10. The Worlds of Others. Implications of the School of the Dialogue of Cultures

Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, vol. 49, no. 2,
March–April 2011, pp. 6–15.
© 2011 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved.
ISSN 1061–0405/2011 $9.50 + 0.00.
DOI 10.2753/RPO1061-0405490201
Gary Saul Morson

A truly dialogic educational perspective would cultivate the “novelistic” capacity to empathize with the beliefs of others. The process of reading novels by identifying with characters unlike oneself, and the process of understanding events by imagining what else could have happened, both train people in intellectual and moral empathy.
Every philosophical conception tries to “test” itself on the idea of education.
—Irina Berlyand (2009a)
He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.
—John Stuart Mill (1986)
Closed and open
In his interview with Eugene Matusov, conducted after the fall of the Soviet Union, Igor Solomadin speaks in an atmosphere of freedom (Matusov, 2009). He can engage in the sort of dialogue impossible when Bakhtin formulated his theories.
Solomadin contrasts two views of the world: “totalitarian state power” and a dialogic belief in “the uniqueness of human personality” (Matusov, 2009, p. 87). Proponents of the first view seek to train people “who would be obediently subordinate to the will of others” (p. 83). Proponents of the second would rather inspire people who can take personal responsibility because they are aware of their own “‘selfness’ . . . their uniqueness, their unsubstitutable positions in the world” (p. 86). What Solomadin calls “the gap between these two worlds” (p. 83) could hardly be greater. The School of the Dialogue of Cultures (SDC) situates itself within the central debate in world civilization over the past two centuries—a debate that was already raging in the nineteenth century, that dominated the twentieth century, and that is still very much with us. Russia played the crucial role in this argument and contributed many of the most important statements of both views.
Let us call these two views “closed” and “open.”
Perhaps the most important difference between them pertains to the nature of truth. In the closed view, truth is already known and absolutely certain. As the Marxists said of their form of socialism, it is “scientific.” Of course, such a usage of the term “science” represents a misunderstanding of science itself, which depends on a skeptical approach to evidence, the inadmissibility of appeals to authority, and the understanding of knowledge as never complete. It is the unscientific view of science as a series of dogmatic statements linked to a technology, a sort of combination of catechism with magic.
In the open view, knowledge is always incomplete and renegotiable, depending on evidence and cogency of argument. As Bakhtin would say, it is unfinalizable.

