In the Middle of Love: At the Fringes of Personhood. An Explorative Essay on the Dialogue of I and Thou and the Poetics of the Impersonal

In Works of Love, Søren Kierkegaard introduces the idea that God’s love is “the middle term.” It is a love that manages to be in the middle of all created being. To that extent, love is not just one relation among others, but the “being-in-relation” as such. It is, in Heideggerian terms, “the with” of being-with. This implies, further, that the middle is as inconspicuous as it is ubiquitous. According to Martin Buber, however, there is a privileged relation to the middle in the I–Thou relation. It is here that it reveals itself. For Buber, this is so on the strength of two important traits of this dyadic relation: that it is dialogical and personal. It is in dialogue that I and You are responsive to the word of God; and it is in personal co-presence that the theophany of “the absolute person” may occur. This paper explores these tenets of “philosophy of dialogue” at their fringes. Accordingly, it explores the impersonal in the person and the monologue in dialogue. More specifically, it aims to show how: (a) the impersonal in the person is disclosed in love and angst and how (b) the monologue in dialogue is expressed in a poetics of the impersonal.

The anthropological foundations of Buber’s cosmic vision of dialogical life

This paper provides an analysis of Martin Buber’s not very well-known essay “Distance and Relation”, which is his most relevant contribution to philosophical anthropology. In the essay, which was published almost thirty years after the publication of his most famous book, I and Thou, Buber elaborated on the anthropological foundations of his cosmic vision of dialogical life. The central question is “How is man possible?” Buber’s answer is very important to the further development of his principle of dialogue in psychology (primarily his notion of confirmation) and philosophy of art, but it is not quite clear how compatible it is with some of his earlier theses from I and Thou. In particular, the relation between “distance” and the I-It relation is unclear. There are two seemingly contradictory statements: “In the beginning is the relation” and “The primal distance is a presupposition of the relation”. The aim of this paper is to examine these anthropological foundations and to elucidate this apparent contradiction.

A Critical Reflection of Martins Buber’s Philosophy of Education and its Relevance in the New-State

The aim of this essay is to examine the relevance of I and Thou through the lens of Martins Buber’s philosophy of education. The fundamental problem is that the educational system in the new-states like Nigeria is in need of re-orientation. Owing to this, policy formulators and educational practitioners need to see education in relational terms with regards to its relevance, implementation and its methodology together with the ends which education wishes to serve to as a facilitator of societal development. The method of critical analysis is useful to facilitate the re-orientation exercise. Findings show that Buber’s philosophy of education as embedded in the idea of I and Thou encourages interaction among individuals which are integral to the flourishing of positive relationship between the educational system and the community. Consequently, the paper attempts to unveil how this value position could impact positively on the Nigerian educational system in a bid to avert its decline. Buber’s I-Thou (You) relationship opens avenue for encounter in which people could engage with each other fully through dialogue. The education is based on authentic relations between teachers and learners where knowledge that is not imposed by the teacher is the basis of true pedagogy. In Buber’s idea of “I and Thou (You)”, personal relation should tend beyond individualism and collectivism for the future generations. The knowledge of self should be first and foremost: learners must be taught to explore their two autonomous instincts: the originator and the communion. Buber explains that the goal of the learner is to turn objective knowledge into active knowledge which helps in self actualization in the relational world.

Others

Chapter 5 takes up our responsibility to understand other persons. Gadamer, as I argue, holds that the ethical stakes of our relations with others are directed not at the other person in isolation from other others (to borrow a well-known turn of phrase from Levinas). Rather, for Gadamer, our relations to others take shape precisely in the larger context of the shared world in which we find ourselves and one another. Thus, for Gadamer, our responsibility to understand others is epitomized first of all by our relation to what he, in reference to Aristotle, designates as relations of friendship. From this viewpoint, our responsibility to understand others is not only a relation of ‘I and thou,’ but marks a transition to our relations in a larger world. Building on Gadamer, I argue that our responsibility to other persons is to enact and cultivate the capacity to see the other in his or her difference from us, to come to understand and care for the other in our respective and also shared commitments, and, in this manner, to help the other understand herself and her life context otherwise and even better.

The Place of Hermann Cohen’s Ideas in the Philosophy of Dialogue

My aim is to prove that Hermann Cohen was not only a philosopher of dialogue but has played an exceedingly important role in the history of that current of thought. His books Ethics of Pure Will (1904) and Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism (1919) offer a detailed analysis of the relationships between I and Thou, I and It, I and We. In the first book these relationships are considered from the ethical-legal point of view and in the second from the viewpoint of religious anthropology. However, Cohen considers the problem of inter-personal relationships not in isolation, but as an important component of his entire philosophical system. Deduction of the concept of personality in Ethics of Pure Will is based on Cohen’s logic of the origin expounded in the first part of his system in The Logic of Pure Cognition. Cohen explains that the origin of the self-consciousness of I as a personality is not the external world, but another person, i.e. Thou. In turn, the partnership relationships between I and Thou create the community We which forms the basis of the law-governed state. The process of artistic creation in the framework of inter-personal relationship is explored in Aesthetics of Pure Feeling. Finally, Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism formulates the conception of religion as the most complete realisation of inter-personal relationship. Thus, dialogism became an important dimension of Cohen’s entire philosophical system, a fact noted by Martin Buber. Franz Rosenzweig, in unfolding dialogical thinking, expressly appeals to all the elements of Cohen’s system. There are signs of his influence on Bakhtin’s doctrine. Thus, examining Cohen’s doctrine as part of the philosophy of dialogue gives insights into this entire trend as a coherent whole.

Inventing the Novel

Bakhtin as a philosopher and a student of the novel is intent upon the novel’s role in the history of consciousness. His project fails if he is wrong about the dialogic nature of consciousness or the cultural centrality of the novel as the only discourse that can model human consciousness and its intersubjective character. Inventing the Novel is an argument in four stages: the Introduction surveys Bakhtin’s life and his theoretical work in the 1920s, which grounded his work on the novel, as investigated in following chapters. Chapter 1 sketches Bakhtin’s view of literary history as an agonistic dialogue of genres, concluding with his claim that the novel originates as a new way of evaluating time. Chapter 2 explores Bakhtin’s theory of chronotopes: how do forms of time and space in ancient fiction delimit the possible representation of the human? Chapter 3 assesses Bakhtin’s poetics of genre in his account of Menippean satire as crucial in the history of the novel. Chapter 4 uses Petronius to address the prosaics of the novel, exploring Bakhtin’s account of how novelists of “the second stylistic line” orchestrate the babble of voices expressive of an era into “a microcosm of heteroglossia,” focusing it through the consciousness of characters “on the boundary” between I and thou. Insofar as this analysis succeeds, it evinces the truth of Bakhtin’s claim that the role of Petronius’s Satyrica in the history of the novel is “immense.”