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How to Read Like You Mean It: Conclusion: To Read Is to Live with Other People

How to Read Like You Mean It
Conclusion: To Read Is to Live with Other People
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“Conclusion: To Read Is to Live with Other People” in “How to Read Like You Mean It”

Conclusion To Read Is to Live with Other People

Now that I am reaching the end of my argument, my fear is that you will place this book on your shelf next to other books that say precious, forgettable things. My fear is that you will forget it just like the students who forget the syllabus their professor reads on the first day of class. My fear, ultimately, is that I will have fallen into the very trap I set out to avoid, that of non-communication masquerading as communication.

But you’ve followed me this far. What has been the point?

This question is really about the value of method and the texts to which it gives us access. If you’re one of my students, this method will have instrumental value. You need to write a paper or a thesis to show what you’ve learned and what you can discover. Here are tools to do that. But what if you’re one of the readers I can’t even imagine?

Over the course of this book, we have dealt with texts of increasing scales. Metaphors, in the introduction, are small. Texts, many of which make use of metaphors, are medium-sized. Meaningful actions, many of which incorporate texts, are large. Now, to find the value in this analysis, I want to expand the scale one more time. Let us look at people, who produce metaphors, use texts, and perform meaningful actions. As I said in the introductory chapter, I want to answer a question about how we open ourselves up to the possibility that others might change our minds. We do so by reading in the broadest possible sense. To read like you mean it, in the end, is to find ways to live with other people, exploring their worlds as they explore yours.

We can do this through the texts they produce, at all the scales I mentioned. To get an idea how, I want to return briefly to ideas related to Indigenous research methods that I mentioned in chapter 3. Scholars such as Margaret Kovach, Shawn Wilson, Alannah Young Leon, and Denise Nadeau describe the ways that Indigenous approaches to research diverge from conventional (one might say “hegemonic”) approaches.1 Their key idea, relational accountability, makes the connection between research and people explicit. Research is good, they argue, only to the degree that it maintains the relational balance between researchers and the people they seek to understand.

There are important points of overlap between Indigenous methods and what we have discussed. Wilson, for instance, highlights the hermeneutic nature of Indigenous method: researchers are engaged in understanding and interpretation. “A key to [an Indigenous] way of thinking and . . . a necessary ingredient of an Indigenous epistemology,” he explains, “is hermeneutics. [For reasons of relational accountability] we contextualize everything that we do, and we do that contextualization in a conscious way.”2 Like Ricoeur, who argues that an author’s audience is potentially limitless (an argument I explore in chapter 1 and again at the end of this chapter), Wilson observes, “As I cannot know beforehand who will read this book, I cannot be sure of the relationships that readers might hold with me or the ideas I share.”3 In a realm shaped by relational accountability, that uncertainty presents important challenges, which Wilson overcomes in part by addressing his book to his children, building on his relationship with them to establish a new relationship with his unknown readers.

In other instances, Wilson goes further than Ricoeur. Although both emphasize the reader’s or listener’s responsibility in interpreting a situation or text, Wilson says that they must suspend their judgment of what the writer or speaker says: “if reality is based upon relationships, then judgement of another’s viewpoint is inconceivable. One person cannot possibly know all of the relationships that brought about another’s ideas.”4 Ricoeur, in contrast, as we saw in chapters 2 and 4, says that we try to persuade others that our interpretation of a text is more likely than theirs. By his account, probability is the warrant for an argument’s quality, which stands in contrast to researchers who are concerned with relational accountability, and who measure the quality of their work differently. Within Indigenous frameworks, an argument’s validity is a function of a researcher’s answerability to those with whom they interact.5 They base their engagement on reciprocity rather than critique.

