From conversations to letters to treatises

The primacy of conversation can also be seen in the derivative forms in which the relation between question and answer is obscured. Letters, for example, are an interesting intermediate phenomenon: a kind of written conversation that, as it were, stretches out the movement of talking at cross purposes and seeing each other’s point. The art of writing letters consists in not letting what one says become a treatise on the subject but in making it acceptable to the correspondent. But on the other hand it also consists in preserving and fulfilling the standard of finality that everything stated in writing has.

Michael Oakeshott once recounted Chuang Tzu’s story of the Duke and the Wheelwright in a footnote to one of his essays. It was here I first learned of the parable-poem, and it’s closing lines stuck with me ever since:

The men of old took all they really knew

with them to the grave.

And so, Lord, what you are reading there

is only the dirt they left behind them.

The story, not much longer than four or five stanzas, recounts a conversation between Duke Hwan of Khi and a wheelwright working in a nearby field. The Duke is sitting under a tree reading a book on philosophy, the wheelwright slaving away, when the latter cuts in and asks, “May I ask you, Lord, what is this you are reading?” The Duke replies: “The experts, the authorities.” The wheelwright then goes on to ask whether they are dead or alive, and when the Duke replies that they are long dead, the wheelwright says in a shock of the age, “Then, you are only reading the dirt they left behind.”

This must have struck the Duke as highly offensive — who would want to be told the book they were reading was nothing more than dirt? Indeed, the Duke immediately tells the wheelwright to justify his words lest he kill him right there on the spot. “You had better give me a good explanation,” the Duke says, “or else you must die.” In the penultimate lines, the wheelwright takes a shot at this justification:

Let us look at the affair from my point of view.

When I make wheels, if I go easy they fall apart,

and if I am too rough they don’t fit.

But if I am neither too easy nor too violent

they come out right,

and the work is what I want it to be.

You cannot put this in words,

you just have to know how it is.

I cannot even tell my own son exactly how it is done,

and my own son cannot learn it from me.

Se here I am, seventy years old, still making wheels!

I think Chuang Tzu — and perhaps by extension, Oakeshott — was only half right. They were right to insist that there is a difference between, in philosophical jargon, ‘knowing that’ and ‘knowing how,’ and that the latter was far more important. The importance of “know-how” is often inversely proportional to the extent that it is thought of as second-rate knowledge. As compared to the supremacy of technique and good ole fashioned book learnin’. “Only intellectuals,” Aaron Haspel says, “confuse what they know with what they can articulate.” Know-how, in short, is something that someone knows but is unable to communicate — at least in a way that would allow the listener to then apply what is communicated in a successful way. Hence, what could the wheelwright say to his son?

In my mind, conversation is to this “know-how” what treatises are to “knowing-that.” And so taking this line of thought and the parable literally, I always felt that a conversation between, say, Richard Rorty and I or Michael Oakeshott and I, would reveal far more to me than anything they’d ever written. Listening to them intently in a conversation, noticing their mannerisms, their quirks, their movements; all would reveal something deeper, I think, then their books could ever pluck at — and their books have plucked at something pretty hard already. Or perhaps our conversation would make something of previously little emphasis a matter of great emphasis, thus changing nearly everything. As Hans Blumenberg says, “the products the readers have in their hands [i.e. books] are final versions, in which everything that could be taken as a capricious trace of subjectivity is deleted.” He notes this not as a triumph, but as a sadness. It is tempting to believe, counter-intuitive as it may be, that everything Rorty or Oakeshott had worth knowing, everything they had worth handing down to us, died with them.

I say that I think this sentiment is only half right perhaps because I’m covering for a jealousy — my resentment at the idea that I did not get the opportunity to speak to my intellectual and philosophical heroes as some did. It could just be a hopeless attempt to “get even” with those who begin their essays “Oakeshott and I had many conversations over the years…” or “Rorty and I were good friends…” These people will always have the upper hand no matter how swift, witty, and gymnastically wonderful my justifications are, or how much I try to read or fully comprehend these long-gone thinkers. At least if the wheelwright is right.

The half-truth, only somewhat recoverable, is that books and essays written are often written to no one in particular, present company included. It’s true, of course, that a certain general audience is often intended, and some writers even get the chance to see their work seep beyond intended boundaries, but the best writers are the ones that seem like they are speaking to you, the reader, directly. It’s not necessary, but it often makes up a lot of ground toward the idea that everything that is worth handing down by any given writer they took with them to the grave. We cannot help but see generalists as missing a very necessary human connection, and sometimes the want to know more, the need to prod further, is frustrated by the idea that all they ever wrote was general, and now they and everything worth actually knowing is gone for good.

Good books, then, make up some of the ground, but still not nearly enough as, say, a conversation that lasts deep into the night or personal letter whose defining purpose is to stay between the eyes of only those involved; those intended. If we never got the chance to converse deep into the night with our heroes or exchange letters with them, this may just be, as Jane Addams says, “the grief of things as they are” — a lamentable but inescapable reality. Perhaps only a sad reality for those, like myself, who think the wheelwright is more right than wrong. We can, I think, fill this gap a bit though. This gap between life as lived and life as written — not to insist on some hard and fast distinction or anything.

