Ever since reading Habermas on ideal speech situations — and rereading Gadamer on the mutuality implicit in the practices of Socratic dialogue — I’ve been asking myself about the case when people who love one another have some dispute. Habermas notes that the more substantial forms of communication he is interested in are fundamentally directed toward conflict resolution of some kind.
Nussbaum points out that love for Aristotle signifies “mutual affection, mutual well-wishing, mutual benefiting for the other’s own sake, and mutual awareness of all this” (The Therapy of Desire, p. 90). This fourfold mutuality seems like it meets Habermas’s criteria for an ideal speech situation, as well as Gadamer’s criteria for dialogue and Hegel’s criteria for mutual recognition. (At one point early in Hegel’s career, love explicitly played the ethical role that mutual recognition came to play later on.) This is of course a question about an ideal, not something presumed to be true always.
My initial idea was to say that dialogue between loved ones should ideally always represent what is called a “safe space”. But I came to realize that the safety I was looking for was not at all the same as what people commonly seem to mean when speaking of a safe space.
I’m looking for a safety grounded in the mutuality of dialogue, where it is safe to say things that otherwise might be risky — safe because there is mutual trust and a presumption of mutual good will. On the other hand, the popular meaning of safe space seems to be a context in which someone will get only affirmative feedback. This seems to leave no room for the possibility of a loving challenge of one we love on some matter of detail.
I’m looking instead for a kind of safety to raise doubts with someone we love. The idea is that where there is love between two people, it should always be possible for one to raise a doubt about something said or done or proposed, without it being interpreted as a personal attack on the other.
The Postmodern Peripatetic 