Martin Buber and Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogue of Voices and the Word That Is Spoken

Author(s): Maurice Friedman

Source: Religion & Literature , Autumn, 2001, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Autumn, 2001), pp. 25-36
Published by: The University of Notre Dame

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/40060095

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 MARTIN BUBER AND MIKHAIL BAKHTIN:
THE DIALOGUE OF VOICES
AND THE WORD THAT IS SPOKEN

Maurice Friedman

Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian literary critic and philosopher of the

human sciences, once said in an interview that he thought of Martin
Buber as "the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, and perhaps
in this philosophically puny century, perhaps the sole philosopher on the
scene."

Bakhtin then went on to explain that while Nicholas Berdyaev, Lev Shestov, and
Jean-Paul Sartre are all excellent examples of thinkers, there is a difference
between them and philosophers. "But Buber is a philosopher. And I am very much
indebted to him. In particular for the idea of dialogue. Of course, this is obvious to
anyone who reads Buber." (Kaganskaya 141)

It is not surprising that Bakhtin uses Buber's terminology and shares his
emphases, for Bakhtin was deeply influenced by Buber. Bakhtin had
already read Buber when he was in the gymnasium in Vilnius and Odessa.
The relation between Buber and Bakhtin is much greater, in fact, than has
been recognized in any of the literature on Bakhtin.1
In his classic work land Thou Buber distinguishes between the "I-Thou"
relationship that is direct, mutual, present, and open, and the "I-It," or
subject-object relation, in which one relates to the other only indirectly
and nonmutually, knowing and using the other. What is essential is not
what goes on within the minds of the partners in a relationship but what
happens between them. For this reason, Buber is unalterably opposed to that
psychologism which wishes to remove the reality of relationship into the
separate psyches of the participants. "The inmost growth of the self does

R&L 33.3 (Autumn 2001)

25

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26 Religion & Literature

not take place, as people like to suppose today," write

relationship to ourselves, but through being made prese
knowing that we are made present by him" {Knowled
Being made present as a person is the heart o
confirmation. Confirmation is interhuman, but it is
interpersonal. Unless one is confirmed in one's uniq
one can become, one is only seemingly confirmed.
the other must include an actual experiencing of th
relationship so that one can imagine quite concre
feeling, thinking, perceiving, and knowing. This "inc
the real," does not abolish the basic distance betw
other. It is rather a bold swinging over into the lif
confronts, through which alone I can make her pres
unity, and uniqueness.
This experiencing of the other side is essential to t
Buber makes between "dialogue," in which I open my
of the person I meet, and "monologue," in which, e
with her at length, I allow her to exist only as a cont
Wherever one lets the other exist only as part o
becomes a fiction, the mysterious intercourse betwe
only a game, and in the rejection of the real life co
essence of all reality begins to disintegrate" (Between
Such in brief is Buber's understanding of dialogue
Bakhtin's also. Bakhtin was a thoroughly dialogical t
voice of the person is inseparable from the dialogue
What became explicit in the philosophy of Martin B
later was already implicit in the thought of Dostoe
pounds it. Dostoevsky's dialogical logic is in turn ba
anthropology and a dialogical ontology: "A single per
with himself, cannot make ends meet even in th
intimate spheres of his own spiritual life, he cannot ma
consciousness. One person can never find complete
alone." The reason for this is that personality mean
solipsistic /nor an object, but another subject "The de
requires . . . addressivity to a thou" (Problems 299; see a

A character's self-consciousness in Dostoevsky is thoroughly d

aspect it is turned outward, intensely addressing itself, anoth
Outside this living addressivity toward itself and toward the ot
even for itself. In this sense it could be said that the person i
subject of an address. One cannot talk about him; one can only
him. Those "depths of the human soul," whose representation

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 MAURICE FRIEDMAN 27

ered the main task of his realism "in a higher

intense act of address. ... At the center of Dost
dialogue, and dialogue not as a means but as a
person not only shows himself outwardly, but he
which he is, ... not only for others but for h
communicate dialogically. . . . Two voices is the min
existence. {Problems 28 1)

