The Epistemological Foundations of the Pedagogy of Reciprocity – Part Two

Martin Buber: The I–Thou Encounter as the Foundation of Reciprocity

With regard to Martin Buber, the individual is formed in the encounter with the other. In the well-known The Way of Man, the Viennese thinker incisively describes a dialogical condition between subjects, inscribed within an authentic relational engagement with alterity. The starting point is the question that the Transcendent addresses to Abraham: “Where are you?” For Buber, every mortal is called to become aware of occupying a specific place in the world, to seek and discover a task on the existential plane¹.

For Buber, identity is not a stable and autonomous datum, but a process continuously renewed in confrontation with the other. The authentic relationship, which he calls the I–Thou encounter, is what makes the full realization of the self possible. The “I” exists only insofar as it turns toward the other not as an object to be used (I–It), but as a living presence to be listened to and welcomed. “Only the one who feels called can respond; and the human being, as a dialogical being, is called from the very beginning”².

In the text, Buber emphasizes that the authenticity of the human journey is at stake in the capacity to remain before the other, not to evade the encounter, to recognize in alterity a path toward the fulfillment of the self. The I–Thou encounter is not an occasional moment, but an orientation of being. It involves the totality of the person, generating a reciprocity that is not symmetrical, yet real—one in which each person is transformed through contact with the other.

This vision carries profound pedagogical implications. Education, in the Buberian perspective, is not the transmission of knowledge, but the generation of relational space in which each subject is called to become fully themselves through encounter. The other, as Thou, is never reducible to function, role, or fixed identity: they are always excess, irreducibility, revelation. The Way of Man does not offer a closed philosophical system, but an ethical and spiritual exhortation to live existence as relationship. The question “Where are you?” remains open, addressed to every subject who seeks to inhabit the world in a responsible and authentic manner.

Within this logic, reciprocity is not merely a pedagogical category, but an ontological and existential orientation.

Emmanuel Lévinas: The Ethics of Responsibility Toward the Other

In his reflection on the origin of ethics and subjectivity, Emmanuel Levinas identifies the roots of the question in relationship. He places the concept of unconditional responsibility at the center of identity and moral life. In Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, he describes how the face of the Other represents a fundamental instance that embodies an inescapable interrogation: “This infinity, stronger than murder, already resists us in its face; it is its face, it is the original expression, it is the first word: ‘You shall not kill’”³.

Such an ethical imperative precedes every form of knowledge, every judgment, every model. It constitutes the very core of human being and becoming. The constitution of the individual is therefore not located in a self-referential consciousness, but in the horizons that alterity is called to offer. The human being is structurally a being-for-the-other, designated to assume responsibility for the one who stands before them. The face is the image of humanity and of the irreducible singularity of the other: it dissolves every possibility of domination, imposing an asymmetrical relationship. The other always remains beyond, elusive to the imposition of the categories of knowledge or possession.

In this sense, one witnesses a true revolution in the nature of ethics. The idea of an ethics constituted by symmetrical relations between rational individuals is overturned. In Levinas, ethics precedes ontology: it is not agreement between identical subjects, but the very foundation of subjectivity itself. It is through the gaze of the other that the individual attains self-awareness⁴.

Pedagogical thought, engaged by these considerations, is called to rethink the educational relationship as an ethical space marked by profound asymmetry. The educator, no longer understood as a subject-supposed-to-know, is radically responsible for the humanity of the other. Reciprocity, therefore, does not coincide with formal equality, but with the unavoidable duty to take responsibility for the other, recognizing their irrepeatable truth. The ethical principles articulated by Levinas orient us toward understanding the educational relationship as a constitutive space of encounter, recognition, and love. The human being has no right to possess the other, but is called to assume them as an end.

Notes

¹ M. Buber, Il cammino dell’uomo, Magnano, Qiqajon, 1990, pp. 3–10.

² M. Buber, Il cammino dell’uomo, Magnano, Qiqajon, 1990, p. 11.

³ E. Lévinas, Totalità e infinito. Saggio sull’esteriorità, Milan, Jaca Book, 2004, p. 204.

⁴ E. Lévinas, Totalità e infinito. Saggio sull’esteriorità, Milan, Jaca Book, 2004.