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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 November 2023
What kind of spider understands arachnophobia?
Robert Wyatt, ‘Free Will and Testament’Prologue
If the past is a foreign country, then it is plausible to expect the conditions for understanding contemporary cultures that seem alien to us to parallel those of historical understanding. R.G. Collingwood famously suggests that such understanding involves ‘the re-enactment of past thought in the historian’s own mind’ (Collingwood 1946, 216–17, 301). This view finds recent expression in Bettina Stangneth’s proclamation that ‘to understand someone like Eichmann, you have to sit down and think with him. And that’s a philosopher’s job’. Such thinking with does not imply any agreement of opinion. Its task is to see things from within a system of concepts and values that is alien to one’s own.
This chapter attempts to illustrate that intercultural understanding requires a parallel sharing of thought processes. It does so through an exploration of recent attempts to make sense of the ghost narratives that emerged in the aftermath of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. With some help from Wittgenstein and Geertz, I suggest that understanding the thoughts of another culture is not a question of mind-reading but rather one of conceptual immersion.
The Universe of Human Discourse
How does one enter the mind of another culture, past or present? How could one? It has become popular to use the expression ‘mind-reading’ as a shorthand for understanding another person’s thoughts. This is not a harmless figure of speech but a misleading portrait of communication that has its contemporary roots in John Locke’s theory of human understanding, which considers all thoughts to be private in that they ‘cannot be laid open to the immediate view of another’ (Locke 1689Bk. IV, Ch. XXI, § 4–10). Accordingly, ‘to communicate our Thoughts to one another, as well as record them for our own use, Signs of our Ideas are also necessary’ (Locke 1689Bk. IV, Ch. XXI, § 4–10).
Locke believed that human understanding requires the translation of inner thoughts into a shared language. This enables communication with recipients, whose minds, in turn, translate our words into their own hidden thoughts.
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