Another criteria, and this I think number four, it's leaving a door to dialogue open. Now you will have millions of examples where you were trying to talk to someone and they weren't talking to you, they weren't really opening the door, leaving the door open, you couldn't get a word in edgeways because they were so full of themselves or for whatever reason. There are very ordinary examples you can see like this one that I find particularly difficult. Is you go into a busy office, and there are four or five people working at computers there. And you go in and you're new to the building, you're new to the office, you don't know whom to approach, you go and you stand there, somebody is talking to somebody else, somebody is just typing, everything is going on, nobody looks up at you. This is the William James not being noticed freaky scenario. There simply dialogue isn't being allowed to begin because your existence is not being noticed. But it's horrible feeling that. You feel small, you feel made small by somebody you want to engage with you. You also have other ways of, probably more damaging ways, of shutting doors to dialogue within intimate relationships where one friend decides to tell you about something that you're doing to annoy people. And this is done with absolutely good intentions and out of kindness and care, so the person is being honest. But if that honest expression of that person's views is being put to you without allowing you to engage with them, it can be absolutely devastating. Because however kind the intention, what it's done is it's blocked you off, if you like, it's blocked your voice. It's shut you off. And you can see this in other situations. You go juries, pronouncing verdicts on criminals. What are you supposed to do if you're innocent and the jury says you're guilty? What are you supposed to do? You simply have no voice. What does it do? I can't imagine what it must do to you, to be seen as not deserving to have a voice. And in smaller ways, it happens in everyday life too. Teachers or panels make judgments about students work. But after a moment of dialogue, the judgment shuts off the door. I don't know this. Our society runs on this kind of institutionalized shutting of doors. It would take quite a lot of work to reopen and to change that kind of thing at institutional level. One more example of this is, some years ago, about 20 years ago I think, I heard a program on the radio talking about powerless speech, women and powerless speech. And I didn't have the concept of that. I knew what they were talking about because suddenly I recognized it. It was this habit that apparently women have of ending sentences with 'isn't it?' or 'don't you agree?' or 'don't you think?' or, and I noticed how I was ending many many official communications with, what do you think, even though I really don't know what they thought. But it felt too hard to end an email saying, "This is what will happen," with a statement rather than an open door question. It felt more polite and more respectful somehow. But women tend to do this and women in general tend to get beaten back, as I understand it from glass ceilings and all sorts of things, because of this use of a form of speech which qualifies or seeks agreement in order to go forward. But maybe what's happening here is it's powerless but it's also very much a seeking engagement and a corroboration about views. It's kind of got very many differently. It's a keeping of doors open in powerless speech. Appreciating the value of the other. So you got to see the person as a person in order, I'm actually going to argue later, to be humble in some senses. But there are some risks in seeing the other or indeed yourself as a uni-dimensional whole person. There is a risk of mis-recognition. Whether it's negative or positive, it can be actually very damaging. Let's take the troublesome student. You see this person. The student is bolshie, they're always making trouble, they're always late, blah blah blah. If that negative aura covers everything that they are, you don't see anything more in the person. You're seeing the person uni-dimensionally and that's not good. That can happen positively as well. So you see the wonderful lover, the person you've just fallen in love with as a, through rose-tinted glasses which are equally untrue and equally prone to mis-recognition. And it bodes no good for anyone, neither the other person nor for you to continue with this uni-dimensionality of the perception of the person. Same thing happens to the self. You win a prize, suddenly it goes to your head and you think, "I'm a superstar self." It's simply untrue. What's happening there is that one dimension is taking over the reality of the variety of aspects of self, and the reality of different moments. You're becoming stuck either in one dimension or out of time. And the same thing can happen very much more negatively with thinking of yourself as worthless. You make one mistake, you see yourself globally as "I'm a useless person, "I'm just not bright", "I'm just not good", or "I'm a bad person," and so on and so forth. So there's a risk in seeing the other person as one uni-dimensional whole. There needs to be an acceptance of multi-dimensionality, of seeing the person present in the moment, although you do need to also go beyond that as we will speak about that at another point in time. And the last thing, the last criterion that I want to talk about is attraction to difference. And this is important because there's been a lot of talk both in psychology and in philosophy about how the perception of similarity between yourself and other is absolutely crucial to getting on with the person, to understanding them, to having any kind of relationship with them. And I think although there's got to be a limit to how dissimilar a person can be before you can get on with them, the really crucial thing, and in my view the starting point for dialogue, is difference. It's not similarity. You need response to yourself from a different other whom you perceive as different and whom you're attracted to as different. Why do I say this? I'm going to give you some quotes from a couple of people which spell this out a bit. Martin Buber. "Though the Thou, he says, is not an It, it is also not 'another I'. He who treats a person as 'another I' doesn't really see that person but only a projected image of himself." Now this you can see this in infancy as well. Yes infants recognize some degrees of similarity, embodied similarity between self and other, but they're also very much aware of distinctions between self and other at birth, and are attracted, if you like, to dialogue and response rather than similarity. How do they see this at birth? Self-other recognition, differentiation at birth? Well actually, yes. So there are different studies showing this but one neat one, it's a very simple one is, you know that babies when you touch their cheeks, newborn baby you touch their cheeks, they open their mouth to root, right. So it's a kind of reflex, a rooting reflex. You touch their cheek, they'll open their mouth to root. They accidentally touch their cheeks with the whole arm movements and they don't turn their mouth to root quite so often or quite so much. They can tell the difference between the connectedness of their own body and the un-connectedness of this other body. So the distinction between self and other is not such a wildly difficult thing even at birth. It's already there. And certainly within the space of two months or three months, infants are able to engage in dialogue of saying different things, of having what they call proto-conversations. And in fact of preferring other people's responses when there are responses, rather than when there are imitations of what they themselves are doing. So something about difference is attractive. And I think it's attractive because it draws you in. It's like it touches on the almost known and it says, "Come and join me, come and be one of us. Come and join the group." And that's, if you like, what happens in dialogue, you get drawn in. Now, a few more quotes. Dialogue needs response. Somebody else to respond to you and you to respond to the other person. It needs surprise. Martin Buber says, for him a surprise was the essence of dialogue. And he says, "For what I call dialogue, there is essentially necessary the moment of surprise. The whole charm of dialogue is that I do not know and cannot know what my partner will do. I am surprised by what he does. And on this surprise, the whole play is based." Imagine if you were having a telephone conversation with a friend, friend was reading from a script, there would be no surprise somewhere, and the disjointedness of it would kill that dialogue quite quickly. And in conversations in general, in how conversations progress, you can't plan or prescript them. Here's a quote from Gadamer, "We say", he says, "that we conduct a conversation, but the more genuine a conversation is, the less its conduct lies within the will of either partner. Thus, a genuine conversation is never the one we wanted to conduct. Rather, it is generally more correct to say that we fall into conversation, or even that we become involved in it. No one knows in advance what will come out of a conversation. Understanding, or its failure, is like an event that happens to us. It allows something to emerge, which henceforth exists.". Okay, and that's it for this part.
