The Doors of Dialogue
Why do we write in one voice what was born between voices - and what happens when writing begins to answer back?
Three years after October 7, I remember my desperate search for light in the darkness of that winter. One attempt took the form of a sprawling WhatsApp exchange. At one point I sent my correspondent an image I had found in an essay on the worldview of the Indigenous peoples of the Andes, heirs to Inca civilization. She replied that it reminded her of one of my favorite paintings - Egon Schiele's The Embrace. I was spellbound. As ever, I was looking for hope in the weave of thought and writing. As sometimes happens, I found it - for a moment.
So, should we write? Does it help us think?
The Silence of the Words
Socrates had his doubts, back in Athens some 2,400 years ago. Writing, he thought, cuts an impressive figure, black on papyrus. But it cannot answer back. In Plato's dialogue Phaedrus, he compares writing to painting: "For its offspring stand before us as though alive; but ask them anything, and they maintain a solemn, dignified silence." As with painted figures, so with written words. Once written, they may take up a wanderer's staff, stray far from whoever first breathed life into them, reach other eyes, and become entangled in interpretations their maker never intended. For there is one thing written words cannot do: listen to a challenge and be changed by it.
But the times, they are a-changin'. We live, so we are told, in the age of AI, with its penchant for mischief - sometimes welcome, sometimes a little too much. Now, as we marvel at, and are horrified by, its feats, writing itself seems to have learned to think and write. Many professors are alarmed: if AI writes students' essays, will they lose not only the art of writing but the very ability to think? Socrates, by contrast, might have wondered why we cling to writing to save thought in the first place.
Have we solved Socrates' problem? Has the written word, at long last, become a partner in dialogue - and therefore in genuine thought?
Not so fast. Haste may no longer be the devil's work alone - the god from the machine has joined the party - but it remains a poor adviser. One particularly bad suggestion: to assume that dialogue means nothing more than a conversation between two.
And we are wrong. Such a narrow, merely technical view is barren. No new life will come of it.
Dialogue may not be just another way to think, but the path thought itself must take
The surest sign that we have lost sight of genuine dialogue is our familiar contrast with monologue. We imagine it is all a matter of arithmetic: one speaker or two? But dia does not mean "two." It means "through," "between," "across"; logos is speech, account, reason. Dialogue, then, is not a matter of two people talking. It is a way of thinking.
But what does "a way of thinking" mean? Is dialogue simply an expression of thought, a conversational way of putting it into words? Or is it one of the ways in which thought comes into being? Perhaps, if we take one further step (a step too far?), dialogue is not another way to think but the path thought itself must take, not just to advance but to exist at all.
Dialogue plainly does not exhaust every cognitive state. But it may reach the heart of that distinctively human one: thinking. For Descartes, thought proved our human existence: the very fact that I think testifies that I exist. Cogito, ergo sum is a philosophy of the rules of evidence. But if the ergo, the "therefore," is causal, thought does more than establish my human existence. It brings it into being.
From Academic Monologue to a Triangle of Dialogue
Three cheers for us academics! Surely we think incessantly, and we too have proof that we are thinking people: we write!
But if Socrates is right, and if dialogue is the very breath of living thought, then academic writing is mostly a dead letter. The Academy's founder, Plato, wrote dialogues; today's academic texts, by contrast, are decidedly monological. They reach the reader after the dust of the journey has settled, when all that remains of thought is its final destination: the triumphant argument, the conclusive evidence, the inevitable conclusion - with open questions for the next monologue.
And not only on paper. In teaching, too, we train students in the art of monologue: present confidently, address your audience, demonstrate mastery of the material. A seminar sounds more promising, but does dialogue really take place there? The professor asks, and students try to hit upon the answer; students ask, and the professor deigns to reply. Instead of wondering, wandering, and going wrong together, we often get an examination in installments. It is hard to enjoy uncertainty when your grade is on the line.
Ideal dialogue has three corners, and nurturing lines connecting them
One source of academia's monological failure is the familiar assumption that thinking comes before dialogue: two people arrive with thoughts of their own, begin to talk - and there we have it: dialogue. But perhaps the sequence runs the other way, or goes in a circle: conversation gives rise to thought, which in turn gives rise to conversation.
Circular - and triangular: dialogue is woven not only between people but within them, within each and every one of us. Though we do not all "talk to ourselves" (aloud or silently), it seems that every human being has a "voice in their head." Mead argued that the ability to see myself through another's eyes is essential to the self's emergence; Vygotsky shows how social speech becomes inner speech, with a structure and function of its own.
