Dialogue versus Dialectic

The basic instinct and behavior of analytic philosophers is to jump on the first expression of a thought by someone and start to clean it up … like a swarm of dung beetles attacking a newly deposited wad of scat.

I now think this is a mistake. For one thing, in practical and social terms, it can immediately shut down meaningful dialogue between two interlocutors. Granted, for two analytic philosophers, it is a joyful activity, and may even be productive. But I submit, as an empirical hypothesis, that this approach to conversation serves with most people to shut them up or to wall them behind a wall of defensiveness, thereby aborting the development of a thought that could otherwise have been midwifed.

But even more essentially – and this is my new thought now, which an analytic philosopher would be salivating to dissect and dismantle with counterexamples – I now view the activity as resting on a mistaken worldview. By “world” here I mean the world of our experience, the world as we know it or assume it to be. The mistaken worldview I have in mind is that our concepts are a reliable guide to reality – at least once our intuitions have gone through a process of critical analysis and dialogue (dialectic) and theory building (reflective equilibrium).

The “correct” worldview, I think (and no doubt due to my exposure to it at an impressionable age), is closer to the Hindu one, which is that reality is One, and all duality is illusion (or delusion if believed). “Duality” here means any distinguishing between individuals.

(Thus, in our hopeless epistemic condition, even talking about the One is a dualistic exercise, since doing so presumes that the One can be distinguished from illusion. This is why the best approach to “ultimate” reality may be not to say anything at all … or, like Zen Buddhists, to speak only in paradoxes.)

The practical upshot for me has been to adopt a more welcoming and less critical attitude toward the expression of ideas (by myself and others) … to become more, if not exclusively, a listener (as feminism often advises), and if speaking, to be at least equally as encouraging as critical, in an effort to discern the kernel of “truth” in every assertion rather than be sidelined by its (necessarily) hopelessly muddled shell.

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