The Return of Dialectic to Its Place in Intellectual Life Author(s): Andrew Low Source: Rhetoric Review, Vol.

15, No. 2 (Spring, 1997), pp. 365-381 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/465649 Accessed: 18/03/2010 16:26
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ANDREW LOW Clemson University

The Return of Dialectic to Its Place in Intellectual Life

In this essay I argue that the truth-versus-playdichotomy sometimes used to characterize the nature and scope of rhetoric is a reification, and I recommend dialectic as an alternative model for the type of discourse to academic disciplines in the humanities. To show what is at stake appropriate in these competing discursive models and to clarify the problems that the notion of dialectic is in a position to solve, I then distinguish dialectic from dialogism, which has also been proposed as a model for academic discourse, and attemptto demonstratewhy dialogism is unsatisfactoryin this function. A brief historical survey sketches some reasons why the dialectical model fell into relative disuse and shows how it tended to dissolve into the reified dichotomies setting science or philosophy or truth in opposition to rhetoric and play. Finally, a model of dialectic suggested by C. S. Peirce is outlined as a useful alternative. The Problem with Rhetoric In the (modestly titled) essay "Rhetoric," Stanley Fish provides a reading of Western cultural history as a struggle between the "serious" and the These categories he derives from RichardLanham,who used them "rhetorical." to tag the poles of a dichotomythat set being against seeming, personalidentity against acted roles, sincerity against opportunisticmanipulation, universalism against pluralistic localism. Fish expands the subheadingsof this dichotomyin a more philosophical direction but leaves it essentially intact: The inner is opposed to the outer, depth to surface, necessity to contingency, the straightforwardto the angled, the abiding to the fleeting, reason to passion, things to words, and facts to opinions. This manner of classifying intellectual allegiances is a Platonic inheritance; Fish, of course, inverts the Platonic rankingand sides with its sophist opponents. Still, by assenting to this account of the alternatives, Fish and Lanham remain Platonists, in a sense. They invoke the timeless purity of remote essences in order to deny it: Rhetoric, as they conceive it, can be understood only as the antithesis of such austereremoteness. Whateverits local usefulness, this dichotomy seems misleading as a passkey to Western thought. Though Georg Lukacs intended "reification"as a diagnosis of modernity, it seems already implicit in the radically opposed alternativesthat Plato bequeathedus,

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and indeed, in a first sketch of the concept of reificationin Theoryof the Novel, Lukaicshimself sees the subjectivism of Greek lyric on one hand, and the objectivism of Greek philosophy on the other, as representingalready a sort of proto-modernfragmentation,the loss of Homeric wholeness. This is essentially the pattern of reification: "Serious"thought assumes the form of an utterly alienated regularityand uniformity,as an objectified "nature" is posited that is stripped of any human context, while an irreduciblehuman residue, excluded by its irregularityfrom the category of serious thought, is conceived as simply "mood" ("play" is in this context a synonym), free-floating and without responsibilitytowardanythingoutside itself. the opposite of reification,may seem to sound a Platonic Though "totality," note of purity and universality,in Lukaicsit is in fact intended as a rejectionof the Platonic categories altogether. It signifies a dialectic that integrates the subjective and the objective realms: At the same time as it refuses to subject nature or truth to the presumptionof a decontextualizedregularity,it submits the subjectivity of mood to a responsibility to a world of which it remains a part. Thus, to agree that the Lanham-Fish category of the "serious"might be considered a reified one is not to urge the stance of rhetoricalplay as the only alternative;from Lukacs'perspective,such a conceptionof rhetoricis not really an alternative at all but simply another manifestation of reification. His argument is one version of a tradition of dialectical thought, continued at present by Jiirgen Habermasand Karl-OttoApel, among others, that seeks to avoid the problems associated with both sides of Fish's antithesis, for both terms in that dichotomy miss something important. The blindness to humancontext that characterizesthe thinkingof "serious" types, and the philosophical and political difficulties this kind of thinking occasions, have frequentlybeen rehearsed,not least by Fish himself, and can be granted here without furthercomment. Some of the problems connected with the rhetorical perspectiveought, however, to be considered. In his recent book Pluralism: Against the Demand for Consensus, Nicholas Rescher attempts to work out (from outside the dialectical tradition-much of his argument is directed against Habermas) a kind of middle path between the serious and rhetorical points of view. The pluralism of his title is thus unlike that of Lanham or Fish: Rescher carefullydistinguishes what he considers a defensible pluralismfrom a numberof its wrong-headedcousins. The first of the bad pluralisms is skepticism, which holds that "no single position [is] at all justified; the alternatives simply cancel one another out" (80). The main defect Rescher discovers in skepticism is that it is morbidly risk-averse;out of fear of error,it impedes minds from doing what minds must do: "The demand for understanding,for a cognitive accommodationto one's environment-for 'knowing one's way about'-is one of the most fundamental requirementsof the human condition"(87). In this account skepticism seems to

