The Philosophical Dialogue and the Forcing of Truth Author(s): Daniel Brewer Source: MLN, Vol. 98, No.

5, Comparative Literature (Dec., 1983), pp. 1234-1247 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2906069 . Accessed: 30/03/2013 16:24
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The PhilosophicalDialogue and the Forcing of Truth

Daniel Brewer

Western philosophy has its beginnings in dialogue. It is in and through dialogue that Plato consolidates a technique of argumentation, a method of reasoning, and a philosophical system, seeking to disengage philosophy from what is now called literature, and to fashion a philosophical discourse that would be proper, distinct, and effective. Yet like all beginnings, this moment in philosophy's discursive history does not mark the sudden, unprecedented appearance of an integral and autonomous form. In attempting to appropriate dialogue, the discourse of philosophy takes over a form with a past. Its lineage is suspect, at least as far as the desire for truth is concerned, for it comprises the Sophists, Menippean satire and the Greek carnival. To turn dialogue into the vehicle for what Mikhail Bakhtin calls philosophy's "official monologue," the attempt was made to eliminate the more threatening aspects of its discursive genealogy.' For philosophy to begin, its other and previous beginnings had to be eradicated, effaced, and silenced. Most notably, that formidable adversary the Sophist had to be barred from the stage of philosophy. It is he, through his manipulation of logic, language, and his listener, who undermines the end of philosophy by exposing its means. For the Sophist, truth is not an absolute, unmediated by language; rather, it is a by-product of language, the result of a discursive encounter that sets two discourses into opposition (as in Protagoras' notion of the dia-logoi), and in which rhetoric serves as an amoral set of powerful discursive techniques designed to force an adversary into agreement. Philosophy's response to this threat is evident in the moral strictures

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placed upon 'sophisticated' discursive techniques, the distinction between a 'good' and a 'bad' rhetoric, and the beginning of a restricted rhetoric, which by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would be reduced to little more than the classification of tropes.2 If the philosophical dialogue's suspect past can be forgotten, its generic ambiguity or hybrid character remains a problem. In his discursive taxonomy Plato characterizes the dialogue as didactic discourse, yet it is the only type of didactic discourse he classes among the poetic genres. This exception, in fact a major concession, suggests that the dialogue form can never be tamed and naturalized once and for all, its poetic function reduced to a didactic technique. In conceding the dialogue's hybrid nature, its link to mimesis and the poetic genres, Plato points up the way dialogue poses a constant threat to the ideal linguistic purity that philosophical discourse would claim for itself. For according to the conventions of the philosophical dialogue, in order to speak of truth the philosopher must first stage a fictional conversation. This is the dialogue's literary-fictional-mimetic side, one of its aspects that French literary theoreticians of the seventeenth and eighteenth century could not accept without strong reservations and limitations. At another moment in philosophy's discursive history, which one could call the beginnings of rationalism, once again the philosophical dialogue's hybrid nature was perceived as a threat to the integrity and purity of philosophical discourse.3 To gauge this threat, let us consider Rene Descartes' only-and unfinished-dialogue, La Recherchede la verite'. Containing a conventional apology for dialogue, the narrative introduction to La Recherche presents the formal elements of the dialogue that follows, and at the same time seeks to limit the importance of having chosen this particular form. Pour cet effet [de rendre les verites que je dirai egalement utiles a tous les hommes],je n'ai point trouve de style plus commode, que celui de ces conversations honnetes, ofu chacun decouvre familierement a ces amis ce qu'il a de meilleur en sa pensee, et sous les noms d'Eudoxe, de Poliandre et Epistemon,je suppose qu'un homme de mediocre esprit, mais duquel le jugement n'est perverti par aucune fausse creance, et qui possede toute la raison selon la purete de sa nature, est visitS, en une maison de campagne ou il demeure, par deux des plus rares esprits et des plus curieux de ce siecle, l'un desquels n'ajamaisetudie, et l'autre, au contraire, salt exactement tout ce qui se peut apprendre dans les
ecoles.4