Ideal dialogue, then, has three corners: my conversation with myself, yours with yourself, and ours, between us. Ideally, again, the lines connecting these corners nurture both the connections and the corners themselves, weaving ties that are intimate in the word's oldest sense: reaching the "innermost" (intimus). Hannah Arendt aptly called the personal inner dialogue the "two-in-one." And when two or more people weave their acquaintance with themselves into their acquaintance with one another, when their "two-in-one" selves become part of a "two-in-one" larger than themselves, the full magic of triangular dialogue unfolds. Geometry becomes topology: the attempt to give a shape precise dimensions gives way to an exploration of its structure and connections.
The Doula of Dialogue
Did Socrates himself really inhabit such a topology of thought and experience? In the very dialogue in which he criticized writing, he offered compelling testimony to the power of "the soul's conversation with itself." In Phaedrus, after his first speech on eros, Socrates is stopped by his daimonion, that inner voice forbidding him to go on. Something within him rebels against what he has just said. Phaedrus is present at the moment of change, but seemingly does not bring it about. In this sense, perhaps Socrates is most dialogical when conversing with himself: he carries within him a voice that challenges him.
Genuine dialogue is dangerous: not that you might lose, but that you might try to win
But would the "daemon" have challenged him without Phaedrus? Just before it stops him, Socrates himself credits Phaedrus with bringing another speech into being. Yet he credits the "daemon" with his recognition of his offense, and recalls that something had already troubled his soul during the first speech. What, then, brought about the change: Phaedrus, the daemon, or the dialogue between them that had already become a conversation within Socrates?
Either way, genuine dialogue is dangerous. It poses a peculiar threat: not that you might lose, but that you might try to win. Winning is monologue's province, given over to verbal combat, confrontation, "debate," all meant to display your superiority, make your logos "the one," a reason under your sole ownership - much like monotheism (God's ownership of the universe), monarchy (the king's ownership of his country), and monogamy (all too often, the husband's ownership of his wife).
Dialogue, by contrast, rejects the contest for victory. If there is an enemy, it is one the speakers share: falsehood. Hence the great danger genuine dialogue holds: truth. The difficulty it stirs in us lies in its very engine: doubt that prompts thought, perplexity that leaves us exposed, humiliation lurking around the corner. It is hard not to experience a challenge to our worldview as an attack on ourselves. Hard not to ward off the blow by raising monologue's fortifications against dialogue - and, in effect, around the lie nesting within us.
For Socrates, aporia, that perplexity, is essential to breaching the walls of self-confidence, sometimes self-righteousness, we build around ourselves. The aim is not a synthesis of thesis and antithesis. Freed of the burden of shame, perplexity at its apex - creative, curious, sometimes full of craving - can breathe new life both into the new "being" born of the connection and into those who joined in its creation. Such is the intimacy dialogue can engender, even within the soul, that it almost brings "knowing," metaphorically, to its biblical sense. In Theaetetus, Socrates described himself as a doula, a midwife of souls: without wisdom of his own, yet helping others give birth to theirs.
Perhaps this is how humility becomes the mother of hubris. But even on a more charitable reading, the division of labor helped Socrates build a wall of his own, around himself. The trouble with the Socratic dialogues was not an asymmetry of intelligence - the fact that Socrates, despite his protests, was the wiser one. Differences in knowledge, and still more in wisdom, can enrich a conversation, and not only through its wisest participant; even the village fool may ask a question that would never have occurred to us. But an asymmetry in openness to error is deadly to dialogue, which requires reciprocity from the outset: what you say can unsettle me within, and if I am lucky enough that it does, I would do well to return the favor. Differences in knowledge are not the problem; immunity to correction is. Dialogue does not require us both to change our minds every time, but it grants neither of us an exemption from the possibility. And in his dialogues with others, Socrates is almost never wrong.
Then, for a fleeting moment, Plato cracks the midwife's immunity. In a dialogue on democracy and virtue, Protagoras argues against Socrates that Zeus gave all human beings equal shares of shame (aidos) and justice (dike). So in matters of state and justice - unlike shipbuilding or medicine, where experts have the advantage - every Athenian citizen deserves to form and advance an opinion. Socrates objects, but runs into a series of difficulties. Toward the end of the exchange, he personifies the dialogue itself: he imagines it as someone who would show them how tangled their arguments have become, making clear to Socrates himself that they need to reconsider their starting point: what is virtue? Perhaps this is the most complete of the Socratic dialogues. The midwife gets pregnant.