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be a kind of hypochondriathat inhibits proper engagement with the world. A second version of pluralism, also unsatisfactory, is called "syncretism," according to which "all the alternativesshould be accepted:all those seemingly discordantpositions are in fact justified; they must, somehow, be conjoined and juxtaposed" (80). Though syncretism is redolent of the "generous spirit of liberalism,"it undermines itself, for it must assent to alternativesthat exclude it. Moreover, it leads to, or is the expression of, sloppy mental habits: It is necessarily uncritical,failing to treat "cognitivebusiness with care and caution" (90). Finally, "indifferentist relativism" maintains that "only one alternative should be accepted, but this acceptance cannot be based on rationally cogent grounds but emerges from considerations that themselves lack any rational basis-as a matter of taste, 'personalinclination,' or social tradition, or some such" (80). According to Rescher, the defect of indifferentistrelativismis that it reduces "authenticvalues" to "meretastes and preferences,"and shrinks from the discipline of impersonalcogency, of giving reasonsfor one's claims (103). Fish himself is quite critical of the broadlymanifest syncretisturge (though he does not use the term). In this he differs from Lanham, for whom the rhetorical tradition, while reminding us of "the inevitable circumstantialityof all human judgment," provides a syncretist "lesson in toleration and selfunderstanding"that is necessary to a democracy, by requiring that the same person argue both sides of an issue (Lanham 111). For Fish, the rhetorically savvy person must remaincontent with the lesson about the circumstantialityof judgment, for the claim that rhetoric, or anything else, can lead one into a "liberal utopia of enlarged sympathies and nonjudgmental . . . mental processes" rests upon an illusion (There's 25). This illusion Fish discovers in the pretensions of interdisciplinarity and in the self-understanding of liberalism; against it he urges an awareness of the unavoidability of perspectivallimitation and the unavailabilityof fundamentalpresuppositionsto rational scrutiny and conscious modification. In Rescher's terms, then, he opposes an indifferentistrelativism to syncretism. In some important respects, however, these alternatives do not provide much to choose between. Rescher argues that both positions are insofar selfdefeating as they must abstain from any claims to being rationallypreferableto other positions. To make or defend a choice on rationally irrelevant grounds, that is, in the absence of a conviction of its rational superiority,can seem as trivializing of the process of choosing as a syncretist refusal to choose at all. Both put "the prospect of advancing a seriously intended, rationally cogent claim beyond one's reach" (104). Rescher calls his own version of pluralism "perspectivalrationalism,"according to which we are entitled, indeed obliged, to see to it that "ourown (rationally adopted) standards [are] superior to the available alternatives"(102); nevertheless, we must acknowledge that, due to

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differences in cognitive situation, others might come to different conclusions aboutwhat is most rational. The adequacy of Rescher's own conception is not the issue in this essay, though one may question whether he has really provided a distinct alternative to indifferentistrelativism. The point now is that his list of the faulty pluralisms that haunt the rhetorical tradition constitutes a nosology of dialogues as well. One can see skepticism, syncretism, and relativism not just as individual positions but as viruses that infect discussions: Once stricken, they fail properly to engage. A dialogue pursued under the aegis of skepticism lacks purpose; underthat of syncretism, it lacks critical focus, and underthat of relativism, the sense that dialogue representsa common enterprise. Even a relativist can still, of course, employ a dialogue simply to attempt to persuade partners of his or her own position, but that is simply to reinterpretdialogue as a kind of public speaking, as rhetoric. What is specific to dialogue is suppressed, namely the understandingthat the conversants can, and have reason to, respond critically to each other's arguments in a mutual testing of conclusions, and even (pace Fish) of presuppositions. Dialogue conceived as such a mutual testing, for which the discipline of dialectic is competent, is a genuine alternativeto the more reified categories of rhetoric and its variously titled "serious" alternative. Dialogue embraces its human context; words are not unfortunate irrelevancies or hindrances strewn along the path to truth, but are the medium in which we have our being and throughwhich truth appearsto us. Nevertheless, this commitment to verbalism does not imply a license for manipulative play or the absence of responsibility: One has to be prepared to be called to account for one's positions by one's partners in dialogue. It is this moment that rhetoric, which oversees the persuasion of largely passive audiences that are necessarily less capable of articulatingand voicing immediate responses, generally neglects. A rhetorically savvy listener is certainly alert to tricks, but only in order (skeptically, syncretistically, or relativistically) to discount them and the arguments they propel. Dialectic, however, is not a matter of taking it or leaving it: It seeks to amend propositions in the direction of unforced, unmanipulated, that is, rationalconsensus. A False Alternative: Dialogism The twentieth century has been a boom time for rhetoric, but the closely relatedfield of dialectic has not fared as well, despite the charge of piety that and so kept "dialogue" enjoys. Pragmatismand hermeneuticshave appropriated alive much that belonged to the ancient discipline, but have not always insisted upon some of its more characteristicfeatures, notably its directedness toward truthand toward agreementamong interlocutorsconcerning it.