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According to Descartes dialogue is merely a matter of style, its function being that of literary embellishment, a didactic device or rhetorical technique. Although more 'literary' than the treatise or essay since it relies on elements of fiction, the dialogue form simply provides the philosopher and his readers with a "chemin plus facile." The type of philosophical writing exemplified by the philosophical dialogue approaches the borders of literature, it would seem, only in order to make the lessons of philosophy less dry and more plausible, to allow its truths to be more easily mastered. So it is that the fictional elements Descartes supposes not only can but should be reduced to a minimum. The text's fictional support is apparently so insignificant that Descartes gives his readers free rein to imagine any other details they might wish concerning Poliandre, Epistemon, Eudoxe, and the place and conditions of their debate ("parmi d'autres discours, que je vous laisse a imaginer, aussi bien que la constitution du lieu et toutes les particularites qui s'y trouvent ..." p. 881). Style and form are subordinated to content, rhetoric to truth, and literature to philosophy, for reasons moreover that are ethical as well as esthetic. For in writing La Recherche Descartes undertakes a lofty enterprise, to teach how anyone can discover alone and within oneself "toute la science qui lui est necessaire a la conduite de sa vie, et ... toutes les plus curieuses connaissances que la raison des hommes est capable de posseder" (p. 880). At stake in La Rechercheis nothing less than the teaching of a method, the method, that Descartes had set forth in 1637 in the Discours de la methode. However important this text's philosophical statements, we should not fail to see that they are supported by a fiction. Philosophical discourse is supplemented by literarity, the philosophical statement (enonc) is mediated by the discursive structure through which it is stated (enonciation).This mediation is more complicated than might appear at first glance. "Sous les noms d'Eudoxe, de Poliandre et Epistemon, je suppose que. . .." Descartes supposes the conditions of dialogue. This simple supposition is an imagined scene, something that appears probable, but cannot or simply need not be shown to be true. The introductory narrative to La Recherche presents the text's fiction hypothetically, as a point of departure for the philosophical debate that ensues. But this reference to fiction, to an imaginary and probable scene, should not be discounted, as Descartes invites us

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to do, by supposing it, by subordinating it and placing it in an inferior position with respect to the philosophical and conceptual discourse of La Recherche. We should not be too quick to grant maximal transparency to the language of the philosophical dialogue. To say that Descartes sub-posesfiction, placing it beneath the discourse of truth, suggests that it is upon the discursive act of producing a fiction that the Cartesian discourse of truth rests. Such a supposition implies that in Descartes, the stating of truth (le vrai) is inextricably bound up with the staging of an imaginary scene (le vraisemblable).The reading of Descartes' text towards which this latter supposition points would, at the very least, require that we re-examine the credibility of this self-styled "honnete homme." For in supposing (subordinating, discounting) fiction in the name of philosophy, Descartes commits an act of deception, exposed by Robert. Supposer. (XVIe s.). Vx. "Mettreune chosea la place d'une autre par fraude et tromperie" (Furetiere). V. Substituer,supposition(II). "On dira a l'audience qu'elle a suppose son enfant" (Cf. Intimider, cit. 1, Sevigne). As far as the philosophical dialogue is concerned, questioning the rhetorical function of the dialogue's fiction necessarily blurs any clear-cut distinction between literary and philosophical discourse. In Descartes' case, this risks turning his text on the quest for truth into a fable, a type of discourse he criticizes in the Discours de la methodebecause it causes one to "imaginer plusieurs evenements comme possibles qui ne le sont point" (p. 129). This criticism of fables is of course consistent with Descartes' often repeated rejection of probable knowledge in favor of things that are perfectly well known and cannot be doubted, as well as with his critique of the schoolmen and rhetors, who with their "machines de guerre des syllogismes probables" can teach or persuade of only what is probable ("vraisemblable"), never what is true. Yet this only aggravates the problem of the philosophical dialogue, for from a to speakers and place-we simply stylistic convention-reference are led not to truth but to a discursive and rhetorical practice akin to that of the fabulist and the rhetor, a practice that calls into question the integrity of the narrative and philosophical subject, the "I" of Descartes' discourse. The "I" of the narrative introduction to La Rechercherefers not to a character of dialogue but to the narrator, the writing subject of the text. Or rather, the dialogical relation marked by the nar-