For Bakhtin as for Buber the person doe

on the boundary; for his self-consciousne
ship to a Thou, The loss of the self come
and enclosure within the self. Absolute dea
unrecognized, unremembered. Martin Bu
fashion that abandonment is a foretaste of
just being left alone but being unheard a
being "unconfirmed." Confirmation, a
upon one person's concretely imagining wh
the other.
To Bakhtin the achievement of self-cons
tant human acts arise out of the relation t
its very nature. To live means to engage in
to answer, to agree." In exact parallel to B
and I- It, dialogue and monologue, Bakhti
denial of the existence outside oneself of
(thou)" Authentic human life can only be v
dialogue" in which one participates wholly
Entering into dialogue with an integral vo
not only with his thoughts, but with his fat
ity" {Problems 292).
For Bakhtin personality only reveals itse
for an I). To be a person is to be the subjec
communicate dialogically." The commun
takes place directly in genuine community
conditioning (Problems 251, 280). Bakhtin
upon the alternation of distancing and en
genuine dialogue:

The author speaks not about a character, but with

Only through such an inner dialogic orientation
intimate contact with someone else's discourse, an
with it, not swallow it up, not dissolve in itself t
preserve distance in the presence of an intense sem

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 28 Religion & Literature

But distance is an integral part of the author's de

genuine objectivity in the representation of a charac

Bakhtin attributes to Dostoevsky precisely t

of the other side of the relationship without
Buber calls "inclusion," or "imagining the
seeming capacity to visualize directly someone e
sion, or imagining the real, does not mean at
the ground of one's own concreteness, cease
eyes, or loses one's own "touchstone of reality"
In every creative act, Bakhtin distinguishe
empathy or identification and a reverse mov
returns to his own position. "Aesthetic activit
one returns within oneself at one's place, outs
when one gives form and completion to the m
close consonance with this, Bakhtin sees "all
productive, innovative, unique and irreversib
tionship of two consciousnesses that do not
99).
One of the most surprising resemblances between Buber and Bakhtin is
the correlation between Buber's concept of the "eternal Thou" and
Bakhtin's "superaddressee." To Buber the "eternal Thou" is met every
time an "I" goes out to meet a finite "Thou," whether that be an animal or
tree, a fellow human being, or a work of art. As Buber puts it in land Thou,
the parallel lines of relation meet in the "Eternal Thou." Although Bakhtin
was by all accounts a religious Orthodox Christian, he did not, to my
knowledge, bring God into his literary theories - with the partial excep-
tion of his "superaddressee." To Bakhtin dialogue was not really a duet but
a trio, the third person being "the particular image in which they model
the belief they will be understood, a belief that is the a priori of all speech."

. . . [I]n addition to [the immediate addressee] the author of the utterance, with a
greater or lesser awareness, presupposes a higher superaddressee (third) whose abso-
lutely just responsive understanding is presumed, either in some metaphysical
distance or in distant historical time. ... In various ages and with various
understandings of the world, this superaddressee and his ideally true responsive
understanding assume various ideological expressions (God, absolute truth, the
court of dispassionate human conscience, the people, the court of history, science,
and so forth). {Genres 126)

In his introduction to Speech Genres Michael Holquist comments on the

above paragraph with a trenchant statement that brings Bakhtin even

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 MAURICE FRIEDMAN 29

closer to Buber's "eternal Thou" in whom one cannot believe as in a

knowledge proposition but only trust in unreserved dialogical relationship:

If there is something like a God concept in Bakhtin, it is surely the superaddressee,

for without faith that we will be understood somehow, sometime, by somebody, we
would not speak at all. Of if we did, it would be babbling. And babble as
Dostoevsky shows in his short story "Bobok" is the language of the dead, (xviii)