I admire the work of these scholars immensely, especially their emphasis on relational accountability. But I am not an Indigenous researcher, nor have I adopted their approach, as my efforts to persuade you demonstrate. It would be inappropriate for me to do so, at least right now: to respect the responsibilities of relational accountability, I would first need to learn the appropriate rules of protocol, something I have not done.6 So why bring up Indigenous methods at all? Because, as a colleague reminded my students and me when she talked to us about her use of Indigenous methods, non-Indigenous people can look for echoes in their own community and history.7 In that respect, the idea of relational accountability suggests ways to expand the scale of our analysis: although our focus has been on texts, we must not forget that texts mediate between people, and in particular authors and readers. I want to shift our attention to that relationship, and in that way answer the call issued by these researchers whose work I admire. Thus in this concluding chapter I turn to one of Ricoeur’s final books, On Translation, published in French shortly before he died and in English translation shortly thereafter. The book’s central idea is that of linguistic hospitality, or the idea that we are released to a relationship of openness and discovery with others because we recognize that we can never know their language and world in a definitive way.8 It is the key for expanding our scale of analysis, as the next sections show by moving from metaphor to text to action to people. These sections focus on Ricoeur’s idea of ontological vehemence, which takes different forms depending on scale but relates in each case to the force that compels us to explore the world that opens before us. We discover, moving from point to point to point, that the processes of distanciation and appropriation present us with an appealing bargain: in exchange for a certainty that was never ours in the first place, we can have, instead, the pleasure of living with others and exploring the worlds they inhabit. Finally, I close the book by returning to a theme that opened it, namely the need for action and the challenges that we as readers and listeners face in the increasingly polarized world in which we live.

Ontological Vehemence: Metaphor, Text, Meaningful Action

The term ontological vehemence appears with increasing frequency in the works Ricoeur wrote at the end of his life, but it “is a tricky matter to write about,” according to Paul Anthony Custer, “since it appears in scattered and fugitive traces in these works.”9 I would define it as the potential of a text, whatever its scale, to reveal a new world, in particular as that potential elicits a drive in readers to discover that world. It is the same drive I referred to as eros (chapter 3), that we feel in reaction to the negation we experience when we must yield to the text’s obdurate nature (chapters 1 and 2). Perhaps the reason the term is compelling is that Ricoeur leaves it largely undefined. It promises to reveal something I hadn’t thought of before, and I feel compelled to understand it. In that respect, it illustrates the very idea it describes.

I first spoke of ontological vehemence in the introductory chapter as a way to describe our drive to make sense of a metaphor’s figurative meaning (the “metaphorical is”), which leads us someplace new, in the face of its impossible literal meaning (the “literal is not”). We can find parallels in texts of other scales (table 7). Roger Savage, for instance, sees a text’s ontological vehemence in “the impact the work has on our ways of thinking, feeling, and conducting our lives.”10 In this vein, we might see an action’s ontological vehemence in the actions it prompts from us by revealing a world we had not yet imagined, in the way, for instance, that we are inspired to do something when another person’s actions help us see that change—and a new world—are possible.

Table 7. Ontological vehemence at the level of metaphor, text, and meaningful action

Metaphor

Text

Meaningful action

Impulse to embrace figurative meaning at cost of literal meaning

Drive to explore the world disclosed by a text

Injunction to act in response to another’s actions

Let me be a bit more concrete. In my Grade 12 English class, we read the Iliad by Homer, which tells part of the story of the decade-long Trojan war fought between the Achaeans (or Greeks) and the Trojans.11 At first, the language seemed stilted and alienating to me. I struggled to keep the different warriors straight. I felt like I was fighting the text as much as the people that it depicted were fighting each other. But once I learned its rhythm, I came to marvel at two things. First was the plight of Achilles, the Achaean hero. He comes from immortal stock, tracing his lineage back to Zeus (or Jupiter, as he is referred to in the translation I cite here), but his emotions are intensely human. Throughout the poem he is torn between these two poles. After the death of his friend Patroclus, for instance, Achilles takes revenge on his killer, Hector, by stabbing him with a spear and dragging his body through the Achaean camp. This act of desecration, an expression of all-too-human grief, draws the wrath of the gods, including Jupiter, who sends Achilles’ mother Thetis to persuade him to return Hector’s body.12 Although Achilles does not die in the Iliad, we know that the gods will punish him for his hubris, having been warned by dying Hector that “a day will come, when fate’s decree / And angry gods shall wreak this wrong on thee.”13

My second discovery was Homer’s use of extended similes and metaphors (which take the same structure—the comparison of unlike things—even if simile uses like or as and metaphor does not). Throughout the Iliad he introduces elaborate images and then uses them to convey an idea that literal language is inadequate to describe. Often, these images evoke an action of great scale, such as this comparison of the gathering Achaeans to a forest fire:

As on some mountain, through the lofty grove,

The crackling flames ascend, and blaze above;

The fires expanding, as the winds arise,

Shoot their long beams, and kindle half the skies:

So from the polish’d arms, and brazen shields,

A gleamy splendour flash’d along the fields.