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Among the successor disciplines of dialectic is a "dialogics"derived from the work of Bakhtin. It has been positioned as a middle ground between reified extremes, appropriateas a model for academic disciplines in the humanities, just as I am arguing now on behalf of dialectic. In fact, however, dialogics is less an alternativeto than a reformulationof rhetoric. Don Bialostosky, to give an example, outlines his interpretation of dialogics as follows: whereas dialectic aims at discovering the truth of ideas or theses, rhetoric at determining the decisions of people . . . , dialogics [aims] at articulating the meaning of people's ideas, our own and those of others. [It] strives for comprehensive responsiveness and responsibilityto the consequential person-ideas of a time, culture, community, or discipline-that is, for the fullest articulation of someone's ideas with the actual and possible ideas of others. (789) People and ideas are thus fused into "voices," dialectic and rhetoric into "dialogics." Much of the Bakhtinian pathos survives even in this brief characterization: The appeal to the warm dignity of specific human beings in specific situations is opposed to the icy imperialism of a simplifying and generalizing formalism, now expressly applied to dialectic. Rhetoric,on the other hand, is implied to be brutally manipulative-personal enough, but a kind of bullying. Since Bialostosky is proposing dialogics here specifically as a model for literary criticism, it has the advantage of obviating the search for agreement, elusive in this field, and of providing a humane-seeming justification for an endless ones. Criticism is productionof text, as an alternativeto cooler poststructuralist to be understood as a "series of voices differentiating themselves from one anotherand open to new voices" (790); since neither truth nor agreement, here implicitly opposed to "openness," are aimed at, but "meaning," which proliferatesas voices confront one another, the aim of discourse is to produce furtherdiscourse. It remains, however, in this presentation rather unclear how or to what extent these voices work upon each other. Since ideas are not to be treated autonomously,but in fusion with persons, to seek to refute one is not clearly distinguishablefrom attacking the other. Even to mediate diverse claims can be perceived as a threat to the identities of those who hold them: Participantsin a dialogue are to be appreciatedin their "radicalotherness";otherwise, they are "reduced" to an "as yet unsolved problem" (794). But this notion of radical otherness is of religious provenance-the "wholly other" is central to Rudolf Otto'sclassic phenomenological account of religious awe-and not particularly useful as a basis for human conversation, excluding as it does shared language and experience as preconditions for or results of conversation. A form of this

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radical otherness turns up also in Fish's insistence upon the absolute inaccessibility of "forms of preknowledge"to rational critique: Members of differentinterpretivecommunities are in this respect utterlyalien to each other. For Bialostosky, the goal of dialogue is to recognize the necessary differences between conversants and to try to characterize them, "opening oneself at the same time to being characterizedby the other in terms alien to those one might be pleased to acknowledge" (794). It is in this context that Otto's numenous and Bialostosky's dialogic otherness seem to merge: "the surpriseand wonder and awe those moments hold cannotbe separatedfrom the vulnerability... they reveal"(Bialostosky 794). Why this type of recognitionof the self as other than it seemed is preferableto those self-alienations that are attendant upon the mutual search for truth or agreement is unclear. The religious language serves to hide a structural similarity between these and something like name-calling-certainly Bakhtin's own "characterizations" celebrationof the carnivalesqueis in a lower register. Despite Bialostosky, it seems more plausible to see this dialogics not as an alternativeto rhetoric,but as a version of it. CertainlyStanley Fish understands Bakhtin this way, observing that "his contrast of monologic to dialogic and heteroglossic discourse sums up .. . many strands in the rhetoricaltradition" (Doing 500). The radical otherness of alien perspectives or "voices," an indifferentist relativism that links perspectives not to rational choice but to identity and location, and the infinite, ultimately directionless nature of conversation are characteristics of both Fish's rhetoric and Bialostosky's dialogism. It is true that dialogism reflects a cultivated openness whereas Fish argues that "openness to revision and transformationare not methodological programsany individual can determinedlyand self-consciously enact"(There's 251); this, however, does not establish a boundary between rhetoric and dialogism, but simply reflects an argumentbetween relativism and a relativistsyncretist hybridwithin rhetoricitself. A similar account, and defense, of a Bakhtinian dialogism is supplied in Gregory Clark's Dialogue, Dialectic and Conversation. Dialogism is set against monologism, the defining characteristicof which is seen as a failure to acknowledge the necessary incompleteness and inescapablelocatedness of any claim. An agreement-seeking dialectics, though inevitably situated among conversants and in time, is to be considered monologic, and authoritarianas well: It denies that "there exists outside of it another consciousness, with the same rights and capable of responding on an equal footing, another and equal I" (10). Consensus is essentially coercive because it requires that alternative beliefs, values, or actions be considered inherently incorrect, denying the

