When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip (Thoreau). Or as Eugene Gendlin put it a century later,
the chief malaise of our society is perhaps that it allows so little pause and gives so little specifying response and interpersonal communion to our experiencing, so that we must much of the time pretend that we are only what we seem externally, and that our meanings are only the objective references and the logical meanings of our words.
— Gendlin (1962/1997, 16)
As Goffman (1959) demonstrated, ‘pretending that we are only what we seem’ is crucial to the maintenance of social roles, “team” membership and morale – our personae or masks. This is probably true of all societies, not only ‘ours,’ but especially in this age of proliferating information we need ways to dip into deeper, more intimate meanings: we need intimologies, which entail a resurrection of the body as meaning space, and a deepening of “logic” into the study of semiosis (the process of meaning) as pioneered by Peirce.