"We need dialogue, true dialogue. Dialogue has become
a fade of school, church, and government. But what they usually mean
by dialogue is, only too often: 'Let's talk together until we agree
with the person in authority.' This is not dialogue. This is debate
and discussion under a new propaganda name. True dialogue is unstructured,
open, and it leads nobody-knows-where. It is based on a study of problems
rather than of disciplines, of gestalts rather than partial knowledge;
on a recognition that authoritarian relationships cannot exist in real
education; and that faculty, students, and citizens must cooperate in
the development of new knowledge. The result of this is that adults
have to become humble--a difficult thing--and students have to become
responsible, which is equally difficult. Dialogue requires at least
a minimum of love and trust. Without these elements, individuals talk
only from their heads . . . . In general, people don't want to talk. We
are willing to make statements at each other, but are not willing to
enter into dialogue. For unless we are convinced that others will not
use our remarks against us, we are unwilling to talk openly. Thus it
is impossible to maintain an authoritarian structure and at the same
time create dialogue; the two are mutually exclusive.
"I am aware that dialogue is disruptive and dangerous. This is
so because it leads from minimum love and trust to maximum love and
trust, to the creation of a viable community. And when one creates a
viable community, he may have the proverbial tiger by the tail. Such
community proceeds ravenously through all administrative structures.
It says that individuals are human beings, not numbers, and cannot be
treated as numbers. . . . Nice tidy administrative lines become irrelevant.
We have to find a way to work a community through cooperation, through
leadership that initiates and helps growth rather than through an administrator
who uses authority. This is difficult and implies great risks.
"Open-ended dialogue can lead to who-knows-where; the impossible and the uncertain become relevant. Educators and students accepting such initiative and responsibility for developing their own learning conditions will discover that they are the reality." [Theobald and McInnis, "A Certain Education for an Uncertain Time," in Roy P. Fairfield (ed.), Humanistic Frontiers in American Education 194-201, at 201 (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1971)]
"The refusal of the opponents to engage in dialogue for enlightenment is of such enormous significance that it becomes a theoretical issue. Those who do not want to participate in enlightenment must have their reasons, and they are probably not the alleged reasons. Resistance itself becomes a topic in enlightenment. The opponents thus necessarily become 'cases,' their consciousness an object. Because they do not want to talk with us, we have to talk about them. But as in every combative attitude, the opponents are from then on thought of not as egos but as apparatuses in which, partly openly, partly secretly, a mechanism of resistance is at work that renders them unfree and leads them to errors and illusions." [Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason 15 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987)]
"The result of [dialogic] confrontation is unpredictable: it might be incomprehension, denial, or repudiation. Or it might be progress. If you ask me, the odds on progress are not favorable. That, however, is not a reason for not trying if there is nothing much to lose. And what is there to lose?" [Frank I. Michelman, Conceptions of Democracy in American Constitutional Argument: Voting Rights, 41 Florida L. Rev. 443, 490 (1989)]
"Language is a cornerstone of our humanness. But we often treat it with total disrespect. We heedlessly abuse and corrupt it, voiding its meanings and eroding its power. And fearful that it deludes (as, alas, it often does), we mistrust it, and therefore strip and limit its meanings, reject its power, divide and reduce its resources, until language in all its dimensions -- excepting only the stark and sterile concepts of science and the bare statements of everyday practicality -- is reduced to impotence." [George W. Morgan, The Human Predicament: Dissolution and Wholeness 24 (New York: Delta Book, 1968)]
"The language we have come to accept articulates the issues of the good for us. But we cannot have fully articulated what we are taking as given, what we are simply counting with, in using this language. We can, of course, try to increase our understanding of what is implicit in our moral and evaluative languages. This can even be an ideal, one which, for instance, Socrates imposed on his unwilling and frustrated interlocutors in Athens, until they shut him up once and for all." [Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity 34 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989)]
