On Dialogue Paperback – 2 July 2013
by David Bohm (Author)
4.6 out of 5 stars 20 ratings
Part of: Routledge Great Minds (10 books)
Edition: 1st
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David Bohm is considered one of the best physicists of all time. He also had a deep interest in human communication and creativity. Influential in both management and communication theory in what is known 'Bohm Dialogue', On Dialogue is both inspiring and pioneering. Bohm considers the origin and very meaning of dialogue, reflecting on what gets in the way of "true dialogue". He argues that dialogue, as a radical form of exploration that allows different views to be presented, leads us beyond the impasse of conflict and argument to the forming of new views.
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On Dialogue
David Bohm
4.09
974 ratings101 reviews
Never before has there been a greater need for deeper listening and more open communication to cope with the complex problems facing our organizations, businesses and societies. Renowned scientist David Bohm believed there was a better way for humanity to discover meaning and to achieve harmony. He identified creative dialogue, a sharing of assumptions and understanding, as a means by which the individual, and society as a whole, can learn more about themselves and others, and achieve a renewed sense of purpose.
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Philosophy
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Psychology
Science
Communication
Education
Leadership
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144 pages, Paperback
First published October 31, 1996
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David Bohm
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David Joseph Bohm (December 20, 1917 – October 27, 1992) was an American scientist who has been described as one of the most significant theoretical physicists of the 20th century and who contributed innovative and unorthodox ideas to quantum theory, neuropsychology and the philosophy of mind.
Sunny
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February 5, 2017
Mind, blown. This was game changing and paradigm shifting. I love books that make me look at something that I thought I had fully understood from a completely different angle. It’s like taking a knockout punch from an angle you just didn’t expect to get hit from to using a boxing analogy. It’s about having dialogues as supposed to discussing things. Interestingly Bohm talked about the link between the word percussion, concussion and discussion – all hitting type activities. A discussion then becoming something that you hit from different angles where as a dialogue being almost a scarf that you put your thoughts on and then wrap between yourself and the other person you are talking to; you don’t pull or tear or hit this scarf. You wear it and take time to digest the warmth of the others' words. You may not agree with them but you stay in the moment and put analysis and point making to one side and take time to really absorb the message the other person is trying to say. It reminded me of Fernando Flores’ quote about the art of listening being about nurturing and growing a figurative flower that grows between you and the other; at the end of each conversation have you listened to the extent that the flower has grown or shrunk? How has the other person who is supposedly listening to you helped this little rose between you grown or shrunk?
Bohm was a physicist that worked with Einstein and come up with lots of other theories related to crazy physics stuff that is way beyond my limited ken but this really hit the mark – yes this could go a long way ... from solving the Palestinian peace process challenge to solving the challenges you may have with your partner.
Here are some of the best bits from the book:
• Bohm talked about communication being like a couple out in the middle of nowhere, lost but each with the same map (language) but on different parts of the terrain (context). They are talking but from different points of view and trying to locate one another in the process.
• “Everything requires attention, really. If we ran machines without paying attention to them, they would break down. Our thought, too, is a process, and it requires attention, otherwise it's going to go wrong.”
• “During the past few decades, modern technology, with radio, TV, air travel, and satellites, has woven a network of communication which puts each part of the world in to almost instant contact with all the other parts. Yet, in spite of this world-wide system of linkages, there is, at this very moment, a general feeling that communication is breaking down everywhere, on an unparalleled scale”
• “The hunter-gatherers have typically lived in groups of twenty to forty. Agricultural group units are much larger. Now, from time to time that tribe met like this in a circle. They just talked and talked and talked, apparently to no purpose. They made no decisions. There was no leader. And everybody could participate. There may have been wise men or wise women who were listened to a bit more–the older ones–but everybody could talk. The meeting went on, until it finally seemed to stop for no reason at all and the group dispersed. Yet after that, everybody seemed to know what to do, because they understood each other so well. Then they could get together in smaller groups and do something or decide things.”
