Continental Philosophy Review (2006) 39:351–359 Ó Springer 2007

DOI 10.1007/s11007-006-9041-2

Hans-Georg Gadamer ‘‘The Incapacity for Conversation’’ (1972)*

DAVID VESSEY
University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
e-mail: vesseyd@uchicago.edu

CHRIS BLAUWKAMP
Washington University St. Louis, St. Louis, MO 63130, USA
e-mail: cablauwkamp@law.wustl.edu

Abstract. In his 1972 essay ‘‘The Incapacity for Conversation’’ (‘‘Die Unfähigkeit zum
Gespräch’’) Gadamer takes up the question of whether changes in society have made it
such that we are losing our ability to participate in dialogue. By the end of the essay he
argues that this is not the case and that the claim that someone is incapable of dialogue
is merely an excuse for not listening to the other person. Over the course of the essay
Gadamer provides a clarification of what exactly counts as a conversation and of how
conversation is connected to friendship.

Key words: Blauwkamp, conversation, dialogue, friendship, Gadamer, Vessey

The question and its point of departure are clear enough: Is the art of
conversation vanishing? HavenÕt we noticed an increasing monologization
of human behavior in the social life of our time? Is this a general
phenomenon of our civilization, one that is connected with its scientific-
technological way of thinking? Or is it the particular experiences of
self-alienation and loneliness in the modern world that silence the young?
Or is it perhaps even a decisive break from all willingness to understand
and a stubborn revolt against the false understanding that prevails in
public life and that is deplored by others as an incapacity for conversa-
tion? These are the questions that come immediately to mind regarding
the present topic.
The capacity for conversation is a natural endowment of human
beings. Aristotle identified humans as the beings with language, and
language exists only in conversation. Language may be codified and be
more or less fixed in dictionaries, grammars, and literature—yet its
unique vitality, its obsolescence and self-renewal, its coarsening, and its

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352 DAVID VESSEY AND CHRIS BLAUWKAMP

