QUOTE : Being a better dialectician meant not only being skillful at invention or at denouncing tricks in reasoning. Before anything else, it meant knowing how to dialogue, together with all the demands that this entails: recognizing the presence and the rights of one's interlocutor, basing one's replies on what the interlocutor admits he knows, and therefore agreeing with him at each stage of the discussion. Above all, it meant submitting oneself to the demands and norms of reason and the search for truth; finally, it meant recognizing the absolute value of the Good. It therefore meant leaving behind one's individual point of view, in order to rise to a universal viewpoint; and it meant trying to see things within the perspective of the All and the deity, thereby transforming one's vision of the world and one's own inner attitude.