Some Bible verses bother me, especially the ones that tell me to do things I don’t like. Then there are the scriptures that are downright troubling. I have a hard time with the verse in Philippians 2:3-4 that tells me to esteem others as higher, better, and more important than myself. In a way, I can even love my enemies more easily than esteem those with whom I disagree, because to love isn’t quite the same as to esteem. But to esteem others as higher? How can I imagine that? And, of course, the great trouble is that there is no clause in the Scripture for us to include or exclude people from our esteem. God’s word implies that I am to take that attitude towards everyone.
In his book, If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face? Author Alan Alda presciently states, “Pretty much everybody misunderstands everybody else,” and “People are dying because we can’t communicate in ways that allow us to understand one another.”[i] Whether it is in the fields of religion and theology or politics and ethics, we are getting further and further apart. I think this is especially true since esteeming is part and parcel of communicating with other people who are different from me.
Enter philosopher Martin Buber, the Austrian Jewish philosopher who is best known for his work on dialogue. Buber’s ideas are a bridge to help me better grasp esteem. I can imagine myself dialoguing with just about anybody. And because I can imagine it, I can better grasp it. Plus, the idea of listening to people, one of the core concepts of Buber’s dialogue, is pretty difficult to criticize. Especially considering the current state of non-listening many of us are in. Increasingly, people from various spectrums are talking about the importance of listening. But what is it to really listen, to dialogue?
Most people have a preliminary acquaintance with Buber’s ideas from his book I and Thou. That is, relating to the other – any other – as a thou rather than an it. This relation is one of respect, mutuality, and affirmation of the other’s very being. This treating the other as a thou works itself into what Buber calls “genuine dialogue.” This genuine dialogue, for Buber, is a “mode of exchange in which there is a true turning toward and engagement of another person, including a full appreciation of the other not as an object but as a genuine human being.”[ii] This is quite profound, and possibly subversive for so many of us that are increasingly unwilling to actually listen. To turn towards the person with whom I am engaging requires humility. To do it includes actually believing in their humanity.
Buber suggests that many times when we think we are having a dialogue, we are actually participating in “monologue disguised as dialogue.” Buber scholar Kenneth Paul Kramer provides an ugly, albeit humorous, picture of what this anti-dialogue really is: a “situation in which two or more men, meeting in space, speak each with himself in strangely tortuous and circuitous ways and yet imagine they have escaped the torment of being thrown back on their own [ideological] resources.”[iii] Kramer then asks a brilliant question: “Is it possible that qualities of monologue have become a national pastime?”[iv]
We have come to a place where many of us insist on being heard but refuse to hear any response. There is no esteeming. Buber might call much of our communication “mismeeting,” which is a failure of any meaningful, mutual interaction with the other. True meeting, for Buber, is impossible when any one person in the communicative process is more interested in propagating their needs, wants, and ideas. When this stance is taken there is no room for communication. Instead – and it is a high order! – Buber calls us to the act of “obedient listening.” And here we are getting close to the troubling scripture that calls us to esteem the other, which quite probably includes (surprise!) listening to them.
True listening requires that we affirm the humanity of the person speaking. When we affirm them, we can then truly turn towards them (which includes turning away from self-preoccupation). Buber knows this isn’t easy; that’s why he says true listening requires an act of will supplemented with grace.
Dialogue does not require agreement or acceptance of the other’s position. However, it does mean that we are engaging a human being we deem worthy of meeting. And engaging requires, as much as possible, a sympathetic imagination: we are to try to get into their shoes, as it were, to see not only from their perspective, but to imagine how their experience has led them to their views. Jürgen Habermas, speaking on an I-Thou relationship, says,
Any interpersonal relationship calls for the reciprocal interpenetration of the perspectives that those involved direct to each other, such that each participant is capable of adopting the perspective of the other. It is part of the dialogical relationship that the person addressed can assume the role of the speaker, just as, in turn, the speaker can assume that of the addressee.[v]
Buber uses different words, but with the same idea: “This gift is not a looking at the other but boldly swinging—demanding the most intensive stirring of one’s being—into the life of the other.”[vi] Buber is asking us to live in the tension of our perspectives and also those of the other to whom we are listening. We are to get close enough to the other to actually see through her eyes. The word “interpenetrate” is not often used, but, in terms of dialogue, it speaks to the possibility for both parties to get entangled with each other.
