We can’t even agree on what’s real! (But we can still do this)

Many heated conversations—about everyday topics like medical information and about big topics like foreign policy—seem to wind up challenging our basic understandings of what’s true.

It can feel deeply disturbing to be in a conversation where what seem like basic facts about reality are in question!

In his book Nonduality, philosopher David Loy explains what happened when European thinkers like Jacques Derrida ran into this problem. They discovered that the truth of words and their meanings seems to always rest on the truth of further words and their meanings. It just goes on and on endlessly.

Derrida decided that apparent meaning wasn’t really there. Meaning just depends on other meanings. An idea, when deconstructed, would just lead to other ideas. None of it meant anything definite or universal. Loy calls the result a “free play of discourse.”

That sounds a lot like being on social media today! It can be a frustrating game of continual misunderstandings and endless conflicts about what things mean and what’s true, without much hope of arriving at solid agreement. Have you experienced an interaction like that?

Is everything really meaningless?

We may feel ready to throw up our hands and agree that everything is really meaningless. But that comes with some huge costs.

Luckily, it’s not our only option. There are more interesting ways to address the problem of different ideas about meaning and truth.

One elegant solution comes from the Tibetan scholar and philosopher Tsongkhapa Losang Drakpa. He arrived at a similar conclusion to Derrida that meaning doesn’t rest on anything solid or inherent.

But he never gave up on the possibility of shared understanding and experiences. He didn’t accept that everything is equally true (or equally false).

Instead he saw a highly sophisticated solution that can be over-simplified to say that things don’t need to rest on any stable meaning in order to work.

What we need is conventional agreements based on functions. What makes a cup of coffee different from a drawing of a cup of coffee? You can’t drink a drawing. The two have different functions. Focusing on functions can turn an endlessly abstract conversation and debate about meaning into a practical chat.

How would that work?

There’s an easy way to apply this idea in your life the next time someone says something you don’t understand. Move from discussions about what words mean to asking about functions. Ask, “How would that work?” Asking people to describe how their ideas function can get them to reduce over-confidence and tone down extreme beliefs.

Dialogue

Physicist David Bohm, in his book On Dialogue, offered a very different approach. Rather than moving into the practical implications of ideas, he advocated people sitting together until they arrived at “coherence”—a real understanding of one another.

Bohm felt that what was needed was a process to seek real understanding together. This would take a tricky shift. It meant not trying to win and not being stuck on your own thoughts and beliefs. Instead you had to be genuinely happy when errors in your logic were pointed out because everyone benefits when they move together toward clearer understanding.

A dialogue process as described by Bohm is based on acknowledging and questioning assumptions.

Where did our beliefs come from and why are we so identified with them? Maybe we didn’t even come up with them. They might be our understanding (or misunderstanding) or someone else’s positions and arguments. Are these serving us today?

To explore this, people sit together in a small group with no agenda, no leader, and no specific goals. They’re not trying to be persuasive. They’re not agreeing or disagreeing with anything said. The group is simply considering what each opinion means, while suspending further judgments.

What is a judgment?

How much of your day would you say is spent evaluating others—what they wear, what they say, how they work?

To be clear, the judgments we’re talking about aren’t the basic predictions and categorizations that your brain seems to be making all the time.

We’re talking about conscious comparisons you make against what you think is normal or acceptable. We’re often looking to see how someone stacks up against where they “should” be. We regularly do the same to ourselves.

What Bohm proposed was that a group would temporarily suspend all of these stories they had about how things “should” be. Without their evaluations, they would have more space to just listen to each other.

They would be participating, together, in coming to a shared sense of meaning—while still recognizing each of the distinct starting places and ideas among group members.

According to Bohm, this isn’t easy. People have to pay attention to even notice when a judgment or assumption is present. Then it takes willingness to participate in the dialogue process to leave that assumption to the side and keep listening.

Bohm readily acknowledged that this could be frustrating and may not work if conditions like trust within the group were lacking. It isn’t always going to be practical, but in the right circumstances, such a dialogue could be richly rewarding.

Many organizations are continuing similar types of dialogue work today. It’s happening online and in the real world. One major coalition of groups promoting these skills and spaces for richer conversations to happen is the Listen First Project, currently with over 550 member organizations!

A version of this post originally appeared on our blog on Psychology Today. Get our free tips for better conflicts and disagreements.