Abstract
Dmitri Nikulin is one of the few contemporary philosophers to have devoted books to the topic of dialogue and the dialogical self, especially in the last fifteen years. Yet his work on dialogue and the dialogical has received scant attention by philosophers, and this neglect has hurt the ongoing development of contemporary philosophical work on dialogicality. I want to address this lacuna in contemporary philosophical scholarship on dialogicality and suggest that, although Nikulin’s account is no doubt insightful and thought-provoking, it is problematic for two main reasons: first, his account fails to recognize the proper relationship between dialogue and agency; and second, his enumeration of the necessary and sufficient conditions for dialogue contains conceptual inconsistencies.
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Notes
See also Lysaker and Lysaker 2008. Excellent work on the dialogical self has been done of course by psychologists, such as the founder of ‘dialogical self theory,’ Hubert Hermans, and others. See Hermans (2001, 2012a, b), Hermans et al. (1992); Hermans and Kempen (1993), Hermans and Hermans-Konopka (2010), Hermans and Gieser (2014), and Hermans and Dimaggio (2016) for the most relevant work.
See Edward P. Butler’s review of On Dialogue in the Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, Volume 28, Number 2, 2007, pp. 167–176.
Mitchell Miller offers a thorough review of Dialectic and Dialogue in the Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, Volume 32, Number 1, 2011, pp. 177–189.
Throughout this paper, I shall use the terms ‘dialogicality’ and ‘the dialogical’ interchangeably.
An additional problem with Nikulin’s account—namely, as Mitchell Miller puts it, regarding the ‘relation of dialogue’s anthropological status and its ontological status’ (2011, 186)—emerges in Dialectic and Dialogue when he claims, ‘Whoever chooses to stop dialogical conversation with others by an act of voluntary self-suspension chooses not to be, because to be is to be in dialogue’ (2010, 155; Italics mine), but I have chosen not to discuss the problem in this paper, as Miller has already offered an albeit brief treatment of it in his review.
As Nikulin puts it, ‘In a strict sense, monologue is simply impossible. As a speech of one single subject, monologue needs to be uttered. As uttered, monologue is always addressed. As addressed, monologue is addressed to the other, even if this other is the other of and within oneself. As addressed to the other, monologue presupposes a reply, because without a reply, monologue is neither meaningful nor can it be uttered. But a reply makes the monologue a dialogue, at least potentially. Thus, it is as though the monologue asks for permission to be excused from the presupposed other, who in turn renders the monologue into a dialogue that has forgotten itself’ (2006, 193; Italics original).
Some passages that are especially illuminating for how Nikulin understands these origins are the following: ‘[T]he whole literary genre (eidoys syggraphēs), which is a genre of dialogue as speech or discussion involving questions and answers. Initially, dialogue was taken simply as a conversation between two or more persons (Latin sermo), each reaching for and needing the other’ (2006, 1; Italics original); ‘A new meaning of dialogue, namely dialogue as a way of life—of philosophical life—where the theoretical is intertwined with the practical in the activity of conversation, is brought about by Socrates, who is a walking and living embodiment of dialogue’ (3); ‘Socrates discovers dialogue as an elenchic genre, which is apt for the consideration of a subject matter from various perspectives, as well as for proofs and refutations’ (Ibid; Italics original), where ‘the Socratic elenchus’ is ‘the refutation of a proposed claim by demonstrating the viability of its opposite’ (14); ‘For Plato, dialogue primarily appears as a logos of a particular kind—a written imitation of oral conversation—without which, and outside of which, humans cannot exist qua persons and cannot express any aspect of themselves…which Plato characterizes in the Sophist as being the soul’s silent conversation, dialogos, with herself in herself’ (Plato. Soph. 263 e, entos tes psykhes pros hayten dialogos aney phones. Cp. Theaet. 189 e; 15, Italics original); ‘However, the manifesto of modern philosophy, Descartes’ Meditations, which presents the new finite subjectivity as that which perceives itself in solitude, which attends primarily to itself and not to the other, as alone and existing only vis-à-vis the infinite and divine subjectivity, is consciously written as an anti-dialogue’ (16; Italics original); and ‘Because of this, even occasionally using dialogue to present their views, modern philosophers rarely reflect on the meaning and notion of dialogue as such within a systematic context’ (17; Italics original).
In comparing the eidema to traditional ideas in the history of Western metaphysics, he says further that the eidema is neither a constitutive nor a regulative idea, in the Kantian sense (77); it ‘is neither an efficient nor a final cause that would predetermine how one acts, how one discloses oneself, or what one says in a conversation’ (Ibid), as Aristotle might understand it; and, again, as has been shown above, it is not a ‘Cartesian thinking substance’ (78). It is not an essence, and it is not a subject or ‘I in any sense’ either (Ibid; Italics original). Nikulin elaborates on his negative description when he says, ‘Thus, the eidema is primarily characterized negatively, in what it is not; it is not a substance, not a subject, not an attribute, not a relation, not a function, not an I, not a cause, not a notion; it has no univocally defined essence, and it is distinct from anything given or preconceived within a person. Thus, not being directly accessible, the eidema cannot, properly or strictly, be logically defined, i.e., it cannot be presented as a subject that is univocally described by its attributes. As such, the eidema should be taken as not directly accessible in the fullest sense; and thus it is not accessible in thought or through any direct communication, nor is it described, intuited, revealed, etc.’ (80; Italics original).
Indeed, Nikulin writes elsewhere: ‘It makes no sense to speak about an independent, preexistent eidema before an act of dialogical communication’ (2006, 87; Italics original).
Rather remarkably, Nikulin drops all mention of the term eidema from the later Dialectic and Dialogue, and yet retains both the notion of the ‘personal other’ and the components constitutive of the eidema, although in Dialectic and Dialogue he couches them in a different context, namely, in a discussion of what makes a conversation a dialogue.
He says, for instance, ‘The reason for this is that dialogue does not have an end in consensus; rather, it essentially presupposes dissensus of a certain kind…whereby every interlocutor retains his position and attempts to clarify (and possibly modify) it for himself, and, at the same time, for the other, thus also clarifying the other’s position for himself and for the other’ (142; Italics original).
In Dialectic and Dialogue, Nikulin says, ‘A certain kind of disagreement constitutes the life of dialogue, whereas complete agreement means the death of dialogue and thus also the end of being, if to be is to be in dialogue. In dialogue, relations with the other are not smooth; dialogue implies a disagreement that nevertheless allows for interaction and reciprocal recognition of the other, including one’s personal other. This reciprocity between interlocutors allows them to mutually support each other in an ongoing dialogical effort to realize and reciprocally understand the other person and the other of oneself’ (2010, 81).
See especially Nikulin 2010, 74 where he talks about the ‘four components [that] turn conversation into dialogue.’ For example, he says there that ‘It is my claim here that the following four components turn conversation into dialogue: personal other, voice, unfinalizability, and allosensus…’ (Ibid).
Indeed, Nikulin insists on the revelation or disclosure of being that occurs in dialogue: ‘[D]ialogue allows for the person to realize and disclose herself in her eidema within dialogue but not to construct herself, i.e., not to produce herself for the first time’ (2006, 232; Italics original).
I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for bringing this to my attention.
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Acknowledgements
I want to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. I also want to thank Michael Butler and Anthony Vincent Fernandez for their helpful remarks on an earlier draft of this paper. Any failings in what follows are my responsibility alone.
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Warfield, B.S. Dialogue as the Conditio Humana: a Critical Account of Dmitri Nikulin’s Theory of the Dialogical. SOPHIA 59, 779–792 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-019-00746-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-019-00746-8