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Posted on April 20, 2023 Leave a Comment
‘Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world’ explains Paul Goodman in his altogether wonderful but sadly out of print work, Speaking and Language.: A Defence of Poetry But, continues Goodman, ‘there are grades of each’. Just as there is speech to hold a family together, a sophist’s speech to […]
Posted on November 22, 2021 Leave a Comment
Good advice is a gift. Like any gift, it isn’t about you, but the other person. Here, this means that what matters is what helps your partner in conversation, and not your desire to be seen as wise. Tied up in this is an important recognition: good advice shouldn’t involve telling someone what to do […]
Posted on September 6, 2021 Leave a Comment
We lash out because we haven’t been listened to, not because we’ve been listened to too much. At the end of the day, sometimes what we really need is not for someone to agree with us, or to give us advice, but simply to hear us; to validate our feelings, to recognise our inner turmoil, […]
Posted on February 16, 2021 Leave a Comment
One of the problems that arise when listening to others, as David Bohm wrote in his exquisite work On Dialogue, is our belief ‘that one already is listening to the other person in a proper way’. It is always the other person who is misguided, isn’t it? It is the dangerously misplaced belief that we […]
Posted on January 30, 2021 Leave a Comment
Your friend has just been dumped by their girlfriend. Limp, depressed, and possessed with a weltschmertz threatening to degenerate into total apathy to life, they begin telling you about their suffering, about how they miss those texts ‘good morning’ each day, and how – as is common when we have nothing left but memories to […]
Proper Candor 