Stiftung Dialogik

Dialogic: Difference and Alterity in
Hermann Levin Goldschmidt's Thought

Willi Goetschel

In the post-modern world of the 21st century dialogue, the dialogical, and even dialogic seem to have become regular, normal, unsurprising, every day terms, or so it seems. Wary of grand narratives and monologues, dialogue has become the promise of delivery from Hollywood to political debate. Not surprisingly, the painfully posthumous life of dialogue has done little do endear the term to an audience accustomed to be taken hostage by the instrumentalization of the market forces. One does not need to think dialectically to realize that it seems ironic that the more debate, discussion, conversation, and exchange one can witness in the media, in print, or whatever reality is mistaken these days for the public sphere, the less dialogue there seems to remain.

What is Dialogic?

For Hermann Levin Goldschmidt, Dialogik or dialogic represented the key philosophical term describing his own thought. When he died on March 29, 1998, he had not only published books entitled Philosophie als Dialogik, Dialogik: Philosophie auf dem Boden der Neuzeit and Freiheit für den Widerspruch (Philosophy as Dialogic, Dialogic: Philosophy on the ground of modernity, and Freedom for Contradiction) but he had also, together with his wife, erected a foundation named Dialogic. For Goldschmidt, dialogic expressed his innermost philosophical and existential life concerns. To inquire into the meaning of dialogic therefore also means to commemorate Hermann Levin Goldschmidt as a courageous intellectual, inspiring mentor and engaging philosopher.

The term dialogic was not a creation invented by Goldschmidt himself. It is Martin Buber who introduced the term dialogic in 1926, interestingly enough, in a speech on education. There he defines dialogic as "die stete potentielle Gegenwärtigkeit der einen [Person] für die andere, als ein äußerungsloser Verkehr" ("the continual potential presence of one person for another, as a non-communicative exchange"). (1) A few years later in Dialogue, he continued to use dialogic as the term to describe the sphere of true dialogue. Here, Buber explicitly juxtaposes dialogic to dialectic. (2) He used the term to express his idea of what he called the dialogical principle, the event one could say of the meeting of two kindred souls: The co-equal encounter that transcends the logical and opens the possibility of "dialogic"; of what lies beyond discursive rationality. Buber coined the word but did not give it systematic philosophical meaning beyond a description of the nature of the interhuman sphere. Thus Buber ends his Problem of Man (1943 Hebrew, 1947 German) with the conclusion:

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While Buber plays a crucial role in Goldschmidt's thought and his I and Thou, Dialogue, and other writings had a formative impact, Goldschmidt took a resolutely secular stance with regard to what on his view presented Buber's problematic metaphysical preferences and options.

For Goldschmidt, thus, dialogic has a more critical ring. To some degree, dialogic is meant as counter-notion to unhinge the dominance of Hegelian and Marxist notions of dialectics. And it is particularly in contrasting dialogic with dialectics that the critical impulse of Goldschmidt's thought comes to the fore. If Buber stressed the event character of the interhuman sphere of dialogic, and Hegel emphasized the processual aspect of dialectics, whereby each opposite would be melted down into a forward going process out of which a new truth would emerge, Goldschmidt's point consists in the continual contradiction of opposites, a contradiction which resists dissolution into a third. Instead, he highlights the importance of the significance of conflict not as a problem but the liberating potential to work through a problem once a conflict is really acknowledged for what it represents: a reminder of the incompleteness of one side of a contradiction without the other. A sentence in the opening chapter of Freiheit für den Widerspruch (Freedom for Contradiction) spells this out with unmistakable clarity: "Where we observe contradiction to emerge we imagine something must be amiss, instead of realizing that something is wrong only where contradiction fails to make itself heard." (4)

In Goldschmidt's eyes, dialogic is then not a new philosophy or method but a way to frame and engage philosophical thinking and discursive methods. At the same time dialogic is not meant as a meta-theory. Rather, dialogic comes into view as an approach that enables us to recognize the significance of dialogical structures in thought and reality as constitutive. As the title of his first book highlights Goldschmidt's program, his is not a philosophy of dialogic nor another philosophy or philosophical discourse that continues in the accumulative work of creating, adding, and expanding the body of knowledge or the powers of reflection: the title Philosophy as Dialogic signals a new and different mode rather than a method, a new and different key in philosophy. Goldschmidt's intervention can be best understood as supplementary in the Derridean sense. As supplement, dialogic is not meant to replace or reinvent the philosophical knowledge but to complicate, enrich, and differentiate it.

