On Dialogue (Routledge Classics) (Volume 76)

by David Bohm

“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.

the pace of life can be speeded up indefinitely – as one teenager put it, “people running faster and faster to get to where no one wants to go.”

Herein lies the first gateway to generating dialogue and moving toward a more coherent tacit ground. To take part in truth we must see our part in it. 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.

Throughout his career as a theoretical physicist, Bohm made note of the fact that, in spite of claims to pursue “truth,” scientific endeavor was often infected with personal ambition, a rigid defense of theory, and the weight of tradition – all at the expense of creative participation toward the common goals of science. Based in part on such observations, he frequently remarked that the general lot of mankind was caught in a similar web of contradictory intentions and actions.

A new kind of mind thus begins to come into being which is based on the development of a common meaning that is constantly transforming in the process of the dialogue.

People are no longer primarily in opposition, nor can they be said to be interacting, rather they are participating in this pool of common meaning which is capable of constant development and change.

We find here a pivotal definition: dialogue is aimed at the understanding of consciousness per se, as well as exploring the problematic nature of day-to-day relationship and communication.

Bohm here outlines a listening of a different order, a listening in which the very mis-perception of one’s spoken intent can lead to new meaning that is created on the spot. Grasping this point is essential for an understanding of what Bohm eventually referred to as the “flow of meaning” in dialogue.

Because of widespread dissatisfaction with the state of affairs described above, there has been a growing feeling of concern to solve what is now commonly called “the problem of communication.” But if one observes efforts to solve this problem, he will notice that different groups who are trying to do this are not actually able to listen to each other. As a result, the very attempt to improve communication leads frequently to yet more confusion, and the consequent sense of frustration inclines people ever further toward aggression and violence, rather than toward mutual understanding and trust.

Thus, in a dialogue, each person does not attempt to make common certain ideas or items of information that are already known to him. Rather, it may be said that the two people are making something in common, i.e., creating something new together. But of course such communication can lead to the creation of something new only if people are able freely to listen to each other, without prejudice, and without trying to influence each other.

It is clear that if we are to live in harmony with ourselves and with nature, we need to be able to communicate freely in a creative movement in which no one permanently holds to or otherwise defends his own ideas.

“Dialogue” comes from the Greek word dialogos. Logos means “the word,” or in our case we would think of the “meaning of the word.” And dia means “through” – it doesn’t mean “two.” A dialogue can be among any number of people, not just two. Even one person can have a sense of dialogue within himself, if the spirit of the dialogue is present. The picture or image that this derivation suggests is of a stream of meaning flowing among and through us and between us. This will make possible a flow of meaning in the whole group, out of which may emerge some new understanding. It’s something new, which may not have been in the starting point at all. It’s something creative. And this shared meaning is the “glue” or “cement” that holds people and societies together.

Discussion is almost like a ping-pong game, where people are batting the ideas back and forth and the object of the game is to win or to get points for yourself.

In a dialogue, however, nobody is trying to win. Everybody wins if anybody wins. There is a different sort of spirit to it. In a dialogue, there is no attempt to gain points, or to make your particular view prevail. Rather, whenever any mistake is discovered on the part of anybody, everybody gains. It’s a situation called win-win, whereas the other game is win-lose – if I win, you lose. But a dialogue is something more of a common participation, in which we are not playing a game against each other, but with each other. In a dialogue, everybody wins.

we have got to look at thought, because the problem is originating in thought. Usually when you have a problem, you say, “I must think about it to solve it.” But what I’m trying to say is that thought is the problem.

Now, you could say that our ordinary thought in society is incoherent – it is going in all sorts of directions, with thoughts conflicting and canceling each other out. But if people were to think together in a coherent way, it would have tremendous power. That’s the suggestion. If we have a dialogue situation – a group which has sustained dialogue for quite a while in which people get to know each other, and so on – then we might have such a coherent movement of thought, a coherent movement of communication. It would be coherent not only at the level we recognize, but at the tacit level, at the level for which we have only a vague feeling. That would be more important. “Tacit” means that which is unspoken, which cannot be described – like the knowledge required to ride a bicycle. It is the actual knowledge, and it may be coherent or not. I am proposing that thought is actually a subtle tacit process. The concrete process of thinking is very tacit. The meaning is basically tacit. And what we can say explicitly is only a very small part of it. I think we all realize that we do almost everything by this sort of tacit knowledge. Thought is emerging from the tacit ground, and any fundamental change in thought will come from the tacit ground. So if we are communicating at the tacit level, then maybe thought is changing.

The group is not mainly for the sake of personal problems; it’s mainly a cultural question. But the personal could come into the group, because personal problems and culture get mixed up.

