The melancholy of meaning

We had said that great philosophies can emerge from misunderstandings. Knowing that there are great historical examples of this may perhaps create disappointments about human beings. Yet looking at these examples, one feels more clearly how strong the "conjecture" dimension of human knowledge is. Thus one comes to possess a more certain knowledge of the human being, of the human miracle.

The valued thinker Selahattin Çakırgil, whose writings on haksoz.net about Althusser's creative interpretations of Marx's texts, which we cited as one of the examples of creative misunderstanding, I always follow with interest, kindly reminded me of a debate voiced about Althusser ten years after his death. Althusser's life ended in complete tragedy (first he killed his wife, then he passed to the other side of reason and was admitted to a psychiatric clinic, and in 1990 he died in that clinic), but his real life ended in a tragicomic situation. For in serious publications about Althusser made ten years after his death, it was shown that this formidable theorist of the French communists, this intellectual Marxist interpreter, had in fact never read Marx's Das Kapital, about which he had written the groundbreaking book Reading Capital.

You see, what is being spoken of here is not a creative misunderstanding but plain fabrication.

Moreover, the interesting thing is that even if this claim is true, it has not cost the groundbreaking character of Althusser's interpretations of Marx or the fruitfulness of the new opening he brought to Marxist thought. It is still a fact that reading Marx accompanied by Althusser's interpretations has a quite different flavor today. Try getting out of this one.

We had better continue once more from the dimension of the relationship between the reader and the writer's intention, which never manage to meet.

In the minds of those who read what a writer tells, different expectations, different feelings, different totalities form, and these totalities may not be found in the texts read. In this case the gulfs that are very likely to form between reader and writer make people's complaints about being misunderstood or not understood at all go public. Gradually, not being understood rather than being understood becomes the norm. Not being understood begins to be accepted as a separate level of meaning, a level of wisdom.

Although every person who opens his mouth to tell his trouble, every writer who takes pen in hand, aims to be understood, the general state of mind that dominates the world of writing is one of failure. We can also call this, I think, the melancholy of meaning. A melancholy arising from the writer and reader, the speaker and listener, never quite meeting. Sometimes the writer himself falls into this melancholy and laments not being sufficiently understood; sometimes other readers produce this melancholy through the claim that their favorite writers can never be understood by others.

Every kind of affliction found in a melancholy is found in the melancholy of meaning as well, but for some reason, in this melancholy I see first of all a kind of arrogance. The writer, or sometimes a writer's readers, may not deign to meet other people's worlds of meaning. They may dislike the meeting that takes place, or be unsatisfied with it. These meetings do not make them happy enough. The typical disease of melancholy, that is…

It might also be asked: why insist so much in a world of reading in which what is not understood is so much more concentrated than what is understood? If people's failing to understand one another, that is, the melancholy of meaning, is the more dominant reality in the world of reading, why do people read, why do they expend such intense effort to understand others? What do people look for in what others have written? It is clear that these questions require us to go deeper into the differences in people's behavior, attitudes and performance regarding reading.

When many people read many things, they get up from the book feeling that they have understood something. But when people think they have understood something, what do they actually understand? Do they really understand what is in the book, or what the author meant when writing it? Or do they make unrelated connections between what they read in the book and their own worlds?

And there is yet another problem: has the author of the book managed to convey into the book whatever he meant? This is of course understood first of all as a problem of eloquence. True. But one dimension of the problem is also the hard-to-close gap between the writer's intention and the reader's world.

Perhaps people constantly look in one another for something they feel they have lost. Perhaps writers, without realizing it, unknowingly scatter among what they write some tokens that many people feel they have lost. Successful writers, writers who are widely read and widely understood, probably include in their texts many tokens that are common to everyone. So that connections are suddenly established in those who read.

Let us see. Will this subject resolve the melancholy of meaning for us, or make some tokens drop? We will continue…