refinement into the high genre of literary art, all this lives only though the
living exchange of people talking with one another. Language exists only
in conversation.
But how varied is the role played by conversation among human
beings! I once observed a military delegation of Finnish officers in a Berlin
Hotel who sat around a large table, silent and withdrawn. Between each
and his neighbor spanned the broad tundra of their soulÕs landscape, like
an unbridgeable distance. And what traveling northerner has not admired
the constant smoking and thundering billow of conversation in the
market and workplaces of the southern countries such as Spain or Italy!
But perhaps one should neither regard one as a deficiency of readiness for
conversation nor the other as a particular gift for conversation. For
perhaps conversation is indeed something other than the conventions of
social life, whether quiet or loud. And surely thatÕs not whatÕs meant by
the complaint that there is an incapacity for conversation. Conversation is
to be understood in a more challenging sense.
LetÕs make clear a contrasting phenomenon, which is perhaps not
without responsibility for the fact that the capacity for conversation is
decreasing: I mean the telephone conversation. We are so used to having
long conversations over the telephone, and scarcely notice the communi-
cative impoverishment between loved ones, insofar as people on the tele-
phone can only hear one another. But the problem of conversation does not
arise at all in such cases, where the close interweaving of the lives of two
people also spins out the threads of the conversation. The question of the
incapacity for conversation means rather whether one is open, and finds the
other open, enough that the threads of the conversation can run back and
forth. Here the experience of the telephone conversation has an illustrative
value like that of a photographic negative. What are almost impossible on
the telephone are those little attentions paid to the open readiness of the
other, signaling a willingness to be involved in a conversation. What never
happens in a telephone conversation are those experiences through which
people foster an intimacy with one another, where step by step they get
deeper into the conversation and in the end are so engrossed in it that a
community comes into being between the partners in the conversation, a
community that can never again be riven. I called the telephone conversa-
tion a kind of photographic negative. For the very sphere of touching, of
being attentive, in and through which humans come close to one another,
becomes numb thanks to the artificial closeness made possible by the
[telephone] wire. Something of the brutality of being interrupted, or of
interrupting the other, attaches to every telephone call even if the partner
assures the other person how much he or she is pleased by the call.
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Our comparison shows just how strong the demands placed on genuine
conversation are, in order that conversation might be brought into
the heart of human community, and also how the forces of modern
civilization have expanded to prevent this from happening. Modern
information technology is perhaps still in the its infancy—if one can be-
lieve the prophets of technology, it will render obsolete books and news-
papers, and especially real teaching, which can only occur through human
interaction. This calls to mind the charismatic leaders of conversation who
transformed the world in precisely the opposite fashion: Confucius and
Gautama Buddha, Jesus and Socrates. We can read their conversations,
but these are only recordings made by another, who can never capture and
reproduce the particular charisma of the conversation. This charisma is
present only in the living spontaneity of question and answer, of speaking
and of allowing oneself to be spoken to. Nevertheless such recordings have
a special documentary power. In a certain sense, they are literature, which
is to say, they presuppose a literary artfulness that is able to evoke and give
shape to a living reality though literary means. But in contrast to the poetic
play of the imagination such recordings are uniquely transparent,
revealing the singular reality and the events that happened behind them.
The theologian Franz Overbeck correctly observed this and, applying it to
the New Testament, coined the term ,Urliteratur,Õ which underlies actual
literature as prehistory does history.
It is useful to turn to another, analogous phenomenon. The incapacity
for conversation is not the only case of diminishing communication
that we know. For a long time now weÕve witnessed the vanishing of
letters and correspondence. The great letter writers of the 17th and 18th
century belong to the past. The age of the mail coach obviously had the
kind of communication where one answered one another with return
mail—which means literally the return of the mail horses—much better
than the technical age, with the almost complete simultaneity of question
and answer that distinguishes the telephone conversation. Anyone
familiar with America knows that there are far fewer letters written than
in the Old World. In fact what one does still communicate by letter, even
in the Old World, is so reduced, so very confined to things that require
neither the linguistic art of presentation nor the psychological art of
empathy nor the productive art of imagination, that the typewriter is just
a better device for such communication than the pen. The letter has
become an obsolete means of conveying information.
Also in the area of philosophical thought, the phenomenon of con-
versation, and, in particular, that special form of conversation between
two people called dialogue, has played a role in the area of philosophical
thinking, and indeed has served as the basis for the sort of contrast we
354 DAVID VESSEY AND CHRIS BLAUWKAMP

have just outlined in the general cultural context. It was above all the age
of romanticism and its revival in the 20th century that assigned a critical
role to the phenomenon of conversation over and against the ominous
monologization of philosophical thought. Masters of conversation like
Friedrich Schleiermacher, that genius of friendship, or Friedrich Schlegel,
whose general excitability allowed him to shine more in conversation than
in the production of any permanent composition, were at the same time
philosophical advocates of a dialectic that grants to the Platonic para-
digm of dialogue, of conversation, its own primacy of truth. It is easy to
see where this primacy lies. When two people come together and enter
into an exchange with one another, then there is always an encounter
between, as it were, two worlds, two worldviews and two world pictures.
The great thinker does not devote his conceptual exertions and the
development of his teaching merely to set out a single view of a single
world. Already Plato presented his philosophy as written dialogues, and
not only out of pious devotion to Socrates, the master of conversation.
He saw in conversation a principle of truth, that the word only finds value
though its reception by another and through that otherÕs agreement, and
that no argumentative conclusion has power until one person enters into
the thought of another. And itÕs true; every human viewpoint has
something contingent about it. The way one experiences the world,
through seeing and hearing and especially tasting, remains inevitably a
private secret. ‘‘No one points at smells’’ (Rilke). Just as our sensory
perception of the world is always inextricably private, so are our drives
and our interests. And reason, which we share in common, and which
allows each of us to grasp what is common or universal, remains helpless
against the blind spots that our individuality nourishes in us. Thus con-
versation with the other, the otherÕs disagreement or agreement, the
otherÕs understandings and also misunderstandings, become a kind of
extension of our individuality and a testing of the possible community we
share, toward which reason encourages us. A whole philosophy of con-
versation can be imagined proceeding from these experiences: the unex-
changeable viewpoint of the individual, in which is reflected the whole
world, and the whole world, that presents itself as one and the same world
in all particular viewpoints. It was the masterful metaphysical conception
of Leibniz, which Goethe also admired, that the many reflections of the
universe, which are the singular individuals, in their totality are the
one universe itself. That could be further developed into a universe of
conversation.
What romanticism upholds in the discovery of the undisclosable
mysteries of individuality versus the abstract universality of concepts is
repeated at the beginning of our century in the critique of 19th century
 THE INCAPACITY FOR CONVERSATION 355

