On Dialogue (Routledge Classics) (Volume 76)

by David Bohm

“Shared meaning is really the cement that holds society together, and you could say that the present society has very poor quality cement

In his talk, Bohm often returns to the challenge in dialogue of simply allowing multiple points of view to be. Our habits are so strong to defend our view, to agree with views that correspond with our own, and to disagree with those that differ, that simply allowing diverse views to stand can be almost impossibly difficult. “The thing that mostly gets in the way of dialogue,” he says, “is holding to assumptions and opinions, and defending them.” This instinct to judge and defend, embedded in the selfdefense mechanisms of our biological heritage, is the source of incoherence.

Our personal meaning starts to become incoherent when it becomes fixed. The incoherence increases when past meaning is imposed on present situations. As this continues, yesterday’s meaning becomes today’s dogma, often losing much of its original meaningfulness in the process.

As Chilean biologist Humberto Maturana says, “when one human being tells another human what is ‘real,’ what they are actually doing is making a demand for obedience. They are asserting that they have a privileged view of reality.”

Reductionist science has great power in understanding isolated things, and in applying this knowledge to create new things like new technologies. But its efficacy hinges on its being able to fragment or isolate its subject matter. It fails and may become actively dysfunctional when confronted by wholes, by the need to understand and take effective action in a highly interdependent context. This is why the modern world is full of increasingly stunning technological advances and an increasing inability to live together.

There is no way by which thought can hold the whole, because thought only abstracts; it limits and defines.” This idea of abstracting versus appreciating wholes was conveyed beautifully by Hebrew existentialist philosopher Martin Buber, in speaking of what it means to take in the whole of a person, to see a person as “a Thou:”3 If I face a human being as my Thou, … he is not a thing among things, and does not consist of things … Thus human being is not a He or She, bounded from every other He or She, … but with no neighbor, and whole in himself, he is Thou and fills the heavens. Just as the melody is not made up of notes nor the verse of words nor the statue of lines, but these must be tugged and dragged till their unity has been scattered into these many pieces, so with the man (mensch) to whom I say Thou. I can take out from him the color of his hair, or of his speech, or of his goodness. I must continually do this. But each time he ceases to be Thou.

participation rather than abstraction.

participatory consciousness.”

“each person is participating, is partaking of the whole meaning of the group and...

There are no “good guys” and “bad guys” separate from ourselves. As members of modern society, we all participate in creating the forces that give rise to what exists, both what we value and what we abhor. The

interdependence, people who cannot do this are headed inevitably toward escalating conflict.

his life had been dedicated to understanding a participatory universe where meaning is continually unfolding.

we are not likely to muddle through without radical changes in our way of being – together.

dialogical world view.

It is a process which explores an unusually wide range of human experience: our closely held values; the nature and intensity of emotions; the patterns of our thought processes; the function of memory; the import of inherited cultural myths; and the manner in which our neurophysiology structures moment-to-moment experience. Perhaps most importantly, dialogue explores the manner in which thought – viewed by Bohm as an inherently limited medium, rather than an objective representation of reality – is generated and sustained at the collective level.

The parts have an integral relationship to one another, resulting in a functional whole. The fragments, on the other hand, have no essential relationship.

that if such a group continues to meet regularly, social conventions begin to wear thin, and the content of sub-cultural differences begins to assert itself, regardless of the topic du jour. This emergent friction between contrasting values is at the heart of dialogue, in that it allows the participants to notice the assumptions that are active in the group, including one’s own personal assumptions. Recognizing the power of these assumptions and attending to their “viruslike” nature may lead to a new understanding of the fragmentary and self-destructive nature of many of our thought processes.

In the dialogue, a very considerable degree of attention is required to keep track of the subtle implications of one’s own assumptive/reactive tendencies, while also sensing similar patterns in the group as a whole. Bohm emphasized that such attention, or awareness, is not a matter of accumulated knowledge or technique, nor does it have the goal of “correcting” what may emerge in the dialogue. Rather, it is more of the nature of relaxed, nonjudgmental curiosity, its primary activity being to see things as freshly and clearly as possible. The nurturing of such attention, often bypassed in more utilitarian versions of dialogue, is a central element in Bohm’s approach to the process.

problems of thought are fundamentally collective, rather than individual;

the paradox of “the observer and the observed,” which implies that traditional methods of introspection and self-improvement are inadequate for comprehending the true nature of the mind.

