{
"title": "A Jewish Critique of the Philosophy of Martin Buber",
"language": "en",
"versionTitle": "merged",
"versionSource": "https://www.sefaria.org/A_Jewish_Critique_of_the_Philosophy_of_Martin_Buber",
"text": {
"Editor's Introduction": [
"No attempt at a rationale of Judaism in contemporary times can be adequate without an evaluation of the philosophy of Martin Buber. His concepts and imagery have become part of the intellectual currency of the age in which we live.",
"Moreover, Buber’s concern with the challenges to religious pre-suppositions is presented in the context and vocabulary of contemporary philosophic and theological thought. As a Jewish existentialist, Buber belongs to the religious wing of the movement which in Judaism has become identified as neo-Hasidism.",
"Now while the subjectivism and irrationalism of the first representative of religious existentialism Kierkegaard, may be absent in Buber, the latter’s main position with regard to the encounter requires elucidation from a Torah point of view. Inasmuch as Buber maintains that the most authentic source for the dialogical I-Thou relation is the Jewish Bible, it is important to inquire into Buber’s attitude toward the Bible, Revelation, and Jewish law.",
"This study of Dr. Berkovits is accordingly devoted to a critique of Buber’s position on revelation, and at the same time presents for the first time a thoroughgoing analysis in the light of Torah Judaism of one of the basic philosophic currents of our day.",
"This essay constitutes the third in our series of Studies in Torah Judaism and is authored by a most penetrating thinker in the field of Jewish thought. Dr. Eliezer Berkovits is chairman of the Department of Jewish Philosophy of the Hebrew Theological College at Skokie, Illinois, and author of “God and Man in History,” and “Judaism — Fossil or Ferment.”",
"DR. LEON D. STITSKIN, Editor Special Publications, Yeshiva University"
],
"I The Teachings of Buber": [
"I and Thou
It is mainly due to the writings of Martin Buber that the term, I-and-Thou, has become a household phrase in modern philosophical and religious thought. It may prove profitable to develop the important ideas implied in this term by starting with Buber’s description of two aspects of the human ego, which he calls its two poles. The ego may appear as individual being (Eigenwesen) and as person. It all depends on how a man relates himself to the rest of the world. As individual being man insists on his specific identity as something apart from the world. In this position he looks upon all reality outside himself as a thing to be mastered, to be owned and used. Man becomes a person when he is aware of a personal presence in the world, when he discovers the personal aspect of reality, when he goes out and “meets a meeter” and enters into a relation of reciprocity with him.",
"The distinction is, of course, most obvious in the manner in which a man relates himself to his fellow. As individual being, he will treat other people as “things” to be used and controlled. As a person, he will know them as persons, enter into mutuality with them and dwell and live in the relation. However, the two attitudes may be adopted to all being. One may, for example, encounter even a tree as one encounters a person and, for a short and quickly passing instant, one may look into the eyes of a house cat as one meets the eyes of an old friend. And so it is with the world of intelligible beings too. The artist does not have an idea which he attempts to realize; he is confronted by a presence that “speaks” to him and to whom he must give answer in his work. All reality has its personal essence which may be met in the immediacy of mutual intercourse.",
"The two poles of human existence correspond to two aspects of all reality. The one may be called its thinghood, the other, its personal essence. As individual being, one experiences the world as a thing, as It; as a person, one encounters all reality as Thou. The two attitudes Buber designates by the two concepts, I-It and I-Thou. He calls these concepts, primary words (Grund-worte), because whenever one says I, one uses it either as individual being or as a person. The I is always related, either to an It or to a Thou. It follows, therefore, that the I that a human being uses does not always mean the same. In its relatedness to an It, the I stands for a functional manifestation of the ego, as it affirms itself, observing, experiencing, using and possessing. On the other hand, the I of the I-Thou, dwelling as it does in the relation with the personal essence, stands for the wholeness of the human personality. The immediacy of the encounter engages the human being in its entirety. One says Thou in the fulness of one’s humanity; one never relates to an It in such a manner. Yet, the partial engagement of the ego in the I-It context may appear more active than the totality of human engagement in the encounter with a Thou. The elimination of all specific and partial functions that occurs in the spontaneity of the meeting between person and person may appear as a form of inactivity. In truth, however, in the I-Thou relation man becomes effective in the wholeness of his being. Thus, the I of I-It is much less real than the I in I-Thou.",
"One might also say that as individual being man uses the world, he manipulates it. Reality submits to him. However, as a manipulator, he is outside, he cannot participate. Only as a person is he present; only so does he meet and associate. As the I of I-Thou, he participates. The non-participating I is unreal. Reality in its essence must be encountered. It reveals its true nature in participation. To be real means to participate. To say all this means also that the world confronted as It is the world of separation and estrangement. Only when encountered as personal presence may the universe become cosmos and home for man.",
"A significant difference between the two manifestations of being is to be seen in the fact that only as a thing does the world have solidity and tangible durability. Only as It can the world be circumscribed by the coordinates of time and space. Being, however, as a personal presence, as Thou that meets us, does not endure in time, nor can it be placed in space beside another presence. The relation between I and Thou is only possible in the spontaneity of a timeless Now. A meeting remembered is no longer the living relation. In memory, one’s former Thou has already become an It. In each encounter one meets only one presence at a time. The moment the I becomes aware of a new presence, one has brought an encounter to a close and entered into a new relation. The former Thou has now sunk down into the world of thinghood as a past experience. All presence exists for me in the actuality of my encounter with it. Without such actuality all reality turns for me into thinghood. All relations with one’s Thou are exclusive. The It borders on other Its; the Thou does not border. However, being that cannot be caught in the net of the time-space coordinates lacks solidity. Thus, the I-Thou aspect of reality is fleeting. One encounters one’s Thou unexpectedly and loses it again without warning. A Thou may reveal himself to one in a flash and will fade away again with equal speed. It is man’s melancholy lot that every Thou must turn for him into an It most of the time of his life.",
"Only the It-world, because of its solidity, may become the ordered world. As such, it can be the object of common discourse between people. Concerning the ordered world of the It, they may reach any measure of agreement. The world of the Thou, with its sudden appearances and equally unexpected withdrawal, can never become an object of agreement or disagreement between people. One is always alone with one’s Thou. Yet, only in the encounter with a presence is it possible for man to catch a glimpse of a world order. One can, of course, not live in the relation with the Thou; one must endure in the world of the It. But he who knows not of the encounter with the Thou, cannot be the I as a person either; he cannot be truly human. No man is only individual being; no man is only person. The question, however, is, which is the dominant element in a man. According to the dominance of each of the poles, some people will be persons, as other will be individual beings.",
"Pure Relation",
"The most intensive form of the I-Thou is established when man succeeds in encountering being in its full independence, the Absolute as a Person. It is the authentic realm of religion. The Absolute in its personal manifestations is the only possible knowledge of God. One cannot derive God from something else whose existence is explained by the assumption of a First Cause, which is then called God. One cannot deduce him from Nature as its originator or from History as its ruler. God is the nearest to us. He is the one who confronts us most immediately as eternal Presence. The living contact with the Absolute as the eternal Presence is called the pure relation. All other meetings with a Thou are only “portals” by which one is led to the presence of the eternal Thou. It is not possible to enter into the pure relation except by way of the portals. One cannot treat all the world as It, subject to the egocentricity of the whims and wishes of the individual being, and at the same time know God as a person knows his Thou. All the I-Thou relations are so many “stations” on the road to the ultimate encounter.",
"In order to understand the specific nature of the pure relation, we must bear in mind the distinction between it and all other I-Thou situations. As we saw earlier in our analysis, the I-Thou relation is not subject to the time-space coordinates. A Thou does not border; one is alone with one’s Thou. This entails that I-Thou is exclusive. Buber hastens to add that this does not mean that all else is disregarded, but that it appears in the light of the actuality of the relation. Everything outside the relation derives its significance for the I from inside it. Ultimately, however, especially — as it always happens — when my Thou has turned into an It for me, the exclusiveness of the relation becomes an injustice done to the world. The exclusiveness, so vital for the relation, degenerates into the exclusion of all. It is not so, however, in the case of the pure relation. As all I-thou encounters, it too is exclusive. He who enters into the absolute relation is no longer concerned with singulars, either as things or as persons. But his Thou is “the essence of all essences,” the Presence in all presences, that which constitutes the Thou in every individual Thou. Encountering him, one encounters the All Presence. All relations are comprehended in the pure relation. In it, exclusiveness and inclusiveness are one. “For the step into pure relation is not to disregard everything but to see everything in the Thou, not to renounce the world but to establish it on its true basis. To look away from the world, or to stare at it, does not help man to reach God; but he who sees the world in Him stands in His presence … to eliminate or leave behind nothing at all, to include the whole world in the Thou, to give the world its due and its truth, to include nothing beside God but everything in him — this is full and complete relation.”",
"Another specific feature of the pure relation is to be seen in the fact that the all-inclusive Presence of the eternal Thou provides the continuity of the personal quality of all reality. At first, we found solidity only in the connectedness of the It-world in time and space. The I-Thou encounters between finite beings could not properly be considered forming a cosmos. They were separated from each other by the massive dimensions of the It-world into which to dissolve was the fate of every Thou. The pure relation, however, becomes the center of a universe of relation, in which all relations meet and from which they expand. Because of it, there is a continuum in the world of Thou too. Thanks to it, the isolated instances of the encounters link up to form the universal reality of association and participation. Without the pure relation, the power of the It might be overwhelming and man would be doomed to estrangement and to the loss of reality, for he would lose the ability to encounter and to participate.",
"Dialogue and Revelation",
"It is, of course, necessary to probe further into the nature of the pure relation. Who is man’s partner in the relation? We have seen that Buber calls him the eternal Thou, the Being of all beings, the Presence in all presences, the “soul of my soul,” or God. What, then, does he mean by God? One cannot call him the Absolute. This would be describing him in terms of an idea, as an It. Nor can the Absolute be defined in intelligible terms. Is he then, person? But person is exclusive and God is all-inclusive. The truth can be expressed only paradoxically by calling him, the absolute Person. This is no description or definition; the paradox renders the term unintelligible. One knows him from the relation. In the encounter, the all-embracing Presence addresses man; in the relation, man may address him as Thou. “It is … impossible to point out the true absolute as ‘the absolute’ in itself, i. e., in intelligible terms. The true absolute can be pointed out only as God; i. e., though to our thinking it is the absolute, it is so only in terms of a personality, or, paradoxically expressed in terms of the absolute personality who addresses us …” And we may add, who addresses us and whom we may reach by addressing him. God is the Unknowable, the eternal mystery, and yet our “true vis-a-vis,” who makes his Presence known to us by his address.",
"There is, however, one more question still to be asked: how does he address man? How does he reveal his presence to man? How does the relation come about? Buber does not consider the address by which the absolute Person makes himself known to man a supernatural event. Nothing really happens beside, or in addition to, the normal course of man’s everyday life. God appears to man “in infinite manifestations in the infinite variety of things and events.” They speak for God. Man recognizes the world, his own existence, the “concrete situation” into which he is placed, as something given to him, something to which he has been appointed. Thus, in the “concrete situation” of his own life, he encounters the Giver. Through everything that he experiences he hears the voice of the Giver calling him to his responsibility and to his appointed task. All the world is God’s sign language addressed to man. This is the theme that, in innumerable variations, runs through all the writings of Buber. It all begins with the “fear of God,” which Buber defines in the following terms: “It comes when our existence between birth and death becomes incomprehensible and uncanny, when all security is shattered through the mystery … It is the essential mystery, the inscrutableness of which belongs to its very nature; it is the unknowable. Through this dark gate … the believing man steps forth into the everyday which is henceforth hallowed as the place in which he has to live with the mystery. He steps forth directed and assigned to the concrete, contextual situations of his existence. That he henceforth accepts the situation as given him by the Giver is what Biblical religion calls the ‘fear of God.’ ” Such is the fear of God, the beginning. The encounter with God takes place “in God’s very giving and in his, man’s, receiving of the concrete situation.” This is possible because out of the concrete situation man hears himself addressed. “The forms in which the mystery approaches us are nothing but our personal experiences.” It approaches us by means of the voice that speaks to us “in the guise of everything that happens, in the guise of all world events …” These thoughts are most markedly summarized in a passage that one finds in the essay on, The Faith of Judaism, where Buber says: “The world is given to the human beings who perceive it, and the life of man is itself a giving and a receiving. The events that occur to human beings are the great and small, untranslatable but unmistakable signs of their being addressed; what they do and fail to do can be an answer or a failure to answer …”",
"The interpretation of the encounter with “the Lord of the one voice” establishes the relation as a dialogical situation. The whole of human life and all human history is thus seen as a dialogue between God and man, “a dialogue in which man is a true, legitimate partner, who is entitled and empowered to speak his own independent word out of his own being.” The dialogue, of course, is not one of words, but of action. God speaks to man through everything that befalls his creature and man answers by everything he does or fails to do in response. Expressing it in Buber’s own words: “In this dialogue God speaks to every man through the life which he gives him again and again. Therefore man can only answer God with the whole of life — with the way in which he lives this given life.” The encounter is a dialogical one; the encounter and the dialogue are one.",
"We can know God only because he addresses man; the relation is his revelation. Needless to say, the relation does not make the mystery intelligible. As we have heard, the Unknown is the essentially unknowable. Revelation consists in what is revealed by the Voice, in what is made known in the address. Revelation and the relation thus become identical and are indeed described in identical terms. Revelation begins when God gives man his “appointed work,” which is of course the concrete situation revealed to man as the one in which he has to prove himself. Thus Buber may say that “revelation is nothing else than the relationship between giving and receiving.” Receiving, however, implies acknowledging the concrete situation as “the appointed work,” acknowledging the giver and responding to his address. Once again we find ourselves in the dialogical situation. The relation and the dialogue are also the revelation. A number of significant insights follow from this position. Since revelation itself is dialogical, it is only started by God and must be completed by man. “Revelation lasts until the turning creature answers and his answer is accepted by God’s redeeming grace.” What is revealed to man is thus not God — Buber does not know of God’s self-revelation — but man’s “appointed work,” his responsibility, his freedom and ability to answer. “Revelation does not deal with the mystery of God, but with the life of man …” In revelation God reveals man unto himself. The meaning of revelation emerges from man’s response to the divine address “through the engagement of one’s own person.” Thus, man becomes God’s partner even in the unfolding of revelation.",
