The Bakhtinian revolution and the i-other relation

1 Introduction: “I am a philosopher”

In his conversations of 1973 with Viktor Duvakin, Bakhtin declares, “I am a philosopher” (Bakhtin, 2002; It. trans.: 120). This statement finds confirmation in his programmatic essay of the early 1920s, “K filosofii postupka”.^[1] But most interesting is the fact that the perspective Bakhtin elected for his philosophical reflections was the language of literature. And why did he make this move? Because literary language operates a shift in the point of view of discourse, namely from the self to the other, from identity to alterity. In Bakhtin’s view this shift was the condition for the aesthetic capacity and worldview of literature and language, and with it the ethical capacity.

This perspective led to misunderstandings concerning Bakhtin’s identity, which was neither a profession, nor a job, an occupation, but what we could call a “craft”: the “craft of the philosopher”. Bakhtin has most often been characterized as a literary critic or a literary theorist. But the interdisciplinary range of Bakhtin’s reflections, even when he is relegated to literary criticism or literary theory, is determined by the fact that his theory is orientated philosophically.

In light of a philosophical preference and from his very first writings, Bakhtin places himself, his standpoint and perspective, inside literature and never moves away from it. Literary writing provided him with the observatory he needed. From this observation post he was able to conduct his anti-systemic and detotalizing critique, thereby revealing the internal threads that connect literature to the extra-literary, and underlining therefore the structural intertextuality that subtends the interconnection between literary texts and extra-literary texts. For Bakhtin the literary text subsists and develops in its specificity as a literary text thanks to its involvement, in an ethical sense as well, with the outside universe.

2 Unindifference, responsibility, singularity: Bakhtin’s vision of literary language

“Iskusstvo i otvetstvennost´” [Art and answerability] is the title of the first text ever that we know of published by Bakhtin, in 1919. In it he proposes the main theme pervading all his work, from his 1929 monograph on Dostoevsky through to his most recent writings of the 1970s. The 1919 text is closely connected to Bakhtin’s two manuscripts from the early 1920s, but published only in the Russian original as late as 1986, posthumously, in a volume edited by Sergej. G. Bočarov: the first, “K filosofii postupka” [For the philosophy of the responsible act] (thus titled by the editor); and the second, “Autor i geroj v esteteskoj tvorčestva” [Author and hero in aesthetic activity].

These writings share a common theme, the need to overcome division between two worlds that seem impenetrable, the life world and the world of culture. But as Augusto Ponzio (2014: 3–5) underlines (in his introduction to the Russian/Italian bilingual volume he recently edited collecting these and other writings by Bakhtin and his circle from the years 1919–1929), we are always in the first, the world of life, even when we cognize, contemplate and create, even when we construct worlds that elect as their object the life we lead, to consider it from a given cultural perspective. These two worlds, the life world and the cultural world, are united by the unique event of the act in which is decided each single individual’s standpoints and choices.

The latter are charged with a double sense of responsibility: that relative to the objective unity of a given cultural sphere, what Bakhtin denominates “special responsibility” or “technical responsibility”, and that concerning the unique, singular event-ness of the act (sobytijnost’), which Bakhtin calls “moral responsibility”. So, on the one hand, we have “special responsibility”, which is relative to a given role, a given function, and which as such is delimited, defined, and referred to the repeatable identity of the objective and interchangeable individual; on the other hand, we have “moral responsibility”, an “absolute responsibility”, without delimitations, without the guarantees offered by a given order, without alibis and which alone, as responsibility that cannot be deferred to others, responsibility without the possibility of exemption, derogation, is responsibility that invests the single individual and renders his act unique, unrepeatable (in Ponzio, 2014: 37–39).

In Bakhtin’s view, the connection between culture and life, between cultural consciousness and consciousness of the unique single individual is given by the unindifference of the responsible act. In the absence of a connection with life, cultural, cognitive, scientific, aesthetic, and political values become values in themselves and lose all possibility of verification, sense, transformation. This problematic is addressed in “K filosofii postupka”, but was already outlined in 1919 with “Iskusstvo i otvetstvennost´”specifically in relation to artistic activity.

