I recall Hagi Kenaan from New Haven around 1989, but with a false memory of him sitting in on Maurice Natanson's lectures on existentialism that were offered at Yale for decades, a sprawling lecture hall packed with students, including auditors like me checking out the scene at the time. But Hagi and I actually were in Natanson's seminar on Husserl's Cartesian Mediations together in 1990, and Hagi was a course assistant for Natanson after that.

Two years later, Hagi led my independent study on Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety. A good friend Stephen M. Rich and I took his seminar on the Derrida-Searle fiasco. I remember circling old campus on foot, over and over, reading Derrida's shrill and reactive response to Searle, Limited Inc. 

Those were strange times, as I did not appreciate the excesses of deconstruction at Yale, and I equally did not like the analytic smugness and pointlessness that often faced off with it. People talked a lot about the "Analytic - Continental split" in the late 1980s and early 1990s. That entire construction was largely toxic. 

What I remember seeking was a place where people could talk together about things on their consciences and have the time, space, fortitude, and intellectual rigor to think through good answers. This plain task is what I hoped to find in philosophy. Often, disappointment awaited, but sometimes it did not—for instance, in many conversations Hagi and I had over the years, often just for part of an hour at the Daily Caffé where theater types, literary types, philosophy folk, and New Haven skaters and punks hung out. There was too much smoke there, a surfeit of loud music from cassettes and CDs, and many a game of chess. 

What I took with me in memory from Hagi is a sensibility that prepared the way for and in conversation, a way of listening and engaging at once, humor and irony that remained humane and made the air feel alive, the quality of a mind that subsists (as our mutual teacher Karsten Harries showed in his lectures and seminars on Kant's aesthetics) through the excess of imagination in the free play of meaning around things that are pregnant with sense.

Hagi and I spoke some over the intervening decades. When I helped root the Department of International Studies at American University of Sharjah, we emailed for a spell. Students there, mostly from the Arab world, wanted to learn about Israel which was not discussed in many of their home-country high schools. I often let students guide the shape of the class within a formal frame. In my Introduction to Political Studies class of 2007, students chose to focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They learned about the history of Zionism, the botched decolonization process of the often anti-semitic British empire, and the formation of the Israeli state including its basic laws. 

By semester's end, the students proposed a mitigation: the Union of Jerusalem, a shared protectorate of the United Nations, and a two state solution. They argued their positions, thinking the unthinkable. The experience stretched them into uncommon mental lands. This is what I mean by positive mental anxiety, or wonder: uncomfortable, filled with meaning, difficultly humanizing. 

Hagi, did our mutual friend Michael Halberstam bring us together again? Talking with you over the past year on and off, often about politics and its devastation, we have come back to dialogue and now your thinking around it. I would love it if you would share some of your approach to the subject for this series on democracy.

~

Hi Jeremy,

Thanks for your invitation.

I’m writing now from the Greek Island of Aegina, hoping to find some distance from the disastrous political reality in my country. I’ll try not to get into that now, but the topic you’ve asked me to reflect on, “dialogue,” inevitably draws the crisis near again. I mean, how can one think straight about dialogue in the face of sheer violence, indifference to human suffering, hatred, and lawlessness?

Where does one even begin, when the bridges of mutual trust and shared values have gone up in flames? Or, put in a somewhat wider angle, why bother today with dialogue? The powers that be clearly don’t give shit about having a genuine conversation with anyone—and that’s typical, of course, not only of Israel’s consolidating autocratic regime, but also of other countries including yours.

More striking, however, is that today, also those who protest the injustices of power seem to have no use for the idea of “dialogue.” Have they forsaken that possibility because there’s no one to talk to? No one on the other side that would listen? I know from my own experience that when you’re facing fascist thugs determined to demolish the values that make your life meaningful, conversation isn’t exactly the first thing that comes to mind. Is this a relevant analogy here?

Is dialogue at all possible in these dark times? Isn’t dialogue today only a fantasy, held by a few sentimental pacifists—if not naïve fools—still believing in the power of conversation? How can one believe that words matter when violence reigns? Wouldn’t it be hopelessly futile—a sheer useless pain—to attempt a genuine, thoughtful, respectful conversation with those who hate your guts?

Looking at the open sea now, I recall Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island (2005), a dystopian novel whose title ironically evokes its bleak vision of humanity, a generation leading an emotionally desolate life, stripped of vulnerability, desire, and any real inter-personal connection. While living in solitary units, this new form of the human can no longer draw sustenance from the kind of refuge a real island once promised. For these neo-humans—whom Nietzsche would have called “the last men”—both the idea and the promise of an island remain out of reach. Is this also what has become of dialogue today? Is its disappearance part of the ongoing transformation of the human—part of who we have gradually become at the far edge of humanism?

