Philosophy, Dialogue, and Education

Nine Modern European Philosophers

Alexandre Guilherme, W. John Morgan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317567288
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Philosophy, Dialogue, and Education is an advanced introduction to nine key European social philosophers: Martin Buber, Mikhail Bakhtin, Lev Vygotsky, Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone Weil, Michael Oakeshott, and Jürgen Habermas. This detailed yet highly readable work positions the socio-political views of each philosopher within a European tradition of dialogical philosophy; and reflects on the continuing theoretical relevance of the work of each to education generally and to critical pedagogy.

The discussion in each chapter is informed by materials drawn from various scholarly sources in English and is enriched by materials from other languages, particularly French, German, and Russian. This enhances the comparative European cultural perspective of the book; and connects the work of each philosopher to wider intellectual, political, and social debates.

The book will appeal to academics, postgraduates, and researchers working in philosophy, philosophy of education, and in educational, cultural, and social studies more generally. Advanced undergraduate students would also benefit from the book's discussion of primary sources and the authors' suggestions for further reading.

1 Martin Buber (1878–1965) – dialogue as the inclusion of the other

‘No matter whether spoken or silent … each participant really has in mind the other or others in their present and particular being and turns to them with the intention of establishing a living mutual relation between himself and them’. Martin Buber, ‘Dialogue’, Between Man and Man

Introduction

As our epigraph indicates, Martin Buber (1878–1965), the well-known Jewish philosopher, was concerned with the problem of genuine dialogue, defined as a ‘living mutual relation’. Buber is considered one of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers on education, having both a philosophical and a practical influence. He had a very eventful life, living under Nazism in Germany and, after his emigration to Palestine, through the wars which established the State of Israel. Such experiences could have led Buber to a life of mistrust of others, and a philosophy based on belligerence, on confronting the different, those who might be in opposition. However, perhaps because of his experience, Buber spent his life seeking dialogue with others and writing about its importance for human relations and for conflict resolution. He was much engaged in reconciliation between Jews and Germans after the Second World War and between Israelis and Palestinians. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1961.

The life and career of Martin Buber

Martin Buber was born in Vienna on 8 February 1878 to an Orthodox Jewish family and spent much of his early life with his grandfather, a prominent scholar of Midrash (Rabbinic dialogue with the Torah, the Old Testament), in Lviv (today’s Ukraine). He didn’t write an autobiography, but the facts of his personal life are well known, and the Buber Archives are at the Jewish National and University Library at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

As a child, Buber was educated at home in Hebrew, Latin, and French, but was later sent to the Polish language Franz Josef Gymnasium at Lemberg. Most of the students were Poles, but a minority of Jews also attended the gymnasium. Vermes (1988, 3) notes,

As a group … they hardly got to know each other … [but there was] no show of intolerance towards … Jews … from the teaching staff or … students. The only aspect of his school life that [Buber] hated was the morning assembly at 8 a.m. when a bell rang, a teacher took up his place beneath the great crucifix on the wall and, after making the sign of the cross, all began the morning prayers together. Until they could sit down again … the Jewish children stood there ‘with lowered eyes’.

(our emphasis)

These early experiences were to have a direct influence on Buber’s philosophy with its emphasis on dialogue and on community. In 1896, he enrolled in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Vienna, attending lectures in a wide range of subjects, such as German, history of art, and economics (cf. Vermes 1988, 4). In 1904, he was awarded a doctorate by this same university for a thesis on ‘Christian Mysticism During the Renaissance and Reformation’.

