(BMM 22) Limitations of Dialogue
1) establishing a living mutual relation...
- rare..."borne on behalf of the continuance of the organic substance of the human spirit".
2) technical dialogue; prompted solely by the need of objective understanding
- "sterling quality of 'modern existence'".
3) monologue disguised as dialogue; "...strangely torturous and circuitous ways".
- a debate...thoughts are not expressed in the way in which they existed in the mind but in the speaking are so pointed that they may strike home in the sharpest way, i.e. a friendly chat.
(BMM 23) [near the bottom of page] "solitude...for him..."; the monological individual.
(BMM 24) "Being, lived in dialogue, receives even in extreme dereliction a harsh and strengthening sense of reciprocity; being, lived in monologue, will not, even in the harshest intimacy, grope out over the outlines of the self."
(BMM 24) "Dialogic is not to be identified with love."
"...love remaining within itself - this is called Lucifer."
(BMM 24) Dialogue between mere individuals is only a sketch, only in dialogue between persons is the sketch filled in.
(BMM 25) "If everything concrete is equally near, equally nearest, life with the world ceases to have articulations and structure, it ceases to have human meaning."
- does this address the distance problem? Only with distance there is meaning.
(BMM 25) "But nothing needs to mediate between me and one of my companions in the companionship of creation, whenever we come near another, because we are bound up in relation to the same centre."
(BMM 26) *modern man rendering turning to the other as "sentimental" or "impractical" -> confesses his weakness of initiative when confronted with the state of the time.
(BMM 26) The basic movement of monologue -> "reflexion"; perceiving the other as an extension of self.
- this is "the other I", as Friedman puts it in The Life of Dialogue, 60
-> note the description of this on the bottom of BMM 27; respect for the other's particularity
(BMM 28) "For then dialogue becomes a fiction, the mysterious intercourse between two human worlds only a game, and in the rejection of the real life confronting him the essence of all reality begins to disintegrate."
(BMM 29) "Unity of life...unbroken, raptureless perserverance in concreteness, in which the word is heard and a stammering answer dared."
(BMM 30) "To all unprejudiced reflection it is clear that all art is from its origin essentially of the nature of dialogue."
(BMM 30) -> "inner court" -> "not the arising of the thought but the first trying and testing of what has arisen."
- pp. 30-31: an intellectual relationship with oneself.
(BMM 32) Feuerbach quote atop p. 32; from The Essence of Christianity, "between I and Thou"
(BMM 38) The mass collectivity marching into the common abyss - totalitarian mass?
(BMM 40) There is no ordering of dialogue. It is not that you are to answer but that you are able.
- potential of dialogue, not the structure of dialogue.
(BMM 40-41) -> there is no expertise for dialogue, because it is a primal quality present in man to be actualized in action?
(BMM 41) Dialogue..."is a matter of creation, of the creature, and that he is that, the man of whom I speak, he is a creature, trival and irreplacable."
(BMM 42) "And nothing is so valuable a service of dialogue between God and man as such an unsentimental and unreserved exchange of glances between two (people) in an alien place."
(BMM 43) "...blind to possibility..."
(BMM 44-45) "...people will try to use his "procedure" without his way of thinking and imagining."
First, the distance problem is naturally one that can be addressed in two sentences.
1) If everything concrete is equally near, human meaning is effaced. Is this a response to Honneth and neo-Kantian categories of morality and universal humanity?
2) "Distance expanding" is compouned and solidifed by monologue, refer to BMM 25.