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possibility of conflict by situating . . . exchange in a closed context where disagreementsare either suppressed or ignored. (54) Clark understandsdialogism as the mode of conversation appropriate to liberal pluralism, which requires that "the conversations that sustain a community proceed not toward agreements that would end the exchange but toward the exposure of disagreements" (57); a residual, formal consensus survives, however: that, namely, to allow the endless conversationto continue. The implication that the only alternativeto dialogism is the suppressionor ignoring of disagreements is, however, clearly false. Classical conceptions of dialectic require competing undemonstrableclaims as starting points; if they then seek to work through disagreements, this is quite different either from ignoring or suppressing them. The formulation, according to which the aim of dialogics is to expose difference, is a particularly weak and uninteresting one-little work is usually requiredfor such exposure, and little enough benefit to be anticipatedfrom it. The association of dialogism with democracy is a very common one-we have seen Lanham's closely related version of rhetoric-as-democracy above-but it is tenuous, nonetheless; it is not at all clear how one is to apply the model of an open-ended, consensus-repelling dialogue to any exercise of democracy,which might ratherbe conceived to rest precisely on the ability of a community freely to reach and act upon agreement. In the constraints of real situations, moreover, the agonism lingering in dialectics, which dialogics wished to transcend, reappears:Again, since every idea is tied to a specific person and location, every issue that comes before a community is unavoidably framedas merely a personalinterest. With its tendency to impede majoritarian democratic action, political dialogism might be understoodas the principle not so much of democracyas of liberalism. If so, it is a liberalism of a curious kind. Though he was opposed to liberalism, the Rightist, Weimar-eralegal philosopher Carl Schmitt accurately formulatedits principle, economic as well as political: that harmony is to be achieved throughfree competition. Parliamentis the political counterpart to the marketplace-it "is the place where one deliberates, that is, where a relative truth is achieved through discourse, in the discussion of argument and counterargument" (46). Where this process does not function-and he felt this to be the case in Weimar Germany-parliament loses its rationale and becomes a facade, its power assumed by others. For his part, Schmitt favored a kind of democratic dictatorship, sensing that parliamentary dialogue had become an irrelevance. It seems that a Bakhtiniandialogism, when formalized and appliedbeyond the sphere of literary texts and aestheticized social forms like carnival, encourages essentially the same unsatisfactory pluralisms as the reified

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interpretations of rhetoric, and that these are unsatisfactory not just on cognitive, but on political groundsas well. To summarize: The interpretationof rhetoric implicit in the Lanham-Fish opposition between serious truthand rhetoricalplay is a reification. Dialectic is an alternative to this reification that avoids the unsatisfactorypluralisms that follow in its wake, while a dialogics based on Bakhtinianprinciples is not. Why Classical Dialectic Declined Though classical dialectic inoculates against the diseases of dialogue that prevent it from undertakinga systematic and mutual testing of positions with a view to achieving a consensus about their truth,it ought not to be understoodas aiming at the hubris of an absolutely closed certainty.According to Gregory Vlastos, Socratic dialectic was adversative,not intendedto produce skepticism, but to discover truth somewhere within the belief system of the interlocutors themselves, and finally, not infallible, but directed instead at the kind of vulnerable knowledge demonstratedby a statement like "I know my friend won't lie to me" (114). Vlastos goes on to show how the Socrates of later dialogues, reflecting Plato's growing fascination with the simpler certainty of geometry, aspires to a harderand neater, nondialecticalknowledge-hence the reified categories with which this essay began. It is the same preferencein modern times that is largely responsiblefor the decline of the discipline, which looks too sloppily subjectiveto scientists and too impersonal-objective to poets. It is this middle ground that Aristotle's dialectics occupies: While not a science, in that it cannot itself directly provide a correct account of reality, it nevertheless does not remain on the level of individual opinions at which it starts. According to the formulationof J. D. G. Evans, we must startwith the objects as each is presentedto our individual faculties, objects which will differ with the individuals who apprehend them. The faculties are engaged scientifically when these differences between individuals have been eliminated and the object is the same for all faculties which are directed towards it. Dialectic is the activity which effects the passage from the prescientific to the scientific use of the faculties. (6) This turns a Bakhtinian dialogics on its head, in that it attempts methodically to separate concepts from their particular locations; because it must start by taking account of these particularities,however, it remains an art, and cannot by itself supply the unqualifiedknowledge of a demonstration.

