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Abstract

This article brings together three separate but not unrelated foci in Maurice Friedman's thought as an approach to the self in context: the life of dialogue, the philosophy and therapeutic implications of confirmation, and the image of the human. He approaches the "self in context" in terms of Martin Buber's ontology of the "between," according to which persons find their reality ever again through meeting one another in dialogue. In Buber's philosophical anthropology, it is the fact that one person sets another at a distance and makes him or her into an independent other that enables the person to enter into relation with others. Through this "interhuman" relation, people confirm one another, becoming a self with the other. Mutual confirmation is essential to becoming a self. True confirmation means that I confirm my partner as this existing being even while I oppose him or her. This mutual confirmation of persons is most fully realized in "making present," or "inclusion," imagining quite concretely what another person is wishing, feeling, perceiving, and thinking. This making present induces the inmost becoming of the self and builds the "essential We" of community, which are, in turn, the foundation for Buber's distinction between neurotic and existential guilt, the latter of which is a real event between persons-a rupture of dialogue. Confirmation cannot be willed; it cannot be blanket. It often occurs as a "contract" with strings attached, and in the specialization of labor it is dependent on function, leading to the tension between personal uniqueness and social and economic roles and to the dialectic between conceptions of roles and our actual relationship to them. The tension between calling and role finds expression in the image of the human that distinguishes between potentiality and the direction we give to our potentiality, which embodies attitude and response, and distinguishes between impersonal and personal guilt.

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References

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Dialogue,Confirmation,and the Image of the Human

Abstract

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References