Not less their number than the embodied cranes,

Or milk-white swans in Asius’ watery plains.14

The descriptions that really moved me, however, were those that evoked characters’ emotions. Consider Achilles’ grief before the funeral pyre for Patroclus:

As a poor father, helpless and undone,

Mourns o’er the ashes of an only son,

Takes a sad pleasure the last bones to burn,

And pours in tears, ere yet they close the urn:

So stay’d Achilles, circling round the shore,

So watch’d the flames, till now they flame no more.15

At the time, I struggled to explain why I felt so moved. I was drawn into the image, which made me feel as the character felt, in ways that words like sad or weary (or, in different places, excited or exultant) could not express. Years later, I would read a study of Homer that explained, “Everything we describe as ‘mental’ and most of what we call ‘emotional’, the Iliad describes physiologically. . . . [People] in Homer have no ‘insides’ where emotions can reside. There is only laughing, crying, and so on.”16 I realized that when I read the Iliad in Grade 12 I was a teenage boy with feelings bigger than I had words to express, and this exteriorization gave me tools for understanding those feelings. My initial alienation from the poem, the result of my frustrations in trying to make it conform to my expectations about literature, transformed into a feeling of euphoria as Homer’s images opened a world I had been looking for. They defied literal explanation, instead placing me in a realm beyond it, a realm I felt compelled to discover. Even if my reflections on them were maudlin or naive, in the way teenage boys can be, they were a clear response to these images’—these metaphors’—ontological vehemence.

Of course, in reacting to the Iliad, I was also moved by it as a whole text, especially with respect to Achilles’ struggles between his human and more-than-human sides. It too possessed an ontological vehemence. But it’s not the only text to have that effect on me. Shortly after graduating from high school, I moved to France for a year as an international student. While there, I took a side trip to Spain to see Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, the mural evoking the northern Spanish town Guernica after it was bombed by the Nazis and Italian fascists in 1937 (figure 15). It shows suffering in its rawest form: a mother cradles her dead child, a soldier grasps a sword as he is trampled by a horse, all in Picasso’s characteristic angular shapes. I remember walking into the room in Madrid’s Reina Sofía Museum where Guernica is displayed, and time stopped. In its immensity—the mural filled the wall and my senses—it had an almost physical impact on me. I didn’t realize how long I had stood there until my friends came back and said it was time to move on: forty-five minutes in front of one painting was enough.

What to make of this experience? How can we understand the ontological vehemence of a work of art, or of any text? In a book on the liberatory dimensions of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, Roger Savage imagines an artist faced with a situation—Picasso contemplating the scale of human suffering in Guernica, for example—that presents itself as a problem to be solved or, better, a call to be answered. The artist responds by creating their art: their work is their answer to the call.17 Exemplary works such as Guernica, “by subverting congealed conventions and established habits of thought,” prompt viewers to see the world from a new perspective, in effect reconfiguring the points of reference they use to navigate through their personal and collective symbolic worlds.18 Guernica, for instance, forced me to grapple with people’s potential for cruelty in a way that I had always been able to contemplate from a safe distance. The plight of Achilles, to return to my earlier example, showed me new ways to understand the forces that tear us in two ways at once. Through this symbolic reconfiguration, these works opened new worlds for me or showed me new dimensions of the world I thought I already knew.

A mural depicting Picasso’s painting Guernica, which shows the torment of war.
Figure 15. A mural depicting Picasso’s painting Guernica, located in Guernica, Spain. Photograph: Jules Verne Times Two / julesvernex2.com / CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

To be clear, I am not claiming that I discovered their “meaning” (as if they had only one) or, even more improbably, the intention of their creators. Instead, I’m pointing to the effect that their juxtaposition of things belonging to different categories—human suffering and surreal representational figures in Guernica or human grief and god-like wrath in the Iliad—had on me. As I stepped into and then out of the works, I found meaning by exploring the tension between those things. This is how a work shapes us, not by establishing some one-to-one correspondence (image X is a symbol for idea Y), but through metaphor. The world that viewers appropriate is complex in ways that escape both the artist’s intention and the viewers’ interpretive skills. If the work can be said to communicate anything, it is the answer that the artist proposes in response to the call, which the viewer encounters and responds to in the world that the work opens up: “communicability does not lie in applying a rule to a case but in the fact that it is the case that summons the rule.”19