Buber was a member of the infant Zionist movement and, in 1901, Theodor Herzl, Zionism’s most prominent leader, appointed him editor of Die Welt (The World), the official publication of the Zionist Congress. However, also in 1901, the Fifth Zionist Congress rejected the idea of Israel as being a purely ‘religious or spiritual’ one, and advocated a secular state that would provide a ‘homeland’ for those of the Jewish faith. This proved an early tension with Zionism for Buber, and he began to distance himself from the idea of a ‘secular Israel’, although it was supported by Herzl. It was something almost inconceivable to him and, in his editorials, for as long as they lasted, he argued that faith and spirituality were essential to the health of Zionism. After this short spell at Die Welt, and for the next twenty years, he concentrated his efforts on educational and publication programmes such as that of Der Jüdische Verlag, a prominent publishing house, and, from 1916, of Der Jude, a review published until 1928 that became the main political journal of Central European Jewry.

The end of the First World War signalled Buber’s re-engagement with Zionism when he became a delegate of the socialist movement Hashomer Hatzir (The Young Guard). This advocated the formation of a close-knit ‘community of communities’ in the lands of Israel, with an integral part of their vision being to live in peace and dialogue with the local Arab population. In 1925 Buber joined the newly formed Brit Shalom (Covenant of Peace), which advocated a bi-national state in which Jews and Arabs would engage in constructive dialogue, share power, and live in peace. However, this position was rejected by both Jewish ‘mainstream’ Zionists and by Arab nationalists. Between 1924 and 1933 Buber was professor of the History of Jewish Religion and Ethics at the University of Frankfurt in Germany. It was during these years that he consolidated his reputation as one of the most important German-speaking theologians and philosophers of religion of his generation. He became also a prominent speaker, not only to academic audiences but also to the public. It is interesting to note that Buber published Königtsum Gottes in 1932, and this was meant to be his Habilitationsschrift: ‘which would have entitled him to what we would now call a tenure-track university appointment’ (Mendes-Flohr 2002, 2–3). However, before he could present this work for academic review in 1933, Hitler came to power and Buber was forced to leave his university teaching position.¹

He became the director of the Central Office for Jewish Adult Education for the National Representation of German Jews (Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden) in Germany, with responsibility for training volunteer teachers and training leaders for Jewish youth movements (such as Betar and Hashomer Hatzair),² as well as providing support for the various Jewish Lehrhäuser, set up because Jews were excluded from Germany’s formal institutions of education. The Frankfurt Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus, where Buber had previously worked with Franz Rosenzweig, was the most famous, but there were many others in Berlin, Breslau, Stuttgart, Munich, and elsewhere. Buber’s status as an educator and as a moral leader of the Jewish community was significant. Hannah Arendt, writing in Le Journal Juif on 16 April 1935, said of him:

Martin Buber is German Judaism’s incontestable guide. He is the official and actual head of all educational and cultural institutions. His personality is recognized by all parties and all groups. And furthermore, he is the true leader of the youth.

(Arendt 2007, 31; Guilherme and Morgan 2009, 566)

Throughout his life Buber remained engaged with education and with the ‘call of the hour’, responding to ‘three turning-points in Jewish history: the emergence of Zionism; the emergence of Nazism in Germany; and the establishment of the state of Israel’ (Yosef 1985, 11). Further, we note that this engagement with education was always focused on the ideas of community and dialogue. For instance, Buber’s ‘First Circular Letter of the Centre for Jewish Adult Education’, May 1934, an open letter to the Jewish community in Germany under Nazi rule, is a good example of Buber’s concern for community building, for leading an ethical life, and for the importance of education:

The concept of ‘Jewish adult education’ might have been understood even a short time ago to mean ‘elements of education’ or ‘cultural values’ that were to be passed on to those growing up and to the grown-up – for instance, giving an idea of ‘higher education’ to those who were not privileged to obtain it, or to initiate those not familiar with Jewish subjects into some general knowledge of this community… . The issue is no longer equipment with knowledge but mobilization for existence. Persons, Jewish persons, are to be formed, persons who will not only ‘hold out’ but will uphold some substance in life, who will have not only morale, but moral strength, and so will be able to pass on moral strength to others; persons who live in such a way that the spark will not die. Because our concern is for the spark, we work for ‘education’. What we seek to do through the educating of individuals is the building of a community that will stand firm, that will prevail, that will preserve the spark.