Bakhtin studies the question of how to describe the uniqueness and unity of a world that is not abstractly “systematic”, but concretely “architectonic” in valuational and spatio-temporal terms, beginning from the unique place that each single individual occupies, without being replaceable, in one’s responsibility without alibis, as a participative and unindifferent center (in Ponzio, 2014: 47–49, 113–117). Bakhtin uses the word “edinstvennji”: singular, unique, unrepeatable, exceptional, uncomparable, sui generis, corresponding to the German “einzig”.

It is not possible to describe this architectonics, which is made of special values and a space-time specific to each single individual, from an objective, detached, abstract, that is, theoretistic standpoint. Such a standpoint is not emotionally and valuationally participative, therefore it is indifferent, incapable of listening and responsive understanding. In fact, this non-participative point of view ends up in oversimplification, impoverishment, and mystification. Nor can understanding be based on empathy, which too would be an impoverishment insofar as it reduces the relation between two mutually external and non-interchangeable positions to a single vision. On Bakhtin’s account, interpretation-understanding of the unique single individual presupposes a viewpoint that is external, extralocalized, exotopic, other, different, and at once unindifferent to the other, participative, responsive to the otherness of the other.

According to this description there emerge two centers of value, that of the I and that of the other, “the two centers of value of life itself” around which the architectonics of responsibility is constituted. These two centers of value must necessarily remain mutually other, if the architectonic relation of two others is to continue on the spatio-temporal and axiological levels.

In “K philosophii postupka” Bakhtin sees the possibility of reaching such a vision in art, specifically verbal art, in literature. The architectonics of the literary vision is organized around that center of value that is the single human being in its uniqueness, unreplaceability, precariousness, mortality, in relation to which expressions like “before”, “after”, “still”, “when”, “never”, “late”, “in the end”, “already”, “necessary”, “due”, “beyond”, “near”, “distant” lose their abstract meaning and are charged – in terms of the emotional-volitional tone of this participative center – with a concrete sense at each occurrence (in Ponzio, 2014: 131–135).

Only in the relationship between author and hero in literary writing does Bakhtin find what he is searching for à propos the relationship between the singularity of the unique single individual and a viewpoint capable of understanding and responding participatively: literary writing establishes a relationship that maintains otherness as the center of value which, in turn, is considered as “transgredient”, extralocalized, exotopic, unique, and other. To explain all this, Bakhtin examines a specific artwork, namely, a poem by Puškin titled (but not by the author) “Razluka” [Parting] (in Ponzio, 2014: 177–181).

3 Consciousness, dialogism, otherness in the chronotope of literature

The subsequent course of Bakhtin’s research begins from this point onward. Having found the possibility of describing the singularity of each single individual in the viewpoint of literature, Bakhtin dedicated his studies to this viewpoint so that what was simply intended as an example, ended up holding his attention for the rest of his life.

Bakhtin focused on the novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky and was convinced that this great writer, the master of polyphony, of dialogical polyphony, could be adequately understood only with the instruments of a methodics of literature, of literary writing that was oriented in the sense described above. In Bakhtin’s view, Dostoevsky’s contribution goes well beyond the sphere of literature and art in general. It consists in the fact that polyphonic artistic thought at last evidences certain aspects of the human that until then had been inaccessible, above all human consciousness and the dialogical sphere of existence. These are completely beyond the reach of monological thought.

We are alluding here to consciousness as voice, as external and internal sign, as interior dialogue, as response, as a double-voiced word. Consciousness thus described, this double-voiced word reveals itself in the relationship with the consciousness of others, with respect to which it manifests its own otherness. This is the word understood as total expression, as ideology, as vision of the world, as expression of one’s own otherness, which is never defined and determined once and for all, which remains unfinalized, unclassifiable, outside and beyond all reified determinacy.

Dialogism, depicted by Dostoevsky’s polyphonic novel, consists in the fact that one’s own word alludes always and in spite of itself, whether it knows it or not, to the word of the other. There is no such thing as a word-judgment, a word on the object, an objectual word that is not a word-allocution, that is to say, a word that enters into dialogical contact with the other word, a word on the word and turned to the word. Consciousness of self is reached and always perceives this self on the background of the consciousness that another has of it, “I-for-myself” on the background of “I-for-the-other” (in Ponzio, 2014: 128–129).

Dialogism operates in the single voice, in the single utterance, emerging in the form of interference among contradictory voices, present in every “atom” of this utterance, in the most subtle structural elements of discourse, therefore of consciousness (Ponzio, 2014: 1269–1275). In Dostoevsky’s artwork the narrator does not remain external to the personage, as a third non-participant in dialogue. If, on the other hand, the narrator were to remain outside, in the polyphony of voices, it would result as a voice capable of withdrawing from dialogue. But by experimenting with polyphony in his novels, Dostoevsky shows that to withdraw and take a neutral stand is not possible for any voice whatsoever, including that of the author or the narrator.

Dostoevsky’s work identifies a space-time, a chronotope that withdraws from a totalizing vision, from ontology, from the jurisdiction of history. This chronotope acknowledges the single individual with a sense outside the commonplaces of discourse, outside the accommodation of history; the single individual with a sense in himself, given his unique responsibility, which cannot be revoked, or deferred, which concerns his existence in relationships, beginning from self and not from an external objectivizing point of view. Such is literary space-time, the “literary chronotope”, precisely.

Bakhtin is fully aware of the power of innovation that identification of this particular chronotope offers, not only for the novel or artistic production generally, but also for the theoretical-practical conception of the human being. Bakhtin underlines how Dostoevsky’s polyphonic novel recovers otherness in the perception and understanding of man and the world; and how as a consequence, by comparison to monological approaches, Dostoevsky’s polyphonic novel operates a sort of “Copernican revolution” (Ponzio, 2014: 1135).

In his early essay of 1920–24 on the “Author and hero in aesthetic activity”, Bakhtin states clearly that: “Ethical and aesthetical objectification requires a powerful point d’appui outside itself; it requires some genuine source or real strength out of which I would be capable of seeing myself as another” (Bakhtin, 1986: 31). As anticipated above, for Bakhtin this shift in perspective, that is, from the I to the other, from identity to alterity means to get free of the theoretistic orientation that, at the time, dominated philosophy and the human sciences. This shift in the center of value from the self to the other characterizes the architectonics of Bakhtin’s thought system, provoking a movement that was no less than revolutionary, such that we may speak of the “Bakhtinian revolution” (Ponzio, 1997; Petrilli, 2012: 195–200), a movement and an expression that is of central importance for a full understanding of the work of Bakhtin and his Circle (see Ponzio, 2013).

The revolution achieved by Bakhtin and his collaborators is effectively no less than a “Copernican revolution”, one that has overturned our phenomenological references altogether. With respect to the phenomenology of life and human relationships, we in fact know that Bakhtin shifted the general perspective from the axis of identity to that of alterity, from the I to the other. The implications of such a shift are enormous and concern no less than the overall orientation of Western philosophy, indeed of Western culture generally. Similarly to another great philosopher from the twentieth century, Emmanuel Levinas (a Lithuanian living in France), for Bakhtin too the problem of otherness is pivotal in the architectonics of his thought system, in his vision of life and human relationships. Both Bakhtin and Levinas interrogate dominant philosophical trends, values, and worldviews in the light of otherness logic; both have contributed substantially to the critique of identity, such that given the affinity these authors can be read together (see Ponzio, 1994, 2015).

The “philosophy of literature” where “of literature” is understood as a subject genitive, that is, philosophy structural to literature, the philosophical vision characteristic of literature – is what renders the Bakhtinian revolution conceivable. The language of literature converges with an exotopic vision of life. Bakhtin’s studies of the human capacity for exotopy (synonyms include extralocality, extralocalization) and its conditions of possibility by comparison with a worldview orientated by the logic of identity, or better the “ideo-logic” of identity, are in effect no less than revolutionary. The capacity for exotopy calls for a different type of logic, the logic of otherness, precisely, by comparison to mainstream logic, the logic of identity (see Ponzio, 1993; Petrilli, 2016).

This new vision of the world as thematized by Bakhtin and staged by the language of literature inaugurates the possibility of a “critique of dialogic reason”, where the expression “of dialogic reason” alludes to the capacity for critique inherent in dialogic reason, made possible thanks to dialogism (see Ponzio, 2007, 2012). Only on the basis of a critique oriented by dialogical reason is it possible to recover the multiplicity of voices in dialogue, including the multiplicity of voices resounding in a single voice, and obtain polyphonic dialectics that, as such, can no longer be reduced to the condition of monologism, univocality and closed identity. Truly dialectical reason is dialogical reason. The word itself is polyphonic; as such it is an internally dialogized word.