• “‘Is it absolutely necessary? So much is being destroyed just because we have this notion of it being absolutely necessary.’ Now if you can question it and say, ‘Is it absolutely necessary?’ then at some point it may loosen up. People may say, ‘Well, maybe it’s not absolutely necessary.’ Then the whole thing becomes easier, and it becomes possible to let that conflict go and to explore new notions of what is necessary, creatively. The dialogue can then enter a creative new area.””
• PROPRIOCEPTION - “We come back to the realization that the thing which has gone wrong with thought is basically, as I said before, that it does things and then says or implies that it didn’t do them—that they took place independently, and that they constitute “problems.” Whereas what you really have to do is stop thinking that way so that you can stop creating that problem. The problem is insoluble as long as you keep on producing it all the time by your thought. Thought has to be in some sense aware of its consequences, and presently thought is not sufficiently aware of its consequences. In neurophysiology it is called proprioception, about the body.”
• “The object of a dialogue is not to analyse things, or to win an argument, or to exchange opinions. Rather, it is to spend your onions and to look at the opinions. TO LISTEN TO EVERYBODY'S OPINIONS, TO SUSPEND THEM, AND TO SEE WHAT ALL THAT MEANS. If we can see what all of our opinions mean, then we are sharing a common content, even if we don't agree entirely. If we can see them all, we may then move more creatively in different direction …. If each of us in this room is suspending then we are all doing the same thing. We are looking at everything together. the content of our consciousness is essentially the same"
• "If you know a person very well, you may pass him on the street and say, "I saw him." If you are asked what the person was wearing, however, you may not know, because you didn't really look. You were not sensitive to all that, because you saw that person through the screen of thought. And that was not sensitivity.”
• “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 thoughts that’s going on all around begins to take over in every one of us without our even noticing it its spreading like a virus and each one of us is nourishing that virus.”
• “You say I am going to look at myself inwardly but the assumptions are not looked at”
• “If somebody says something to you causing you to react 2 / 3 seconds later a needle jerks - it takes that time for the impulse to work to work its way down from the brain through the nervous system … now the person said something to you 2 /3 seconds ago but you don’t see the connection. You don’t connect it and you say “there is a deep gut feeling which is a sign that I’m justified in being angry” you use the feeling to justify the anger and you say “here is an independent gut feeling which shows that I’m perceiving something. it shows that my anger is right.” Which is a clear indicator of wrongunism.
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John David
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April 14, 2014
David Bohm, the author of “On Dialogue,” was apparently recognized as one of the greatest theoretical physicists of the twentieth century. Despite my background in physics, I’d never heard of his contributions to the field, and I’d certainly never heard of his contributions to other fields, including … well, whatever you could call this book. Is it philosophy? Communications? I know it’s not an attempt at literary theory, but some of it seems to resemble it. It fancies itself a visionary way of reimagining and reawakening the power of human communication, but much of it sounds like New Age occultism – spooky and obscurantist, weird and much of it frankly unfounded.
Bohm thinks that following his recommendations will result in a kind of enhanced, unbiased conversation (which he insists on calling “dialogue”) between people that will help foster a common sense of humanity, and that our dialogue with one another has been irrevocably tainted by personal ambition and unexamined prejudices. Because we have these presuppositions, we can only engage in “conversations” (which is somehow very different from dialogue, which is the idealized type of human interaction). How conversation is different from dialogue is never really discussed. The way we can reestablish this most meaningful type of human connection is by letting go of these ambitions and prejudices.
He says that dialogue should ideally begin with no set purpose, no leader, and no hidden assumptions or opinions which will only serve to make you defensive during the course of the dialogue. Now, gentle reader, there is a difference between suspending opinions which might be culturally or religiously biased, which is something I would completely understand doing to open a dialogue fully up, and what Bohm is asking us to do in this book. He seems to want us to sit and listen to absolutely anyone say anything they sincerely believe. But the problem with sincerity is this: it and four dollars will buy you a cup of coffee at Starbucks.
