Can We Talk?

Was it Sartre or de Beauvoir who said, “We see ourselves in the eyes of the Other”? I’m pretty sure it was him in ‘Being and Nothingness’ but it’s been a while, please correct me if I’m wrong.

Let’s talk about talking. I know, we’ve been doing little else for the last week or so, but I’m on a roll here.

Tonight we had dinner with a dear friend. (Hi, Scott!) Then later, while walking Jonah, we had a conversation with a nice neighbor. This made me think about the difference between just talking and having “a conversation.”

When it’s someone I’m comfortable with, I just talk. I don’t think about what I’m saying, any effort I make is merely to be sure that I use words corresponding to whatever is in my head at the moment. Ideas move forward, carrying the people with them. Eventually we stop talking and go home. Although there is a beginning and an end, those are arbitrary. We know we’ll talk more next time.

“A conversation” seems different. Information is exchanged in an almost capitalistic way. At first, the information is biographical: I tell you what I do and you tell me about your job. That’s a reasonable exchange, fair enough. A “one sided conversation” is just that: an unfair exchange, a bad deal, someone didn’t get their share.

That’s when I thought about the Sartre quote. People often use conversations to present themselves as they want to be seen, or as they want to see themselves. Words become a static image of variable reality, depending on how honest we are or what we want to get out of it. Which leads me to thinking about Facebook, (talk about image control!) and if Jean Paul Sartre had a Facebook page, would he update his status and what would he say?