Communication is both one of the most essential parts of human life and one of the most fraught. It is how we connect, how we learn, and how we grow in intimacy, but it is also how we fight, misunderstand, and alienate ourselves from each other.
Our contemporary world is more saturated with communication than any era in human history. You are probably receiving text messages, voice messages, emails, Slack messages, and Marco Polo chats as you read this essay. You may be tempted to feed all of those into ChatGPT’s large language model to tidy up all that discourse. All this communication is discarnated, detached from the intimacy of real human conversation. Our language is lost to abstraction, drawn away from the concrete realities around us and the embodied reality of our very selves. We are replacing our intimate conversations with digitized abstractions mediated by large corporations.
Amidst all this disembodied communication, there is less communion and vanishingly little understanding between us in our increasingly fragmented time. What are we trying to do with all this discourse? And what are we losing when we replace the intimacy of talking together with abstract digital mediation?
The temptation to disincarnate language is an old one, but it is more intense in our era than ever before. Philosopher Erika Kidd’s slender but brilliant new book, Intimacy and Intelligibility, points us back to Augustine’s own attraction towards abstraction and away from incarnation. What Kidd offers is a better vision of human communication—one that Augustine discovered 1600 years ago, in conversation with his son. Moving through the errors that Augustine highlighted then, she sheds light on the distinctive problems of our own time and shows how to inhabit a better discourse.
Kidd draws on both the ancient work of Augustine and the writing of contemporary feminist thinkers such as Luce Irigaray. The synthesis provides important insight into perennial questions of human meaning. Importantly, Kidd’s book is grounded in her Augustinian Christianity and—more specifically—in the belief that God was born of woman, into a world of words and mutual dependence. Augustine loved that the Word, as a baby, could not speak and so learned language from His mother. Christ, Kidd notes, did not try “to escape his flesh” and was “intimate with creation.” Against the Stoic creeds of his time and the tech-bro certainties of ours, Augustine knew that “life in the care of God is life in the care of others.”
Building on this philosophical and theological foundation, Kidd argues for a more incarnate and, in a certain sense, a more feminine way of reconnecting with each other through both our words and our bodies.
Why Talk with Each Other?
Kidd’s book centers on a question Augustine asked his son Adeodatus: “What do we want to accomplish when we speak with one another?” This question is the center of a dialogue called On the Teacher (De Magistro). Today—as we increasingly substitute Large Language Models for all kinds of communication—the question is as pressing as ever. To get language wrong is to get the human person—and thus human community—wrong.
Kidd first takes us through a standard reading of Augustine’s On the Teacher, arguing that it actually misses the point of the dialogue. In the standard interpretation, language is about informing and being informed. We use signs to inform others about things, and Christ the Inner Teacher is the kind of intellectual guarantor making sure this signaling works. According to Kidd, however, Augustine is not endorsing this account of language. Rather, he’s showing that it does not work. The biggest problem with this model is how reductive it is. Human beings are, in this reading, information transmission mechanisms: I send you signs, you send me signs, signs point to things, and Christ, shrunken down to a kind of sublime ChatGPT, verifies the process for us.
Augustine’s description of language as merely being signs for informing is an intentionally failed attempt to explain what we want when we speak with one another. This failure opens other possibilities of dialogue. Kidds argues that we should understand the dialogue between Augustine and Adeodatus as “a spiritual exercise, aimed at the purification and formation of the intelligence and the heart.” To understand what the dialogue seeks to prepare us for, Kidd emphasizes that Augustine’s motivating question is about the desire that moves us talk.
Being together in conversation entails talking for many reasons: humor, solace, mutual support, and prayer. None of these are captured by a paradigm of informing. In all of these, our words are “made into… a joint venture between listener and speaker.” When we speak to one another, we seek to be together. That being-together in intimate intelligibility cannot be accomplished on our own, for “life is not something one can give oneself.” We always come from another, most especially from our mothers, but also all those who touch us with their words over the course of our lives.
In other words, what we want when we converse is, ultimately, “to birth each other into the beata vita [blessed life].” Language is not about data transfer. It is about communion, happiness, and that most female of actions: giving birth.
Interdependent and Incarnate
Augustine is rare in the history of Western philosophy in that he had a child, one that he did not initially want but one whom he could not help but fall in love with when he first held him. He also knew grief. His son, whose name means “gift from God,” died in his late teens before Augustine wrote On the Teacher.
This dialogue—in which Augustine speaks with the son he held as a baby and whom he held in his death—is an illustration and enactment of the way we touch each other’s lives and are born together into a life of intimacy. As Kidd reminds us, “for parent and child, no life is fully one’s own.” We exist from, towards, and with each other. We first hear voices in the womb of our mother and first learn words in the arms of our mother and father. Words touch other persons. And words point, for Augustine and Kidd, to the God who stands “vigil over us like a mother.”
To draw her reader into a deeper understanding of the intimate intelligibility of language, Kidd draws on the work of contemporary feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray. Irigaray is important for Kidd’s argument because her work points to the ways Western thought has prioritized abstract thought that it labels masculine, while degrading thought grounded in the flesh, which it has traditionally deemed feminine. Irigaray and Kidd show the ways that this is a disservice to both men and women. We are intelligences incarnated, deeply linked to the bodies from which we speak. Kidd writes that Irigaray “challenges the notion that intelligibility can exist apart from intimacy and connection with bodies, loves, times, and histories.”
Kidd offers a vision of life not as independent achievement but as intimate gift, not as detached abstraction but as felt intersubjectivity. While written in a different register, her book parallels Leah Libresco Sargent’s The Dignity of Dependence in highlighting the way a strongly felt female reality—that of dependence as linked to pregnancy—discloses the reality not only of women but also of men. In Kidd’s reading, Augustine knows that he must give up his ideal of abstract information transfer and take up a deeper reality of incarnate intimacy in dialogue.
The vision Augustine eschews is similar to that of today’s manosphere, in which men are seen as hyperrational non-emotional humans who don’t need anyone else. The manosphere celebrates a life without the intimacy of compassion and degrades having emotions as “feminine.” But for Augustine and Kidd, men and women alike need others, are ineradicably emotive beings, and are all deeply shaped by our birth into this world. Augustine learned this lesson with special help from his mother Monica, his son Adeodatus, and the Virgin Mary. We, too, need to learn this lesson. We must reembrace the intimacy of real conversation and the ways desire and intelligence belong together.
In an era of rampant social isolation, when many young men are lost to online gambling, games, and porn, Kidd’s book is a reminder of the need to reconnect not in digital abstraction but in the concrete context of real relationships, mediated by in-person conversation. As fewer people socialize in person, date or make friends, or get married and have kids, this wisdom is more essential than ever.
If we are to find a human way through the era of AI, we will need to recover a better understanding of language, better ways to live together offline, and richer accounts of the human virtues. We might, in this process, become willing to embrace the more “feminine” vision of Augustine. If we do, we may find that it is really a more human vision. Augustine, Adeodatus, and Kidd help us see that we talk with each other because we desire communion with each other. In learning to desire rightly, we too can incarnate words and be born together to life most blest. To resist the digitization of everything, we will need to remember that this is the deepest reason we want to talk and live together.
