The Intuitive Conversation and the Intuitive Speech

I. Two ways of speaking

Around 1805 Heinrich von Kleist wrote a short essay, On the Gradual Formation of Thoughts While Speaking. His observation: a thought does not lie ready-made in the head, waiting to be spoken. It comes into being in the speaking. You begin a sentence without quite knowing where it will end, and precisely for that reason something emerges that you did not know before. The listener is not a recipient but a midwife. A glance, a frown, a half-finished interjection, and the thought turns a corner.

The opposite is playback. The politician with his speaking notes, the talk show as an exchange of prefabricated positions, the sales conversation by script, the press conference with agreed wording. There, nothing is thought; what was thought beforehand is reproduced — usually by someone else. The other person notices at once, even if they cannot say how.

But speaking intuitively does not mean speaking unprepared. The jazz musician improvises because he has practised for a thousand hours. The experienced family doctor hears, while taking a history, the one subordinate clause that matters, before he can explain why. The chess master sees the move and looks for the reason afterwards. Intuition is saturated preparation that no longer needs to look things up. Whoever knows nothing does not speak intuitively but arbitrarily.

II. Flow

I know both ways of speaking from my own experience, and afterwards I know exactly which mode I spoke in. In conversation I get into a flow. Then I stop thinking about the speaking, the sentences come, and the thoughts go further than I had thought them before. Afterwards I often no longer know in detail what I said.

That is not a failing of memory but the hallmark of the state. All attention was on the matter and on the other person. Nothing was left for the self-observation that otherwise runs alongside and keeps the minutes.

But I reach this flow only in a small circle. My limit lies at about five people. Beyond that I no longer get into it — and in front of an audience I never have. So I know the intuitive speech only from the outside.

III. Why five

The limit is no accident. Up to this size a group remains a conversation: you see every face, anyone can cut in at any moment, you speak with the others and not in front of them. Conversation research has measured this in freely forming groups. More than about four people rarely hold a single shared conversation. If the circle grows, it splits into two conversations side by side — everyone knows this from dinner parties where, from the sixth or seventh guest on, two conversations are suddenly running. Or it stops being a circle and becomes an audience.

With an audience the situation changes fundamentally. You are looked at instead of spoken to. The contradiction along which the thought feels its way in conversation falls away. And part of the mind begins to watch itself.

In my case the voice comes on top. My vocal cords have given me trouble for a long time; therapy changed little. In front of five people I can speak at normal volume. In front of twenty I would have to speak louder, and then attention goes to the voice. Whoever has to monitor his voice cannot follow the thought at the same time. Flow does not tolerate divided attention. That is not a question of courage but of conditions.

IV. Flow before the crowd

That the intuitive speech exists is beyond question. And it is worth looking where it was most effective, uncomfortable as that is.

Hitler spoke in flow. You can see it in the recordings of his speeches. He often began with a long silence, then quietly, groping, haltingly — as if he were still standing beside himself. Only once he had the hall did he become faster, louder, up to frenzy. Otto Strasser, who knew him at close quarters, wrote that Hitler responded to the vibrations of the human heart with the delicacy of a seismograph. After the speeches he was drenched in sweat and exhausted.

All of this fits what one knows from conversation. But the counterpart was a different one. In conversation it is a person whose reactions give birth to the thought. For Hitler it was the crowd. His flow followed not the thought but the resonance. He sensed what the hall wanted to hear and gave it back with mounting force. Nothing new came into being in terms of content. Behind him lay hundreds of beer-cellar speeches, the same grievances and enemy images in ever new mixtures. That too is saturated preparation — a preparation of resentment.

And next to it lay calculation. In the 1920s Hitler had his photographer Heinrich Hoffmann photograph him rehearsing gestures, and discarded whatever did not work. Flow and calculation did not exclude each other in him.

V. Performed charisma

Goebbels was the counter-model. The Sportpalast speech of 18 February 1943 — “Do you want total war?” — was worked out word for word. The audience was hand-picked, and a group had been instructed when and for how long to applaud. Afterwards Goebbels is said to have remarked that had he told the people to jump out of the window of the Columbushaus, they would have done it. That is not the sentence of a man who let himself be carried away. It is the sentence of a technician who had measured the ecstasy of others.

He is not alone in this, and not only on the dark side. Churchill wrote out and rehearsed his great speeches; the jibe went round that he had spent the best years of his life composing impromptu speeches. The apparently casual product launches of great entrepreneurs are rehearsed for weeks. A good actor weeps every night at the same spot.

So there are two kinds of charisma: one that comes from flow, and one that performs it. The audience cannot tell them apart. It reacts to both in the same way. That is the first uncomfortable insight.

VI. The call

There is one case that shows how the intuitive speech can also arise. On 28 August 1963 Martin Luther King spoke in Washington. At first he read from his manuscript, orderly and somewhat stiff. Then the singer Mahalia Jackson called out to him from the side: “Tell them about the dream, Martin!” He put the page aside. The part the world remembers came freely.

The trigger is telling. It was not the crowd but a single person he knew. The great speech tipped into flow because for a moment it became a conversation again. And what carried it was not resentment but a thought he had long carried with him.

Good speakers know this, even if they do not call it that. They pick out two or three attentive faces in the hall and speak to them. The hall listens, but the counterpart remains a person.

VII. Thought or mood

This allows the difference to be stated precisely. Both the intuitive conversation and the intuitive speech live on feedback. But the feedback differs.

In conversation, contradiction or confirmation comes back. The other person hesitates, asks, shakes his head, nods in agreement or brings in thoughts of his own. The thought of whoever is speaking has to prove itself against this, and in the process it gets better or it falls. The intuitive conversation corrects itself.

The crowd answers too, with approval as well as with contradiction. But it answers without words. The nod becomes applause, then shouts, then cheering. Hesitation becomes a murmur, then unrest, then whistles and booing. Both can happen very fast. What comes back is a signal, not an argument. Applause says: more of that. The murmur says: not like that. Neither says why, and neither brings in a thought of its own.

The speaker can react in only two directions. To applause he adds more: what lands is repeated louder, and the speech leads to where the hall already is, only further. To contradiction he gives way and hands the hall whatever calms it again — or he braces himself against it and gets louder. At the early meetings of the Nazi party there was a third answer: the stewards threw the hecklers out. The crowd’s answer is almost never constructive and enriching the way it can be in conversation. Approval drives, contradiction brakes. The intuitive speech before a crowd corrects itself not by the thought but by the mood.

Today this feedback no longer needs a Sportpalast. Every platform that reports approval and outrage back in numbers is a hall that never empties. Whoever writes there learns within minutes what lands, and learns to deliver more of it. The seismograph now sits in every trouser pocket.

VIII. What remains

Charisma depends to a large extent on the intuitive speech — or on its skilful performance. It does not follow that one must admire it. It rather follows that one should mistrust it, and all the more, the less contradiction it allows.

Thinking happens in the small circle. There, what no one would have had alone comes into being, and there it is tested. The circle of five is not a deficiency of those who fall silent before large halls. It is the size at which thinking takes place at all. A society that takes its decisions in halls rather than in circles will be governed by those who command halls.

My own medium is the written word, especially in chat with people and with my non-human partner Claude. There too there is flow, because there is a counterpart who answers and contradicts. Kleist would probably have said that what matters is the listener, not the voice.