"Every encounter is a minor revelation, but essentially it is the same as the major revelations that are claimed to be at the origin of the great religions. Buber, therefore, calls revelation, “the eternal, primal phenomenon, present here and now.” He lists its essential feature. Most important among them is that the human being does not come out of the supreme encounter the same that he was when he entered it. Something happens to him. He notes an increase in being, something added to him, of whose existence he did not know before and of whose origin he is unable to render a proper account. It should, however, be understood that what is received is not “a content,” but a Presence that joins one as a Power and makes itself known, as it were, with a threefold significance. First, there is a sense of complete mutuality and reciprocity of being accepted and standing in relation. Secondly, one gains an assurance of meaningfulness. From now on, nothing can ever be meaningless. The meaning, however, cannot be formulated conceptually. We learn that there is a meaning for us, that the Presence wants something of us, and we have to choose and decide in the spontaneity of every new moment and go and do it. What we then do is what He desires of us. This is the third element in the revelation. The meaning, however, is for me and for me alone in my situation at this moment. It cannot be transmitted as theology or religion, or as generally valid wisdom, to others; nor can the living of the meaning by me be transcribed unto tablets of law, “to be raised above all men’s heads … We cannot approach others with what we have received and say ‘You must know this, you must do this.’ We can only go, and confirm its truth. And this, too, is no ‘ought,’ but we can, we must.”",
"Freedom and Destiny",
"The dialogue, the human responsibility to respond to the Voice presupposes freedom. Without freedom man could render no answer; without freedom there can be no relation. How is, then, freedom possible in the midst of a world that is held together by the principle of causation? In solving the problem, Buber elaborates further a distinction between the It-world and the Thou-world. The It-world alone exists within the coordinates of time and space. It alone has the continuum within which the principle of causation may function. The world of the It is indeed one of unfreedom. The man who lives only in it is completely subject to fate. The human being who has encountered the Thou knows of freedom. I and Thou confront each other in freedom. The relation is untinged by causal determinism. The category of the personal is the category of spontaneity. The freedom of one’s own being, as well as that of Being, is vouchsafed in the spontaneous reciprocity of the relation. Only he who knows relation and is aware of the presence of the Thou is capable of deciding and responding. Of course, no one can ever live in the I-Thou situation for any length of time. Again and again, he must leave the presence and enter into the It-world. But he who knows about the freedom in the relation is not oppressed by the causality of the It-world. He understands that human life is “a swinging between Thou and It.” He realizes that it is the very meaning of human existence to leave the world of Thou again and again and to prove oneself in the realm of It. There, on the threshold of the sanctuary, “the response,the spirit is kindled ever anew; here in the unholy and needy land, the spark has to prove itself.”",
"Obviously, the determinism of the It realm does not cease to be effective even for the man who returns to its with the spark from the encounter with the Thou. However, it becomes transformed. Understanding how this happens leads us to another one of the key thoughts in Buber’s philosophy. The man who stood in the presence of the Thou may well forget all causality. He is confronted with innumerable possibilities of action and he knows he has to decide. At the same time, he is circumscribed by the situation in which he finds himself and which is given. He cannot really do as he pleases. Somewhere in his condition there is a deed waiting for him in order to be done by him. Unless he chooses the deed that “means” him, he will not fulfill the meaning of his life. The deed is destined for him, but it will not be done unless he discovers it in responsible choice. When this happens, fate is transformed into human destiny. Man is free to choose what has been destined for him. He may use his freedom in order to learn what it is that the Voice, addressing him in the concrete situation, desires of him. Even if the dominion of causality should not allow him to perform “his deed” as he envisaged it, even in such resistance he will recognize his destiny which does not limit his freedom but completes it. Freedom and destiny embrace each other in order to reveal to man the meaning of his life.",
"On the strength of this, Buber is critical of the exclusively scientific attitude which attempts to interpret all reality in terms of cause and effect. It finds everywhere lawfulness, the law of life, of history, of society, of culture; everywhere it sees only a gradual process that follows well established rules. One must either submit to the rules or be eliminated. It is the strictest belief in inescapable fate. Buber calls it “the dogma of the gradual process” and sees in it “man’s abdication before the teeming It-world.” At the same time, he rejects, for instance, the Kantian solution of the antinomy of freedom and necessity. Only in thought may one relegate necessity to the realm of appearances and freedom to the world of transcendental being. However, the man who stands before God in the reality of his concrete situation knows that, while it is true that he is what he is of necessity it is also true that “it all depends on him.” He must live with the paradox; he must accept both truths. In the one life they become one. Thus, blind necessity is transformed into meaningful human destiny. Buber may, therefore, in another context say of human existence that it “means being sent and being commissioned.”",
"However, has not the essence of religion been described as a sense of complete dependence on God? Is not such absolute dependence, too, a situation of unfreedom? Buber does not agree that either Schleiermacher or Rudolf Otto fully describe the contents of the I-Thou relation with God. This relation is bi-polar. Both I and Thou are most real in it. It may well happen that as the result of one’s own religious attitude the significance of the I-pole may escape the attention of the reflective memory, yet in truth the experience represents a “coincidentia-oppositorum.” As Buber says: “Yes; in pure relation you have felt yourself to be simply dependent, as you are able to feel in no other relation — and simply free, too, as in no other time or place: you have felt yourself to be both creaturely and creative.” We have to see in this the deepest significance of the dialogue. Man needs God more than anything else, but — says Buber — God too needs man for the fulfillment of the very meaning of human existence. Creation happens to us, but we also participate in it, meeting the Creator, lending ourselves to him, helpers and partners. If we understand the pure relation merely as dependence, we eliminate one of its poles. Thus, the relation itself loses its reality.",
"As is well known, the feeling of absolute dependence often leads to the complete submerging of individuality in the mystical union with the All. As Buber corrects Schleiermacher’s definition of the essence of religion, so does he also correct the mystic’s description of the essence of the mystical experience. The mystic is mistaken, maintains Buber. The union with the All never really occurs; the two never become one. At times, however, it may happen that the ecstatic experience of the relation is so overwhelming that its two poles almost fade away and the I as well as the Thou may be forgotten. “What the ecstatic man calls union is the enrapturing dynamic of the relation, not a unity arisen in this moment … that dissolves the I and the Thou, but the dynamic of relation itself, which can put itself before the bearers as they steadily confront one another, and cover each from the feeling of the other enraptured one.” Finally, mysticism in its various forms is rejected by the strength of the sense of selfhood that man carries within himself and that of ‘the sense of being,” which cannot be included in man’s idea of the world. Man knows himself as being present in the world but not identical with it. Man and the world are ultimate entities and cannot be reduced any further. And here Buber adds the significant sentence: “I know nothing of a ‘world’ and a ‘life in the world’ that might separate a man from God.” What is often thought of an alienation from God due to involvement with the world is in reality “life with an alienated world of It, which experiences and uses. He who truly goes out to meet the world goes out also to God.” To go out “truly” to meet the world is of course to live in the dialogical situation, acting on the world in response to the address that reaches a man from the midst of his given situation.",
"Criticism of Historic Religions",
"There seems to be no subject under the heavens that, according to Buber, is not amenable to illumination by his magic formula of I-Thou. Already in his earliest writings he applied it to a criticism of historic religions.",
"Buber is prepared to acknowledge that all religion is revelational. Yet, as is well known, religions do promulgate knowledge and prescribe action and behavior. Revelation in historic religions has contents; it knows of Thou-shalt and Thou-shalt-not. This, of course, is not in keeping with Buber’s interpretation of revelation. How do the Presence and the Power originally encountered in revelation, become contents to be formulated as creed and as religious rites? At first, he answers the question from the point of view of the human psyche. We noted that the encounter with God does not occur in the time-space continuum. The encounters are few and far between and they are quickly passing. They have no duration in time. Then again, man must go out in the loneliness of his selfhood to meet God. I-Thou has no expansion in space. But man longs for solidity. He hungers for continuity. He wishes to have his God and desires to expand the basis of his meeting with him from I to We. And so it happens that man’s desire for duration in time transforms the living reality of Thou into an object of faith. Instead of going out to the absolute Person ever anew, man rests in his faith in a God-thing. God himself is now turned into It, which one owns, enjoys and uses for one’s security and wellbeing. Similarly, man’s need for spatial presentation of his religion reduces God to a mere object of cult and rites, which one may share with a community of believers. Man imagines that thus he may overcome his solitude and stand in relation with the eternal Thou as part of a community.",
"Both these attitudes are mistakes. The continuity of the relation in time may only be assured by incorporating relation into the whole of man’s life in the world. The pure relation is realized as man meets the whole of being with the Thou on his lips, by making every day his contribution to the revelation of the Thou in everything that exists. This way, the reality of participation, the only reality Buber recognizes, gains steadfastness and continuity. “Thus the time of human life is shaped into a fulness of reality, and even though human life neither can nor ought to overcome the connection with It, it is so penetrated with relation that relation wins in it a shining, streaming constancy; the moments of supreme meeting are then no flashes in darkness but the rising moon in a clear, starlit night.” In a previous part of our analysis, we heard Buber say that the pure relation restores to the Thou-world the privilege of continuity which originally belongs to the It-world alone. We understand now more clearly how this was meant. It is a continuity that does not really exist, but has to be established by man in partnership with God.",
"So too, man’s longing for constancy in space can be satisfied only by means of the life in the relation itself. A community exists when the radii, which run from every individual I to the eternal Thou in the center, form a circle. The origin of the community is not due to the continuity of the periphery; not the periphery comes first, but the radii, the relation that binds every individual to the living center. Buber applies here his definition of the community which he expresses in another context. According to it, the existence of a community depends on two conditions: that all its members stand in living mutual relation to a living center; that they are associated with each other in living relations of mutuality. The second condition depends on the fulfillment of the first. The community is established by the living mutual relation of all its members; the master builder, however, is the living and effective center. We note that in describing the nature of the specifically religious community no mention is made of the second condition. In every other case, Buber can say that the second condition has its source in the first, but it is not necessarily given with the first. However, when the living center is the eternal Thou, then of course the relation of every I to it is all-inclusive. As we have heard, one cannot treat the world as It and stand in the I-Thou relation to God. Therefore, in the specifically religious community, if every member is related to the living center, he will also be united to every other member in the mutuality of a living and effective relation.",
"Buber does not leave it at that. There is yet another reason for the transformation of “the Presence and the Power” of revelation into “contents” of historic religion. It is connected with what he calls “the primordial phenomenon of religion” as it becomes manifest in history. There are times when the human spirit matures, be it even suppressed and — as it were — underground, with readiness for the touch by the eternal Presence. When then revelation occurs, it takes hold of the whole shining element of the spirit of man in all its expectation and, melting it down, impresses on it an image, a new image of God in the world. This is not due to human strength alone, nor is it simply God’s passage through the human substance. It is a mixture of the divine and the human. “He who is sent out in the strength of revelation takes with him … an image of God.” Yet, not even this image is a contents communicated. It comes about as a result of the dialogical situation. The spirit responds through a beholding which is “formative.” Beholding the Presence, we shape the image of God. The image is also called an admixture of Thou and It. As image it is an object of thought, and it may serve as basis of belief and cult. Yet, it is not altogether object; the essence of relation lives on in it. Thus, the image itself may ever again become a presence. Often, however, man removes the image from God. The image then becomes a mere It, rendering the saying of Thou impossible. When this happens, the Word, born in the original encounter, has disintegrated. Man must ready himself for the new encounter. “The images topple, but the voice is never silenced … the voice speaks in the guise of everything that happens, in the guise of all world events; it speaks to the men of all generations, makes demands upon them, and summons them to accept their responsibility …” We cannot hide our feelings that especially here it would have been most advantageous if beauty of language were matched by power of clear thinking. We must confess that this concept of the image of God took us completely by surprise. We were unprepared for it on the basis of the rest of Buber’s philosophy. We assume what he means is something like this. At the moment of revelation, man hears himself addressed by the Voice which reaches him from the concrete situation. As he responds to the call, revelation is completed and meaning is revealed in man’s engagement to do and to live. Man knows: this then is what God wants of me. In the light of this knowledge, he forms the image of God. God, the Unknown and Unknowable, must be loving, since he desires me to act with lovingkindness. He must be just, since he wishes me to be just. Thus the image comes into being. Such an interpretation of the idea will be borne out by what Buber says in another connection: “Our own life is, therefore, the only sphere in which we can point him out, and then only through this life of ours.”",
"Philosophy, Ethics, and the Eclipse of God",
"The understanding of the full implication of the primary word I-Thou, yields for Buber the distinction between philosophy and religion. Philosophy often assumes that religion too is founded on an act of intellectual cognition, which, however, is not as clear as philosophical thinking. This is a mistaken notion. Intellectual cognition treats the divine and the absolute as objects of thought. This in indeed typical of philosophy. “Religion, on the other hand, insofar as it speaks of knowledge at all, does not understand it as a noetic relation of a thinking subject to a neutral object of thought, but rather as mutual contact, as the genuinely reciprocal meeting in the fulness of life between one active existence and another.” Unlike philosophy, religion does not deal with an object comprehended, but knows only the presence of the Present One. In religious reality one meets God; in philosophy one objectifies him in thought. The man who is incapable of meeting with the divine can only inquire whether God’s existence may be proved by derivation; but where there is no actual relation with the eternal Thou, no indirect proof is of much avail.",
"Objectification in thought means of course that philosophy abstracts from the particular and concrete and sees the absolute in universal concepts or ideas. Religion, however, is essentially involvement in the concrete situation, in which man, the particular, meets God, the Absolute. The convenant between the particular and the Absolute, as it is revealed in the relation, is at the core of the meaning of religion. In this I-Thou covenant the whole of the human being is engaged, whereas in philosophy only the faculty of thinking is at work. The objectifying thought knows the world itself as object, whereas in the reality of religion man confronts Being in its personal essence. “I-Thou finds its highest intensity and transfiguration in religious reality, in which unlimited Being becomes, as absolute person, my partner. I-It finds its highest concentration and illumination in philosophical knowledge.” Furthermore, the philosophical process of objectification establishes a continuum of intellectual discourse in which all thinking beings may share. The reality of relation with absolute Being, however, cannot be demonstrated. One may only testify to one’s own experience and point toward “the hidden realm of existence.”",
"Closely related to a proper evaluation of philosophy is, according to Buber, the question of ethics. The connection is well illustrated by Kant’s struggle with the problems, “What is God?” and “Is there a God?” as it is reflected in his unfinished posthumous work. What Kant was after was a God who could establish the absolute quality of the catagorical imperative, a God to serve as “the source of all moral obligation.” Kant did not succeed because he did not know of the relation to the Absolute. The absolutes of philosophy, objects of human thought, may at best yield us a concept of God as “a moral condition within us” or will derive the authority of ethical obligation from the existence of society. Either way, one places the validity of the distinction between good and evil in man. “And yet — says Buber — I am constitutionally incapable of conceiving of myself as the ultimate source of moral approval or disapproval of myself, as surety for the absoluteness that I, to be sure, do not possess, but nevertheless imply with respect to this yes or no.”",
