On Expectation and Understanding: Intervention and the Unknown

Abstract: I argue that a certain form of misunderstanding/non-knowledge stands at the core of the unknown, and that this necessitates a certain behavioral uptake toward something like “the sacred.”

There is an irony to the experience of when something is said, it is heard, but it is not understood: we take this either as the basis of babble, blunder, gibberish and nonsense, or we see it as the essence of profundity. I want to interrogate that category of statements which, when written by a thinker I admire/respect, though I read the words and feel the completeness of their interconnection (e.g. I recognize 1. the statement as a statement, and 2. that the statement holds meaning), I do not understand them. Yet it is here that I seem to appreciate the profundity of the statements themselves; it is here that I am willing to give them a certain “leeway”—my understanding is held in abeyance, rather than deteriorating into negative judgment or dismissal—but by what force? Do I appreciate the statement by dint of its position within the greater economy of a thinker’s corpus? Foucault on the problem of the author: that is, since I know much of what else they write and I understand it to be salient, cogent and sagacious, I expect this statement, despite its current opacity, nevertheless to retain a hidden truth of great insight.[1] Analogous to this might be the kind of ethical leeway we reserve for those we already appreciate and like, while we grant little to those we have previously written off. Or: I am struck by my relationship to certain friends, and the expectations/coordinations that emerge from my “knowability” of their character. In this light, upon hearing that one of my friends committed an act with the same character flaw he had harbored for years, I responded with: “Well, I’m not particularly surprised…”—and it is this condition, of being surprised or not, that signals the nature of my expectations viz. my perceived disclosure of his past character. And yet, if pushed to describe or circumscribe my friend’s character in parsed-out detail, I would falter, and offer only snapshots, anecdotes, valences of who he was. Yet, pressed to identify actions/situations I think that my friend could/would commit/find himself in, I feel confident my expectations would prove an accurate judge, portending the future based on a reasonably imagined extension of his character into a given contingency. What this seems to imply is the continuity of a constellation of traits, hanging somewhere between memory and imagination.[2] What does it mean to be able to expect, but unable to know, another’s character?[3]

In this manner, it is when one believes another is good/has faith in another’s goodness that one permits another faults and flaws—and either finds these deficiencies something different and excusable, or fails to recognize them as deficiencies in the first place (e.g. “blinded” by Cupid, etc.). Conversely, it is when one believes another to be fundamentally evil or flawed that one recognizes in another hardly any of their actual qualities—as it is with this very basic individual bias, so it is with peoples and nations.

Somewhere in the background of this theory roams James and his concept of the will to believe: we in part project/invent the people that surround us—and never do we get it entirely right. Despite—and because of—communication, misinterpretation is endemic and prevalent to a ubiquitous degree. This is all to say that, just as we cannot fully see ourselves given the tightness of our self-proximity[4], so, too, are our perspectives on others never fully quite “right”—and hence the ethics involved with a type-of constant vigilance, a commitment to permanently reevaluate the character of another under novel circumstances and the related capacity to amend judgment. Or: we get too much wrong, about ourselves and about others, to not leave the door open.[5]

This leads me to reflect on a political example of this phenomenon. From the perspective of an employee working in the State Department, I imagine diplomacy looks an awful like a continuous stage of misquotations and misinterpretations. How it is that nations that have been allies for hundreds of years still communicate with one another by employing an inhuman formality that is reminiscent of a bad first date? No doubt the historical legacy of 17th– and 18th-century court politics—but as a practical problem? This is in part answered by the relative infancy of any given regime—in the US, of course, this means a general maximum of 8 years for any major post, while of course the skeletal bureaucrats may stay on for much longer, and others forms and figures of power exerting their influence in a more sustained manner at lesser or more restricted levels—think John McCain, for instance. The question becomes: how best to foster diplomatic relations among nations of an entrenched allied character such that these communicative links may adopt a more human and jovial disposition—and hence mistakes and gaffes are permitted, as they are in virtually any stable and friendly human relationship?