"Whenever a person wishes to speak to another, he must speak a language that has its existence outside himself, in the world he inhabits. If he is to be understood, he must use the language of his audience. This language gives him his terms of social and natural description, his words of value, and his materials for reasoning; it establishes the moves by which he can persuade another, or threaten or placate or inform or tease him or establish terms of cooperation or intimacy; it defines his starting places and stopping places and the ways he may intelligibly proceed from one to the other." [James Boyd White, When Words Lose Their Meaning: Constitutions and Reconstitutions of Language, Character, and Community 6 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1984)]
"[N]o language can be completely precise about its source, its standpoint, or the criteria it applies. . . ." [Gérard Fourez, Liberation Ethics 7 (Philadephia: Temple University Press, 1982)]
"The slightest philosophical reflection upon language proceeds on the assumption that the meaning of any given saying on our part lies in some sort of background more or less recalled by the saying. Moreover, it must be seen that the background providing the meaning for what is said is not immediately evident in what is said. In other words, reflection upon language is itself significant only because there is a puzzling difference between what in any given case is said and what is at bottom meant. And our part as speakers seems to remain just that: a part, a part of a background of meaning over which we have no immediate control and into which we have no immediate insight." [Cyril Welch, "Speaking and Bespeaking," in James M. Edie (ed.), New Essays in Phenomenology: Studies in the Philosophy of Experience 72-82, at 72 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969)]
"Let it be said that when we encounter thoughts that seem unintelligible, the fault may not be ours. . . . Sometimes obscurity is really the best that can be achieved in an honest effort to express subtle and elusive truth. . . . Any effort to give voice to our deepest feelings and thoughts is liable to be unavoidably vague at times. Truth is greater than both our thoughts and our language." [Daniel Maguire, The Moral Choice 37, 39 (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1978)]
Methods
"To preserve the healing fiction of a free dialogue is one of the last tasks of philosophy." [Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987)]
"Hermeneutics watches language at work, so to speak, language as it is used by participants to reach a common understanding or a shared view." [Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990)]
"Just as the grammatical structure of a language can be revealed by carefully studying actual spoken and written examples, the ideological structure of legal and moral argument can be unearthed by carefully studying actual legal and moral rhetoric." [J.M. Balkin, The Rhetoric of Responsibility, 76 Va. L. Rev. 197, 200 (1990)]
"In a very real sense, each generation is faced with using the method of experience to develop a language that is consonant with the events and potentialities of its own situation." [John J. McDermott, The Culture of Experience: Philosophical Essays in the American Grain 5 (New York: New York University Press, 1976)]
"Hermeneutics has its origin in breaches in intersubjectivity. Its field of application is comprised of all those situations in which we encounter meanings that are not immediately understandable but require interpretive effort. . . . [T]he hermeneutical has to do with bridging the gap between the familiar world in which we stand and the strange meaning that resists assimilation into the horizons of our world. It is vitally important to recognize that the hermeneutical phenomenon encompasses both the alien that we strive to understand and the familiar world that we already understand. The familiar horizons of the interpreter's world, though perhaps more difficult to grasp thematically, are an integral a part of the event of understanding as are the explicit procedures by which he assimilates the alien object." [Daniel E. Linge, "Editor's Introduction," to Hans-George Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics xi-viii, at xii (Berkeley: University of California, 1977)]
[The following excerpts on "value discussions" are drawn from Agnes Heller, Radical Philosophy 113-114, 116-117, 118, 120 (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1984)]:
"In everyday value discussions it is not necessary for the values which are being discussed to have been consciously chosen or re-chosen; philosophical value discussions by contrast are concerned with consciously chosen or re-chosen values. To participate in everyday value discussions one does not necessarily have to have true values. Anyone who enters into a discussion will not have purified their values from particular and personal motives, and the values may well be merely rationalisations of particular wishes and concerns. Yet they must contain a reference to certain values--ones accepted by the consensus as true--for otherwise a value discussion would simply be impossible. By contrast, in a philosophical value discussion the opponents should commit themselves to true values. In everyday value discussions the system and the hierarchy of the values can be latent; in philosophical value discussions the system and the hierarchy of the values should be explicit.