(Buber 1999, 51–52)

In 1938, Buber left Germany to become professor of social philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1942, Brit Shalom, which we mentioned earlier, was reformed as Ichud (Union), a political party, and counted among its members Martin Buber, Henrietta Szold, Hugo Bergmann, Shmuel Sambursky, Judah L. Magnes, and other academics and intellectuals (cf. Agassi 2006, 242; Heller 2003) who advocated a bi-national state in Palestine, with power shared between the Jewish and the Arab communities. However, this aspiration was not reciprocated on the Arab side and was rejected by the Zionist majority.

In 1948 the State of Israel was declared and the surrounding Arab countries invaded it almost immediately, leading to the War of Independence, which ensured Israel’s survival. In 1949 the new Israeli Ministry of Education asked Buber’s help in establishing an Institute for Adult Education in Jerusalem. Its purpose was to train teachers to work with Jewish immigrants, encourage a sense of community amongst people from the most varied social and cultural backgrounds, and forge a sense of common Israeli identity. Buber’s personal history, his experiences in Germany and Israel, help us understand how his philosophy of education and of dialogue was developed in practice in a response to situations of crisis (Friedenthal-Haase 1990; Friedenthal-Haase and Korrenz 2005; Zank 2006). His engagements in Germany and Israel brought him respect, and his reputation both as scholar and activist continued to grow.

A decade later, between 1958 and 1961, Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary-General of the United Nations (April 1953 to September 1961), held three personal meetings with Buber and exchanged an intense and influential correspondence. Hammarskjöld shared with Buber the idea that dialogue was key to conflict resolution, and this influenced him as the Secretary-General of the United Nations. He was engaged with the Israeli–Arab conflict, with problems in Africa, and with the communist bloc, and he visited China to negotiate the release of American pilots captured during the Korean War. Hammarskjöld was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1961, following his death in an air crash in Zambia while on a peace-making mission. Hammarskjöld had been working on a Swedish translation of Buber’s I and Thou and, in 1959, wrote a four-page memorandum for the Nobel Prize Committee in Sweden, in which he spoke of his admiration for Buber and proposed him for the Nobel Peace Prize. It is argued that the Prize Committee would have given the Peace Prize to Buber if there had been an Arab counterpart engaged in Arab–Israeli reconciliation who could have received it jointly (Marin 2010, 35–36; Murphy 1988, 35, 37). This was the second time Buber had been proposed for a Nobel Prize as:

already in 1949, the German novelist Hermann Hesse had initiated a campaign for Buber to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. At that time, the proposal had been dropped because the Nobel Prize Committee did not want to award the prize to an Israeli, as the United Nations mediator Count Folke Bernadotte had been murdered on 17th September 1948 by members of the terrorist organization, the Stern Gang (or Lohamei Herut Yisrael, ‘Fighters for the Freedom of Israel’, LEHY).

(Marin 2010, 36).

Buber remained engaged intellectually and practically in education, philosophy, theology, and peace throughout his life, engaging in dialogue with figures such as Carl Rogers, Emmanuel Lévinas, Georg Lukács, Carl Gustav Jung, Mahatma Gandhi, and Bertrand Russell, to mention only a few. He was also very active trying to resolve issues of conflict between communities, especially the Israeli–Arab problem, until his death in Jerusalem on 13 June 1965. A month later two thousand people attended his memorial service at the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York, demonstrating the impact this thinker had on Jewish life and community.