Goldschmidt's call for dialogic asks for something ultimately less radical than to start from scratch, at degree 0 but therefore maybe also something more profound and challenging than any radical gesture would amount to. Goldschmidt's call for dialogic suggests a change of perspective that has not only theoretical implications but suggests at the same time an ethical turn. In fact, the ethical or practical impulse of dialogic is particularly strong and has for many become an irritant. But it is important to understand that, for Goldschmidt, this ethical moment of dialogic cannot be separated from its theoretical significance.

In 1948 in his Philosophie als Dialogik, Goldschmidt lays out what we could call the logic of dialogic. With the complete discovery of every spot on earth, the completion of the mapping of the universe within and without makes it no longer possible to assume the existence of empty pockets that would absorb the contradictions the modern human subject encounters at every moment of its existence. As understanding the whole of the All has come within reach of our power the reality of contradiction emerges as an increasingly imposing challenge. But in order to grasp and understand this universe as well as ourselves we must come to terms with the fact that our positionality yields always only one specific viewpoint. To become complete knowledge therefore requires that every viewpoint is complemented by its opposite, that the opposite position of a particular viewpoint is taken seriously and made part of the process of knowledge in order to become valid. Science needs philosophy, philosophy needs religion, one approach or discipline needs the other because every viewpoint is predicated on the exclusion of its opposite. Only by taking seriously the contradiction one particular mode of truth encounters can we ever go beyond the problematic fragmentation of the universe, the rubbles and epistemic ruins in which modern science, modern religion, and modern philosophy have left human existence in the middle of the 20th century.

For Goldschmidt the reality of contradiction does not mean that we abandon Aristotelian logic but that, similarly to the advance from classic to modern physics, we recognize the limited validity of the laws of logic for the whole:

jeder

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As a consequence, Goldschmidt describes his project of philosophy as dialogic as

(

Goldschmidt calls this new philosophy open

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For Goldschmidt's new and open philosophy however this means:

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For the philosophically trained ear there are of course resonances of Hegel and, indeed, most of the criticism of Goldschmidt's thought consists in suggesting that Hegel took care of contradiction in an ultimate manner. Did not Hegel show us how to work through contradictions, go down the path of sublation to reach absolute knowledge? Goldschmidt's point of departure is precisely this objection's point. For Goldschmidt, Hegel was a key inspiration because he is the first philosopher to have taken the challenge of contradiction seriously as one that forces us to rethink the task, function, and discourse of philosophy itself. Goldschmidt fully agrees with Hegel's unrelenting insistence on the significance of contradiction as well as Hegel's project to resituate philosophy as a critical activity no longer tied to the academic intra-universitarian limitations in which the discipline had begun to become bound up in the course of the process of professionalization in the 19th century. (9)

And as for the triumphant superiority of absolute knowing: in one of the rare moments when Hegel lets his reader have a glance on the meaning of absolute Spirit, it is a moment when the Phenomenology of Spirit offers an intriguingly dialogical view on truth, one in fact towards which the whole trajectory of this text gestures:

(

Just like Hegel, Goldschmidt recognized the problematic of philosophy caught in the false choice of having either to claim status as a rigorous academic discipline or to move outside institutional esotericism and therefore truly open to a thorough engagement with the real world of real contradictions. Just as Hegel sought to stake out a discursive open space for his project Goldschmidt, too, signals profound skepticism toward any institutional ties of professional philosophy. However, while Goldschmidt takes from Hegel the serious commitment to the importance of contradiction for the constitution of truth, Hegel's insistence that the tension and counter-forces contradictions produce are seen positive, or else that the key to truth is to be – to use Hegel's famous expression – "tarrying with the negative", Goldschmidt does not follow Hegel on the road of dialectic.

