind are not equal. Certainly our brains all differ simply by genetics and information constantly being imprinted upon them. It’s as if the words we speak and write and also the more complicated body signals that we take for granted are actually an auxiliary language. We use learnt languages for interpersonal communication, but our true selves retain a native, innate language of its own, unable to be understood by anyone else.
I know within myself there are many thoughts that I cannot easily put into “words”, and I probably have a larger-than-average vocabulary. I feel that anything that I say outside of the radically simple is not truly communicated, with some meaning lost in translation even before I speak it, let alone when someone else hears it. Intimacy cannot be boiled down to simple terms and concepts. We are indeed quite unknowable outside of ourselves.
Still, we somehow manage to live with one another. Perhaps not being able to fully open ourselves up to someone else actually keeps the peace. Then again, wars often start because of a failure to communicate. However, I believe that is more about a failure to listen instead of a failure to speak. Perhaps it is the relative equality of communication that is what allows for civilisation to exist and families to be formed. That’s good enough for me.