scholasticism and of liberal faith in progress. ItÕs not a coincidence that it

was the Danish writer Søren Kierkegaard, a student of German roman-
ticism, who in the 1840s wielded great authorial skill against the dominant
school of Hegelian idealism, and now influences twentieth century Europe
though the German translations of his work. It was here in Heidelberg
(but also elsewhere in Germany), that the experience of the Thou and of
the word, which binds the I and the Thou, was set against the thought of
neo-Kantianism idealism. In the journal ,Die KreaturÕ the Kierkegaard-
Renaissance found an effective expression, in particular in Heidelberg
though JaspersÕs sponsorship. Men like Franz Rosenzweig and Martin
Buber, Friedrich Gogarten, and Ferdinand Ebner—to name Jewish,
Protestant, and Catholic thinkers who came from very different camps,
but also a psychiatrist of the rank of Viktor von Weizsäckers—were
united together in the conviction that the way of truth was conversation.
What is a conversation? Naturally we think of a transaction between
humans, who for all their flexibility and potential endlessness nevertheless
possess a oneness and a closeness of their own. Something is a conver-
sation for us if it leaves something behind in us. It is not that we have
found out something new that makes a conversation a conversation, but
that we have encountered something in the other that we have not
encountered in the same way in our own experiences of the world. What
moved the philosophers in their critique of monological thinking may be
experienced by the individual through introspection. Conversation has a
transformative power. Where a conversation is successful, something
remains for us and something remains in us that has transformed us. Thus
a conversation is a close neighbor of friendship. Only in conversation
(and in laughing with one another which is like a non-verbal, exuberant
mutual understanding) can friends find each other and develop that kind
of community in which everyone remains the same for the other because
they find the other in themselves and find themselves in the other.
But rather than discuss only this most extreme and deepest meaning of
conversation, we should direct our attention to the various forms of
conversation that arise in life, and which are subject to the particular
threat that is our theme. First there is the pedagogical conversation. Not
that it deserves special priority, but with this case it is especially easy to
see what might lie behind the experience of the incapacity for conversa-
tion. The conversation between teacher and student is certainly one of the
most basic types of conversation experiences, and those charismatic fig-
ures of conversation, about whom we spoke above, are all masters and
teachers who instruct their students or apprentices though conversations.
In the case of the teacher however, there is of course the peculiar difficulty
of maintaining a capacity for conversation, a difficulty that defeats most.
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Whoever teaches believes he has both the duty and the right to speak, and
the more consistently and coherently he can speak, the better he can
communicate his teachings. That is the danger of the lectern, as we all
know. I remember my time as a student in a seminar with Husserl. Of
course such seminars should, if possible, foster research discussions or at
the very least pedagogical discussions. Husserl, who in the early 20s was
the Freiburg master of phenomenology and inspired by a deep missionary
drive, and indeed practiced an important philosophical teaching, was no
master of conversation. In those seminar classes he started by setting
forth a question, got a short answer then dwelled on this answer for 2 h in
an uninterrupted lecture. Once when he finished a class, he said to his
assistant Heidegger: ‘‘today was an interesting discussion, for once.’’ It is
these kinds of experiences that today have led to something of a crisis of
the lecture. The incapacity for conversation above all rests on the side of
the teacher, and in particular, in so far as the teacher is the principle
purveyor of knowledge, on the monological structure of modern science
and theoretical education. In higher education, one tries again and again
to loosen up the lecture through discussion, only to discover the reverse
problem, that it is immensely difficult for the students to leap from the
receptive attitude of being listeners to the initiative of posing questions
and objections; they rarely succeed in doing so. In the end there is an
inextricable difficulty for the conversation in the teaching situation,
insofar as it takes place amongst a group larger than a small, intimate
circle. Plato probably knew that well; a conversation is never possible
with many people at the same time or even only in the presence of many
people. Our so-called panel discussions, these conversations around a
semicircular table, are always half dead. There are however other,
authentic, that is, individualized conversational situations in which the
true function of conversation is preserved. I would like to distinguish
three types: the conversation of business negotiation (Ver-
handlungsgespräch), the curative conversation (Heilgespräch), and the
confidential conversation (vertrauliche Gespräch).
Already in the word ‘‘conversation of negotiation’’ lies an emphasis on
the reciprocity in which here the conversation partners come to one an-
other. Certainly it is here a matter of forms of social practice. Negotia-
tions between business partners or also political negotiations do not have
the character of the so-called reciprocal discussion between persons. Here
the conversation, if it is successful, also brings about a reconciliation, and
that is its particular designation, but the persons who arrive at a recon-
ciliation in the reciprocal exchange of their conditions are not thereby
involved or discussing as persons, but rather as trustees for the interests of
the parties they represent. Nevertheless it would be of interest to consider
 THE INCAPACITY FOR CONVERSATION 357