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rative "I" is one that involves reader and text. This relation is made explicit: Ce queje tacheraide vous faire voir ici par une suite de raisonssi claires et si communes, que chacun jugera que ce n'etait que faute de jeter plus t6t les yeux du bon c6te, et d'arreter sa pensee sur les memes considerationsque j'ai fait, s'il ne remarquaitpas les memes choses. (p.880) It could be argued that the way Descartes is read depends entirely on how his readers understand the term faire voir. What in Cartesian discourse is being shown? What are we made to see? How can discourse make things be, or be visible, or be visible to us? In Le Monde, for example, Descartes' mechanistic explanation of the origin and workings of the cosmos, he shows that scholastic cosmogony is superfluous by showing us a fable, the fiction of a "monde feint." Il me reste ici encore beaucoup d'autres choses a expliquer, etje serai meme bien aise d'y ajouter quelques raisons pour rendre mes opinions plus vraisemblables.Mais afin que la longueur de ce discours vous soit d'une moins ennuyeuse,j'en veux envelopperune partiedans l'invention fable, au travers de laquelle j'espere que la verite ne laissera pas de paraitresuffisamment, et qu'elle ne sera pas moins agreable a voir que sije l'exposais toute nue.5 Also in the Discours de la methodeDescartes shows more than he proves. "Mon dessein n'est pas d'enseigner ici la methode que chacun doit suivre pour bien conduire sa raison, mais seulement de faire voir en quelle sortej'ai tache de conduire la mienne" (Discours, p. 127). His design is not to teach but to show, to "faire voir, en ce discours, quels sont les chemins quej'ai suivis, et d'y representer ma vie comme en un tableau, afin que chacun en puisse juger, et qu'apprenant du bruit commun les opinions qu'on en aura, ce soit un nouveau moyen de m'instruire que j'ajouterai a ceux dont j'ai coutume de me servir" (ibid.). Descartes' discourse on method is supported by another fiction, its author's strategic self-portrayal, his dessein/dessin.It is here, as Jean-Luc Nancy notes, in Descartes' refusal of the authoritative argument in favor of the authorial argument, that we find the Cartesian model for the communication of truth: "ce dont je suis seul l'auteur ne peut s'imposer qu'au jugement que chaque je en pourra faire."6 The discursive set-up of the Discours allows Descartes to sidestep the issue of authority and the requirement of authoritative demonstration, a form of

