How to Know a Person:
The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
by david brooks
random house, 320 pages, $30
David Brooks, an opinion columnist at the New York Times, has set himself a remarkable task: finding a cure for the modern epidemic of loneliness. In a series of thoughtful books—The Social Animal (2011), The Road to Character (2015), The Second Mountain (2019)—he has challenged the individualistic character of contemporary life in the name of personalism, and has sought to recover the social solidarity that has suffered so much fragmentation.
How to Know a Person goes right to the foundations of this project. What is it, he asks, for one person really to encounter another? Martin Buber, whom Brooks quotes, answers that it is to encounter the other not as It but as Thou. This is easy to state but difficult to accomplish: “seeing another person well is the hardest of all hard problems,” Brooks observes. Even those we live with might remain invisible to us as persons, and we to them. Stuck in our own inner worlds, we are unable to enter into theirs, even after years of acquaintance. He quotes the nameless narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. It is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When others approach me, they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed everything and anything except me.”
There is of course an abstract way of knowing about others that is not particularly difficult. As Brooks observes, we are surrounded by survey data and observations collected by market researchers and pollsters. “This is a great way to understand trends among populations of people, but it is a terrible way to see an individual person.” He states with exactitude why it is terrible: “If you adopt this detached, dispassionate, and objective stance, it’s hard to see the most important parts of that person, of her unique subjectivity—her imagination, sentiments, desires, creativity, intuitions, faith, emotions, and attachments—the cast of this unique person’s inner world.”
Brooks writes with great perceptiveness about the experience of being unseen. It leads to the sense of being annihilated in your personal existence. Ellison’s narrator again: “You wonder whether you aren’t simply a phantom in other people’s minds. You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world.” Oppressed by this sense of unreality, people may be driven to destructive actions. Brooks says that some school shooters “decide to commit suicide in a way that will selfishly give them what they crave most: to be known, to be recognized.”
By contrast, it is life-giving to hear from another, “It is good that you exist.” Or as Brooks puts it: “Human beings need recognition as much as they need food and water.” Only through another who knows me and affirms me can I come to experience my reality—and, even more importantly, my worth, the goodness of my being. I cannot say to myself in solitude, “How good it is that I exist,” nor can I say defiantly, “I don’t care whether others recognize me or not, I know that I exist and have worth, and that suffices for me.” No, it does not suffice; I must receive this sense of my goodness from another who knows and appreciates me. I must receive it as a gift, for I do not hold it as an inalienable possession.
Brooks is insightful about the wisdom needed for advising a friend whom we have come to know deeply. “The really good confidants—the people we go to when we are troubled—are more like life-coaches than philosopher-kings. They take in your story, accept it, but push you to clarify what it is you really want, or to name the baggage you left out of your clean tale.” He insists on the radical receptivity of those who know how to accompany us wisely. They know how to “create an atmosphere of hospitality, an atmosphere in which people are encouraged to set aside their fear of showing weakness, their fear of confronting themselves.” Perhaps we can say that Brooks wants us to practice reverence in our way of advising and guiding others; he wants us to practice a certain self-emptying in relation to them.
Brooks characteristically engages us in a concrete way, discussing everyday situations and bringing novelists, biographers, and storytellers into the picture. He also gives special attention to the ordinary everyday circumstances in which we are challenged to see others deeply.
By contrast, he takes a dim view of what the philosophers have had to say on his subject. He seems to think that philosophy is so concerned with universals that it loses touch with the uniqueness of persons and with the concrete texture of their moral lives. At one point, for instance, Brooks refers to Kant’s teaching that persons should always be treated as an end in themselves and never as a mere means. Brooks writes impatiently: “That emphasis on abstract universal principles is fine, I suppose, but it’s impersonal and decontextualized. It’s not about how this one unique person should encounter another unique person.”
