Avant-propos - Studia Moralia

208 JOSEPH CHAPEL
examined the complex of problems surrounding the imprecise
use of language (opening the way to critical theory, structuralism
and semiotics). In the attempt to step back from experience
in order to understand it, the phenomenology of Edmund
Husserl and others is an influence and a bridge to the existentialist
philosophies that were to come. Meanwhile, such varied
thinkers as Wilhelm Dilthey, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg
Gadamer, Gabriel Marcel and Paul Ricoeur take up diverse
hermeneutical issues of interpretation and their relationship to
human historicity.
These diverse contemporary philosophies offer a backdrop
against which to situate the work of the “dialogical philosophers,”
who viewed dialogue in authentic relationship as constitutive
of the human person.
The Dialogical Philosophers
While earlier thinkers such as Blaise Pascal, Ludwig Feuerbach,
Søren Kierkegaard and Max Scheler had all struggled with
the turn to the subject and its implications for the reality of the
“I” and the “other,” and their place in the universe, dialogical
personalist philosophy as such only began to take shape in the
wake of World War I. At issue was a loss of confidence in the sufficiency
of reason and the possibilities of human and social
progress, a confidence which had begun with the Enlightenment
and endured as Idealism into the twentieth century.
The drastic experience of the war put an end to the optimism
of Idealism and was, perhaps, the spark for a general renewal
of faith life which accompanied a new attitude of realism,
in which God is not a mere “idea,” nor man a mere “moment”
within that idea. Rather, God and man are two realities, infinitely
different and unequal, but nonetheless, in essential relation
one with the other. The “I” of each man is fully constituted only
by entering into personal relation with the “thou” of others, and
above all, with the Thou of God; true “reality” is to be found in
this dialogical environment.
The most prominent dialogical philosophers – Franz Rosenzweig,
Martin Buber and Ferdinand Ebner – share a remarkable
similarity of thought due not to the limited contact they had