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argumentation that can be refuted most successfully simply by refusing to recognize the power and legitimacy of authority. The rhetorical strategy for obtaining certitude in the Discours, a certitude not entirely free from a certain dependency on others (on the viewers of his 'life portrayed,' on the readers of his text), requires only that Descartes portray himself, not prove his self, just as the rhetorical strategy of persuasion in Le Monde allows him to fabricate a fabulous world only, without having to prove the workings of a real one. What Descartes wants to show readers of La Rechercheare truths so true they require no master teacher, truths to be sought for with only "la lumiere naturelle," as the dialogue's sub-title indicates. "Ce que je tacherai de vous faire voir ici par une suite de raisons si claires et si communes, que chacun jugera que ce n'etait que faute de jeter plus tot les yeux du bon cote...." If, however, we ask what Descartes wants his readers not to see, turning our eyes from the bedazzling clarity of Cartesian chains of reasons and casting our gaze instead on the 'wrong side' of the text, we see a darker fiction. According to the fictional set-up of La Recherche,the dialogue is motivated by Eudoxe's desire to justify Epistemon's "high opinion of him, the latter's opinion that he must possess "une science ... beaucoup plus parfaite que celle des autres" (p. 883). Once again Cartesian method takes up the challenge to prove itself,7 and to do so it must silence its adversaries.8 In order for the carefree and untrained Poliandre, "une personne neutre," to be brought to reason, "[range] du bon cote," the schoolman Epistemon must remain silent ("sans qu'Epistemon nous interrompe"). Scholastic knowledge (episteme)must be discarded if good and proper judgments (eu doxa) are to have their effect on men in numbers (poly andro). Etymology recapitulates Descartes' claim for method, made throughout his works. But the silencing of the figure of the adversary, which takes place here in and through fiction, should give us pause. What of Descartes' position itself? Do the judgments (doxa) of his "science" hold because they are proper, or are they good because they obtain by decree (doxa),by force? In the fictional set-up of La Recherche,the dialogue ends at precisely that moment when Poliandre, the "joyeux compagnon," becomes no more than the dummy for the ventriloquist Eudoxe: Il y a tant de choses contenues dans 1'ideed'une chose qui pense, qu'il faudrait des jours entiers pour les expliquer. Pour le moment, nous traiterons seulement des principales et de celles qui servent a rendre

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cette idee plus distincte, et qui aident a ne pas la confondre avec tout ce qui ne s'y rapporte point. J'entends par chose qui pense...."

(p. 901)
If the rest of La Recherche ever existed, its author is perhaps

better off for its being lost to us. For it is here that the relation between fiction and the power to speak the truth with which it endows philosophical discourse, and which it at the same time subverts, is most apparent. It is in the text's final move, when the fiction of La Recherche is exposed, and the fictive dialogue is reduced to monologue, that we are struck by the rhetorical workings of Descartes' dialogue. The dialogue structure of La Recherchedoes nothing so much as impose a pedagogic relation between master and pupil, text and reader, in which language is masterfully mobilized in order to teach by force a truth already found, a truth whose free discovery by another results in fact from the manipulation of discursive force. Although a necessary formal supplement, the fictional-mimetic side of Descartes' dialogue contains a potential threat to the philosophical discourse of truth. Are the truths of Descartes' text spoken by a philosopher, a fabulist or a teacher? Are they of an epistemological, literary or rhetorical order? More important, are such categories mutually exclusive, or does their interpenetration not signal instead the range of tensions that constitute the discourse of philosophy? If the ideal purity of philosophical discourse is to be maintained, its truths cannot remain subject to such undecidability. The most effective way to neutralize such a threat involves establishing the proper referential function of the dialogue form, based on a restricted notion of mimesis. Just as philosophers, when they question their own language, tend to justify its rhetorical aspects by subordinating the effective to the ethical, so too in the case of the philosophical dialogue recourse to fiction can be justified by setting 'good' mimesis apart from 'bad.' (Descartes refers to a "bon c6te" to which he asks his readers to direct their gaze. If there is a "mauvais c6te" to his text, it is where the text manifests its own literarity and the rhetoric of persuasion, when Descartes is unable to succeed fully in blinding his reader to his text's self-referentiality.) This attempt at partition, motivated implicitly by an ethics of representation, characterizes traditional interpretations of the dialogue form. Literary interpreters join with philosophers in the name of truth, a move that bears closer scrutiny. An instructive example of this ethical partitioning of mimesis is found in an eighteenth-century text by Anthony, Earl of Shaftes-

