Turning to the Other — “Otherness” is essential to dialogue

The Other is an entity completely separate from and independent of the self. The Other as a separate entity exists outside the control of the self and can be only partly known to the self.

Dialogue consists of a fundamental tension between the otherness of the Thou versus the reality of one’s contact with the Thou as the Other. Buber dismisses the idea of the psyche as an all-inclusive totality. He calls this modern view “the psychologizing of the world” and insists on its opposite, the absolute distinction between the self and the Other. This otherness is absolutely necessary in order for I-Thou relating to take place. He equally stresses the other side of the tension:  the reality of the contact between oneself and the Other in the dialogical moment, the act of relating:

“The actual Other who meets me meets me in such a way that my soul comes in contact with his as with something that it is not and that it cannot become. My soul does not and cannot include the Other, and yet can nonetheless approach the Other in this most real contact.”  (“Religion and Modern Thinking,” 88; see my book Turning to the Other, 273)

To Buber, the difference and the distance between an I and a Thou, their irreducible otherness to each other, is an absolute prerequisite for their dialogical encounter. This otherness, which Buber calls a “primal setting at a distance,” makes it possible for two persons to enter into relation with each other. The complement to this distance is the capacity of each to enter into relation, to turn to the Other in openness and affirmation. The situation of otherness brings a double contingency into play: the I and the Thou can each independently decide whether or not to turn to the Other. When the distance is recognized and the turning to the Other is mutual, this distance becomes a “span of relation,” what Buber also calls “the between.” This mutual turning is the dialogical event. In this mutual turning, each person addresses and confirms the Other and in turn is addressed and confirmed by the Other. In this event of genuine meeting

The inmost growth of the self is . . . accomplished . . . in the relation between one person and the Other, between [the two persons engaged] in the mutuality of the making present—in the making present  of another self and in the knowledge that one is made present in one’s own self by the Other—together with the mutuality of acceptance, of affirmation, and confirmation. . . . It is from one person to another that the heavenly bread of self-being is passed.  (Buber, “Distance and Relation,” The Knowledge of Man 71; see my book Turning to the Other, 150)

“I am human, I consider nothing human alien to me.”

 Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto. “I am human, I consider nothing human alien to me.” 

         Publius Terentius Afer, an African, a Berber, was born a slave near Carthage in what is today Libya. He was taken to Rome by his owner, the Roman Senator Terentius Lucanus, from whom he took the name Terentius, “Terence.” His patron educated him, then freed him because of his unusual intellectual talents. In his short life (he likely died on a sea voyage to Greece when he was perhaps in his mid-twenties) he wrote six plays, still extant. As a man who underwent significant social and cultural transformations on his journey from the margins to the center of his world, he was uniquely qualified to know the meaning of homo sum . . . , his most famous line.

        So too Martin Buber, who was born in Vienna at the heart of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was raised on its fringes in what is today Ukraine and spoke Polish as the language of his childhood schooling. Decades later, Buber became a German citizen. He lived in Germany, first in Berlin, then in Heppenheim, from about 1900 to 1938. He had a very productive career as a writer and German-Jewish cultural leader in the German-speaking world until he was forced by Nazism to emigrate to Palestine at the age of sixty. This was ten years before the State of Israel was born. Hebrew then became the language of his daily life and writings for his last 27 years. He put years of effort into advancing dialogue between Jews and Arabs in Palestine.

        In spite of the differences between Terence’s trajectory and Buber’s, Buber, like Terence, knew the power of “I am human, I consider nothing human alien to me” from within.  

"The narrow ridge" — A hike in the Dolomites inspired a lifelong metaphor

 Buber once illustrated his famous metaphor of “the narrow ridge” with a reference to hiking in the Dolomites, the rugged mountain range in northern Italy near the Austrian border. Perhaps he hiked there during his sojourn in Florence when he was in his late twenties. At any rate, he wrote this to Hugo Bergmann, his lifelong friend with whom he had associated in Prague during their student days:

“We may not carry the moral into faith . . . . The moral is a shelter that faith shatters. . . . Faith . . . is a narrow way between two abysses, such as I once encountered in the Dolomites.             

       (Buber to Hugo Bergmann in 1940; see Turning to the Other 77, 99-100)

 

Seceda Ridge, Italian Dolomites

We do not know what ridge Buber hiked but this is a famous one.

