>Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 20:16:00 +0800
>From: Eric Franz Leher <fr102anz at netvigator.com>
>Subject: Re: lbo-talk-digest V1 #4738
>
>Kenneth MacKendrick wrote:
>
> > Memory, longing, affection,
> > wishing... there is nothing inherently incommunicable about these
> > experiences, insofar as they are meaningful at all.
>
>I really think this is wrong, and contradicts every human being's
>experience of trying to communicate any of these things. You can come up
>with a very poor approximation (in fact, not even that) of your memory,
>longing, affection, wish, and put it out there - 'communicate' it. But
>most of it is missing.
Yes, but thankfully one doesn't have to be gifted with telepathy to communicate. All the significant elements of our feelings can, in principle, be formulated in language. Hell, we understand these feelings in language, so our own internal relation to ourselves has already translated them into language or symbolic form. No, you won't be able to communicate experience, but you can put these experiences into meaningful propositional form...
>As an example - you could bless me with the verbal genius of
>Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe and Nabokov, and I could spend the rest of my
>life trying, but there is no way I will ever communicate to anybody -
>not even in the slightest - my memory of the room where I loved
>so-and-so. Is this deprived of meaning because I cannot communicate it?
>Not to me (at this point should I anticipate some objection that meaning
>only exists between two or more subjects, and that communication is not
>anywhere near perfect? My objection still stands.)
Insofar as you can understand your own experience, you can communicate it. That doesn't mean anyone else will understand, agree, or even empathize with your experience, but all human comprehension take place within language. I'll defer to Gadamer on this point, whom Habermas agrees with completely on this score. The point is this: you can't establish a political system on the basis of your feelings toward so and so in such and such a room. You might want to duplicate the solidarity or the tenderness of such a moment, but this means coming to an understanding, with yourself and others, about what tenderness and solidarity means. This can only be negotiated communicatively. In other words: we don't need to communicate everything, but there is nothing meaningful that cannot be communicated in principle. If one can have the experience, then it is an experience that can be grasped in language, even if we need the help of Goethe to express it. Such representations to not replace experience, they simply make experience intelligible to ourselves (and others).
>Eric Leher
ken