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bury. At one point in The Moralists Shaftesbury asks why the dialogue genre has fallen from favor and appears so "insipid" to "us moderns." His answer is a standard one: the form's improbability and artificiality.9 Elsewhere, Shaftesbury's discussion of dialogue is more nuanced and of greater interest. In Advice to an Author he traces the dialogue's genealogy, relating it to a type of poetic writing that antedates both philosophy and dramatic imitation. The earliest dialogues were forceful texts, he suggests, their force stemming less from what they related than from how they represented. These dialogues' power was not diegetic in nature but mimetic. "Twas not enough that these pieces treated fundamentally of morals ... they exhibited them alive, and set the countenances and complexions of men plainly in view. And by this means they not only taught us to know others, but, what was principal and of highest virtue in them, they taught us to know ourselves" (I, 127-28). Shaftesbury's desire to find in dialogue the capacity to engender self-knowledge seems to reflect the traditional humanistic valorization of 'open' forms of exchange and inquiry. By its very structure, dialogue would belong more readily than other genres to an intellectual tradition that "accentuates the value of a relatively free, manipulable, dynamic discourse, open to the play of interrogation, objection, digression, and improvization."'0 An understanding of form, whether 'open' or 'closed,' cannot be separated from its force, from the use to which a particular form is put, in short from the type of reading it promotes. The formal relation between interlocutors in the dialogue text, which is the genre's chief trait, is part of a dialogical relation far more crucial for understanding dialogue, namely, that between text and reader. Shaftesbury continues, claiming that through the philosophical dialogue, we might ... as in a looking glass, discover ourselves. . .. By constant and long inspection, the parties accustomed to the practice [of selfinspection engendered by dialogue] would acquirea peculiarspeculative habit,so as virtually to carry about with them a sort of pocket-mirror, alwaysready and in use.... Whateverwe were employed in ... if once we had acquired the habit of this mirror we should, by virtue of this double distinguish ourselves into two different parties. And in reflection, this dramatic method, the work of self-inspectionwould proceed with admirablesuccess. (Ibid.,my emphasis) The philosophical dialogue is a form of "mirror-writing," providing a reflection of the self and society. Moreover, it is because Shaftesbury reads the dialogue as mirror, granting it a supremely

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mimetic function, that he finds it an impossible moderngenre. Like the painter, the modern writer of dialogues must strive for resemblance, presenting his characters "in their proper manners, genius, behaviour and manner." But this leads to an apparently unsoluble dilemma. If the writer of dialogues avoids the "ceremony" and bienseancesof a "modern" society, his characters will be unnatural, yet if he represents his "fellow-moderns" "as we naturally are," the result will be a distasteful and unbearable portrait too true to life. And finding no public approval, the writer of dialogue must abandon his craft. "No more designing after the life; no more mirrorwriting or personal representation of any kind whatever. Thus dialogue is at an end. The ancients could see their own faces, but we cannot. And why this? Why, but because we have less beauty; for so our looking glass can inform us. Ugly instrument! And for this reason to be hated" (I, 134). Shaftesbury's discussion of dialogue is part of the classical debate between Ancients and Moderns regarding realism and verisimilitude. If, however, we apply slightly more interpretative pressure to his text, we see that Shaftesbury's rejection of dialogue (however ironic) pertains to more than the esthetics of a certain classicism. His critique of dialogue is based not only on the form's ability to reflect the supposed decadence of the age, but more importantly on a doubly mimetic power he attributes to dialogue. The dialogue can reflect too much. It can contain a kind of mimesis en trop,which involves not only particular conceptsof philosophy (such as the noble, the beautiful, the true) but also the rhetorical functioning of philosophical discourse in general, the mechanisms of the literary text and the relation between text and reader. Shaftesbury too is caught up in the age-old struggle to keep the philosophical dialogue a pure discourse of truth, and the tactics he adopts are revealing. Raising the question of the subject of philosophical discourse, Shaftesbury would do away with all reference to a writing subject. He sharply criticizes the author who writes "in his own person," equating him with the author of love-letters, who has "the privilege of talking eternally of himself, dressing and sprucing himself up, whilst he is making diligent court, and working upon the humour of the party to whom he addresses" (I, 131). Is Shaftesbury merely criticizing the "coquetry" of modern writers? Perhaps, yet his criticism is made in the name of a writing whose purity is that of an authorlessdiscourse.He will praise the memoir style of the ancients,