We experience the text’s ontological vehemence when, through the world it presents, it compels us to read further, look closer, and explore for ourselves. We can understand an action’s ontological vehemence in an analogical way. Someone answering a call issued by a situation they face might respond by creating a text or work of art, but they might also respond through action that they endow with meaning. When we see and interpret their action, it might compel us to investigate further and—again—explore the implications of the action for ourselves: “For [Ricoeur], the ‘effect of being drawn to follow’ . . . takes hold when, in apprehending the act’s fittingness in answer to the situation calling for it, we respond to the injunction articulated by the act by changing our conduct accordingly.”20 Imagine a moment where you witnessed someone do something that inspired you to act. Did it prompt you to see the world in a new way? In what way did it “leave its mark,” so to speak?21 Did it inspire you to see how a different, better world might be possible? If it did, you came to see that world through the paradoxical process of appropriation we discussed in chapter 4: the action compelled you to let go of your certainty in your own notions of the world so that they might be reconfigured.

Our analysis of this process of appropriation, from the micro-level of metaphor to the macro-level of meaningful action, has led us to a surprising place. The first half of this book was about the anxiety we feel when the texts we read (at every scale) resist our efforts to interpret them—when they’re confusing or dense, or when they make us feel angry or confused. We resist them because they force us to see that the world is too complex for us to know in a definitive way. Our knowledge is always partial, in both the sense of “incomplete” and “biased.” That fact gives rise to our desire to impose our understanding upon the world, as if by doing so, we could tame its complexity. This impulse is clear in fundamentalist philosophies, whether religious, political, or cultural, whose adherents try to impose their ideas through force. The harder they work, the more the cracks in their philosophy become clear. There is danger in this impulse.

But the first half of the book is also about how our certainty is always an illusion. It is not ours in the first place. What we are giving up is the illusion of control, not control itself. What we get in return is a new world. In that respect, the second half of this book is about a bargain we strike, not just in the sense of an exchange, but of a really great deal: we’re getting something for nothing. We give up a certainty that was never even ours, and in exchange, we get the pleasure of a new world to explore.

The Meaning We Make of Other People

If you’re reading this book as a way to understand method in the humanities, you have accomplished your goal. Go forth and read! You have the tools you need—claims, evidence, and warrants—to interpret texts and defend your interpretations.

But if you’ve come this far, I suspect that, like me, you see something more. Like me, you have an intuition that through the interactions we have with others, we get glimpses of their world, although we can never get a complete picture. Like me, you wonder, if we can gain access to the world of a text through appropriation, what would it mean to gain access to the world of another person? Through what door might we enter (figure 16)? Surely there is pleasure to be found there!

That is the question I raise in the few pages I have left. As I wrote in the introductory chapter, I conceived this book as a response to the question of how we open ourselves to others and the possibility that they might change our minds. The answer is conceptually simple, although harder to put into practice: we can try to see the world as others do, using the same tools to “read” people as we have used throughout this book. We have their statements and actions, both of which we can interpret in ways to reveal the world to which they point. In other words, they combine to become a discursive event, in the same way as metaphors, texts, and meaningful actions (chapter 1). Specifically, they exhibit these traits:

  • The symbolic world to which the person’s statements and actions refer is not that of the immediate physical environment.
  • Their statements and meaningful actions make propositional claims (for example, that X is Y or A does B).
  • Their content is fixed.
  • The person’s intention is distant.
  • The person’s audience is potentially limitless.

Let’s consider each of these traits in turn. First, in contrast to a conversation where people can point to things in the space they share, the texts we have available to read—in a general sense, but also in the sense of “reading” other people—point to a different world. It is one that, in James Carey’s words, “is brought into existence, is produced, by . . . the construction, apprehension, and utilization of symbolic forms.”22 What Carey means is that we know the external world through our own perceptual lenses, which are inextricable from our understanding of how the world’s component parts fit together. If we’re trying to gain access to another person’s world, we won’t arrive at a place where we can point to it the way we can point to our physical environment. Their world, like ours, is constituted by its symbols.

An image of two traders standing in front of a large, ornate door that opens onto a courtyard filled with unknown wonders.
Figure 16. What would it mean to gain access to the world of another person? Through what door might we enter? Source: David Roberts, Entrance to the Temple of Bacchus, Baalbek (1855). OldBookIllustrations.com.

