Peut-on dialoguer avec un texte ? Interculturalisation de l’herméneutique de Gadamer à Daya Krishna

Can we dialogue with a text? Gadamer’s dialogical hermeneutic drew an analogy between dialoguing and hermeneutic understanding of texts. However, he did not intend to ask how one can dialogue with a text from another culture. Gadamer’s dialogical hermeneutic therefore raises a question regarding its applicability to texts originating from another tradition than the one of the reader or the speaker. While relating his concepts to Daya Krishna’s concept of dialogue, I study how interculturality requires reinterpreting hermeneutical models for a dialogue with texts from different traditions. Daya Krishna offers indeed an alternative way, which did not simply criticize the hegemony of European philosophies but engaged in intercultural dialogues with different philosophical traditions while preserving their conceptual structures. He uses the difficulties of understanding in these contexts to show the effectivity of dialogues in renewing philosophical categories issued from a particular tradition. This implies reworking the hermeneutic concept of understanding and the exegetical attitude, from a logic of commentary to the one of use of concepts. It also reminds us of the question-answer logic retrieved from Gadamer, however by emphasizing the attention on the act of dialoguing itself rather than on the limits of the interlocutors located inside a historico-cultural horizon. In this paper, I therefore suggest to read Gadamer’s contribution with Daya Krishna, thereby accentuating the creativity of misunderstandings and the one of questioning in their fallibility and unpredictability, which are conditions for intercultural dialogues.