What does it mean to understand another person? It is easy to understand another person when you agree with them, because then you simply agree with yourself and perhaps even enjoy seeing your own thinking reflected in the other person, enriched by a slightly different perspective, more colorful, more lively, more energetic, because both are happy to have found someone who is on the same wavelength. This mirroring, the mirror neurons, give us a feeling of appreciation, of being seen, a sense of harmony and the idea that we have a common basis on which we can build and develop further.
Is that the case? What if I want to understand someone who thinks completely 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 person calls my own thinking into question and I have the feeling that I can dismiss everything as nonsense, perhaps even have to, because it undermines my existence. But if, at the same time, I see in the other person a lovable person whom I want to understand - what does that mean? When an atheist talks to a believer, a rationalist to a conspiracy theorist, a scientist to a mystic... how does understanding work here?
It is possible to meet on other levels, on the level of the heart, for example, or on the level of intersubjectivity, to perceive that there really is another, someone who is decidedly different from me and does not feign the illusion 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 that demands a different understanding.
Understanding here is not mirroring, not assimilation, but the experience of otherness, which makes a genuine encounter possible in the first place. Understanding then means understanding the other as the other, and what the other says and does is then secondary. The thinking of the other is thus classified and contextualized differently. It is not about consistency, i.e. freedom from contradiction, but about the possibility of seeing the other person. Seeing then means seeing with different eyes; a difference does not demand a resolution or conciliation, but rather a going deeper to the ground of being. Difference makes perception and identity possible in the first place; unity, on the other hand, does not exist in dialog, but only in spiritual experience, which then includes the other.
Talking to someone who thinks radically differently can therefore lead to depth rather than confrontation. However, this is only possible on the basis of genuine appreciation. But what does understanding mean? Is it the joint search for the reason? Does understanding mean understanding how the other person is searching? Which paths does one's own thinking and the thinking of the other take? Do these paths intersect? Are they crossroads or forks in the road, convergences or parallels? Are the encounters respectful and loving?
This experience of the other, which is not part of my consciousness, which is not an illusion but fundamentally eludes my thinking, is a reconciliation of thinking with the world. For the experience of this otherness overcomes any doubt about reality. Reality is not an illusion; it may be radically different from what I think, but it is real. This experience is only made possible through the encounter with the other.