As for propositional claims, people’s statements and actions make them in two ways. First, there is what they say, and second, what they presuppose. In the first instance, what statements say is straightforward: it is their content. Actions become meaningful in a somewhat more complex way: they are meaningful to the degree that people interpret them, for instance when one person tries to explain why another has made one choice instead of another. (“Why did he do that?” you say to a friend, who answers, “I really don’t know, but here’s my guess . . .”)

In the second instance, statements and actions reveal something about a person’s symbolic world, which is to say, the way they make sense of the relationships between themselves and the objects and phenomena that surround them. They do so indirectly through what they presuppose. If I say, for instance, “The reading strategies presented in this book are valuable because they might help us avoid conflict,” that statement can be true only if other unspoken statements are also true, for instance that avoiding conflict is desirable. In this way people’s statements provide a glimpse into how they interpret the world, and our task as readers becomes one of translation. We are trying to express their propositional claims in a different way, transposing them to a different context and, in all likelihood, transforming them as we do.

The content of people’s statements and actions is fixed in two ways, as well. In chapter 1, I remarked that a text’s form is fixed when it is written, noting also that I meant writing in the broadest possible sense. Texts can be inscribed on a page or created electronically, but they also take a given (albeit ephemeral) form when people speak words heard by others. Not that we are limited to texts as collections of words. As with Guernica, they can take the form of works of art. Broadly speaking, any collection of signs becomes a text if people interpret it. Similarly, actions take a fixed form when, as Ricoeur says, they “leave their mark.”23 For example, individual and collective actions by people in different levels of government during the COVID-19 pandemic have left their mark on societies the world over, as well as on individuals, as my frequent return to the topic of the pandemic suggests. People will debate the meaning of their actions for years to come, despite their ephemerality in time.

But the content of statements and actions is fixed in a second way, as well, in that the propositional claims that they presuppose are relatively fixed. These inferred propositions describe people’s unspoken conception of the world, but, if this book has shown anything, it is that this stability is only relative: people can come to see their world reconfigured as they engage with other people and other texts.

The final traits relate to the ways that texts remain at a distance from readers. For written texts, an author’s intention is out of reach because authors are usually not present when readers encounter their work. Some readers will encounter a text in situations that authors could never imagine, and authors cannot course-correct as they might in a face-to-face conversation. (Where are you as you read this? Perhaps you are a student in one of my classes. Perhaps not. You are not here as I write, and I am not there as you read. You are—alas—an abstraction to me, as I am to you.) In cases of geographic, temporal, or cultural distance, there is the real possibility that a text will evoke something for readers that the author did not intend, although that possibility exists even when an author and readers are close.24

Similarly, the texts that reveal the symbolic worlds of other people remain at a distance from us. At a micro-level, just as translators discover seemingly untranslatable elements within a text, which “are to a translation what a nail is to the sweater it catches, causing it to snag,”25 we discover peculiarities embedded in people’s statements that hint at their singular way of making sense of the world. We struggle to reconcile them with our own understanding. These “points that catch” are symptomatic of something larger. At a macro-level, just as translators face “the presumption of non-translatability, which inhibits [them] even before [they tackle] the work,”26 we sense that another person’s symbolic world is so distinctly their own that it will be accessible to us only in approximate ways. To adopt a visual analogy: as close as we might stand to another person, we cannot occupy the exact same place, nor can we adopt their exact vantage point. The same is true of another person’s figurative (rather than literal) perspective. We can never make a complete abstraction of our own interpretive lenses because we can never step so fully out of our own perspective as to see the world fully from another’s point of view. In the process of translation, we distort what it is we purport to describe.27

In response to these forms of distanciation, we must undertake what Ricoeur describes in his book On Translation as “the work of mourning”: we must “give up on the ideal of the perfect translation.”28 Paradoxically, this work is liberating, just like so many other dimensions of communication we have explored, in particular the process of appropriation: “it is this mourning for the absolute translation”—in our case, the idea that we could ever see someone’s symbolic world as they see it, without distortion or loss—“that produces the happiness associated with translation.”29

