Towards a Dialogical Sociology

Abstract

IntroductionThe physicist David Bohm wrote that one of the main obstacles to dialogue lay in the human inability to differentiate between one's tentative opinion and one's personal background consisting of past experiences, emotions, and a sense of identity. According to Bohm, we tend to defend our thoughts as parts of our person but, on the other hand, it is precisely the fragmentation of the world through thought that is responsible for the errors and illusions of our cognition. As Bohm put it, 'thought is very active, but the process of thought thinks that it is doing nothing-that it is just telling you the way things are' (Bohm 1996: 11- 12). In other words, each thought has a blind spot, which is the process of thought itself. This continuous process produces conjectures and images that order the world and secure a sense of continuity for the thinking subject. Therefore, the gradual process of identitybuilding through thought has a dark side: the immunization of individuals against a critical self-awareness and, as a consequence, a loss of truth. For this reason, dialogue poses a theoretical problem: being focused on one's own thought enhances narratives that harmonize with the paths of action taken in the past and makes them unquestionable while they may be precisely what poses a problem.In the following paper I depict sociology as the art of dealing with a specific aspect of that fundamental problem. In the first section I illustrate the problem by comparing selected classical concepts of sociology and society. In the second section I differentiate between dialogue, communication, and interaction. The third section introduces the existential idea of dialogue on the grounds of the Socratic approach to thought. Finally, the concluding fourth section demonstrates the dialogical practices in sociology.Thought and SocietyWhat is controversial in sociology is not the human being nor the society in their respective solitude, but the relationship between individual and society or, to quote the famous handbook by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman (1966), the internalization of the society in the individual and the externalization of the individual in the society. These simultaneous processes may be interpreted as metaphors of the problem of dialogue highlighted by Bohm.Max Weber defines 'society' at different places, once with reference to Tonnies' concept of Gesellschaft (1976 [1922]: 22), and once as a 'general structural form' of communities (1976 [1922]: 212). But at the heart of his idea of sociology lies a continuous interest in the conduct of individual actors who orient themselves either at the expectations of others or at social orders (1976 [1922]: 11-12). According to this concept, societies are no more than complex bundles of conjectures produced by actors who advocate their more or less stable, material and ideal interests. As a result, the essence of social reality is a lengthy conflict between parties who continue to produce sophisticated justifications of their positions (Boudon 2001: 97-100). The immanent logical problems and ramifications of the rationalization processes lead to a general pessimistic outlook of the Weberian sociology (Lowith 1993 [1982]: 69-72).An apparent inversion of this position, being, in fact, its most significant counterpart, is to be found in the work of Emile Durkheim. He implicitly deals with the problem of dialogue in the context of utterly different concepts and hypotheses. Instead of juxtaposing thinking actors with their emancipated thoughts, Durkheim contrasts two theoretically opposed realms of thought: the individual and the collective representations (Durkheim 1974). The relationships between these two kinds of experiences, judgments, and interpretations of reality take different forms among various cultures. Remarkably, when modern societies become more interdependent, as a consequence of mushrooming contracts between free agents, the new collective ideals of rights-oriented 'sacredness of the person' are, at first, too weak to alleviate the sharp tensions generated by the egoistic individualism of alienated and uprooted individuals. …