"Mutual understanding happens by the fact that talk stands up against talk, but does not remain static. Instead, in talking to each other we pass over into the imaginative world of the other, we as it were open ourselves up to them, and they do so to us. So we play into each other until the game of giving and taking, the conversation proper, begins. No one can deny that in such real conversation there is something of chance, the favor of surprise, finally also of lightness, yes, even of elevation, which pertains to the nature of game-play. And truly the elevation of conversation is experienced not as a loss of self-possession, but, even without ourselves actually attending to it, as an enrichment of ourselves."
Hans-Georg Gadamer: Philosophical Hermeneutics (translated by David E. Linge) (via fuckyeahphilosophy)