Indeed, Ricoeur argues that the joy of translation comes not from perfection but from exchange and dialogue itself.30 Why? Because other people possess their own ontological vehemence. They possess a truth beyond our own that we are driven to understand, fuelling our desire to translate not just for trade and other necessary forms of commerce, but to expand our world in our own language.31 Ricoeur turns to French translation theorist Antoine Berman to illustrate this point. Berman wrote about Bildung, or the process by which writers in eighteenth and nineteenth century Germany used translation to enrich their language. They saw translation as a means by which to leave their language, see it from the outside, and then, through this foreign mediation, come back to it with new ideas: “This circular, cyclical, and alternating nature of Bildung implies in itself something like a carrying-across, an Über-setzung, a placing-of-oneself-beyond-oneself.”32 Likewise, we come to know ourselves better by stepping out of ourselves, travelling beyond our familiar world, and then, through the mediation of the other, coming back, our world having become a bigger place.33

In the process, we strike a bargain similar to the one above. We trade away something that was never ours in the first place—broadly speaking, the certainty that our conceptual tools are sufficient for describing the world, or narrowly speaking, our confidence in our ability to see the world from another’s point of view, exactly as they see it—for something far more precious. We find a new experience, one filled—if you’ll forgive my obstinate naivety—with wonder, like the wonder Lawrence Ferlinghetti evokes in “I Am Waiting,” the poem I imagined reading instead of a syllabus in the opening pages of this book. We are offered a gift, which Ricoeur calls linguistic hospitality, “where the pleasure of dwelling in the other’s language is balanced by the pleasure of receiving the foreign word at home, in one’s own welcoming house.”34

Conclusion: The Turn to Action

The question remains: how do we accept this hospitality? As enticing a bargain as it might seem, it still presents risk. To admit to uncertainty—to admit that one might be wrong—is to make oneself vulnerable, especially in the climate of political polarization that we see in North America and Europe in this third decade of the twenty-first century, where anything less than absolute allegiance to one’s camp’s ideas risks being seen as weakness. Such polarization grows out of people’s fear about the rapid changes they are experiencing, along with the precarity these changes bring about. Such fear causes people to identify strongly with their own groups and see members of other groups as threats. It also contributes to the popularity of the conspiracy theories that fracture our social narratives: as fear and uncertainty increase, so do people’s tendencies to see patterns where they do not exist and to attribute agency to random actions, so as to “intensify people’s moral judgments, rendering them more susceptible to extreme ideologies.”35 As people come to link their identities to their political or ideological allegiances, their feeling of risk becomes even more pronounced.36

In other words, giving up our sense of certainty about our interpretation of the world might come at too high a cost. What pleasure is there if we feel we are in danger? We need to trust that other people are acting in good faith and will reciprocate our actions.37 Indeed, such reciprocity is one of the fundamental ideas of hospitality, a word tracing its roots back to the Latin word hostis, signifying

“the stranger insofar as he is recognized as enjoying equal rights to those of the Roman citizens.” This recognition of rights implies a certain relation of reciprocity and supposes an agreement or compact. Not all non-Romans are called hostis. A bond of equality and reciprocity is established between this particular stranger and the citizens of Rome, a fact which may lead to a precise notion of hospitality. From this point of view hostis will signify “he who stands in a compensatory relationship” and this is precisely the foundation of the institution of hospitality.38

Thus we return again to the question I keep asking: how do we open ourselves to others and to ideas that scare us because we don’t understand them? This question presupposes a value highlighted by the Indigenous scholars I referred to earlier in this chapter, namely that of our relationship with others. But to understand this value, it would seem, is beyond the scope of this book. Think of all it implies. Some people act in good faith, and some do not; moral philosophers have been asking about the reasons and consequences of these actions for a very long time.

Yet this idea of relationship issues a call to action that we cannot dismiss, lest we neglect the very relationships we value. What is its nature? On the one hand, we can work to persuade others to see the world differently. We cannot force others to act in good faith, of course. To do so would itself be an act of bad faith. But we can present them with means and motivation to peer at the world from a new angle. That is the argument I pursue in my previous book whose final question prompted this book, as I write in the introductory chapter.39

But this is not the only way to understand action, and indeed, not the point of this book. In making my argument, from my silly scenarios in the introductory chapter to now, I have found a world that opened itself to me. The call to action I hear is much broader than that of persuading others. Instead, it is an action we undertake for ourselves. In seeing another’s world, we realize the value of our relationship with them. Because of that relationship, we are called now to explore that world.

Let that be the action we undertake.


1 Margaret Kovach, Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts; Shawn Wilson, Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods; Alannah Young Leon, and Denise Nadeau, “Embodying Indigenous Resurgence: ‘All Our Relations’ Pedagogy.”

