The Limits of Radical Openness

Abstract

To what extent can the structure of dialogue be used to ground a theory of human understanding? In this paper, I examine Plato's Phaedo, Republic, and Philebus with an eye toward challenging Gadamer's thesis that Socratic dialogue grounds a theory of hermeneutics that characterizes understanding as afactor within experience as radical openness. I contend that there is a basic problem in Gadamer's historical appropriation of the dialectic. This is that the elenchtic ideal of most of the early dialogues of Plato, which underlies Gadamer's notion of privileging process over result in conversation, is fundamentally in tension with reaching an understanding of concepts, and ultimately reaching toward the Good.