Relationships

Alan Saunders: Well, I mean... There are various things in his early life which point towards the later man. One is that he obviously didn't get from his parents, and certainly not from his mother, what he thought was most important in relationships. So you can see his later philosophy in a way as compensating for a lack in his own early life.

Paul Mendes-Flohr: Indeed, that's the way he presented it. He understood the fragility of relationships, the profound, existential and emotional need that we have for genuine relationships. But he also learned along the way the, I would say the dynamic of establishing relationship, and the difficulty of establishing a genuine relationship. One particular story he told is that when he was already a famous man, writing extensively on mysticism, not only Jewish mysticism, he was visited by a soldier during the First World War, distraught... came unannounced to his home in Germany, where he was living at the time. And despite the fact that it was not the custom to receive guests unannounced, Buber did receive this young man, and allowed him a half-hour early in the morning to present his questions. And Buber says he was very polite and cordial, and he responded to all the questions posed, and after a half-hour he indicated that unfortunately he doesn't have that much more time. And then he learned the following day that this man took his life.

And Buber drew from that the lesson that it's not sufficient to respond to questions that are verbalised, but also to questions that are etched on a person's forehead, and a person's eyes, the visceral questions. And that requires another type of listening than simply academic or even cordial listening. So the first point of departure towards this philosophy of dialogue was this type of listening: a truly attentive listening, which is not necessarily communicated by words, or facilitated by words. And in time he developed the notion that he calls the 'I-Thou' relationship - I'll explain that momentarily - or dialogue.