I’m not sure I have an answer ready at hand, but I’m convinced that the factual limits of the present must not be allowed to dominate—must not become our ultimate measure. The possibility of dialogue invites us to think beyond these limits.

To begin with, dialogue—or conversation—is not simply the everyday back-and-forth that language enables. The transmission or exchange of content does not require dialogue to occur, and communication can be entirely effective without being truly dialogic.

This is because dialogue, before it takes on a specific linguistic form, is always already rooted in the way we uphold our ways of being with others—how we embrace the relational structure of being human while sharing the meaningfulness (or meaninglessness) of the surrounding world.

The need to see dialogue as a modality of existence that cannot be reduced to the linguistic takes me back to Martin Buber whose writing on dialogue struck me profoundly when I was a young student of philosophy; specifically, at a time when I was drawn to the philosophy of language, and troubled by the fact that most of what I read in the field evaded questions about how individuals inhabit their language and how language, as a phenomenon, bears a trace, a resonance of that individual presence.

In Buber, I encountered not only a philosophical sensibility toward the radical singularity of human beings but also an anchoring of this sensibility—surprising for me then—in what he understands as the relational essence of human existence. For Buber, the question of how we orient ourselves in language is ultimately inseparable from, and indeed grows out of, the ways in which we are always already bound to others, and called to respond to their singularity. And, from here, I found it to be a relatively short step to seeing why and how the question of ethical responsibility is embedded in our most ordinary linguistic encounters. The question of what we owe to each other is inseparable from how we orient ourselves in listening and responding to the other person.

At the heart of Buber’s conception of dialogue is his understanding of two fundamental forms of interpersonal relation that are intrinsic also to our being in language. These appear in distance vs. proximity and in epistemic and practical mediation vs. immediate personal contact. He’s thinking more broadly of the distinction between the I-It and I-Thou relationships, which are both part of our constitution as humans. While speaking and listening often unfold on the level of linguistic transaction—thus reflecting the I–It relation—they remain modes of encounter that hold the potential to draw forth the unique personal presence of others, from within what might otherwise appear as the general uniformity of their language.

Here, it is worth noticing how Buber’s position diverges from the existentialist tradition with its tendency to posit a fundamental opposition between the singular, idiosyncratic meaning of the individual and the linguistic space of shared meaning. Unlike Heidegger or Sartre, for Buber, singularity and language are not mutually exclusive. The uniqueness of an individual’s presence lives in—and may show itself through—the resonance of language. And thus, dialogue, for him, is a concrete—albeit elusive, and perhaps even rare—lived-possibility: something we all too often fail to realize in our daily routines and, yet, one that remains ever open to us.

When we forsake dialogue, our interaction with the other is reduced to a relation with generic—even if familiar—interlocutors, encountered primarily through the function they serve in our lives. Much of daily life operates within this functional attitude: the cashier at the supermarket, my ride to work, the irritating neighbor upstairs, my dean—these are all examples of how naturally we relate to others through their positionality within the matrix of communication.

But in genuine dialogue, a particular kind of attunement is required. The kind of intentionality that sustains a true conversation is one that aims at the singularity of the person we address. In such conversations, the horizons of the encounter always remain open—open to the new and the surprising. In dialogue, I find myself connected, before all else, to an irreplaceable and ultimately unknowable individual—the one for whom the word You, or Thou, finally takes on its full meaning.

Buber is aware that this cannot always be achieved. Strictly objective, informational, goal-oriented, and even instrumental languages are all integral to who we are as human beings, contributing in various ways to the fabric of human life. Yet when the I-It relation comes to dominate language, our experience ineluctably becomes impoverished. What we lose is not merely a significant mode of speaking, but the crucial and irreplaceable possibility of encountering in language the immediate presence of the other person. “Without the It, one cannot live,” Buber writes, “but whoever lives only with it is not human.”

Buber’s statement offers a general, theoretical insight into the human condition. But it also serves as a concrete critique of the dominant life-forms of his time—modes of existence in which the I–Thou relation, and its dialogical expression, felt increasingly marginalized, quietly receding in an ever more mechanized, bureaucratic, and impersonal world. In this context, it is striking to note how, as early as 1923—long before speech would be absorbed by the efficient linguistic technologies that now dominate the 21st century—Buber was already deeply attuned to the lurking threat of the objectification of personal language.

However, for Buber, the emerging domination of technology over the human spirit is only a symptom of a deeper crisis: the gradual disintegration of the old organic forms of human life, leaving the individual homeless in an indifferent, alienated, shattered—post–World War I—reality. Uprooted and disoriented, the human being develops reactive patterns of behavior, desperately gasping to reclaim a sense of security and belonging that once anchored the world they have lost.

