We would like to offer you an excerpt from an already stimulating book entitled: Argue in the name of heaven. Even if the title has a precise meaning, as I invite you to discover, I still consider it a beautiful universalistic exhortation. I apologize for such a strain on this, in any case, a beautiful book. It is a work by Vittorio Robiati Bendaud, a scholar of Jewish thought engaged in Jewish-Christian dialogue on an international level and by Ugo Volli, semiotician and philosopher of language. The book was published a few days ago by Guerini e Associati with goWare (for the digital version).
Engaging in a dialogue is one of the most revolutionary behaviors of collective life and has origins as old as man. In the Bible itself, as the authors write, dialogue is not only a cognitive practice but an essentially ethical practice aimed at involving the participants in common decisions (see episode of Abraham and Isaac).
Unfortunately dialogue is a beacon that is increasingly going out in our world, a flickering light darkened by an assertive and absolute truth that does not intend to engage in confrontation. The two authors write about this monological truth and its nemesis, polyphonic dialogue:
"And so the truth, which is monologic - even when God bends down to the human being and converses with him, like the Bible tells -, it immediately becomes dialogic, multiple, like the sparks produced by a hammer that shatters the rock. This is the origin of the discussion and its highly positive value”.
Discussing precisely generating sparks like those produced by a hammer that shatters a rock (wonderful image). Any true dialogue, true discussion "always implies - as Robiati Bendaud and Volli write - a comparison of thoughts, arguments, perspectives and identities, which mirror, oppose and define each other in the turmoil of the relationship with the other".
As a reading proposal from this book we have chosen this passage, more philosophical, which deals with the Greek dialogical culture which has impressed the connotations of the modern dialogic form and defined its methods and purposes.
Dialogue as a value in itself
In the Greek dialogue we start from the hypothesis: ypo-thesis, i.e. what is (thesis) under (ypo) the discussion. However, the Greek word used by Plato is «problem», which has as etymology «what is thrown forward», put before everyone's eyes: it is not a question of our problem to be solved, but precisely of a hypothesis of solution.
Dialogue is the process of verifying or falsifying these assumptions through verbal interaction. In doing so, a fundamental step is taken in the path of communication.
We expose ourselves to dialogue for the most varied reasons. However, the moment one is immersed in it, one is forced to consider the discourse as a value in itself: dialogue has its own rules, the most important of which is the guarantee of its orderly development.
Discussing according to scientific modalities, which are basically still the Socratic ones, we find ourselves in a position of responsibility towards the dialogue, its grammatical, syntactic and semantic forms.
Like any frame, the dialogue also forms a kind of prigione, of a closed environment from which one cannot escape. Above all, the positions expressed cannot do this because, as in all logical environments, each proposition brings with it a series of consequences, which are coherently developed.
The rules of dialogue
In particular, it is not permissible to make two contradictory affirmations: for any logical system the assertion of a proposition, combined with that of its contradictory (A and not A), allows us to deduce any other proposition and of course also its opposite; therefore the contradiction pays undetermined discourse, eliminates the distinction between true and false, empties the sense of language.
After a contradiction it is no longer possible to continue the dialogue; what they say no longer makes sense. For Socrates, contradiction is in itself a suffering, one discord of the soul which is not bearable. But the interlocutors' commitment to the dialogue they undertake is broader and deeper than the rejection of contradiction.
After all, this is where Habermas' intuition starts: the fact that communication is the fundamental structure of our social world leads us to propose basic pragmatic rules, neither subjective nor objective, but placed under the condition of the very possibility of discourse and therefore of knowledge, of the very perception of reality.
However, the common commitment to protect dialogue is by no means the sign of a search pacific common, of one collaboration. If we want to give it a final characterization, the Greek dialogue is a combat symbolic for truth.
Dialogue as logical combat
Let us try to understand this point better, attempting to place it in the transition between mythical thought and rational thought, as Colli (1972) characterizes it. According to Colli, the opposition theorized by Nietzsche between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, where tragedy belonged to the Dionysian sphere and philosophy to the Apollonian one, does not hold water.
The wisdom ascribed in the Greek tradition to the name of Apollo is not at all pacified but fundamentally violent, and is characterized byenigma, whose root is archaic religious wisdom: not a declaration and prescription of a benevolent god, but a conflict between men and gods.
Just as knowledge is conquered through struggle, so the whole Greek tradition is crossed by this great agonistic paradigm, in which victory has a strong religious meaning and defeat implies mortal danger, not only on a psychological level.
In the enigma, which has a multiple meaning, there is the idea that whoever fails to penetrate the word and wisdom deeply enough not only loses the challenge, but also loses himself.
This in both cases: both for the enigma that gives rise to the challenge and struggle between men and gods, and for the enigma that gives rise to the challenge and struggle between men: a duel between scholars. This happens, for example, to Homer, the greatest of the Greek poets, who, according to a tradition referred to by Heraclitus, dies for not having been able to answer what appears to us to be a trivial riddle.
From dialogue to dialectic
Here a reversal begins to take shape which - according to Colli - dwells at the basis of the Greek "miracle". In fact, towards the XNUMXth or XNUMXth century, the struggle turns into dialectic. The general form of the dialectic is that of a crossroads path, of a logical tree in which the choice derives from a discussion.
It is achieved not on the basis of a free exchange of opinions, but is articulated in troubled posed by a questioner in the form of dilemmas and by the choices of a declarer. With this mechanism repeated as necessary, the elimination of the wrong option should be achieved, showing that it does not hold up, that it contradicts itself.
In Socrates and Plato the interrogator holds a truth that he tries to bring out: the process works, when it succeeds (not always), like an acid that eliminates everything that can be dissolved, but which leaves intact, indeed reveals and makes , an incorruptible nucleus of truth, thus rediscovering at least in part the legacy of ancient lost wisdom.
What Socrates and the Sophists have in common is the consideration of the destructive root of the polemic path. All the cautions with which the dialogue is cloaked are the result of a very clear perception of the danger of dialogue, or ritualizations of forms of combat due not to respect for the opponent as next, but al fear that one feels for him as being, so to speak, armed.
The polyphony of the dialogue is not - or is not only - a simple premise for a communication of contents, but regulated fight, in which the opposition is fundamental and fruitful and the negative manifests its creative capacity. The very making explicit of the conflict is, in Greek culture, a value.
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Based on: Vittorio Robiati Bendaud and Ugo Volli, Argue in the name of heaven. Dialogue and dissent in the Jewish tradition, Guerini e Associati, with goWare (for digital), Milan, 2021, pp. 66–69.
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The authors
Vittorio Robiati Bendaud
He coordinates the Rabbinical Tribunal of Central-Northern Italy and has been involved in Jewish-Christian dialogue at an international level for many years. A pupil of Giuseppe Laras, he deepened the study of Jewish thought and the relationship between the Armenian genocide and the Shoaḥ. Author and translator, he collaborates with numerous newspapers and magazines. He wrote for Guerini e Associati The star and the crescent. Brief history of the Jews in the domains of Islam (2018)
Ugo Volli
Semiologist and philosopher of language, he was professor of Semiotics at the University of Turin. He wrote about theatre, communication, culture on the Republic, The European, Epoca, l'Espresso, The morning. Among his works are remembered Semiotics manual (2002) Philosophy of communication lessons (2008) The rest is interpretation. For a semiotics of the Jewish scriptures (2019). For our editions he edited, with Martina Corgnati, The endless genocide (2015)