"What then is required? Buber believes that his concept of I-Thou provides the answer. Only the Absolute may be the source of absolute obligation. But we know the Absolute only in the encounter as “the absolute Person.” It follows, then, that the quality of absolute obligation which attends the ethical values depends entirely on man’s encounter with the eternal Thou. The man who seeks for an ultimate basis for the distinction between good and evil, as well as for the ethical commitment, cannot derive it from his own soul. “Only out of a personal relation with the Absolute can the absoluteness of the ethical co-ordinates arise … it is the religious which bestows, the ethical which receives.”",
"Buber adds to this thought an interesting reflection on the distinction between Christianity and Judaism. The significance of Israel he discerns in the fact that it stood in “a fundamental relationship” to God as “the people of a covenant.” Christianity, on the other hand, replaced the concept of the people by that of the individual. The idea of the “holy people” was given up for that of personal holiness. In Christian individualism the relationship between the ethical and the religious is thus impaired. In Judaism ethics is an inherent function of religion. And since religion is based on the covenant of God with the people, the entire area of public and national life becomes a matter of spiritual concern and ethical engagement. This is the powerful motivation of prophecy in Israel. Behind the prophets of Israel stood the injunction, “You shall become a holy people unto me.” Therein lies “the true binding of the ethical to the Absolute.” However, when sanctification is not required of a people as a people, “then the peoples accept the new faith not as peoples but as collections of individuals. Even where mass conversions take place, the people as a people remains unbaptised; it does not enter as a people into the new covenant that has been proclaimed.” Where the norm, grounded in the encounter with the absolute Person, loses its centrality for the public life, it is made easy for “the secular norm” to gain more and more recognition at the other’s expense.",
"In modern times, the absolute quality of ethical values has come under considerable criticism. Understandably, such criticism is not to be separated from the modern crisis of religion — a crisis due to a philosophical movement that has abolished the Absolute as a personal reality confronting man. The prelude to the present phase one may see in the thoughts of Hobbes; its beginning, in Feuerbach. By way of Marx and Nietzsche the movement has reached our own days. Its present protagonists are Heidegger and Sartre, on the one hand, and the psychologist, Jung, on the other. What they have in common is that each, in his own way, has shifted the concept of God from the realm of objective being to “the immanence of subjectivity.” Thus, “the silence of God” means the relativity of all ethical obligation and resurrection of the old adage of Protagoras that man is the measure of all things. It may mean, as Heidegger puts it, the “elimination of the self-subsisting super-sensual world by man”; or, as Sartre believes, that God is “the Other,” who just looks on but does not communicate and thus becomes a matter of indifference to man. A similar approach is adopted by Jung in the realm of psychology. According to Buber, the result is “a religion of pure psychic immanence.” In all these modern attempts at ontological and psychological interpretation there is a turning away from “the God believed in by the religious, who is to be sure present to the soul, who reveals Himself to it, communicates with it, but remains transcendent to it in His being.” The crisis in religion and ethics is due to the fact that man is determined “to interpret encounters with Him as self-encounters.” As a result, “man’s very structure is destroyed. This is the portent of the present hour.”",
"What of the future, what of tomorrow? Nietzsche was wrong in speaking of the “death” of God. The eternal Thou lives on “behind the wall of darkness.” It is modern man who is no longer able to attain to I-Thou relation with Him. For this reason, Buber speaks of “the eclipse of God as the character of the historic hour through which the world is passing.” By this metaphor, he expresses the belief that man may indeed “glance” at God, as it were, as he may glance at the sun; and as between the human eye and the sun, so too between the human being and God something may intervene and shut out the vision. This something is recognized in the tremendous increase in the dominion of the I-It relation in our times. “The I of this relation, an I that possesses all, makes all, succeeds with all, this I that is unable to say Thou, unable to meet a being essentially, is the lord of the hour. This selfhood that has become omnipotent, with all the It around it, can naturally acknowledge neither God nor any genuine absolute which manifests itself to men as of non-human origin. It steps in between and shuts off from us the light of heaven.” Yet, Buber remains optimistic. The I-Thou relation has been forced underground. Who can tell but that already tomorrow it may break forth with renewed power, relegating the I-It to its rightful place of assisting and serving! Buber is aware of something that “is taking place in the depths … tomorrow even it may happen that it will be beckoned to from the heights, across the heads of the earthly archons. The eclipse of the light of God is no extinction; even tomorrow that which has stepped in between may give way.”"
],
"II Buber's Testimony": [
"Having concluded the presentation of the main trends in Buber’s thought, we cannot but agree with him completely when he says that the validity of his teaching is not to be demonstrated or proved. It is of the very essence of what he tells us about that he can only testify to what he himself has encountered and to what he himself has committed himself. Nevertheless, as he mentions it on various occasions, the witness does not speak about himself alone, about a purely subjetcive experience. He speaks about reality; he testifies to the objective nature of reality, to what being truly is. As we have heard him say, the witness points toward “the hidden realm of existence.” Only because of that is his testimony more than a moving private confession. The testimony obviously means to be teaching for all of us. Buber does not only bear witness, but, as he says, he “calls to witness him to whom he speaks.” It is up to us to encounter what he encounters, to meet whom he meets. The question is, therefore, inescapable: Can the testimony be accepted on the strength of its own internal evidence? We believe that on a number of important points the answer will be in the negative. What is at stake is the objective significance of the testimony in its various ramifications, its value for all those to whom Buber wishes to speak.",
"Subjectivity of Experience",
"Any one who wishes to penetrate the nature of the pure relation cannot suppress the question: If the I can reach that far, why not continue in the course and bring it to a culmination by submerging the I in the Thou in a mystical union? We have heard Buber answer the question. In essence, he maintained that there was no such thing as mystical union. The mystic misinterprets his experience. The I and the world, the I and the Thou, are final entities, which cannot be reduced any further. The two may never become one. We do not mean to question the objective validity of the answer. What we should like to understand is, how Buber can bear witness to it. The mystics of all ages also testify. According to their testimony, I and Thou are further reducible to the undifferentiated All. They experience the union no less convincingly than Buber experiences the relation When Buber says that the mystical union never really occurs, may it not just be that it never occurred to him? One might perhaps argue that since in the encounter I and Thou are revealed to each other as real and their relation as the essence of reality, they can never again lose their identity. To argue in this manner would be begging the question. The point may be illustrated by taking another glance at the I-It and the I-Thou relations within the teaching of Buber. Needless to say, Buber never suggested that the It-world did not exist. He never demanded that I-It relations should be dispensed with. On the contrary, he fully realizes that they have their places in the scheme of living, that indeed life without them would be impossible. What he maintains is that they must not be the dominant relations; they must subserve the realm of I-Thou, where alone meaning can be found. Obviously, he to whom — for whatever reason — the access to the realm of I-Thou is closed, evaluates the significance of I-It differently. The status of the It-world is validly established for Buber in the light of his acquaintance with the world of Thou. The It does not cease to exist when man encounters the Thou, but the nature of its existence and its significance are now understood differently. May it not be the same as regards I-Thou, should there be a further realm of complete union in the All? No one need doubt the reality of the encounter. Yet, seen through the eyes of one who knows of the mystical union, Buber’s evaluation of the encounter may be no less distorted than is, from Buber’s point of view, the evaluation of I-It by the man who knows nothing of the pure relation. The problem is all the more serious, since Buber acknowledges that God is unknowable, that his definition of the absolute Person should be understood more like an attribute of personal being among the infinite number of divine attributes. May it not indeed be conceivable that in the encounter with “the absolute Person” one has not yet reached the Ultimate? When he affirms that I and Thou are ultimates, and the relation the very essence of reality, is he still testifying?",
"Subjectivity of Response and Meaning",
"However, what of the meaning which unfolds itself dialogically in the relation and is present in the encounter? Is it not ground enough to testify that the relation is indeed not still further reducible? The question only puts the finger on another weak spot in the testimony. It is of the very essence of the dialogue that God calls man and that man answers in freedom. He has to give his own answer. The revelation, which takes place in the encounter, we have heard Buber say, has no contents. It reveals a Presence that assures meaning. The meaning, however, is not to be formulated in intelligible terms. It is unraveled by man when he responds to the call in the freedom of his choice and decision. It emerges from the course of action to which man commits himself in response to the divine call. We assume that the very nature of the dialogue excludes the possibility of the communication of a contents, a law and a command, in the revelation. Such a contents would destroy the mutuality of the relation, the dialogical situation itself. But if so, one should like to know, how does one ascertain that one’s response to the Voice which speaks from the concrete situation is the valid response; that the meaning which has unfolded itself as a result of man’s own participation in the revelation is the authentic one accepted by God? How can one know that one’s own participation has not distorted the meaning? The question touches also on the important issue that we discussed in the preceding section under the heading, Freedom and Destiny. There is this deed, hidden somewhere in the concrete situation, waiting to be done by me, meaning me and destined for me. Yet it is up to me to choose it from among the unlimited number of possibilities. I choose, I act and discover meaning. How do I know that I have chosen correctly? We are quite willing to accept Buber’s assurance that the meaning “is not ‘subjective’ in the sense that it originates in my emotion or cerebration, and then is transferred to objective happenings. Rather, it is the meaning I perceive, experience, and hear in reality. The meaning … is not an idea which I can formulate independent of my personal life. It is only with my personal life that I am able to catch the meaning … for it is a dialogical meaning.” But just because it is a dialogical meaning its authenticity is subject to be questioned. There is subjective participation in its revelation. True, man’s response is invited and demanded; but when it is forthcoming, how is it validated? All that is left, is our own experience of the meaningfulness of the course of life in which we are engaged. Is that sufficient? There may indeed be something objectively present as meaning; but what we finally perceive and experience in the creative freedom of the dialogue, could it not be distorted by our own subjective limitations? Buber does occasionally use such phrases as, man’s answer “is accepted by God’s redeeming grace.” Does he suggest that every time man responds correctly to the challenge, he is applauded by the Lord of the One Voice, speaking to him from his own deed? If only he wrote less movingly and with greater clarity of thought.",
"Occasionally, one has the feeling that Buber would like to provide more solid foundations to assure the objectivity of the testimony. While he does not admit any contents or definitive teaching in the encounter and revelation, yet he does seem to acknowledge divine commandments addressed to man. Of the Decalogue, for instance, he affirms that “they were uttered by an I and addressed to a Thou. They begin with the I and every one of them addresses the Thou in person. An I “commands’ and a Thou — every Thou who hears this Thou — ‘is commanded.’ ” In itself, this sounds like good Orthodox teaching. The phrase, however, every Thou who hears this Thou, indicates that the dialogical situation is not given up. As he explains later, as everything else, the Decalogue too is revealed to man dialogically. The human being “in the midst of a personal experience hears and feels himself addressed by the word ‘Thou.’ ‘Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain,’ or ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.’ ” We must not overlook the phrase, in the midst of a personal experience. It is our old familiar friend, the concrete situation. Buber is still standing on his own ground that there is no contents or command communicated in revelation. There are divine commandments which emerge dialogically from personal experience. The elucidation of his meaning may be derived from a passage, where he declares: “… God wants man to fulfill his commands as a human being, and with the quality peculiar to human beings. The law is not thrust upon man; it rests deep within him, to waken when the call comes. The world which thundered down from Sinai was echoed by the word that is ‘in thy mouth and in thy heart.’ Again and again, man tries to evade the two notes that are one chord; he denies his heart and rejects the call.” We are given here an interpretation of the revelation at Sinai in terms of the dialogical freedom that has to choose but chooses rightly only if it decides for the deed which is waiting for man. Man is called, but he is called to perceive the law that is implanted within his own heart. He does not have to hear and thus the decision is his very own; yet he chooses the law of God, which “means” him. In this way, one might surmise, man’s response — and the dialogically emerging meaning — receive validation. The call and the response are two notes of the one chord: The law given is the same as the law chosen. However, does the concept of the divine law, resting deep within man, remove the quandry in which Buber’s testimony got entangled? How does man in the dialogue know that this something, deep down within him, is indeed a divine law? How can he know that there is such a thing at all as a divine law embedded in human nature? Again, we emphasize, we do not question the correctness of the statement as such. That God created man in his image is good Orthodox teaching. We question Buber’s testimony. How can he make the statement on the basis of his understanding of the I-Thou relation? Hearing himself addressed, man knows of a Presence. He has to respond. Groping for an answer, he perceives the law within himself. Is he compelled to obey it? This would be the end of the dialogue. Is he free to accept it, as one of the innumerable possibilities open to him? Who is then to say which is the divine law within him and which is not divine? Does he, on the other hand, receive explicit divine confirmation that in his response he has embraced the law of God? That would be a new revelation with a contents and a law unilaterally communicated; it too would abolish the dialogical situation. We would have a form of revelation which according to Buber’s testimony was not possible. Try as we may, the problem of the authenticity of the response and the meaning remains unresolved.",
"Absolute Obligation?",
"The question of the validity of the meaning “revealed” bears of course heavily on the question of the relationship between religion and ethics. We have heard Buber maintain that all ethics instituted by men is of necessity relativistic. This of course is commonplace. But he went on and, in his search for the ethical absolute, tied ethics to religion. Absolute obligation may originate only in the absolute Person. “Only out of a personal relationship with the Absolute can the absoluteness of the ethical coordinates arise …”, Buber proclaimed. Let us now take a closer look at the idea. How can the absoluteness of the ethical coordinates arise out of the dialogical relation? Needless to say, Buber cannot mean that the absoluteness of the obligation is explicitly transmitted. This would introduce contents into the relation; it would mean the end of the dialogue. He makes this clear himself when he protests against the assumption that he was upholding “so-called moral heteronomy or external moral laws in opposition to so-called moral autonomy or self-imposed moral laws.” Only when man attempts to derive the quality of moral obligation from his own soul may we speak of autonomy; and only when laws are imposed upon man from without can we speak of heteronomy. In the relation, however, heteronomy, or theonomy, and autonomy are one.",