Opinion
“Closists” tend to regard those who disagree with the Truth as either stupid, insane, malicious, or bribed. From this perspective, there could be no good reason to disagree, any more than there could be a good reason to dispute the law of gravity or the multiplication table. Someone would have to be mad to maintain that rocks fall up or that capitalism is more productive than socialism. Whoever is not mad has probably been bribed by “very many dollars.” Or one may say: for closists there is no room for opinion, in the sense of legitimate difference. Democracy depends on the concept of opinion: after all, if there is no legitimate difference, why grant freedom of speech or elections by secret ballot? If those institutions play no legitimate role in assessing the Pythagorean theorem, then neither do they have a proper place in politics. By contrast, the open view presumes that everyone’s beliefs reflect his or her unique personality and set of experiences. People can disagree in good faith because all experiences are, in both senses of the word, partial. Bolivians who favor socialism because they have grown up with great disparities of income may find it hard to understand Poles who oppose socialism because they have lived under it, and vice versa. No matter how sure you are, you could turn out to be wrong, and, indeed, it is easy to point to such mistakes by the absolute certainty on the other side of the issue or by the benighted people of the past. Openists caution that just as their conviction of certainty was unsound, so may ours be.
The crucial difference between the two ways of looking at the world lies in how each approaches those who disagree. Openists seek out, or at least believe in seeking out, the best arguments on the other side. They discover the other side’s arguments not by reading what their side’s publications say the other side believes, but by discovering from the other side’s own best publications what they say they believe. They know that until they can paraphrase opponents’ beliefs in a way that the opponents themselves would accept as accurate, they do not know enough even to begin an intelligent debate.¹
When I was a teenager, I was surprised that people who saw me reading The Communist Manifesto assumed I was a communist and upbraided me. As a college professor, I remember an alumna, who saw me with a conservative student publication I had just picked up, cautioning: “Oh, you don’t want to read that, it’s a conservative newspaper! They’re so closed-minded!”²
John Stuart Mill wrote that 99 percent of educated people “have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them . . .
and consequently they do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess” (Mill, 1986, p. 44). Often without realizing it, they behave as if they and their group were “infallible” (p. 24). As a result, their own position, even if true, is badly argued; and their recommendations, if adopted, will be poorly executed. Human thought withers, and even the best policy fails because implementers have not bothered to consider the most obvious obstacles they might have learned from opponents.
Openists recognize that, while some members of the other side are indeed reprehensible, so are many members of their own side. Barring strong evidence to the contrary, they assume that swinishness is evenly distributed. When they see opponents who appear to be deceiving themselves about the facts, they immediately ask whether they may be doing the same, but not seeing it precisely because they are deceiving themselves. When people speak of opponents as “in denial,” as they so frequently do, perhaps they are saying less about the opponents than about their own willingness seriously to consider contrary evidence. “In denial”: the refusal of them to accept what is obvious to us.
“He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.” Mill’s insight, when made the basis of education, leads to education through dialogue, the sort of education that the SDC has so thoughtfully developed. Dialogue makes one both smarter and wiser.
No one better understood or appreciated the value of dialogue than Bakhtin.
Many of his core concepts derive from his dialogic values: “the dialogic nature of truth,” novelization, the “surplus of humanness,” and “unfinalizability.” The SDC develops this aspect of Bakhtin’s thought.

Impersonation
As far as I know, I teach the largest class in Russian literature in America (over 500 students). The most gratifying comment students offer in their assessment of the class is that it changed the way they think about their lives and made them wiser about themselves. Is that not what Russian literature sets out to do?
It is easy to see how small discussion sections can promote dialogue. The techniques I use for such discussions resemble, but in a less sophisticated form, those of the SDC. But a class of 500 depends largely on lectures, and it is not obvious how one conveys a dialogic sense of truth before an audience much too large for discussion. What is a dialogic lecture?

I developed a method I call impersonation. I teach Dostoevsky and Tolstoy not from my point of view, but from theirs, as I understand it. If I draw comparisons from contemporary life, it is the ones that would occur to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. As Bakhtin would say, I draw “dotted lines.” This method is the very opposite of many American critical schools today. Instead of judging authors from the supposedly superior moral and intellectual position of today’s professors, I show how the authors might see and evaluate us.
When I teach The Brothers Karamazov, I impersonate the book’s Christian perspective as I understand it. With Anna Karenina, I speak from what my publications on Tolstoy have called his “prosaic” point of view. As it happens, I used the same technique of impersonation in my book based on this course, “Anna Karenina” in Our Time: Seeing More Wisely (Morson, 2007). That is, instead of making critical theory the basis of pedagogy, my book does the reverse by letting pedagogy suggest theories. Or rather, each informs the other.
As my book’s title suggests, it both explores Tolstoy’s novel from within and shows how its perspective could illuminate our concerns today. Accordingly, I suspend my own point of view on these issues in order to convey Tolstoy’s. Students in the class, and readers of the book, come to learn my beliefs about what Dostoevsky and Tolstoy meant, but not my beliefs about religious or social questions.

