Avant-propos - Studia Moralia

DIALOGICAL PERSONALISM REVISITED 221
that the word “occurs” between the first and second persons. In
being spoken, language presupposes that the relation of the I to
the Thou is a personal one. Precisely because man “has the
word,” the very potentiality of “speaking” brings with it the possibility
of “being addressed” as a person, as the Thou, “the ‘addressability’
in the other, and this belongs just as much to the
essence of personality as the potentiality to express ‘self,’ in
which the ‘I’ emerges.” 39
Bringing thought to speech, in words, liberates the I, for the
strong desire and longing to be known and to express oneself to
the other demonstrates that one’s spiritual life is always oriented
to the spiritual in the other person. The vehicle of this spiritual
relation is the word. Even one’s own solitary thinking is in
the word: “Even if I were closed within myself before others and
I were to occupy myself only with the clarification of my
thoughts, I would desire that relationship – whose vehicle is the
word – because I need it for this clarification.” 40
In the relationship between thought and word, Ebner does
not believe that there are thoughts which cannot be expressed.
Bringing one’s interior life into word regulates thought, especially
the content, for in coming into word, thoughts are discovered
and understood, in an immediate sense, as an expression of
one’s interior life, as an immediate sense of being, consciousness
and existence.
Allowing thoughts to come into speech brings them out of
the private realm and into the public realm – consciously before
God. Word adds a “communicative tension” to the concept of
mere thought, a tension that is the urge or desire to communicate,
so the word brings thought up to the brink of dialogue and
allows the thought to take root in the person’s being.
Word mediates reason but it also founds our origin and
communal existence in relation. Yet, thought which is not
grounded in authentic relation may remain at the level of monologue.
Not to experience a communicative tension to move beyond
monologue of thought and into speech means to ignore the
39 GREEN, 14; WR, Schriften 1:87.
40 EBNER, La parola è la via, 123.