"Let us see how Buber explains this. Says he: “Where the Absolute speaks in the reciprocal relationship, there are no longer such alternatives. The whole meaning of reciprocity, indeed, lies in just this, that it does not wish to impose itself but to be freely apprehended. It gives us something to apprehend, but it does not give us the apprehension.” Clearly, this is once again “the two notes that are one chord.” Should anyone have any doubts about it, let him read on: “Our act must be entirely our own for that which is to be disclosed to us to be disclosed, even that which must disclose each individual to himself. In the theonomy the divine law seeks for your own, and true revelation reveals to you yourself.” It is only now that Buber’s idea of revelation may be completed. The divine law, as we have heard him say, “rests deep within man.” Thus, it is identical with man’s true self. This is the meaning of man having been created in the image of God. When man apprehends this, he apprehends himself; at the same time he has also embraced the law of God. But how are we to understand that reciprocity “gives us something to apprehend?” Once again, it does not give us teaching or commandment. It gives us the opportunity to apprehend, if we are willing to apprehend. In the reciprocity the Voice calls us to responsibility. It is then up to us to “waken” the law implanted within us. It is then we who must apprehend the law within us as divine and it is we who do decide that what we have “wakened” is indeed what has been implanted there originally by God. Can this be the source of the absoluteness in the moral obligation? How mistaken Buber is, one may see clearly in the most succinct formula in which, consistently with all his other opinions on the subject he defines his concept of revelation by saying: “… it must be mentioned here for the sake of full clarity that my own belief in revelation, which is not mixed up with any ‘Orthodoxy,’ does not mean that I believe that finished statements about God were handed down from heaven to earth. Rather it means that human substance is melted by the spiritual fire which visits it, and there now breaks forth from it a word, a statement, which is human in its meaning and form, human conception and human speech, and yet witnesses to Him who stimulated it and His will. We are revealed to ourselves — and cannot express it otherwise than as something revealed.” In this clarification by Buber the point we have been arguing becomes manifest. A revelation that reveals dialogically can indeed reveal only man unto himself. The meaning revealed must be human meaning, the speech, human speech; and for the same reason, the obligation perceived in the meaning, human obligation. Dialogical revelation cannot provide the quality of absoluteness in ethical values and moral obligations.",
"Responsibility?",
"The question into which we have been probing reaches deeper still. It poses not only the problem of absolute obligation, but that of obligation in general. By everything that a man experiences he is being addressed. We know, however, that the address is only a challenge. Beyond that, it contains no guidance, no teaching; it provides no direction. All this is left to human choice and decision. The question that arises is: Assuming that man is so addressed, what is the source of the obligation to answer? Why does he have to answer? We cannot maintain that while the address has no contents of teaching, it does carry within itself the command of respond. This would violate man’s freedom and partnership in the dialogue. What is more, once the obligation to respond becomes the contents of a revelation, why not some other obligation as well? Whence, then, does Buber derive the responsibility to respond to the challenge? It is true, man may be able to answer, to participate in a dialogue. But how may such an ability of human nature be turned into an obligation? How may one speak here about an “Erzgebot?” Is this original command anything else but the voice of human conscience, a sense of responsibility that man discovers within himself? Buber does hint at this possibility in a few places. But for him conscience is not what most people understand by the word. It is something deep down in human nature. It is Meister Eckhart’s “spark.” Be that as it may, either the obligation to respond comes from the Presence that confronts man, in which case we have contents, command, and teaching in revelation; or the obligation has its source in man’s obligating himself in freedom to respond. Since the first alternative is excluded, we are left with an essentially relativistic ethics, which Buber otherwise is most anxious to reject.",
"Nor is Buber’s “philosophical anthropology” of much help here. He may rightly affirm that human nature is only revealed in the fulness of human realtion with all the world and that without the “dialogical life” man is lacking reality. We shall not get obligation this way. Man may indeed be unreal, if he does not enter into the dialogue with his whole being. But supposing, he — very foolishly, perhaps, and rather unrealistically — prefers being a mere ghost, how can it be shown that he is ethically wrong? That the human being has a certain nature is a statement of fact; by itself, it does not imply the obligation to be human.",
"Whereas in the main body of Buber’s work the concept of man’s obligation to respond is taken for granted, there is at least one passage where the author allows himself to draw the conclusions clearly from the logical implications of his position. In “Zweisprache” Buber says to his “dear opponent”: “… I beg you to notice that I do not demand. I have no call to that and no authority for it. I try only to say that there is something and to indicate how it is made: I simply record. And how could the life of dialogue be demanded? There is no ordering of dialogue. It is not that you are to answer, but that you are able.” Exactly so! This is the decisive point. Buber cannot show that man is obligated to enter into the dialogical situation. He may well say: Woe unto him if he does not. He will fail to realize himself. He will “carry away a wound that is not to be forgotten.” It may be excellent mental hygiene to follow the advise of the doctor, but it does not yield ethical obligation.",
"Inseparable from these investigations of the validity of the dialogically revealed meaning and truth is the ultimate issue that has its place here, i. e., the question, who is it that addresses man in the dialogue which constitutes the pure relation. It is the question that Buber asks himself in the “Zwiesprache.” Everything that happens to us is a sign by which we are addressed. “Who speaks?” asks Buber. Before giving the answer, he warns us that we must not reply with the traditionally handed down word, “God.” We must reply existentially, “out of that decisive hour of personal existence when we had to forget everything we imagined we knew of God, when we dared to keep nothing handed down or learned or selfcontrived, no shred of knowledge, and were plunged into the night.” How do we know, then, who is the giver of the sign, who it is who addresses us through the daily experiences of our lives? Obviously, from Buber’s point of view, we can know him only from the experience itself, “from time to time from the signs themselves.” The speaker is always the speaker in a single experience, addressing man in a unique, never-again recurring situation. Buber concludes, therefore, correctly that “if we name the speaker of this speech God, then it is always the God of a moment, a moment God.” But we did hear Buber speak of the Lord of the One Voice. How does one get from the innumerable moment gods to the One God? In order to explain this, Buber uses what he calls a “gauche” comparison. Because of the importance of the matter, we shall let him speak for himself.",
"Says he: “When we really understand a poem, all we know of the poet is what we know of him in the poem — no biographical wisdom is of value for the pure understanding of what is to be understood: the I which approaches us is the subject of this single poem. But when we read other poems by the poet in the same true way their subjects combine in all their multiplicity, completing and confirming one another, to form the one polyphony of the person’s existence. In such a way, out of the givers of the signs, the speakers of the words in lived life, out of the moment Gods arises for us with a single identity the Lord of the voice, the One.” We remain so unconvinced by this interpretation that the only part of it which we are able to accept is that the comparison is a very “gauche” one indeed. The many assumptions of the example itself are, from the point of view of literary appreciation, highly questionable. Our concern, however, is mainly with the application to our immediate problem. The assumptions granted, the basic difference between the “true and real” understanding of a poem and the signs that reach us through our daily experiences is that a poem does have content, it does reveal a meaning, a teaching, a truth, that it desires to communicate. The “signs,” however, only challenge us. They are question marks addressed to us. They reveal no contents, they must give no indication as to what kind of a response is expected of man. The answer must be altogether man’s own. How can one identify the speaker in such circumstances? The question, what now little man? may be addressed to us by a devil no less than by a god. How to know, how to distinguish? If there is no indication in the address what the response ought to be, who can tell who the speaker is, whether there is one speaker or whether there are many speakers? It is quite interesting to note that as Buber sees life as “a sign language” addressed to man by the absolute Person, similarly does Karl Jaspers recognize a code of Transcendence which is incorporated in Existence and which requires deciphering. However, Jaspers is careful to point out that the code of the devil may not be less visible than that of the deity. Buber is, of course, right in saying that such a remark shows how different his position is from the position of Jaspers. What he does not prove is that he makes more sense than Jaspers does. He argues with Jaspers very eloquently, exclaiming: All due respect to the devil, surely one should not concede him so much power as to enable him not only to disarray but also to distort the code writing of God. Continuing the argument, he also reasons in the following manner: “If the ‘code’ is to have a uniform meaning, one must predicate an authority that instituted it, and that desiring that I decipher that part of the code destined for my life, though rendering the task difficult, enables me to do so.” This is bravely exclaimed, but — unfortunately — rather poorly reasoned. Buber is right, if the code is to have a uniform meaning and if the one who instituted it does desire that I decipher it. But Buber does not speak hypothetically; he is rhetorically affirming, and thus he begs the question of questions, i. e., “who speaks?” In that “decisive hour of personal existence,” when, according to Buber, man has to forget everything he ever imagined he knew about God, all he is confronted with is a sign and an unknown speaker, a moment god. He perceives a code but it is entirely up to him to break its secret. He may add moment gods to moment gods, he will still have nothing but moment codes. How will he know whether the codes do have one uniform meaning, whether it is indeed the kind of god speaking whose signals could not be interpreted by assuming a less respectable presence than a deity! In spite of all Buber’s eloquence, the question remains unanswered.",
"The Problem of the Community",
"The question of the objective significance of the I-Thou relation with God has to be raised in yet another sense. The man who goes out to meet the Presence is a lonely soul. We also know that all I-Thou relations with finite beings are of necessity exclusive. How does the complete absorption of the individual in the pure relation affect his relationships with other people and with the world? Is this another case of the “alone flying to the Alone?” This, as we have seen, is not Buber’s view. In our presentation we noted that being exclusive as well as inclusive was one of the specific features of the pure relation. In utter loneliness man turns towards God only to find that his relation to the eternal Thou includes all his other I-Thou relations which he ever entertained, because He is the Presence in all the presences. This is, of course, a difficult concept. It is yet a new variation on the theme of “the two notes that are one chord.” How important the thought is for Buber’s teaching, one may judge by the fact that it forms the theme of one of his major tomes, the one entitled: “Die Frage an den Einzelnen.” It is mainly a discussion of the case of Kierkegaard, who dissolved his engagement to Regina Olsen because she was the “object” that stood between him and his love for God. For Kierkegaard the I-Thou relation to God is exclusive. It is so exclusive that one has to choose between God and the world. Turning to God, one must be “the Single One.” One must give up Regina, or whatever else takes her place in one’s life; indeed, one must give up the world. Kierkegaard sums up his position in the sentence: “Every one should be chary about having to do with ‘the others,’ and should essentially speak only with God …” The tragic greatness of Kierkegaard’s life found expression in his ceaseless striving to become “the Single One” who speaks essentially only to God. Kierkegaard’s course runs counter to Buber’s affirmation that the pure relation is exclusive and inclusive in one. As against this Buber maintains that God desires that we come to him “by means of the Reginas he has created and not by renunciation of them.” One does not come to God by renouncing creation but by embracing it. He reaffirms the position he has evolved in his Ich und Du by maintaining that the “exclusive love to God is, because he is God, inclusive love ready to accept and to include all love.” The true nature of his argument we discern in the exclamation: “… who could suppose in decisive insight that God wants Thou to be truly said only to him, and to all others only an unessential and fundamentally invalid word — that God demands of us to choose between him and his creation?” For once, one is inclined to remind Buber that no less a man than Kierkegaard supposed just that. It is reasonable to assume that he did so “in decisive insight,” since he did give up Regina and the world and did choose in fact between God and his creation. It would seem to us that in this case it is Kierkegaard who testifies and Buber who “theologizes.” The whole life of Kierkegaard is testimony that for this great soul the relation to God was exclusive and not inclusive. Buber is meeting the testimony with arguments, with theories, and with philosophy. Surely, God the creator could not have created the world and yet demanded of man that he renounce it. This, and his other arguments, may or may not be good theology; they do not show how in fact an intensively exclusive relation to God may in reality include and preserve man’s all other I-Thou relations. Buber believes he can refute Kierkegaard by quoting the latter’s saying that “the only means by which God communicates with man is the ethical.” To this Buber adds: “But the ethical in its plain truth means to help God by loving his creation in his creatures, by loving it towards him.” Assuming this to be correct, he has still failed to show how in the act of loving God’s creation in one or the other of his creatures, one may actually remain in the I-Thou relation to God himself at the same time. No doubt, Kierkegaard could not do it. Neither does Buber succeed anywhere in showing that it can be done.",
"The concept of an exclusive-inclusive relation is so difficult to grasp that Buber deemed it necessary to elaborate it further in a Postcript to his I and Thou. How may exclusiveness be one with inclusiveness? In his answer he treats us to a short dissertation about God. He asserts that to the two attributes, named by Spinoza, we have to add a third one, that of personal being. We have direct knowledge of this from the pure relation. However, God is absolute; therefore, we have to describe him paradoxically as “the absolute Person.” With all this we are, of course, familiar from Buber’s other writings. Having explained his notion of the absolute Person, he believes he is now in a position to clear up the difficulty of the inclusiveness in the pure relation. He continues: “But no limitation can come upon him as the absolute Person, either from us or from our relations with one another; in fact we can dedicate to him not merely our persons but also our relations to one another. The man who turns to him therefore need not turn away from any other I-Thou relation but he properly brings them to him, and lets them be fulfilled ‘in the face of God.’ ” Let us disregard all hazy rhetorics and see whether what he says makes sense. That the absolute Person cannot be limited is obvious. Therefore, he includes all personal existence. He is “the Being of beings,” of trees encountered as “persons,” of people met as Thou, of intelligible being confronted as a presence. But are we not now at the brink of tumbling into mystical union with the All? Buber parried this danger in the text to which he supplied the Postscript by declaring: “God comprises, but is not the universe. So, too, God comprises, but is not my Self. In view of the inadequacy of any language about this fact, I can say Thou in my language as each man can in his, in view of this I and Thou live, and dialogue and language …, and the Word in eternity.” In other words, God as eternal Person embraces all personal existence, yet selfhood remains inviolate. This, of course, cannot be proved; but it is so. We know it, says Buber, because of the experience of the encounter with the absolute Person. But does it follow from this that “man who turns to him therefore need not turn away from any other I-Thou relation?” His interpretation of the absolute Person means that within God exclusiveness of personal being and inclusiveness of all personal existence are one. However, it certainly cannot mean that because God is absolute and personal, therefore in the pure relation the finite individual I can encounter in the eternal Thou every other personal presence of his experience as the Thou that it is. It is believable to testify that in the relation with the eternal Thou one has the experience of having encountered “the Being of beings” — and this in itself will have its profound implications for all of one’s future encounters with finite beings; but it makes little sense to maintain, as Buber does, that confronting the “Being of beings” one also confronts all finite beings in actual I-Thou relations. If these finite beings retain their personal identity, without which they cannot enter into I-Thou relations, and are so in the integrity of selfhood mysteriously comprised in the absolute Person, then the inclusiveness of the pure relation would require on the part of the I entering into innumerable I-Thou relations at the same time. In order to accomplish such a feat, the capacity of the finite self for the encounter would have to be akin to the capacity of the absolute Person. If, on the other hand, the selfhood of the finite beings does not remain inviolate but merges into that of the absolute Person, then, while the pure relation may well be described as all inclusive, it will not “include all other I-Thou relations of this man”; it will absorb and dissolve them.",