Considering that Bohm is a scientist and is ostensibly on the hunt for something resembling truth about the physical world, this is somewhat disheartening to read. Do I need to suspend my judgments about the absurdity of Holocaust denial when I speak to someone who actually denies historical reality? Or fail to adduce the evidence that the Earth is roughly spherical to a flat Earther while engaged in a conversation with one? For someone who thinks that the scientific endeavor is something other than an utterly futile one, how can someone genuinely think these things? To request that we listen to varying opinions, measure their respective amounts of evidence, and adopt the one that has the most explanatory power all the while maintaining a cool head about those who have very different ideas from our own is a very good idea. Actually engaging people with ridiculous, patently false ideas is another. Not only is it silly, but it’s dangerous. There are some people who should be disabused of their false ideas. In fact, if that’s not the main point of dialogue, it should be one of its major reasons for existing. To say that dialogue shouldn’t be used for the purpose of convincing people of things we know to be true is detrimental to the idea of any kind of human interaction, especially if you believe that some things are true and some things aren’t.
This is mostly a collection of ad hoc work, with only a couple of pieces having been previously published elsewhere. Most of what I spoke about above is found in the first piece, “On Dialogue.” The subsequent pieces serve to expound upon the first in minor, tangential ways, and none of them seemed as egregious as what was set forward in the first piece. If this is the kind of uncritical work that Bohm is known for, I think I can safely bypass his other stuff and regard him for what he is: a physicist who should stick to doing what he knows best.
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Jake
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November 28, 2019
By some strike of fortune I happen to have skimmed part of another one of Bohm’s books and as such I am slightly introduced to his manner of thought - which lets me know I dont know what I am reading. While I have a temptation to speak, I will wait until I have read a bit more of his writings to throughly analyze his thinking. What I can say for now is that his writings appear to convey a deeper underlying philosophical framework on the nature of reality as a whole (yes, that grand) and as such I can say a very limited set of things on this exact book despite that I have an impression that I understand what he is saying.
From an initial impression, it seems that this book is on discovering the nature of truth via open discussion. He seems to believe that fundamentally if people were to talk and listen to one another that all disagreements would be resolved. He further things that innovation in science, politics, technology and whatever have you in social structures comes about from a smooth transition of information between parties. This is not cybernetics.
There is something deeper going on here.
He at times uses words like fragments and references his other books- which makes me believe Im not getting the full picture
Nevertheless there is a truth in his words and an idealistic naïveté which I must elaborate on.
The truth exists in that honest communication would resolve a great deal of issues that we presently have within the world - assuming of course that the parties have the proper information of course. If it were the case for example that congress or some other body of polity were to talk out their disagreements they may be able to find a practical resolution. Of course issues in communication leading to conflict exist not only on the political level but down to our day to day interpersonal relationships. Witha. Country abound in an expanding divorce rate one may for ask how many marriages would be saved for example if the could could simply talk it out?
Which of course leads to where he is, in my view, naive. Can open communication answer all questions and always bring about peace?
This is something im not so sure about. Bohm presents an example of where he thinks communication could have aided a relationship : between Einstein and Bohr.
It is well known by many physicists and historians thereof that Bohr advocated a Copenhagen interpretation of the universe (or one indeterminate) while Einstein stood by a mechanical view of the universe. Einstein, it is said, maintained the universe must be deterministic. He held by the tradition of the western determinist like Laplace- that if all the particles and their forces of the known universe were to be placed on a page - a sufficiently complex mathematician could espouse their history and future.
Bohr stood by that modern quantum mechanics have changed this, and shown it to be incorrect, while Einstein maintained in his classically spinozian way that “God does not play dice with the universe”.
Bohm (an acquaintance of the two- albeit one that was superficial )maps the decay of their relationship as they were unable to reconcile their differences. He suggests- if they were only able to talk it out they would find peace.
