ABSTRACT
Concern for dialogue as the establishment of genuine communication between I and Thou is a distinctively twentieth-century phenomenon. The centrality of dialogue in human life and in philosophy that have come to recognize, is, at least in part, a consequence of World War I. “There is a diagnostician for the sickness of our age; it is Karl Kraus,” wrote Ebner, “but there is also a physician for it: Soren Kierkegaard.” Ebner developed our century’s first “philosophy of dialogue”—a term he would not like for reasons that shall soon become clear—as a response to Kraus’s critique of language. The most serious problem in all of this is that Ebner’s own account of the substance of dialogue is all-too fideistic. Offenbach’s greatness rests upon his exploitation of refined wit as the supremely humane technique for relativizing, what fantasizing has made absolute in a transvaluation of values that is the indispensable prelude to dialogue.
