Communication is a need and ability simultaneously. Knowledge, understanding, creativity and love are four needs/abilities of any human. These are not steps or stages, but four dimensions. They intermingled. There are some scenarios, more or less typical, for the relations between these dimensions, and these scenarios may constitute 98 percents of human behaviour. But the other 2 percents are most interesting, because they make every human special. Someone is more advanced in understanding than knowledge, someone never created anything but loves everything and anyone, at least during different periods of one’s own life.
All four processes are essentially communicative. They can be practiced in solitariness, but their goal is to share with others. This differs knowledge, understanding, creativity and love from safety, satiety, happiness and joy.
Freedom appears here as a possible fifth element of humanness. Freedom has a communicative nature also, it can be understood only as a relation between participants of life. Still, freedom is neither a need not an ability, it is just a condition for life, not a life itself.
Freedom is something closely connected with curiosity, with the abolity (and need) to investigate, to search «something» without preliminary knowledge and/or understating of what constitutes this something. Person iniates a quest for something foggy, may be something which doesn’t exist, which is only a supposition.
Robert Sheckley wrote a great story «As a Foolish Question» (1953) about strange artefact constructed by an advance civilisation. The object knew everything. It was called Answerer, but practically it could give any answer because all questions were but in a wrong way. «Answerer knew. But he had to be asked the proper questions first. … The proper questions. The race which built Answerer should have taken that into account, Answerer thought. They should have made some allowance for semantic nonsense, allowed him to attempt an unravelling.»
It comes out that all humans assumptions are wrong. All their questions are silly, based on anthropomorphisms and only partial knowledge. As one of the heroes put it:
«Suppose you were to ask, 'Why was I born under the constellation Scorpio, in conjunction with Saturn?' I would be unable to answer your question in terms of the zodiac, because the zodiac has nothing to do with it."
Communication is based on the freedom of being wrong, uneducated, autistic, superstitious etc. Progress is always possible, but there is no visible end and there is very strong feeling of endlessness of being.
22 november 2023