p.o.t.o.: on action & reflection, activism & verbalism

previously:
+ "about truth, radicalism as a creative critical spirit for building a future; & rightist v. leftist sectarians, both suffering from an absence of doubt"
+ "on power and dehumanization: more from p.o.t.o."
+ "p.o.t.o.: banking education v. liberating education"
+ "p.o.t.o.: more about problem-posing education -- pursuing a vocation of becoming more fully human, escaping from fatalism and resignation"

As we attempt to analyze dialogue as a human phenomenon, we discover something which is the essence of dialogue itself: the word. But the word is more than just an instrument which makes dialogue possible; accordingly, we must seek its constituitive elements. Within the word we find two dimensions, reflection and action, in such a radical interaction that if one is sacrificed -- even in part -- the other immediately suffers. There is no true word that is not at the same time a praxis.* Thus, to speak a true word is to transform the world.**

An unauthentic word, one which is unable to transform reality, results when dichotomy is imposed upon its constitutive elements. When a word is deprived of its dimension of action, reflection automatically suffers as well; and the word is changed into idle chatter, into verbalism, into an alienated and alienating "blah." It becomes an empty word, one which cannot denounce the world, for denunciation is impossible without a commitment to transform, and there is no transformation without action.

On the other hand, if action is emphasized exclusively, to the detriment of reflection, the word is converted into activism. The latter -- action for action's sake -- negates the true praxis and makes dialogue impossible. Either dichotomy, by creating unauthentic forms of existence, creates also unauthentic forms of thought, which reinforce the original dichotomy.

Human existence cannot be silent, nor can it be nourished by false words, but only by true words, with which men and women transform the world. To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it. Once named, the world in its turn reappears to the namers as a problem and requires of them a new naming. Human beings are not built in silence,*** but in work, in action-reflection.

But while to say the true word -- which is work, which is praxis -- is to transform the world, saying that the word is not the privilege of some few persons, but the right of everyone. Consequently, no one can say a true word alone -- nor can she say it for another, in a prescriptive act which robs others of their words.

Dialogue is the encounter between men, mediated by the world, in order to save the world. Hence, dialogue cannot occur between those who want to name the world and those who do not wish this naming -- between those who deny others the right to speak their word and those whose right to speak has been denied them. Those who have been denied their primordial right to speak their word must first claim this right and prevent the continuation of this dehumanizing aggression.

If it is in speaking their word that people, by naming the world, transform it, dialogue imposes itself as the way by which they achieve significance as human beings. Dialogue is thus an existential necessity. And since dialogue is the encounter in which the united reflection and action of the dialoguers are addressed to the world which is to be transformed and humanized, this dialogue cannot be reduced to the act of one person's "depositing" ideas in another, nor can it become a simple exchange of ideas to be "consumed" by the discussants. Nor yet is it a hostile, polemical argument between those who are committed neither to the naming of the world, nor to the search for truth, but rather to the imposition of their own truth. Because dialogue is an encounter among women and men who name the world, it must not be a situation where some name on behalf of others. It is an act of creating; it must not serve as a crafty instrument for the domination of one person by another. The domination implicit in dialogue is is that of the world by the dialoguers; it is conquest of the world for the liberation of humankind.

Dialogue cannot exist, however, in the absence of profound love for the world and for people. [...] Love is at the same time the foundation of dialogue and dialogue itself. It is thus necessarily the task of responsible Subjects and cannot exist in a relation of domination. Domination reveals the pathology of love: sadism in the dominator and masochism in the dominated. Because love is an act of courage, not of fear, love is commitment to others. No matter where the oppressed are found, the act of love is commitment to their cause -- the cause of liberation. And this commitment, because it is loving, is dialogical. As an act of bravery, love cannot be sentimental; as an act of freedom, it must not serve as a pretext for manipulation. It must generate other acts of freedom; otherwise, it is not love. Only by abolishing the situation of oppression is it possible to restore the love which that situation made impossible. If I do not love the world -- if I do not love life -- if I do not love people -- I cannot enter into dialogue.

[emphases mine]

Footnotes:

* Action + Reflection } word = work = praxis
Sacrifice of action = verbalism
Sacrifice of reflection = activism
** Some of these reflections emerged as a result of conversations with Professor Ernani Maria Flori
*** I obviously do not refer to the silence of profound meditation, in which men only apparently leave the world, withdrawing from it in order to consider it in its totality, and thus remaining with it. But this type of retreat is only authentic when the meditator is "bathed" in reality; not when the retreat signifies contempt for the world and flight from it, in a type of "historical schizophrenia."

Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 30th Anniversary Ed.
(New York: Continuum, 2000)