Dialectic and Dialogue

Dmitri Nikulin

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780804774734
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book considers the emergence of dialectic out of the spirit of dialogue and traces the relation between the two. It moves from Plato, for whom dialectic is necessary to destroy incorrect theses and attain thinkable being, to Cusanus, to modern philosophers—Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Schleiermacher and Gadamer, for whom dialectic becomes the driving force behind the constitution of a rational philosophical system. Conceived as a logical enterprise, dialectic strives to liberate itself from dialogue, which it views as merely accidental and even disruptive of thought, in order to become a systematic or scientific method. The Cartesian autonomous and universal yet utterly monological and lonely subject requires dialectic alone to reason correctly, yet dialogue, despite its unfinalizable and interruptive nature, is what constitutes the human condition.

CHAPTER ONE

In the Beginning: Dialogue and Dialectic in Plato

Dialectic and Dialogue in Plato. In certain periods of antiquity, Plato and Demosthenes were considered the prose writers who set the standards of writing for later imitations and commentaries. That Demosthenes was a rhetorician and Plato a philosopher did not really matter in this regard, because literature had not yet been rigidly separated from philosophy or rhetoric, just as fiction had not yet been separated from strict (in terms of its logic) or persuasive (in its seductive beauty) speech.

As a writer, Plato composed dialogues, which in turn established written dialogue as the first prosaic literary genre accessible to the general public: Plato’s dialogues were often published on the occasion of a large communal celebration in Athens. Before Plato, philosophers often wrote poems about nature to present their views (e.g., Parmenides’ poem Peri physeōs), as they also did much later in antiquity (e.g., Lucretius’ De rerum natura). Tragedy and comedy, which use dramatic dialogue, were also written in metric verse during Plato’s lifetime. Dialogues were probably composed before Plato (tradition points to Zeno of Elea, or to a certain Alexamenus), but Plato was the first to use prosaic written dialogue systematically for the purposes of showing and constructing what is thought about a given thing through speech, moving from presuppositions to a conclusion and aided by the mutual effort of interlocutors.

Plato’s logos, or speech, is unique in that it uses the achievements of Socratic oral dialogical conversations in a constant and conscious opposition to Sophistic monological speeches, which establish their superiority not by demonstration or proof, but by persuasion. No doubt there is more of an affinity and similarity between the Socratic and Sophistic methods than their supporters assert, insofar as both belong to the first historically documented Enlightenment. Yet the Socratic claim is that there is something within us that is nevertheless independent of us and has its own logos, whereas the Sophistic claim in its Protagorean version is to “make the weakest speech the strongest,” regardless of whether it is true or false by itself, since speech, logos, does not appear to possess anything in and of itself, independent of our intentions.¹

In Plato we have a rare case where we can actually identify the beginning of a genre: that of dialogue, which is intimately bound to the practice of dialectic. Thus, in the beginning was Plato’s logos of dialectic and dialogue. In what follows, I outline the main features of dialogue in Plato, and then trace dialogue’s relationship with dialectic. My main claim regarding Plato’s dialogical dialectic is that dialectic originally was an oral practice established in oral dialogue; written dialogue then appeared as an imitation of oral dialectic; and finally, written dialectic was distilled into a non-dialogical and universal method of reasoning.

Plato was the first writer to use dialectic systematically and to reflect on this usage and the limits of dialectic in his dialogues. In fact, he invented the very term “dialectic.”² Plato’s dialectic, however, is inseparable from the form in which he chooses to publicly present his deliberations—written dialogue. Plato’s dialogues are complemented by a letter (the Seventh Letter), in which he describes the evolution of his political views and the failed attempts to embody them in the political constitution of Syracuse. The letter is addressed to someone; that is, it either presupposes an answer, or it could itself be an answer and therefore may be considered as the preserved part of an otherwise now lost epistolary dialogical exchange. Moreover, Plato appears to have been developing a set of more systematic teachings that were not published by him in written form and are known mostly from other testimonies (e.g., from Aristotle’s Physics, the lecture “On the Good,” referred to by Aristotle, Theophrastus, and the later tradition) and from some hints within the Platonic dialogues themselves.³ These apparently systematic doctrines of a mathematical ontology are dialectical investigations reflecting oral dialogical discussions within the Academy.

Addressing various ethical, political, and theoretical problems, Plato refines the method of dialectic in his written dialogues as a philosophical appropriation of oral dialogical logos, embodied by Socrates’ speaking with the people in the streets and squares of Athens. Through Plato, the genre of Socratic reasoning or discourse, Sōkratikos logos, soon becomes an established literary form. It is also used by many of Plato’s contemporaries, including Aeschines and Antisthenes the Cynic, who themselves were disciples of Socrates and the latter of whom wrote dialogues against Plato.

