About Humanism: Only humans feel; collectives do not feel.
About Isolation: Feelings of other people can be judged only by their acts.
About Insatiability: It is impossible to overcome all needs.
About Tastes: People value powers differently.
About Egoism: Strangers' needs are not important.
About Love: Loved ones are only few.
About Justice: The worse the offense, the more offender is hated.
About Envy: The richer the person, the more he is hated.
Today it is turn of the axiom about isolation: Feelings of other people can be judged only by their acts. This axiom is about unreliability of knowledge about feelings of other people, because we can’t know about those feelings directly. We can only get some information about their feelings from their acts—including speech or gestures. And of course they can lie.
Other’s soul is a thing-in-itself. Immanuel Kant referred to inconceivable, impenetrable as thing-in-itself. You can only feel your own soul, your own grieves and joys. Other people’s feelings can be known only through these people’s acts—for instance through what they say about their feelings. It is impossible to immediately, i.e. directly hear the “music” in other’s head, as it is to see other’s dreams.
Special tools or magic spells allowing immediate reading of others’ feelings can only be found in science fiction or fairy tails.
In Herbert Wells’s Men Like Gods the people of fictitious parallel world could communicate without use of words. Instead of speaking to each other they thought to each other. The one who received a thought clothed it in words. Notably that each one could clothe the thought in words most convenient for him, so there was no use in translators.
In the movie What Women Want the main character played my Mel Gibson after electric shock begins to “hear” the thoughts of women, which leads him to a fantastic success amongst them.
In reality we only can reconstruct thoughts of other people judging by their acts. The best way to understand what woman wants is to talk to her.
Immediate—i.e. without medium of acts, particularly speech—perception of other’s soul is as impossible as travelling back in time.
Only your own feelings are best known to you. We can only guess about other people’s feelings. Chances are that these other people may misinform you regarding their feelings. They may for example mislead others about some strong feelings and valued powers calling them sins to put off guard ones who they consider to be their competitors in order to seize such valued powers themselves. After all they may be just kidding.
In 1928 Margaret Mead in her book Coming of Age in Samoa, which then became classics of social anthropology, wrote about promiscuous sexual relations between Samoans. Only in 1983 Derek Freeman proved the failure of this work. American lady was just pranked by young Samoan girl who instigated her boyfriend. She let her believe in ridiculous nonsense about Samoan sexual traditions. But amongst Samoan traditions are pranks, not promiscuity.
The word is a door into other’s soul. Lev Uspensky in his book A Word about Words wrote about impression he had from words about simple conversation.
- “It was about sixty years ago. I happened to read Kuprin’s nouvelle titled “Evening guest” in an issue of some magazine… A little scene stuck in my mind forever, although I was very young at that time—not more than ten or twelve years old. Why did it strike me?
A man is sitting in the room, while someone, some “evening guest”, is about to enter from the yard.
“Now he opens the door”, Kuprin writes. “Another instant, and the simplest, yet the most incomprehensible of things will take place. We shall begin to talk. With the aid of sounds of different pitch and intensity, he will express his thoughts in the customary form, while I shall receive those sound vibrations and decipher their meaning; and the other man’s thoughts will become mine…. Oh, how unintelligible to us, how mysterious, how strange are the commonest phenomena of life?”.
Having read these lines I halted in confusion. At first it seemed like author is laughing at me: what had he found so amazing in such a really ordinary thing—conversation between two people? Everybody talks… And it never seemed to me neither strange, nor amazing.
And now? And now I am deep in thought. Indeed: how is that?
Here I sit and think. No matter how much I think, nobody—not even a single person in the world—can know my thoughts: they are mine!
But I have opened my mouth. I began to produce “sounds of different pitch and intensity”, as written in the nouvelle. And suddenly as if everyone besides me had an opportunity to penetrate “inside me”. Now they know my thoughts…”
Easy understanding of beloved ones. Love makes communication easier. Much less acts are needed to understand one another. Characters of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina—Levin and Kitty—didn’t need words at all. Glances and initial letters of words were enough to confess about their love to each other:
- “Here,” he said; and he wrote the initial letters, w, y, t, m, i, c, n, b, d, t, m, n, o, t. These letters meant, “When you told me it could never be, did that mean never, or then?” There seemed no likelihood that she could make out this complicated sentence; but he looked at her as though his life depended on her understanding the words. She glanced at him seriously, then leaned her puckered brow on her hands and began to read. Once or twice she stole a look at him, as though asking him, “Is it what I think?”
“I understand,” she said, flushing a little.
“What is this word?” he said, pointing to the n that stood for never.
“It means never,” she said; “but that’s not true!”
He quickly rubbed out what he had written, have her the chalk, and stood up. She wrote, t, i, c, n, a, d…
…He was suddenly radiant: he had understood. It meant, “Then I could not answer differently.”
He glanced at her questioningly, timidly.
“Only then?”
“Yes,” her smile answered.
“And n…and now?” he asked.
“Well, read this. I’ll tell you what I should like—should like so much!” she wrote the initial letters, i, y, c, f, a, a, w, h. This meant, “If you could forget and forgive what happened.”
He snatched the chalk with nervous, trembling fingers, and breaking it, wrote the initial letters of the following phrase, “I have nothing to forget and to forgive; I have never ceased to love you.”
She glanced at him with a smile that did not waver.
“I understand,” she said in a whisper.
He sat down and wrote a long phrase. She understood it all, and without asking him, “Is it this?” took the chalk and at once answered.
For a long while he could not understand what she had written, and often looked into her eyes. He was stupefied with happiness. He could not supply the word she had meant; but in her charming eyes, beaming with happiness, he saw all he needed to know. And he wrote three letters. But he had hardly finished writing when she read them over his arm, and herself finished and wrote the answer, “Yes.”
“You’re playing secrétaire?” said the old prince. “But we must really be getting along if you want to be in time at the theater.”
Levin got up and escorted Kitty to the door.
In their conversation everything had been said; it had been said that she loved him, and that she would tell her father and mother that he would come tomorrow morning.”
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