Instead Goldschmidt works through the meaning of dialogic differently. After the publication of Philosophie als Dialogik follows an intense decade of historical recovery work. Confronted in the midst of Europe's depression with destruction, genocide, and utter loss of meaning, Goldschmidt's response to Auschwitz is nothing less than to argue that while one of the most creative and inspiring periods in the history of Judaism and European culture has come to a close, recognition of the significance of its continuing legacy will not only prove crucial for the future of Germany and Europe at large but also for the rest of the world. Modeled in1952 after Franz Rosenzweig's Frankfurt Jewish House of Learning of the 1920s, Goldschmidt's Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus in Zurich becomes a house of study of the legacy of Judaism. During its decade of activity, Goldschmidt teaches and learns Jewish history in all its forms, aspects, and cultural contributions. The fruit of this labor is a series of publications. But the most noteworthy are the two books published in this period: Das Vermächtnis des deutschen Judentums and Die Botschaft des Judentums (The Legacy of German Jewry and The Message of Judaism). Published in 1957, Das Vermächtnis des deutschen Judentums appeared until 1965 in three editions, which at every stage became more expanded. Together with Dialogik: Philosophie auf dem Boden der Neuzeit, published in 1964, these three books form a trilogy. Whereas Dialogik is a revised and largely expanded version of the earlier Philosophie als Dialogik that articulates the theoretical position of the period, Das Vermächtnis des deutschen Judentums is a historical approach that works through the philosophical implications of dialogic in its particularity in the case of the German Jewish experience. Die Botschaft des Judentums completes this trilogy as this book addresses the specificity of Judaism's universal message that, in turn, represents a central focal point that informs the German Jewish experience in terms of its distinctly Jewish, i.e. universal/particular significance. Spanning the poles of the oppositions between the theoretical and historical, the universal and the particular in this way, Goldschmidt's work is dialogical in the precise sense. Das Vermächtnis des deutschen Judentums argues that this legacy is so important for the present and future because as a laboratory of cultivating modern paradigms for truly multicultural and fertile interaction it developed models of dialogic in practice that would not merely stop at the bleak outlook to co-existence as an option, often nothing but a sophisticated version of mutual disinterest and disregard. Rather, the model put into practice and existentially lived by German Jews offers fruitful insights into the way difference and alterity can become crucial agents for the advancement of the ideal modernity shares with Biblical prophecy: a truly free, open, and joyful society.

The Legacy of German Jewry

German Jewish culture, Goldschmidt argues, must be regarded as one of the most forceful articulations of the modern project as a quest for the universal recognition of difference in all its cultural and philosophical forms. (11) This conception of modernity presents a test case for Goldschmidt's concept of the "dialogic," his notion that the mutual constitution of contending voices had transformed the traditional notion of culture as a seamless whole. (12) German Jewish writers and thinkers, Das Vermächtnis des deutschen Judentums argues, helped to create the modern notion of a liberated, modern culture, by connecting their inward quest to recover Jewish sources with humanity's aspirations to freedom as a whole. To understand this difference-centered interpretation of the German Jewish achievement, the inner and outer development expressed in its culture and way of life, and the legacy German Jews left to the post-Holocaust world, Goldschmidt himself turned to the biblical sources of the Jewish tradition. These efforts, undertaken during the war and after, would bear fruit in a new interpretation of German Jewry as the bearer of a very modern, and very Jewish vision of liberation.

