Socrates died for it. Charlie Kirk died doing it. They both died because some people, powerful or not, hated them for what they said and did. Socrates died from a dose of hemlock his enemies obliged him to swallow; Kirk died from a bullet in the neck.
Essentially what these two men had in common, and for which they were hated by their political enemies, was the dangerous habit of trying to dialogue and converse with those who opposed them. Nothing seems to have changed in two and a half millennia and every time in our human culture, when civilised conversation and the freedom to speak our minds and search for truth has been abandoned, we descend into barbarism. It is not only heroic people who die. With them will also die true friendship and true political life.
An essay in the Financial Times back in 2012 proclaimed that the art of conversation was on a death list. “It’s a dying art,” wrote John McDermot, “struck down by texting, email and messaging”
McDermott, at that time an FT comment editor, recalled an account by Thomas de Quincy of an evening spent in the company of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The experience was like being swept into some great river, a continuous strain of dissertation, certainly the most novel, the most finely illustrated, traversing the most spacious fields of thought…”
He did not think it probable that many of us would enjoy that level of conversation. Nevertheless, he hoped that we might at some time have felt the elation of staying up all night talking with a friend or loved one.
What is it that makes a conversation something more than idle chatter? Cicero’s formula was summarised by The Economist in 2006: “Speak clearly; speak easily but not too much, especially when others want their turn; do not interrupt; be courteous; deal seriously with serious matters and gracefully with lighter ones; never criticise people behind their backs; stick to subjects of general interest; do not talk about yourself; and, above all, never lose your temper.”
“But”, McDermott reflects, “Cicero was lucky: he never went on a first date with someone more interested in their iPhone than his company.”
People have been preoccupied by the question of what real conversation is for a long time. The British philosopher Michael Oakshott connected it with the very idea of the pursuit of learning itself. Oakshott was one of the founders of the free University of Buckingham back in the 1960s.
This foundation embodied the principle that the pursuit of learning is not a race in which the competitors jockey for the best place. It is not, he said, “even an argument or a symposium; it is a conversation. And the peculiar virtue of a university (as a place of many studies) is to exhibit it in this character, each study appearing as a voice whose tone is neither tyrannous nor plangent, but humble and conversable. Its value lies in the relics it leaves behind in the minds of those who participate. A conversation does not need a chairman, it has no predetermined course, we do not ask what it is ‘for’ and we do not judge its excellence by its conclusion; it has no conclusion, but is always put by for another day.”
The New York Times columnist, Ezra Klein recently drew attention to another angle of the demise of conversation. He reflected that while holidays – like Christmas time – are an unusually social time, filled with parties and family get-togethers, for most of the year, we feel isolated and unsatisfied with our social lives. Our society, he thought, wasn’t structured to support connection year-round. He drew our attention to a book by Sheila Liming, an associate professor of professional writing at Champlain College and the author of “Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time.” In the book, Liming investigates the troubling fact that we’ve grown much less likely to simply spend time together outside our partnerships, workplaces and family units. “What would it look like,” Klein asked, ”to reconfigure our world to make social connection easier for all of us?
For Hannah Arendt, conversation was about much more than ‘hanging out’, valuable and pleasurable a human experience as that might be. ‘Gladness, not sadness,’ she wrote, “is talkative, and truly human dialogue differs from mere talk or even discussion in that it is entirely permeated by pleasure in the other person and what he says.”
In her short biography of Arendt, Samantha Rose Hill writes, “Aside from Arendt’s husband Heinrich Blücher, no one understood this better than her mentor, the philosopher Karl Jaspers. In Jaspers, Arendt found a man who understood the art of listening and conversation, and elevated these worldly activities to the centre of his life and work”
Arendt said of Jaspers, “Within this small world he unfolded and practiced practicsed his incomparable faculty for dialogue, the splendid precision of his way of listening, the constant readiness to give a candid account of himself, the patience to linger over a matter under discussion, and above all the ability to lure what is otherwise passed over in silence into the area of discourse, to make it worth talking about. Thus in speaking and listening, he succeeds in changing, widening, sharpening – or, as he himself would beautifully put it, in illuminating.”
For Arendt, Karl Jaspers embodied what it meant to think, because they both understood the importance of conversation, lingering over topics and returning to subjects of contemplation.
The central elements of Jaspers’s philosophy, Hill writes, left a lasting impression on Hannah Arendt’s work. At the centre of her conception of thinking is conversation, or the ‘two-in-one’ dialogue one has with oneself. Studying with Jaspers meant that, for Arendt, thinking was no longer confined to a hidden realm. Her dissertation work on Saint Augustine drew together the disciplines of theology and philosophy in order to understand neighbourly love as a secular value for being with others in the world.
Hill writes that friendship was an oasis for Arendt, and in dark times – of which there were a number in her life – it offered a refuge. She said, in being with others, “one heart reaches out directly to the other. It is a meeting ground of equals, where one is free to go without a mask, without the pressures of performance and appearance. It is the intimacy of close relationships with others that teaches us how to breathe, to co-exist.
Another Arendt scholar, Kathleen B. Jones writes, “For Arendt, friendship thrived on equality, but only in the sense of a shared commitment to independent thinking and a willingness to take risks. For Arendt, conversation was the lifeblood of friendship and friendship was the lifeblood of society.
Arendt saw genuine conversation and friendship as the place where truth can be spoken without the distortions of ideology, propaganda, or power. She held that with a friend, you do not speak to persuade, command, or manipulate.
You speak to seek understanding and to “appear” authentically before one another.
In that way friendship preserves individuality. Friendship helps people remain distinct individuals rather than absorbed into mass movements and she saw conversation as the essence of human plurality. Arendt thought human beings live in a condition of plurality—we each see the world differently. Conversation for her was how we come to terms with these differences without violence. It is not aimed at agreement but at mutual understanding. Conversation is how the world becomes “real” between us.
What would our world look like if these values, these practices and dispositions prevailed within it? Conversations and friendships are surely the key to resolving the terrible polarisation which now afflicts us and kills the genuine plurality which is part of our true human inheritance. Polarisation, mindless ideology, and the hatred they induce are driving our world to a very lonely and unforgiving place. We must resist them with all our moral strength – as heroes in all ages have done.
Garvan Hill 