What does it mean to understand another person? It is easy to understand someone facing us when we are of the same opinion, because then we are simply agreeing with ourselves. We may even enjoy seeing our own thinking mirrored in the other, enriched by a slightly different perspective, more colorful, more alive, more energetic, because both are pleased to have found someone on the same wavelength. This mirroring, the mirror neurons, gives us a feeling of appreciation, of being seen, of harmony, and the idea that we have a shared basis on which we can build and develop further.
Is that so? What if I want to understand someone who thinks very differently? What if I fundamentally disagree with the other person’s basic assumptions? What does understanding mean then? When every sentence and every thought of the other calls my own thinking into question, and I feel that I could dismiss everything as nonsense — perhaps even must dismiss it, because it undermines my existence. But if, at the same time, I see in the other a lovable person whom I want to understand — what does that mean? When an atheist speaks with a believer, a rationalist with a conspiracy theorist, a natural scientist with a mystic… how does understanding work here?
It is possible to encounter one another on other levels: on the level of the heart, for example, or on the level of intersubjectivity; to perceive that there really is an other, someone who is decisively different from me and does not create a false semblance of understanding. This challenge of the Other — Hegel describes it as a life-and-death struggle, Lévinas as an ethical encounter — is a much deeper encounter, one that demands another kind of understanding.
Understanding here is not mirroring, not assimilation, but the experience of otherness, which is what makes a genuine encounter possible. To understand then means to understand the Other as Other, and what the Other says and does becomes secondary. The thinking of the Other is therefore placed and contextualized differently. It is not about consistency, that is, freedom from contradiction, but about the possibility of seeing the person before me. Seeing then means seeing with other eyes; a difference does not demand resolution or reconciliation, but a movement deeper down toward the ground of being. Difference is what first makes perception and identity possible; unity, by contrast, does not exist in dialogue, but only in spiritual experience, which then also includes the Other.
To speak with someone who thinks radically differently can therefore lead into depth instead of confrontation. This, however, is only possible on the basis of genuine appreciation. But what, then, does understanding mean? Is it the shared search for the ground? Does understanding mean understanding how the Other searches? Which paths does my own thinking take, and which paths does the thinking of the Other take? Do these paths touch? Are they crossings or forks in the road, convergences or parallels? Are the encounters respectful and loving?
This experience of the Other, who is not part of my consciousness, who is not an illusion but fundamentally eludes my thought, is a reconciliation of thought with the world. For the experience of this otherness overcomes every doubt about reality. Reality is not an illusion; perhaps it is radically different from what I think, but it is real. This experience becomes possible only through the encounter with the Other.
