Understanding Others

How to Actually Know Another Person

Think of the person you know best in the world.

Now ask yourself what that knowledge is made of. It is not their address, their job title, their favorite restaurant. You could feed all of that into a database and you still wouldn’t know them in the sense you mean. What is the truly-know-them knowledge?

I want to argue in this post that the thing you have, when you know someone deeply, is a working grasp of their philosophy — the picture of the world they’re actually living inside. And that the work of understanding other people, especially people you disagree with, is harder and more important than we usually admit. Let me show you why.

The Paid Friend

Imagine a friend who behaves exactly like a real friend in every external respect. They remember your birthday. They listen when you talk. They show up when you need them. They laugh at your jokes. They tear up at the same movies. From the outside, an observer could not tell the difference between this person and your closest friend.

Then you find out they’re being paid to do it.

Almost everyone has the same reaction here: something essential has just been destroyed. The behavior is identical; the value has collapsed. Why?

Robert Nozick asked a related question in 1974. He proposed an experience machine that could give you any subjective experience you wanted — perfect simulations of a happy marriage, a successful career, deep friendships, profound spiritual experiences. The catch is that none of it is real; you would be floating in a tank with electrodes in your head. Would you plug in?

Most people say no, and what Nozick draws out from that “no” is huge. We don’t actually want the feeling of friendship, or the feeling of love, or the feeling of a life well lived. We want the things themselves. We want our friends to actually be friends. We want our spouses to actually love us. We want our work to matter in fact, not just to feel meaningful. This is a deep claim about human beings: we are oriented toward reality, not just toward experience.

And here is what this means for our question. If what we want from another person is a real relationship with a real them, then we need to actually know who they are. Not their behavior, not the things they do that please us — them. Their interior. The way the world looks from where they are standing.

The Principle of Charity

How do you do that? How do you know the interior of another person whose behavior, in some cases, makes no sense to you at all?

There is a name for the move, and most people don’t know it. Donald Davidson and W. V. O. Quine called it the principle of charity. The idea: when you are trying to interpret another person, you should attribute to them the most coherent, rational set of beliefs and desires that makes sense of what they are doing. If their behavior looks crazy, that probably means you are missing something they know — not that they are crazy.

A small example. You see someone walking out into the rain without an umbrella, smiling. You could conclude they are irrational. Or you could ask: what would make this make sense? Maybe they love rain. Maybe they just got engaged. Maybe their drought-ruined garden is finally getting water. The principle of charity says: start with the assumption that there is a reason, and then go looking for it.

Now turn this up. In the video I walk through the practice of sati in traditional Hinduism — a widow burning herself on her husband’s pyre. From the outside it looks like horror, and we want to say so immediately. But charity asks us to slow down. The Hindu cosmology around the practice is real and internally coherent: the goal of life is moksha, release from the cycle of reincarnation; karma and ritual purity matter intensely; the bond of marriage was understood as carrying through death. Within that picture, sati is not random cruelty. It is the dedicated act of a person trying to escape a metaphysical trap.

Notice what charity does and does not do here. It makes the action intelligible. It does not make it right. The British eventually banned the practice in 1829.

The Night Road

Charity also matters for a smaller case I want to think about carefully.

Picture this. You are walking along a dark road at night. There is someone walking next to you. A car comes up behind you with its headlights off, moving fast. The person beside you shoves you hard, you fall to the side of the road, and she takes the impact instead. She dies. You live.

How do you feel about this person?

Most of us would call her a hero. We’d write her name in our prayers. We’d thank her family. The action is identical to heroism, and the cost was the highest a person can pay.

Now suppose you found out, somehow, that she was actually trying to push you into the other lane — where a second car was passing — and she simply wasn’t strong enough. She died because she failed to murder you.

Same action. Same outcome. Completely different moral status.

This is one of the cleanest illustrations in philosophy of why pure consequentialism — judging actions only by their results — cannot be the whole story. Immanuel Kant put the principle starkly at the opening of his Groundwork: nothing in the world, or even outside of it, can be called good without qualification except a good will. The shape of the act, considered apart from the will behind it, does not fix what kind of act it is.

This is also why understanding people requires getting at their intentions, not just their behavior. You cannot read a person’s morality off their movements. You have to know what they were trying to do. Which means you have to know how they saw the situation — what they wanted, what they believed, what they were aiming at. You have to know their philosophy.

The Christian Picture

I want to take this one step further, because I think the Christian tradition has more to say here than is usually credited.

The central claim of the Christian faith is not that God explained things from a distance. It is that God indwelt a human life — that the eternal Word became flesh and lived among us. The Incarnation is the strongest possible statement that understanding others, on the model God himself uses, requires actually entering their situation. Not analyzing it from outside. Not pitying it from above. Living it from within.

When Jesus tells his followers to love their neighbors as themselves, he is not asking for generic well-wishing. The neighbor in the parable he tells — the Samaritan story — is a specific person bleeding on a specific road, and the man who loves him does so by stopping, looking, kneeling, and paying attention to this injured person and what this person needs. Loving your neighbor presupposes knowing your neighbor well enough to love them as the particular human being they are. The priest and the Levite in the parable are not condemned for hating the wounded man. They are condemned for not stopping long enough to see him.

This is, I think, the deepest reason philosophy matters. Not because it is clever, not because it builds careers, but because the work of understanding another person from the inside is something close to the work of love. And you cannot do it without the patient, careful, charitable, attentive disciplines that philosophy at its best is trying to teach.