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AHP PERSPECTIVE August/September 2000 Table of Contents

THE AFFIRMING FLAME:
A Poetics of Meaning
By Maurice S. Friedman
Prometheus Books, 1999
Reviewed by Royal E. Alsup

W ith this engaging work,
Maurice Friedman contributes a valuable addition to the domain of the philosophy of dialogue, drawing upon his long-standing love of the poetics of dialogue with modern literary figures and poets.

Friedmans approach is elegantly explained when he writes that, Literature as dialogue then implies the meeting between the image of the human, or basic attitude of the reader and that of the author. The life of dialogue, as Martin Buber points out in I and Thou, "teaches you to meet others and to hold your ground when you meet them."

Applied to the dialogue with literature, this means the combination of faithfulness to literature in its concrete uniqueness and otherness, including the whole fullness of style and form, with response to that literature from the ground of ones own uniqueness, ones life, and ones situation.

Friedman exquisitely dialogues with excerpts from the works of various modern poets and literary figures, chiefly from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as Auden, Celan, Dickinson, Kafka, Levertov, Melville, Morrison, Neruda, Rilke, Whitman, and Yeats. He discusses their writings that describe the existential, concrete human condition.

The book is divided into three main areas of concern. "Part IFinding Meaning in the Lived Concrete," is a well-presented section consisting of two chapters that introduce the authors "mysticism of the particular" and which enlarge upon his ideas with the work of poets who write about the presentness of consciousness in the concrete condition of human life. I was immediately fascinated and captivated by Friedmans creative use of Bubers dialogical approach and his understanding of "genuine meeting" in an I-Thou experience.

The book is clearly well-grounded in ethics and religion. Friedman writes that his term, "mysticism of the particular," celebrates what Martin Buber calls the bond of the Absolute with the particular, rather than with the general or the universal." This is the thesis.

The four chapters in "Part IIEvil and the Absurd: The Threat of Meaninglessness" indicate how our everyday happiness and meaning can be shattered by evil forces.

Friedmans existentialism guides us through the shattering of our security, or what he calls "the loss of existential trust."

The chapters provide a clear orientation to his existential theodicy. He presents us with the call to courage that it takes to believe in the I-Thou, when God is eclipsed by genocide, such as experienced by Native Americans, African-Americans, and in the Jewish Holocaust. Gods questions or addresses cry out to the human person to respond and make meaning out of the ridiculous. This is "the encounter with the Evil and the Absurd in our concrete everyday reality." This is the antithesis.

The four chapters in "Part III-Holding the Tension between Affirming and Withstanding" confronted my own reality of dealing with evil. It was difficult for me to maintain that balance between distance and relation that Bubers dialogical philosophy demonstrates is essential for the I-Thou experience.

Friedmans book points out Bubers ontology that "to be is to have the courage to be relational." Friedman calls the Holocaust, the Shoal, "our ultimate confrontation." Friedman assserts that the survivors of these events must maintain the existential trust, the ability to affirm, and to maintain what Buber calls the "between," the place where God addresses us in our everyday con- frontations. No matter how horrible the day, we must hallow the everyday and maintain the I-Thou that does not rely on I-It objectivity, nor on distance without the relation.

Friedman aptly defines the strength and courage necessary to say "yes" to the I-Thou and to say "no" to the evil that confronts us in our daily lives. The Affirming Flame gives notice that "existential trust can never be equated with a theology or worldview. It is at best a dialogue with the absurd." Friedman explains the basic offering of this section when he writes that, "Meaning can only be recovered by going through and beyond the evil and absurd to the place where one can hold the tension between affirming where one can affirm and withstanding where one must withstand." This is the synthesis.

The book concludes with a chapter on the great existential theme of confronting death. This reminds me of an old Buddhist saying that "life is the cause of death." Death, for Friedman, is our ultimate task; and the fear of abandonment that confronts us in looking at our own death is an enhancement of the exile and abandonment we feel and experience in every moment of the present. Friedmans chapter on death reminds me of my Native American friends who see death as the ultimate experience that makes our life worth living. The use of death as a guide to everyday reality calls out the importance of each day in the present. With the belief that all of creation is interrelated as one seamless whole, these ideas and attitudes regard the destruction of nature and of the human being to be of the same tragic significance. The ending phrase in traditional Native American prayers, "all my relations," confirms the realization and acceptance of the relatedness that holds all sacred.

Friedman makes the point that technology in the absence of the sacred creates the threat of non-being, which provokes our anxiety. Modern technology and violence have brought about despair, hopelessness, and helplessness in the aftermath of the Holocaust and Hiroshima. The eclipse of God is great and human annihilation is possible, but Friedman counsels us that we have to be modern Jobs, taking the stance of "trusting and contending, affirming in the midst of withstandinga stance in which meaning is found in immediacy without any pretense to an overall, comprehensive meaning that would make the absurd anything less than absurd."

The Affirming Flame leaves readers with the wisdom that we can survive and enjoy a meaningful existence if we maintain the life of dialogue. Friedman proclaims, through the beauty and aesthetics of the literary works he has presented, and through his carefully delineated poetics of dialogue, that love can and will triumph over hatred.

ROYAL ALSUP, Ph.D., is an Adjunct Faculty member at Saybrook Graduate School and co-founder of the Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychotherapy Center in Arcata, California. He is co-creating a new interdisciplinary humanistic curriculum in community development.

AHP PERSPECTIVE August/September 2000 Table of Contents

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