Of the art of looking together / I

The ancients defined dialogue as an exchange where ideas and affections were alternately expressed. Socratically understood, dialogue is the art of looking together to seek a unity of meaning, a mutual collaboration in the construction of meanings. All dialogue requires understanding, which allows the realization of one’s being because understanding is part of opening up to the world, that superior act that accepts the free manifestation of entities, “what is”, without imposing one’s own opinions on them.

The dialogue begins by letting the interlocutor ask a question. Whoever asks or admits a question puts their opinions and prejudices on hold, recognizes an ignorance. A false question is one that does not question anything or presupposes something that it should not. Once the question is admitted, the dialogue begins, and all dialogue requires submitting to the direction (the thing) to which the dialogue is oriented. It consists in weighing the validity of each argument in relation to the subject, not in refuting the opposite, it is looking at its strength and not its weakness. Such exchange builds a concept, a unit of meaning beyond personal beliefs that thus accesses language.

The negotiated agreement, according to Gadamer, is a transformation into something common, something that is shared, and those who spoke are no longer what they were before they started. The art of looking together does not represent obtaining a victory over the interlocutor. Neither dialogue crushes the other, because whoever wishes to understand must allow himself to be affected by a dialectic of questions and answers. The result is a process in which the present expands, it means a gain of truth and meaning, of freedom. We don’t listen to others because we only hear ourselves doing it. Whoever dialogues comes out of himself, out of his confinement in the particular.

That means Buddhist detachment: letting the other appear, listening to the other. _

Fernando Solana Olivares

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