Platonic Dialogue. The ancient aesthetic ideal is art as the imitation of being. Art is a skillful reproduction of the beautiful, which itself belongs to becoming. Spontaneous and alive, beautiful being escapes fixation in images and words. In this sense, Platonic dialogue is an art because it is an artful and artificial imitation of spontaneous Socratic discourse—that is, of an oral logos or conversation that follows its own logic instead of the one that an artist or a philosopher imposes on it. Attempting to grasp being or “what is” in conversation and thought, Plato develops an art of reasoning that strives to be more than an art—namely, a method of grasping the truth of a subject.

Plato thus deliberately uses Socratic dialogue both philosophically and dramatically, by dialogically rendering philosophy as dialectical and using dramatic effects that imitate oral discourse. As Bakhtin notices, among all of the genres, written dialogue is eventually reduced to either philosophical or dramatic dialogue, and yet neither of them is capable of retaining the multi-voiced polyphony of live dialogue. Of course, Plato did not invent dialectic as such. Socratic oral discourse is already elenchic; that is, it implies the proof of a point and the refutation of an opponent’s claim by demonstrating the meaningfulness of its opposite. Plato’s philosophical agenda consists, on the one hand, in rendering philosophy as a strict thinking that utilizes and constructs proofs and refutations. On the other hand, he strives to make philosophical reasoning appear true to life, as well as true to the very process of thinking and its “history,” through the dramatic depiction of characters who interact in a commonly voiced discussion. For this reason, Plato confined the use of dialogue to two genres: the dialectical and the dramatic, and has produced unsurpassed examples of both, the influence of which has been enormous and enduring. Plato’s published dialogues became a sui generis scripture for antiquity—the text to be learned from and commented on.

In an ancient testimony, when presenting the characters of his dialogues, Plato imitated the mimes of Sophron, a Sicilian poet.⁴ This testimony is not well confirmed by other sources, and in general there is not a great deal known about ancient mime as a genre—its possible relation to a cult, or its connection with other literary genres of which we sometimes know only the names (e.g., hilarody or lysiody). Nevertheless, it appears that mimes were short dramatic pieces imitative of ordinary situations and characters in everyday language, which is stressed by their abundant use of proverbs. Mimes were written for at least two characters, and as such may have contributed to the presentation of alternating voices in the genre of dialogue.

The ambiguity of Plato’s dialogues is deliberate and perhaps ironic, in that he refuses to opt univocally for either the dialectical or the dramatic. Why? Because Plato seems to recognize clearly the richness of oral discourse, with all its nuances and paths of reasoning that are possible at any moment; and yet, insofar as reasoning is discursive and thus can go only one way at a time, it cannot fully fit into a constructed dialogue. Hardly anyone else within the philosophical tradition has been capable of preserving the delicate balance between these two components of philosophy made real. Even contemporary philosophy does not withstand this temptation: whole traditions choose to present themselves, according to the standards of reasoning, as either strictly “scientific” (i.e., “analytical”), or “literary” (i.e., “Continental”). One might say, however, that bare argument, which lacks any context or historical background, is dry and thus empty of sense. Contrary to such argument, the sheer dramatic imitation of thinking is not binding for our thought, and in this sense is fictional and makes no claim of presenting things as they are.

Dialogue, Dialectic. A later Greek writer, Diogenes Laertius, who preserved stories and anecdotes about illustrious thinkers of the past, characterizes dialogue in Plato as follows: “A dialogue [dialogos] is a discourse, or speech [logos], consisting of questions and answers on a philosophical or political subject, with due regard to the characters of the persons introduced and the choice of diction.”⁵ In its form Platonic dialogue is deliberately structured as a speech that imitates or reproduces in writing the step-by-step reasoning in alternating rejoinders that is unwrapped in and as an exchange between interlocutors. These rejoinders mostly contain questions and answers, at least implicitly, except when Plato retells a myth (e.g., in the Republic, Timaeus, Politicus, and Critias), which he disguises as a humble attempt to illustrate a philosophical or political point without going further into speculative discussion. As questions, the rejoinders mostly allow for a simple and unambiguous “yes” or “no” answer. They thus refer to opposite positions, at least implicitly. The whole of the deliberation consists in questions and answers that move in terms of opposites. Yet questions and answers cannot be separated because each question, insofar as it is a question, awaits an answer and presupposes it, even if the answer is inconclusive or simply incorrect.