Fascist Baby
And how great the temptation, then, to disregard the months of pregnancy, the clear amniotic waters that protected the fetus, and now scrub it clean, purify it of everything that clings - taking care, of course, not to throw the baby out with the murky bathwater. Such, alas, is often the fate of academic thought on its way to expression, to publication, as it passes from fertile, triangular dialogue into the silent journal.
Think about it: when did you last read a genuinely dialogical academic article? Not an interview or a learned contest over an argument, but a dynamic encounter in which the speakers seek the truth together, are genuinely perplexed, change their minds as they talk, and arrive somewhere new?
Isn't this how we think? Research begins in a laboratory or a seminar, on a late-night walk, or sometimes in a hallway conversation: a voice within or without questions and objects; a finding refuses to fit; something we read changes the question; two coauthors invent a distinction because they cannot agree. Then, at journey's end, comes the demand for pure form: present the argument. Unanimously. In one clear voice. The reader encounters "We argue that..." Perplexity gives way to a show of confidence.
E pluribus argumentum: out of many, an argument
Even peer review, putatively one of academia's most dialogical rituals, takes place behind a screen that keeps the encounter from the reader's view. A reviewer objects, the authors reply, sometimes everyone has to think again; in the published paper, perhaps a few words of thanks to the "anonymous reviewers" remain. Anonymity has its reasons, especially in a world of rank and dependence. But it also erases the outlines of the encounter. The reader may have no way of knowing whether a claim was born of the author's flash of insight, a reviewer's question, or a disagreement that nearly kept the paper from seeing daylight. What if that was precisely where the thought was conceived?
We scrub away every trace of pregnancy and labor, birth and stretch marks, and put the finished product on display: "A fascist baby, utopia."
Have I gone too far again? So be it. But how far is this offspring from the Roman fasces: a bundle of rods bound around an axe, an ancient emblem of authority that fascism later claimed as both symbol and name? The rods are cut to size, pressed together, bound along a single axis. Together they are strong, but almost nothing happens between them. Their strength has nothing to do with what one rod might learn from another, and everything to do with what can be done with them once they are tightly bound.
E pluribus argumentum: out of many, an argument. We knead research, in all its restless variety, into a text tailored for publication. Hubris, that mortal conceit to become godlike, or godliked, hardly spares the ivory tower, where a paper aspires to become a deed, a speech act: "Let there be light."
It should go without saying, but perhaps should not go unsaid: the academic monologue is indeed an achievement. Readers need not, and generally would rather not, relive a research project's entire history to learn its conclusions. I don't want every claim accompanied by a transcript of the lunch at which it was born, either. The trouble begins when compression and the bottom line become all but sacred, and the thinking behind them mere excess baggage.
The Joy of Perplexity
But the fascist baby's efficiency is an answer in search of a question: efficient at what? If thinking is more than an assembly line for findings and conclusions, isn't there something inefficient about producing papers that are so hard to think with?
We might begin with the most modest virtue of dialogical writing: it may be more interesting. Thought, too, has a plot. Two people trying to understand something, objecting, getting tangled up, occasionally surprising themselves, may draw a reader toward an idea they would have passed over had it arrived as a "contribution to the literature." Not every exchange deserves to be read, of course, and not every conventional article is dull. But if, in our world, we can scarcely broaden horizons or advance knowledge without reading, then holding a reader's interest matters enormously. Curiosity is not science's consolation prize.
Why not simply devise the finest possible sieve, pour away the murky water, and keep our spotless baby?
There is an educational gain here, perhaps a moral one too. Students encounter the finished article and conclude that good researchers know where they are going from the start. Rarely do they get to hear their teachers say "I was wrong," "I don't understand," "I hadn't thought of that" - and discover that these are not admissions of defeat but tools of the trade. Hiding the process does more than remove doubts from a text; it teaches us to be ashamed of them. Writing that lets us see how an idea almost failed may teach others, too, the joy of getting it wrong.
Provided, of course, that getting it wrong is genuinely allowed. Hierarchy is not the whole story here: differences in knowledge and rank need not condemn anyone to silence. A student told me that, for her, clear professional boundaries are precisely what allow her to think aloud without fearing that each mistake will be a personal affront to her teacher. This is not a contest to see who stands taller, but a shared willingness to come away perplexed. Dialogical writing invites risk because dialogue itself, as we have seen, is dangerous. The more we write this way, the more we teach ourselves and others to be less fixed in our views, more open to aporia. We will stop being embarrassed by perplexity and embrace it as a powerful engine of creativity.
