I understand you

‘I understand you.’

Someone said it to me several times last week. Sometimes in another form: I know what you mean. While I did not yet know what I meant myself. I was still searching for words, and as I searched, my story had already been understood.

The intention was good, of that I have no doubt. The sentence meant to say: I am with you, I am following you. Still, I noticed my searching came to a halt. What I had not yet said appeared to have already been given a place.

Usually the sentence means something smaller: I understand what you are saying, I follow you, I recognize it. Something larger sounds through it all the same, as though the person speaking has thereby been understood as well. Whoever hears the sentence may think at that very moment: you do not understand me at all.

I hear this sentence often, in conversations around me and out of my own mouth. That is why I want to write about it. I want to try to give words to what happens in such a moment.

Two people leave a conversation like that with a different story each. One has offered understanding and feels close. The other has experienced that same understanding as a door closing. The intention was there. The effect was something else.

What happens in that space between?

With Emmanuel Levinas the sentence I understand you takes on an uncomfortable weight. Understanding, for him, is never only an innocent movement towards the other. When I understand something, I place it within a coherence I already know. I connect it to my language, my experiences and my concepts. What was strange becomes recognizable. What surprised me acquires a name. What came from outside is taken up into my world.

I need that capacity. Without ordering I can hardly speak, think or act. The problem begins as soon as my understanding closes. When I come to believe that my interpretation coincides with the person in front of me. Levinas uses the word totality for this: a way of thinking in which everything is given a place within a whole I can survey. The other then becomes the one about whom I now know how things stand, and thereby becomes smaller than they are.

Against that totality Levinas sets the infinite. The infinite points to the irreducibility of the Other: this one human being never fully coincides with what I know, think or say. Even when I know a great deal about someone, something remains that escapes my knowledge.

Here it becomes visible why I understand you can fail precisely when the sentence is sincere. Whoever speaks it offers a conclusion: I have given your story a place. Whoever receives it may hear that the search is over, even though it was perhaps still fully underway.

In his later work Levinas distinguishes between le Dire (the saying) and le Dit (the said). The said is the content that can be summarized and repeated. The saying is the event that precedes it: someone turns towards me, searches for words, exposes themselves by speaking. The sentence I understand you belongs to the said: summarizing, rounding off, fixing in place. That is exactly how the sentence can miss the saying: the hesitation, the searching, the question that had not yet found words.

Perhaps this is why listening with matters so much to me, rather than listening to. Whoever listens to someone stands opposite the other and receives content: the said. Whoever listens with someone stands alongside the other in the searching itself. The words do not have to be there yet. They do not even have to arrive, and a meaning least of all. What matters is what the other wants to tell, in the story as it lives in this person. In such listening the sentence I understand you no longer carries weight, and neither does the sentence I do not understand you. Both put me back at the center. Listening with asks that the I steps out of that center: present at the edge, available, open to correction, while only the other remains standing.

Hvile (Rest), Vilhelm Hammershøi, 1905

In my Architecture of Listening I call this the touchstone of effect before intention. My intention may be pure. The ethical question lies elsewhere: what did my words do in the encounter? Did they open space for the other, or did they make the encounter smaller? Only the other can say.

That is why a second movement belongs to this touchstone, one I call repairability: the willingness to revise what I said as soon as it appears to have done the other an injustice. Levinas has his own word for that movement, dédire (unsaying the said). In Autrement qu’être he holds that the saying must free itself again and again from the said in which it hardens. He means this first of all for philosophy itself: every formulation about the Other inevitably becomes a said and must therefore be opened up again, in the awareness that this correction too will harden in its turn. Taking back is, for him, a rhythm, a movement that keeps repeating as long as the encounter lasts.

Repairability is the form this rhythm can take in an ordinary conversation. When I say that I understand someone and the other lets me know that my understanding falls short, the listening begins again. The correction comes from two sources: from the other’s contradiction, and sometimes from an unease in myself, the suspicion that my summary was too smooth. In this sense a conversation remains repairable as long as both may speak. As soon as I begin to defend my understanding rather than offer it, that possibility closes.

Perhaps understanding is therefore best seen as a provisional answer. I listen, try to follow and give back what I believe I have heard. In doing so I offer my understanding, as something the other may correct. There is a difference between saying that I try to understand someone and saying that I have understood someone. In the latter something rounded off sounds through, as though the other can be filed away in the story I have made of it.

The sentence I understand you may remain, as the beginning of something. It asks for a continuation: this is what I have understood of you so far. And after that for the question that perhaps comes closer to listening than any understanding:

Where and when did I miss you?