Living into
Vladimir Osetinsky observes that “literature is the key subject for the SDC” (Osetinsky, 2009, p. 64). I take him to mean that the SDC’s Bakhtinian approach to literature forms the basis of its approach to other disciplines as well. Even with mathematics, students experience from within what it is like to understand numbers in ways strange to them but familiar to others. As Irina Berlyand stresses, such an approach creates, in the study of all subjects, what she calls “an internal rift” (Berlyand, 2009b, p. 87) as “the child is forced to see his or her own perspective as if from the side, first as an integral single picture, and second as only one of the possible pictures” (p. 88).
The phrase “one of the possible pictures” evidently alludes to Bakhtin’s concept of the “Galilean consciousness” conveyed by novels.³ For Bakhtin, all novels, not just the extreme case of “polyphonic” novels, orchestrate diverse points of view.
Each major character has his or her own unique perspective, and readers switch from one to the other. They experience many views of a situation.

It is therefore insufficient to impersonate only the perspective of the author. In addition, I try to impersonate each character’s point of view. I speak from within the voice zone and perspective of Levin, Anna, Dolly, Ivan Karamazov, and—the students’ favorite—Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov. By so doing, I illustrate an ethical, dialogic truth that realist novels are supremely well adapted to convey: the importance of “what Bakhtin called vzhivanie (“living into” another perspective without losing one’s own). To avoid what in English would seem like an ungainly, jargonish term, I use the common word “empathy,” while emphasizing the importance of seeing it as more than mere “merging.”
Over the past three-quarters of a century or more, literary theory has largely excluded a topic that for nonprofessionals virtually defines the experience of reading novels: identification with a character. Literary critics have tended to regard identification as philistine. Too often, they see in it little more that the naive desire to imitate young Werther or the impulse to run on stage and stay the hand of Judas. Schools as varied as Russian Formalism, Prague Structuralism, American New Criticism, Deconstruction, and others have largely neglected this topic, and in so doing, have distanced themselves from one of the key experiences that attracts readers to novels in the first place.
Authors labor to make this experience rewarding. After all, one distinction between great novelists like George Eliot and mediocre ones like Disraeli is that the former create characters with whom we can identify while the latter create ones we can only view externally. If authors take such effort to allow and encourage identification, and if that experience is so central to literary greatness, then surely it is anything but philistine to take identification seriously.
When we read great novels, we identify with people utterly unlike ourselves.
They may be of the opposite sex, a different social class, nationality, ethnic group, age, or set of beliefs. More than any other art form, and more than any branch of social science, novels allow us to sense what it is to be another person. If social scientists knew as much about people as great novelists do, they could create pictures of people as believable as Dorothea Brooke or Anna Karenina, but of course they have not even come close. We know the novelists must somehow grasp what it is to be someone else because in reading the work we vicariously experience being someone else.
In fact, novels permit us to know more about others than we can in real life.
Through the device of “double-voiced words” (or “free indirect discourse”), we follow the progress of a character’s thoughts and feelings from within. That is never possible in real life.

Moreover, because the character’s inner speech is doublevoiced, we sense potential dialogues absent from real life. For example, we may be allowed to sense what a second character would say if she could overhear the first character’s thoughts, as readers do. If Dolly could eavesdrop on Stiva’s mental description of her as a “worn-out woman, no longer interesting or attractive,” and “merely a good mother,” would her distress at Stiva’s affair not be still worse?

The humanization of knowledge
The SDC seeks to create “a person of culture.” That goal is essentially moral, insofar as we understand morality in dialogic terms. For Kantians, morality consists in following the rules simply because they are the universal rules; for utilitarians, it consists of achieving the greatest good for the greatest number; but from a dialogic perspective—and the implicit perspective of the novel as a genre—it demands empathy (in the sense of “vzhivanie”). As Berlyand writes, people must “hear one another, that is . . . reproduce the speech of others in their own inner speech” (Berlyand, 2009b, p. 87). Ethics begins when one learns to feel another from within. The SDC is well adapted to creating people of culture in this sense.
Bibler calls for “the humanization of knowledge. . . . Every ‘module’ of unified culture turns out to be humanitarian” (Bibler, 2009, p. 51). Such humanization represents what Bakhtin would call the “novelization” of knowledge. Unlike other conceptions of knowledge, this one intrinsically includes the possibility of a moral approach.