Both Martin Buber and Mikhail Bakhtin were profoundly religious

men. Here in the meeting of Bakhtin's "superaddressee" and Buber's
"eternal Thou" we find the key to the religious attitude that underlies their
far-reaching philosophies of dialogue and that accounts for the remark-
able fact that Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian Orthodox believer, could have
been so deeply and decisively influenced by Martin Buber, who rested his
philosophy and his life on unconditional trust in the relationship with God.
To Bakhtin "every word is directed to an answer and cannot escape the
profound influence of the answering word that it anticipates" (Dialogic 280;
see also Problems 161). Like Buber in his essay by that title in The Knowledge
of Man, Bakhtin finds the significance of language in "the word that is
spoken." "The word, the living word, inseparably linked with dialogic
communion, by its very nature wants to be heard and answered. By its very
dialogic nature it presupposes an ultimate dialogic instancing. To receive
the word, to be heard. The impermissibility of second-hand resolution. My
word remains in the continuing dialogue, where it will be heard, answered
and reinterpreted" (Problems 300).
For Bakhtin the person departs, having spoken his word, but the word
itself remains in the open-ended dialogue. The authentic sphere where
language lives is dialogic interaction. "The entire life of language, in any
area of its use (in everyday life, in business, scholarship, art, and so forth), is
permeated with dialogic relationships. A dialogic reaction personifies
every utterance to which it responds" (Problems 183).
To Buber, however, in contrast to Bakhtin, it is poetry rather than the
novel that witnesses to the "word that is spoken":

Were there no more genuine dialogue, there would also be no more poetry. . . .
[The present continuance of language] wins its life ever anew in true relation, in
the spokenness of the word. Genuine dialogue witnesses to it, and poetry witnesses
to it. For the poem is spokenness, spokenness to the Thou, wherever this partner
might be. ... Poetry . . . imparts to us a truth which cannot come to words in any
other manner than just in this one, in the manner of this form. Therefore, every
paraphrase of a poem robs it of its truth. (Knowledge 101, 108)

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30 Religion & Literature

Buber insists that "the mystery of the comin

of the coming-to-be of man are one." "Th
spoken; the only being of a word resides in it
"Every attempt to understand the present c
accessible detached from the context of its
astray," writes Buber in "The Word That Is S
word, from human dialogue, that language
Language derives from and contributes to t
the I-Thou relationship. Language is a "system
the fruitful ambiguity of the word in its differ
In "The Word That Is Spoken" Buber fin
meaning essential to humanity: "It is the com
at once 'word' and 'meaning' which makes m
proclaims itself from of old in the communalizi
again and again comes into being" {Knowledg
The written word is never, for Buber, just a
It calls out for dialogue with the other, the T
responding to the address of the literary wor
lifts the written words anew "into the sphere o
of which the literary work "wins its life eve
staying enclosed within the dialogue between
one's interpretation into dialogue with other
"communal speaking" which Buber points to
{Knowledge 92-97).
In "The Word That Is Spoken" Buber distin
truth in relation to the reality that was onc
pressed, in relation to the person who is add
makes present to himself, and in relation to
speaker in all its hidden structure. This hum
just in one's existence as this concrete person
ness for the word that is spoken by one. "The t
itself in the person's existence" (110).
Bakhtin speaks of a hidden dialogue or a h
expresses and reflects the anticipation of a r
ways glance to where another speaker stands.
is ... no word about an object, no secondhand
only the word as address, the word dialogical
word about a word addressed to a word." The
heard and answered {Problems 197, 199, 237

