Carey Senior Faculty Fellow 2001-02
Vittorio Hösle (German and Russian Languages
and Literature)
University of Notre Dame
Hermeneutics of Dialogue
The reason I am particularly interested in the genre of the philosophical
dialogue is that it represents a peculiar challenge to the art of
interpretation, since it confronts the reader with different opinions
and does not always make it clear which opinion is favored by the
author. Since furthermore, according to Gadamer, real dialogue is
the model for meaningful hermeneutic activity, there is the hope
that an elaboration of the different forms of interaction in philosophical
dialogues may contribute to an ethics of dialogue as the basis of
hermeneutics.
Since Rudolf Hirzel's "der dialog" (1985) an exhaustive
analysis of this literary genre is missing, even if the twentieth
century is full of reflections on the ethical importance of the
principle of dialogue (Mikhail Bakhtin, for example, was interested
in dialogue within novels). I myself have already proposed a taxonomy
of dialogues according to different criteria and discussed the question
why a "correct" interpretation of a dialog must indeed
go beyond its author's intentions. Now I would like to research
the hermeneutics immanent in the dialogues themselves:
How do understanding and misunderstanding occur in dialogues? Why
do some dialogues fail? What are the ethical principles guiding
the discourse? Of particular emotional importance is the dialogue,
when one of its possible results is a conversion; and therefore
an analysis of interreligious dialogues promises peculiarly valuable
insights into the nature of the dialogue.
|