There is no denying that we philosophers often lose ourselves in abstractions, and there is something refreshing about the concreteness of Brooks’s discourse. But philosophy has more to contribute to his project than he realizes. Suppose I ask myself: Am I performing a hospitable act toward my neighbor only because I want to put him in my debt and gain control over him, or am I performing it out of honest concern for him? If I have the Kantian principle in mind, an alarm will go off in my conscience as soon as I detect that I might be using the other for my purposes. In this way the universal principle, far from diverting me from concrete situations, can illuminate them. Indeed, there are times when Brooks himself is clearly presupposing the Kantian principle in his ethical deliberations.
The same antagonism to universal principles surfaces in Brooks’s repudiation of “essentialism.” “Essentialists are quick to use stereotypes to characterize vast swaths of people.” True, stereotypes are a great hindrance to deeply knowing a person. But not all concern with essential types involves stereotyping. Consider the “essentialism” involved in distinguishing the essential kinds of human excellence; consider, in other words, virtues such as reverence, truthfulness, faithfulness, generosity, chastity, and courage. If we praise others as truthful or generous we are not stereotyping them. Yes, persons are unique, as Brooks says, but they are not so unique that the basic types of moral integrity are not binding on them all. And yes, a generous person will embody generosity in his own unique way—but being generous is something he shares with all admirable human beings.
These essential types of moral excellence also help us make sense of the self-transcendence that we see in outstanding moral personalities. Brooks speaks of some people who grow morally by clarifying what it is that they really want. But there are others who grow in a more radical way by asking what it is that they ought to want, even if they don’t yet want it. Perhaps a person does not yet want the virtue of humility, but seeing the splendor of this virtue in others, he aspires to possess it. Brooks won’t be able to do full justice to this way of growing beyond oneself in the moral life until he makes friends with the essential forms of moral excellence.
There is another danger in this admirable book: subjectivism. We get to know persons, according to Brooks, by paying particular attention to their subjectivity, or inner life. This focus has the effect of turning our attention from what is objectively there to what is subjectively felt. It is of course not subjectivism to distinguish between the objective and subjective layers of reality, and to give attention to the latter. Nor is it subjectivism to acknowledge that there is an aspect of the world that is relative to our experience (much as “below” and “above” are relative to where you are standing). Yet he surely goes too far when he approvingly quotes the saying: “We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.” And when Brooks speaks of the human mind as “constructing” reality, he tends in a subjectivist direction.
Brooks does not seem to notice that subjectivism is fatal for his project of deeply knowing other persons. As he writes, in knowing another I must become completely receptive to him, so as to experience him as he truly is. But receptivity is the very thing that gets eliminated by subjectivism. How can I be receptive to another when I am “constructing” his reality? No—if I am receptive to another, really listening to him, then I must set aside all activity of constructing, of interpreting, of imposing my meaning. I must apprehend him, not according to my image of him, but according to who he is in his own right.
It follows that Brooks can ground his project of deeply knowing persons only if he establishes a stronger connection with the philosophical realism of Western thought. According to the realist tradition, which derives from Plato and Aristotle, human knowledge is fundamentally receptive. Our knowledge is not the measure of reality; rather, our knowledge is measured by reality. The reverence that is so important to Brooks is nothing other than realism put into practice.
This realism is entirely different from what Brooks deplores as “naive realism,” the simpleminded assumption that everyone sees the world the same way I do. Authentic realism sees in the perspectives of other people something that has a reality of its own and is to be acknowledged with reverence.
Sometimes Brooks seems to blunt the edge of realism by saying that we are receptive to others only in registering empirical facts—such as the details that might be listed on a résumé. He seems to speak as if everything that goes deeper in a person, everything situated in the deep subjectivity of a person, were constructed. But this is not what our experience teaches us. When we get to know the unrepeatable mystery of a person, when we make ourselves radically receptive, we surely are aware of encountering something irreducibly other than ourselves. The reality of the other comes to us as a surprise and a gift, and not as a product of our constructing activity. In fact, this deeper knowledge of the other expresses philosophical realism even more than does the information found in a résumé.
Brooks’s intuitions about knowing persons are sound, and some of them are profound; but they need to be placed on a more secure foundation. Perhaps his next book might explore the fruitfulness of philosophical realism for his important project.
John F. Crosby is professor emeritus of philosophy at the Franciscan University of Steubenville.
Image by Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret, public domain. Image cropped.
