From Nietzsche’s Daybreak:

The many forces that now have to come together in the thinker. — To abstract oneself from sensory perception, to exalt oneself to contemplation of abstractions — that was at one time actually felt as exaltation: we can no longer quite enter into this feeling. To revel in pallid images of words and things, to sport with such invisible, inaudible, impalpable beings, was, out of contempt for the sensorily tangible, seductive and evil world, felt as a life in another higher world. ‘These abstracta are certainly not seductive, but they can offer us guidance!’ — with that one lifted oneself upwards. It is not the content of these sportings of spirituality, it is they themselves which constituted ‘the higher life’ in the prehistoric ages of science. Hence Plato’s admiration for dialectics and his enthusiastic belief that dialectics necessarily pertained to the good, unsensory man. It is not only knowledge which has been discovered gradually and piece by piece, the means of knowing as such, the conditions and operations which precede knowledge in man, have been discovered gradually and piece by piece too. And each time the newly discovered operation or the novel condition seemed to be, not a means to knowledge, but in itself the content, goal and sum total of all that was worth knowing. The thinker needs imagination, self-uplifting, abstraction, desensualization, invention, presentiment, induction, dialectics, deduction, the critical faculty, the assemblage of material, the impersonal mode of thinking, contemplativeness and comprehensiveness, and not least justice and love for all that exists — but all these means to knowledge once counted individually in the history of the vita contemplativa as goals, and final goals, and bestowed on their inventors that feeling of happiness which appears in the human soul when it catches sight of a final goal.

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If you’ve caught sight of and studied the limitations of the intellectual moves you’ve been trained to perform since toddlerhood, and gained some freedom from unconscious habit of thought, and perhaps even learned some new counts and steps and trained yourself to dance kinetically so the dance dances itself… you’ll see exactly why “objective” thinkers tend to be so sterile and stiff. Objective thinkers know only how to stand apart and think about things. They tune out music as mere noise, and consequently never go beyond the counts.

If we want the world to be a place we love to inhabit, we’re going to have to teach ourselves some new modes of knowing.

Here it is, all laid out:

Hermeneutical experience is concerned with tradition. This is what is to be experienced. But tradition is not simply a process that experience teaches us to know and govern; it is language — i.e., it expresses itself like a Thou. A Thou is not an object; it relates itself to us. It would be wrong to think that this means that what is experienced in tradition is to be taken as the opinion of another person, a Thou. Rather, I maintain that the understanding of tradition does not take the traditionary text as an expression of another person’s life, but as meaning that is detached from the person who means it, from an I or a Thou. Still, the relationship to the Thou and the meaning of experience implicit in that relation must be capable of teaching us something about hermeneutical experience. For tradition is a genuine partner in dialogue, and we belong to it, as does the I with a Thou.

It is clear that the experience of the Thou must be special because the Thou is not an object but is in relationship with us. For this reason the elements we have emphasized in the structure of experience will undergo a change. Since here the object of experience is a person, this kind of experience is a moral phenomenon — as is the knowledge acquired through experience, the understanding of the other person. Let us therefore consider the change that occurs in the structure of experience when it is experience of the Thou and when it is hermeneutical experience.

[FIRST STAGE: Thou as a behaving object; understanding as ability to predict behavior and a means to influence/control it. This view is overwhelmingly the norm in business. The problem of the Thou is centered around “eliciting desired behaviors” from customers and employees that benefit the business.]

There is a kind of experience of the Thou that tries to discover typical behavior in one’s fellowmen and can make predictions about others on the basis of experience. We call this a knowledge of human nature. We understand the other person in the same way that we understand any other typical event in our experiential field — i.e., he is predictable. His behavior is as much a means to our end as any other means. From the moral point of view this orientation toward the Thou is purely self-regarding and contradicts the moral definition of man. As we know, in interpreting the categorical imperative Kant said, inter alia, that the other should never be used as a means but always as an end in himself. [NOTE: This is the heart of morality, in my opinion.]

