Turning to the Other. Donovan D. Johnson

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СКАЧАТЬ Ellenberger, Discovery of the Unconscious, 448–50, 673.

      144. Buber, “Postscript,” 123–24 (my translation).

      145. Ellenberger, Discovery of the Unconscious, 890.

      146. Buber, unpublished motto of Ich und Du, quoted in Horwitz, Buber’s Way, 55.

      147. Buber, “Replies to My Critics,” 689.

      148. Buber, “How and Why,” 211.

      149. Buber, “How and Why,” 211.

      150. Buber, “Replies to My Critics,” 689.

      151. Buber, “Replies to My Critics,” 689.

      152. Plato, Letters 341c (translation modified). Friedman points out that this passage was a repeated reference point for Buber, Martin Buber’s Life and Work, 1:311. See Buber, “Religion and Philosophy,” 41.

      153. Buber, “Postscript,” 128.

      154. Buber, “Spirit and Body,” 146.

      155. Buber, “Spirit and Body,” 147.

      156. Buber, “Spirit and Body,” 148.

      Chapter 3

      Buber’s Task Finds its Rhetoric

      1. Buber’s Task: The Imperative to Bear Witness

To bear witness is to testify regarding an experience one has had. In Buber’s case, to bear witness is to testify to the reality of spiritual encounter, of I-Thou encounter, as he first came to know it in his response to reading the testament of the Baal-Shem-Tov. Buber’s testimony to encounter takes written form as his own testament, his public declaration expressing his life stance, his relation with what he has found to be of ultimate importance. The major components of this testament are Buber’s “My Way to Hasidism” and his “History of the Dialogical Principle,” which we have examined above,157 and I and Thou.

Buber makes clear that bearing witness, not abstract thought or argument, is the relevant means of communicating what he is attempting to proclaim. The depths that have opened to him are rooted in the concreteness of his individual human existence.158 Such realities are accessible only by direct apperception, not through abstract concepts, as he himself has stated: “Everything else may be discussed purely speculatively, but not our own existence. . . . Here witness is made.”159 The immediacy of one’s own personal existence requires witness, not discursive reasoning. Accordingly, the reality of dialogical mutuality is not subject to proof but, rather, to bearing witness, and the witness one bears has its effect because it is dialogical, the expression of an I to a Thou. It calls the one to whom witness is borne to witness to it as his or her own immediate apperception: “The existence of mutuality between God and man cannot be proved, just as God’s existence cannot be proved. Yet the one who dares to speak of it bears witness, and calls forth the witness of the one to whom he speaks.”160 Thus, witness is dialogical, for the voice of the witness calls forth its interlocutor’s inner attestation to the reality of which it speaks.

As Grete Schaeder points out, “It was not Buber’s task to transmit a message like the prophets or to admonish and censure in God’s name, but rather to demonstrate that the experience he had and the path he took were accessible to others. He therefore had to find a conceptual language to convey the subtle texture of his nonconceptual experience to make it comprehensible to others.”161 This search became Buber’s rhetorical task.

Buber’s purpose is to bear witness to an experience so that others can know that that experience is accessible: “To bear witness to an experience is my basic intention, but I am not primarily concerned with exhorting men; rather, with showing that experience to be one accessible to all in some measure, in some form.”162 In other words, as we have seen above, “Since I have received no message which might be passed on . . . but only had the experiences and attained the insights, my communication [had to relate] to what is discoverable by every man in his own existence.”163 His witness had to be such that it resonated with the inner life of his readers. Buber was clear about this in his “History of the Dialogical Principle”: “From this exceptional sequence [of his own spiritual initiation], thought led me now, ever more seriously, to the common, to that which is accessible in the experience of all.”164 Buber’s search for the common was a search for the language to express the foundations of spiritual life at the level of humanity, the foundations of spiritual existence that are true for all human beings, not just those who identify with a particular spiritual heritage or who participate in a particular community of faith.165 Buber describes the definitive sense of the dialogical nature of his task in bearing witness with these words: “If I am asked where the mutuality is to be found . . . all that remains to me is indirect pointing to certain events in a human life, which can scarcely be described, which experience spirit as encounter; and in the end, when this indirect pointing is not enough, there is nothing left for me but to appeal, my reader, to the witness of your own mysteries—somewhat buried, perhaps, but yet still accessible.”166 Buber expects his reader to test the truth of that to which he testifies by holding it up for comparison with the truth of the reader’s own inner life. For Buber, attestation is of the most inward kind.

      2. Indirect Communication: Buber’s Means of Bearing Witness

      Because the I-Thou relation is a primal lived reality, it is visible at a level other than that of the I-It world. Buber’s foundational distinction between lived reality and rational-conceptual thought necessitates a special rhetoric. He makes this clear:

When a man’s speech wishes to show, to show forth reality, obscured reality, it will not be able to avoid the paradoxical expression insofar as it touches on the reality between us and God. The lived [and not the conceived] reality of encounter is not subject to the logic forged in three millennia; where the complexio oppositorum rules, the law of contradiction is silent.167

Pointing to the I-Thou encounter requires indirect communication. Thus, Buber had to use unusual rhetorical tools to make this otherwise unknowable reality present to his readers. Along with Kierke­gaard, Buber “needed a form of rhetoric which would force people back onto their own resources, to take responsibility for their own existential choices, and to become who they are beyond their socially imposed identities.”168 Yet Buber does not take his rhetoric to the extreme that Kierke­gaard did in order to challenge his readers to turn and face the transcendent. Where Kierke­gaard used multiple pseudonyms and irony in his rhetoric of indirect communication, Buber uses pointing. His primary modes of bearing witness include such devices as a few carefully selected axiomatic formulations, multiple voices in dialogue within his text, and poetic-metaphorical imagery.

      3. Buber’s Invention: СКАЧАТЬ