Yet curiosity, inspiration, and a willingness to take risks do not establish that knowledge itself has improved. Perhaps all we have gained is a pleasant glimpse backstage? Here comes a harder question: when we discard the scaffolding after we finish building, are we sure we haven't dismantled a load-bearing wall, or even the keystone? Why not simply devise the finest possible sieve, pour away the murky water, and keep our spotless baby?
The Hidden Stitches
William James would probably have shuddered at what we do to the living waters of thought. He saw thought as a "stream of consciousness" moving between resting points: thinking happens in encounters, frictions, transitions. But what happens when two such streams of consciousness meet, like waterfalls plunging into a single pool? What good are the waterfalls once they have reached the pool?
On the way there, each stream, each waterfall, carries its own speed, weight, and course. Their confluence creates eddies and currents that neither contains alone. In Quechua, the official language of the Inca Empire, this encounter echoes in the word and idea of Tinku, which names and celebrates the fertile meeting: what happens, what clashes, what thrills.
But in the turbulence of "together," haven't we lost the one, and the possibility of being alone? Interestingly, in the pool itself we can often still trace where the different streams entered, a kind of yin-yang, distinct yet endlessly intermingled. It echoes the polyphony Bakhtin found in Dostoevsky, whose tangled plots preserve independent voices that never quite merge: two-in-one, not two-as-one. And the new one born of the encounter has changed its parents too.
Consider another incarnation of Tinku: the weave. Warp and weft do not dissolve into a third substance; their crossings make the fabric. The pattern does not lie hidden in one thread, waiting to be revealed. It arises in the relations between them. More than that, each thread is itself spun from fibers: plurality within a voice, plurality between voices, and a form that comes into being through both. What looks like unity from a distance rests, up close, on repeated encounters between differences.
Andean tradition offers a few more threads to think with. Ayni speaks of reciprocity, yanantin of differences that complement one another, and in k'eswa an opposing twist turns two threads into a stronger one. Yet no fabric is immune to its own pleasing pattern: q'iwa, the irregularity, the discordant note, reminds us that disturbance is part of the work. Isn't this, in its own way, aporia? It carries a warning: the weaver may fall so deeply in love with the work that no room remains for a question.
And what of a thread we can no longer see? Ukhu, the interior, the depth, offers a lovely distinction between what the fabric shows and what still holds it together from behind: that scaffolding we are so quick to discard. Without the hidden stitches, the whole fabric would unravel. Why, then, reject them?
A Chancay fiber figure of a well-dressed woman features visible finery. The complete finishing of the legs and toes shows that normally invisible features are also significant and act as an embodiment of the concept of ukhu.
Especially in academic writing, where those stitches may be essential not only to holding an argument together but to helping it see the light of day. Think of rejected papers. Had the reviewers read a dialogue rather than an imposing monologue, they might have recognized some of the objections now leading them to reject it as the very engines and companions of the thinking that produced it, and given the dialogue a chance to develop through publication. Think, too, of the immense, largely wasted potential in those hidden stitches, which might encourage what Imre Lakatos called a generative, progressive research agenda rather than a degenerative one.
one of monologue's quiet murders: it does not merely shorten the journey; it decides, after the fact, what counted as "the path" and what now counts as "deviation."
Ironically, this very essay was born of a long dialogue(?) with AI. At its conclusion, I asked it to run an experiment: turn our conversation into an essay, a coherent, lucid monologue that curious readers could understand and perhaps enjoy. The result was exactly what I had been trying to describe - and criticize. AI delivered a model fascist baby, pure and tender, rinsed clean of the murky waters of so many ideas we had raised: the etymology of "dialogue," Socrates' daemon, the two waterfalls, some of the questions that had given birth to the claims. Even Tinku did not survive. They went the way of all AI, not because we had decided they were wrong, but because it could not immediately see where they belonged (and it took me long hours too). The rough edges were pushed aside, the hidden stitches unpicked or concealed.
Perhaps this is one of monologue's quiet murders, now with digital backup: it does not merely shorten the journey; it decides, after the fact, what counted as "the path" and what now counts as "deviation." Call me a deviant with a destructive delight in alliteration, but for me it was precisely in those discarded detours that thought took shape and danced its strange dance in the dark. I don't know what Citizen Kane would be without "Rosebud." A good film, probably. One I would have forgotten two hours later.
