In his essay Of Essay-Writing, David Hume divides the world into two kinds of people: the learned and the conversible. The learned tend toward solitary reflection on substantive matters, the “higher and more difficult operations of the mind.” The conversible pursue “the more gentle exercises of the understanding,” including human affairs, judgments of taste and beauty, and the “duties of common life.” The problem, Hume continues, is that the learned and the conversible have become separated, and this separation has had “a very bad Influence both on books and company.” 

Hume seems to capture something of our current predicament—academic discourse has become acutely arcane; common conversation has been reduced to chatter. Hume’s argument is neither nostalgic nor pretentious. Our thought and speech are impoverished because we have not attended to the “Balance of Trade” between the learned and conversible. Common speech needs substantive things to talk about; learned speech should be more connected to the arts of living. The moral wealth of a nation (my phrase, not Hume’s) depends upon the mutuality of the learned and the conversible—conversation and the common life supply the material for learning; learning provides nourishment for conversation and the common life. Fortunately for our time, Paula Marantz Cohen’s Talking Cure gives us a bridge: a call to better daily conversation as well as a defense of liberal education.

Talking Cure admirably accomplishes just what its subtitle says it sets out to do. It explores “the civilizing power of conversation” as a contribution to our common life. Like an agile museum guide, Cohen ushers us through a series of literary and historical exhibitions, not as a lecturer but as a conversation partner in prose. That is, Cohen artfully gives us a book that is itself a conversation about conversation in which the learned and the conversible are reunited.

When, and under what circumstances has conversation flourished? Cohen takes us from Boswell to Bloomsbury, from the dinner table to the Parisian café and the undergraduate classroom. Like Hume, Cohen understands that good conversation is rooted in both learning and experience. She provides both a helpful summary of scholarship on conversation and a taxonomy of the various ways in which we encounter conversation in everyday life. In so doing, Cohen illuminates the rich chapters of our past while delivering a gentle but firm criticism of the current poverty of our speech and civilization. Informed by enormous learning, the book is never pedantic or wistful. 

Cohen has a therapeutic aim. She takes the phrase “Talking Cure” from Freud, not in a psychoanalytic sense, but more in concert with Aristotle’s recognition that speech is what makes us most human. Civilizing speech is not chatter. What makes us civil are not mere utterances, but common deliberation about what is important to us as moral beings—halting attempts to navigate and re-navigate our differences about how we ought to live. Such attempts, we all recognize, have become increasingly fraught. “In past eras,” Cohen writes,

daily life made it necessary for individuals to engage with others different from themselves. … If we simply mouth platitudes of agreement, we must harbor the secrets of our individual natures within our own breasts, and this can turn toxic to our mental health. To share who we are, in our essential uniqueness, is one of the most human and creative of acts. I believe that most of us need good conversation to lift our spirits, connect us to others, and give us a more solid sense of ourselves. 

Civilizing conversation is therapeutic, for Cohen, because it helps us live better with one another and to be more at home with ourselves. 

Home is where conversation begins (Cohen describes herself as coming from a family of talkers). Siblings and the dinner table help form our capacity for conversation. So too, Cohen observes, does marriage, in which we learn to “adjust ourselves to a discourse developed in another family of origin.” Each household puts a different accent on the conversational language with which we negotiate our relationships. But if conversation is learned initially at home, it is developed in countless other settings: coffee shops, bars, classrooms, the ritual of meals, salons, and friendly gatherings.

What makes conversation civil is not mere politeness, but the willingness of the parties to probe and negotiate—to care enough about each other, and about the truth as they see it, to speak, to separate, and to come back together.

Cohen transports us in imagination to some of the most famous conversational gatherings: Samuel Johnson’s circle, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group, William Wordsworth and the Lake Poets, among others. It is instructive to be reminded that good conversation is enough of an art form that its exemplars are historically noteworthy. At the same time, these examples remind us of how rare circles of fine conversation can be. Records of great conversation, like the repository of great writing, offer us models of the kinds of conversation to which we might aspire.

That said, even the models of conversation were messy—nothing precious comes easy. Cohen is careful to note that the melodies of admirable conversation are punctuated by dissonance. Johnson was often a bully; Woolf and Wordsworth disagreed with their interlocutors. Conversation is necessarily social, and the bonds of discourse are often stretched—and sometimes they break. What makes conversation civil is not mere politeness, but the willingness of the parties to probe and negotiate—to care enough about each other, and about the truth as they see it, to speak, to separate, and to come back together. Conversational friends fight, but they also forgive. In conversation, we acknowledge but do not dwell on our friends’ negative characteristics. Ideas triumph over ad hominem attacks. Conversation at its best is the encounter of difference, not as a contest, but as an act of loving truth while learning to love one another better.

