Chapter 5/4

Getting married made me a better thinker. I am a man and men need to hear from women if they are to complete their thoughts, and if they are to clarify what they think. That is one reason I married. That way I always have a woman handy to serve as my antithesis, my complement—the yin to my yang.

Without dialogue I cannot become a whole person. If in the home we don’t share our inner lives, we remain family, but are familiar with each other only in a limited sense. Without the exchange of ideas, plans, hopes, and fears, we never live in community on this earth. Our pain, our emptiness, and our horrors are, in large measure, rooted in our lack of dialogue. It is a historical commonplace that the declaration of war is immediately preceded by the announcement that “talks have broken off.” They usually have broken down because the negotiation between diplomats is, too often, an exchange of reciprocal monologues. Each tries to convince the other side, but neither seeks to hear and understand the other’s heritage, position, predicament, or philosophy.

However, we are stuck with each other. Our radical individualism and egoism cannot eliminate all the others—people, nature, and God—linked with our life. The twentieth-century French thinker Jean-Paul Sartre argued that “hell is other people,” but he also tells us there is NO EXIT from this world of others. We are inescapably social, made for relationship, and directly linked with the natural order. If we fail to take others into account, we risk denying our humanity and destroying hope for a human and global future. Because everything is ultimately connected and interrelated in one great ecosystem, we must acknowledge otherness, listen and respond to it, and work toward a more satisfying harmony of all its parts, including the part that is our self. Apart from dialogue, we are doomed.
On the other hand, we have available a method of thinking and living that can clear the way to a more promising, satisfying, and humane future. That method is the Dialectic.