Yet with no immediate path back to an organic place in the world—and with the sciences and philosophies of his time offering little guidance in this crisis, as Buber argued—people all too readily turn to artificial, virtual substitutes that only promise renewed control over an unpredictable reality. So it is against the backdrop of this historical, social, and spiritual process that the forgetfulness of the I–Thou takes root. Accordingly, for Buber, dialogue becomes a work of restoration—one that marks the task of humans in relation to one another, to nature, and to God.

In 1938, fleeing Nazi Germany, Buber made a new home in Jerusalem, where he became a professor at the Hebrew University. During the decades that followed, the idea of a dialogical life remained central to his work, intertwining philosophical reflection with a political vision that had already begun to ferment in the 1920s. One of the clearest expressions of this vision was Buber’s involvement with Brith Shalom (Hebrew for Covenant of Peace), a group of Jewish intellectuals who advocated for Jewish–Arab coexistence based on mutual recognition and equality.  

The name Brith Shalom resonates deeply with Buber’s theological and dialogical commitments. Brith (a covenant), in his understanding, is not merely a contract but a sacred binding, an ongoing commitment grounded in mutual presence and responsibility. Shalom, likewise, is not the cessation of conflict but the possibility of a shared life, coexisting in dignity and openness.

It was in this spirit that Buber brought to the group his conviction that genuine dialogue—rooted in the I–Thou relation—could and should guide political life as well, shaping the very possibility of a just and shared existence among the different peoples living in the land. However, Brith Shalom achieved only limited success as a political association and remained marginal throughout its brief existence. Its members were often portrayed within the broader Zionist movement as politically naïve, hopeless idealists, whose views were dismissed as lacking Realpolitik and as blind to the harsh realities of a tense national conflict unfolding around them.

So, we find ourselves returning to a pacifism—and to pacifists—from another era, whose political vision was rooted in the idea of dialogue, which was ultimately irreconcilable with the political realities of their time, and which led to their dismissal as naïve. Where does this lead us? I think that the historical failure of Brith Shalom to become a viable political option is not coincidental. It thus illuminates, for us, the need to reflect more carefully on the relationship between dialogue and the political sphere and, more specifically, on the possibility and limits of dialogue in violent times of which war is emblematic.

This was, as you remember, the opening theme in this letter: the possibility of dialogue invited thinking as it seems deflated and irrelevant in the dark and difficult political times we are currently living through. In this context, the word possibility feels especially apt—reminding us that dialogue is tenuous, and never there for us as a given. Human life can clearly unfold without conversation. More unsettling still: conversation can die even as the machinery of language runs on, undisturbed. The ruler announces new measures, orders are issued, people are murdered in mass numbers, lives are destroyed and mutilated, the judicial system falls to criminals—and still, words go on circulating: media reports—mostly hollow, rarely poignant—protests, talk shows, police brutality (they also use words), chatter, social media.

Can conversation exist when strife—when polemos—is king? Or, is dialogue a possibility that must depend on peace, or at least a peaceful setting, in order to take root? And in this context, does Buber’s philosophy of dialogue speak only to times of peace? He does offer reflections on the meaning of peace, but perhaps the crucial distinction here is not between peace and war, but between the personal ethics Buber offers and the political. Is there a way in which a personal ethics of ineffable authenticity could ever serve as the foundation for an ethico-political project? Can the I–Thou relation be pertinent in times of bitter conflict, for example, when one is face to face with an enemy?

Allow me to return for a moment to the demonstrations against the war and against the regime’s euphemistically named “judicial overhaul” that I mentioned earlier. In these situations, no one expects a dialogue to open up with people from the other side, whose very presence is meant to provoke, not to engage. These are typically provocateurs, often sent to disrupt solidarity, which they do quite well. Encounters tend to escalate quickly, moving from verbal aggression to physical violence. I do remember, however, one occasion in particular when something like a conversation began to take shape after a large demonstration.

As we walked back to the car through narrow streets, still carrying big anti-war and anti-government signs, a group of local teenagers began cursing and spitting at us, calling us traitors. I approached one of them—the loudest—and asked him, without sarcasm or bitterness, why he was spitting at us. At first, he was clearly confused. But he quickly situated himself within a kind of language-game that resembled—let’s say—ordinary argument, perhaps even an ordinary rational argument. He was smart, aggressive, and deeply racist—which, in Israel, usually also means deeply right-wing. He had grown up this way. The encounter remained tense and loud throughout, but in an uncanny way, he was actually engaging—focused, weighing arguments, responding with counter-examples—perhaps something he picked up during his yeshiva studies. It almost seemed that he didn’t want the debate to end. There was no reconciliation, no agreement, but then he ended up walking us to the car as the talk between us continued. I’m not sure if he ever said goodbye. The event left me hopeful for a few days. Yet as the days passed, it slowly dawned on me that while those moments may have touched—or even softened—a personal nerve, they couldn’t be carried over sufficiently into the political.

