Volume 67, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Dialogue and Relational Ontology: Rethinking the Significance of the Second-Person Perspective

This article explores the challenges of intercultural dialogue between European and non-European epistemologies through a study of Heidegger’s conversation with a Japanese thinker. It discusses the inherent challenges and potential failures in such dialogues, emphasizing the differences in language and thought systems, and concludes by considering the ethical implications of these dialogues and the necessity of an “ethics of not speaking”.

This essay offers a psychoanalytic perspective on ethics utilizing Jean Laplanche and Søren Kierkegaard. It proposes a homology between Kierkegaard’s ”God” and Laplanche’s “primal adult” as well as between Kierkegaard’s account of the indirection of love and the role of the analyst in the transference relationship. Both Kierkegaard and Laplanche center scenes of second-person relation in which a seductive asymmetry calls forth a rigorous ethics of unknowing.

Within Christian theology, the second-person perspective primarily comes into play when it refers to God’s perspective on humanity. In contrast, this article focuses on the second-person perspective as a human perspective and explores its relevance for the development of an individual’s self-relationship. Drawing on insights from developmental psychology, it also argues for an intergenerational and social understanding of human sinfulness and advocates for more systematic-theological attention to childhood and adolescence. Overall, the article contributes to strengthening an intersubjective view of the self and to deepening one of the many dimensions of human interdependence.

Lutheran theology is faced with the challenge of rearticulating the human relationship to God in justification in a way that is not only consistent with the biblical and theological tradition but also makes sense to modern human beings who inhabit a society of widespread biblical and theological illiteracy. In this article, I suggest rephrasing this relationship as a dialogue of mutual recognition between God and the human being. I ground this suggestion in a reinterpretation of Martin Luther’s understanding of justification as a dialogical process of identity formation whereby God and humans are mutually recognised. In the justifying dialogue, the individual is recognised as a you in relation to God’s creative and saving I. Moreover, God is recognised as God when humans answer his initial address and call on him in prayer and in praise. Emphasising the role of the human response in the process of justification highlights the importance of the community of believers who express their answer to God’s word of law and gospel through prayer and songs of worship.

The paper describes a form a non-Socratic dialogue which aims at exposing oneself to the normative critique of interlocutors with different commitments. It further argues that such exposure is the only way in which one can achieve critical distance from one's own commitments. It goes on to explore the epistemic and political virtues of this form of dialogue.

The present paper is the third and final piece of an ongoing and as of yet unfinished dialog on normative issues about rationality and the self. After specifying the differences, yet also the actual – and to some extent: unexpected – agreements between myself and Menachem Fisch, I argue that the latter are more substantial and far-reaching. This is an assumption I seek to justify by unpacking the implications of Fisch’s core idea, according to which being rational in the fullest human sense goes hand in hand with and in fact depends on being (able to be) a self. However, I also argue that some remaining shortcomings in Fisch’s account are mainly due to the latter’s all too liberal notion of rationality (“acting for a reason”) – shortcomings, which in my view can easily be remedied by a more restricted account, according to which acting for a reason only counts as rational, if and to the extent that the agent is “ responsive to reasons,” i. e. willing to call his claim to being and acting rationally into question, whenever that claim is (expected to be) challenged by his peers. This notwithstanding, the entire conversation between Fisch and myself is arguably itself an instance of what it is about: a dialog concerning issues of rationality in the environment and spirit of a rationality conceived of as irreducibly dialogical.

The paper charts the main points of my ongoing dispute with Heiko Schulz by teasing out the differences between my account of self and rationality, and Schulz’s Kierkegaardian alternative.