In the dialogue group we are not going to decide what to do about anything. This is crucial. Otherwise we are not free.

You could say that generally our culture goes in for large groups of people for two reasons. One is for entertainment and fun. The other is to get a useful job done. Now, I’m going to propose that in a dialogue we are not going to have any agenda, we are not going to try to accomplish any useful thing. As soon as we try to accomplish a useful purpose or goal, we will have an assumption behind it as to what is useful, and that assumption is going to limit us. Different people will think different things are useful. And that’s going to cause trouble.

People will come to a group with different interests and assumptions. In the beginning they may have negotiation, which is a very preliminary stage of dialogue. In other words, if people have different approaches, they have to negotiate somehow. However, that is not the end of dialogue; it is the beginning. Negotiation involves finding a common way of proceeding. Now, if you only negotiate, you don’t get very far – although some questions do have to be negotiated.

Now, dialogue is not going to be always entertaining, nor is it doing anything visibly useful. So you may tend to drop it as soon as it gets difficult. But I suggest that it is very important to go on with it – to stay with it through the frustration. When you think something is important you will do that.

What’s required then is that we notice the connection between the thoughts going on in the dialogue, the feelings in the body, and the emotions. If you watch, you’ll see from the body language, as well as from the verbal language, that everybody’s in much the same boat – they’re just on opposite sides. The group may even polarize so that two very powerful groups are against each other. But one of the things we’re aiming for is that this should come out. We’re not trying to suppress it.

We are not trying to change anything, but just being aware of it. And you can notice the similarity of the difficulties within a group to the conflicts and incoherent thoughts within an individual.

What about these notions of necessity which we have to set up or discover? If an artist just puts on his paint in arbitrary places, you would say there wasn’t anything to it; if he just follows somebody else’s order of necessity, he’s mediocre. He’s got to create his own order of necessity. Different parts of the form he is making must have an inner necessity or else the thing has not really much of a value. This artistic necessity is creative. The artist has his freedom in this creative act. Therefore, freedom makes possible a creative perception of new orders of necessity. If you can’t do that, you’re not really free. You may say you’re doing whatever you like and that’s your impulse, but I think we’ve seen that your impulses can come from your thoughts.

I am saying society is based on shared meanings, which constitute the culture. If we don’t share coherent meaning, we do not make much of a society. And at present, the society at large has a very incoherent set of meanings. In fact, this set of “shared meanings” is so incoherent that it is hard to say that they have any real meaning at all. There is a certain amount of significance, but it is very limited. The culture in general is incoherent. And we will thus bring with us into the group – or microcosm or microculture – a corresponding incoherence.

Dialogue may not be concerned directly with truth – it may arrive at truth, but it is concerned with meaning. If the meaning is incoherent you will never arrive at truth. You may think, “My meaning is coherent and somebody else’s isn’t,” but then we’ll never have meaning shared. You will have the “truth” for yourself or for your own group, whatever consolation that is. But we will continue to have conflict.

What blocks sensitivity is the defense of your assumptions and opinions. But if you are defending your opinions, you don’t judge yourself and say, “I shouldn’t be defending.” Rather, the fact is that you are defending, and you then need to be sensitive to that – to all the feelings in that, all the subtle nuances.

you have to think/feel out all your mental processes and work them through, and then that will open the way to something else. And I think that is what can happen in the dialogue group. Certain painful things can happen for some people; you have to work it all out.

Sometimes people feel a sense of dialogue within their families. But a family is generally a hierarchy, organized on the principle of authority which is contrary to dialogue. The family is a very authoritative structure, based on obligation, and that sort of thing. It has its value, but it is a structure within which it might be difficult to get dialogue going.

that sort of dialogue will be limited – the people involved do have a definite purpose, which is limiting – but even so, it has considerable value. The principle is at least to get people to come to know each other’s assumptions, so they can listen to their assumptions and know what they are. Very often people get into problems where they don’t really know what the other person’s assumption is, and they react according to what they think it is. That person then gets very puzzled and wonders: what is he doing? He reacts, and it all gets very muddled. So it is valuable if they can at least get to realize each other’s assumptions.

the important point is not the answer – just as in a dialogue, the important point is not the particular opinions – but rather the softening up, the opening up of the mind, and looking at all the opinions.

In the case of Einstein and Bohr it didn’t lead to violence that they did not; but in general, if somebody doesn’t listen to your basic assumptions you feel it as an act of violence, and then you are inclined to be violent yourself. Therefore, this is crucial both individually and collectively. Dialogue is the collective way of opening up judgments and assumptions.

Love will go away if we can’t communicate and share meaning. The love between Einstein and Bohr gradually evaporated because they could not communicate. However, if we can really communicate, then we will have fellowship, participation, friendship, and love, growing and growing. That would be the way. The question is really: do you see the necessity of this process? That’s the key question. If you see that it is absolutely necessary, then you have to do something.

