Turning to the Other. Donovan D. Johnson

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СКАЧАТЬ of his rhetoric in testifying to concrete human existence and the I-Thou relation. Pointing is a kind of gesture made in dialogue through which the person doing the pointing directs the attention of his interlocutor toward something present but unnoticed by the interlocutor. The metaphor of pointing thus sums up the rhetoric of Buber’s witness: “That which there has been to say was . . . a pointing, an indication of reality.”169

Buber claims, “I have no teaching. I only point to something. . . . I take him who listens to me by the hand and lead him to the window. I open the window and point to what is outside. I have no teaching, but I carry on a conversation.”170 At first glance, Buber’s claim to have no teaching seems disingenuous. Yet it serves to highlight his rhetorical move of pointing. To take his auditor/reader and “lead him to the window” requires that the person follow Buber to Buber’s window. This following already puts the person in a dialogical relation with Buber, who thereby “carries on a conversation” with him.

The outlook at the window is akin to what Paul Ricoeur calls the world before the text. Ricoeur’s analysis helps to give us a sense of the dialogical dynamic here. A text presents a world, what Paul Ricoeur calls “the world of the text.”171 The reader who learns to approach the text as Thou, that is, with the stance of the I in the primary word I-Thou, appropriates, enters into, the world that the text presents as a proposed world. This proposed world “is not behind the text, as a hidden intention would be, but in front of it, as that which the work unfolds, discovers, reveals.”172 Ricoeur continues, expressing in his terms the dynamics of Buber’s I-Thou encounter, Begegnung, in the act of reading: “Henceforth, to understand is to understand oneself in front of the text. It is not a question of imposing upon the text our finite capacity of understanding, but of exposing ourselves to the text and receiving from it an enlarged self, which would be the proposed existence corresponding in the most suitable way to the world proposed.”173 The instrument of pointing is the trope signifying Buber’s discursive method. Like the finger of the person doing the pointing, what is at stake is not the instrument. The instrument only functions properly if it helps the interlocutor to see beyond it to what the person pointing intends for him to see. This seeing, when undertaken by the whole person, involves teshuvah, turning as an awakening, a transformation of all of the perspectives of the one who looks.

      In an essay on Buber’s ethics, Maurice Friedman confirms how I-Thou is self-authenticating, and therefore stands apart from linear discourse:

The ultimate check of the authenticity of an I-Thou relationship is the verification that comes in dialogue itself. Therefore, Buber does not prove his moral philosophy. Rather, he points to the concrete meeting . . . in which alone it can be tried and tested. Not only the context of ethics, but also the formal nature and basis of ethics itself must be validated, verified, and authenticated in “the lived concrete.”174

      In this way the interlocutor’s confirmation from within becomes his part in I-Thou dialogue with Buber.

Buber presents pointing as the alternative to linear conceptual discourse for two major reasons. First, it best fits the nature of that to which Buber is referring, the I-Thou relation. To refer to it by means of any field of discourse is to reduce it to nonrelational categories. Second, the nature of the era in which Buber and his interlocutors live requires this indirect rhetoric. This era of modernity is the time of “the eclipse of God,” in which the obviousness of I-Thou is overlooked, hidden in plain sight. “I have no teaching. I only point to something. I point to reality, I point to something in reality that had not or had too little been seen.”175 Buber fully lays out this problem of modern spiritual obtuseness in his extended critique of modernity in part two of I and Thou.

Pointing, the act of communication by gesture, draws from the depths of Buber’s Hasidic roots. It keeps his message in the realm of lived life, even through the use of conceptual abstractions. It puts us, as Buber’s readers, in the position of the seeker who goes as a pilgrim and learns from the zaddik simply by watching how he laces his boots.176 The zaddik, like Enoch the cosmic cobbler, stitches together heaven and earth simply by his living his life as a zaddik.177

      4. Breakthroughs toward a Dialogical Rhetoric

Buber consistently sides against the abstractness of conceptual thought and for the unmediated concreteness of the transcendent encounter—yet this reality is by its nature riven with paradox: “I have, indeed, no doctrine of a primal ground (Urgrund) to offer. I must only witness for that meeting in which all meetings with others are grounded, and you cannot meet the absolute.”178 With these words Buber presents the paradox of grounding without ground, meeting without meeting. He takes this further by characterizing the clash of mental construct with unmediated experience as the great paradox: “The primary reality is the working of the Absolute on the human spirit. The human spirit stands up to the Overwhelming [dem Übergewaltigen] through the power of its gaze; thus the human spirit experiences the Absolute as the great Over-Against, as the Thou as such [als das grosse Gegenüber, als das Du an sich].”179 When the absolute/unconditional works on the human spirit, it enters human experience (“the power of its gaze”)—and thereby human discourse—as encounter with “the Thou as such” (das Du an sich, echoing Kant’s das Ding an sich). Hasidic legend gave Buber one way to formulate this paradox—as myth: “the myth of I and Thou” is the myth “of the one calling out and the one being called out to, of the finite that enters into the infinite and of the infinite that requires the finite.”180 In this formulation we see Buber’s breakthrough to his great innovation, the fruit of his struggle in the months following Landauer’s death, the coming to the fore of the I-Thou relation in his thought as the foundation of his discourse, the axiom and framework of his witness.181

      A second breakthrough in Buber’s months of struggle was his formulation of the duality of the primal words I-Thou and I-It, a formulation he intended to use not to build a comprehensive system but to point back to that which was overlooked, the concrete experience of his reader:

The theme that was dictated to the thinker experiencing here was not suited to being developed into a comprehensive system. It was, in fact, concerned about the great presupposition for the beginning of philosophizing and its continuation, about the duality of the primal words. It was important to indicate this duality.182

Buber, as “the thinker experiencing,” received, discovered, as an imperative theme or philosophical foundation, the axiom of the duality of I-Thou and I-It as the two primal positions of concrete human experience. It is true Buber had made an early distinction between “orienting,” a reifying stance, and “realizing,” a making present, in Daniel;183 yet now this distinction has evolved to become the foundational distinction between I-It and I-Thou. His breakthrough here was to identify the two stances as the primal word pairs I-It and I-Thou and to locate the I-Thou encounter no longer in the subject or subjectivity but in “the between.”184 Encounter was about neither subject nor object but rather about the between, the interface where subject meets subject.

The I-Thou encounter now stood out as the treasure which Buber had recovered for mankind: “Although it is the basic relationship in the life of each man with all existing being, it was barely paid attention to. It had to be pointed out; it has to be shown forth in the foundations of existence. A neglected, obscured, primal reality was to be made visible.”185 Buber makes clear that this theme, the primal reality of the concrete, relational nature of human existence, had become lost: “it was barely paid attention to,” it was “neglected” and “obscured.” In the face of this loss or forgetting, the imperative stood forth for Buber: “It had to be pointed out; it has to be shown forth in the foundations of existence; [it] was to be made visible.” That is, “The thinking, the teaching had to be determined by the task of pointing. Only what was connected with the pointing to what was to be pointed to was admissible.”186 With these last words, “Only what was connected with the pointing to what was to be pointed to was admissible,” Buber’s rigorous self-discipline as a witness/thinker/writer stands out.

      Buber’s focus as a thinker and teacher, as one who was summoned to be a witness to СКАЧАТЬ