Surprisingness and the dialogic sense of time
The SDC shapes its curriculum around cultural and intellectual history. It teaches ideas through their development. I could not be more sympathetic with this approach. I once planned to be a physicist, and so, when inspecting a possible high school for my son, I made sure to attend a science class, in this case, biology. The teacher began the discussion of the circulatory system with Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood. The teacher first explained what the earlier theory was and why it would seem plausible. Students began to think in those terms, which are actually fairly close to uninformed common sense. Then he asked, what evidence suggested to Harvey that this model was wrong? In fact, it was evidence that any of us can reproduce by appropriate examination of our own bodies.
Learning in this way, students came to see science not as a series of textbook propositions to memorize or apply to problem sets, but as a process of reasoning.
I have always found it odd that science, which demands skeptical weighing of evidence, is so often taught as a series of authoritative pronouncements. Would it not be better to teach current scientific knowledge as the product of the arguments and evidence that led to it, especially the sort of testing that scientists have come to value?
Sergey Kurganov writes: “A dialogic concept is the history of its own construction. The dialogic concept ‘lives’ . . . in that [which] recounts the entire dialogueargument. This argument is not ‘sublated’ in subsequent constructions by the dialogue participants” (2009, p. 40). What exactly is the link between dialogue and knowledge as the history of ideas?
One can discern the link if one considers all those intellectual histories that are written as an inevitable unfolding of the Truth, a gradual approach to present beliefs. If history is understood this way, it is entirely unnecessary, since present views contain all that is valuable in past views and more. It may have taken time to be revealed, but the process of its discovery is not an intrinsic part of it.
It is hard not to write history this way. As Tolstoy liked to say, it is natural and agreeable to do so. In War and Peace, he satirizes all those historians who judge figures of the past as if from outside history:
In describing the part played by these historical personages who, in their opinion, caused what they call the reaction, the historians severely condemn them. All the famous people of that period, from Aleksandr and Napoleon to Madame de Staël, Photius, Schelling, Chateaubriand, Fichte, and the rest, pass before their stern tribunal and are acquitted or condemned according to whether they promoted progress or reaction. . . . In what does the substance of these strictures consist?
It consists in the fact that a historic character like Aleksandr . . . did not have the same conception of the welfare of humanity fifty years ago as a present-day professor who from his youth has been occupied with learning, that is, with reading books, listening to lectures, and making notes. (Tolstoy, 1968, pp. 1351–53) The only way to avoid this sort of error is to cultivate the ability to view oneself from outside, from the perspective of another, which is to say, dialogically. One might begin by wondering whether fifty years in the future one’s own views will look as benighted as those held fifty years ago look today. Then one might consider all those people who were once as sure of the unquestionable truth of their beliefs as we are of ours, but turned out to be blind or self-deceiving. Again, a key point about self-deception is that, to the extent it works, one is unaware of it. It is only visible in others. Dialogic wisdom invites us to view ourselves from the perspective of others who miss their own self-deception but clearly see ours.

If one adopts the SDC approach to knowledge as the history of ideas in dialogue, no narrative of the past as an inevitable unfolding will do. The reason lies in what Bakhtin calls “surprisingness.” (I was pleased to see how often the word “surprise” appears in these SDC writings.) In my book on time, I tried to give a rigorous definition of this concept (Morson, 1994). In brief, it means that, at least at some moments, more than one thing can happen. There are more genuine possibilities than actualities. Whatever does happen, something else might have. Play the tape over again and there could be a different outcome.
Leibniz claimed that for any event there must be a sufficient reason, that is, a reason explaining why that event, and only that event, is possible. Each present moment is the automatic derivative of past moments. But if one believes in surprisingness, then the past constrains the present, but does not specify a single outcome. The world may be roughly predictable, but no more than that. Those who believe in the possibility of a social science in the hard sense typically argue that unpredictability is temporary and results merely from our present ignorance of laws. But “surprisingness” presumes that indeterminacy pertains to the very nature of things.

