"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.”