The twentieth century Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin wrote extensively on the concept of dialogue.
Bakhtin regards this conception as a consequence of 'theoretism'—the tendency, particularly in modern western thought, to understand events according to a pre-existing set of rules to which they conform or structure that they exhibit.
In one's view of the other there is a surplus of spatio-temporal objectivity necessitated by the very fact of its externality: "In order to understand it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding—in time, in space, in culture... Our real exterior can be seen and understood only by other people because they are located outside us in space and because they are others".
[9] Only the outside perspective, never the person themselves, can see "the clear blue sky against whose background their suffering external image takes on meaning".
[10] If the surplus is actively entered into the other's world, or the view from outside oneself is likewise engaged, the potential for new understanding comes into existence.
In this sense dialogue has more profound implications than concepts such as 'empathy', or the social anthropologist's goal of understanding an alien culture from within, which involve trying to merge with the other's position.
There is no guarantee that an individual's investment of herself in dialogue will necessarily yield 'truth', 'beauty', 'consolation', 'salvation', or anything of that kind (ideal goals often claimed by monologic philosophies or methods).
As Emerson expresses it: "By having a real other respond to me, I am spared one thing only: the worst cumulative effects of my own echo chamber of words.
In the reifying sciences, this codification is mistaken for reality, undermining both creative potential and true insight into past activity.
The uniqueness of an event, that which cannot be reduced to a generalization or abstraction, is in fact what makes responsibility, in any meaningful sense, possible: "activity and discourse are always evaluatively charged and context specific.
"[14] In theoretical transcriptions of events, which are based in a model of "monads acting according to rules", the living impulse that actually gives rise to discourse is ignored.
"[17] In the existing forms of 'knowledge', the open-ended dialogue of life is monologized—turned into a summary statement of its contents, but failing to recognize its unfinalizable nature.
It possesses extraordinary independence in the structure of the work; it sounds, as it were, alongside the author's word and combines both with it and with the full and equally valid voices of other characters.