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cautiously explore areas of agreement, not run head on into the walls of disagreement. It is true, of course, that you do not know a person until you know his philosophy of life — his religion, his politics, his economics. It is also true that you not only want to know it, but you also want to affect it, perhaps bring it into harmony with your own. But you cannot do this until he has known you for a little while and come to trust and like you. In the final analysis, "selling" one's philosophy of life is really the prize around which all high-class conversation revolves. That is what those conversations were of which we read in Boswell's Life of Johnson and in Eckermann's Conversations of Goethe and even in the Acts of the Apostles. Seeing the truth about life and wanting to share it with others is a much nobler aim than wanting to "cry on someone's shoulder." It is much finer than wanting to share one's personal troubles with others. It is really the highest aim of conversation, possibly the purpose for which God ordained it. It is this function that makes conversation an oceanic filter plant for the truth. When we try to win people over to our philosophy of life, we do our ideological duty by our fellow men. If each man does his duty well, one has to assume that truth will come off the victor. |
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