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In Aristotelian ethics, dialectic is more central yet. Martha Nussbaum formulatesits role so: When, throughwork on the alternativesand through dialogue with one another, [people] have arrived at a harmonious adjustmentof their beliefs . . . this will be the ethical truth, on the Aristotelian understanding of truth: a truth that is anthropocentric, but not relativistic. ("I believe," she interjects on her own account, "that this position is substantiallycorrect.")(11) It is precisely the loss of this integratingvantage, "anthropocentric, but not crisis of reification: False objectivities in relativistic," that constitutes Lukaics' the scientific and economic realms are matched by equally false subjectivities elsewhere (e.g., in literatureand ethics). Most conceptions of dialectic share a concern to maintainlinks between the subjectiveand objective domains, which appearto fly apartinto irreconcilablyhostile camps when the notion of dialectic dissolves. A brief survey of several of the critical moments in the decline of the dialectical traditionwill show how this traditionis situated between the terms of Fish's reified opposition, and that the forces behind its modern dissolution have been those to which Lukaicshas drawn attention: opposed, but mutually determining tendencies toward fetishized objectification and the solipsistic cultivation of mood. To reestablishdialectic as the model for a type of dialogue that is neither scientific nor rhetorical requires an understanding of the pressurestendingto subvert it. A narrativeof the modern decay of dialectic might start with Walter Ong's account of the depredationsvisited upon the discipline by Ramism. Ong shows how both rhetoric and dialectic were not so much asphyxiated in the intellectual atmospherethat broodedover the earliest manifestationsof modern science, as inclined, rather, obligingly to reformulate themselves to accommodate them. Ramism spatialized the verbal arts after the model of geometry into lists, graphs, and schematic representations,useful originally as pedagogical devices for very young students, but soon usurping control of the foundational metaphors of the disciplines. So dialectic becomes the art while this term still maintains a crucial connection with the oral "disserendi"; sphere, it invokes not so much a dialogue as a classroom lecture, and implies mnemonic treatmentsof the classical "topics."It is in the humdrum running through of such schematizationsrather than in a Cartesianconcern for logical hygiene that Ong situates the origin of a reified modern conception of "method." He surveysthe damageto dialectic as follows: Ramist dialectic has lost all sense of Socratic dialogue and even most sense of scholastic dispute. The Ramist arts of discourse are

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monologue arts.... This orientationis very profoundand of a piece with the orientationof Ramism toward an object world (associated with visual perception) rather than toward a person world (associatedwith voice and auditoryperception).(287) Ramism is thus a source of the tendency of "serious" discourse to associate truth with a certain wordlessness. To this assault upon dialectic from an allegiance to the mute "objectworld"correspondstwo centuries later a series of attacks from the opposite quarter, namely a Romantic sense of beleaguered subjectivity. In some of its forms it, too, is suspicious of words. When Rousseau,in the Second Discourse, contraststhe happy savage with the servile Europeanofficial, he sums up the primarydistinctions as follows: "The savage lives within himself; the sociable man, always outside of himself, knows how to live only in the opinion of others; and it is, so to speak, from their judgment alone that he draws the sentiment of his own existence" (179). Though he is famously ambivalenton just this point-for later, in the Social Contract, it will be only within the bonds of a tight republic that full humanity is conceived as possible-this fundamental suspicion of sociability as the source of unauthenticity casts dialectic in a dubious light. The educational regime depictedin Rousseau'sEmile, for example, is remarkablefor its paucity of open discussion, consisting ratherof a series of contrived mimes and laconic object lessons: Pedagogy is to be an authentic unfolding of inner being, as far as this is possible, by the words of others. uncontaminated, German Romanticism is particularly rich in reflection upon the role of dialectic. Though Friedrich Schleiermacher, the primary theological voice of German Romanticism, is himself the author of a formidable Dialektik, his earliest and most popular works, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, and Soliloquies, in their representativelyRomantic focus on the claims of individuality, are also wary of all but the most carefully pruned versions of dialectic. To open oneself up to dialogue is to endanger one's identity, and to impoverish the world as well, since it encourages a gray uniformity of consensus. A founder of liberal Christian theology, Schleiermacherdownplaysthe truth value of religious statements, taking them instead as expressions of emotion, which he understandsto be the proper stage for religious life. In this context, what remainsof discussion is self-expression. In the Soliloquies he sounds the note of "plenitude"that one associates with Lovejoy'sGreatChain: "[E]achman is meant to representhumanity in his own way, combining its elements uniquely, so that it may reveal itself in every mode, and all that can issue from its womb be made actual in the fullness of unending space and time" (31). This uniqueness seeks recognition, so communicationis necessary, but it is not dialectical:

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[E]ven while engaged in meditation, in contemplation, or in the assimilation of anything new, I need the presence of some loved one, so that the inner event may immediately be communicated, and I may forthwith make my account with the world through the sweet and easy mediation of friendship.(37) It is, perhaps, not surprising in a work titled "Soliloquies"that the doubleness of dialogue should be so muted: Friendship strips otherness of the awful remoteness that Bialostosky attributedto it and replaces the contest of truthseeking with a loose, syncretistic harmony. Outside this harmony, opinions can be threatening: My late awakened spirit, rememberinghow long it bore an alien yoke [i.e., a strict religious education], fears lest it be subjected again to the domination of some alien opinion, and whenever a strange object discloses a new aspect of life, my first step is to rise in arms against it, in order to fight for freedom. .... As soon, however, as I have won my distinctive point of view, the time for strife is over, and I gladly suffer each other view to take its place beside my own; my mind in peace completes the work of penetratingand interpretingeach other standpoint. (41) The harmonyenvisioned is not, then, a consensus: Schleiermacher,and behind him Rousseau and Herder, are sponsors of "gorgeous mosaic" forms of multiculturalism,which in a sense invoke dialogue in order to limit it. This gives rise not to dialectics but to a kind of erotics: Differences are not mediated and overcome, but let stand, after the threat of their initial challenge has been overcome and they have been properly situated; variety is objectified and savored. The pluralisms of relativism and syncretism, rhetorical or dialogical, have much in common with this view. They do not share Rousseau'sdistrustof sociability, but one might be able to find in them a trace of Schleiermacher's fear of contagion by alien opinion, and the pleasure in diversity that sociability provides is seen to derive more from new additions of discrete voices than from the bending or transforming of opinions that have been opened up to each other, which transformationscan be seen as sources of the heteronymousand unauthentic. Moreover, in each case, claims are not to be tested so much as interpreted: One seeks meaning rather than validity. To "penetrate"alien opinion appears to entail attempting to work oneself into the place that it holds-a kind of simultaneous acknowledging and discounting that is not entirely different in form from patronization.

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These pluralisms codify the Romantic reluctance to sacrifice the self to truth, and can be seen as a kind of failure of nerve: One hesitates to put one's own attitudes and opinions to a dialectical test, but rationalizes this hesitation as a requirementof tolerance. Gadamermakes a similar criticism of a related appearance,the kind of historicism that approachestexts from the past simply as exotica to be classified: In our understanding we have as it were, withdrawn from the situation of trying to reach agreement. [The researcher] himself cannot be reached. By including from the beginning the other person's standpoint in what he is saying to us, we are making our own standpointsafely unattainable. (270) This seems the inevitable result of treating arguments primarily as Romantic self-expressions or Bakhtinian "voices,"for that is precisely what it means to "include the other person's standpoint in what he is saying to us"-Bakhtin presses no point as insistently as this. After the passing of some of his Romantic enthusiasms,and after extensive work on Plato, Schleiermacherreturns,in his lectures on dialectic, with much more sympathy to the question of its nature and function. There, following Plato, he begins by noting the structuralidentity of thinking and conversing, maintaining that the development of an idea within an individual mind is essentially the equivalent of its developmentin a dialogue. He then supplies a conversationis typology of dialogues according to their respective ends. "Free" an aesthetic form driven by a simple pleasure in sociability, and is characterized by a relative unconcern with the precise relationship of the expressions among themselves, and so with the presence of contradiction. Having no aim outside itself, free conversation ends only when the pleasure does. "Business"conversation is the pragmatic attemptto establish a working consensus and frequently relies upon the art of rhetoric. Pure or "authentic" conversation aims at knowledge; it is the proper home of dialectic, which distinguishes itself from simple demonstrationin that its course is rougher. It must confront obstacles, occasions for doubt and disagreementthat prevent the smooth and strictly logical developmentof an idea. Schleiermacher maintains that dialectic can emerge only when free or aesthetic conversation is kept clearly distinct from the pure or authentic sort. Because aesthetic conversation simply celebrates sociability, it interprets disagreementas the naturalresult of differences in place or personality;because one cannot be expected to be someone other than one is, attemptsat mediation make no sense. This position is a variant of the one defended in Schleiermacher's own earlier work; here it is marginalized, as he posits something in thought-a directednesstowardwhat exists-that is unaffectedby

