"The Narrow Ridge" -- Part 3

“As sword sharpens sword, so a person sharpens the countenance of a friend.”

                                                             —  Proverbs 27:17

        As we have seen, Buber introduced “the narrow ridge” in his inaugural lecture to show the nature of his thinking as a continually shifting process of change—as the “ever anew” of emerging dialogical moments with being rather than the “once for all” of static, abstract, timeless systems of thought (see Turning to the Other 170). Yet later in his inaugural lectures he uses the term as a metaphor for the evanescent reality of “the between” which exists for the moment that dialogue is enacted.

What happens in fleeting moments of “encounter”—whether as part of an authentic conversation, a deep pedagogical exchange, a genuine embrace, or a serious duel—this cannot be understood by means of psychological concepts; it is something ontic, partaking in being itself. It is something that has its being between the two participants in the dialogue and it transcends both of them. In the most powerful moments of dialogue, where in truth “deep calls unto deep,” it becomes unmistakably clear that it is not the wand of the individual or of the social, but of a third thing which draws the circle around what is happening. On the far side of the subjective, on the near side of the objective, on the narrow ridge where I and Thou meet—there is the realm of “the between.”                 —  “What is Man?” 203-04

        Here the “narrow ridge” is an event, the event of the encounter of I and Thou. This event constitutes “the between,” that which is really real, according to Buber’s thinking. (See Turning to the Other 157)