Plenary, 18 Mar 2009
Meeting date: Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Official Report
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Time for Reflection
Good afternoon. The first item of business is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leader today is Professor Leonard Swidler, from the Global Dialogue Institute, Temple University, Philadelphia.
Professor Leonard Swidler (Global Dialogue Institute, Temple University, Philadelphia):
In the dawning of the age of global dialogue, we humans are increasingly aware that we cannot know everything about anything. This is true for the physical sciences: no one would claim that we know everything about biology, physics, or chemistry. Likewise, no one would claim that we know everything about the human sciences, sociology, anthropology, or—good heavens!—economics. Each of these disciplines is endlessly complicated.
However, when it comes to the most comprehensive and complicated discipline of all—theology or religion—billions of us still claim that we know all there is to know, and that whoever thinks differently is simply mistaken. But if it is true that we can know only partially in any limited study of reality, as in the physical or human sciences, surely it is all the more true of religion, which is an
"explanation of the ultimate meaning of life, and how to live accordingly, based on some notion of the Transcendent."
We must then be even more modest in our claims of knowing better in this most comprehensive field of knowledge: religion,
"the ultimate meaning of life."
Because of the work of great thinkers, such as the recently deceased Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, we now also realise that no knowledge can ever be completely objective, for we, the knower, are an integral part of the process of knowing. In brief, all knowledge is interpreted knowledge. Even in its simplest form, whether I claim that the Bible is God's truth, or the Qur'an, or the Bhagavad Gita, or, indeed, the interpretation of the Pope, or John Knox, it is I who affirms that it is so. But if neither I nor anyone can know everything about anything—including this most complicated claim to truth: religion—how can I proceed to search for an ever fuller grasp of reality, of truth?
The clear answer is dialogue. In dialogue, I come to talk with you primarily so that I can learn what I cannot perceive from my place in the world, with my personal lenses of knowing. Through your eyes, I can see what I cannot see from my side of the globe, and vice versa. Hence, dialogue is not only a way of gaining more information; dialogue is a whole new way of thinking. We are painfully leaving behind the age of monologue and we are—albeit with squinting eyes—entering into the age of global dialogue.