Which makes one wonder. Are there times where dialogue breaks down- in where two groups, or two people can no longer speak without fighting and disagreeing fundamentally. What then do we do? He seems to think peace will be find and a truth may come about, I do not think this is always the case. If so there may be hope for such institutions as the American bipartisan state which finds themselves in a whirlwind of conflict. I hope he is correct.
But then again, as I mentioned in the start I don’t truly understand bohm.
This serves to be a thought provoking book and I advocate anyone interested in the nature of communication give it a read
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Morgan Blackledge
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October 11, 2020
This is an oft cited, highly revered classic.
I’ve been meaning to read it for a long time.
And as is the case with so many classics.
It was WAY ahead of its time.
And so.
I can forgive the prolix and groping nature of the text.
And yes.
The core insight of the book is simple and profound.
That being.
There is a form of dialog that lacks agenda beyond connection, communication and honest exploration.
It’s transformative and healing.
It’s the fundament of authentically good therapy.
And when done well, it’s a genuine spiritual practice.
That being said.
Throughout much of this text.
The honest reader may find that they simply have no fucking idea what the actual fuck Bohm is fucking yammering about.
If you’re an educated reader in the domains of behavioral neuroscience, and cognitive psychology, you’re apt to be very frustrated by many of the claims.
Yes it’s an older text.
But frankly speaking.
Bohm was a physicist.
And much of the text deals with psychological and philosophical matters.
While he does an admirable job.
He’s a curious, creative and strong critical thinker.
The insights lack the discipline and clarity of a skillful and trained philosopher or psychologist.
This review is sure to draw ire (if anyone actually reads it).
I’m super sorry if I offend.
And in the high likelihood I’m missing something.
Please straighten me out.
Anyway.
I’m giving it a 3⭐️⭐️⭐️ until otherwise convinced.
Sorry about it 😕
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Blackdogsworld
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March 11, 2018
ผมคิดว่าเนื้อหาที่เกี่ยวข้องกับชื่อของหนังสือจริง ๆ คือ บทที่ 1-2 ซึ่งกล่าวถึงแนวคิดและกระบวนการ Dialouge นอกนั้นเหมือนเป็นการพูดถึงมุมมองของโบห์มในเรื่องความคิดและเรื่องอื่น ๆ ทำให้อ่านแล้ว รู้สึกว่าเนื้อหาไม่ค่อยกลมกลืนเท่าไหร่ และค่อนข้างมีความซับซ้อน ในประเด็นที่เกี่ยวข้องกับธรรมชาติและผลกระทบของความคิดนี้ ผมคิดว่างานของกฤษณมูรติอธิบายได้ง่ายและชัดเจนกว่า อย่างไรก็ตาม มันอาจไม่ใช่จุดมุ่งหมายหลักของหนังสือเล่มนี้ แต่หากมองว่าจุดมุ่งหมายหลักคือการนำเสนอเกี่ยวกับ Dialouge ก็ยังทำได้ไม่ค่อยชัดเจนนักอยู่ดี
책 제목과 관련된 실제 내용은 개념과 Dialouge 과정을 논의하는 챕터 1-2인 것 같아요. 내용이 그다지 조화롭지 못한 느낌 그리고 꽤 복잡하다 이 아이디어의 본질 및 영향과 관련된 문제에 대해 크리슈나무르티의 작품이 더 쉽고 명확하게 설명되어 있다고 생각하지만 그것이 이 책의 주된 목적은 아닐 수도 있다. 그러나 주요 목표가 Dialouge에 대해 발표하는 것이라고 생각한다면 여전히 명확하지 않습니다.
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Phakin
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July 16, 2020
Need more time and more basic knowledge, this book was very tough. Yet I think it was quite interesting despite the fact that I didn't even understand how can "a dialogue" work especially in such specific situation. By the way, Bohm's explanation on the relation between a 'tacit knowledge' and our actions was so touching.
