마르틴 부버 ‘만남’ 철학의 교육적 함의

Abstract

Buber's focus on dialogue and community would alone mark him out as an important thinker for educators. But when this is added to his fundamental concern with encounter and how we are with each other his contribution is unique and yet often unrecognized. I and Thou, Buber's best known work, presents us with two fundamental orientations - relation and irrelation. We can either take our place, as Pamela Vermes puts it, alongside whatever confronts us and address it as ‘you’; or ‘we’ can hold ourselves apart from it and view it as an object, an ‘it’. So it is we engage in I-You and I-It relationships. This basic distinction becomes complex - as we can see from the following extract. For Buber encounter has a significance beyond co-presence and individual growth. He looked for ways in which people could engage with each other fully – to meet with themselves. The basic fact of human existence was not the individual or the collective as such, but ‘Man with Man’. As Aubrey Hodes puts it: Encounter is an event or situation in which relation occurs. We can only grow and develop, according to Buber, once we have learned to live in relation to others, to recognize the possibilities of the space between us. The fundamental means is dialogue. Encounter is what happens when two I's come into relation at the same time. This brings us back to Buber’s distinction between relation and irrelation. ‘All real living is meeting’ is sometimes translated as ‘All real life is encounter’. This, as Pamela Vermes has commented, could be taken as the perfect summary of Buber's teaching on encounter and relation. Today, when the word ‘dialogue’ is spoken in educational circles, it is often linked to Paulo Freire. The same is true of ‘subject’ and ‘object’. Yet, in the twentieth century, it is really in the work of Martin Buber that the pedagogical worth of dialogue was realized - and the significance of relation revealed. He wrote - ‘All real living is meeting’ and looked to how, in relation, we can fully open ourselves to the world, to others, and to God.