"Related to this problem is the question of the community. How is one to establish a community on the basis of the I-Thou relation? Community between an individual I and an individual Thou, yes! but a community of people, a society of men, how? Buber is well aware of the seriousness of the problem. We have noted that he is of the opinion that the element of exclusiveness in all I-Thou relations may even become an injustice to the rest of the world. We reach such an intimacy between I and Thou that it threatens to undermine all community in the broader sense of the word. Buber tackles the dilemma by declaring that the very essence of community is to be found in the spirit that unites men with each other. The spirit for him is of course not spirituality. “The spirit in its human manifestation is a response of man to his Thou.” Community exists only where “the spirit that says Thou” is dominant. But is not this a contradiction? Does not the spirit that says Thou exclude community with all those who are not included in the Thou? Buber meets the problem by laying down two conditions which must prevail in order that “true community” may come into being. We discussed those conditions in our presentation of Buber’s criticism of historic religions in the first section of this study. We shall list them here once again. Community arises where people stand in living reciprocal relation to a living center and also stand in such living relation of mutuality to each other. Even though the community thus defined seems to reflect the Hasidic fellowship around the living center of the Tsadik, we believe that if Buber’s conditions are indeed the requiremens, then a “true community” never existed on this earth. The second condition is obviously never to be fulfilled. People can never stand together in living mutual relation with one another. It is always in the isolation of I-Thou that they can so stand. One and the same person is, of course, capable of a varied number of such relations. He may be a father, a husband, a son, a disciple. But he can stand only in one living relation of reciprocity at a time. In moments when I-Thou relation is realized between husband and wife, all other I-Thou relations may only be latent. They may be called into actuality, each one by itself and in its own time. But whenever this happens, the newly actualized relation forces the preceding one back into latency. Even if one should admit the latent relations into the category of the living mutual ones, how limited is the human capacity for the I-Thou encounter! Shall we say that the boundaries of the true community are identical with man’s subjective capacity for entering into I-Thou situations? But perhaps the “living center” might help us here. Buber calls it “the Architect” of the community. Let us examine whether the architect may help us. If “the living center” is a finite Thou, then it cannot be a living center. No finite Thou can enter into relation with more than one Thou at a time. If the center is a finite person, there can be no “radii’ of I-Thou emanating from it to form a periphery. The “common quality of relation to the Center” will be missing. We have then to conceive of the living center as the eternal Thou. This would, of course, limit the true community to the specifically religious community. However, thus we are back to our previous problem of the inclusiveness in the pure relation. While it is true that innumerable “radii” may join innumerable beings to the absolute Person in reciprocal relations, it is not conceivable that the individual being, standing in the pure relation, should at the same time be able to stand in living mutual relations with all other beings. What is more, even if we accepted the possibility of inclusiveness in the pure relation, the true community would last only as long as the pure relation lasts. It would be a momentary incident, without historic reality and without living constancy.",
"We must consider Buber’s attempt to base community on the interplay of living, mutual relations a failure. His inability to deal with the problem comes to full expression in his discussion of economics and of the state. Those are obviously areas of the It-world. Their very existence depends on the effective functioning of the principle of utility. Both have to use and organize people according to their ability to produce and to serve in the context of the innumerable needs of society. It is as He and not as Thou that people must be treated by the state as well as by the economic system. But, says Buber, look where this has led man! Is man still the master of his fate, does he still control intelligently the economic order of society! Is it not rather that we have been overwhelmed by the tyranny of the It and delude ourselves imagining that we are the masters?",
"It is very easy to agree with Buber’s social criticism. We are also prepared to follow him when he declares that “the communal life of man can no more than man himself dispense with the world of It” and that, therefore, his will to profit and to be powerful has its proper place and function in life, “as long as they are linked with, and upheld by, his will to enter into relation.” However, into how many relations may each of us have to enter, in order to bring the state under “the supremacy of the spirit that says Thou?” That economics and the state “share in life as long as they share in the spirit,” that if “they abjure spirit they abjure life” is nobly said. But what next? Let us not forget that by spirit Buber means man’s “response to his Thou.” How, then, are economics and the state to be expected to respond to their Thou, especially if we bear in mind all the intricacies of the dialogical nature of the response! Buber insists that they can “share in the spirit” if they stand “in living relation with the Center.” What he has in mind must be the true community, and whatever we have said in criticism of that idea applies here too. On the basis of Buber’s teaching, as the true community is inconceivable, so must also the state and society forever remain unredeemed from the thraldom of the tyranny of the It.",
"The Problem of Israel",
"What we have called the problem of the community cannot but have its most serious implications for our understanding of the place that must be rightly alloted to the Jewish people and to Judaism in the context of Buber’s teachings. Buber has said a great many fine things about both Israel and the nature of Judaism. In an essay on Hebrew Humanism, for instance, he declares: “Israel is not a nation like other nations, no matter how much its representatives have wished it during certain eras. Israel is a people like no other, for it is the only people in the world which, from its earliest beginnings, has been both a nation and a religious community. In the historical hour in which its tribes grew together to form the people, it became the carrier of a revelation. The covenant which the tribes made with one another and through which they became ‘Israel’ takes the form of a common covenant with the God of Israel.” This is said in the best of Orthodox Jewish tradition. Many are the passages in Buber’s writings and speeches that manifest the same attitude. The uniqueness of the Jewish people Buber, in common with good Orthodox teaching, sees in the fact that whereas in all history creed and nationhood are separated from each other, in the one instance of Israel they coincide. “Israel receives its decisive religious experience as a people …” At the very outset of its history, Israel experienced the Divine as a people. Let one more quotation show with what passionate fervor Buber believes in the universal significance in the uniqueness of Israel. In the essay, The Spirit of Israel and the World of Today, he says: “We men are charged to perfect our own portion of the universe — the human world. There is one nation which once upon a time heard this charge so loudly and clearly that the charge penetrated to the very depth of its soul. That nation accepted the charge, not as an inchoate mass of individuals but as a nation. As a nation it accepted the truth which calls for its fulfillment by the human nation, the human race as a whole. And that is its spirit, the spirit of Israel. The charge is not addressed to isolated individuals but to a nation. For only an entire nation, which comprehends peoples of all kinds, can demonstrate a life of unity and peace, of righteousness and justice to the human race, as a sort of example and beginning. A true humanity, that is, a nation composed of many nations, can only commence with a certain definite and true nation. The hearkening nation was charged to become a true nation.”",
"We are rather inclined to agree with him on all this. At the same time, we cannot forget that Buber often uses the traditional terminology of Judaism but invests it with his own meaning. We confess to a sense of mental discomfort, caused by his use of the term, “a true nation.” It reminds us too much of “the true community,” which we had occasion to discuss earlier. And when he speaks of the Jewish people as “the carrier of revelation,” we felt sure that the phrase should be understood in the light of what Buber means by revelation. So interpreted, what he has in mind will turn out to be quite different from what most of his readers may think he wishes to say. If anyone should think that by “the charge” addressed to the people and accepted by the people, Buber refers to traditional concepts of Mattan Torah and Kabbalat haTorah, let him turn, for instance, to the Two Focii of the Jewish Soul. The God who appears to Israel is encountered in the same manner as in the I-Thou relation. He appears “in infinte manifestations in the infinite variety of things and events.” The people is “the carrier of revelation” in the same sense in which the individual person was described to be one. Buber maintains that “the community of Israel experiences history and revelation as one phenomenon, history as revelation and revelation as history.” This is, of course, nothing else but “the concrete situation,” out of which one hears the Voice speak ‘in the guise of everything that happens, in the guise of all world events.” Only this time, it is the concrete situation of a people. It is not an I that hears, but a We. This then is what Buber means by “the hearkening nation” that was “charged to become a true nation.” It was charged in the same way in which the individual is charged in the I-Thou relation to become a true human being, i. e., charged dialogically. The revelation of which the people is a carrier comes about in the same manner in which the I is able to receive revelation. History, which is one and the same phenomenon as revelation, is also called “a dialogue in which man, in which the people, is spoken to.” As man, by responding, discovers meaning and “the divine law within him,” so too the people becomes “the carrier of revelation” by participating in the revelation in the act of responding.",
"How then does Buber explain the Biblical story of the revelation at Sinai? He cannot accept it as the report of a supernatural event, but as “the verbal trace of a natural event.” It is the record of “an event which took place in the world of the senses common to all men and fitted into connections which the senses can perceive. But the assemblage that experienced this event experienced it as revelation vouchsafed to them by God … Experience undergone in this way is not self-delusion on the part of the assemblage; it is what they see, what they recognize and perceive with their reason, for natural events are the carriers of revelation, and revelation occurs when he who witnesses the event and sustains it experiences the revelation it contains. This means that he listens to that which the voice, sounding forth from this event, wishes to communicate to him, its witness, to his constitution, to his life, to his sense of duty.” If one reads this important passage carefully, bearing in mind some of the basic concepts of Buber’s teaching, one need not be confused by its Buberian opacity. What is told here is the, by now for us, familiar story of the encounter, the dialogue, and the dialogical revelation. However, the rather surprising aspect of this interpretation of the revelation at Sinai is that what was originally maintained as regards the I-Thou relation is now asserted of a We-Thou relation. The people encountered the eternal Thou in a concrete situation. This happened when at some juncture in their history they as a people accepted “the concrete situation as given to them by a Giver” and thus were able to hear a voice addressing them. The voice was not uttering any explicit statement, or pronouncing any divine truth. It was a wordless voice, challenging the people to choose and to decide to respond to the demand inherent in the natural event, which in its givenness was carrying a message to them. The message, however, was in code and could only be deciphered dialogically. They “sustained” the event, which, in Buber’s terminology means that they endured the challenge of the situation and responded to it. Through their response they broke the code of the sign communication and experienced revelation. In order to complete Buber’s idea, we ought to add that in the dialogical response they found “the divine law resting deep within them.” And indeed we hear Buber say that “the true spirit of Israel is the divine demand implanted in our hearts.”",
"Let us now consider whether this makes sense within the context of Buber’s own testimony about the encounter, the dialogue, and revelation. The Jewish people became Israel as a result of their becoming the carrier of a revelation. The revelation was completed in the dialogue, when they responded to the challenge of the concrete situation. At that moment, we assume they were a true community. They stood in living mutual relation to a living Center and also stood in living mutual relations to each other. Prior to the great event of the founding of Israel, however, they were a nation like any other nation. In other words, from the point of view of a possible encounter with the eternal Thou, they were “an inchoate mass of individuals,” who as a people and as a society lived essentially in the It-world. What we should like to know is how such an inchoate mass of individual souls could encounter the Divine as a people. How is it conceivable that millions of human beings should as a people be able to encounter the Presence in the givenness of the concrete situation, in the natural events of their everyday experience? It is difficult enough to imagine that they would all hear the same wordless challenge reaching them from the event as one people; but it is certainly beyond all comprehension that, standing in the full freedom of the dialogical situation, they could as one people render the one response that alone established “the supremacy of the spirit that says Thou.’ This would seem to us so fantastic that, compared with it, the simple soul’s most naive acceptance of supernatural revelation would have to be considered a triumph of sheer rationalism.",
"Buber is unable to appreciate the fact that the I-Thou relation, as he describes it, is a relation of isolation. It is so charged with subjective insights and commitments, be they however existential, that they cannot serve as a basis of community or constitute “a holy people.” Buber is right when he insists that, as far as he is concerned, “just as the meaning itself does not permit itself to be transmitted and made into knowledge generally current and admissable, so confirmation of it cannot be transmitted as a valid Ought; it is not prescribed, it is not specified on any tablet, to be raised above all men’s heads. The meaning that has been received can be proved true by each man only in the singleness of his being and the singleness of his life.” All this follows indeed logically from the I-Thou, as Buber understands it. It is of the very essence of Buber’s concept of meaning that what is revealed dialogically refers to the single person that encounters the Thou, to his specific situation at a given moment, to be proved true by his personal commitment to a definite course of realization. If this were to apply to a people, then the people would have to be in existence as a single entity already prior to the encounter, in the same way as the I is. As one entity it would have to establish the relation with the Thou, as one entity it would have to respond. In other words, it would have to be a true community already prior to the encounter and the revelation in order to consummate both relation and revelation, as the result of which alone — according to Buber — it may become a true community. This, of course, is completely fallacious.",
"On the basis of Buber’s premises only individual souls can enter into relation and only individual souls may come out of it with individual meanings for their individual lives. Even if a multitude should encounter the eternal Thou at the same time, each one of them would be alone with his Thou at the moment of the encounter. Even if they all should come out of the encounter with meanings commiting each one to the same course of action, each one of them would still stand alone with his meaning and his life. The “charge’ would still be addressed to each one of them individually and not to all of them as to one people. There is no bridge from Buber’s I-Thou to a We; nor is there a possibility for a We-Thou, as a result of his interpretation of the encounter.",
"In our presentation of Buber’s teaching, in the paragraph Philosophy,Ethics, and the Eclipse of God, we referred to Buber’s remark on the distinction between Judaism and Christianity. In Christianity individual piety replaced the concept of the holy people of Judaism. As a result, the public life of the people was withdrawn from direct commitment to faith as well as from its ethical implications. The people as a people remained “unbaptized.” Unfortunately, Buber fails to show how a people “as a people” can enter into a covenant with God. While it is correct to say that the concept of the holy people is fundamental to Judaism, Buber’s interpretation of the encounter does not allow such a people to arise. It is, perhaps, the most bizarre aspect of Buber’s work that although he has been teaching, preaching, and interpreting Judaism through a long and rich life, the basic principles of his teaching renders Judaism inexplicable.",
"* * * * *",
"We may now summarize the result of our examination of Buber’s testimony. We have found that on the basis of his testimony",
"a. the relation between I and Thou need not be considered the ultimate form of reality — the possibility of a further reduction through the mystical merging of the I in the All is left open;",
"b. the meaning, received in dialogical revelation, may have existential significance for the I; it lacks objective validity;",
"c. the concept of absolute obligation is mistakenly derived from the relation with the absolute Person; nor is there any basis for the concept of obligation in general;",
"d. there is no way from I-Thou to We or to We-Thou, no bridge between mutuality of relation and the community or society;",
"e. the singularity of the I-Thou relation may serve as a basis for the personal religion of the individual soul; it cannot account for Judaism and the concept inseparable from it, that of the holy people."
