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Issue VIII Dialogues
Issue VIII Dialogues
INTRODUCED BY EDITOR-IN-CHIEF MARIANNE JANACK
Dialogue is a technique that we often find in works of literature—a way of portraying characters in situ, or a way of moving a plot forward. But dialogue is also the name of a genre, one that shows up in the history of philosophy, but which is not common in contemporary philosophical writing.
Maybe one of the most noticeable differences between dialogues as they show up in the history of philosophy and the literary technique of including conversations or dialogues among characters is that the former often seem stagey and artificial, while the use of dialogue in fiction or nonfiction often adds a touch of realism to the work—and, of course, if one reads a Shakespeare play, most of what one reads is dialogue. Dramatic works are often driven by both the actions and the conversations among characters. But contemporary philosophical writing is marked by an absence of dialogue and action—rather, in its contemporary manifestations, the form focuses on the presentation of arguments, responses to objections, and the criticism of other arguments.
One of my colleagues in the theatre department here at Hamilton (Craig Latrell) pointed out to me that drama and philosophy, in their early days, shared a commitment to the traditional model of dialogue as a series of questions and answers. But contemporary literature and drama have mostly given up this form of dialogue, opting for something that sounds more like conversation: the model of question-and-answer, which usually aims at the goal of examining an issue and resolving the questions posed by that issue, became the subject of dialogue itself. Questions might be posed but they weren’t necessarily answered.
If you think of the question game that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern play in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, you can see this shift in the dialogue format, as well as an implied comparison between the traditional model of dialogue and tennis.
Craig Latrell cited Waiting for Godot as another example: “Waiting for Godot follows the question-and-answer model in a sort of exploded fashion:
Estragon: Let's go
Vladimir: We can't.
Estragon: Why not?
Vladimir: We're waiting for Godot.
Estragon (despairingly): Ah!
“Nothing is solved, or really examined,” Craig explained.
One of the debates in philosophical scholarship about literary forms is about the ways in which certain dialogic forms or genres create different experiences for readers. The dialogue might seem to be a better way of teaching philosophy, some scholars suggest, and that might be why Plato used it. But it might also be that the shift in writing style and dramatic style is connected to a change in our ideas about communication, about realistic portrayals of characters, and about the sharp divide between the public world of dialogue and conversation and the private and interior world of the mind—a shift that some philosophers and literary theorists see as part of the rise of modern portrayals of mind.
The pieces we have chosen to publish play with the idea of dialogue in ways that raise interesting questions: If we think of dialogues in terms of poems, how does that change our idea of who is speaking? If we think of the ways in which the use of dialect speaks to the particular social and historical circumstances of characters, we might wonder why more dialogues are not written in a way that captures the particularities of personhood. If we think about the ways in which dialogue is undermined—either by a character’s sense of how what she says will be received or because that character is merely the reflection and representation of another character—we come to see the workings of misunderstanding and silence that are just as philosophically interesting as are understanding and speaking your mind. Dialogues take us into philosophical issues by way of a portrayal of character, circumstance, speaking, and thinking. The dialogues in this issue give us several different ways of thinking about what dialogue is and how it might fail or be undermined.