Bakhtin's critique of dialogic reason is developed on the basis of his thematization of the logic of otherness, where dialogue is not the result of initiative taken by an I. Dialogue, as understood by Bakhtin, does not ensue from a subject's decision to open to the other. On the contrary, dialogue alludes to the fact that to close to the other, to shut out the other is impossible, that the other cannot be ignored, that involvement with the other in one form or another cannot be avoided, even if only to reject the other. In spite of any attempts by the I at withdrawal, involvement with the other is inevitable. The I is dialogical in spite of itself, not as the result of a kind concession towards the other, but as passive involvement with the other, in the word of the other (Ponzio, 2006a, 2006b).

Interpreted in such terms dialogue is not a prerogative of the human universe, but a limit, an obstacle to its definition and finalization, to the possibility of recomposing the identical. Thus described, dialogue cannot be reduced to a formal exchange of rejoinders among interlocutors, even less so can it be considered as a quality of the personality. Not only: all attempts at closing and separation – that inevitably occur in the word whether in the form of internal or external discourse – are vain; for the word is constitutively other with respect to the I, to the subject. The word is already inhabited by the other, by the word of others, by the intention of others, by the sense of others. The word is always semi-other, as Bakhtin says. The word is always the home of the other words that it contains; the word always speaks of other words. Moreover, the word arises in the relation among bodies; as such it flourishes in the condition of intercorporeality. As Bakhtin says in “From Notes Made in 1970–71”: “Everything that concerns me enters my consciousness, beginning with my name, from the external world through the lips of others (my mother, and so forth), with their intonation, in their emotive tonality based on values. I become aware of myself, at first, through others” (Bakhtin, 1986: 138).

The word is dialogical in this sense above all, that is, it is the place of interference among manifold voices: dialogism, substantial dialogism is interference of sense, intentions and intonations whether in a single voice or in the many, in spite of the subject’s claims to rendering the word one’s “own word”, of being master of one’s own word, of guaranteeing the intentions of one’s own word – “on my word”, “my word of honor”, “I give you my word”, “to put out the word”, etc. In reality, there is no such thing as a word that is not oriented towards the other, that does not enter into dialogical contact with the other, the word is a word on the word, a word turned to the other. It ensues that consciousness of self is achieved in the relation with the consciousness that another has of one self’s own consciousness, just like the child who comes to the world for the first time. In Bakhtin’s words from “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity”: “The child begins to see himself for the first time as if through his mother’s eyes, and begins to speak about himself in his mother’s emotional-volitional tones – he caresses himself, as it were, with his first uttered self-expression” (Bakhtin, 1979; Eng. trans.: 50).

4 Otherness, intercorporeity, utterance

Correlated to thematization of the logic of otherness is Bakhtin’s critique throughout the whole course of his writings of monologism and appreciation of dialogism, where we know that by the latter is understood something completely different from the mere formal exchange of rejoinders among two or more interlocutors. In fact, a synonym for “dialogism” as understood by Bakhtin, that is to say, “substantial dialogism”, is “intercorporeity”. Dialogism understood as intercorporeity alludes to the condition of inevitable interconnection and interdependency with the other, a condition that characterizes human life, indeed life generally. But the point we wish to underline here is that dialogism understood as intercorporeity alludes to the fact that identity can only ever be reached in the relation with the other.

In the architectonics of Bakhtin’s thought system dialogism, otherness, and the body are inexorably interconnected. Bakhtinian dialogism converges with the semiotic materiality of otherness, it consists in the irreducible materiality of otherness in which human subjectivity takes shape and develops (Petrilli, 2010: 137–158). Dialogical involvement with the other is intercorporeal involvement: the I must respond to the other, must answer to the other, for the place that he occupies in the world physically, materially, a place that nobody else can occupy. This place is the perspective that the I speaks from, and from which alone can he have a voice. Subjectivity develops in the relation among signs not as disincarnated consciousness, but as bodily material, in the situation of intercorporeality, as a body that remembers its constitutive polyphonic intercorporeality far beyond the limits of memory, classifications, and definitions, not only on the biological level, but also the historico-social, outside the division of parts, outside roles, outside codes and communicative intentionality, independently from moral imperatives, standpoints, or initiatives taken by the subject.

