University of South Florida Scholar Commons Graduate Theses and Dissertations Graduate School April 2017 Speaking of the Self: Theorizing the Dialogical Dimensions of Ethical Agency Bradley S. Warfield University of South Florida, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd Part of the European Languages and Societies Commons, and the Philosophy Commons Scholar Commons Citation Warfield, Bradley S., "Speaking of the Self: Theorizing the Dialogical Dimensions of Ethical Agency" (2017). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/6976 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Speaking of the Self: Theorizing the Dialogical Dimensions of Ethical Agency by Bradley S. Warfield A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Philosophy College of Arts and Sciences University of South Florida Co-Major Professor: Charles Guignon, Ph.D. Co-Major Professor: Joanne Waugh, Ph.D. Lee Braver, Ph.D. John Christman, Ph.D. Michael Morris, Ph.D. Date of Approval: April 4, 2017 Keywords: dialogism; ethics; dialogical self theory; event ontology Copyright © 2017, Bradley Scott Warfield Dedication For my parents, Ron and Dottie, my brother, Chris, my son, Brad, and my wife, Katie Acknowledgements My path to the Ph.D. has been long and circuitous. I have received a tremendous amount of support from different people at various stages, and I have a lot of people I want to thank. I first want to thank the Philosophy Department at Salisbury University. It was and remains a special place to do philosophy. I’m eternally grateful that I got a chance to both study and teach there. I’d like to thank Jim Hatley, Fran Kane, Tim Stock, and Joerg Tuske for their encouragement and support. I want to especially thank Grace Clement and Jerry Miller for introducing and welcoming me to the intellectual life. I’ve tried to model my practice and teaching of philosophy based on the example they set. Their teaching changed my life and made it immeasurably better. I am also thankful to the Department for giving me my first opportunity to teach in college. I can never adequately express the affection I feel for SU’s Philosophy Department. I also want to thank my professors from my time at Temple University, especially Craig Eisendrath, Lewis Gordon, and Anthony Monteiro. They helped foster my continued development as both a person and a philosopher, especially in my study of Africana philosophy, an area of study so close to my heart. Additionally, I want to thank my professors from Columbia University Teachers College. David Hansen and Megan Laverty were incredibly supportive of my work there. They are teachers par excellence and two of the nicest people in academia that I’ve ever met. Their encouragement emboldened me to “take the plunge” and pursue my doctoral degree. And, although it took me a few years to realize it, one of Megan’s courses ended up serving as the basis for my dissertation. I am also very grateful to the University of South Florida’s Philosophy Department for its generous support during my doctoral studies here. It provided a welcoming environment in which I could develop as a person, a philosopher, and a teacher. I am especially thankful for receiving both a Teaching Assistantship and the Dean’s Excellence Award. I of course want to thank my dissertation committee members, as well—Lee Braver, Michael Morris, John Christman, Joanne Waugh, and Charles Guignon. Lee Braver’s expert knowledge of Heidegger and Gadamer has served me well during my dissertation writing. He has been very supportive and generous with his time. Michael Morris has been consistently supportive of my work during my doctoral study. Michael has demonstrated the uncanny ability to always provide incredibly insightful feedback. John Christman has been very generous in his support of my project, and I appreciate it immensely. His excellent work on narrative has also come to inform my thinking on it. Joanne Waugh has been consistently supportive of my work at USF. And I have had the pleasure of taking courses and directed studies with her that have helped shape my dissertation project. Lastly, I especially want to thank Charles Guignon for his wonderful support over the last six years. He has been very generous with his time and feedback, and he has encouraged me to believe that I have something philosophically important to say. He is also one of the nicest people I’ve ever met, inside or outside of academia, and I strive to make my work even a fraction as good as his has been. It has been an honor to study with him. I am incredibly grateful for my family’s limitless love and support over the years. I want to especially thank my wonderful parents, Ron and Dottie, my great brother, Chris, my amazing son, Brad, and my wonderful wife, Katie. I could not have finished my Ph.D. without their continued support and encouragement. Lastly, I thank John Pauley for granting me permission to use portions of my previously published “Dialogical Dasein: Heidegger on ‘Being-with,’ ‘Discourse,’ and ‘Solicitude,’” published in Janus Head, Volume 15, Issue 1, February 2016, edited by Brent Dean Robbins, John Pauley, and David Wolf. © 2016. “To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.” --Frantz Fanon The Wretched of the Earth “[W]e are aware of the world through a ‘we’ before we are through an ‘I.’” --Charles Taylor “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man” “As we tell stories about the lives of others, we learn how to imagine what another creature might feel in response to various events. At the same time, we identify with the other creature and learn something about ourselves.” --Martha Nussbaum “A Newly Rich Life with Yourself” Table of Contents Abstract .............................................................................................................................. iii Chapter One: On the Philosophical Neglect of Dialogism ..................................................1 1.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................1 1.2 Why Not Dialogism?: Western Philosophy’s Obsession with Interiority .........6 1.3 A Note on Procedure ........................................................................................10 1.4 Conclusion .......................................................................................................13 Chapter Two: The Primacy of Dialogue: Bakhtin’s and Gadamer’s Theories of the Dialogical .....................................................................................................................15 2.1 Introduction ......................................................................................................15 2.2 Bakhtin on Heteroglossia and Polyphony ........................................................17 2.3 Dialogism in the Novel: Polyphony as a Dialogical Event ..............................23 2.4 Bakhtin on the Inner Speech of the Dialogical Self .........................................27 2.5 Dialogical Understanding: Gadamer on Horizons, Events, and Texts ............31 2.6 Gadamer on the Art of Genuine Conversation ................................................35 2.7 The Significance of Play (Spiel) in Gadamer’s Hermeneutic Phenomenology ................................................................................................39 2.8 Conclusion .......................................................................................................44 Chapter Three: Hermans et al. on Dialogical Self Theory .................................................46 3.1 Introduction ......................................................................................................46 3.2 Hermans et al. on Spatially Situating the Dialogical Self ................................46 3.3 I-Positions in the Dialogical Self .....................................................................50 3.4 Historically Situating the Dialogical Self ........................................................72 3.5 Additional Positions in the Dialogical Self ......................................................75 3.6 The Nine Features of Good Dialogue ..............................................................80 3.7 Conclusion .......................................................................................................83 Chapter Four: Dialogue as the “Conditio Humana”: Dmitri Nikulin’s Theory of the Dialogical .....................................................................................................................85 4.1 Introduction ......................................................................................................85 4.2 Transcending the Literary: Approaching Dialogue via Philosophical Anthropology and Ontology ............................................................................86 4.3 The “Polyphonic Interaction of Voices” ..........................................................88 4.4 Nikulin on the Eidema .....................................................................................92 4.5 A Critique of Nikulin’s Conception of Dialogue .............................................99 4.6 Conclusion .....................................................................................................109