Editorial: Dimensions and Faces of Dialogue

Abstract

The current issue of our journal is devoted to the widely recognized issue of dialogue. According to Professor Marian Śnieżyński, “The sense of dialogue means discovering the truth. What is most valuable in dialogue, is what is most subjective. Its essence is free participation and tolerance of the other, stranger, and the need for attentive listening both to the words and their meaning, as well.” The first and best school for dialogue should be the family. As Professor Stanisław Leszek Stadniczeńko emphasizes, “just in the family there are direct face-to-face relationships, filled with feelings and emotions, and the relations between the members are close, creating a specific laboratory of the educational situation,” which emerges as a result of the relationships of the people participating in it. “The family is the bridge between the individual person and society.” In childhood our personality, our sensitivity, our perception of reality and other people are shaped most. Dialogue in the family transfers onto dialogue in a wider social context, defining its dimensions, its faces. Dialogue, defined, according to Martin Buber, as “essential relationship,” is the basis of humanity, it shapes a man.