Genuine dialogue and understanding require that certain ethical conditions be met.

The interlocutor must take seriously what the other person says as a claim to truth worth learning.

The interlocutor must approach the other with respect and a good will to understand.

This post is Part 3 of a series.

In my first post of this series, I introduced Hans-Georg Gadamer’s way of seeing human understanding as a process of play—a back-and-forth communicative movement in which human beings reach a shared grasp of some subject matter of their world together. In my second post, I outlined eight key characteristics of this movement of play, highlighting how it is a collaborative, free, unpredictable, and open-ended movement in which participants are transformed and enriched.

What has always caught my interest in Gadamer’s description of the dialogical play-process is that it requires (what I call) certain “ethical conditions” to be met. There are particular ways we must approach and treat another person, and the “game” itself, for a genuine dialogue to take place and for a shared understanding to emerge. There are commitments, responsibilities, and a self-disciplined conduct necessary for genuine dialogue and understanding to occur.

In this post, I want to show how those ethical conditions emerge from Gadamer’s description of play. I also want to begin to consider if illuminating these ethical conditions gives us a clue as to why dialogue and understanding so often fail in our culture today.

Taking the Game of Understanding Seriously

First of all, Gadamer observes that a player in any game has to take the game seriously for the game to function. They have to engage fully, rather than stand back at a distance or view the activity as........

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