Between You and I: Dialogical Phenomenology

5. Buber and His Critics

C h a P t e r 5 ................................... BuBer and his CritiCs In this chapter, I propose to engage Buber in dialogue with some of his most eloquent critics, Rosenstock-Huessy and Levinas. Engaging RosenstockHuessy ’s critique will help to appreciate the phenomenological character of Buber’s speech-based philosophy. Even more important however is it to engage Levinas’s influential but also tendentious and ultimately harmful critique of Buber. Levinas’s critique of Buber’s ethics of fellowship, oriented by an ethics of the responsibility to the face of the other, has received a certain notoriety within the contemporary Continental scholarship, but it may be based on an uncharitable and ultimately distorting reading of the dialogic philosopher. It is therefore urgent to examine this critique in a critical light, and reconsider the position of Buber in particular and the dialogical tradition in general within the contemporary Continental philosophical canon. rosenstoCk-huessY: names and Pronouns In the direct exchange with Buber (Philosophical Interrogations), RosenstockHuessy critiqued the philosophy of I–you connectedness for privileging personalist pronominal discourse at the expense of discourse involving names, and, concomitantly, for privileging the present time at the expense of history. In Rosenstock-Huessy’s words, “ich (I) and Du (Thou) are fictitious abbreviations for the real pluri-aged, named, ‘nationalized,’ and century-bound real person. To me, pronouns are omissions. . . . You are Mr. Friedman and Maurice Friedman long before you are I or Thou” (Rome, 1964, 32). Following Rosenstock-Huessy, Buber omitted the larger historical and futural dimensions of personhood from his account (“pronouns are omissions”) by focusing on the personal pronouns of direct address employed in the actual encounters between flesh-and-blood beings rather than on the usage of 162 Between You and i the personal name that precedes and exceeds these encounters. Buber thus excluded the past and the future from his philosophy of dialogue, and confined it narrowly to the present within which interpersonal relations take place. In his response, Buber conceded that “memory and promise are mingled in language, and both extend immeasurably beyond the birth and death of the speaker.” However, Buber observes that historicity does not capture the radical novelty of the “eternally new event” of “the saying,” which is irreducible to the historical sedimentation of “the said,” that is, the informational content of the utterance. Now, the saying as an event stands in the personal present, which cannot be derived from the past. It captures the untraceable being of each person, best witnessed in the welcoming of a newborn child. “What addresses you, not in the said but in the saying, is the underivable person , the now living new creature. The person becomes known in the I-Thou relation” (34). This relational quality of being a person is captured in the personal pronouns and is missing in the case of proper names. Buber notes that the act of name-giving need not place the giver and the recipient of the name in a personal relation. The name might be assigned to the child by a “superintendent of an orphanage” with no genuine Thou being exchanged in the process (35). Hence names can (though do not have to) bypass the personal dynamic of living relations in ways that pronouns, with their inextricable invocative mode enacted in their utterance, never could. I conclude therefore that by privileging the personalist pronominal discourse over discourse involving names, Buber follows the phenomenological directive of description rooted in the very phenomenon it describes. His focus is on personal life as it is lived from birth to death, in dialogic engagement with others, and not the impersonal records of life generated in third-person documentation . His methods are therefore applicable to the descriptive task historically undertaken by phenomenology, with the added benefit of retrieving I–you connectedness in the process. levinas: reCiProCitY and resPonsiBilitY I now turn to Buber’s most famous and accomplished critic, Emmanuel Levinas . Levinas is the most insightful ambassador of the dialogic tradition in that he fully recognized and articulated the original and revolutionary nature of Buber’s notion of dialogue within the western philosophical tradition, in BuBer and his CritiCs 163 its potential to transcend the subjectivism of both modern and idealist traditions . At the same time, Levinas is the most tendentious and ultimately harmful caricaturist of the dialogic tradition, which he profoundly misconstrues in part to promote his own ethical philosophy of radical alterity. The harm...