Talking with AI, pondering Tinku, I thought of the olive tree. AI then taught me about a botanical phenomenon called inosculation: branches that have grown separately may fuse where they touch, joining their vascular tissues. We can still trace their separate paths, but the point of encounter has become part of the anatomy from which they continue to grow. This happens quite often in olive trees, with their relatively thin young bark, twisted trunks, and long lives. Here is another sign of fertile dialogue: I carry you with me - in what I know, in how I think, in what I believe, or, juiciest of all, in a question mark. I think of the olive tree as such a fruitful dialogue and wonder what might have happened had Rome, and humanity after it, adopted the lively, twisting olive branches and trunks rather than the dead straight fasces as its emblem.
E pluribus, inter se
Perhaps it is not too late. This is not a plea to replace the academic article with the transcript of a Zoom call, or a record of every passing thought. No need to abolish monologue's unum, only to dethrone it. To stop sanctifying a unity that swallows, indeed suffocates, its voices, or a plurality proud that no one needs anyone else - and instead cultivate ties of mutual care and cross-fertilization instead. Perhaps these are also the outlines of a democracy.
Maybe it's time for another motto: instead of "out of many, one," let us try "out of many, with one another": E pluribus, inter se. I can imagine a new journal inviting open, perplexed, creative dialogue among researchers, students, and citizens. We already have a nice Andean name for it. And let's not get lost counting voices again: two people can duel in monologues, while one can write an essay that lets us hear them arguing fiercely with themselves. The question is not how many mouths are speaking, but whether thought still leaves an opening for disturbance - including from the reader.
And from AI, too? Socrates feared words that look alive but cannot answer back. But to return to our opening question: what about writing that has begun to answer? Is it alive? Does it breathe new life into our thinking - or is it killing us softly?
Is AI killing me softly with its siren song? Sometimes I wonder, looking at my blog. I started it to make room for dialogue, out in the open, never entirely safe: with myself, and with others. When I walked, I thought; when I sat down, I wrote. I was writing not only for myself but for anyone who might take the trouble to read. It was my private Tinku. And even if my triangle lacked a corner and a side - even if not a soul read me and began to wonder, to argue with themselves - at least I had offered myself to the world, opened a door.
Why labor to weave a finished essay, one more tree falling unheard in the forest of my blog?
In recent years I have done much less of this. And I am not sure why. The years of horror in Israel, my immersion in civic activism and new ways of teaching, are a large part of the story. As though I had moved hope's home from the blog to the street and the classroom.
But AI is part of the story too. I have not stopped thinking or writing. I may be writing more than ever, and the ideas, it seems to me, keep surging. But suddenly I have someone to talk to who is always there. Even in the dead of night, there is someone to wonder with about how Lychee, a lovable dog who loathes cats and meets other dogs with anxious aggression, was once a wolf in a pack and now, tamed, has no one to lick but humans - who have themselves forgotten how to groom one another, only to turn grooming into yet another red flag pinned to the voodoo doll of modern life. But then, once eyes have closed and the night is spent, why labor to weave a finished essay, one more tree falling unheard in the forest of my blog?
I have no answer - except in the Hebrew word hibbur: both a piece of writing and a connection. Not only between things on a page or a screen, but within myself, and between myself and others. AI is many things. But - for now, at least - not this. I cannot deny that it is a creative partner: it already affects my thinking, and this essay is proof.
Yet courageous intimacy asks more of us than thought answering thought. It takes at least two willing to lay themselves bare, to take risks, and to change in each other's presence. This will not always happen. Moments of grace bring Egon Schiele's The Embrace; other moments, the cold loneliness - close, but not together - of Oskar Kokoschka's The Bride of the Wind. Human intimacy sways, storm-tossed, between the two. AI has not yet reached that height of human encounter.
It is easy to surrender to AI's fluent flow as it answers, teaches, apologizes, changes its position, even asks why we asked. Easier still to grow accustomed to its eventual agreement whenever we insist. But a voice offering boundless affirmation is not necessarily a partner in thought; sometimes it is merely a partner in comfort, an accomplice in the urge to win. Can the mechanized word, too, come away from our encounter changed, or are we the only ones changed by its answers? And if AI should follow Eve and bite into the fruit of the tree of knowledge we planted in a garden of stone, iron, and silicon, will we follow God - wounded pride and all?
Later, after the exchanges of that dark winter had branched out in a thousand unruly directions, we tried to trace the threads and see which we might weave into something fruitful. My correspondent ranked a few promising possibilities and summed up:
Just not the waterfalls.
Comments