If we relate this form of the I-Thou relation — the kind of understanding of the Thou that constitutes knowledge of human nature — to the hermeneutical problem, the equivalent is naive faith in method and in the objectivity that can be attained through it. [NOTE: There does seem to be an uncanny correlation between fixation on method and an apparent prediction-and-control view of understanding others.] Someone who understands tradition in this way makes it an object — i.e., he confronts it in a free and uninvolved way — and by methodically excluding everything subjective, he discovers what it contains. We saw that he thereby detaches himself from the continuing effect of the tradition in which he himself has his historical reality. It is the method of the social sciences, following the methodological ideas of the eighteenth century and their programatic formulation by Hume, ideas that are a cliched version of scientific method. But this covers only part of the actual procedure of the human sciences, and even that is schematically reduced, since it recognizes only what is typical and regular in behavior. It flattens out the nature of hermeneutical experience in precisely the same way as we have seen in the teleological interpretation of the concept of induction since Aristotle.

[SECOND STAGE: Thou as a separate, “seen against the sky” subjectivity; understanding as psychological explanation. One believes one understands another if he is able to sketch out an accurate and nuanced persona of that person. It has been very, very difficult to extricate myself from this vision of the Thou.]

A second way in which the Thou is experienced and understood is that the Thou is acknowledged as a person, but despite this acknowledgment the understanding of the Thou is still a form of self-relatedness. Such self-regard derives from the dialectical appearance that the dialectic of the I-Thou relation brings with it. This relation is not immediate but reflective. To every claim there is a counterclaim. This is why it is possible for each of the partners in the relationship reflectively to outdo the other. One claims to know the other’s claim from his point of view and even to understand the other better than the other understands himself. In this way the Thou loses the immediacy with which it makes its claim. It is understood, but this means it is co-opted and pre-empted reflectively from the standpoint of the other person. Because it is a mutual relationship, it helps to constitute the reality of the I-Thou relationship itself. The inner historicity of all the relations in the lives of men consists in the fact that there is a constant struggle for mutual recognition. This can have very varied degrees of tension, to the point of the complete domination of one person by the other. But even the most extreme forms of mastery and slavery are a genuine dialectical relationship of the kind that Hegel has elaborated.

The experience of the Thou attained here is more adequate than what we have called the knowledge of human nature, which merely seeks to calculate how the other person will behave. It is an illusion to see another person as a tool that can be absolutely known and used. Even a slave still has a will to power that turns against his master, as Nietzsche rightly said. But the dialectic of reciprocity that governs all I-Thou relationships is inevitably hidden from the consciousness of the individual. The servant who tyrannizes his master by serving him does not believe that he is serving his own aims by doing so. In fact, his own self-consciousness consists precisely in withdrawing from the dialectic of this reciprocity, in reflecting himself out of his relation to the other and so becoming unreachable by him. By understanding the other, by claiming to know him, one robs his claims of their legitimacy. In particular, the dialectic of charitable or welfare work operates in this way, penetrating all relationships between men as a reflective form of the effort to dominate. The claim to understand the other person in advance functions to keep the other person’s claim at a distance. We are familiar with this from the teacher-pupil relationship, an authoritative form of welfare work. In these reflective forms the dialectic of the I-Thou relation becomes more clearly defined. [NOTE: This is why I have soured considerably on personality typology. I’ve seen it used to explain away the relevance of other people’s claims: “this claim is only intelligible and applicable to certain temperaments.”]

