Turning to the Other. Donovan D. Johnson
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: His Rhetoric of Pointing
Buber uses the metaphor of pointing to identify the nature 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