Language and symbols can never fully bridge the gap between separate minds

Evidence

This is because we are all, according to the existentialists, ultimately isolated from our fellow humans in that we can never communicate with them directly, only indirectly through words and other symbols that, despite their great power, never enable us to completely know another person or be known by another person. “We come into contact with others only through our exteriors,” Becker explained, “yet each of us walks about with a great wealth of interior life…we are hopelessly separated from everyone else…. We touch people on the outsides of their bodies, and they us, but we cannot get at their insides and cannot reveal our insides to them.” Even the best relationships cannot fully bridge this gap, no matter how close they are. “Often,” as Becker put it, “we want to say something unusually intimate to a spouse, a parent, a friend, communicate something of how we are really feeling about a sunset, who we really feel we are, only to fall strangely and miserably flat.” — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 752

Categorization

• XREF: Recalls the ‘other minds’ problem in philosophy of mind and Wittgenstein’s private language argument.
• DEEPTHINKING: The Becker block is a dense, layered meditation on the ineradicable solitude of consciousness — worth sitting with, though it is fairly self-contained.