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Foreword
- Syracuse University Press
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ix Foreword Kenneth P. Kramer Aperson does not spend his entire life polishing a single lens unless doing so quickens his awareness, hones his perspectives, and releases a continuity of significant discoveries. Not shackled by the imperatives of classical pedagogy, Professor Maurice Friedman’s intellectual career, which spans sixty years of study, teaching, writing, speaking, traveling, mentoring, and cofounding the Institute for Dialogical Psychotherapy, has engendered grammars of genuine dialogue. With illuminating range, he has applied Martin Buber’s philosophy of dialogue to the human sciences , asking not only what we know but also how we come to know. Viewed from the standpoint of a Jewish philosopher writing as a philosophical anthropologist, Friedman’s central subject has been the I-Thou relationship, an alternative way of knowing beyond individualism and collectivism. This foundation of Buber’s work, according to Friedman’s concluding sentence in his introduction to Buber’s culminating work, The Knowledge of Man (1965), “refers us with a profundity unequaled in our time to [our] still unfathomed relation to being and meaning.”1 Clearly, as this book shows, Martin Buber was the most deeply intellectual and spiritual presence in Friedman’s life. Although Friedman never studied formally with Buber, through Buber Friedman came to a deep concern with Hasidism, biblical x • FOREWORD Judaism (the Hebrew Bible), psychotherapy, education, social philosophy and social problems, existentialism, and the life of dialogue —all of which he has expressed in his writing and teaching over the years. What Friedman especially inherited from Buber was a profound caring about the question of how best to respond to each person’s unique address with one’s wholeness of being. A dialogically interhuman response to the immediate requires deep inner intention, which the Hasidim called kavana. Buber’s life gave Friedman one such expression of authentic dialogue, which, as Buber wrote, is “a part of our birthright as human beings, for only through it can we attain authentic human existence.”2 For this reason, Friedman wrote in his one-volume biography of Buber, Encounter on the Narrow Ridge, “In a time when we are in danger of losing our birthright as human beings, Martin Buber has given us again an image of the human.”3 Although Friedman did not meet Buber until after six years of immersion in his work, their first face-to-face encounter—on October 31, 1951, at the Hotel Marcy on Ninety-sixth Street in New York City—was both memorable and instructive for Friedman. Buber, who was staying in New York while teaching at the Jewish Theological Seminary, welcomed Friedman by looking deeply into his eyes while taking his hand. Friedman’s initial response was to feel how totally “other” Buber seemed. His eyes were of a depth, gentleness, and directness that Friedman had never before encountered. Indeed, in 1961, a year after Friedman had spent four months in Jerusalem with Buber, he asked himself, “What did I experience when I looked into Buber’s eyes?” Upon reflection , Friedman realized that when he looked into Buber’s eyes, he understood that Buber really included him and, for this very reason, also placed a demand on him to be fully present. This was by no means an easy demand! In this first encounter Buber told Friedman of his meeting several days before with the great poet T. S. Eliot in London. They [3.89.200.155] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 12:02 GMT) FOREWORD • xi had been brought together by Ronald Gregor Smith, translator of I and Thou (still the best translation despite Walter Kaufmann’s later one) and Between Man and Man. When Friedman asked Buber whether he did not find his own opinions different from those of Eliot, Buber replied: “When I meet a person I am not concerned with opinions but with the person.” Friedman rightly took this response as a reproach because, as he later realized, he had turned Buber and Eliot into positions in a dialectic within his own mind and lost their reality as dialogical persons. Springing from Friedman’s relation with Buber, beginning in the summer of 1950 and ending with Buber’s death in 1965, this work takes us from Friedman’s earliest contact with Buber, through Buber’s three visits to America, his wife’s death, Friedman ’s stay in Jerusalem, and the articulation of Buber’s culminating philosophy of the interhuman. To trace this chronology, Friedman draws extensively—particularly in chapters between Buber’s visits to America—on his personal...