According to Bakhtin words in live communication are utterances, vital and flourishing expressions, altogether different from dead sentences in the system of language, as thematized by linguists. Words are voices and are incarnate. Dialogue is an encounter among voices and not among abstract ideas, among different voices in the same utterance, a multi-voiced utterance, in the same thought, the same intention, the same consciousness, the same self.

In dialogue the voice, the word is strongly oriented, intonated, accentuated; the voice in dialogue expresses a point of view, or different points of view, an evaluation, or different evaluations. Logic in Dostoevsky’s polyphonic novel is dia-logic, because ideas are incarnated in the voice, in different voices, voices that are not indifferent to each other in spite of all attempts at ignoring the multiplicity of voices in which difference is constituted. As clearly emerges from Bakhtin’s analyses in Problems of Dostoevsky’s poetics, Dostoevsky never gives up the voice, so that to maintain that his dialogues are dialectical is a mistake (Bakhtin, 1963, Eng. trans.: 251–261). It is impossible to get free of the physical presence of the other, just as it is impossible not to feel the absence of the other. According to Bakhtin, the voice, its incarnation, the body is what distinguishes dialogue in Dostoevsky from dialogue in Plato. On this account, included in the 1963 edition of his original 1929 monograph on Dostoevsky, we find the following statement formulated to effect by Bakhtin in his 1929 “Fragments”, precisely from the section titled “From the chapter ‘Dialogue in Dostoevsky’”^[2]:

Everywhere there is an intersection, consonance, or interruption of rejoinders in the open dialogue by rejoinders in the heroes’ internal dialogues. Everywhere a specific sum total of ideas, thoughts, and words is passed through several unmerged voices, sounding differently in each. The object of authorial intentions is certainly not this sum total of ideas in itself, as something neutral and identical to itself. No, the object of intentions is precisely the passing of a theme through many and various voices, its rigorous and, so to speak, irrevocable multi-voicedness and varivoicedness. The very distribution of voices and their interaction is what matters to Dostoevsky.

The idea in Dostoevsky in never cut off from the voice. For this reason it is radically wrong to claim that Dostoevsky’s dialogues are dialectical. […] It is not the idea as a monologic deduction, even if dialectical, but the event of an interaction of voices that is the ultimate given for Dostoevsky.

This is what distinguishes Dostoevsky’s dialogue from Platonic dialogue. In the latter, while it is not a thoroughly monologized pedagogical dialogue, all the same the multiplicity of voices is extinguished in the idea. The idea is conceived by Plato not as an event, but as existence. (Bakhtin, “Fragment 1929” in Bakhtin, 1963, Eng. trans.: 278–279)

In “From notes made in 1970–71”, Bakhtin delineates the process that leads from concrete dialogue without synthesis to abstract dialectics, attributing a fundamental role to the voice in his distinction between dialogue and dialectics:

Dialogue and dialectics. Take a dialogue and remove the voices (the partitioning of voices), remove the (personalistic-emotional) intonations, draw abstract concepts and judgments from live words and responses, cram everything into a single abstract consciousness–and that’s how you get dialectics. (Bakhtin, 1986: 147)

Indifference as it characterizes abstract differentiation is replaced by unindifference of the responsible act, of answering to someone for something, of exposure without alibis to the other.

To repeat then: dialogue as thematized by Bakhtin is inevitably associated with the body, it implies encounter among bodies, among singularities, between the other as other and one’s own I, described as the “naked I”, intercorporeity. The allusion here is to encounter among alterities before and after the restrictions of definition or social identity, which invests both the I and the other – whether family, social class, profession – with “concrete flesh”. In Bakhtin’s own words from the 1929 “Fragments” cited above:

The “man with man” dialogue analyzed by us is a highly interesting sociological document. An exceptionally keen sense of the other person as another and of one’s I as a naked I presupposes that all those definitions which clothe the I and the other in socially concrete flesh – family, social and economic class definitions – and all variants on these definitions, have lost their authoritativeness and the form-shaping force. A person, as it were, senses himself in the world as a whole, without any intervening stages, apart from any social collective to which he might belong. (Bakhtin, 1929, Eng. trans. 280)

Dialogue and intercorporeity. Bakhtin analyzes intercorporeity keeping account of Rabelais. Dostoevsky and Rabelais united in a single voice, Bakhtin’s. In The Life of Garantua and Pantagruel, by François Rabelais, the body is portrayed as a grotesque body – a body that is not mystified by an individualistic vision, that is not isolated or reduced to a silhouette, that is not defined and delimited by spatial and temporal boundaries. The body as depicted by Rabelais and theorized by Bakhtin (Rable v istorii realizma [Rabelais in the history of realism] was the original title of his monograph, presented as his doctoral dissertation) is the body as experienced by popular culture across the world. This is the grotesque body, the dialogic body that subtends the tip of an iceberg represented by a limited and egotistic vision of the body imposed upon us by contemporaneity.

