Final Paper for Interpersonal Communication - God, Buber and Communication

A man and his wife talk about their day over dinner. A customer discusses her favorite movies with a video store clerk. A student and his professor discuss the finer points of the day’s lecture. A mother speaks lovingly to her daughter. A congregation sits quietly in the church pews singing hymns. Conversation is all around us. It ranges from the seemingly mundane to the sublime. Philosopher Martin Buber posited that within all conversations lies the potential to better understand not only ourselves and each other but ultimately God.

In communication, as it is described in our text, whether it is between two friends or between an individual and God, the same process is followed. Not only is the process important in defining how we as individuals view ourselves, our cultures, our communities our personal identities, Buber argues that divinity, itself resides in the process of communication.

I am not really sure what I was thinking when I decided that taking a closer look at Martin Buber was good idea. After picking up a few books by Buber I am struck with paralysis. Not only are some of Buber’s concepts extremely dense and complicated, his language is often unwieldy and convoluted. But there is just something about Buber’s ideas that strikes a chord with me. Strange things happen when I read his words - phrases will seem to jump off of the page and straight into my head. Somewhere, somehow, this long-dead Jewish philosopher is connecting with me.

The following except from the forward by Walter Kaufman at the beginning of I and Thou illustrates the density and complexity of the ideas presented in Buber’s work: “Not all simplicity is wise. But a wealth of possibilities breeds dread. Hence those who speak of many possibilities speak to the few and are of help to even fewer”. (p.9) Even before delving into Buber’s writing itself I had this sense of both connection and frustration.

To be honest, I do know what I was thinking when I chose this topic. I thought there were some interesting concepts in the Buber essay in our text. Specifically, Buber’s phrase “I and Thou” made me think of the word “Yahweh”, which I had a vague recollection was the traditional name of God and poorly translated as “I am who am.” This notion got me to thinking that perhaps much of what we had been studying in the text regarding interpersonal communication was somehow connected to a sense of spirituality.

My mind started making connections. In our text, we had previously studied Vygotsky and Mead’s view that identities are relational in nature (p.69). According to this view who we are is shaped in part by how we interact outside of ourselves, how we interrelate with the world. Not only that, but we can only truly achieve an understanding of who we are through these interactions.

So for me, it seems that Buber was logically taking this relational concept and applying it to notions of God and spirituality. Who I am and my ability to understand who I am is a relational construction. Buber takes this concept and expands it to include spiritual concepts. Buber is arguing that within these relational constructions the spirit of God exists. So, just as we define a community by living within it and it defines us through the same process, so God exists in a similar fashion – existing within a communal context. Hints of this idea come through in Buber’s essay in our text, “Only in partnership can my being be perceived as an existing whole” (p. 686).

Diving further into this notion by researching Martin Buber I discover that he was a Hasidic Jew. Hasidism is a sect of Judaism which is founded upon “two theoretical conceptions: (1) religious panentheism, or the omnipresence of God, and (2) the idea of Devekus, communion between God and man. ‘Man,’ says the Besht, ‘must always bear in mind that God is omnipresent and is always with him; that God is the most subtle matter everywhere diffused... Let man realize that when he is looking at material things he is in reality gazing at the image of the Deity which is present in all things. With this in mind man will always serve God even in small matters.’” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasidism#Religious_practice_and_culture).

So how do these religious conceptions tie into communications in a real sense? Again I think Buber provides us a bridge between the ethereal and the earthy. “‘Religiousness’ is the astonished and worshipful feeling of man that above his conditionality there stands an Unconditioned whose desire is to form a living community with him and whose will he may realize in the world of men.” (http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter.asp?title=459&C=377).
The way I interpret the above is that the “Unconditioned” is God and that how we most fully experience God is through community. Again we see the notion that community is paramount in creating our relational identities.

Buber argues that what makes us truly unique as humans is our ability to strive to rise above our conditionality and to seek to connect with one another in an unconditional way. I think John Stewart touches on this idea in his outline of Buber’s essay, “Where dialogue becomes genuine, ‘there is brought into being a memorable common fruitlessness [sic] which is to be found nowhere else.” (p.684).

I have intentionally included John Stewart’s misquote rather than the actual quote of “fruitfulness” (p.694). It was actually Stewart’s misquote which helped me to better understand Buber’s meaning (never underestimate the power of cognitive dissonance!). I found myself trying to make sense of this misquote. Through this process I concluded that the quote meant that when we communicate with one another without conditions - or without expecting the conversation to bear fruit - will we truly begin to enter into an unconditional dialogue.

Despite this misquote I think I have still arrived at the heart of what Buber meant. In order for a true dialogue to take place “…the speaker does not merely perceive the one who is present to him in this way; he receives him as his partner, and that means that he confirms this other being, so far as it is for him to confirm” (p.693). The shift from perceiving a conversational partner to receiving them again resonates for me beyond this temporal existence and into the spiritual realm.

For Buber, God lives not within a static model of communication but rather within the dynamic process of communication. “God is the aim of human beings, the image that man aspires to become. It is important that human beings aspire to become, and not to be like God. A process has always priority over a static state for Buber.” (http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Ithaca/1180/buber.htm).

While it is not always easy to drop our conditioned existence and to communicate openly and honestly with one another I believe that it is important, even natural that we strive towards a higher level of communication. To rise up and reach beyond what we can easily grasp or even comprehend is a defining characteristic of humanity and although we may never fully succeed in dropping our conditional state it is a worthy ambition nonetheless. “To yield to seeming is man’s essential cowardice, to resist it is his essential courage” (p.688).