],
"III The Biblical Encounter": [
"Our final conclusion is indeed surprising. From Buber’s writings one might easily gain the impression that he is interpreting basic Biblical ideas. Is it not the case that Biblical religion is not grounded on conceptual meditations on the nature of God, but on the actual confrontation between man and God? Every page of the Bible seems to tell the same story: God addresses man and man answers God. Is this not the relation of mutuality and the dialogical situation?",
"Creature and Creator",
"There can be little doubt that the foundation of Biblical religion is indeed the encounter between God and man. The God whom Adam and Eve knew was the one who spoke to them in the Garden of Eden. The history of the patriarchs begins with God’s call to Abraham. The revelation at Sinai is the manifestation of an actual relation between God and the people. The prophets’ message to Israel normally commences with the words, Thus says the Lord. All this is true, but is it the I-Thou relation of Buber? In order to understand the nature of the Biblical encounter, it is not enough to read the story of the confrontation. One of the encounters in the Bible that comes closest to Buber’s I-Thou is Abraham’s struggle with God for the preservation of Sodom and Gemorrha. There is meeting there; the Present One is present and so is Abraham and between the two a genuine dialogue seems to be conducted. There is, however, nothing in the record to inform us of the How of the encounter. We are not told how the relation comes about and thus, we cannot judge the nature of the dialogue. To say, as Buber would have to, that out of some natural event of his everyday experience Abraham heard a voice addressing him and realized that he was challenged to plead the cause of justice and mercy with the Presence seems extremely far-fetched. Moreover, whether such an interpretation was justified or not, could hardly be decided on the basis of the record of the story itself. In order to catch a glimpse of the nature of the Biblical encounter, we have to see how the confrontation is described by those who actually experienced it. When God reveals himself at Sinai, the people are overwhelmed with terror and trembling. This need not be attributed to the phenomena of the thunder and the lightening. It is the experience of the actual encounter itself that threatens to crush them. Only part of the revelation is addressed to them directly; the people cannot endure the full power of the divine word. Buber occasionally indicates that the encounter has to be endured. However, what he means by it is something quite different from the Bibilcal significance of the idea. Buber maintains that “to endure the revelation is to endure this moment full of possible decisions, to respond and to be responsible for every moment.” Undoubtedly, an entirely different kind of a test is implied in a Biblical revelation whose quality is reflected, for instance, in these words of Deuteronomy: “Behold, the Lord our God hath shown us His glory and His greatness, and we have heard His voice out of the midst of the fire; we have seen this day that God doth speak with man, and he liveth. Now therefore, why should we die? for this great fire will consume us; if we hear the voice of the Lord our God any more, we shall die …” There is no reciprocity here, no mutuality. On the contrary the Thou is so overwhelming that it threatens to extinguish the reality of the I completely. All other Biblical testimonies as to the nature of the experience are of a similar kind. About his encounters with the Divine, Ezekiel reports: “I fell upon my face, and I heard a voice of one that spoke.” The context shows that this falling upon the face is due to human weakness. The force of the vision saps the strength of the prophet. He cannot stand up and confront the Divine. Most impressively is the nature of the experience described by Danial when he says: “So I was left alone and saw this great vision, and there remained no strength in me; for my comeliness was turned in me into corruption, and I retained no strength. Yet heard I the voice of his words; and when I heard the voice of his words, then I was fallen into a deep sleep on my face, with my face toward the ground.” Far from entering into a relation of mutuality in the encounter with the Divine, man becomes aware of his utter helplessness in the presence of God.",
"It is true, the I is nevertheless not extinguished. He is sustained, but by the mercy of God alone. When the Voice orders the prostrate Ezekiel to stand up and listen, he is still unable to move. He has to be brought back into life, as it were. “And spirit entered into me, reports Ezekiel, when He spoke unto me, and set me upon my feet; and I heard Him that spoke unto me.” How movingly is the same experience described by Daniel! After relating the condition of utter helplessness from which he passed into a deep sleep, he continues: “And, behold, a hand touched me, which set me tottering upon my knees and upon the palms of my hands, And he said unto me …” Even as he is upheld by the kindness of God, his condition of creaturely powerlessness has not left him completely. He is still shaky, resting on his knees and, in the position of an animal supporting himself on the palms of his hands.",
"The Rabbis in the Talmud and Midrash had the right appreciation of the nature of the Biblical encounter. We read, for instance, in the Talmud that Rabbi Joshua, the son of Levi, explained: “At the impact of each word at Sinai, their souls left the Israelites. For so we read, ‘My soul failed me when he spoke.’ But if their souls departed at the first Word, how could they receive the next one? — God brought down on them the dew with which he will quicken the dead and thus, revived them. For so does the Psalmist declare, ‘A bounteous rain didst Thou pour down, O God; when Thine inheritance was weary, Thou didst confirm it.’ ” According to the Bible, and to Biblical tradition, man can indeed not endure the encounter with God. It is true, as Buber says, that in revelation man is revealed to himself; but in the exact opposite sense in which Buber understands it. It is man’s nothingness that is first of all revealed to him in the presence of God. He cannot but realize that, in his own right, he is indeed but “dust and ashes.” He is not annihilated, but he is at the brink of nothingness. He is brought back into existence by the love of God. His I is returned to him as a gift of God.",
"We saw how Buber, in opposition to Schleiermacher, affirmed that in the pure relation one experiences freedom as well as dependence and knows oneself as creature as well as creator. He cannot be speaking of the immediacy of the Biblical relation. There is no trace of freedom or creatorship for man in the Biblical encounter. The essential experience there is human worthlessness and powerlessness that, nevertheless, is redeemed by the love of God. Man may stand upright in the encounter because he is held up; he may hear because the spirit from God sustains him; he can speak because the dew from God revives him. The situation is not a dialogical one. Man is not a partner of God in the actuality of the I-Thou. He is altogether a creature, if ever there was one. As long as the actuality of the revelation lasts, man has no freedom. He cannot deny his Thou, he cannot disobey him. Only when the encounter has passed, is he dismissed into a measure of selfhood and independence; only then can he deny and disobey.",
"There are two opposing ways of misunderstanding the nature of the Biblical encounter. The one is reflected in Rudolph Otto’s work, Das Heilige; the other is the one pursued by Buber. Otto, because of his Christological bias, could only perceive the “mysterium tremendum” in the encounter of the Hebrew Bible and stubbornly closed his eyes to the redeeming presence of God that in the same encounter raises man from “dust and ashes” to creaturely dignity. Buber, on the other hand, overemphasizes the reality of the I in the relation, establishing man as a partner of the Thou who responds to God’s address in the freedom of selfhood. Contrary to Buber, the Biblical encounter is not a dialogical I-Thou relation. It is God’s relation to his creature who is established by God and sustained by him. The I in the relation is altogether God’s possession. He lives with life lent to him by his Creator; he stands with His strength; he listens and answers sustained by His love. Man is never as unfree as he is in the actuality of the Biblical encounter. However, confronted with the nothingness that he is in his own right and experiencing his selfhood as wholly granted, he stands in the light of God and knows no desire for freedom. Contrary to Otto, the encounter is an encounter; it is a relation. God’s creature is not just “dust and ashes.” In spite of the “mysterium tremendum,” he hears the words that Daniel heard, “O Daniel, thou man greatly beloved,” and lives. He stands in the relation because he is called into the relation by God.",
"Rather characteristically Buber remarks: “You know always in your heart that you need God more than everything; but do you know too that God needs you — in the fulness of His eternity needs you? How would man be, how would you be if God did not need him, did not need you? You need God, in order to be — and God needs you, for the very meaning of your life.” In other places Buber has softened his proud “God needs you” to “God wants to need man.” This is the culminating significance of his statement that man is God’s partner, that in the relation man knows himself not only as creature but also as creator. Notwithstanding Buber’s repeated assurance that he only testifies but does not demonstrate — the nature of his truth being undemonstrable — this is obviously no testimony. It is the result of speculation. It is reasonable to say that if God did not want man to be, he would not exist. Ergo, God wants man. But to go on from there and conclude, since God wants man, He needs him, or wants to need him, is poor theology. One thing is certain: that God needs man can never be a religious experience. Man may know in his heart that he “needs God more than everything.” He may believe in his mind, as apparently Buber does, that God needs him. But he can never know in his heart that God needs him. The need in the Biblical encounter is all man’s. It is of the very essence of that encounter that man experiences his entire being as one great need that can only be satisfied by the One who is infinitely needless. The idea that in the pure relation man experiences himself as a creaturely creator needed by God is so foreign to the Biblical encounter that it starts one wondering whether Buber’s I-Thou is indeed a genuine confrontation between man and his Creator.",
"Revelation and Its Contents",
"This leads us to the consideration of the important question of the contents of revelation. Buber, as we saw, does not allow any contents in revelation. This of course follows from his interpretation of the relation as reciprocal. Of necessity, in the dialogical freedom of the encounter meaning and contents can emerge only dialogically as the result of the human response. The revelation of a contents, in the form of teaching or command, would violate the nature of the dialogical situation. A teaching or a law revealed by God would be an imposition from without and an interference with human freedom and responsibility. As a result, we saw how Buber was obliged to solve the problem of ethical heteronomy versus autonomy by the tortuous mental construction of a free human response that reveals man’s true nature unto himself as being in confromity with the divine law “resting deep within him.” Since the Biblical encounter is the very opposite of the dialogical situation, the reasoning of Buber as to the contents of revelation does not apply to it. As we saw earlier, in the Biblical pure relation the question of freedom does not arise. It is not that man is denied freedom, but everything he is, he owes. In this knowledge he is wishless, for in it he finds his greatest affirmation. To assert that in this situation the explicit revelation of a divine law would interfere with man’s responsibility to choose and to decide in freedom would be as meaningless as it would be dogmatic. In the Biblical encounter all meaning is due to divine interference. In it, man left to himself could only discover his nothingness. Within the context of Biblical tradition, there is certainly no necessity for excluding the possibility of a contents in revelation. Indeed, the plain meaning of the tradition affirms that God reveals explicitly his Torah and his law. Buber’s dialogical revelation is altogether foreign to the spirit of the Bible.",
"However, beyond the possibility of revelational contents, it is not difficult to show that there is a religious need for such a contents. Nothing may illustrate the point better than Buber’s own predilections. We have found that Buber’s I-Thou cannot serve either as the basis of a true community nor as the foundation of a holy people. Buber’s dialogical encounter is only conceivable between an individual person and his Thou; and the meaning which is revealed in the individual response is valid only in the single life of the single responding soul. We could find no way from there to a religious community or a holy people. An entirely different picture presents itself to us, if we investigate the possibility of a true community from the point of view of the Biblical encounter. It is not correct to say of this encounter that “the forms in which the mystery approaches us are nothing but our personal experiences,” that God reveals his presence to man “in the variety of things and events” of our everyday experience. It would be presumptuous on our part to attempt to describe how the encounter comes about. One thing, however, seems to be certain: it is not in the natural events that man meets God in the Bible. The Biblical encounter is always a supernatural occurrence, “something happening alongside or above the everyday.” He who rejects the supernatural no longer stands on Biblical grounds. Because Biblical revelation is much more than the “voice addressing man from the midst of his concrete situation,” it does not have to be limited to the individual alone. Because it is not “the verbal trace of a natural event,” but manifestly and overwhelmingly a supernatural approach of the divine Presence, can it be directed not only to individual souls but also to the full assemblage of an entire people; only because of that may it be a public event and not a mere individual experience. Only an individual may testify to Buber’s pure relation; it is a whole people to whom God says, “Ye are my witnesses.”",
"If, as we pointed out, the nature of the Biblical encounter does not exclude the possibility of a contents in revelation, when the encounter occurs between God and a people, all possibility for a dialogically revealed meaning is indeed excluded. It is not conceivable that a people should ever respond in unison as one people in dialogical freedom and should then, as a result of its response, conclude the revelation with one meaning for the entire people. In the encounter with an entire people meaning must be revealed explicitly, it must be communicated in the act of revelation. If after the conclusion of the encounter, the meaning should remain with the people as significant for their existence as a people, then they must come out of the encounter with a meaning that has objective validity, that can be formulated as teaching, that can be transmitted or engraved on tablets “to be held above their heads.” The encounter itself may indeed be complete without any contents revealed. The assurance of the divine Presence and the experience of God’s sustaining mercy, are abundantly satisfying in themselves. No man may hope for more; no man needs more. But alas, the actual encounters with the Divine are few and of extremely short duration. What would happen to a people that after the supreme moment of the confrontation with God, would leave the pure relation with only the memory of their awareness of the Presence once experienced? What would happen to it in the dry wastelands of history during the long stretches of divine silence? Not even the memory of the experience could be a national one. After the encounter, in the actual concreteness of the historic situation, the people would no longer stand in any relation to God as a people. Whatever the individuals would do with the memory, it would have only individual significance. At best, we might get an “inchoate mass” of believing individuals, but not a people who as a people would be committed to living in the presence of God. Only the objective contents of the revelation, explicitly revealed to the people in the encounter, preserves them as God’s people after the encounter. The teaching and the law with which they come out of the encounter is the bond that unites them as a holy people of history. The joint commitment to the law of God alone makes of a people the people of God. Without the teaching and the law, communicated in the encounter, the religious community cannot arise. Buber is right in saying that the individualism of Christian piety leaves the public realm of national life open to intrusion by the secular norm. What he does not seem to see is that this is the direct result of dispensing with the explicit contents of revelation that, after the encounter, confronts man as the law of God. Without the law, there can only be individual piety. Buber’s revelation without contents places him in the Pauline tradition.",