Every rational being should strive to hold their value discussions at the level of philosophical value discussion. The philosophical value discussion is therefore the regulative idea of all value discussions." [113-114]
* * * *
"Concrete value discussions do not begin at the philosophical level. However, they can become philosophical ones in that, in the course of argument and counter-argument, the opponents mutually raise themselves to the level of the philosophical value discussion. This can occur in the following ways: (a) a discussion partner, or a group of discussion partners, proves that in the value system of the other partner or partners there is a contradiction; (b) a discussion partner or group of discussion partners prove that in different judgements the other partner or partners are giving the same value different meanings; (c) a discussion partner proves that there is a contradiction or a discrepancy between the theoretical and the practical application of the other partners' value; (d) a discussion partner proves that the others in their theories are appealing to facts which do not exist and which cannot be replaced by others that are functionally equivalent in relation to the theory's coherence; (e) a discussion partner proves that on the opposing side a social event, an occurrence or an objectification, is being interpreted on the basis of the chosen values, in such a way that misunderstanding does not involve understanding; (f) a discussion partner proves to the others that there is a discrepancy between a particular explicit value and another implicit value." [116-117]
* * * *
"In everyday value discussions the correctness of values in relation to concrete actions is tested." [118]
* * * *
"If one value idea confronts another value idea, then the value discussion always returns to the discussion over values, and thus two worlds confront each other. . . . If the truth of an idea of value is put into question, then so too is an entire world epoch and the social agents who represent it." [118]
* * * *
"Discussions over contradictory value ideas do not aim primarily at convincing the participants in the discussion. . . . In discussions over contradictory value ideas, the participants address themselves above all to those who have not yet clarified their values, those who still are open to reception. Discussion of contradictory values is always performed on the world stage." [120]
* * * *
"If, as a result of their experiences, a person or a group of people develops a feeling of hostility towards the inherited values--a feeling that ‘something is wrong' with these values--then they are prepared to allow themselves to be convinced in a value discussion." [120-121]
* * * *
"Everyday value discussions frequently come back to the particular motive of the other person: 'You only condemn war because you are cowardly' or 'Your vanity prevents you from seeing that you are wrong.'
In value discussions in which we want to test the truth of our correct values, that is to say, in discussions which develop from everyday value discussions into philosophical value discussions, we can never and must never refer to the other's particular motives. If this does happen, the value discussion immediately sinks to the level of everyday value discussion. One can indeed assume that the other has particular motives, but one can never argue that they do." [122]
* * * *
"In philosophical value discussions one starts from the assumption that both sides are committed to the truth of their own value. A particularistic motive cannot be assumed. At the same time neither in everyday nor in philosophical value discussions is it assumed that the values which are in debate are not the expression of particular interests or of mutually contradictory social needs, or do not at least show an affinity with these. Philosophical value discussion is structured as a confrontation between true values. If the value can be deduced from the interest, then a philosophical value discussion is quite simply impossible. If the value can be deduced from needs, or if it is simply an expression of them, then the philosophical value discussion is only an illusion which one can strip off. In this case philosophical value discussion is basically impossible." [122]
Bibliography
For Application of these Ideas to Legal Education: James Boyd White, The Legal Imagination: Studies in the Nature of Legal Thought and Expression (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1973)
For Application of these Ideas to Education: C. Roland Christensen, David A. Garvin & Ann Sweet (eds.), Education for Judgment: The Artistry of Discussion Leadership (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1991); Ira Shor, Critical Teaching and Everyday Life (Boston: South End Press, 1980)
On Suspicions About Language: George W. Morgan, The Human Predicament: Dissolution and Wholeness 18-21 (New York: Delta Book, 1968)
