The Dialogical Experience: Transcendental Intersubjectivity and Communicative Praxis

Abstract

It is very difficult to dispute the fact that sociality (or better put, more simply, intersubjectivity) poses one of the most serious problems our twentieth century has faced — and will continue to face, for innumerable reasons —, since we have discovered that sociality (intersubjectivity) hovers over, or lies beneath the great majority of human achievements, if not all of them, and conditions the sense of human praxis as well as any possible self-understanding of the human existence. Here we propose to deal with the problem of intersubjectivity through consideration of features of the broad panorama of problems offered by dialogical experience. We shall all the while be conscious that dialogue may be considered from a strictly “dialogical” perspective (according to the dialogisches Denken orientation proposed by Martin Buber, among others), or taken from the “transcendental-semiotic-pragmatic” viewpoint (as authors such as J. Habermas and K.-O. Apel contend), or from any non-philosophical scientific disciplinary perspective (those which come to mind are psychology, psychiatry, sociology, etc.) and that, in any case, the dialogical experience, its possibility or impossibility, its limits, its risks, its success or failure, etc., permanently concerns us, and orients our daily efforts.