"Ethical Obligation and Revelation",
"In this connection we should like to take up once again the question of the ethical absolute. We have shown earlier that the absoluteness of the ethical obligation cannot be established dialogically. In addition to what has already been said on this account, let it be also noted that Buber labors here under a fundamental misconception as regards the nature of ethical obligation. In his discussion with Sartre, he says: “One can believe in and accept a meaning or value, one can set it as a guiding light over one’s life if one has discovered it, not if one has invented it.” It would seem that Buber is of the opinion that values or meanings exist by themselves, not unlike Platonic ideas. One has to discover them (whether dialogically or in any other way need not concern us at the moment). One must perceive them first as values and only then may one believe in them and accept them. We agree fully with him that to discover a value is not the same as setting it up “as a guiding light over one’s life.” We would say that the difference between these two is paralleled by the distinction between what constitutes a value and what is the source of obligation for accepting it as a guiding light for one’s life. It is possible to acknowledge that a certain course of action is inherently good and yet refuse to accept the obligation to pursue it. The question, what is the essence of the good, is altogether different from the one why is one obligated to do the good. One does not have to do the good because it is good; one has got to do it, because one is obligated to practice that which is good and not that which is evil. But what is the source of the obligation for doing the good, after one has discovered the good? An obligation is an Ought; it is well expressed in the form of Thou Shalt. A desire that the good shall be is always the source of the obligation. Desiring a good perceived, a man may obligate himself; or society, the state, the family, recognizing a good and wanting it, may obligate its members. Only in this sense can one say that one may accept a value or believe in it after one has discovered it. One discovers a value by grasping its intrinsic meaningfulness; one believes in it by wanting its realization in life. The discovery is accomplished by the intellect; the belief in the value stems from the will. The source of an obligation is always in a will that desires the end to be achieved. What Buber does not seem to realize is that even if a person were able to perceive the absolute character of a value, he would still not have the absoluteness of a moral obligation. The quality of the obligation would depend on the will that desires the value in question. If a man would discover such a value of essential meaningfulness, if he would then proceed and “set it as a guiding light over his life,” it would still be his own decision that woud render the acceptance of the value obligatory. It might be an absolutely meaningful value, but the quality of obligation attached to it would be relative to the human desire that “set it up.” The absoluteness in an obligation depends on the absoluteness of the will that desires the end in mind. The absolute will is the will of the Absolute. Unless it is explicitly stated to man, it desires nothing from him. The absoluteness of ethical obligation has its source in the absolute will of God revealed to man as His law. Without contents in revelation, all ethical obligation is relative.",
"Law and Continuity",
"The divine law, or the contents of revelation, has its significance for the specifically religious experience of man’s relation to God. The relation is never as intimate as Buber wants us to believe; it is never mutual and reciprocal. Most important of all, the moments of the Biblical encounter are the rarest in human experience. Buber is aware of the melancholy lot of man that determines that every Thou should, almost immediately, turn into an It. At the same time he maintains that God is the eternal Thou. When the pure relation does not materialize, it is because man is not present. According to him, man may at any time enter into relation or leave it. Thus the pure relation is presented as the coordinate of solidity and continuity of the entire I-Thou realm. Man and mankind live and prove themselves in the relation or fail outside it. In this sense, Buber may say that all history is a dialogue between God and man. It means that the I-Thou relation between God and man is expected to be a continuous one. This, of course, is so naive that once again one wonders whether Buber means by the I-Thou relation what the phrase would normally indicate. Even if we agreed that the encounter was a dialogical situation, history could still not be described as a dialogue between man and God, for the simple reason that history endures whereas the encounter does not. People and nations live and act in history, but it is in the rarest moments of their existence that they may pass through the encounter. It is just not true to say that man may enter at any time into the pure relation. Only of Moses is such a statement made in the Bible; and even he is not called a partner of God, but “God’s slave.” Most people all the time of their lives and all people most of the time of their lives must stay outside the relation with the divine Thou. How, then, is continuity to be established between the basic religious reality of the encounter and the wordly reality of human existence? In Biblical teaching, the coordinates of such continuity are the contents of revealtion with which people leave the encounter. After the departure of the manifestation of God’s presence, as a pawn for God’s continued concern and love, his law and will for man, remain with man. God is not man’s eternal Thou; He is not always accessible. Most of the time He is indeed silent. But His word and His will, once uttered, eternally confront man. Neither man nor nations can stand in living mutual relation with God and enact history; but they can relate themselves in commitment to the word of God and His revealed will, and living in that commitment, they may sanctify life in all its manifestations. One should, however, not mistake the divine word for an It, in the sense in which Buber at times refers to Platonic ideas. The word of God is not only an object of thought. It is a word by which God actually communicates with man; it is a will, actually expressed and made manifest to man. Even though the encounter has long passed, the word remains forever God’s word for the human being. There is no I-Thou relation, but there is contact with God by hearing His word and doing His will.",
"The Biblical Dialogue",
"Is then there no dialogue and no freedom in the context of the religious reality based on the Biblical encounter? It is the most dangerously misleading aspect of Buber’s philosophy. that it uses Biblical and Jewish concepts but interprets them in such a manner that they lose their Biblical and Jewish signifiance. That the original religious experience is an encounter between God and man is the foundation of Biblical religion; Buber’s interpretation of it as an I-Thou relation of reciprocity is its falsification. A vital aspect of the Biblical encounter is revelation; Buber’s insistence that revelation has no contents is its distortion. We may note the same discrepancy between Biblical ideas and Buberian interpretation in the case of the dialogue. That the whole of life is, in a sense sign language addressed to man, that the concrete situation is given to man by God in order to challenge and to test him, that man is thus addressed by God in every event of his life and has to answer in the human freedom of responsible choice and decision is of course good Biblical teaching. What is more, that is exactly how Jews through the ages understood life and history. The authentic Jew approaches every situation of his life with a question in his heart: what is it, my God, you desire of me here and now. But does it mean that he stands all the time in living mutual relation to God? Is he really all the time existentialy aware of the divine Presence confronting him as his Thou? It is indeed true that every event of human life contains a challenge to man. But how do I know that the challenge is from God, meant by Him for me? The problem could not be solved on the basis of Buber’s dialogical situation. It is not from the concrete situation itself that the Jew derives his knowledge of the challenge, but from what he has learned from the Biblical encounter and from what has been revealed to him in that encounter. In the encounter God reveals Himself as the giver of life and its sustainer by giving life to the human being who otherwise could not endure; He also makes known to man that it does matter to Him how man lives and what he does with his life by revealing to man His word, teaching and command. In the light of this knowledge alone can man approach the concrete situation and know that it is given to him by the Giver, that it addresses him and challenges him on behalf of the Giver, and that the Giver is indeed God. That I am not my own creator, that life is given to me and, therefore, there must be a giver is of course logical. But such reasoning itself cannot identify the giver. It certainly does not show the nature of the giver’s interest in human existence in general or in one’s own personal life in particular. Standing by themselves, nature as well as history are indeed a mystery, but they do not speak for God. Only after God encounters man and makes known to him His will do nature and history become God’s messengers to man. They may speak for God because at first God spoke for Himself in the encounter. Only because of Sinai does a Jew know that every event of his life is God’s challenge to him. The confrontation is between man and the Word of God. The concrete situation is not, as Buber maintains, God’s voice in disguise. The concrete situation has nothing to say. It is the once revealed law of God that addresses man all the time regarding each concrete situation. It is God’s word — without the actual experience of his Presence — speaking to all generations, not from the concrete situation, but from the heights of Sinai.",
"Faith and Freedom",
"What are we, however, to say about the question of human freedom and responsibility? When Buber asserts that man stands in dialogical freedom in the I-Thou relation with God, he offers us another circumstantial evidence that he does not speak either of the genuine encounter or of the true relation. In the presence of God, there is no freedom. No one who stands in God’s presence can deny Him. Of the Decalogue Buber says: “The word does not enforce its own hearing. Whoever does not respond to the Thou addressed to him can apparently go about his business unimpeded. Though He who speaks the word has the power … he has renounced this power of his sufficiently to let every individual actually decide for himself whether he wants to open or close his ears to the voice, and that means whether he wants to choose or reject the I of ‘I am.’ He who rejects Him is not struck down by lightening; he who elects Him does not find hidden treasures. Everything seems to remain just as it was. Obviously, God does not wish to dispense either medals or prison sentences.” This too is one of those typically equivocal statements of Buber which are so misleading because they are altogether right and altogether wrong. They are right in their Jewish context and wrong in the Buberian sense. If we change the phrase, “Though He who speaks the word has the power” to “Though He who spoke the word has the power,” we stand on Jewish grounds. The freedom and the human responsibility which are thus affirmed are at the core of Jewish faith as it is formed after the encounter. During the act of revelation itself, He who speaks must be heard. He who indeed hears himself addressed by God cannot reject the I of “I am.”",
"Man’s freedom is returned to him after the encounter. And since encounters are not everyday occurences, and since most people never really enter into actual living relation with God, most people are most of the time of their lives free to accept or reject God. After the encounter, as well as for all those who never experience the divine Presence as living reality actually confronting them, religion is essentially a matter of faith. For a Jew this means that he commits himself to the implications that follow for his life from the Biblical record of God’s encounter with men and with Israel. To have faith for him means to believe that God is present all the time even though man hardly ever is able to experience His presence in actuality; that He is concerned about every living creature, even though His concern is most of the time not convincingly made manifest to men; that His law and his will were made known to men and to Israel in His revelations, even though God is silent now and here for me; that the ultimate fulfillment of life is to be found in becoming aware of His presence in living actuality, even though this ultimate experience may never be granted us on this earth. The foundation of religion is the encounter and the revelation; the life and the history of religion is the life and history of faith. The encounter and the revelation are indeed imposed upon man, no less imposed upon him than is life itself. They are given to him, as is life itself. But after the act of giving is completed, man may refuse to accept. Not only is faith not imposed on man, but man’s historic experience outside the encounter urges him on to reject all the implications of the encounter. Only in the utmost affirmation of his spiritual independence and responsibility can man commit himself in faith.",
"Of faith, Buber says that it is the “entrance into this reciprocity (of mutual contact and meeting) as binding oneself in relationship with an undemonstrable and unprovable, yet even so, in relationship knowable Being …” Now, had Buber been satisfied with stating that faith “does not mean professing what we hold true in a ready-made formula,” one could easily go along with him. However, it makes little sense to say that faith is entrance into reciprocity “between one active existence and another.” One cannot enter into the mutuality of such a meeting by means of faith. Either such contact is real, then there is no need for faith; or else the contact is not real, in which case it will not become real by entering into it with all the power of faith. One cannot enter into a non-existent relation. Biblical faith is commitment to the proposition that “my Redeemer liveth,” that He is present all the time, that He watches man and is concerned about him and that, because of it, man has a responsibility on earth. The man of faith affirms that God is accessible, that He hears when man calls and that He answers in His own way, even though the answer may never be heard by human ears or perceived by the senses. Even if God remained forever silent for him, the man of faith would call again and again and would know that he was heard. Biblical and Jewish commitment in faith is essentially a non-dialogical situation. It is living in the divine Presence, even though the Presence is hidden and, most of the time, inaccessible."