For some reason or another, a particular exchange between the French philosopher Jacques Bouveresse and Richard Rorty has become, in my mind, the quintessential example of writing that gets at this mystery for me. At first I thought I appreciated the exchange because of its civility, the humility and respect given by each in their turn — not to mention the genuine and pleasantly small (as opposed to sycophantic and sweeping) praise each offered to one another. Bouveresse isn’t flamboyant or agitated in his essay — after all, the exchange is found in the volume Rorty and His Critics, so one could expect most contributors to be agitated — but surprisingly guarded. He takes the character of someone who is constantly hedging his own thoughts, coming across as if he too, perhaps, should ruminate on the question he is asking of Rorty a bit longer as well.

And Rorty’s response is typical: calm, collected, and civil; dismissive of certain questions he finds uninteresting but not in a bombastic, condescending — that is to say, Trumpian — way. The whole tone of the exchange is one of a conversation between two friends, addressing what comes up, sometimes in a drawn out and rigorous manner, and sometimes in a dismissive one, no one the worse for either approach, and no one, I can only imagine, takes it to heart. A conversation, Oakeshott tells us, “lies in the acceptance of the convention that talk is neither a search for ‘truth’ nor the propagation of a belief, but it to be understood as a partnership in intellectual pleasure.”

Rorty ends his reply to Bouveresse by saying,

I have rarely read a discussion of one philosopher’s work by another that is so clearly aimed at facilitating a mutual understanding, as opposed to achieving a dialectical victory.

I say this is about as close to a conversation between two friends without it actually being a physical, face-to-face conversation because, as Rorty said, its purpose is “so clearly aimed at facilitating a mutual understanding” and “intellectual pleasure” as opposed to attempting to win or show why the other person loses. But there are, indeed, wins and loses in this exchange. Points that I find myself nodding in agreement to from both writers, at different times. “We may win a point, score a hit,” Oakeshott says, “but that is incidental: nobody wins the conversation.” I’ve read the exchange multiple times, with an emphasis on multiple, and it is true: there is no discernible “winner.” This is coming from someone who understands that my sympathies inevitably lean toward Rorty in every hostile engagement — in other words, he rarely loses, and things are rarely deadlocked.

There’s little doubt that Bouveresse and Rorty came away from that exchange differently. Or, perhaps, they would at least admit to being “better off” in having had the exchange without knowing precisely why they were better off — maybe it was just a pleasant exchange, and, for Rorty at least, a pleasant surprise considering the ire and passion he’s attracted throughout his career. An ire, I might add, that is only inflamed further by Rorty’s smooth and somewhat anti-social demeanor. It’s true that pleasant exchanges are often more powerful than rigid and well-reasoned ones, yet the paradox is not to view “pleasantness” as a rhetorical tool; not to see it as merely one more dialectical method by which I can convince you of something. Conversation as rhetorical strategy is no conversation at all.

In my moments of grandeur I always find myself wishing that more of our writing took the Bouveresse-Rorty framework as its guide — goodness knows that we could stand to lose a little by way of “mainstream” journalism and stand to gain a bit more by way of intellectual exchanges hinging on mutual understanding and not, as it were, mutual exclusivity. And a mutual understanding that isn’t riddled with willy-nilly, reductive motive ascription. Rather, it is an exploration and prodding of what this person means, what they possibly could have meant when they said this, and trying one’s best to see just how their world is arranged such that they could say such a thing?

Thomas Kuhn, was right to advise that, when encountering an absurdity in someone’s writing, thinking, or thoughts, we should

ask [ourselves] how a sensible person could have written them. When [we] find an answer… when those passages make sense, then [we] may find that more central passages, ones [we] previously thought you understood, have changed their meaning.

I would add or amend this by replacing absurdity with peculiar or confusing — there’s no reason why this little Kuhnian maxim wouldn’t work in general with any aspect of someone’s thoughts, beliefs, or writings. These days, people don’t get much beyond someone else’s base, uncontroversial propositions much less their absurdities.

The Bouveresse-Rorty exchange is a searching conversation between a man who found another man’s proclamations to be peculiar if not just a bit absurd and went about addressing them in a civil, casual, and enlightening way, knowing full well that any interpretation he is bringing might not be at all the interpretation intended. It is not to say “Let me go after him,” but rather “Let me see if I’m correct in my suspicions.” Most of all, Bouveresse and Rorty address each other as if they were in the same room. Most writing these days seems to think it can afford to be flamboyant and vile because the author knows that, for the most part, they will never have to read what they wrote out loud to their intended audience much less confront a reply — it’s just put it out there, and on to the next piece. Perhaps this proposes general rule of engagement: write as if you’re going to have to someday read it to the person or persons you are addressing or — more likely in today’s world of journalism — the person or group you’re talking down to.

We may continue to think, with Tzu and Oakeshott, that most everything worth handing down by thinkers and geniuses died with them, but this is not something that ought to make us wallow. Rather it should make us move more toward the conversational end of the spectrum; the side of the spectrum that isn’t about parade or pomposity, but mutual understanding and sympathy. We should come to see life, with Oakeshott, not as an argument but a conversation. We should cease to think in terms of winners and losers, and instead view the plurality of utterances that make up our social sphere as different voices and idioms; different, if somewhat off-tune, notes in the symphony.