The liberating power of attending to the dialogue of reason with the Jewish tradition becomes apparent in this book. Capturing the force of Hermann Cohen's conceptual breakthrough, Goldschmidt advanced here a bold model of cultural interaction that traces the actual, historical give and take between German and Jewish, "universal" and "particular" cultures. (3) This dialogical relationship is central to Goldschmidt's study of German Jewry. But while for Cohen, Buber and Rosenzweig, the dialogical model could only be expressed in terms of philosophy, Goldschmidt removed dialogue from this displaced, homeless status, and anchored it in the lived complexity of historical experience. In the wake of the Holocaust and the height of cultural depression amidst the boom of Germany's reconstruction, Goldschmidt's dialogic model began to document the productive results of the exchange between diametrically opposed cultural positions the German Jewish experience had made possible, and to develop a new way of valuing the past. Previous historical and philosophical accounts had emphasized the fated, one-way march of historical progress. Instead, Goldschmidt stressed that history was not a collection of facts moving forward, but was constituted by a back and forth of contending, opposed voices. While for Buber, dialogue meant the event-bound aspect of the "dialogic principle," Goldschmidt developed dialogic as a critical concept, and used it to describe the endless reciprocity and conflict that defines culture, history, and tradition and the individual's understanding of them as well.

As Goldschmidt shows, the legacy of German Jewry lives on in the dream of liberating the particular in its broadest sense, a vision of modernity grounded in the respect for the other. This ultimately biblical message, as Goldschmidt points out, depended on German Jewish culture's creative re-appropriation of its most traditional and ancient sources. Das Vermächtnis des deutschen Judentums's concluding plea for the universal meaning of difference is based on the book's presentation of cultural history, but also on its notion of the past as promise, a radical view of the past's urgent significance for modernity that Goldschmidt once cast in biblical terms: "The Jewish millenia: – the most contemporary form of the present." (14)

The past remains alive, in this sense, not because it has taken place, but because it has not yet fully occurred, like a liberation that awaits completion, and therefore must be preserved as a living tradition if it is ever to reach fruition. As history's remnant, the German Jewish tradition became a legacy because its quest for a universal culture that would preserve Jewish difference has been forgotten, to a certain extent, but also preserved as the larger goal of post-Auschwitz culture:

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Such universal, recognized acceptance for the Jews, and all peoples – in 1957, as today – is still far from having been achieved, and as a legacy that awaits its fulfillment, cannot therefore be regarded in strictly historical terms. As "the remnant that remains," to borrow from Isaiah, German Jewry preserved the idea of the "universal legitimacy" of cultural difference, and of the particular strivings of "all groups throughout the world," and thus helped set the intellectual and political agenda for modern thought as a whole. Though now part of the cultural past, the German Jewish recognition of cultural difference as the emancipatory impulse of modernity remains alive: a reminder that the right to participate in a universal culture is just as powerful as the need to express human particularity in all its forms. After giving voice to Judaism's age-old vision of emancipation, German Jewry's message of liberation became a legacy – a dream yet to be realized in practice – and hence a task that still awaits its completion.

In this vision of a human liberation not yet achieved, German Jewry remains post-contemporary in its significance for a globalized world. As Goldschmidt argues in his concluding section of Das Vermächtnis des deutschen Judentums, the contribution of Moses Mendelssohn, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Franz Kafka and everyday Germans Jews extends beyond the measure of cultural treasures and intellectual work. The message carried by German Jewry was expressed just as powerfully in their simple, everyday efforts to live a full life as both Germans and Jews. The success German Jews achieved in becoming "German," we know in hindsight, was a costly one, given their ultimate rejection by the Germany that needed them most. The German-Jewish re-creation and transmission of Jewish tradition, however, was just as expansive and significant, even if the trauma of the Holocaust has at times made it difficult to appreciate the depth of their enrichment to Jewish life and thought. (16) The continuing importance of German Jewry rests not on its German contribution, nor its Jewish one, but on the depth of cultural and human exchange that it strove to establish between the two. German Jewry did anything but compromise its identity. Instead, German Jews asserted a challenging paradigm of cultural identity that envisioned difference as the crucial moment in cultural creation. The historical significance of this German Jewish contribution, as Goldschmidt so forcefully argues, still awaits its recognition.