In the beginning, people were expressing fixed positions, which they were tending to defend, but later it became clear that to maintain the feeling of friendship in the group was much more important than to maintain any position. Such friendship has an impersonal quality in the sense that its establishment does not depend on close personal relationship between participants.

going further along these lines would open up the possibility of transforming not only the relationship between people, but even more, the very nature of consciousness in which these relationships arise.

the key components of dialogue: shared meaning; the nature of collective thought; the pervasiveness of fragmentation; the function of awareness; the microcultural context; undirected inquiry; impersonal fellowship; and the paradox of the observer and the observed.

As Bohm himself emphasized, however, dialogue is a process of direct, face-to-face encounter, not to be confused with endless theorizing and speculation.

In a time of accelerating abstractions and seamless digital representations, it is this insistence on facing the inconvenient messiness of daily, corporeal experience that is perhaps most radical of all.

what he calls the “vision of dialogue” – the prospect that our tendency to fall prey to mindless group activity can be transformed to intelligent collective fellowship, if only we will face the actual nature of the problems that exist between us.

It is this pool of knowledge, says Bohm, that gives rise to much of our perception of the world, the meanings we assign to events, and indeed our very sense of individuality.

What is called for, says Bohm, is to begin to attend to the movement of thought in a new way, to look in places we have previously ignored.

perceptual input is fused with memory to produce representations that guide us in our moment-to-moment experience.

the essential difficulty here is that we automatically assume that our representations are true pictures of reality, rather than relative guides for action that are based on reflexive, unexamined memories.

Once we have assumed that the representations are fundamentally true, they “present” themselves as reality, and we have no option but to act accordingly.

that we carefully attend to the fact that any given representation – instinctively perceived as “reality” – may be somewhat less than real, or true. From such a perspective we may be able to engage a quality of reflective intelligence – a kind of discernment that enables us to perceive and dispense with fundamentally false representations, and become more exacting in the formation of new ones.

the greatest challenge, says Bohm, is to attend to those representations which are tacitly formed and upheld at the collective level.

in the realm of relationship, whether inwardly or externally, the posing of a “problem” to be solved creates a fundamentally contradictory structure.

Unlike practical problems, where the “thing” to be solved has independence from us (e.g., improving the design of ocean-going vessels), psychological difficulties have no such independence.

I then seem to consist of at least two parts: an urge to believe the flattery, and an urge not to believe the flattery. I am thus proceeding on the basis of a contradiction, which will result in a cycle of confused attempts to “solve” a “problem” whose nature is quite unlike that of a technical problem.

Bohm suggests that what is occurring is in fact a paradox, not a problem.

a paradox has no discernible solution, a new approach is required, namely, sustained attention to the paradox itself, rather than a determi...

the confusion between problem and paradox operates at all levels of society, from the...

Bohm addresses the phenomenon of a “central entity,” a “self,” which observes and acts upon itself.

the observed – “anger.”

Our observed in ourselves is a part of our whole; and must be treated systematically

this observer is primarily a movement of assumptions and experiences – including anger – but is attributed the status of “entity” through habit, lack of attention, and cultural consensus.

inner ...

This sense IS the limitation. The safe sense of observer to observed toward a fragmentation (a “part” crosscut into an observable element) is a fragmentation

does not allow sustained consideration of the nature of the observer itself.

limitation on the mind’s scope of activity

“Suspension, the Body, and Proprioception”

on one’s own and in the context of a dialogue, it is possible to “suspend” assumptions.

if you feel that someone is an idiot, to suspend you would (a) refrain from saying so outwardly and (b) refrain from telling yourself you should not think such things.

the effects of the thought, “You are an idiot” (agitation, anger, resentment) are free to run their course, but in a way that allows them to simply b...

suspending an assumption or reaction means neither repressing it nor following through on it,...