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 MAURICE FRIEDMAN 3 1

has a responsive nature. One of Bakhtin's

"addressivity" [Genres 92-95, 145).
Like Buber, Bakhtin always sees speech as
the event, which leads him to see the worl
this concept through the phrase "speech
"the aggregate of all the social relationship
cal horizons, and, finally, the concrete si
"Each individual event is a link in the ch
[Method 85; Genres 162, 92-96).
In Dostoevsky's novels Bakhtin hears "a
unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a ge
voices." The consciousness of a character i
is given as someone else's consciousness. Th
himself and his world is as fully weighted
subordinated to the character's objectifie
characteristics, nor does it serve as a mout
This extraordinary independence of the
author's and that of the other characters
novelistic genre - the polyphonic novel. A
this novelistic genre burst upon world li
dialogic." Its wholeness is constructed fro
independent consciousnesses which do not
say an "It") for other characters but re
absorbed into other consciousnesses. Ther
persons, either in the point of view of the a
must be, like the author, a participant in t
There is no place here for a "monological
ness."
Thus in contrast to those who make of the isolated consciousness their
"touchstone of reality" (to use my own phrase), in Dostoevsky conscious-
ness is always found in intense dialogic relationship with another con-
sciousness. It is important not to mistake this for "a meeting of true
minds," for such disembodied mental interaction really characterizes dia-
lectic. Ivan Karamazov, and Rubashov in Arthur Koestler's Darkness at
Noon, are excellent examples of this, as are the dialectical and intellectual
conversations of Settembrini and Naphta in Thomas Mann's The Magic
Mountain.
A powerful proof of Bakhtin's thoroughly dialogical stance is the radi-
cal distinction which he, like Buber and like me, makes between dialogue
and dialectic. Dialectic is close to the psychologism which both Buber and

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32 Religion & Literature

Bakhtin reject because it removes events which take

into the intrapsychic. Dialectic is also close to w
Bakhtin call monologue in which the word that
neutralized and depersonalized in monological consci
born from dialectic in the head of an individual
people collectively searching for truth, in the proc
interaction." "Dialectics is the abstract product o
Problems 293). "Take a dialogue and remove the
abstract concepts and judgments from living word
everything into one abstract consciousness - and tha
tics." This does not mean that dialectics is always ba
"I- It" it is evil only when it blocks the return to "I
born of dialogue," writes Bakhtin, "so as to return
higher level (a dialogue of personalities)" (Problems
291-93; Genres 147, 162).

Bakhtin, like Buber, was concerned with methodo

sciences, and like Buber too he found that methodol
The tendency of by far the largest and most domin
most human sciences today is to begin with dial
dialogue as part of that dialectic. Putting this in Bu
means that the mutual knowing of the I-Thou rela
under the subject-object knowledge of the I- It relat
of this perspective would not mean any rejectio
remains essential to the whole human enterprise of
from one generation to another. What it does mean
toward understanding dialogue as the source of kn
an elaboration of that source. "The 'corrective' o
incontestable," writes Buber, "and it can be summon
set right an 'error' in my sense perception - more pr
with what is common to my fellow men." In the I-
received in the I-Thou is elaborated and broken
possible that can be corrected through directly estab
what is past and passive in the minds of others. "B
replace the smallest perception of something parti
its gigantic structure of general concepts, cannot by m
the grasping of what here and now confronts me" (

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 MAURICE FRIEDMAN 33

Most of what Bakhtin has to say ab

sciences is found in his essay "The Prob
thinking in the human science to

a special kind of dialogue: the complex interrelations between the text (the object
of study and reflection) and the created, framing context (questioning, refuting,
and so forth) in which the scholar's cognizing and evaluating thought takes place.
This is the meeting of two texts - of the ready-made and the reactive text being
created - and, consequently, of two subjects and two authors. (Genres 1 06)

To Bakhtin everything linguistic is only a means to the end of the

extralinguistic, dialogic aspects of the utterance. Explanation entails only
one consciousness; but understanding, comprehension, entails two
consciousnesses, dialogue. Images, language-styles in a work, have a dia-
logical relation that cannot be reduced either to the purely logical (even if
dialectical) or the purely linguistic (compositional-syntactic). Even utter-
ances from various eras have a dialogic relationship if they are juxtaposed.
Bakhtin feels that in probing understanding as dialogue we are approach-
ing the frontier of the philosophy of language and of thinking in the
human sciences in general. "Linguistics studies only the relationships
among elements within the language system, not the relationships among
utterances and not the relations of utterances to reality and to the speaker
(author)." Bakhtin believes that the monologism of thinking in the human
sciences could be overcome if we recognized that "dialogic boundaries
intersect the entire field of human thought." The word, or in general any
sign, is interindividual because it is a voice addressing another voice, a
Thou. "Everything that is said, expressed, is located outside the 'soul' of the
speaker and does not belong only to him." To Bakhtin dialogic relations
are always present even among profoundly monologic speech works. Un-
derstanding being dialogical, the criterion of depth of understanding is
"one of the highest criteria for cognition in the human sciences" (Genres
109, 111,115-22,125-27).
One of Bakhtin's last short essays is entitled "Toward a Methodology
for the Human Sciences." While the limit of precision in the natural
sciences is identity, in the human sciences precision means surmounting
the otherness of the other without transforming him or her into purely
one's own. Bakhtin conceives of a "great time" of infinite and unfinalized
dialogue in which no meaning dies. "I hear voices in everything," Bakhtin
exclaims, "and dialogic relations among them."