Whatever happens, something else might have. One must cultivate a sense of the something else. That is, “surprisingness” involves a dialogic sense of time. Just as dialogue with others requires us to imagine ourselves out of our own position and into that of another, a dialogic sense of time demands that we imagine the alterative course of events, what I call the sideshadows cast by the might-have-beens.⁴
Anyone who knows only the sequence of events that did happen, knows little of that.
The American satirist Ambrose Bierce defined an “egotist” as “a person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me” (Bierce, n.d., p. 52). We are all natural egotists. But a dialogic approach cultivates a “learned ignorance” of our own point of view long enough to imagine ideological and temporal alternatives.

The meaning of Russian cultural history
Let us return to Solomadin’s comments about the Russian experience. He observes that modern Russian poets have sought to assert the value and uniqueness of human personality. In so doing, they opposed the totalitarian ideology striving to create “the absolute impossibility of expressing one’s own personal, responsible vision of the world” (Matusov, 2009, p. 87). Solomadin then offers an important comment about Russian history:
I wonder if the value of twentieth-century culture consists in its ability to show the rest of the world that individual, personal creation is indeed possible under conditions of its total impossibility. (ibid.)
I prefer to avoid self-contradictory rhetoric (show that something is possible when totally impossible), but I do endorse the sentiment behind this comment, and would even take it a step further.
In 1909, the critic Mikhail Gershenzon observed in the anthology Landmarks:
A Collection of Articles on the Intelligentsia that the surest gauge of the greatness of a Russian writer “is the extent of his hatred for the intelligentsia” (Shatz and Zimmerman, 1986, p. 60). He was using the term “intelligentsia” in its classic Russian sense to refer to the revolutionary intelligentsia who believed in the absolute supremacy of ideology. Gershenzon and other Landmarks contributors constructed the history of classical Russian culture as the argument between the radical intelligentsia and the great writers: between those who presumed to know the absolute truth and those who knew we lived in uncertainty, between those who shunned and those who embraced dialogue. On the one hand, we have the tradition of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, who all despised the intelligentsia, and on the other, the tradition of Chernyshevsky, the revolutionary populists, and Lenin.
The conflict between the poets and regime mentioned by Solomadin represents the continuation of this argument. I agree that it is the central story of Russian culture over the past two centuries.
Bakhtin’s theory derives from the tradition of Landmarks and the great writers.

His notion of dialogue defines itself against the ideology and “theoretism” (as he calls it) of the revolutionary intelligentsia and the Soviet regime. In a larger sense, Bakhtin’s call for dialogue responds to all attempts, wherever and whenever they occur, to assert an ideology that ascribes skeptical questioning to venality, stupidity, or mental derangement.
The most important lesson taught by the School of the Dialogue of Cultures is the value of dialogue itself. It is a lesson that Americans, as well as Russians, sorely need.

Notes
¹ As Mill writes: “Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. This is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form” (1986, p. 44).
² Openists are particularly distressed when those in their own camp deny the possibility of decent argument on the other side. American liberals may wince at Paul Krugman’s totalizing contention that opponents of health-care reform are motivated by “cultural and racial anxiety” because the president is African American. These people are directed by “cynical political operators . . . exploiting their anxiety to further the economic interest of their backers.” An evil motive combined with venality: that does not seem to leave much room for rational opposition. Surely health-care reform can be defended with better argument than this! See Krugman (2009).
³ On the significance of the Galilean consciousness, see Morson and Emerson (1990, pp. 309–17).
⁴ On sideshadowing, see Morson (1994, pp. 117–72). See also Bernstein (1994).
⁵ As I argue in Morson (1993).

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Gary Saul Morson is Frances Hooper Professor of the Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University. He coauthored with Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Yale University Press published his most recent book, “Anna Karenina” in Our Time: Seeing More Wisely; The Words of Others: From Quotations to Culture is forthcoming from the same publisher.
E-mail: g-morson@northwestern.edu.