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individual difference, and that has knowledge ratherthan pleasure for its aim. A community of thought is now seen as possible and desirable, and disagreement, though an engine of progress, is something that is properly conceived as removableby means of dialectic. Here too, however, a distinction is made between what issues from dialectic and something like "objective" truth: Communities of thought are equated with national linguistic communities, within which, but not among which, the possibility of consensus can be presupposed. dialectic seeks to disclose thus appearsto The world that Schleiermacher's precede any sharp division between the subjective and objective: Language infuses it inseparably.It seems that at the level of the Volk, some of the same ideas are repeated that were earlier applied to individuals, but this time more secure against charges of solipsism. Bakhtin provides a convenient foil here. The historical moments that most fascinate him-imperial Rome and the Renaissance, for example-are precisely those in which different languages confront and put each other into question: He is most interested in those occasions when agreement is least to be expected. His "polyglossia"is not a capacity to assimilate foreign languages and traditions, as, say, the Germanic tribes assimilated classical-Christian culture, but a state of constant contestedness: the world becomes polyglot, once and for all and irreversibly.The period of national languages, coexisting but closed and deaf to each other, comes to an end. ... A multitude of different languages, cultures and times became available to Europe, and this became a decisive factor in its life and thought. (12) For what, exactly, does this "multitudeof different languages, cultures and times" become available?Simply for the sensibility necessaryfor the creation of the novel, apparently. Schleiermacher would doubtless argue that this celebration of the dissolution of a community of thought, instead of emancipating, simply fences us into the hollow relativism-syncretism of aestheticizing dialogue. An early friend of Schleiermachersuggested an influential variant form of "aesthetic"dialogue: According to Friedrich Schlegel's famous definition of Romanticism in the 116thAthendmsfragment, the dialogue that is Romanticism is necessarily open-ended. Classicism prized the formal perfection of closure; Romanticism denies its possibility. Schlegel's notion of Romantic irony is the application to the self-conception of the artist of this infinite dialogue: rather than providing occasion for the expression of a unique self, this new form of aesthetic dialogue opens the self up to endless transformations.

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A similar view is formulated by another associate of Schleiermacher: While few have matched Wilhelm von Humboldt's enthusiasm for the cultivation of individuality, and indeed the vigor with which he defends the primacy of this concern has made him the prototype of what one might call "lifestyle liberals," he could not share the slightly misanthropic anxiety of influence of Rousseau and the young Schleiermacher. In his lecture "On the Dual," he explains the existence of the dual forms in some languages (particularlyGreek)by pointing out both the centralityof doubleness in human experience, and the common tendency to reintegrate experienced doubleness into a kind of unity. As examples, he cites the general proclivity of language to make sense of the world by means of paired opposites, and adduces as an even more fundamental fact of language that it necessarily manifests itself in dialogue: Thought itself is essentially accompaniedby the desire for a social existence: human beings want, apart from all physical and emotional relationships, even for the sake of pure thought, a Thou to correspondto each I. A concept assumes its clarity and certainty only as it appears in the reflection of an alien power to think: it emerges by pulling itself out of a heaving mass of representations, and in the face of a subject, forms itself into an object. (25, translationmy own) The dialectical journey of the concept toward clarity and certainty via an is arrestinglyformulated objectificationthat remainsa mode of intersubjectivity here. Humboldt, and John Stuart Mill, whom he strongly influenced in this respect, hold that it is precisely the cultivationof individualitythat requires the proliferation of conversation; alien influence is not to be avoided but sought out, for variety arises out of a multiplicityof influences and modifications. The state should be kept minimal because of its capacity, through various forms of intimidation, to restrain free associations. Here, again as in Mill, the requirementsof dialogue are explicitly made the criteria that are to determine the shape of public life: A form of dialectic becomes the chief concern of government. This conversation, though, aims at Bildung, at a richness of formative experience, not at consensus about truth. However, the richness of experience that comes from variety of influence also squelches any concern about strict individual authenticity.In this Humboldt and Mill turn Rousseau and Schleiermacherneatly on their heads.

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The Peirceian Alternative A dialectical model supplied by C. S. Peirce, similar in some respects to the one Mill proposes in On Liberty, but in my view an improvement, seems a good stopping place. It offers a kind of compromise between dialectic and dialogics: Like the former it tends toward the impersonaland is directed toward the truthabout the world, but like the latter it provides for no actual conclusion. This is Peirce's definition of the real: The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independentof the vagaries of me and you. Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a community, without definite limits, and capable of a definite increaseof knowledge. (247) "Information"independent of the "vagaries of me and you" suggests the acknowledgementof a responsibilityto something "outthere,"though precisely what that something is is left hypothetical and for the future to determine. "Reasoning" suggests the methodicalness of a discipline, although the "communitywithout definite limits" leaves the specific method without final determination. This open conversation does not imply skepticism, for it is capable of "a definite increase of knowledge," but neither does it allow the illusion of finality. Peirce's model may never have the literary resonance of Bakhtin'sdialogism or Lanham'srhetoricalplay, but if accepted as appropriate for a certain kind of discussion-a kind well suited to academic disciplines in the humanities-it can work, in its sphere, against a common aesthetic shortcircuitingof dialogue. Lanhamhas proposeda sort of panrhetoricismas the primarysubstance of a lower-division curriculum.At the heart of a liberal arts education lies, he claims, the game of rhetoric, and at the basis of a tolerant democracy lies the rhetorical capacity to argue all sides of a question. Lanham's case takes a familiar path: Of rhetoricalexchange he claims that "theonly true absolute, in a secular democraticeducation,is the obligation to keep that oscillation going" (114); "all arguments are constructed with a purpose, to serve an interest" (110); "[r]hetoricpersuadesby taking for its engine our evolutionary heritage as primates-our need for pure play" (110). The competition among positions is, once again, simply to be savored. What gets lost in this aestheticization is preciselywhat a Peirceian dialectic would cultivate: a readiness to submit one's ideas to the modification requiredby rational criticism and to work toward an agreement that is not victory or defeat in a game, but the proper result of a