"Turning to the Other"

“Turning to the Other” [die Hinwendung] is a term of Buber’s which I have used as the title of my book. “Turning” is the centerpiece of Buber’s vision: “Turning stands in the center of the Jewish conception of the way of humankind” (“The Way of Man,” 164).

Buber takes the word “turn” from the Hebrew Bible. There the Hebrew word shub, “to turn” or “to return,” is the core of the message of the prophets, who called people to “turn” . . . to God. Throughout Buber’s thinking he continually connected relating among human beings and relating between humans and the Unconditional, so it was natural for him to apply the prophets’ word to the inter-human level. As he put it in I and Thou, “Every particular Thou is a glimpse through to the eternal Thou” (§44b). Thus when Buber calls out to us to “turn to the Other,” he is challenging us to address other persons in the openness and fullness of dialogue. He expresses what he means by this turning most clearly in “Dialogue,” the companion essay to I and Thou:

The fundamental inner movement of the life of dialogue is one’s turning toward the Other. . . . If you look at someone and address him, you turn to him—of course with the body, but also in indispensible measure with the soul—in that you direct your atten­tion to him. What is the essential action, done with one’s essential being? This: that out of the random incomprehensibility of all that lies at hand this one person comes to the fore and becomes present to us. In this emergence, the world that we perceive shifts from being an indifferent multiplicity of points to a setting which is finite in itself, yet now given form and released from its own randomness. . . . This turning to the Other is fully realized when we come to know the Other in the particularity of his existence [Dasein] end even mentally embrace him so that the situations common to both the Other and oneself are experienced from the point of view of the Other. (Between Man and Man, 22-23; see Turning to the Other, 149-50, 156)

Later in this passage Buber discusses the counterpart to this turning to the Other. He calls it “bending backwards.” This bending backwards takes place when

a person withdraws from accepting with his essential being another person in his particularity—this particularity of the Other is by no means to be cir­cumscribed by the circle of one’s own self and though it may substantially touch and move his soul it is in no way immanent in it—and lets the Other exist only as his own experience, only as a "part of myself." When a person does this, dialogue becomes an illusion, the mysterious intercourse between one human world and another becomes only a game to be played, and in the rejection of the real life confronting him, the essence of all reality begins to erode away.  (“Dialogue,” 23-24; see Turning to the Other, 195, 232)

Following this distinction, my book celebrates Buber’s invitation to dialogue, “Turning to the Other,” and his rejection of its opposite, “bending over backwards.”

Buber’s “Dialogue”—More Than Just a Chat

 

The word “dialogue” originates from the Greek roots, dia (“across,” “between”) and legein (“to speak, pick out words”). The common definition of “dialogue” equates it with conversation. Both dialogue and conversation generally mean an informal exchange of thoughts and sentiments between two or more persons by spoken words. In the field of drama, the word is used to refer to scripted conversations. Yet in the general meaning of the term the speaking between persons is unscripted, spontaneous, unstructured, and open-ended.

Buber would distinguish this general sense of dialogue from the focus of his concern. His distinction between I-It and I–Thou helps to show his focus. Dialogue in the I-It mode involves a verbal exchange that takes place with a partial or even superficial involvement of the participant. One engages in such dialogue to get or achieve some predetermined goal, to pass the time, or to make a superficial connection, but it involves no little or no risk or transparency, and thus no significant potential for change to oneself or the other.

By contrast, the dialogue that is Buber’s focus is dialogue in the I-Thou mode. In such dialogue, the participant turns to the dialogue partner bringing the whole self to each moment of interaction in full openness, self-disclosure, and risk, being fully present to the present moment. With this openness, the participant is fully present to the shaping power of the dialogue as well. Each moment is “unforeseen, unprecedented, unmediated, ever anew.”

Dialogue in such terms is a fluid, very dynamic interaction from which the person who has entered into it can emerge to a greater or lesser degree changed. It is by full participation in such dialogue that “the bread of self-being is passed from one person to another in mutual acceptance, affirmation, and confirmation” (Buber, “Distance and Relation,” 71; see Turning to the Other 150).

Thus the reality of dialogue as Buber envisions it is not just “having a neighborly chat.” Dialogue in Buber’s terms involves such a complete “turning to the other” that it resonates to the very depths of one’s being.