As a consequence of this entanglement, Buberian scholars bring up another consequence which was already hinted at by Habermas. Paul Mendes-Flohr states,
By listening to the Other attentively, by allowing the voice of the Other to penetrate, so to speak, one’s very being, to allow the words of the Other … to question one’s pre-established positions fortified by professional, emotional, intellectual, and ideological commitments, one must perforce be open to the possibility of being challenged by that voice.[vii]
Moreover, as Eugen Roesenstock-Heussy (who started the journal Die Kreatur, of which Buber was an editor) stated more bluntly concerning the risk of dialogue, “The ‘danger’ [is] that by truly listening to the other – be the other an individual, a text, a work of art – … one might, indeed, be changed, transformed cognitively and existentially.”[viii] I would dare say that a willingness to be changed is also an ingredient of esteem. I see no way that esteeming someone else precludes my willingness to be persuaded by them. This doesn’t mean I will be, but the “dangerous” potential exists.
While the risks of entering into genuine dialogue are real, so too are the rewards. Buber tells of the sacramental aspect of genuine dialogue when we allow ourselves to be truly present with the other. He believes that God enters into the equation. As Kramer puts it,
A [sacramental] dialogic conversation … has three voices, not two (mine and yours). There is also a third voice. … [I]t speaks in and through our speaking voices, especially when each speaker hears something that they (or the other) says for the first time, or when one voice really addresses a question or issue that other dialogic partners have. The co-creative third voice casts a transcendent light on our blind spots. It is a voice of interactive intonations that voicelessly challenges literalistic listening and unthinking mimesis, a point of view which cannot be reduced to either person alone, or to a compromise between them. Rather, the third voice is a mutually animated exchange of inspired intelligence.[ix]
Buber believed that when we are in genuine dialogue, we not only address and are addressed by our most immediate partner, but also by the “eternal Thou.”[x] David Benner says, “being present [with the other] is a brush with the Holy One.”[xi]
Back to esteem and what it means for me in relation to Buber’s ideas: Buber was convinced that our world is made up of a multitude of voices. These many voices are independent and irreducible. They are different. What is momentous for me in Buber’s perspective is that differences can be brought into harmony – not necessarily unity – but harmony through the power of dialogue. If he is right, then I can at least attempt to follow the mandate of Scripture to esteem the other. Maybe I will not be able to esteem the other higher than myself, but at least I can start with esteeming them, in general.
When I think of the need in our culture for dialogue and for esteeming the other, it might be easy to despair. How can we change what is considered normative – this tendency to un-listening, and to “mismeeting”? I am reminded of something T.S. Eliot said in The Idea of a Christian Society, about there being two classes of people, “one class of persons to which one speaks with difficulty, and another to which one speaks in vain.” Who are those in the second group? They are the numerous “obstinate” people who, “prone through natural sloth … cannot believe” that things will ever be different from what they are now. Consequently, “an invincible sluggishness of imagination makes them go on behaving as if nothing … [could] ever change.” You will carefully note the word “imagination.” But, thank God, there is a second group! These are the people “who believe that great changes must come.”[xii] It is to this second group that I wish to belong. And I am persuaded that an integral aspect of that is cultivating a heart for dialogue through learning to esteem the other.
Matthew Steem is the editor of Radix Magazine
[i] Alan Alda, If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face? (New York: Random House, 2017), xiii.
[ii] David G. Benner, Care of Souls: Revisioning Christian Nurture and Counsel (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1998), 136.
[iii] Kenneth Paul Kramer, Martin Buber’s Dialogue: Discovering Who We Really Are (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2019), 8.
[iv] Kramer, 26.
[v] Jürgen Habermas, “A Philosophy of Dialogue,” in Dialogue as a Trans-Disciplinary Concept: Martin Buber’s Philosophy of Dialogue in its Contemporary Reception, ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 15.
[vi] Martin Buber, The Knowledge of Man: Selected Essays. Edited by Maurice Friedman. Translated by Maurice Friedman and Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Harper & Row 1965), 81.
[vii] Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Introduction: Dialogue as a Trans-Disciplinary Concept,” in Dialogue as a Trans-Disciplinary Concept: Martin Buber’s Philosophy of Dialogue in its Contemporary Reception, ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 3.
[viii] Paul Mendes-Flohr, 3.
[ix] Kramer, 98.
[x] Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith, second edition (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), 75.
[xi] David G. Benner, Presence and Encounter: The Sacramental Possibilities of Everyday Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Bravos Press, 2014), 25.
[xii] T.S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society (London: Faber & Faber, 1934), 14.
Photo: courtesy of The David B. Keidan Collection of Digital Images from the Central Zionist Archives (via Harvard University Library).