Dialectic and Dialogue - Softcover

Nikulin, Dmitri

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804770166 ISBN 13: 9780804770163

Verlag: STANFORD UNIV PR, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

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.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Dmitri Nikulin is Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. His most recent books are Matter, Imagination and Geometry: Ontology, Natural Philosophy and Mathematics in Plotinus, Proclus, and Descartes (2002), and On Dialogue (2006).

Dmitri Nikulin is Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. He is the author of Metaphysik und Ethik. Theoretische und praktische Philosophie in Antike und Neuzeit (1996), Matter, Imagination and Geometry: Ontology, Natural Philosophy and Mathematics in Plotinus, Proclus and Descartes (2002), and On Dialogue (2006).

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

DIALECTIC AND DIALOGUE

By Dmitri Nikulin

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7016-3

Contents

Acknowledgments.........................................................viiPreface.................................................................ix1 In the Beginning: Dialogue and Dialectic in Plato.....................12 Dialectic: Via Antiqua................................................233 Dialectic: Via Moderna................................................484 Dialogue: A Systematic Outlook........................................725 Dialogue: Interruption................................................956 Against Writing.......................................................119(Dialectical) Conclusion................................................153Notes...................................................................157

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 physeos), 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.

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 nondialogical 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." 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. 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, Sokratikos 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 multivoiced 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...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: STANFORD UNIV PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804770166
• ISBN 13: 9780804770163
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 169
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland