Buber and Education

Dialogue as conflict resolution

W. John Morgan, Alexandre Guilherme

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138284821
• eBook ISBN: 9781135067731
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

Martin Buber (1878-1965) is considered one of the 20th century's greatest thinkers and his contributions to philosophy, theology and education are testimony to this. His thought is founded on the idea that people are capable of two kinds of relations, namely I-Thou and I-It, emphasising the centrality of dialogue in all spheres of human life. For t

1 Buber and his times¹

According to a Jewish legend, the first human beings saw the setting of the sun for the first time on the day of their creation, after they had abandoned God and were driven from the garden. They were terrified, for they could only understand it as the world sinking back into chaos because of their guilt. They both cried, sitting across from each other, all night, and the great return occurred. Then dawned the morning. Adam rose, captured an unicorn and brought him as a sacrifice instead of himself.

(Martin Buber, ‘Gottesfinsternis’, in Werke, Bd 1,
p. 520f (Poma, 2006: 173))

Introduction

Most of what has been written on Buber and education tend to be studies of two kinds: theoretical studies of his philosophical views on education (cf. Rosenblat, 1971; Schudder, 1968; Hilliard, 1973; Gordon, 1978; Cohen, 1979); and case studies that aim at putting theory into practice (cf. Itzhaky and Hertzanu-Laty, 1999; Lundan, 2003). The perspective taken by commentators has been to hold a dialogue with Buber's work to identify and analyse critically his views and, in some cases, to put them into practice; in such an approach commentators dialogue with the text.

In this chapter our aims are of a different kind. First and fundamentally, we demonstrate the political and social ontological basis of Buber's thought; we show that Buber, the philosopher of dialogue, held an authentic dialogue with his times; and we demonstrate that his work, in this case I and Thou, holds a dialogue with its Zeitgeist. Certainly, there is nothing wrong when a commentator dialogues with the text. Indeed, this is important work as it provides different and particular perspectives that contribute to the many interpretations on and facets of the work. However, allowing the text to dialogue with its Zeitgeist may provide us with further insight into the complexities of the text and the discovery of facets that remained hidden because of its de-contextualisation; thus, by allowing the text to dialogue with its time we can enhance our own knowledge of the text. This brings us to our second aim; that is, we demonstrate that Buber's thought remains relevant to our times, particularly when it serves as a dialogical educational tool with which to resolve conflict of all types and aids dialogue towards achieving peace in inter-community relations.

This chapter has three further parts. The first provides a contextual account of the Zeitgeist in Germany in the late nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century. The second demonstrates how some of Buber's contemporary writings are a dialogue both with this Zeitgeist and with Zionism and his later experiences in Palestine. The final part shows how, through dialogical education, Buber remains relevant to our own times.

The German Zeitgeist

The late nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth century saw important social, economic, political and educational changes in Germany. Following examples from the United States, there developed a fascination for technology, accompanied by acute transformations in labour practices (cf. Taylorism and Fordism²), which had great impact on the economy (e.g. rapid industrialisation) and implications for society (e.g. growth of the middle classes). It is interesting to note that Max Weber published his famous essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in 1904 when these changes were taking place. Weber argued that the Protestant connection between work and piety shifted human efforts towards the ‘rationalisation’ of economics—this is particularly true of Calvinism, but it is also true of Lutheranism; the term ‘rationalisation’ describes an economic system that is not based on customs or traditions, but rather on the intentional and systematic tuning of economic modes of production for the sole attainment of profit (cf. Weber, 1968; Tawney, 1968; Friedmann, 1971: 171–172). In this respect industrialisation and capitalism are: ‘the historic destiny of the West and the present destiny of the Germany created by Bismarck’ (Marcuse, 1971: 133; cf. Mommsen, 1974: 91–92). Within this context work is not merely an economic activity, but also a spiritual duty (cf. Tawney, 1968: 2–3; Weigert, 1991: 110–111), and this leads the successful bourgeoisie to view the so-called unsuccessful working-class not just as inept economically (perhaps even lazy), but also as deficient spiritually. Weber also noted that this economic ‘rationalism’ soon becomes incompatible with its religious roots, which causes both an increase in economic ‘rationalism’ and for religion to be set aside. Weber's essay provides us with a glimpse into issues faced by his Zeitgeist (and that remains relevant for the Zeitgeist which concerns us here), that is:

i human relations with God;

ii human relations with work;

iii inter-human relations—and we shall deal with these in detail below.

