Asaf Ziderman

Herman Levin Goldschmidt delineates and critiques four types of “dialogism,” four ways of derailing dialogical discourse and praxis. In the following, I examine two of them: “Pan-dialogism” is the glossing over the effect of power differentials such as gender, class, and race as relevant factors in the constitution of dialogue. “Pluralogic” is the evading of true dialogue, which is intense and exclusive, by conducting simultaneously multiple superficial conversations. Pluralogic enables to escape the internal turmoil and conscience’s call for critiquing that are part and parcel of true dialogue. To examine the two dialogisms, I use Martin Buber’s thought, which Goldschmidt sees himself as continuing, as a case in point as well as a resource to further unpack Goldschmidt’s thought. In the course of the paper, I criticize what I call “Human Resource Office Morality,” the celebration of mere diversity at the expense of true contradiction.

This paper corrects a pervasive mistake in readings of Buber’s iconic trope, “I-Thou” (Ich-Du; hereafter, I-You). The mistake lies in considering it synonymous to the principal concept of his dialogical thought, “relation” (Beziehung). A detailed reading of relevant passages in Buber’s I and Thou (hereafter, IAT) reveals their difference: While both “relation” and “I-You” refer to the same reality—to the dialogic moment—they do so with a different focus and scope: “Relation” refers to the dialogic moment in its bilateral entirety. However, “primary word I-You” (hereafter, PWIY)—the phrase in which the I-You trope in fact appears in IAT—focuses on the active share of only one of the two interlocutors in the dialogic moment. While PWIY does refer to the dialogical moment (which is indeed bilateral), it denotes only a partial aspect of the dialogical moment. It focuses exclusively on my active turning toward you and defocuses your concurrent turning toward me (which, no doubt, is present as well). This mistake, I show, is due to interpreters’ enthusiastic endorsement of Buber’s later phrase, the “I-You relation,” which is indeed synonymous with “relation.” It is then easy to read back the “I-You relation” into the earlier, more focused concept of PWIY. Furthermore, this enthusiasm has blinded readers from realizing that, following IAT, Buber in fact abandoned the I-You trope and used it only reluctantly, mainly when addressing his interpreters who used it themselves, or when discussing IAT where it indeed appeared.