An Argument for Unknowability

It is a strange thing to read characterizations of men (or women, of course).  As someone who deals in them, both as producer and consumer, I know how they can grip us and flip all our switches of recognition.  They are almost unbearably intimate things--if drawn with care and conviction, they can leave us trembling with insight.

But what are they, really, these conclusions about the general type of a person?  Or perhaps better, to what/whom do they correspond?  To ask this may well be nothing less than to ask that great wrenching question forever being tossed up by the western world: what is a man?  Is he ever, in whole or in part, that which somebody says about him?  And furthermore, irrespective of any Thomistic or Aristotelian essentialist-type issues, what has anyone's summing up got to do with the operational decisions faced by the individual in question?  Can a man learn what to do by following who he thinks he is?  Or is he fated to try to puzzle out who he is on the evidence of what he does?

My prompt for this predictably gooey and solipsistic meditation is Henry Kissinger's depiction of Richard Nixon at their first formal meeting as President-elect and would-be adviser.  This from Kissinger's hefty memoir, White House Years, v. 1:

"I did not know then that Nixon was painfully shy.  Meeting new people filled him with vague dread, especially if they were in a position to rebuff or contradict him.  As was his habit before such appointments, Nixon was probably in an adjoining room settling his nerves and reviewing his remarks, no doubt jotted down on a yellow tablet he never displayed to his visitors.

When at last Nixon entered the room, it was with a show of jauntiness that failed to hide an extraordinary nervousness.  He sat on a sofa with his back to the window overlooking Fifth Avenue, and motioned me to an easy chair facing him.  His manner was almost diffident; his movements were slightly vague and unrelated to what he was saying as if two different impulses were behind speech and gesture."

This is rich stuff, and compelling.  The subject is not a confused derelict, or a defeated, distracted sales manager from Indiana, but the President-elect of the world's preeminent nuclear power.  How do we reconcile this shaky man with the unarguably shrewd (if bitter) observer of foreign and domestic events, atmospheres, capacities, trends?  In fact, this breaks down into two questions: 1) To what extent is Kissinger's characterization, well, relevant?  Even if he's right (and he likely is), he's right about such a fraction of what constitutes a human.  He's right about a moment, one moment among the zillions which together make up a single life.  Here we edge up on the experience, in real life, of Derrida, who said that nothing is ever finished.  Kissinger's impressions may have held, Nixon, in some respects may have been consistent, a repeater of indicative behaviors, but so what?  The constant flux of phenomena, of emotional throughput in one human heart of the course of even a few moments produces a storm of data beyond all processing capability.  Our consciousness is ever on the knife's edge, tipping and tipping, by the milisecond.  In case you missed it, this is an argument for unknowability.  2) Since we don't generally sense, though, in our everyday lives, that we are unknowable to each other, this second question arises: What is happening inside a man (and in society) when he finds himself in a life to which he's both so ill-suited temperamentally and so drawn by his own obvious skill and effectiveness within it?  Is it self-discipline in pursuit of a higher goal? (Kissinger would, in other writings, say yes.)  Or is it something more mysterious and imponderable?  Something inaccessible even (or especially) to the subject himself?

I'm sorry, I know this is exhausting, and perhaps an odd exercise all around, but the take-away for us is this: Is there some ultimate merit in pursuing precisely that which we dread most, in binding ourselves to a life of dismay, uneasiness, confusion and disappointment?

I don't know.  By most accounts, Nixon was a miserable man.  Did he drive himself to it, to the rancor and paranoia that ultimately undid him, in service to a great ideal?  If he did, then the question for us is, Is that really a viable life choice?  Can I really sublimate my every instinct toward the right life to a vision of a possible life?  Would I necessarily be mad to do so?