The most effective image of the dialogic body is in fact the grotesque body. Dialogue and the body in Bakhtin are closely interrelated. The grotesque body is the image that best portrays the dialogical body, which is why it appears in the novel and notably in Dostoevsky's polyphonic novel: “Pour Bachtine, le dialogue et le corps sont étroitement interconnectés, et l’image correcte du corps dialogique est celle du corps grotesque. Voilà pourquoi le grotesque apparait également dans le roman et notamment dans le “roman polyphonique” de Dostoievski” (Ponzio, 2011: 53). The relationship between dialogue and the body, the dialogic body is at the basis of Bakhtin’s philosophy of language, his dialogism is all one with his biosemiotic conception of the grotesque body.

With Bakhtin and his collaborators the objectivity of signifying / interpretive processes, of semiosis in becoming is reasserted in the interrelation between subjective and objective, inner and outer, inside and outside, public and private, official and unofficial. The critique of identity reaffirms the “objective”, that is, the “social”, and the “material”, the objectivity of “semiotic materiality”, of the “signifiant”, of the “interpreted sign”, the semiotic materiality of “otherness” (Petrilli, 2010: 147–148). To recover the logic of otherness and dialogism is to recover the sign's potential for plurivocality, heteroglossia, dialogic plurilingualism, polylogism as opposed to the monologism of identity (understood as closed identity), to the dogmatism of univocality.

Bakhtin and his circle celebrate the objective, social dimension of sense relevant not only when a question of “explicit meaning”, of discourse formulated directly, overtly, publicly, but also when a question of “implied meaning”, indirect discourse in its various forms from parody and irony to silence. Recourse to implied meaning, assumed meaning is not possible if not on the basis of the objectivity of sense, of silent understanding, the understood, or the misunderstood (see Petrilli, 2014: 139–157; 2016: 279–306). As claims Vološinov in his 1927 essay, “Discourse in life and discourse in art” (now in Vološinov, 1987):

What I alone know, see, want, or love, cannot be assumed. Only what all of us speakers know, see, love and recognize – only those points on which we are all united can become the assumed part of an utterance… Assumed value judgments are, therefore, not individual emotions but regular and essential social acts. Individual emotions can come into play only as overtones accompanying the basic tone of social evaluation: “I” can realize itself verbally only on the basis of “we”. (Vološinov, 1987: 100–101)

5 Listening as responsive understanding

To conclude then, the problem of the relation between identity and otherness is a constant focus throughout all of Bakhtin’s writings from the 1920s through to the 1970s and as emerges from writings by Bakhtin as well as by members of his circle the otherness relation is a fundamental characteristic of the word. Even more, the other is the very vocation of the word in live discourse, of the utterance. Bakhtinian writings evidence the dialogic conception of language, of speech, and its significance for human consciousness. Listening is strictly connected to speaking. Listening too is described by Bakhtin as involving an active, responsive attitude. In a relation of understanding, what we recognize as “responsive understanding,” “participative understanding,” the listener responds to the meaning of an utterance, whether to agree or disagree with it, enhance it, question it, etc. In live speech, understanding is responsive, indeed elicits a responsive attitude, so that, in Bakhtin’s words “the listener becomes the speaker” (1986: 68). Understanding the other implies the capacity to respond to the other, assuming a responsive attitude, which also implies a “responsible” attitude toward the other, which can only occur appropriately, adequately, on the basis of listening to the other. The failure to understand the other is connected with the failure to listen to him, so that the unsympathetic listener becomes the uncomprehending hearer, indicating a lack of understanding. Instead, we understand each other because we love, like, or respect the other, or want the other to love, like, or respect us and, in fact, people who are fond of each other often say that “we understand each other”.