Dialectic and Dialogue (review)

To study philosophy is to encounter paradox after paradox. These encounters provoke thought but also frustration. How many times have I seen eager eyes turn to Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling with the expectation that he will tie ethical justification to religious belief in a comforting and familiar manner, counterbalancing the incessant demand for reasons from Plato and Aristotle and the all-too-radical critiques of Nietzsche. Instead, of course, matters get even harder with Kierkegaard. The turn to the religious doesn't provide justification for the ethical as hoped, and worse still in Kierkegaard's little book we are told that he cannot, in language that trades in universals, capture the singularity of god, which at first blush puts the reader in the paradoxical position of reading a book about something that cannot be written about. Few eager students survive the encounter with the text without either deciding that the text simply meant what they expected it to mean in the first place or having the good fortune to be shepherded through by more experienced eyes.

Dmitri Nikulin's book Dialectic and Dialogue returns to a paradox made famous in recent times by Derrida among others. Nikulin has written a book that argues centrally against writing as a key mode of philosophical investigation. Of course, he understands that "writing against writing is performatively self-contradictory" (141), but Nikulin defends his project with a number of astute observations. In order to assess his effort in this regard, one needs to appreciate the general situation for philosophy, which finds itself served in central but different ways by dialectic and dialogue. So I will turn to that first.

The book is composed of six chapters: an introductory chapter that traces the roots of dialogue and dialectic to Plato, two chapters on dialectic (via antiqua and via moderna), two chapters on dialogue (systematic outlook and interruption), a chapter against writing, and a dialectical conclusion. The heart of the project is a careful explication of the centrality of dialogue and dialectic to philosophical inquiry. Dialectic evolves from a set of methods of reasoning in antiquity to being understood as a single method in modernity—it seeks to produce systematic knowledge. As Nikulin points out, that there is a particular dialectician behind the exercise of dialectic doesn't really merit much for particularity since, if it is properly pursued, all good dialecticians should reach the same end. Thus, even if they reveal something of their particularity in the style that they employ, the uniqueness of the dialecticians is unimportant: "Dialectic is thus impersonal: an argument can be anyone's argument" (87). Dialogue, however, is another matter: "The objective of dialogue, on the contrary, is communication and expression which presupposes discursivity and cannot be overcome in the inalienable presence of the other" (86–87). Dialogue not only discloses the individuality of the participants but is primarily about preserving and attending to the uniqueness of each participant. Dialectic emerges within dialogue and seeks to break away from the conversation among interlocutors to establish impersonal truth. Though opposed in a variety of ways, dialectic and dialogue both serve central philosophical purposes. Dialectic produces systematic knowledge, while dialogue "allows one to utter one's unique—and mysterious—individuality, not through theoretically verified definitions, but rather as something that can be expressed as the same, yet each time anew, in communication with the other" (86). Dialogue facilitates spontaneous communication and therefore enables recognition of the individual.

Writing, on the other hand, parts entirely with what dialogue allows. It may record a past dialogue, but it only imitates real dialogue. Dialogue is spontaneous and unpredictable. Written dialogue is fixed. Writing can, of course, capture the steps of dialectic; however, it loses connection with being. As Nikulin recounts: "Dialogical oral speech closely follows being insofar as being is present and reproduced for humans in becoming. Such speech is living and ensouled logos, yet it is rendered mute and monological through its written imitation" (125). Although it is the case for Nikulin that dialectic that...