Dialogue as a Search for Common Ground

The article explores the social dimension of dialogue as manifested in the joint search for truth, the overcoming of alienation, the formation of social institutions, the reproduction of linguistic forms of communication, and the enactment of social action. The study of dialogue lies at the intersection of several fields of social inquiry, including philosophy, sociology, and psychology. In Plato’s works, dialogue serves as a means of jointly seeking truth, justice, and virtue, linking the interlocutors’ movement through physical space with the intersubjective movement of thought. In the philosophy of Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas, dialogue is understood as a relation to the Other that opens up the possibility of self-knowledge and provides the foundation for an ethics of mutual responsibility. In the Russian intellectual tradition, these questions were further developed by Mikhail Bakhtin, who described the dialogical organization of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s works as an interaction among the autonomous voices of the characters, the author, and the reader. The disruption of dialogical relations leads to alienation, various forms of which are examined in Robert Merton’s sociological theory and in the Marxist tradition. Alienation restricts the possibility of mutual understanding, reinforces relations of domination and subordination, and may result in institutional domination, whereby the individual becomes subordinated to a norm embodied in the Generalized Other. At the same time, dialogue creates conditions for the transformation of social institutions, the expansion of social rights, and the reconciliation of institutional norms with the experiences of individual subjects. In the theoretical framework of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, norms are reproduced and transformed within the intersubjective space of everyday interactions. In contemporary society, internal dialogue also plays an important role, enabling individuals to relate the demands of the Generalized Other to their own experience, needs, and interests. Dialogue remains an underestimated resource in the social sciences: on the one hand, as an independent object of inquiry that allows for a more precise understanding of the formation of solidarity, institutional change, and social development; and, on the other hand, as an instrument of social regulation that cannot be reduced to administrative intervention but is capable of creating a space for social transformation and for the coordination of meanings, positions, and norms. Dialogue is an immanent form of social life and is indispensable to its key domains, including politics, civic self-organization, and artistic and other forms of creative activity.

social philosophy, Other, dialogue, intentionality, intersubjectivity, reflexivity, alienation, social institutions

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