Such an energy has been called “communion.” It is a kind of participation. The early Christians had a Greek word, koinonia, the root of which means “to participate” – the idea of partaking of the whole and taking part in it; not merely the whole group, but the whole.

The real crisis is not in these events which are confronting us, like wars and crime and drugs and economic chaos and pollution; it’s really in the thought which is making it – all the time. Each person can do something about that thought, because he’s in it. But one of the troubles we get into is to say, “It’s they who are thinking all that, and I am thinking right.” I say that’s a mistake. I say thought pervades us. It’s similar to a virus – somehow this is a disease of thought, of knowledge, of information, spreading all over the world. The more computers, radio, and television we have, the faster it spreads. So the kind of thought that’s going on all around us begins to take over in every one of us, without our even noticing it. It’s spreading like a virus and each one of us is nourishing that virus.

Another example would be a rainbow – everybody sees the same rainbow. There’s a collective representation of the rainbow – we all have a consensus about it. But physics, which looks at things “literally,” says, “No, there is no rainbow. There are a lot of droplets of water, the sun is in back of you and it’s being reflected and refracted off the water and forming colors. In seeing this, each person is forming his own perception of a rainbow. It happens they all look very similar, therefore they all think they’re all looking at the same rainbow.” (You could also argue that by adopting that view you are taking physics as the real thing.) The point, though, is that a lot of our collective representations – a country, a religion, General Motors, the ego – are of the same quality as the rainbow. A great many things which we take as solid reality are very similar to the rainbow. In fact, it’s not wrong to do that. The difficulty arises because we do not realize that this is happening, and we therefore give the representation the value of independent fact. If we could see it happening, it would produce no problem at all. We would then be able to value the “fact” for whatever it is. But in our current approach, we are able to take “facts” which have very little value, and value them very highly.

The root of “problem” is a Greek word whose meaning is “to put forward.” Indeed, this is the essential significance of the word: i.e., to put forward for discussion or questioning an idea that is suggested toward the resolution of certain difficulties or inadequacies.

However, when one puts forth an idea in the form of a problem, there are certain largely tacit and implicit presuppositions which must be satisfied if the activity is to make sense. Among these is of course the assumption that the questions raised are rational and free of contradiction. Sometimes, without our noticing it, we accept absurd problems with false or selfcontradictory presuppositions. In the practical and technical realm, however, we can usually sooner or later detect that our question is absurd, and we then drop the “problem” as meaningless.

consider the prevailing tendency toward nationalism. People in each nation apparently understand the need for common human feeling and truthfulness in communications. Yet, when the nation is in danger, so strong is the reaction of fear and aggression that everyone is immediately ready to cease to treat the enemy as human (e.g., each side is ready to use bombs, killing children on the other side, when individually they would be horrified at the notion of child murder). And at home, they accept a censorship, which implies that they agree to take what is false as true, because they believe such self-deception to be necessary for the survival of the nation. Nationalism is thus seen to be rooted in a tremendous paradox. It therefore makes no sense to treat nationalism as a problem. The absurdity of such a procedure becomes evident if one puts forth the question of how one can be ready to annihilate children of another nationality and yet love children of one’s own nationality. Such a question has no answer, and indeed the attempt to find an answer can only lead to further confusion. What is needed is that people be ready to give serious and sustained attention to a paradoxical pattern that has come to dominate their thinking and feeling.

For ages, men have generally realized that thinking and feeling are commonly infected with greed, violence, self-deception, fear, aggressiveness, and other forms of reaction that lead to corruption and confusion. For the most part, however, all of this has been regarded as a problem, and thus men have sought to overcome or control the disorder in their own nature in countless ways.

Thought lacks proprioception, and we have got to learn, somehow, to observe thought. In the case of observing the body, you can tell that observation is somehow taking place – even when there is no sense of a distinct observer. Is it possible for thought similarly to observe itself, to see what it is doing, perhaps by awakening some other sense of what thought is, possibly through attention? In that way, thought may become proprioceptive. It will know what it is doing and it will not create a mess.

The concrete process of thinking is very tacit. At the actual level where thinking emerges in the tacit process, it is a movement. In principle, that movement could be self-aware. I suggest that there is a possibility for self-awareness of thought – that the concrete, real process of the movement of thought could be self-aware, without bringing in a “self” who is aware of it.

“Proprioception” is a technical term – you could also say “self-perception of thought,” “self-awareness of thought,” or “thought is aware of itself in action.” Whatever terms we use, I am saying: thought should be able to perceive its own movement, be aware of its own movement.