This period also saw changes in the German educational system: Ten years of compulsory education from the age of six was introduced; changes to the educational syllabus (e.g. a sharper focus on teaching skills and techniques); and the development of new teaching and learning techniques (e.g. teacher-centred and student-centred approaches).

Central to our argument is that the period saw the development of the concepts of Deutschtum and of the Volk. In July 1918 Germany conceded defeat in the Great War and in November 1918 experienced the Novemberrevolution,³ which brought the threat of a Bolshevik revolution (Ryder, 1959). These bitter national experiences were compounded by the Treaty of Versailles, 1919, with its territorial losses and subsequent national humiliations such as the French occupation of the Ruhr in 1923. This experience deepened in many Germans the notion of Germanism (Deutschtum); that is of a close-knit community based on the German language and racial identity. Such events had a great impact on the German fabric of politics, economy and society, which fomented the rise of a populist-nationalistic (Völkisch) mood and ideology in Germany, centred on the cultural idea of Germanism (Deutschtum). At first the Völkisch-Deutschtum prompted the well-educated and the upper classes to seek roots in their own [German] land, in their own [German] culture, and in nature; later this Völkisch-Deutschtum reached the masses through the idealisation of the worker and through fostering a return to artisanship (Mosse, 1964: 259–260).

Völkisch-Deutschtum was deeply ingrained in some of the movements and literature of the time, and was taken to extremes as with Aryanism and its racist biology, philology and philosophy. Consider Nietzsche's The Will to Power, published in 1901, where he says: ‘It is quite in order that we possess no religion of oppressed Aryan races, for that is a contradiction: a master race is either on top or it is destroyed.’⁴ A good example of an ideologue of Völkisch-Deutschtum after the Great War was Carl Schmitt, a well-known jurist and philosopher of law. As Lilla notes, Schmitt: ‘became prominent [in the early part of the twentieth century] as an anti-liberal political and legal theorist, and as an outspoken critic of the Versailles Treaty and the Weimar Constitution … and advocated temporary dictatorial rule.’ He was later nicknamed the: ‘“crown jurist” of the Third Reich’ (Lilla, 2001: 49–50) and defined politics, in his racist political treatise The Concept of the Political (1927), as an opposition to the Other, to the stranger, to the enemy, and claimed that: ‘The essence of the political existence of a people is based on its capacity to define the friend and the enemy’ (Schmitt, 1976: 76). Canetti (1962: 73) further comments on this in his influential Crowds and Power where he describes war as the clash between two masses and adds that:

it is always the enemy who started it, even if he was not the first to speak out, he was certainly planning it; and if he was not actually planning it, he was thinking of it; and, if he was not thinking of it, he would have thought of it.

Compare this with Hitler's pamphlet The National-Socialist Party and the German National Conservative Party (1922), which claimed explicitly to lead: ‘The movement which unites those that strengthen this Germanism (Deutschtum) day by day, not only in words, but in all the thousand fold deeds of human activity’ (Hitler, 1987: 21).

A direct consequence of the rise and radicalisation of Völkisch-Deutschtum in German society was to be a profound cultural uneasiness in those who were not deemed part of the German people; and this in turn led to a rise of anti-Semitism (for Jews were understood to be of a different race and as such became the scapegoats for all the troubles of German society); later this led to the persecution of all those ‘others’ who were considered corrupting or of trying to undermine the German people (e.g. communists, homosexuals, the disabled or eugenically racially unfit ‘useless eaters’, and, of course, Jews).

