dialogue The topic of this special issue is Dialogue – a conversation about creation, man and the language of the soul. He who feels to a certain extent attracted by these words, which are core concepts, will probably understand that the dialogue that we seek is different from an exchange of points of view.
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magine a common space that we entered by opening this magazine. It is our space. We will wholly fill it with our time, our thinking power, our longing for knowledge and insight, and perhaps by our yearning for redemption or liberation. In this space, everything is present and possible. It scintillates, teeming with energy that can become concretely active like the feeling of a child on the eve before its tenth birthday. However, nothing is concrete yet. A conversation would dull this space and make it expressionless. A debate would turn this space into an arena. A dialogue does the very opposite: it makes this space ‘fertile’ as it were – every participant leaves it richer, gains more insight and feels ‘connected’. A dialogue always develops at a certain level – and what is more: it makes what is present in this space free, visible, tangible and concrete. The Greek word dialogos means: ‘through’ the ‘word’, what becomes possible through the word – in this case the written word! Rational arguments count in dialogues that usually follow the trace of arguments that matter most at that moment. Nevertheless, most dialogues are not aimless or endless because there is no channel for the stream of arguments. Even in so-called ‘open dialogues’, this is not the case. In Plato’s classical dialogues, we see how Socrates was able to give direction to the dialogue by asking questions, not as an interrogator, but by respectfully asking the discussion 2 pentagram 5/2010
partner questions on the basis of the latter’s truth, which was often embedded in a fixed or self-evident opinion. It was Socrates’ inner wealth of wisdom and knowledge that enabled him to ask his questions in such a way that they gave direction to the conversation. He was quite aware of the prejudices and the superficial lines of thinking of his discussion partners, but did not proclaim his insights dogmatically. He attempted to make his partner discover a higher insight himself through dialogue or, even more subtly, by helping him to achieve this insight himself. Plato wrote or recorded the dialogues and it is, obviously, questionable whether these conversations really took place in this way. Apart from these, still special, Greek dialogues, the Italian dialogues by Giordano Bruno did not really take place as conversations between (more than) two people either. The unique aspect of these dialogues is that, apart from their dealing with essential and, at the time very modern, vital questions, they also dealt with equality.
Dresses. The abstract paintings of American artist Derrick Hickman from Grove City, Ohio (USA) stand between the spectator and the story in the painting, ‘similarly as romance, the ego and exaggeration (drama) deform our memory’.
