Understanding Other Persons: a Guide for the Perplexed

nderstanding other persons is not merely a kind of accurate knowledge about the other, a concept that grasps the states of mind motivating the other’s behaviors and expressions. Rather, it is a complex phenomenon that mingles the voluntary with the involuntary, conative with nonconative postures, cognitive with pathic forms of cogito, nature with culture, meaning-effects with presence-effects—in an unstable state of tension or oscillation between the two. Genuine understanding is a dialectic situation that involves these conflicting attitudes without a synthesis, and this is one of the reasons why it remains open to a process of infinite approximation to the other whose emblem is the feeling of aloneness-togetherness, that is, the more I feel in touch with the other the more I acknowledge the distance from the other. Understanding other persons is a gesture—the commitment to cross the space that separates me from the other, the act of tending to the other, purified from its goal. Yet, unlike a Kantian or religious virtue, understanding others is not its own reward. What good do we get from this kind of “virtue”? The answer is that without an effort to understand the other, I am at risk at imploding into myself. The other is the counterweight that avoids my collapsing into myself. Understanding other persons is not an act of pure generosity, but a necessity inscribed in the fragile condition of being a human self.