Dialogically Speaking

Maurice Friedman's Interdisciplinary Humanism

Kramer

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781498273398
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

What makes us authentically human? According to Maurice Friedman, world-renowned Martin Buber scholar, translator, and biographer, it is genuine dialogue. When there's a willingness for dialogue, Friedman says, then one must 'navigate' moment-by-moment. It's a listening process. Friedman addresses our humanity in ever-unique ways through his dialogue with philosophy, literature, religion, and psychotherapy. At least two things make this book new. Friedman presents his wide-ranging thought directly in five original essays forming an intertextual compass, which is then elaborated upon by colleagues familiar with his work. Second, a special feature of this book is found at the end of each part which invites readers to engage with questions drawn from and pointing toward Friedman's writing. The book's intended audience includes teachers, scholars, and students interested in dialogical approaches to any of the human sciences. In a time when we are in danger of losing our human birthright, Friedman's interdisciplinary insights point us again to the touch of the other.

part one

Philosophy as Dialogue

My particular concern as a philosophical anthropologist is for the wholeness and uniqueness of the human. I am not concerned merely with describing values and ideals but with what makes the human human, what is essential to our existence as human persons in direct and indirect relationship with one another and with the environments in which we are set.”

—Maurice Friedman

1

Becoming Authentically Human

The Consciousness of Dialogue

Maurice Friedman

“The limits of the possibility of dialogue are the limits of awareness.”

—Martin Buber, Between Man and Man

Becoming authentically human in the truest sense of the word is our becoming as persons. Situated within the tension of the “is” and the “ought” in our personal, communal, and social existence, one comes to awareness as a self, not just through one’s individuality and not just through one’s differences from others but in dialogue with others. Because one lives as a separate self, yet in relation to other persons and to society, present, past and to come, we need an image of authentic humanness to direct us toward finding a meaningful way of life. Whether it is an image shared by only one person or by a society as a whole, the individual stands in unique personal relation to it. One’s image of authentic humanness is not some objective, universal Saint Francis or Gandhi, but the Saint Francis or Gandhi who emerges from one’s own meeting with this historical and legendary figure.

Authenticity

The image of authentic humanness does not mean some fully formed, conscious model of what one should become—certainly not anything simply imposed on the individual by the culture, or any mere conformity with society through identification with its goals. Rather, for each one of us it is made up of many images and half-formed images, and it is itself constantly changing and evolving. It proceeds and develops through every type of personal encounter we have; a friend stands by us in a crisis; a poet speaks to us through his poems; a great historical figure affects us through the impact she had on those among whom she lived; the characters of novels and plays seize our imaginations and enter into our lives through a dialogue we carry on with them in the wordless depths of our being. Even when it occurs through ideal types such as the knight, the courtier, the Roman citizens, the Spartan, and the saint, the image of authentic humanness implies a more concrete representation of what the human is and should be rather than abstract, philosophical concepts. We cannot understand authentic humanness through some general conception of human nature, but again and again through the concrete uniqueness of single persons who realize their humanity by becoming what only they can become.

The image of authentic humanness therefore distinguishes between our potentiality and the direction we give to our potentiality. Such terms as self-fulfillment, self-expression, and self-realization are comforting to many in our age who vaguely feel that they are living without expressing themselves; yet they offer little real help toward an image of authentic humanness, for they leave unanswered the question of what direction one must take in order to “realize” or meaningfully “express” the self. If we had only one set of potentialities, then the question could be simplified to one of realizing them or not realizing them. But our potentialities are, in fact, legion. To give our potentialities direction means to decide—not consciously, but again and again through the response of one’s whole being—what is the more and what is the less authentic choice in a particular situation, what is the more and what is the less authentic response, and in what way is it ours because it is true for us and we have committed ourselves to be true to it. We become ourselves through each particular action; we choose ourselves in each act of becoming.

For this reason, it is becoming authentically human and not my universal precept that enables me to say, “Nothing human is alien to me.” Becoming authentically human enters into and forms that attitude which makes me ready to meet and respond to any persons whatever as a human being with human dignity, someone I stand open to know, to respect, perhaps even to love. Thus becoming authentically human plays an essential role in linking one moment of realized dialogue with another. It is, often, the very form in which dialogue remains potential, awaiting its actualization.

