The book is a pretty good blend of philosophical explanations, specific examples, and tips for better communication. It is a little academic in tone, but not preachy or hard to understand - the academic nature works to give more background and insight into the nature of conflict. Specific topics in the book include parent-child relationships, immediate conflicts like bedtime, and conflict between partners.
You can learn more in this interview.
Conflict is of course something that we all have to live with and navigate. All of us could benefit from a better understanding of what we shouldn’t take personally and when to stand up for ourselves. Is this something that you have special training to study? Or how did you get started?
Actually, it was only through a bit of luck that I discovered how philosophy could help me to understand and work through some really challenging issues in my own life – originally, it was part of what I was going through while living with my mother-in-law for a year. Before then, most of my research in philosophy was about some very abstract questions that were hard to explain to people outside of my field. But I found philosophy so helpful in sorting through this relationship that I set out to re-orient my career around better understanding why it had helped me so much, and figuring out how to help others in that way. What I’ve come to realize is that the reason that none of my professional training as a philosopher specifically addressed the study of conflict is that even philosophers have been slow to appreciate the untapped potential of both ideas and methods from philosophy for understanding and navigating conflict. And I’ve made it my mission to try to reveal that potential to others, and to do what I can to tap it.
So what is it that philosophy brings to our understanding of conflict that is so different from other fields?
A lot of things, actually! But one of the most important, I think, is that we need philosophy in order to understand what makes conflicts “personal” – as opposed to “merely business.” It sounds redundant to say this out loud, but interpersonal conflicts are conflicts between people. We need to look to philosophy in order to understand what goes into being or being treated as a person. That is what my book is all about. It’s about how our understanding (and misunderstanding!) of ourselves and of one another as people shapes the dynamics of our relationships and the conflicts between us.
Okay, so let me pick up on that idea. What goes into understanding someone as a person?
The observation that I explore in the book is that one really important part of seeing someone as a person requires distinguishing what I call “signal” from “noise”. A lot of what someone does or says is signal – it reflects on them as a person, and paying attention it and responding to it is a way of seeing and connecting to them as a person. But sometimes some of it is just noise. If his anger at you is signal, then the right response might be to get defensive, or to feel guilty. These are natural responses as part of your relationship. But maybe what’s really going on has nothing to do with you or your relationship, because he is just hangry. In that case, the right response isn’t to get defensive or guilty – you should just hand him a Snickers bar and wait for him to calm down. That’s the noise. Seeing someone as a person requires seeing their signal through the noise.
Distinguishing signal from noise sounds like it can be really helpful for getting along with one another – it would be a shame to get into a fight with someone just because they are hungry. But in the book you say that our ability to distinguish signal from noise can get us into trouble. How does it do that?
That’s right – the ability to distinguish signal from noise is a great relationship tool. It’s one that we all have, and using this ability helps us to avoid mistaking noise for signal, and getting too worked up over things that don’t matter. But this same ability creates the possibility of making the opposite mistake – of confusing signal for noise. Imagine that you are trying to tell your husband something, and he just passes you a Snickers bar. Or maybe he responds by asking if it’s that time of the month. He’s not really hearing or listening to you, if he is interpreting what you are doing or saying as noise. Lots of relationship troubles turn, I think, on little ways in which we fail to genuinely see or hear one another because we are mistaking signal for noise.
Is distinguishing signal from noise something that we can get better at? How can we avoid this kind of problem?
Unfortunately, there is no surefire way to avoid making this kind of mistake, because there is no perfect test for what is signal! And even when we get it right, and correctly interpret someone else, sometimes they will still think that we are misinterpreting them, because they misinterpret themselves, which still leads to conflict. So I don’t think there are any easy solutions. Personally, I find this good news rather than bad, because it means that the fact that I find conflicts in all of my relationships doesn’t mean that they are bad relationships – it is just an inevitable consequence of everyone doing their best. But in the book I also show how merely understanding how these kinds of misunderstandings work can make at least some of them go away, and offer advice about how to use the ideas in the book to get better at perspective-taking.
Mark Schroeder is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California, where he is founding director of the Conceptual Foundations of Conflict Project. His books include Slaves of the Passions, Being For, Reasons First, and When Things Get Personal.
No comments:
Post a Comment