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because "even when they writ at any time concerning themselves, there was neither the I nor thou throughout the whole work. So that all this pretty amour and intercourse of carresses between the author and reader was thus entirely taken away" (I, 132). It is in dialogue, he claims, that this authorless discourse, this complete elimination of reference to a writing as well as reading subject, can be realized: "for here the author is annihilated, and the reader, being no way applied to, stands for nobody. The self-interesting parties both vanish at once. The scene presents itself as by chance and undesigned. You are not only left to judge cooly and with indifference of the sense delivered, but of the character, genius, elocution, and manner of the persons who deliver it" (ibid.). At issue here is less the dialogue form's didactic capacity to lead its reader to clear-headed judgments than whether the purity and power of this particular discursive form depend precisely on the "annihilation" or rather dissimulation of the writing subject. In this sense the Socratic dialogues are all the more powerful and persuasive because "the scene presents itself as if by chance and undesigned," that is, because a certain discursive position, that of the writer Plato, is dissimulated. If it is to be effective and its truths unquestioned, the improper mimetic function of the philosophical dialogue must be checked. The dialogue may relate the truths of philosophy, but it must not represent itself. It must not reveal itself as a discursive machine for silencing the voice of the other, as a mechanism of interlocutionary force exerted upon the addressee of discourse. For this force, which characterizes a rhetorical practice of language, would determine the truth of discourse as an effect of reception. Such a truth would be the product of a reading that had entered into complicity with a discursive mastery that conceals itself in (the name of) fiction. Moreover, to say that the philosophical dialogue should be authorless is to say that the discourse of philosophy must be subjectless, that it cannot allow to be represented any other philosophical subject than one whose primacy over language is total, whose consciousness of self is reflected in discourse instead of being its effect, and whose texts are designed to mirror the truth of an inalienable subject rather than force a precarious mastery over others. To write philosophical dialogues is always to restage the endlessly same struggle between philosophy and its (literary) other. Although our discussion of Descartes and Shaftesbury helps to understand this conflict, writing on philosophical dialogue from a

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position that may seem to be outside the discourse of philosophy does not necessarily put the discourse of literary interpretation beyond the fray. In numerous interpretations of the philosophical dialogue, literary interpreters play out the same struggle in their own way. Invariably, form is subordinated to concept by appealing to a mirror model to explain literary form, a critical gesture betokening a telling fascination with the specular. The dialogueform may evolve, but its function seems always to remain constant: to reflect some aspect of the dialogue's productive instance, be it historical or psychological." In most accounts of the dialogue, interpreters seek to pass from an analysis of literary form to the writing of a critical narrative, a history of literature or society, of ideas or the subject. These interpretations are regionally valid, each providing a certain access to the literary text. Yet we should not become entangled in the question of critical realism by limiting ourselves to the issue of whether these commnonplaces of dialogue interpretation adequately describe and accurately reflect their object. More urgent is to ask instead whether these literary truismstruths of a theoretical discourse concerning literary texts-do not all derive from certain implicit assumptions concerning the representational nature of language. In making the dialogue an integral part of a history-be it of society, the mind or the subjectthe theoreticians of form must take the dialogue to be a sign or symptom, a mirror or metaphor, of something exterior to and different from the literary text itself. Form becomes figure, and in ascribing a tropological function to literary form, the theoretician of dialogue places himself in the position of being able to reach the goal of a materially, objectively or historically 'valid' reflection of things as they are (or were) only by ignoring or forgetting the extent to which he is enmeshed in language. The narrative that the theoretician of dialogue would write, and which he takes the dialogue form to reflect, is not a flawless mirror, insofar as any such narrative results from having attributed a mimetic function to language, from having granted, or read in, to literary form the power of unproblematic referentiality. In short, this mirror function is not so much a property of the text as it is an assumption about language that drives certain theoretical discourses concerning literary form. In this sense one could argue that any interpretative history of literary form must be subordinated ultimately to a thorough-going rhetorical analysis of the discourse of (literary) history in general.'2

