… the notion of dialogue has been present from the very beginning of Gadamer’s discussion of play as the “clue to ontological explanation.”
When one enters into a dialogue with another person and then is carried further by the dialogue, it is no longer the will of the individual person, holding itself back or exposing itself, that is determinative. Rather, the law of the subject matter is at issue in the dialogue and elicits statement and counterstatement, and in the end plays them into each other.
A conversation or a dialogue is
a process of two people understanding each other. Thus it is characteristic of every true conversation that each opens himself to the other person, truly accepts his point of view as worthy of consideration and gets inside the other to such an extent that he understands not a particular individual, but what he says. The thing that has to be grasped is the objective rightness or otherwise of his opinion, so that they can agree with each other on the subject.
In a genuine dialogue or conversation, what is to be understood guides the movement of the dialogue. The concept of dialogue is fundamental for grasping what is distinctive about hermeneutical understanding.
… Gadamer, in his analysis of dialogue and conversation, stresses not only the common bond and the genuine novelty that a turn in a conversation may take but the mutuality, the respect required, the genuine seeking to listen to and understand what the other is saying, the openness to risk and test our own opinions through such an encounter. In Gadamer’s distinctive understanding of practical philosophy, he blends this concept of dialogue, which he finds illustrated in the Platonic Dialogues, with his understanding of phronesis. But here, too, there are strong practical and political implications that Gadamer fails to pursue. For Gadamer’s entire corpus can be read as showing us that what we truly are, what is most characteristic of our humanity is that we are dialogical or conversational beings in whom “language is a reality.” According to Gadamer’s reading of the history of philosophy, this idea can be found at the very beginning of Western philosophy and is the most important lesson to be learned from this philosophic tradition in our own time.
But if we are really to appropriate this central idea to our historical situation, it will point us toward important practical and political tasks. It would be a gross distortion to imagine that we might conceive of the entire political realm organized on the principle of dialogue or conversation, considering the fragile conditions that are required for genuine dialogue and conversation. Nevertheless, if we think out what is required for such a dialogue based on mutual understanding, respect, a willingness to listen and risk one’s opinions and prejudices, a mutual seeking of the correctness of what is said, we will have defined a powerful regulative ideal that can orient our practical and political lives. If the quintessence of what we are is to be dialogical — and if this is not just the privilege of the few — then whatever the limitations of the practical realization of this ideal, it nevertheless can and should give practical orientation to our lives. We must ask what it is that blocks and prevents such dialogue, and what is to be done, “what is feasible, what is possible, what is correct, here and now” to make such genuine dialogue a concrete reality.
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The chief presupposition for the rise of genuine dialogue is that each should regard his partner as the very one he is. I become aware of him, aware that he is different, essentially different from myself, in the definite, unique way which is peculiar to him, and I accept whom I thus see, so that in full earnestness I can direct what I say to him as the person he is. Perhaps from time to time I must offer strict opposition to his view about the subject of our conversation. But I accept this person, the personal bearer of a conviction, in his definite being out of which his conviction has grown — even though I must try to show, bit by bit, the wrongness of this very conviction. I affirm the person I struggle with: I struggle with him as his partner, I confirm him as creature and as creation, I confirm him who is opposed to me as him who is over against me. It is true that it now depends on the other whether genuine dialogue, mutuality in speech arises between us. But if I thus give to the other who confronts me his legitimate standing as a man with whom I am ready to enter into dialogue, then I may trust him and suppose him to be also ready to deal with me as his partner.
But what does it mean to be ‘aware’ of a man in the exact sense in which I use the word? To be aware of a thing or a being means, in quite general terms, to experience it as a whole and yet at the same time without reduction or abstraction, in all its concreteness. But a man, although he exists as a living being among living beings and even as a thing among things, is nevertheless something categorically different from all things and all beings. A man cannot really be grasped except on the basis of the gift of the spirit which belongs to man alone among all things, the spirit as sharing decisively in the personal life of the living man, that is, the spirit which determines the person. To be aware of a man, therefore, means in particular to perceive his wholeness as a person determined by the spirit; it means to perceive the dynamic centre which stamps his every utterance, action, and attitude with the recognizable sign of uniqueness. Such an awareness is impossible, however, if and so long as the other is the separated object of my contemplation or even observation, for this wholeness and its centre do not let themselves be known to contemplation or observation. It is only possible when I step into an elemental relation with the other, that is, when he becomes present to me. Hence I designate awareness in this special sense as ‘personal making present’.
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Intentionality, in the language of Husserl, is the fact that every sense has its object and exists in having an object. If you don’t see something, you aren’t seeing. If you are not thinking a thought, you are not thinking. The intentionality of a human being is world. The intentionality of a friendship is not one friend within the world of the other, but rather the shared world of the friends. The world is shared (by way of co-intentionality) developed through dialogue about the world – in coming to agreements about the contents of the world. This is “seeing-with”. This is the meaning of not treating another person as an object. We want and need to be treated by our fellow-subjects as fellow-subjects.
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It in the union of the ancient Greek and Jewish traditions is the recognition of the ultimacy of the word, from which the “material” world is articulated from the chaos of the phenomenal flux. That flux, whatever it really is, is much stranger than we know, and not in some hidden way, but right there in plain sight if we choose to see it.
I’ve thought many times that people add fantastic mystery to life, not because life is not mysterious enough for them, but to drape over life’s own mystery, which is not under our control, and is infinite in the very real sense that we can make no finite sense of it. Each of us is comfortable with what is his, less comfortable with what is ours, and filled with dread at what is nobody’s. Through dialogue, we can learn the pattern of angst and overcoming and learn deep trust in the face of dread.