It may be supposed that the diverse idioms of utterance
which make up current human intercourse have some meeting-place and compose a
manifold of some sort. And, as I understand it, the image of this meeting-place
is not an inquiry or an argument, but a conversation.
In a conversation the participants are not engaged in an
inquiry or a debate; there is no 'truth' to be discovered, no proposition to be
proved, no conclusion sought. They are not concerned to inform, to persuade, or
to refute one another, and therefore the cogency of their utterances does not
depend upon their all speaking in the same idiom; they may differ without
disagreeing. Of course, a conversation may have passages of argument and a
speaker is not forbidden to be demonstrative; but reasoning is neither
sovereign nor alone, and the conversation itself does not compose an argument.
. . . In conversation, 'facts' appear only to be resolved once more into the
possibilities from which they were made; 'certainties' are shown to be combustible,
not by being brought in contact with other 'certainties' or with doubts, but by
being kindled by the presence of ideas of another order; approximations are
revealed between notions normally remote from one another. Thoughts of
different species take wing and play round one another, responding to each
other's movements and provoking one another to fresh exertions. Nobody asks
where they have come from or on what authority they are present; nobody cares
what will become of them when they have played their part. There is no
symposiarch or arbiter, not even a doorkeeper to examine credentials. Every
entrant is taken at its face-value and everything is permitted which can get
itself accepted into the flow of speculation. And voices which speak in conversation
do not compose a hierarchy. Conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield
an extrinsic profit, a contest where a winner gets a prize, not is it an
activity of exegesis; it is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure. It is with
conversation as with gambling, its significance lies neither in winning nor in
losing, but in wagering. Properly speaking, it is impossible in the absence of
a diversity of voices: in it different universes of discourse meet, acknowledge
each other and enjoy an oblique relationship which neither requires nor
forecasts their being assimilated to one another.
This, I believe, is the appropriate image of human
intercourse, appropriate because it recognizes the qualities, the diversities,
and the proper relationships of human utterances. As civilized human beings, we
are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of
an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the
primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of
centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of
ourselves. Of course there is argument and inquiry and information, but
wherever these are profitable they are to be recognized as passages in this
conversation, and perhaps they are not the most captivating of the passages. It
is the ability to participate in this conversation, and not the ability to
reason cogently, to make discoveries about the world, or to contrive a better
world, which distinguishes the human being from the animal and the civilized
man from the barbarian. Indeed, it seems not improbable that it was the
engagement in this conversation (where talk is without a conclusion) that gave
us our present appearance, man being descended from a race of apes who sat in
talk so long and so late that they wore out their tails. Education, properly
speaking, is an initiation into the skill and partnership of this conversation
in which we learn to recognize the voices, to distinguish the proper occasions
of utterance, and in which we acquire the intellectual and moral habits
appropriate to conversation. And it is this conversation which h, in the end,
gives place and character to every human activity and utterance.
from 'The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind', Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, (Methuen 1962) pp 197-247
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