At any moment in the development of the dialogue there are immense, boundless
masses of forgotten contextual meanings, but at certain moments of the dialogue's

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34 Religion & Literature

subsequent development along the way they ar

renewed form (in a new context). Nothing is absolu
have its homecoming festival. (Genres 169)

The summit of the meeting between Buber

of Dialogue.3 Bakhtin's clearest presentation
found in his book Problems of Dostoevsky's Poet
hero but hear him, according to Bakhtin, for h
but a pure voice. . . . Only he can reveal hi
conscious discourse, for he can only be reve
externalizing secondhand definition of an It
his characters is "about someone actually p
and is capable of answering him" (53. 58, 6
Thus the new artistic position of the autho
Dostoevsky's polyphonic novel is a fully real
dialogic position, one that affirms the inde
unfinalizability, and indeterminacy of the h

For the author the hero is not "he" and not "I" bu
another and other autonomous "I" ("thou art").
deeply serious, real dialogic mode of address. . . . An
the novel as a whole takes place not in the past, but
present of the creative process. (63; original italics).

Even the ideas that Dostoevsky presents in

an authorial surplus of meaning but of the
human thought. So far from lying in one
consciousness, the idea begins to live and h
ine only when it enters into genuine dialogi
of others, ideas embodied in someone else's
in a person's head but in dialogic communi
Therefore, it "is a live event, played out at
and, like the word with which it is dialogica
understood, and "answered" by other voice
Dostoevsky's creative stance, Bakhtin point
him all positions are equally valid, as if the
his own viewpoint and truth. "Rather it is
specific interrelation between his truth and
author is profoundly active, but his action tak

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 MAURICE FRIEDMAN 35

ter. . . . Dostoevsky frequently interrup

cover it up, he never finishes it from
consciousness (his own)" (Problems, quo
It would be a mistake, therefore, t
"novels of ideas," as has been so often
ideas the way philosophers do. He heard t
including the "latent, unuttered fut
Grand Inquisitor" in The Brothers Kara
"Dostoevsky possessed an extraordinar
his epoch," writes Bakhtin (90). Fol
Dostoevsky heard his epoch as a great d
individual voices, but precisely and pred
among voices, their dialogic interaction in
"Everything essential is dissolved in d
sitioned face to face" (296-99). Thus Ba
that Buber provided him and, without
carried beyond Buber's seminal insigh
criticism, philosophy of literature, and in

San Dieeo State Uni

NOTES

1 . This holds even for Nina Perlina, who wrote the only article on the two that exi
English. Like most other Bakhtin critics she has very little understanding of Buber
2. In Martin Buber and the Human Sciences, a book of which I was editor-in-chief, th
twenty-six essays on philosophy and religion, the written and the spoken word; her
tics, aesthetics, and literature; economics, politics, and history; and dialogical p
therapy and contextual (intergenerational family) therapy. Taken together thes
offer a powerful witness to the importance of Martin Buber's dialogical approach
human sciences.
3. This is shown in some fullness in the Hermeneutical Appendix: loward a roe tics
of Dialogue" in my book The Affirming Flame (209-31). This appendix also discusses my
own poetics of dialogue and in more condensed form those of Walter Stein, Walter Ong,
Robert Detweiler, Paul Gelan, Steven Kepnes, and Tsvetan Todorov.

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 36 Religion & Literature

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