Buber, Between Man And Man (In) Bb.pdf - PolkFolk

dialogue 31
insight, or the order in face of which he has to answer for the
newly arrived conceptual form. And it is a misunderstanding of
the dynamic of the event of thought to suppose that these apostrophizings
of a being existing in nature or in ideas are “really”
colloquies with the self.
But also the first trying and testing of the thought, when it is
provisionally completed, before the “inner” court, in the platonic
sense the stage of monologue, has besides the familiar
form of its appearance another form in which dialogue plays a
great part, well-known to Plato if to anyone. There he who is
approached for judgment is not the empirical self but the genius,
the spirit I am intended to become, the image-self, before which
the new thought is borne for approval, that is, for taking up into
its own consummating thinking.
And now from another dimension which even this lease of
power does not satisfy there appears the longing for a trying and
testing in the sphere of pure dialogue. Here the function of
receiving is no longer given over to the Thou-I but to a genuine
Thou which either remains one that is thought and yet is felt as
supremely living and “other”, or else is embodied in an intimate
person. “Man”, says Wilhelm von Humboldt in his significant
treatise on The Dual Number (1827),
“longs even for the sake of his mere thinking for a Thou corresponding
to the I. The conception appears to him to reach its
definiteness and certainty only when it reflects from another
power of thought. It is produced by being torn away from the
moving mass of representation and shaped in face of the subject
into the object. But the objectivity appears in a still more
complete form if this separation does not go on in the subject
alone, if he really sees the thought outside himself; and this is
possible only in another being, representing and thinking like
himself. And between one power of thought and another there
is no other mediator but speech.”