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)