Difference and Alterity

With this work of historical recovery, Goldschmidt gave dialogic the specificity necessary to make it a critical concept. Regardless of the significance Goldschmidt's approach to the German Jewish past would have for the assessment of the past, present, as well as for the future, his move into history has crucial significance for his notion of dialogic. Similar to Adorno's insight that truth will only make itself available for the critic prepared to heed the imperative of concreteness and buckle down to the arduous work of hermeneutic recovery, Goldschmidt's work of the 1950s represents a resolute return to the attention of historical particularity as the philosophically appropriate site for theorizing the universal. And just as Adorno insisted on the irreducibility of history to method and vice versa, Goldschmidt stressed the importance of the opposition of historical and systematic reflection as a productive contradiction instrumental in helping to flesh out the truth of both sides while equally defining each side's limits.

Read together, the historical and the philosophical writings form the two focal points for Goldschmidt's dialogic: the universal philosophical thought and the particular historicity in and through which the universal is realized in negotiation with the particularity of the specificity of the moment. Opening the circle with only one center of truth – still the main feature in Hegel's paradigm even in its speculatively high-powered form of the spiral – to the ellipsis with two focal points that stand over and against each other as contradicting but at the same time enabling forces, Goldschmidt takes the imperative of dialogic to its logical and practical conclusion.

As a result, Goldschmidt has never seen the need to restrict himself to the inside of academic discourse, and he has never felt compelled to follow the protocol of the discursive conventions of academic philosophy. While Levinas, Derrida, and others have seen their task, regardless of the radical philosophical significance of their thought, to operate within the institutional framework of university discourse to reform philosophy, as it were, from within, Goldschmidt has chosen to move outside the inside, outside established groups and to think independently from norms and instituted laws of scholarly discourse. This has made him in the eyes of many an avatar of a time gone by, a thinker curiously out of touch with his time. But this peculiar untimely, unfashionable and non-contemporary attitude makes Goldschmidt in so many surprising ways so distinctly contemporary or, post-contemporary.

In other words, Goldschmidt's recognition of the future buried in the German Jewish past, i.e. its legacy, is what motivated him to identify German Jewish existence as a free inter-space which would yield the ground from which he could voice a philosophical critique for which cold war society had no longer any institutional home or even a genuine interest and commitment. In this way, the seemingly anachronistic, obsolete voice of Goldschmidt, the German Jewish exile in Zurich, gains new and unexpected critical significance. Goldschmidt's stubborn and persistent resistance to be co-opted by mainstream academic discourse has often been misunderstood as a form of splendid isolation of a resigned thinker, as stubborn refusal to "go with the time," to "adapt to the changes." But like any other judgment this is a question of optics or, as the saying goes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. For Goldschmidt the situation presented itself differently. For him, dialogic, if it was to take its task seriously, would have to resist becoming part of the dialectic of dominant versus minority discourse. In Goldschmidt's view of dialogic this would merely have meant yet another indulgence in the power battle of rhetorics creating yet another esoteric canon of thought. His insistence that he had not found the acknowledgment he had wished – "ich bin nicht durchgedrungen" – was not only a regret but signaled at the same time more than a mere gesture of resignation. It was also his expression of the deeply felt conviction of what it means to remain true to the imperative of dialogic.

The intellectual and philosophical trajectory of Goldschmidt's life and thought is an important lesson we cannot really afford to ignore if we wish to take philosophy seriously. It exemplifies the uncompromising power of the dialogical impulse and its vital significance for a critical practice of philosophy true to its name.