2 Wilson, Research Is Ceremony, 102–3.

3 Wilson, Research Is Ceremony, 6.

4 Wilson, Research Is Ceremony, 92. With respect to the listener’s interpretive responsibility, see Kovach, Indigenous Methodologies, 72, 90, and 97.

5 Wilson, Research Is Ceremony, 57, 79, 92–94; Kovach, Indigenous Methodologies, 52.

6 Kovach, Indigenous Methodologies, 127 and 143.

7 Many thanks to Brenda Macdougall at the University of Ottawa for her insights in November 2020, when she spoke to the students in my doctoral methods seminar.

8 Paul Ricoeur, On Translation, 10.

9 Paul Anthony Custer, “Speaking, Vehemence, and the Desire-to-Be: Ricoeur’s Erotics of Being,” 233.

10 Roger W. H. Savage, Paul Ricoeur’s Philosophical Anthropology as Hermeneutics of Liberation: Freedom, Justice, and the Power of Imagination, 114.

11 I’m using Alexander Pope’s early eighteenth-century translation (along with his spellings) because it is widely regarded as “one of the greatest translations of any work into English” (Daniel Mendelsohn, “Englishing the Iliad: Grading Four Rival Translations”). I like that Pope’s style, marked by the era in which he wrote, has an estranging quality for contemporary readers that draws our attention to the distance between its time and our own. (The translation I read in high school was Richmond Lattimore’s.)

12 Homer, The Iliad, 475.

13 Homer, The Iliad, 440.

14 Homer, The Iliad, 35–36.

15 Homer, The Iliad, 454.

16 Rob Wiseman, “Metaphors Concerning Speech in Homer,” 7 and 9.

17 Savage, Paul Ricoeur’s Philosophical Anthropology as Hermeneutics of Liberation, 122–23.

18 Savage, Paul Ricoeur’s Philosophical Anthropology as Hermeneutics of Liberation, 3.

19 Ricoeur, quoted in Savage, Paul Ricoeur’s Philosophical Anthropology as Hermeneutics of Liberation, 125.

20 Savage, Paul Ricoeur’s Philosophical Anthropology as Hermeneutics of Liberation, 125.

21 With respect to the qualities that meaningful actions share with texts, see chapter 1.

22 James Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society, 20.

23 Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation, 165–70.

24 See Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation,” in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 93–106.

25 Kyle Conway, “The Vicissitudes of Untranslatability,” 936.

26 Ricoeur, On Translation, 5.

27 I make an extended version of this argument in chapter 1 of The Art of Communication in a Polarized World.

28 Ricoeur, On Translation, 8.

29 Ricoeur, On Translation, 10.

30 Ricoeur, On Translation, 10.

31 Ricoeur, On Translation, 21.

32 Antoine Berman, The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany, 47. In addition to removing Berman’s italics, I have altered the translation to emphasize the out-and-back motion of Bildung. Berman’s original text reads: “Cette nature circulaire, cyclique et alternante de la Bildung implique en elle-même quelque chose comme une translation, une Uber-Setzung, un se-poser-au-delà-de-soi.” Berman, L’épreuve de l’étranger: Culture et traduction dans l’Allemagne romantique, 78.

33 See Richard Kearney, “Introduction: Ricoeur’s Philosophy of Translation.”

34 Ricoeur, On Translation, 10.

35 Jan-Willem van Prooijen, The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories, 89.

36 For popular press accounts of the role of identity, see Rachel Martin, “She Resisted Getting Her Kids the Usual Vaccines. Then the Pandemic Hit”; Shrestha Singh, “I’m a First-Generation Indian American Woman. I Married into a Family of Trump Supporters”; and Max Fisher, “‘Belonging Is Stronger than Facts’: The Age of Misinformation.” For scholarly accounts, see Kolina Koltai, “Vaccine Information Seeking and Sharing: How Private Facebook Groups Contributed to the Anti-vaccine Movement Online,” and Brendan Nyhan, “Why the Backfire Effect Does Not Explain the Durability of Political Misperceptions.”

37 Kyle Conway, “Modern Hospitality.”

38 Émile Benveniste, “Hospitality,” chap. 7 in Indo-European Language and Society.

39 “How do we change people’s minds?” I ask: “By opening ourselves to the possibility that they might change our minds, too.” Conway, The Art of Communication in a Polarized World, 128.

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