If I say that this book "convinced" me to keep on examining my "self"... Did Bohm achieve his aims?
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Alex Lee
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March 11, 2016
This is a difficult book to classify. Although its written by a physicist, its really about the nature of being a human individual attempting to understand how to fit into the world.
Bohm at times, reaches into a near mystical state, not really scientific but more philosophical and religious when he describes how our expectations characterize our experience. He could be more philosophically explicit, but this may detract from what is already a very succinct text.
By extension these ideas can be related to the way in which groups also reason out ideology.
Nonetheless Bohm suggests using a group calibration of thought in order to bring about awareness as to how our experiential underpinnings force us to view the world in a way that is not our own. We often live our lives according to ideas we got from somewhere else. Sometimes they are misunderstandings that we extrapolate as morals. Other times they are partial ideas adopted from some authority figure in our past. Either way the worlds we construct are often inappropriate or at least misleading as to the full context of where we are and what we are doing. As a result, we are often at the mercy of thought itself -- we live in a world not constructed for us (for our benefit) and yet we constantly construct this world even identifying completely with it for the purposes of finding our place... a place that may not be to our benefit.
Often individuals deal with situations by reacting to their thought and the switching the order of their thinking. Their reactions become justifications for the thought they originally had, even though their justifications are reactionary. This is both the subject of Kant's Critique of Judgement (teleological thinking) and what Nietzsche was attempting to outline in his books about culture. Deleuze in Nietzsche and Philosophy shows more directly how Nietzsche considered culture to be created nearly of completely reactive forces... impulses and ideas that would limit our ability to be active so that we can be in service to a greater null. We become domesticated through out ideas and then cannot create a new world.
Bohm isn't proposing an overman kind of resolution. Instead he believes we should speak with others in a rigid methodology utilizing dialogue in order to come to understand the underpinnings of our reactive assumptions. When we can successfully pull them out we will see how irrational our assumptions are, and we can begin to create a new community. For a community is not founded on imposing will but by the collective synthesis of a completely new common will. When we find where we can identify with one another we will come that much close to healing the world we live in. Especially with politics as it is today and with communication how it is, we do not talk with those outside our group because we seek to enforce the veracity of our ideas. In such a forced presentation no one listens. We lose the ability to be a nation or a whole group and with that loss of communication we lose not only community but our shared lifeworld -- which requires a collective goal for everyone.
Very interesting book. Bohm is equally hard on scientists as they also present teleological thinking when it suits their favorite theories. I heartily recommend this tiny book to everyone!
2016
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Ali
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October 24, 2015
اين نوشته ها به جان نفوذ مي كند. دوست داشتم همه اين كتاب را بخوانند.به هر كس كه ميرسم، با اشتياق ميگويم كه بخواندش ولي جز اندكي عموما توجهي نمي كنند. و اين خود چقدر به مطالب كتاب نزديك است. وقتي خوانده باشيش و ديگران اشتياقت را درك نكنند كه چقدر دوست داري بخوانندش، درد بسيار دارد. اين كتاب كوچك يادت ميدهد چگونه درون خودت سفر كني خودت را خالصانه از منظر يك سوم شخص بنگري و خودت را و نگاهت را به هستي بپالايي. جايگاهت را در هستي مي يابي انگار و ياد ميگيري كه چگونه نگاه كني، بينديشي و خلاق باشي.
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Peter Blok
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September 18, 2018
The book is Interesting because Bohm analyses the way we think, or, to be more precise, the way we think that we think. He introduces the concept: proprioception. That means selfperception. Peoples lack proprioception about the way we think.
He proposes the idea of an open dialogue. This is different from the way most peoples discuss with each other. What we should try to do is to understand each others presuppositions. That is not easy but we could start by trying, over and over again.
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Brandon Lott
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January 23, 2013
Immensely important to the future of humanity. If we can't dialogue ... we will continue a downward spiral in our humanity towards each other and the planet.
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