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Despite a blindness to the underpinnings of their own theoretical discourse, interpreters of the dialogue form do point the way towards an understanding of dialogue based less on a static concept of literary form than on a discursive and rhetorical practice of language. Their fascination with dialogue has led them to view it as something other than an empty, unmotivated form: whatever a dialogue may 'mean,' regardless of the ideas and concepts it 'conveys,' these interpretations would suggest, even in their variety, that the function of the dialogue form cannot be restricted to the simple communication of a message. In the preceding critical narratives, this otherfunction of dialogue is referential, extra-linguistic, serving to produce some type of reflected image. Each of these images may be as valid as any other, insofar as they all are equally imaginary scenes. This does not mean of course that these critical narratives can be discounted because they are not true (as if it were ever possible to accede to truth by discounting the imaginary as false). Rather, the truths at which the critical imagination will arrive should be understood in relation to critical desire. In the case of the philosophical dialogue, the mirror function it is said to possess may well be less a natural property of language and literary form than a product of the theoretical desire to possess in and through language an untarnished means of representation, an affectless means of pure speculation. Such a desire is of course a powerful one. But in order to try to extricate or at least distance ourselves from that trap, we must turn away from the image in the mirror in order to gauge its force. How then are we to read the philosophical dialogue, today? The conversations related in most philosophical dialogues end in unity and agreement between their fictional characters. This unity is supported by a fiction and is emblematic of a powerful philosophical ruse, all the more necessary because of what is at stake. The end of the philosophical dialogue is to eliminate, subjugate or at least postpone difference. It would silence the voice of the other, putting an end to another discourse; it seeks to contain an alterity that threatens to disrupt philosophical discourse by destabilizing its force and placing the absoluteness of its truths into question. In the face of this we can continue to read the philosophical dialogue as a classical form, taking the term 'classical' to refer to a "closed unit, whose closure arrests meaning, preventing it from shifting, doubling, drifting."13 My point has been to show, however, that the philosophical dialogue can achieve its end only

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if we its readers fail to read this classical form against itself, remaining unaware or silent regarding our own always unfulfilled critical desire for closure, stability, and meaning. The philosophical dialogue exemplifies one of the most rigorous types of cognitive discourse. Yet it can lead us securely from word to concept, from discourse to epistemology, from language to truth, only if we choose to read classically. In the indeterminable middle ground between literature and philosophy the philosophical dialogue may finally have run its course. Yet this does not mean that the question it poses as a specific type of discourse has been resolved. Rather, that question has been displaced. If we have discussed the philosophical dialogue in terms of a constitutive yet threatening alterity that philosophical discourse both contains and seeks to contain, it is because in a broader sense this same problematic can be extended to include all philosophical and, inevitably, literary texts. The philosophical dialogue is but one response to a situation confronted by all users of language, poets and philosophers alike, namely, being able to posit a meaning yet remaining powerless to impose meaning absolutely. To believe otherwise is to desire a restored classicism and a timeless unity of true meaning, and perhaps even a guiltless repression of all that would threaten them. The last of the master dialoguers-Diderot, Valery, Blanchot-for whom the distinction between philosophy and literature has little importance, all seek by means of dialogue not to silence the other but to give it voice, or at least mark its position, without precipitating the dialogue's fall into monologue. Their texts attempt to maintain an irreducible difference, or at least postpone the moment of its foreclosure. For us, today, the pertinence of analyzing the dialogue form is to be measured in the extent to which it allows us to grapple effectively with instances of monologic, centralizing, centripetal force,'4 to confront a broader crisis of legitimation and a struggle for authority that defines "the post-modern condition."'5 In the process we must inevitably come to terms with the critical enterprise itself, questioning the goals, desire, and strategies involved in our reading and interpretation of texts in general.
Cornell University NOTES
I Mikhail Bakhtin, Problemsof Dostoevski's Poetics, trans. R. W. Rotsel (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1973). For other analyses of this moment in philosophy's discursive history,

