Communication is like a dance in that it requires participation from both parties involved: the audience and the speaker, writer, artist, etc. In a dance between partners — in fact, in many, if not most partnered activities — one generally leads. Partners may be equal in value to the activity and equally necessary to the carrying out of that activity, as just because one person leads in the tango does not mean the tango can be performed solo, but the equality of this kind of worth does not translate to homogeneity of roles. Picture, if you will, a two-man saw. Both men are necessary to effectively operate the saw, but equally important is the need for each man to hold his own handle. The saw does not work if both men try to play the same part. Opponent process theory also broadly speaks to the manner in which such functions often operate.

How might communication be the same as these? Clearly, the audience and speaker do not play the same role. Even if, in the case of conversation, the roles switch back and forth, communication degenerates into senseless noise if both parties speak at once and collapses into silence if both parties insist upon listening only. Consider the frustrations caused by delays in speech due to things like latency in a video call. Temporal shifts distort the rhythm of conversation and confuse the transferring of roles. This problem is compounded with an increase in participants. The fluctuation of roles, therefore, is not equivalent to their eradication, as it is apparent that the eradication of such roles leads to the eradication of communication entirely.

We arrive at perhaps the most critical distinction of communication at the question of whether or not it does indeed ‘take two to tango.’ Is the audience necessary to the process, or can the speaker achieve the same effect by shouting into a vacuum? Is the artist without a patron an artist at all? What if the speaker fundamentally makes no difference to the audience? If the audience must divine meaning from the words of the speaker, is that process any different than one creating meaning in solitude?

In order to begin answering these questions, it may be useful to begin with an establishment of the purpose of communication. In strictly utilitarian terms, we might say that communication merely refers to the phenomenon of traveling information. More fundamentally, I think, communication is the means by which meaning can move from one consciousness to another. Animals communicate by much simpler means than humans as a reflection of what is, as far as we can tell, a much lower form of consciousness. Wolves do not howl abstractions, crows do not caw elaborate treatises, and whales do not bellow rambling blog posts on the nature of their own bellowing. That is because, presumably, one cannot communicate beyond one’s capacity for thought, though the reverse is apparent in the phenomenon of difficulty of expression. So, communication evidently follows cognition.

Regarding human beings, each person is separated by consciousness. This is partially instantiated in the classical conception of the soul as an essence walled in by the body. Each person only sees through his own eyes, hears through his own ears, and thinks his own thoughts. We are each a mind apart, a world of experience suspended upon and contained within an island. This is as true physiologically as in any other sense. The nervous system is a closed one, receiving only the sensory information of its own organs and no others. So does the same isolation apply to meaning? Are our own worlds of experience self-existent and independent?

Enter the word. Classical and later Christian thought conflate written and spoken speech with meaning itself in the concept of logos. Plato seemed to place the logos antecedent to experience, regarding the input of the senses as a shadow, a descriptor of divine truth rather than vice versa. The Word of God, to extend the thought to the Christian sense, is not only a vehicle that conveys meaning, but one that creates it. Human speech is capable of attaining in some capacity to God’s speech, though only in a limited sense, and therefore the Word of God, manifested as scripture, creation, and the Christ, serves as the measure of worth for human speech. Natural, moral, and spiritual truth are created by God and then striven for by Man. In this framework, the goal of communication to move limited human conceptions across the oceanic gulf between island consciousnesses is colored distinctly by the super-ordinate metric of the divinely-ordained truth to which those ideas should aspire. That is, the purpose of ideas is to attain to the logos, to objective reality, and this fact is then reflected in communication. Meaning is real, even more than the material.

The power of the logos is appropriated by mankind in relativistic thought. When meaning is considered entirely an invention of the mind rather than a discovery, the possibility of traversing the gulf of consciousness is nullified. In terms of human speech, if the meaning of words in my mind cannot be discerned by any means to be the same meaning found in your mind, then the transfer of meaning is rendered impossible. You are the god of your own logos and I of mine. Heraclitus described the realm of sleep, the world of dreams, in all their surreality and nonsense, in a similar manner. Relativism elevates sleep over wakefulness in a profound sense, portrays darkness as light and blindness as sight. If the purpose of thought is to construct meaning, then the purpose of communicating is entirely self-centered. The only audience worth speaking to is oneself and the only speaker worth hearing is the same. This makes each man a mutually exclusive overlord of his own domain.

In this view, neither party is necessary for “communication,” as communication does not actually occur, in a sense, is not actually real. Any idea one may think one has received from another is merely a construction of one’s own mind. The idea is not rooted in anything outside the self, and thus all other selves are necessarily inconsequential. If reality follows perception, then ideas dictate truth rather than partake of it. This view is shown to be incoherent by the material world. My favorite metaphor for this fact is the phenomenon of being struck in the back of the head. If one is knocked out by a sudden and unexpected blow, we see consciousness defeated, stripped from the person by a force entirely beyond his perception. Consciousness is plainly seen to be subordinate to the external world.

How does all of this ultimately relate to the initial question? In my estimation, it seems apparent that communication is capable of and meant for conveying truth that transcends the self, which means that one is capable of saying something real. Interpretation by the listener, then, is not a no-holds-barred game of construing any conceivable meaning from the speaker’s words. The listener is capable of misunderstanding, of being objectively wrong about what is said, and so the goal of interpreting is to discover meaning more than create it. Evidently, the human word is not the divine Word, so this is not to say that the listener cannot at all contribute to the meaning of a mere mortal’s speech. Not all interpretations are equal, but no one man has the divine logos all contained within himself. The objectivity of reality does not negate the reality of isolated, individual experience. Both have their places. The subordinance of perception to reality means that it is also possible to objectively describe one’s perception and, by extension, for another to understand that perception correctly or incorrectly.

My point, in the end, is that both parties are necessary for communication. We strive to see the truth in greater detail by looking through one another’s eyes. The artist who hides away all his work is depriving himself of the true nature of artistic endeavor and consequently depriving his potential audience of the same. The madman is the one who speaks only to himself. We do not create art or sing songs or give speeches purely for our own sake, but for the sake of the truth. If each consciousness is indeed an island, the tide affects them all. We inhabit one sea, one sphere of nature distilled to tiny drops that minds can contain. The metaphor of the blind men touching an elephant is bafflingly popular among some who wish to decry the notion that objective truth is knowable. Each blind man may only perceive a small part, but their perception does not negate the real presence of an elephant before them. In the metaphor, it is the man that sees who, like Christ, embodies the logos, who reveals by the power of speech the objective truth to those groping in the dark for reality.

So dance, but find a partner first. Find beauty and the riches of experience sailing the vast sea between us all. The words that don’t reach the listener may achieve little or nothing, but that’s no reason for the audience to surrender to meaninglessness, nor for the speaker to stop striving. Without the struggle, communication would not be an adventure. This post is hardly comprehensive regarding my thoughts on this topic, particularly with respect to the phenomena that cause failure in communication, but I hope it represents an effective beginning to their articulation.