"Hell is other people"
- Sartre
I have recently been thinking a fair bit about something called correspondent inference. It is essentially a concept in psychology that represents our proclivity to presume that a person's overt behaviour represents stable personality traits. Although initially learning the concept didn't precipitate any kind of reflection, I seem to have suddenly become aware of how often we do that to each other and perhaps even to ourselves.
Attempts at coming to grips with my social reality has been mired with fateful detours. Regardless of how much I have struggled with trying to understand the intricacies involved in social interactions, it has become increasingly clear to me that people require some conception of whoever they interact with. Conceptions they either form at first sight or through sustained conversations. But the need to reduce the person to some finite understanding is ever present in all facets of discourse. It appears to me that more than just serving an operating principle that guides behaviour such conceptions become dogma which we tenaciously cling to make sense of others. Dogma without which the social fabric becomes filled with individuals whose existence defies coherence.
I wouldn't have imagined that Sartre's most quoted maxim "Hell is other people" would be echoed within the confines of my own life. For what makes others Hell is precisely this need to reduce the idiosyncrasy of an individual into something finite and comprehensible by thought. But an individual's essence, if we can speculate upon that, transcends the realm of coherence and thought does it not? Does a person cease to exist or does he commit a grave error against himself if his actions sometimes go against his usually "expected" behaviour? What exactly constitutes the individual?
I find myself returning to these questions whose answers, it is clear, that I must labour for. But what is evident to me at least is that one can never truly know someone by what they say or what they do. Such markers at best indicate the nexus from which the former springs. Words and actions only serve as a means to understand but not conclude of the ineffable mystery that lies underneath the semblance we perceive.