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see Julia Kristeva, "Bakhtine, le mot, le dialogue et le roman," Critique,239 (April 1967), 438-65; and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, "Le Dialogue des genres," Po6tique, 21 (1975), pp. 148-73. My brief discussion of the Greek Sophists owes much to Jean-Francois Lyotard. 2 See Roland Barthes, "L'Ancienne rhetorique," Communications,16 (1970), pp. 172-229; Gerard Genette, "La Rhetorique restreinte," in Figures III (Paris: Seuil, 1972); and Pierre Kuentz, "Le 'Rhetorique' ou la mise a l'ecart," Communications, 16 (1970), pp. 143-57. See also Paul de Man's Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), and Jacques Derrida's "La Mythologie blanche, " in Marges de la philosophie(Paris: Minuit, 1972). 3 See Maurice Roelens, "Le Dialogue philosophique, genre impossible," CAIEF, 24 (May 1972), pp. 43-58, and "La Description inaugurale dans le dialogue philosophique aux 17e et 18e siecles," Litterature, 18 (May 1975), pp. 51-62. 4 Rene Descartes, Oeuvres et lettres (Paris: Gallimard, 1953), p. 881. All further references are to this edition unless otherwise noted. 5 Oeuvres philosophiques,ed. Ferdinand Alqui6, I (Paris: Garnier, 1963-73), pp. 342-43. 6Jean-Luc Nancy, Ego Sum (Paris: Aubier Flammarion, 1979), p. 65. Nancy's reading of Descartes problematizes the Cartesian model of certitude as truth by displaying the extent to which the constitution of certitude depends on the project of communicating and portraying truth. 7 According to Charles Adam the characters Epistemon and Poliandre represent two of Descartes' visitors in Holland in 1641, the abbe Picot and Desbarreaux, and Eudoxe is Descartes himself. Noted in Oeuvres, p. 877. 8 Indeed, for Descartes "dialogue precludes truth, which is monological." Chaque fois que sur le meme sujet deux [hommes] sont d'un avis different, il est certain que l'un des deux au moins se trompe; et meme aucun d'eux, semble-t-il, ne possede la science: car, si les raisons de l'un etaient certaines et evidentes, il pourrait les exposer a l'autre de telle maniere qu'il finirait par le convaincre a son tour." Regles pour la directionde l'esprit,in Oeuvres, p. 40. 9 (1711) (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics 1964), II, 6. 10Philip Lewis, "Dialogic Impasse in Pascal's Provinciales,"Canadian Review of Comparative Literature (Winter 1976), p. 28. See also Eva Kushner, "Le Dialogue en France au XVIe siecle: Quelques criteres geneologiques," Canadian Review of Comparative Literature (Spring 1978), pp. 141-53. 1 In Der Dialog (1895) (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1963), the most extensive study of the dialogue to date, Rudolf Hirzel distinguishes three highwater periods of dialogue (the Greek Golden Age and the age of the Sophists, the Renaissance and Reformation, and the Enlightenment), arguing that it is both symptom and instrument of the social, cultural, and ideological transformations defining these periods (II, 443-44). The dialogue form has also been taken to mirror the structure and functioning of the mind, embodying a dialectical logic unmediated by the historical. See Victor Goldschmidt, Les Dialogues de Platon (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1947). It is a theoretically small step from this characterization of dialogue to one in which it is seen to reflect the psychological configuration of a particular subject, or the divided-yet always ultimately unified-consciousness of the writing subject. 12 See Paul de Man, "The Epistemology of Metaphor," Critical Inquiry, 5:1 (Autumn 1978), pp. 13-40. 13 Roland Barthes, "Th6orie du texte," in Encyclopaedia Universalis (Paris: E. U. France, 1968), XV, 1014. My translation. 14 Cf. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). 15 See rapportsur le savoir (Paris: Jean-Francois Lyotard, La Conditionpostmoderne: Minuit, 1979).

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