The philosophy of Martin Buber

Buber discusses dialogue in I and Thou (1923). In this seminal work, he established a taxonomy describing the kinds of relationships in which people engage. According to Buber, human beings possess a twofold attitude indicated by the basic words I-It (Ich-Es) and I-Thou (Ich-Du). The basic words are a ‘linguistic construct created by Buber as a way of pointing the quality of the experience that this combination of words seeks to connote’ (Avnon 1998, 39, our emphasis), so that I-It and I-Thou are read as ‘unities’ indicating one’s state of Being and attitude towards the Other, the World, and God. This means that there is no I relating to a Thou or to an It; rather, what exists is a kind of relation encapsulated by the unification of these words. Avnon (1998, 40) comments that: ‘one may summarize this point by suggesting that the difference between the I-You and the I-It relation to being is embedded in the hyphen’. The hyphen of I-Thou indicates the kind of relation that is inclusive to the Other, whilst the hyphen of the I-It points to the sort of relation that is not inclusive to the Other, that in fact separates the Other. As such these basic words are pivotal for a proper understanding of Buber’s thought, and consequently of his views on education.

The I-Thou relation is an encounter of equals who recognise each other as such, and it is a dialogue, representing an inclusive reality between individuals. Buber argues that the I-Thou relation lacks structure and content because infinity and universality are at the basis of the relation. This is so, as when human beings encounter one another through this mode of being, an infinite number of meaningful and dynamic situations may take place in what Buber calls the ‘Between’. Thus, it is important to note that any sort of preconception, expectation, or systematisation about the Other prevents the I-Thou relation from arising (cf. Theunissen 1984, 274–275; Olsen 2004, 17) because they work as a ‘veil’, a barrier to being inclusive towards the Other. Within I-Thou relations, the I is not sensed as enclosed and singular, but is present, open to and inclusive towards the Other (cf. Avnon 1998, 39). Even though it is difficult to characterise this kind of relation, Buber argues that it is real and perceivable, and examples of I-Thou relations in our day-to-day life are those of two lovers, two friends, a teacher and a student.

The I-It relation is different. In this relation a being confronts another, objectifies it, and in so doing fails to establish a dialogue and separates itself from the Other. This is in direct contrast with I-Thou relations because the ‘ “I” of I-It relations indicates a separation of self from what it encounters’ and

[b]y emphasising difference, the “I” of I-It experiences a sensation of apparent singularity – of being alive by virtue of being unique; of being unique by accentuating difference; of being different as a welcome separation from the other present in the situation; of having a psychological distance (“I”) that gives rise to a sense of being special in opposition to what is.

(Avnon 1998, 39)

Thus, when one engages in I-It relations one separates oneself from the Other and gains a sense of being different, special, and, arguably, superior at the same time.

The I-Thou and I-It relations can perhaps be illustrated by two biographical events in Buber’s life. For instance, the following is a good example of I-Thou relations, of real dialogue, and of meeting, and inclusion:

When I was eleven years of age, spending the summer on my grandparents’ estate, I used, as often as I could do it unobserved, to steal into the stable and gently stroke the neck of my darling, a broad dapple-gray horse. It was not a casual delight but a great, certainly friendly, but also deeply stirring happening … When I stroke the mighty mane … and felt the life beneath my hand, it was as though the element of vitality itself bordered on my skin, something that was not I, was certainly not akin to me, palpably the other, not just another, really the Other itself; and yet it let me approach, confided itself to me, placed itself elementally in the relation of Thou and Thou with me.

(Buber 2002, 31–32)

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Martin Buber (1878–1965) – dialogue as the inclusion of the other
• 2 Mikhail M. Bakhtin (1895–1975) – dialogue as the dialogic imagination
• 3 Lev S. Vygotsky (1896–1934) – dialogue as mediation and inner speech
• 4 Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) – dialogue as a public space
• 5 Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) – dialogue as an ethical demand of the other
• 6 Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) – dialogue as being present to the other
• 7 Simone Weil (1909–1943) – dialogue as an instrument of power
• 8 Michael Oakeshott (1901–1990) – dialogue as conversation
• 9 Jürgen Habermas (1929–present) – dialogue as communicative rationality
• Conclusion: Sweet peace, where dost thou dwell? I humbly crave
• Bibliography
• Index