that characterise different secular or religious world-views,
since each not only construes but linguistically constructs
the very concepts of truth or reality that it claims to
singularly most truly represent. What this so-called ‘post-
modern’ linguistic paradigm fails, paradoxically, to take any
historic account of, is the way in which ‘pre-modern’
religious philosophies, Eastern and Western, were the first
to acknowledge the formative power of language – whether
as the Graeco-Christian concept of the ‘Logos’ or ‘Word’
become Flesh and the corresponding understanding of
Nature as God’s living speech, or both the Kabbalistic and
Tantric theologies of a primordial alphabetic matrix of
world-creation (Gematria/Matrika), one that Jews saw signs
of in the Hebrew alphabet and Hindus in that of Sanskrit.
It is from the Greek word logos and its root verb legein
(to gather) that the terms ‘logic’ and ‘dialectic’ itself derive,
not to mention the ‘-logies’ such as biology and psychology
and common words as ‘analogy’, ‘legend’, intelligence,
intellect etc. Indeed the abstractly theoretical term
‘dialectics’ can be understood in a more originary way
through the word itself, and in particular through the
common word ‘dialogue’, for this is a word whose root
meaning has to do precisely with what is mediated ‘through
the word’ (dia-logos). The word ‘dialogue’ however leads us
into the realm of living human relations rather than abstract
conceptual ones alone – what the Jewish social and
religious thinker Martin Buber called the realm of the