Dialogue

Notes by Arianna Bove on Pierre Hadot's Philosophy as a Way of Life, 2006

The form of the dialogue is first a form of friendship. It is a journey in which the interlocutors do not know the destination. They do not respectively defend a ‘truth’ or conclusion yet it is a kind of battle with oneself and the other, because it requires a constant shifting of the goal post. Socrates was know for saying ‘All I know is that I do not know anything’. Yet the imparting of an attitude of questioning and an openness to unpredicted detours of reflection was the character of his style. So the dialogue is friendship for knowledge, philo-sophia, an attitude of love towards it that demands an engagement that is dialectical. The nature of dialogical dialectic of the Platonic form is this battle and constant questioning, where the interlocutor brings a random element to the engagement that makes it capable of transforming oneself and the other. This random element is freedom.