David Bohm’s legacy crosses the worlds
of science and language. His championing of a causal interpretation of quantum
physics led to lengthy conversations with Einstein, but it won him little
respect among most scientists, who preferred the orthodox indeterminate
approach espoused by Niels Bohring and Werner Heisenberg, the Copenhagen School
theorists (and subjects of Michael Frayn’s Tony Award-winning play Copenhagen).
In the early 1950s, Bohm stood fast against Senator Joseph McCarthy’s
anti-Americanism inquiries, which seriously damaged his professional standing
in the United States and caused him to live and work abroad until his
retirement in 1987 and his death five years later.
Perhaps it was his
insistence on seeing order in the universe or his deep principles in the face
of McCarthyism that inspired Bohm to fashion his paradigm about the implicate
order and undivided wholeness, through which he cogitates with remarkable
lucidity about humanity’s transcendence beyond individual and collective
domains to an immersion in a cosmic dimension. This unique fusion of science
and society resides at the center of Dialogue, and Bohm devotes substantial
space to it in On Dialogue, a slim and engaging treatise.
Dialogue is
unlike discussion or debate, where demonstrating one’s acumen, outwitting an
adversary, or winning a political advantage is paramount. It requires a
different sort of reflection that strikes at the heart of self-awareness and
empathetic discourse. As Bohm observes,
Thought
should be able to perceive its own movement, be aware of its own movement. In
the processes of thought, there should be the awareness of that movement,
of the intention to think, and of the result which that thinking
produces.
A seminal manifesto on
communication breakthroughs, Bohm's book provides just the theoretical grounding that
a Dialogue neophyte would need to venture into this provocative terrain of how
we mean—a question general semanticists pose assiduously.