The moral conditions of conversation are fragile. However loving the fellowship may be, group conversation seems to require “an orchestrating figure,” not exactly a conductor, but certainly not a symposiarch. Sometimes the very force of the personality (like Dr. Johnson) that draws people into conversation can be the force that dominates, extinguishing dialogue with monologue. The physical conditions of conversation matter as well. Too much background noise is inimical to conversation; the quality of the food, if a dinner conversation is to last, is not unimportant. Cohen brings this latter point home by contrasting Virginia Woolf’s experience dining at an Oxford men’s college high table with that of the women’s college. The poor food at the latter made meals short and conversation correspondingly under-nourishing, underscoring the material inequities of the age as well as the educational disparities. 

In a chapter on the rise of the novel and “Female Talk,” Cohen explores the relationship between gender, literary forms, social norms, and conversation. Here, the novels of Jane Austen take center stage as examples of how the cultivation of “female-oriented discourse” had a profound effect on culture. In Austen’s novels, Cohen writes, we see how “conversation is both a barrier and a bridge to understanding in a world that is structured and mannerly.” Identity can be both a source of and an impediment to conversation, especially in a world that is less structured and mannerly than Austen’s. 

Indeed, Cohen underscores our contemporary need for better forms of conversation across the intellectual and social divisions that define us. This means a refusal to cancel the authors of the past or the seemingly abrasive voices of the present. In this, Cohen is admirable in her firmness and nuance in refusing to cancel the cancellers. She is equally keen to address our propensity to cancel ourselves: “Self-censorship eventually leads to a restriction in thought. … Shared diversity of opinion makes us more human and our society more humane; its absence results in the opposite.” Cohen’s chapter on “bad conversation” is exemplary in its analysis; the balance of the book offers equally insightful antidotes to bad conversation. Conversation is not so much a skill as it is a sensibility, and Cohen captures that sensibility in its full colors. This sensibility is practical in the sense of making clear the kind of conversations to which we might aspire. Mindset is the first step toward the practical skills of dealing with those who spoil conversation.

The French, interestingly, are for Cohen signally instructive in the arts of dialogue. A common curriculum, the ability to think abstractly, a willingness to be playful in verbal joust, and a seriousness about ideas—and leisure—characterize France’s cultural disposition to good conversation. By contrast, Cohen argues, Americans are too practical, too intent on results to have the patience for conversation and its corresponding pleasures. (The chapter on conversation in the classroom underscores why a liberal arts common core curriculum and conversational experience are important, especially for Americans.) And Cohen is right to observe that being a linguistic and social outsider (she studied abroad in France) is often liberating, even as one’s “outsider” status requires adaptation and more refined skills of listening and attention.

Cohen invokes Mikhail Bakhtin’s description of the novel as “a means of experiencing the multiple voices of a creative and expressive humanity” and applies it to the spoken word. When we listen and speak, we experience creative and expressive voices and personalities. Bakhtin’s tripartite engagement—“I-for-myself, I-for-the-Other, and the-Other-for-me”—is a reminder that literature itself is a conversation with the works that have come before. When we are in conversation with literature of all kinds, and with each other, we exercise our humanity and build a more civil community. “One can argue,” Cohen writes, “that only when conversation is free and flourishing does a society thrive in the ways that most of us value.” 

Tocqueville observed that if democracy were to survive we must continue to develop the arts of association. Cohen has captured well this Tocquevillian injunction, and in my work leading Aspen Institute Seminars, I can attest to the hunger people have for the kinds of conversations she describes. Our participants (drawn from across the business, government, non-profit, military, academic, and arts sectors) engage in a close reading of and moderated dialogue on short selections from a global core curriculum. We are fond of saying we engage in three simultaneous conversations: the conversation with the ages, the conversation with peers, and the conversation within oneself. This art of associating forges strong friendships across differences and the qualities of mind and conversation that support the give and take upon which democracy depends. These are the conversations to which Cohen asks us to aspire, in all our walks of life.

Conversation develops the arts of association. Talking Cure reminds us that when we engage in conversation with honesty and goodwill, we reap the joys (as well as the discomforts) of being in communion with one another. “We assert our humanity and become more acutely aware of the humanity of others. This makes us better friends and neighbors and, as such, better citizens.” 

Conversation—with texts and with each other—is both an expression of living and a practice for living. In reuniting the learned and conversible, Talking Cure is a beautifully expressed reminder of the joys, perils, and aspirations of conversation and its civilizing power.