In the hermeneutical sphere the parallel to this experience of the Thou is what we generally call historical consciousness. Historical consciousness knows about the otherness of the other, about the past in its otherness, just as the understanding of the Thou knows the Thou as a person. In the otherness of the past it seeks not the instantiation of a general law but something historically unique. By claiming to transcend its own conditionedness completely in knowing the other, it is involved in a false dialectical appearance, since it is actually seeking to master the past, as it were. This need not be accompanied by the speculative claim of a philosophy of world history; as an ideal of perfect enlightenment, it sheds light on the process of experience in the historical sciences, as we find, for example, in Dilthey. In my analysis of hermeneutical consciousness I have shown that the dialectical illusion which historical consciousness creates, and which corresponds to the dialectical illusion of experience perfected and replaced by knowledge, is the unattainable ideal of the Enlightenment. A person who believes he is free of prejudices, relying on the objectivity of his procedures and denying that he is himself conditioned by historical circumstances, experiences the power of the prejudices that unconsciously dominate him as a vis a tergo [“force from behind”]. A person who does not admit that he is dominated by prejudices will fail to see what manifests itself by their light.

[NOTE: This next point is enormously important] It is like the relation between I and Thou. A person who reflects himself out of the mutuality of such a relation changes this relationship and destroys its moral bond. A person who reflects himself out of a living relationship to tradition destroys the true meaning of this tradition in exactly the same way. In seeking to understand tradition historical consciousness must not rely on the critical method with which it approaches its sources, as if this preserved it from mixing in its own judgments and prejudices. It must, in fact, think within its own historicity. To be situated within a tradition does not limit the freedom of knowledge but makes it possible.

[NOTE: This is why one cannot learn about philosophy (or religion) from survey texts or survey courses. A student immerses himself in the philosophy and tries to see and apply its validity or its meaning is lost. It is not a matter of thoroughness, either. One can know an infinite number of facts about a philosophy or religion or the biographical facts of the people who founded them, without having the slightest essential knowledge of that philosophy or religion. Further, because of one’s erudition on the topic, one may be closed to knowing it any differently.]

[THIRD STAGE: Thou as a partner in a mutual relationship to which I and Thou belong; understanding as synesis, shared vision. Through dialogue, the other is “experienced” and known by way of a change of holistic understanding of the the world, mediated by the content of the dialogue.]

Knowing and recognizing this constitutes the third, and highest, type of hermeneutical experience: the openness to tradition characteristic of historically effected consciousness. It too has a real analogue in the I’s experience of the Thou. In human relations the important thing is, as we have seen, to experience the Thou truly as a Thou — i.e., not to overlook his claim but to let him really say something to us. Here is where openness belongs. But ultimately this openness does not exist only for the person who speaks; rather, anyone who listens is fundamentally open. Without such openness to one another there is no genuine human bond. Belonging together always also means being able to listen to one another. When two people understand each other, this does not mean that one person “understands” the other. [NOTE: the false intimacy of psychologism.] Similarly, “to hear and obey someone” does not mean simply that we do blindly what the other desires. We call such a person slavish. Openness to the other, then, involves recognizing that I myself must accept some things that are against me, even though no one else forces me to do so.

This is the parallel to the hermeneutical experience. I must allow tradition’s claim to validity, not in the sense of simply acknowledging the past in its otherness, but in such a way that it has something to say to me. This too calls for a fundamental sort of openness. Someone who is open to tradition in this way sees that historical consciousness is not really open at all, but rather, when it reads its texts “historically,” it has always thoroughly smoothed them out beforehand, so that the criteria of the historian’s own knowledge can never be called into question by tradition. Recall the naive mode of comparison that the historical approach generally engages in. The 25th “Lyceum Fragment” by Friedrich Schlegel reads: “The two basic principles of so-called historical criticism are the postulate of the commonplace and the axiom of familiarity. The postulate of the commonplace is that everything that is really great, good, and beautiful is improbable, for it is extraordinary or at least suspicious. The axiom of familiarity is that things must always have been just as they are for us, for things are naturally like this.” By contrast, historically effected consciousness rises above such naive comparisons and assimilations by letting itself experience tradition and by keeping itself open to the truth claim encountered in it. The hermeneutical consciousness culminates not in methodological sureness of itself, but in the same readiness for experience that distinguishes the experienced man from the man captivated by dogma. As we can now say more exactly in terms of the concept of experience, this readiness is what distinguishes historically effected consciousness.

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We cannot regard the other as an object, nor can we regard the other as an alien subject with a separate but explicable experience of the world.

