Musing About Reading Other People

I have been reading biographies of J. Robert Oppenheimer and Toussaint L'Ouverture. The two very different biographies of two very different people led me to think about how hard it is to understand another person.

Both the scientist and the general worked with groups in their most important efforts. Thus I assume that there were in both cases social processes for the construction of knowledge and for decision making. Yet the biographers have little opportunity to understand, and less to communicate, the nature of the group processes.

In both cases, the biographers have had access to information from the subjects of their biography. Of course, what the person said or wrote must be considered in terms of the fallibility of memory, the possibility that the information is deliberately biased to be self serving, the possibility that the person was shading the reports for the benefit of the intended audience, as well as the general inaccuracy of what we say in reflecting the reality we understand.

In both biographies, the author tries to understand the subject through the things written and said about him by others. In both biographies one might suspect that there were several people by the same name, and the biographer was confounding reports about different people. Some of the informants were pro and some con. They in turn were providing information though the fog of memory, a posteriori interpretations of what they had observed, and the desire to look good themselves. In both cases, it may well be that those commenting on the subject of the biography were deliberately lying.

In both cases, the personal growth of the subject of the biography is amazing. Oppenheimer apparently had a breakdown as an unhappy young graduate student in England, away from the United States for the first time. In part, the stress he experienced was due to his inability to excel as an experimental physicist. He ended his career with a great reputation as an academic leader and as the conceptual leader of the huge effort to build an atom bomb, a sophisticate, loved and respected not only be a wide circle of friends and admirers, and recipient of major awards. L'Ouverture went from being an undersized and ugly slave to being the head of his nation, with a reputation as a brilliant strategist. In neither case does the biographer adequately explain the process of personal growth, and indeed that process may be inexplicable.

I believe that people make decisions balancing many objectives and constraints, in processes that combine the analytic and the unconscious. A biographer tends to have to attribute the process to an analytic process based on a subset of the probable motives. Indeed, I assume that people may act often with little analysis based on partial understanding of the circumstances.

And of course, the biographer is himself presenting not "just the facts", but a selection of the information he has obtained filtered through the conclusions he has reached about the character of his subject and the forces that formed that character.

It makes me wonder how well I understand the people I know. If it is so hard to understand the subject of a biography after hours of contemplation, aided by the best efforts of a respected biographer, how much more difficult is it to understand someone based on the interactions in day to day life.