Dialogue as a Trans-disciplinary Concept

Martin Buber’s Philosophy of Dialogue and its Contemporary Reception

Paul Mendes-Flohr

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110402377
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish History

This volume of essays constitutes a critical evaluation of Martin Buber's concept of dialogue as a trans-disciplinary hermeneutic method. So conceived, dialogue has two distinct but ultimately convergent vectors. The first is directed to the subject of one's investigation: one is to listen to the voice of the Other and to suspend all predetermined categories and notions that one may have of the Other; dialogue is, first and foremost, the art of unmediated listening. One must allow the voice of the Other to question one's pre-established positions fortified by professional, emotional, intellectual and ideological commitments. Dialogue is also to be conducted between various disciplinary perspectives despite the regnant tendency to academic specialization. In recent decades' an increasing number of scholars have come to share Buber's position to foster cross-disciplinary conversation, if but to garner, as Max Weber aruged, "useful questions upon which he would not so easily hit upon from his own specialized point of view." Accordingly, the objective of this volume is to explore the reception of Buber's philosophy of dialogue in some of the disciplines that fell within the purview of his own writings: Anthropology, Hasidism, Religious Studies, Psychology and Psychiatry.

Endnotes

1 Buber to S. H. Bergmann, letter dated 16 April 1936. Buber, Briefwechsel aus sieben Jahrzehnten, ed. Grete Schaeder (Heidelberg: Verlag Lambert Scheidner, 1973), vol 2: 589.

2 On the complex trajectory of Buber’s academic career, see my article “Buber’s Rhetoric,” in: Martin Buber: A Contemporary Perspective, ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr
(Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities/Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2002), 1–24.

3 Rosenzweig to Eugen Meyer, letter dated 23 January 1923, in Rosenzweig. Der Mensch und sein Werk: Gesammelte Schriften, Part 1: Briefe und Tagebücher, ed. Rachel Rosenzweig and Edith Rosenzweig-Scheinmann, II: 883.

4 Buber, Königtum Gottes (Berlin: Schocken Verlag, 1932)

5 Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in: From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1948), 134 f.

6 Ibid., 135.

7 Ibid., 155.

8 Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), vol. 2: 375.

9 The Dialogical Turn: New Roles for Sociology in the Postdisciplinary Age, eds. Charles Camic and Hans Joas, (Landham, Maryland: Rowman and Littefield, 2003).

10 Ibid., 5

11 Ibid., 9f. The citation is from Levine, Visions of the Sociological Tradition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 297.

12 Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 134 f.

13 Cf. Dimitri Gawronsky, “Ernst Cassirer: His Life and Work”, in The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, ed., P. A. Schlipp (La Salle, IL, 1973), 34f.

* Originally delivered in May 2012 as the inaugural lecture of the annual Martin Buber Lecture of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Jerusalem, and published in the Proceedings of the Academy, VIII/6 (2013). Published here with the kind permission of Professor Habermas and the Israel Academy.

14 Tuvia Rübner and Dafna Mach, eds., Briefwechsel Martin Buber – Ludwig Strauß (Frankfurt a.M: Luchterhand, 1990), 229.

15 The present text has much benefited from the careful editing of Deborah Greniman of the Academy’s Publications Department. Prof. Paul Mendes-Flohr kindly read the edited text and made some important corrections.

16 Martin Brenner, Jüdische Kultur in der Weimarer Republik (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2000), 32ff.

17 Franz Rosenzweig, ‘Upon Opening the Jüdisches Lehrhaus’, in idem, On Jewish Learning, ed. Nahum Norbert Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1955), 98.

18 Brenner, Jüdische Kultur (above, note 3), 90, 96.

19 Notker Hammerstein, Die Geschichte der Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1989), vol. 1:120.

20 Paul Arthur Schilpp and Maurice Friedman, eds., The Philosophy of Martin Buber (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1967). Among the participants in this volume of critical evaluations of Buber’s philosophy were Gabriel Marcel, Charles Harthorne, Emmanuel Levinas, Emil Brunner, Max Brod, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Jacob Taubes, C. F. von Weizsäcker, Helmut Kuhn and Walter Kaufmann.

21 On Buber’s interest in Hasidism see Hans-Joachim Werner, Martin Buber (Frankfurt a/M–New York: Campus, 1994), 146ff.

22 Gershom G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1995), 238.

23 Martin Buber, ‘Autobiographical Fragments’, in Schilpp and Friedman, The Philosophy of Martin Buber (above, note 7), 26.

24 Ibid., 35.

25 Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans., Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Continuum, 1957), 11.

26 Ibid., 56: “But in times of sickness it comes about that the world of It, no longer penetrated and fructified by the inflowing world of Thou as by living streams but separated and stagnant, a gigantic ghost of the fens, overpowers man.”

27 On Humboldt, see Martin Buber, Zwiesprache, in idem, Das dialogische Prinzip (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1979), 178; on Feuerbach, see Buber, Das Problem des Menschen (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1982), 58 ff. On the stimuli that Buber received from his contemporaries, see especially Michael Theunissen, The Other: Studies in the Social Ontology of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Buber,trans., by Christopher Macann (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984), §46.

28 Buber, Zwiesprache (above, note 14), 153.

29 Martin Buber, Die Frage an den Einzelnen, in idem, Das dialogische Prinzip (above, note 14), 233; on this issue, see Werner, Martin Buber (above, note 8), 48ff.

30 I and Thou (above, note 12), 87.

31 Theunissen, The Other (above, note 14), 291.

32 Nathan Rotenstreich, “The Right and the Limitations of Martin Buber’s Dialogical Thought,” in: Schilpp and Friedman, The Philosophy of Martin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Paul Mendes-Flohr
• Jürgen Habermas
• Julia Matveev
• Jeffrey Andrew Barash
• Samuel Hayim Brody
• Ran HaCohen
• Irene Kajon
• Karl-Josef Kuschel
• Yoram Bilu
• Andreas Kraft
• Henry Abramovitch
• Alan J. Flashman
• Aleida Assmann
• Contributors
• Endnotes
• Subject index