Here the question opens to a greater, scalar problem of “pragmatics,” taken in its linguistic variant; here the topic of diplomacy might lead to a notion of “interstate pragmatics.” Within this frame, the question of “joking” between friends, for instance, implies a certain degree of shared background material, of unquestioned cultural and linguistic tropes that both parties join in performing: that friends joke with one another means that only friends can joke with one another. Or: the joke either substantiates a preexisting relation of friendship or aims to make friendly inroads where otherwise there is enmity and resistance. I am reminded of Simmel and the problem of the stranger: one can joke at the strangers expense, can joke against the stranger, but not with the stranger.[6] Or: the notion of being able to joke among nations would disclose a range of similarity, of shared experience, that threatens the difference inherent in the concept of the nation state itself. To joke with a foreign power is to assume that that power is not so foreign after all—that enough is shared in order to accomplish a type of linguistic feat reserved only for members of shared communities. In other words, true discourse among nations—open, human dialogue—can only be accomplished with the admitted breakdown of national boundaries—in the admission that nations are artificial and no longer operative borders, that nationalism is a thing of the past. The miscommunication intrinsic to international diplomacy betrays an underlying resistance states have to their own maintained sovereignty. The equivalent here is being taken aback by a Turing-like experience of a robot joking with you; the state is naturally seen as something inhuman, as something that is supposed to be “friendly” without being a true “friend.” By contrast, true friendship, one that could sustain misunderstandings without by devolving into scandal, greater problems, etc., would come at the expense of the nation as it stands.

From a different, philosophical angle, Wittgenstein takes up the problem of misunderstanding and interpretation viz. rule-following: I might say that, if some random student were to walk up to the chalk-board and write “2 + 2 = 5” and then step back in contemplation, I would find this scene utterly and intolerably silly, I would dismiss it and the student, I would walk out the classroom, etc.; but say that a known Nobel laureate in mathematics walks up to the board, writes and performs the same—well, then I would wait, interested and curious, to see how it all panned out, to see what charms the laureate had yet to perform…

Toward the kind of nonsense-statement made by an “authority” or “expert”, I take an attitude of self-doubt, convinced that the fault is in my own understanding, rather than in any inherent deficit of the statement in question. We might call this the essential institutional attitude that rallies itself against the antinomean impulse.

But all this begs a greater question: can the “profound,” the truly sacred, ever be understood? Must the “profound” exist precisely at the threshold of expectation—must it be not so much held in abeyance, but constitutive of abeyance itself? I am reminded here of Rudolf Otto. Or: does understanding exhaust some of the power/force of the sacred, such that the transitional threshold between the sacred and the profane is a matter of what is understood and what is not? Therefore, too, what is feared and not?[7] Does the understood necessarily ameliorate fear of a certain kind, and metamorph what is sacred into what is profane; or can understanding merely transform fear into a more refined and penetrating version of itself? One can easily picture “knowledge” here as pharmakon, as providing both comfort and therapy and exacerbation and intensification. What is vital is the relation between fear and homeness. Different variations on a Utopian theme sound-off: does homeness seek to ameliorate fear entirely, or does it seek to channel fear into knowable/expected—and therefore controllable and masterable—informational and mechanistic outlets? We might say that the first course devotes itself to “leaner,” positive, usually-monistic political program; the latter carves out a negative modality, more akin to Shklar’s “liberalism of fear” than any positive political project.[8] On a personal level, this question might be analogous to that between activism and stoicism, or: in terms of self-therapy, to what extent should one intervene into vs. withdrawal from the world?[9]

[1] See Heidegger on the problem of “unconcealment.”

[2] See Locke on identity.

[3] I am reminded here of my grandmother’s comments regarding her own support of Trump: that Hillary Clinton constitutes a form of corruption one already “knows,” whereas, according to her, Trump constitutes the unknown possibility. But does he? What part of his character suggests that he will handle the office of the presidency with stateliness and aplomb? Isn’t the reverse rather true: that the gap between expectation and experience (Koselleck) ought to be perceivable here, and that his character discloses a future that, though unknowable, certainly does not bode well? Here might simply be an example of “bad faith” or “blind bias”—a powerful and significant political force, but one separate from the more nuanced phenomenon I’m trying to hone-in on.

[4] See Arendt on the notion of the daemon.

[5] See William Connolly on the appropriate attitude one ought to take toward one’s own sentiments.

[6] I think, too, of Schmitt’s “friend/enemy” distinction. Aristotle, Derrida and Nehamas on friendship.

[7] See Hobbes, James; Corey Robin: the basis of pragmatic amelioration and therapy as a release from fear? Shklar. See, too, Marx on capitalism: “All that is solid…” Marshall Berman on modernity. Edith Hamilton on myth and “omnipotent unknwon.” H. P. Lovecraft’s observation that “The oldest and strangest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strangest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” Francis Bacon on mastery and scientific method; Foucault, Montaigne on knowledge-as-power; Nietzsche.

[8] See Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment

[9] See my note #25: On Ubermensch: Domination or Self-Erasure