which characteristics of conversational ability distinguish the successful

businessman and politician, and how such a person is able to break down
the otherÕs barriers that stand in the way of reconciliation. There is
certainly here also the crucial condition that one knows to recognize the
other as other. In this case, the real interests of the other are opposed to
oneÕs own interests, but perceived correctly, they may hold the possibility
of reaching agreement (des Sich-Zusammenfindens). To this extent, the
general condition of conversation—that in order to be capable of speech,
one must listen—is preserved in conversations of negotiation. The
encounter with the other rises above the limitations of its concern with
dollars or with the interests of power.
Of particular explanatory power for our topic is the curative conver-
sation, especially in the practice of psychoanalysis. For here the inca-
pacity for conversation is almost the starting point from which the
reacquisition of conversation presents itself as the process of healing. The
pathological disturbance, which eventually propels the patient into total
helplessness, consists in delusions that prevent natural communication
with the shared world. The patient is so mired in these delusions that he
can no longer really hear what the other says, and instead just feeds on his
own diseased delusions. But the very fact that his isolation prevents him
from entering into the natural, human community of conversation brings
him in the end to realize he is ill, and this leads him to a doctor. So we
have described a starting point of special significance for our topic. The
extreme is always instructive for the intermediate cases. The peculiarity of
psychoanalytical curative conversation is that it undertakes to heal the
incapacity of conversation, which is the illness itself in this case, in no
other way than through conversation. Yet we cannot simply generalize
from this case. The analyst is not merely a conversation partner, but also
an expert who, against the resistance of the patient, pushes to unlock the
taboo areas of the unconscious. Of course one rightly emphasizes that the
conversation is truly a joint enterprise aiming at understanding, and not
simply the application of knowledge on the part of the doctor. But an-
other condition limits the extent to which one can apply the curative
conversation in psychoanalysis to the conversational life of social prac-
tice: the patient must be aware of his illness. In other words, the inca-
pacity for conversation must admit itself.
In contrast, the real theme of our investigation is an incapacity for
conversation that doesnÕt admit itself. On the contrary, one normally sees
the incapacity not in oneself, but only in the Other. One says, ‘‘thereÕs just
no talking to you.’’ And one has the feeling or even the experience of not
being understood. This leads one to fall silent or even to purse oneÕs lips in
bitterness. In the last analysis ‘‘incapacity for conversation’’ is always a
358 DAVID VESSEY AND CHRIS BLAUWKAMP