The result was a profound intellectual and social friction and unease in the Germany of the early twentieth century, which contributed to the Great War and, ultimately, to the disaster of National Socialism. It is only by considering Buber's philosophy, his social, political and educational views, within this historical framework that we can understand fully his thought and its lasting importance.

Buber's dialogue with the conflicts of his times

As we said above, commentators usually dialogue with the text and concentrate on specific, or perhaps even narrow, readings of Buber's views in I and Thou; that is, they concentrate on enquiring into, discovering, and analysing particular facets of the text and the implications of this for various fields, such as theology, education and ethics. However, by allowing the text to dialogue with its times one can appreciate another hidden facet; this discovery enriches our understanding of the text and of Buber's views; and it allows us to appreciate the text's social and political foundations, as well as its lasting implications. As we noted earlier, I and Thou was written between 1919 and 1922 and published in 1923. Therefore, it was written during a period of great intellectual and social tension in Germany. Such tension was the source of profound conflict: between humankind and God; between the human being and work; and between human beings or, as Buber put it in a famous later book, Between Man and Man (1961).

The first and most fundamental conflict is that between humanity and God. Buber identifies God as the ultimate or everlasting Thou, and that the only way a human being has to establish a relation with God is through the I—Thou relation, because this relation is based on an encounter with a very deep meaning and infinite content. The I—It relation, as will become clear below, can never account successfully for the kind of relationship between a human being and God, as God can never be addressed as an object, can never be addressed from ‘above’ by a human being. Vermes (1994: 138) notes that:

the everlasting You preserves the many meanings and shades of meaning integral to belief in the indefinability and inscrutability of God, yet at the same time keeps intact, and even enhances, the traditional doctrine of close and intimate contact with him … ‘everlasting’ here reflects no knowledge of God's eternity, but only the impossibility of ever being other than You. You must by nature be everlasting You. We may experience its absence as well as its presence, but that absence can never take on the remoteness of an It.

Vermes (1994: 137) also notes:

[Buber] refuses to recognise a God ‘believed in’. He acknowledges instead a God ‘lived with’. A God with believed desires, qualities, plans, likes, and dislikes is for him an It-God, a subject of speculation, but never the vis-à-vis to whom man says You. The same careful rejection of every temptation to consider God as an object is conspicuous in I and Thou, when Buber writes of Him as: ‘… .that Being which confronts us immediately, momentarily and lastingly face to face, that which can rightly only be addressed, not expressed’.

Thus, within this perspective God is not an entity to be merely ‘believed in’, with whom no certain communication is possible; rather within this perspective God is an entity that human beings ‘live with’ and with whom true communication is not only possible, but necessary—that is, there is true communication, true conversation, between human beings and God, there is always dialogue between a human being and God (cf. Katz, 2006: 261–263). An interesting implication of this is that, for Buber, prayers are always dialogical and petitionary in character (cf. Widmer, 2004: 18) and should not be understood as attempts to bring about a change of outcome or to influence the outcome of events, which would equate prayers with some sort of incantation and as superstition; rather, prayers are about reflecting upon the character and purpose of our lives as well as an expression of devotion to God through the way events take place (cf. Phillips, 1981; Evans, 1998: 28; Clack and Clack, 2008: 150–151).

This is an accurate reading of Buber's views, but it is also a narrow reading of human spirituality as it is based on the internal argument of I and Thou; it is based on the dialogue between theologians and Buber's text I and Thou. However, if we allow the text to dialogue with its Zeitgeist, then human relations with God, with the ultimate Thou may be seen from a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• New Directions in the Philosophy of Education Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series editors' preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Martin Buber's life of dialogue
• 1 Buber and his times
• 2 Buber, Russell and Lukács: Utopia
• 3 Buber and pacifism
• 4 Buber and Fanon
• 5 Buber and the Holocaust
• 6 Buber and moral education
• 7 Buber and adult education
• 8 Buber and peace in the Middle East
• 9 Buber and interculturalism in Brazil
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index