Was den Menschen zum Menschen macht

Dialogue

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🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: Dialog

Dialogue (Gr. dialogos, “speaking-through”) or, equivalently, the conversation is the reciprocal linguistic enactment between persons. It is the linguistic figure of the I–Thou encounter and more than an exchange of information — a personal enactment of address, truthfulness, understanding, and self-transcendence within a shared form of life.

Twelve Essential Characteristics

From the classical tradition (Plato, Augustine, Humboldt, Buber, Husserl, Stein, Heidegger, Gadamer, Levinas, Habermas, Austin, Searle, Wittgenstein, Wojtyła, Spaemann, Pieper, Bakhtin), twelve constitutive characteristics condense:

1. Addressability. Dialogue begins with address — the Thou-pole, which is not first constituted through speaking but acknowledged in it (Buber: the basic word I–Thou; Rosenstock-Huessy: the vocative before the indicative).

2. Original intentionality of both poles. Both speakers are sources of their own directed acts (intentionality, original intentionality) — not mere reaction to stimuli.

3. Truth-claim. Every understanding-oriented speech act raises validity claims: truth (propositional), rightness (normative), truthfulness (expressive) (Habermas, Apel).

4. Truthfulness as a disposition. Personal truthfulness (Hildebrand, Spaemann) is the speaker’s moral basic constitution. Being-able-to-lie presupposes ought-to-be-truthful.

5. Understanding as encounter with the subject matter. Understanding is not data extraction but a fusion of horizons concerning a subject matter (Gadamer). It demands engaging oneself with the that-about-which of speech (Heidegger).

6. Bodily co-presence. The word is a bodily gesture (Merleau-Ponty); the gaze, the pause, the silence carry meaning. Empathy is a sui generis act (Stein).

7. Self-transcendence and self-gift. In dialogue the person transcends itself toward the other (self-transcendence). Genuine dialogue is reciprocal self-gift and thereby an enactment of the communio personarum (Wojtyła).

8. Responsibility through the word. Whoever promises binds himself; whoever asserts is answerable (Austin: performatives; Searle: commissives). The word is binding because a person stands behind it.

9. Language-game within a form of life. Speaking is embedded in a shared practice (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations §§19, 23, 241). Without a form of life, no language-game.

10. Performativity. The word effects and enacts — it baptizes, forgives, promises, founds a marriage (Austin, Wojtyła, the sacramental tradition).

11. Aletheic function. Truth appears in dialogue, not before it (Plato: maieutics; Gadamer: truth as event; Heidegger: alētheia).

12. Asymmetry and symmetry. Address comes “from above” as an ethically obligating claim (Levinas); the recognition of dignity is materially symmetrical (Habermas, Spaemann). A tension, not a contradiction.

What Dialogue Is Not

The rigor of these characteristics has an important consequence: whatever reproduces the linguistic surface of a dialogue without fulfilling the underlying conditions is not a dialogue.

  • AI conversation simulation (German) by an AI system is not a form of dialogue but its simulacrum — a linguistic surface without a speaking subject, without a sincerity condition, without a Thou-pole.
  • AI pseudo-encounter (German) with a quasi-personal system lets the sensation of being heard be real, but not the being-heard itself (Turkle, Vallor).
  • AI truth-indifferent utterance (German) in Frankfurt’s sense is neither truthfulness nor lie — but structural indifference toward truth. LLM output is paradigmatically truth-indifferent.
  • AI derivative persona (German) is a character mask without a character-bearer (Shanahan). No “who” behind the “how.”
  • defective AI speech act is a speech-act form whose sincerity condition remains structurally unfulfillable (Searle).

That human beings have the feeling of a dialogue with AI systems is phenomenologically real and psychologically effective — but this changes nothing about the fact that the ontological structure of dialogue requires persons at both poles.

Ontological Classification

Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.

Further sources:

  • Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Transl. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Scribner, 1970.
  • Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Transl. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. London: Continuum, 2004.
  • Habermas, Jürgen. The Theory of Communicative Action, vols. 1–2. Transl. Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984–1987.
  • Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity. Transl. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969.
  • Wojtyła, Karol. The Acting Person. Transl. Andrzej Potocki. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979.
  • Spaemann, Robert. Persons: The Difference between ‘Someone’ and ‘Something’. Transl. Oliver O’Donovan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
  • Austin, John L. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon, 1962.
  • Searle, John R. Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.
  • Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Transl. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1953.
  • Stein, Edith. On the Problem of Empathy. Transl. Waltraut Stein. Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1989.
  • Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Transl. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1962; §§34–35.
  • Pieper, Josef. Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power. Transl. Lothar Krauth. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992.
  • Hildebrand, Dietrich von. Christian Ethics. New York: David McKay, 1953.

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