The Consciousness of Dialogue

Buber’s classic presentation of his philosophy of dialogue is his poetic book I and Thou. Here he distinguishes between the “I-Thou” relationship that is direct, mutual, present, and open, and the “I-It,” or subject-object, relation in which one relates to the other only indirectly and non-mutually, knowing and using the other. What is decisive is the relationship itself—whether it is sharing or possessing, imposing on the other or helping her to unfold, valuing the relationship in itself or valuing it only as a means to an end.

Buber’s I-Thou philosophy is concerned with the difference between mere existence and authentic existence, between being human at all and being more fully human, between remaining fragmented and bringing the conflicting parts of oneself into an active unity, between partial and fuller relationships with others. It is only in a direct, mutual relationship that I grasp concretely the unique value of the other, experience the other’s side of the relationship. From one moment of meeting to another, I carry the other with me, as it were, as one for whom I am responsible, one to whom I am ready to respond when we meet again. No one ever fully becomes a “whole person.” But one may move in the direction of greater wholeness through greater awareness and fuller response in each new situation.

As the I of the I-It is different from the I of I-Thou, so is the consciousness of the I-It relation and the I-Thou relationship. The consciousness of I-Thou is not only fuller than that of I-It; it is also qualitatively different. Only in I-Thou is the unique known of and for itself; only in I-Thou is there real presence and presentness; only in I-Thou is the ineffable “suchness” of the particular met and recognized in itself.

The Interhuman

“The inmost growth of the self does not take place, as people like to suppose today,” writes the great Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, “through our relationship to ourselves, but through being made present by the other and knowing that we are made present by him.”1 The sphere in which person meets person has been ignored because it possesses no smooth continuity. Its experience has been annexed to the soul and to the world, so that what happens to an individual can be distributed between outer and inner impressions. But when two individuals “happen” to each other, there is an essential remainder that is common to them but that reaches out beyond the special sphere of each. That remainder is the basic reality, the “sphere of the between.” In an essential relation the barriers of individual being are breached and “the other becomes present not merely in the imagination or feeling but in the depths of one’s substance, so that one experiences the mystery of the other being in the mystery of one’s own.” This is the heart of true friendship and of genuine love. The two persons participate in one another’s lives not merely psychologically, as images or feelings in one another’s psyches, but ontologically as a manifest, even if not continuous, reality of the between.

In us something takes place that takes place nowhere else in nature. One person turns to another as this particular being in order to communicate with the other in that sphere of the between that reaches out beyond the special sphere of each. In that sphere what happens cannot be exactly distributed between an “outer” event and an “inner” impression. This realm of the between exists on the far side of the subjective and on this side of the objective “on the narrow ridge where I and Thou meet.” This sphere of the interhuman is where the human comes into being, and it is our contact with the really real.

Since “the between” is not a fixed object but a reality that comes and goes, it cannot be objectified. The psychological, what happens within the soul of each, is only the secret accompaniment to the dialogue. The meaning of this dialogue is found in neither one nor the other of the partners, nor in both added together but in their interchange. What is essential is not what goes on within the minds of the partners in a relationship but what happens between them. For this reason, Buber is unalterably opposed to that “psychologism” that wishes to remove the reality of relationship into the separate psyches of the participants. This distinction between the “dialogical” and the “psychological” constitutes a radical attack on the psychologism of our age.

The meeting between persons is hardly a mere going outward; for in its depth such meeting includes our penetrating to the very heart of the other by what Buber calls “imagining the real”—a bold swinging to the life of the other so that to some extent one concretely imagines what the other is thinking, feeling, and willing. Only from such a meeting, in fact, can we know that there is not just one inner—myself—, and one outer—others. Only if we can get beyond this deep-seated prejudice of inner and outer can we understand the sense in which our existential meetings—whether with persons, animals, plants, or rocks—are, in their betweenness, meeting with the reality that can be known only in the between. As every elec...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgment
• Introduction: My Dialogue with Dialogue
• Part One: Philosophy as Dialogue
• Part Two: Literature as Dialogue
• Part Three: Religion as Dialogue
• Part Four: Psychotherapy as Dialogue
• Conclusion: Confirmation through Conflict?
• Conflict in the Dialogue of Touchstones
• Annotated Bibliography