For Goldschmidt dialogic is thus the watchword for a critical notion of difference. If he had argued theoretically and historically in his trilogy, Freiheit für den Widerspruch (Freedom for Contradiction), published in 1976, fleshes out this point in a politically more accentuated note. In addition, his numerous interventions of the 1970s and 1980s demonstrate the critical force dialogic could take when applied to traditional examples like education, medicine, theology, and social, political, and cultural critique. But dialogic, Goldschmidt liked to remind his contemporaries, had also new and critical things to say concerning society's behavior with regard to nature and the environment, technology, and man's precarious relationship to his spaceship planet earth. Goldschmidt's critical point of departure was that dialogic would always highlight the fundamental significance of the human as well as interhuman aspect in all of these issues. All of these interventions make Goldschmidt an inspiringly provocative interlocutor for our time. His forceful insistence on the importance of everyone's right to alterity makes him a voice in the debate on multiculturalism that cannot be overheard if we want to move beyond the alternative of either safely cordoning off difference to the degree of sheer ignorance or sanitize it into stale forms of side-by-side coexistence of mutual indifference. While the concept of difference still seems to presuppose a notion of identity, however diluted and problematic but therefore only all the more powerfully present, Goldschmidt's dialogic proposes alterity as the irreducibly other which, at the same time, forces me to heed the call to become a better I. Difference between human beings becomes thus neither what is to be tolerated, accepted, or even just celebrated – all in Goldschmidt's final analysis problematic ways to respond to alterity. Instead, Goldschmidt's dialogic argues, comprehending the challenge of difference as the key allows us to become who we are – precisely because we let others be and become who they are. In this regard, Goldschmidt insists, we really need the other, we need the contradiction; we need critique and challenge. Without them we could never be who we really are, and we could never understand the world in which we live, and worse, we would never be able to act in an ethical way – that is, claim genuine responsibility – if it were not for the others and their contradicting us.

(1) Martin Buber, "Über das Erzieherische", in Buber, Werke, Schriften zur Philosophie, vol. 1 (Munich and Heidelberg: Kösel and Lambert Schneider, 1962), 802.
(2) Buber, Zwiesprache, in Buber, Werke vol. 1, 194, 202.
(3) Buber, Das Problem des Menschen, in Buber, Werke vol.1, 407.
(4) Hermann Levin Goldschmidt, Freiheit für den Widerspruch, Werke vol. 6 (Vienna: Pasagen, 1993), 15.
(5) Goldschmidt, Philosophie als Dialogik. Frühe Schriften, Werke 1 (Vienna: Passagen, 1992), 192f.
(6) Ibid. 195.
(7) Ibid. 238.
(8) Ibid. 249.
(9) For an in-depth study of Hegel's project as an alternative to institutionalized disciplinary discourse see Terry Pinkard's tracing of the young Hegel's intellectual career in his Hegel, A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
(10) G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, transl. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
(11) The discussion of Goldschmidt's project of his "Legacy of German Jewry" (Das Vermächtnis des deutschen Judentums) in the next paragraphs is taken from Willi Goetschel und David Suchoff, "Das Vermächtnis des deutschen Judentums: Hermann Levin Goldschmidts unzeitgemässe Betrachtung" in Neue Rundschau 4 (2005).
(12) See Goldschmidt's Philosophie als Dialogik (1948) and his Hermann Cohen und Martin Buber. Ein Jahrhundert Jüdisches Ringen um Wirklichkeit (1946), both in Goldschmidt, Werke vol. 1.
(13) See David Suchoff, "Widersprüchliche Identität: Judentum und Postmoderne im Werk Hermann Levin Goldschmidts" in Willi Goetschel, ed., Perspektiven der Dialogik (Vienna: Passagen, 1994), 111-123.
(14) Hermann Levin Goldschmidt, "Von der Weltschöpfung zur Weltvollendung-12 Thesen" in Goldschmidt, "Der Rest Bleibt": Aufsätze zum Judentum, Werke vol. 4, 19.
(15) Goldschmidt, Das Vermächtnis des deutschen Judentums, Werke vol. 2, 53f.
(16) For such a recent appreciation, see Paul Mendes-Flohr, German Jews: A Dual Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).

Paper presented at the Hermann Levin Goldschmidt Memorial Lecture 2005.

© Stiftung Dialogik, Zürich. Copying and distributing this paper is only allowed with the written permission of the Stiftung Dialogik.