Thus the very form of philosophical dialogue is that of questions and answers (in Greek, erotetic and apocritic), which tolerates the occasional monological incursion of a myth. The erotetic and apocritic form is also the form of dialectical reasoning. Dialectic is an art or method of reasoning that initially occurs in dialogue and has to clarify the essence of a notion—that is, “what” a thing is. In this sense, Platonic dialogue, as an exchange of rejoinders, is already dialectical in its form. Therefore dialectic is originally and profoundly a dialogical enterprise of alternating questions and answers that refer to opposites.

Dialogue and dialectic are also parallel in that both are capable of ever further deepening one’s understanding of a subject by considering it from various sides, insofar as questioning and answering can always continue. But such an exchange cannot go on indefinitely, whereas live dialogue can; live dialogue cannot be finalized because it presents a personal other that is not a thing and thus cannot be represented by a finite number of features. Contrary to this, the subject matter of both Platonic dialogue and dialectic is a subject whose “what” or essence can be (although is not always) disclosed through a finite number of predicates and in a finite number of steps of reasoning. Of course, once the problem or topic is identified in Platonic dialogue, it is not at all guaranteed that a discussion will end with an agreement as its outcome, let alone with a firm conclusion.

As I said earlier, both Platonic dialogue and dialectic proceed in terms of opposites. Moving in and through opposites constantly opens up the possibility for contradiction, refutation (which is why Socratic dialogue is “elenchic,” or refutational), opposition, and disagreement. Because Platonic dialogue presupposes disagreement in that interlocutors test and try to refute the other’s opinion, such dialogue is inevitably agonistic , based on struggle and competition. The purpose of agōn is to win a dialectical competition by revealing a weakness and inconsistency in the other’s claim by gaining the upper hand in the discussion, and by trying to persuade the other of the superiority of one’s own argument. Live dialogue, on the contrary, is not dialectical, because it does not need to prove any claims (although it can do so accidentally); instead it allows for the expression of oneself, of one’s personal other, together with and vis-à-vis the other person or dialogical other.

As we know from Xenophon’s Memorabilia, Socratic dialogue can have any subject matter. Socrates seems to be equally eager to discuss the nature of beauty and raising horses, using the same technique of questioning and answering. Plato, however, who elevates Socrates to a philosophical saint—the guardian and protector of dialogue and dialectic—narrows the subject matter of his dialogues to questions of theoretical and practical philosophy. The former includes physics (discourse about nature), ontology (discourse about being), and metaphysics (which may be taken as the “leftovers of physics”). The latter includes ethics (which asks: “what is virtue?” and “can it be taught?”) and politics (which asks: “what is justice?” and “how can it be implemented in the constitution of a (best) state?”). Still, since being, the good, and beauty are eventually identical for Plato, the separation between theoretical, practical, and productive (“aesthetic”) philosophy is not yet as rigid and determined as it is in Aristotle and later philosophy.

Style. In Platonic dialogue as it is characterized by Diogenes Laertius, the style of a dialogue, its diction (lexis), must first of all correspond with its topic. Thus the narrative style of the “scientific myth” in the Timaeus differs from the enthusiastic and erotic style of speeches in the Symposium, which in turn is different from the didactic style of the Laws. However, the task of Platonic dialogue is more that of philosophically disclosing a thing or a notion than of dramatically presenting a person through individual stylistic peculiarities of his or her appearance or a uniquely recognizable voice. Hence, with rare exceptions, in a philosophical exchange the individual voices in Plato are often conventional and not as complex as they are in modern dramatic or novelistic dialogues, which are more concerned with the detailed and nuanced elaborations of each character’s voice.

Above all, the dialogical style is, as I said above, prosaic.⁶ In dialogue, only the rhythmic exchange of rejoinders is still poetic. Literary written dialogue must involve a consideration of the appropriateness and beauty of its expression, whereas the interlocutors in oral dialogue often use language casually and may not even speak in full sentences. They do not care as much about the embellishment of language and speech as they do about the expression of the other and their understanding of the other person, which is driven by a “dialogical eros” or the desire to speak to the other. Because of this, live dialogue is spontaneous and unpredictable, quick, and even sometimes perplexing. Hence, oral dialogue is led in prosaic—that is, non-metric and non-poetic—language. Indeed, poetry is an artful and artificial suspension of language to the point of its complete evaporation and transformation into non-discursive being, which is ordered through silence. Oral dialogue is discursive and keeps moving because it is the life of the mind, which does not stand still and does not keep quiet and always speaks to and from the other.

The Characters of Dialogue. Furthermore, the characters depicted in a written dialogue have to preserve the similarity and likelihood that would allow one to ask the proper questions and get the appropriate answers in a concrete dialogical situation. The Greek term for “character” is prosōpon, which means “mask,” a facial appearance worn an...