Consciousness, or rather, the other has always interested me. I am, at least on some level (for this moment we’ll omit Freud) privy to my own thoughts and desires, yet I can access only the thoughts that others make known to me.
Despite Derrida we communicate - despite linguistic uncertainty and finitude we understand.
And yet I feel that I never truly know myself or any other: there is always an surplus of alterity, always a degree of otherness.
Often I fail to acknowledge this otherness:
“One claims to know the other’s claims from his point of view and even to understand the other better than the other understands himself. In this way the Thou loses the immediacy with which it makes its claim. It is understood, but this means it is co-opted and preempted reflectivity from the standpoint of the other person… withdrawing from the dialectic of this reciprocity, in reflecting himself out of his relation to the other and so becoming unreachable by him. By understanding the other, by claiming to know him, one robs his claims of their legitimacy” - Gadamer
The moment of understanding closes off the other to us by removing our openness to the other as the other becomes a type, a that rather than a person who is subject to sudden tumultuous change.
I find that the moment I type someone; the moment I understand is often the very same moment that them I lose interest in them or they begin to irritate me. Whereas, the people who most intrigue me are those who I can never quite understand. Yet, philosophically I know that this very same understanding is an impossibility, theory has yet to meet praxis.
I believe, and I do not know if Gadamer ever ventured to make this argument, that if we never know ourselves (Freud) or are not a self but selves (Derrida) then we may fall into this very same pitfall by claiming to be a holistic self that we understand. If I know who I am then I remove myself by reflecting myself out of my relationship with the other, or myself. Pragmatically this feels much like William James claims of, “Pure Experience”, but differs radically epistemologically in that “Pure Expirence” is not an extension of understanding of the self, but rather a state of being in relation to the universe and oneself that leads to a knew understanding of a experience, “the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories… a that which is not yet any definite what, tho’ ready to be all sorts of whats…” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). The key, or so it seems, is to remain in constant dialogue with the self without ever reaching a definitive conclusion of the self in contention with what I learn about myself through dialogue with others.
Thus the self, the other, and by extension the community (taking into account Gadamer’s thoughts on tradition) are inextricably linked to any understanding of the self or the community; to understand without understanding.
Theory meets praxis.