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responsibility both to one's dialectical community and to what exists "independentof the vagaries of me and you" (whatever that should turn out precisely to be). A revival of dialectic along Peirceianlines (as has begun in the work of Karl-Otto Apel and Jiirgen Habermas) is therefore much to be welcomed.
Note 1 would like to thankRR reviewersAlan Grossand Kathleen Welch for theirinsightfulcritiques andsuggestions. Works Cited Der Denkweg von Charles S. Peirce. Frankfurt: 1975. Apel, Karl-Otto. Suhrkamp, . "Fallibilismus, Konsenstheorie der Wahrheit und Letztbegriindung." Philosophie und Suhrkamp,1987. Begriindung.Frankfurt: Bakhtin,M. M. TheDialogic Imagination.Austin:U of Texas P, 1982. U of Minnesota . Problems of Dostoevsky'sPoetics. Minneapolis: P, 1984. Criticism." PMLA101 (1986): 788Bialostosky,Don H. "Dialogicsas an Art of Discoursein Literary 97. Clark, Gregory.Dialogue, Dialectic, and Conversation:A Social Perspective on the Function of SouthernIllinois UP, 1990. Writing.Carbondale: UP, 1978. Evans,J. D. G. Aristotle'sConcept of Dialectic. Cambridge: Cambridge Feuerbach, Ludwig.TheEssence of Christianity.New York:Harper,1957. Fish, Stanley. Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literaryand Legal Studies. Durham:Duke UP, 1989. . There'sNo Such Thing As Free Speech And Its A Good Thing, Too. New York: OxfordUP, 1994. Truthand Method.New York:Crossroad, 1982. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. MIT, 1990. Habermas, Jiirgen.ThePhilosophical Discourse of Modernity.Cambridge: Wilhelmvon. The Limits of StateAction. Indianapolis: Humboldt, LibertyFund,1993. -. Schriftenzur Sprache. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1980. Lanham, Richard. The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. Lukiacs,Georg. History and Class Consciousness. Trans. Rodney Livingstone.Cambridge:MIT, 1971. -. The Theoryof the Novel. Trans.Anna Bostock. Cambridge: MIT, 1971. Mill, JohnStuart.On Liberty, in TheEnglish PhilosophersFrom Bacon To Mill. New York: Modern Library,1939. C. The Fragility of Goodness:Luckand Ethics in Greek Tragedyand Philosophy. Nussbaum,Martha UP, 1986. Cambridge Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1958. Ong, WalterJ. Ramus:Method and the Decay of Dialogue. Cambridge: Otto,Rudolf.TheIdea of the Holy. Trans.JohnHarvey.London:Oxford,1950. Peirce,C. S. Philosophical Writings.New York:Dover, 1955. 1995. Rescher,Nicholas.Pluralism: Against the Demandfor Consensus.Oxford:Clarendon, The First and Second Discourses. Trans.Roger D. Masters.New York: St. Rousseau,Jean-Jacques. Martin's,1964. HanserVerlag,n.d. Kritische Schriften.Miinchen: Schlegel,Friedrich. Friedrich. Dialektik. Leipzig:HinrichsVerlag,1942. Schleiermacher, . On Religion: Speeches to Its CulturedDespisers. Trans.JohnOman.New York:Harper,1958. . Soliloquies.A New Year'sGift. n.p., n.d. Schmitt, Carl. The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. Trans. Ellen Kennedy. Cambridge:MIT, 1988. Vlastos,Gregory.Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher.Ithaca:CornellUP, 1991.

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Andrew Low is AssistantProfessorof English and Humanitiesat Clemson University,and has andethics. publishedin the areaof literature

Imagery and Composition: Classrooms, Curriculum, and Lives Coeditors Kristie Fleckenstein, Linda Calendrillo, and Demetrice Worley solicit essays that investigate mental imagery in contexts that impinge on the teaching of writing and reading.In our literateWesternculture,where language functionsas the most visible tool of culturalnegotiationand its role in the creationof culture legitimation,mentalimageryin all its sensoryrichnessis marginalized, and consciousnessneglected.The goal of this collectionis to redressthat imbalanceacrosscomposition to focus theiressays on the intersectionof theoryandteaching. studies.We urge submitters Submit 3 copies of a 3000-5000 word essay (15-20 pages, including bibliography)in MLA formatby June 30, 1997 to Linda T. Calendrillo,Departmentof English, EasternIllinois University, IL 61920. Charleston,