diagnosis one makes when one is unable to engage in conversation, that

is, conversation with another. The otherÕs incapacity is always oneÕs own
incapacity.
I would like to consider this incapacity both with respect to the sub-
jective side and with respect to the objective side, that is, on the one hand
the subjective incapacity to listen and on the other the objective nonex-
istence of a common language. The incapacity for listening is such a well-
known phenomenon that one doesnÕt need to provide illustrations to
make it clear. One experiences it sufficiently in oneself when one ignores
(überhört) or mishears (falsch hört). And isnÕt that really one of our basic
human experiences, that we fail to perceive in time what is going on with
the other, that our ear was not fine enough to ‘‘hear’’ the otherÕs silence
and stubbornness? Or also that one mishears? It is incredible what can
happen. Once, thanks to an abuse of official authority in Leipzig
(inconsequential in itself), I was put in jail. Throughout the whole day I
kept hearing, called down the corridor, the names of those who were to be
led off for interrogation. Almost every time a name was called, I thought
at first I had heard my name—was my anxiety so severe? Ignoring and
mishearing occur for the same obvious reason: one who ignores or mis-
hears is one who constantly listens to himself, whose ears are so filled
from the encouragement that he constantly gives to himself and with
which he pursues his drives and interests, that he is unable to hear the
Other. That is, I would insist, to some degree or other a character trait we
all share. Nevertheless to become always capable of conversation—that
is, to listen to the Other—appears to me to be the true attainment of
humanity.
Now there is also the objective reason that language more and more
disintegrates as a shared medium, indeed all the more as we have
accustomed ourselves to the monological situation of our scientific civi-
lization these days, and are at the mercy of the anonymity of information
technology. One might think for instance of the recent form of ultimate
extermination of table talk through the senseless use of a technical
comfort in certain luxury apartments of pitiably rich Americans. There, it
is said, there are dining rooms devised such that that guest at the table has
his own television in front of his plate. One can envision a progress of
technology that goes yet further, where one would wear ‘‘glasses’’ through
which one no longer sees, but watches television, perhaps just as one
sometimes sees someone hiking through the Odenwald while listening to
the latest hit songs on a portable radio. The example illustrates that there
are objective social conditions that can make us forget how to speak, that
is, how to speak to someone and answer someone: it is this that we call a
conversation.
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Again the extreme case illuminates the less extreme case. It should be
noted that communication between humans creates a shared language
just as much as it presupposes one. Alienation shows itself in the fact that
people no longer ‘‘speak the same language’’ (as the saying goes), whereas
rapprochement shows itself in that one finds a common language. ItÕs true
that understanding becomes difficult where there is no common language.
But understanding becomes beautiful where a common language is
sought and in the end discovered. We know the extreme case of the
stammering conversation between people of different mother tongues who
only have broken knowledge of each otherÕs languages, but feel they must
say something to one another. The fact that understanding or even, in the
end, an agreement can be achieved, in practical dealings (or even in
personal or theoretical dealings), may serve as a symbol for the fact that
also where language seems to be missing, understanding can succeed,
through patience, through sensitivity, through sympathy and tolerance,
and through the absolute confidence in reason that all of us share. We
experience constantly that even between persons of differing tempera-
ments or differing political viewpoints conversation is possible. An
‘‘incapacity for conversation’’ looks to me more like an accusation that
one makes against someone who does not want to follow oneÕs own train
of thought, rather than any real deficiency on the part of the other.

Note

* ‘‘Die Unfähigkeit zum Gespräch’’ in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2, Hermeneutik II:

Wahrheit und Methode, Ergänzungen (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1993), 207–15. This
was originally a radio lecture given in 1971, and published in Universitas 26 (1971):
1295–1304. It was reprinted in GadamerÕs Kleine Schriften, vol. 4 (Tübingen: Mohr
Siebeck), 109–17. Special thanks to Peter Adamson for helpful suggestions for
making the translation more conversational.