The other is someone who, through dialogue, might showing you something deeply unexpected and world-transfiguring. The other is one with whom the world can be shared in synesis.

Everything I do is guided by and serves one moral principle: a person is to be understood and related to as a Thou. A person is not to be  merely or even primarily understood as an object.

To attempt to understand another person objectively is to misunderstand what understanding a person is.

However, to attempt to understand another person without the help of objectivity is also to misunderstand what understanding a person is.

The scientific attitude and the romantic attitude misunderstand what understanding another person is.

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The objectifying scientific attitude and the radically subjective attitude that characterizes romanticism together constitute an antithesis which has been steadily attacked and weakened over the last century and which (I am convinced) is breathing its last putrid breaths. (Nothing wrong with dramatizing things, ok?)

The two attitudes fail to see how an unconscious agreement (a shared determinate ignorance, a cognitive process that is unaware of its own operation) has drawn them into to an intractable conscious disagreement.

It is impossible to find agreement within the terms to which the two sides are unconsciously bound, and they are blind to the possibility of an alternative.

The only possible positions either side can conceive fall on a linear continuum of impure compromises between two pure and antithetical principles. Whatever is not the thesis or its antithesis is understood to be an equivocating ambithesis.

When someone trapped in this kind of ignorance wishes to be principled, he is “uncompromisingly” either-or, wholeheartedly throwing his support behind either the thesis or the antithesis. When he wants to appear politic, circumspect and socially wise it starts talking about “shades of gray”. (After all, you’re either an unrealistic purist or someone who understands the necessity of compromise and occasionally taking it up the tooter.)

At all times, however, all conceptions brainlessly obey the limiting terms of the underlying unconscious agreement, both in the schema of the theory and in practice.

The process of illuminating such forms of shared determinate ignorance, and in the process discovering new possibilities of resolving the issue that fall entirely outside the terms of the old disagreement is called dialectic. One discovers a point of view that opposes the old opposition and unites them in their common limitation, and opens up previously inconceivable options, often also outside the point of contention.

Here is how I’ve been drawing the structure of dialectic. White is the thesis, black is the antithesis and the red is the dialectic overcoming of the dichotomy, which is a new thesis:

Two problems I’ve had with this diagram. 1) Once the old dichotomy fades from relevance a new one forms as a new antithesis forms against the new thesis, and the process repeats. This diagram accurately represents the delusion of the finality of the overcoming (to which some people believe Hegel succumbed), but the whole purpose of dialectic is to overcome this delusion, so the representation must be regarded not as a feature, but a bug. There is no indication that the process will continue, and this indication is essential. 2) Thesis and antithesis are not equal. A fundamentalist and an atheist argue over the existence of a ludicrously misconceived “God”… both are ignorant of other possible conceptions, but it is far more respectable to disagree with a fundamentalist than to be one. The atheist is philosophically superior to the fundamentalist, but both are philosophically inferior to someone who knows other possibilities of knowing God. And of the two, the atheist is closer to that realization than the fundamentalist who mistakes himself for religious and is therefore more closed to lines of questioning that can overcome his ignorance. (AND! — by the way, the limitation of both is that they have failed to grasp the being of Thou, which closes them off not only to the being of God, but also to the being of other people, which brings us back to my original point.) So, the thesis, though not true enough, does at least bear some resemblance to the larger truth, where the antithesis is simply a negative indication: this resemblance is not enough.

For these reasons, from now on, at least until I know better, I am going to draw the structure of the dialectic differently, on the golden section, and also I’m going to draw the antithesis as gold because I like how that looks:

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But what is the determinate ignorance shared by scientism and romanticism? Neither recognizes the role of tradition in selfhood. I’m sure I’ll have more to say on this soon.

Meanwhile, here’s something to think about:

The only way to know an Other as Other — as Thou — is to enter into dialogue and consequently come to see the world differently.

Dialogue -> Metanoia -> Synesis -> Tradition -> Community