Dialogue and learning

Few words are as susceptible to misunderstanding as ‘dialogue’. In the popular imagination it conjures up pictures of formal meetings in which speakers work towards agreement on some clearly defined topic. In this sense, dialogue may not be the enemy of truth, but the relationship can become problematic; if the object of the exercise is the negotiated settlement of some knotty problem, a degree of compromise and accommodation enters the picture. Thus the term gets associated with the activities of politicians and public officials – and inevitably gives off a whiff of vested interest and undisclosed motives. Small wonder that when the word is applied to the encounter of religions it often attracts a degree of suspicion, as if to enter into dialogue with people of another tradition is to collude with a relativising disregard for religious integrity.

There is, however, another side to the experience of dialogue. When people meet each other as people of faith, the term dialogue comes to connote less the type of reasoning found in Socrates’ insistent questioning of his students than the more mystical encounter of ‘I and Thou’, which is associated with the thought of personalist philosophers like Martin Buber. A Buberian model of dialogue subordinates the issues discussed to the significance of the encounter itself. It is concerned not with the negotiation of outcomes but with a meeting of persons that is almost an end in itself.