Perhaps, under other circumstances, I could have asked this young man about his aspirations, about how he imagines building a life. Still, the conversation could not cross the bridge into the political. That impossibility is hard to grasp. Maybe, later in life, he’ll have experiences that shift his views. But at that moment, I met a racist brute—proud of his convictions, eager to assert dominance through violence. Meeting him in conversation, as the unique individual that he is, might matter in certain contexts. But it cannot resolve the deeper political conflict I have with the authoritarian, racist, and religious worldview he embodies—one that actively undermines the very conditions for a democratic, liberal, pluralistic, and peaceful society. Yet it is irrelevant to resolving the deep political dispute I have with the authoritarian, racist, religious way of life he represents—one that threatens the possibility of a democratic, liberal, pluralistic, and peaceful society.

However, the lesson to be gleaned from this story is not about the failure—or inadequacy—of Buberian dialogue, but about how to understand its limits. Time has taught me that the personal (which for years was central to my thinking) is insufficient for the work of restoration in the political sphere. Was I naïve, from the start, to have thought otherwise?

The I–Thou is invaluable for the quality of our life in common—but it cannot itself ground the socio-political. At the same time, this does not mean that our language is necessarily doomed to reification (the I–It), as Buber might suggest. While Buber’s emphasis on the importance of the I–Thou rightly accompanies his critique of the philosophical tendency to intellectualize language and to overlook its personal and affective dimensions, the stark opposition between these two existential modalities slides too easily into a problematic binarism. When the reifying power of the I–It is too sharply opposed to the authentic openness of the I–Thou, a significant intermediary zone in our life with language withdraws from view and becomes subsumed under the I–It category. This overlooked dimension of language is crucial for thinking about language in these dark times.

The key here, I believe, is to recognize that the uselessness of conversation we’re experiencing today does not stem solely from painful political polarization. There is another, less noted form of the effacement of dialogue at work. It lies in the gradual destruction of those foundations—the foundational structures of language—that Buber too quickly relegates to the domain of the I–It. The death of conversation comes, perhaps surprisingly, not from the failure of the I–Thou, but from the deterioration of the I–It.

To explain this, we must remember that language’s ability to create and preserve the coherence of meaning in the human lifeworld is not something we can afford to take for granted. Nor can this creative force be reduced to any reproductive algorithm that severs language from the very life of the human. We must protect this tenuous human capacity—its role in upholding a sense of organic, even if always relative, order: measure and proportion, logical rules and hermeneutic intuitions, relations of difference, sensitivity to nuance, to exceptions and irregularities, complex conceptual frameworks, distinctions and subtleties, rational paths for reasoning and explanation, systems of critique and standards of rigor, and patterns for articulating what can and cannot be said. These are not abstract conditions of possibility that erase one’s personal presence, but the conditions of actuality of our human capacity to think, understand, explain, reason, oppose, refute, argue, and persuade—all in relation to something that is neither purely objective nor reducible to the idiosyncratic uniqueness of the individual: the meaning of things, the truth of a situation.

Amid the breakdown of democratic norms and the rise of authoritarian rule, however, it is not only the needs of citizens that are being forsaken—language itself is under assault. Institutional responsibility has collapsed; power is exercised without restraint, and “alternative facts” circulate without consequence. When the regime and its mouthpieces desecrate language—overturning meanings, emptying core concepts, even forbidding the use of certain words—the linguistic sphere fractures. And when toxic demagoguery, fake news, and incendiary rhetoric flood the media, language begins to corrode at its core. Today, it is undergoing a sustained barbarization, threatening to render it hollow. The presumed resilience of rational, critical, secular language has collapsed before our eyes.

In this setting, before we can consider building bridges between enemies or mending hearts—before any search for unity—the possibility of dialogue depends on the restoration of language: on the daily preservation, renewal, and protection of the intricate and fragile systems of meaning it sustains. The I–It, which in Buber’s world signified an infrastructural and hegemonic mode of relation in need of disruption and critique, now appears—one hundred years later—like a museum relic, a rare treasure in need of preservation and repair. And yet it remains a cornerstone of any cultured society that aspires to have a future.

So, let me end with the question that pushed this letter forward: Where does one even begin, when the bridges of mutual trust and shared values have gone up in flames? I’m in favor of modest answers. If a bridge is burning, it may not be the moment to cross it. Stay on your island—preferably with friends, with people you care for and trust. And keep up the work that gives language life. Talk to your close ones. Read books, especially those that keep alive the memory of a past you cherish. And write: a diary, poems, stories, philosophy; write a letter to a friend.

The post The Restoration of Language and the Possibility of Peace first appeared on Blog of the APA.

Read the full article which is published on APA Online (external link)