],
"IV Buber's Metaphysics; Two Notes of the One Chord": [
"In our elucidation of the main features of the Biblical en counter, we had occasion to wonder what kind of an I-Thou relation Buber must have in mind, if in it man is a partner of God, facing Him in freedom and developing in dialogical cooperation with God the meaning of revelation? What kind of an encounter could be accessible to man all the time? What is this “eternal Thou” with whom man is ever able to enter into relation and of whom Buber may say that if man is not encountering him, it is because man is not present? It is our intention to show in this section of our study that these questions are not unrelated to those problems which we raised in the second part of our investigation. There is an underlying trend in Buber’s teaching that may explain his confidence in the validity of the dialogical response as well as the sense in which alone one may speak of both the exclusive-inclusive pure relation and the true community of the We; at the same time, it will also reveal the root of his basic departure from the essence of the Biblical encounter. This underlying trend is his ontology and metaphysics. Even though Buber often emphasizes that he only reports, that he is only a witness, the fact is that his testimony becomes meaningless without his ontology and metaphysics and therefore, the value of the testimony cannot exceed the value of these.",
"The Bi-polar Experience",
"Most people use the terms, dialogue and I-Thou relation, without appreciating that they are used by Buber in a very specific sense. In his lecture, Ueber das Erzieherische, for instance, Buber says: “A relation between persons that is characterized in more or less degree by the element of inclusion may be termed a dialogical relation.” When two people experience an event in common, if at least one of them, “without forfeiting anything of the felt reality of his activity, at the same time lives through the common event from the standpoint of the other,” we speak of inclusion or encompassing. It is the experiencing of the situation from both its ends at the same time, from my own as well as from that of the person who confronts me. It is living through what he lives through; to be here as well as there; to take his place, to be he as it were, and yet to remain oneself. For example, “a man belabors another, who remains quite still. Then let us assume that the striker suddenly receives in his soul the blow which he strikes: the same blow; that he receives it as the other who remains still. For the space of a moment he experiences the situation from the other side. Reality imposes itself on him.” Or let us take another example. “A man caresses a woman, who lets herself be caressed. Then let us assume that he feels the contact from two sides — with the palm of his hand still, and also with the woman’s skin.” This is encompassing. There is nothing perverse or unnatural about it. On the contrary, it is “the bipolar experience,” the completion of the turning towards the other, which is “the basic movement of the life of the dialogue.” The bi-polar experience is the fullness of the I-Thou relation. When Buber was eleven years of age, he was associated in such bi-polar I-Thou relation with his “darling, a broad dapple-grey horse.” And since man’s relations to house cats and trees can and, therefore, should be dialogical, one ought to aim at such bi-polar life with those presences as well.",
"One should not lose patience with Buber if one wishes to understand him. Even when he sounds absurd, he has his own depth. He is wrestling hard with the problem of human solitude and loneliness, the problem that — according to him — became the stumbling block on the paths of Heidegger and Sartre. Either one can reach over completely to the other, encompass him, take him up into one’s own being, or no bridge at all is possible from I to Thou. This is the heart of his teaching, the very core of the dialogical life. The I-Thou relation is not mere solicitude for another, care and concern for the one that confronts me. It is an essential relation, and it is described by Buber in the following words: “In an essential relation … the barriers of individual being are in fact breached and a new phenomenon appears which can appear in only this way: one life open to another …; the other becomes present not merely in the imagination or feeling, but in the depth of one’s substance, so that one experiences the mystery of the other being in the mystery of one’s own. The two participate in one another’s life in very fact, not psychically, but ontically.” This, then, is the dialogical life: the breaching of the barriers of individuality, the breaking open of the closed units of individual beings towards each other, thus enabling one actually to enter into the substance of the other and be present there: being the one to participate in fact in the other’s being. When this is accomplished, a man, experiencing his own reality, also experiences that of the other, who is existentially present in one’s own. The question, of course, is how such ontic break-through of the barriers and actual mingling of individual beings is to be accomplished? The assertion that such is the dialogical situation is made again and again, but we shall look in vain for an explanation in that part of Buber’s work where these assertations are made.",
"The Dual Rhythm of Cosmic-metacosmic Being",
"These affirmations of “the philosophical anthropology” must be read in the light of the metaphysics of the Ich und Du. Having analyzed Buber’s definition of the dialogical situation as between man and man, let us now see how be defines the nature of the same situation as between God and man. Buber himself raises the question, how does one enter into the pure relation? Due to the nature of the subject, the answer is given rather haltingly. All rules and regulations, all religious observances or mystical rites, which purport to prepare one for the relation with the eternal Thou are themselves only objects of human thought. According to Buber, they have nothing whatever to do with the fundamental fact of the meeting between I and Thou. They are Its and belong to the It-world. Regulations and religious practices will not redeem man from his isolation. This can only be achieved by the encounter itself. But how is the encounter to be brought about? At first, man must know how it is not to be accomplished. One cannot meet the eternal Thou by trying to escape from the world of the senses as if it were a mere sham. This is the world. Nor is the goal we are striving for to be reached by passing beyond the realm of the senses into some state of supernatural experience. All experience, natural or supernatural, yields again only an It, an object. It will lead us to thinghood not to the Presence. One might also say, one cannot conjure up the divine Presence by rules and observances. To attempt to do that would mean treating God as an It; but God is the only Thou that never becomes an It. One must know him as the Thou or one does not know him. Having said how God is not to be encountered, Buber tries to indicate what is required in order that the relation may materialize. He puts it in one short sentence. Required is: “the complete acceptance of the Presence.” This needs further elaboration. Unfortunately, it too is given mainly in negative terms. One must give up one’s separation from reality. One must rid oneself of the distorting urge of self-affirmation which enables man to escape from all encounter into the possession of things. All this, of course, does not really explain what is meant by the acceptance of the Presence. Obviously, Buber cannot mean by it the actual encountering of the Absolute as Thou. So understood, the phrase would mean that the pre-condition for entering into the pure relation was entering into such a relation. The difficulty here is similar to the one we had to contend with as we discussed Buber’s concept of faith. Indeed, on the basis of other passages in his writings, we assume that the acceptance of the Presence is not the actual encounter itself, but an act of faith to confront reality as such as one would face a person. Whereas man as a world-using subject is bent completely on himself, as a person he must undertake the elementary movement of turning towards reality as one turns to a Thou. Even before the actual encounter, he keeps himself open for the possibility of the revelation by the acceptance of all Being as a Presence. What Buber has in mind is well expressed by what he declares in another place regarding faith. “Real faith, he explains, does not mean professing what we hold true in a ready-made formula. On the contrary: it means holding ourselves open to the unconditional mystery which we encounter in every sphere of our life and which cannot be comprised in any formula. It means that from the very roots of our being, we should always be prepared to live with this mystery as one being lives with another.” We assume that it is Buber’s meaning that if one is prepared to adopt such an attitude of faith toward Being, one will encounter it as the eternal Thou. Needless to say, there is an element of risk involved in such an attitude. One must forego the satisfaction one may derive from living in the solid and reliable dimensions of the It-world and one must put one’s trust in the Unknown which will yet reveal itself as knowable in the actualized relation. But why should anyone take such a chance? On what grounds should one adopt such an attitude toward the Unknown?",
"It would seem to us that Buber’s attitude of faith toward the Unknown can be justified only on the basis of his ontology. According to it, the I-Thou relation is at the very origin of being. Traces of it one may still discover in the language of the primitive as well as in the early development of the child. The “nuclei” of primitive speech “mostly indicate the wholeness of a relation.” The primitive man does not know himself as a separate entity and his neighbor, or the world around him, as something apart from him. His speech testifies to the fact that he sees himself and the incidents of his life always in situations that are relational. Events are experienced by him as “being confronting him” and of his own situation, he is aware as “life with a being confronting him.” All separation, all assertion of selfhood and identity, comes later. The same may also be observed in the early life of the child. The child does not discover the world by perceiving the various items in it as separate objects. He reaches out towards it by trying to “grasp’ it with his senses and embrace it. He relates himself to what attracts his attention and he discovers it by addressing it. Originally, the child, not being aware of his selfhood, meets the world without being aware of its separateness. “It is simply not the case that the child first perceives an object, then, as it were, puts himself in relation with it. But the effort to establish relation comes first — the hand of the child arched out so that what is over against him may nestle under it; second is the actual relation, a saying of Thou without words, in the state preceding the word-form; the thing, like the I, is produced late, arising after the original experiences have been split asunder and the connected partners separated.”",
"Buber is not prepared to accept a psychological interpretation of these phenomena among the primitive and in the development of the child’s personality. On the contrary, they can only be understood if one bears in mind their “cosmic and metacosmic origin.” “In the beginning is relation” is for Buber a “cosmic and metacosmic” truth. It is, however, only the first point of his metaphsyics. The origin of the child is, from the cosmic-meta-cosmic point of view, not really different from that of all reality. “Every child that is coming into being rests, like all life that is coming into being, in the womb of the great mother, the undivided primal world that precedes form.” This resting in the womb of the great mother is the original relation that is retained yet for a while, even after the phase of separation has started. It is reflected, as a manifestation of the cosmic principle, in the initial experiences of the primitive and the early encounters of the child with the world. There is a cosmic-metacosmic history of Being, which takes place in two movements. The one is separation from the womb of the great mother, the other is turning back toward it. The act of separation is “the process of becoming” or individuation; the turning back toward the womb is the way of finding redemption in Being. The primary words themselves are articulation of this cosmic rhythm on the human level. I-It is the movement of separation, of the becoming of the I as an individuum, a subject, and the emergence of reality as the It-world. I-It is the result of the distintegration of the original unity of the relation which is the beginning. I-Thou corresponds to the movement of turning. The I, as a person, turns toward Being as one turns to the “great mother,” to the Thou that confronts one as a person. Let us allow Buber to speak for himself on this rather difficult point. Says he: “… this double movement of estrangement from the primal Source, in virtue of which the universe is sustained in the process of becoming, and of turning towards the primal Source, in virtue of which the universe is released (better to be translated: is redeemed) in being, may be perceived as the metacosmical primal form that dwells in the world as a whole in its relation to that which is not the world-form whose twofold nature is represented among men by the twofold nature of their attitudes, their primary words, and their aspects of the world.” It is true, Buber introduces this paragraph with the word, perhaps. In other parts of his magnum opum this word is completely forgotten. So, for instance, he declares without any qualifications that “the two primary metacosmical movements of the world-expansion into its own being (better translated: expansion into individuality, i. e., existence as I-It) and turning to connection — find their supreme human form, the real spiritual form of their struggle and adjustment, their mingling and separation in the history of the human relation to God.”",
"Buber is dead serious about his ontology and metaphsyics. Some of the vital aspects of his teachings are dependent on them. The coming into being of the world is an act of separation and estrangement. All being carries within itself a kind of a memory of the “womb,” of “the primal Source”; it is possessed of a desire to return. Such a desire, however, is the flowering of being as spirit. As spirit, all being is yearning for the cosmic binding of itself to the true Thou. There is an ontic longing in all being for its true Thou. This longing is “a category of being”; it is “the a priori of relation” or, as Buber also calls it, “the inborn Thou.” The inborn Thou is the ontic desire of all being, in its state of estrangement, for reunion with the true Thou. As Kant’s categories are the mold of human experience, so for Buber “the a priori of relation” is the basis for man’s ability to encounter “that which stands over against him” as his Thou. But whereas the Kantian categories are silent on the nature of the Ding an sich, Buber’s ontological category of the inborn Thou also determines the essential quality of that which stands over against man. It is a Thou. Man does not only have an innate desire for relation, but this desire can be satisfied because whatever “stands over against him” has itself the same ontic longing for its Thou as he himself has. All being, having been separated from the “womb,” has the same ontic longing for reunion. This longing is at the root of being a person. All being has thus a personal essence. It is not just a subjective desire within me that induces me to encounter a tree as my Thou. This in itself might be due to a psychological malfunction. It is the nature of Being within me that longs for relation and it is the same nature of Being within the tree that reveals itself in the reciprocity of the encounter. Of course, I must give in to the inborn Thou; I must go out and meet the world as a person, only then will I be able to meet it in its personal reality.",
"There is, however, one more point which we have to consider before we may complete the analysis of Buber’s metaphysics. Since the a priori of relation is man’s yearning for his “true Thou,” how come that it finds satisfaction in the encounters with finite beings? Buber maintains that in all such encounters the yearning for the true Thou may only partially be satisfied. But partially, at least, it may find fulfillment. This is due to the fact that, according to him, every form of personal being — and that is of course all being — is essentially of the same nature. It is the one Presence that irradiates all spheres of existence. Thus, every individual Thou is a symbol, or an image, of the Eternal; every individual Thou represents the eternal Presence. This does not mean that God is only immanent in the world and not transcendent to it. He encompasses all the spheres but he is not encompassed by them. Yet, since all individual presence is a manifestation of the eternal, in saying Thou to any of the spheres and to whatever they contain is like addressing the eternal Thou. In every sphere, in every I-Thou situation, “we look out toward the fringe of the eternal Thou; in each we are aware of a breath from the eternal Thou; in each Thou we address the eternal Thou.” Indeed, the purpose of every I-Thou situation is within itself. The contact with any Thou is important, for through it the breath of eternal life touches us.",
"We may now describe Buber’s way to the pure relation. In a state of cosmic estrangement, man is urged by the inborn Thou to find fulfillment in cosmic connection with the eternal Thou. Thus he enters the world with the desire to meet and expectant of the meeting. But it is not what he is looking for that he encounters immediately. What he beholds are so many “disguises” of the Presence. With the power of his desire to meet, he at first encounters the Presence in its finite manifestations. All these encounters are, as it were, stations on the way to the ultimate encounter. One knows that this is so, because the inborn Thou finds only partial satisfaction in all of them and thus, urges one on — until one comes face to face with the Presence and is at rest again. Of this meeting with the eternal Thou Buber says: “It is a finding without seeking, a discovering of the primal, of origin. His (man’s) sense of Thou, which cannot be satisfied till he finds the endless Thou, had the Thou present to it from the beginning; the presence had only to become wholly real to him in the reality of the hallowed life of the world.” The hallowed life of the world is, of course, the life of relation. By entering into I-Thou relation with everything that confronts us, we are more and more encountering Being itself as a presence, thus the eternal Thou, whose presence irradiates all spheres of reality, becomes “wholly real” for us. We see now more clearly what Buber means by saying that I-Thou relations with nature, with human beings, and the intelligible sphere, are the “portals” that lead to the encounter with God. The divine Presence is the only presence in all reality. While it is present all the time, it must become real for man. However, it will become real for man, if man himself is real, i. e., if he is a person and as such longs for participation and speaks the primary word of I-Thou again and again. The divine Presence becomes more and more real for the man who himself becomes more and more real as a person. This is the ultimate significance of the statement that the eternal Thou is always present; it is only man who is not present if there is no relation.",
"We are now in a position to appreciate what Buber has in mind when he says that the acceptance of the Presence is the prerequisite of the pure relation. It is the acceptance of the thesis that Being is personal, that it should be encountered in the innumerable I-Thou situations with finite beings; for through the contact with each Thou one is touched by the breath of eternal life. This is no longer tautological and it does require entering into “a relation of reciprocity with the Unknown.” One does it, however, by acknowledging one’s inborn Thou and by going out to “meet the Meeter,” as first, in his innumerable finite manifestations. If one is prepared thus “to accept the Pressence,” one will be lead into the presence of the eternal Thou.",
"Needless to say, there is a strong pantheistic element in this metaphysics and ontology. Since, according to Buber, God is not only the Being present in all beings, but also transcends them all, we ought to describe his metaphysics as a form of panentheism. Against its background we may now understand what Buber calls “ontic participation,” which is characteristic of the “essential relation” and the dialogical life. It is the actual mingling of individual substance wth individual substance. The separating walls of individuality may indeed be broken down, since individuality is due to the cosmic movement of estrangement from Being. As such it is unreal. Since all being is essentially one, and since the same Presence irradiates all, the turning toward the other can and should become actual participation in the being of the other. Only because of the pantheistic aspect of his philosophy can Buber maintain that in the dialogical situation a man experiences the mystery of the being of the other in the mystery of his own being. One may even agree that in the light of the underlying ultimate oneness of the Presence which flows through all beings, even the “bi-polar experience” may not be as absurd as it would seem at first glance.",
"The pantheistic metaphysics is the source of Buber’s optimism and confidence. He trusts the dialogical situation, he trusts man and the meaning as well as the truth which are dialogically revealed because at heart he is a pantheist. As with all pantheistic philosophy, so with his too, Being and Meaning are identical. So his advise to man is: be real,participate in all being “ontically,” and you will be true. Some of the specific aspects of Buber’s teachings, which we presented in the first section of this essay, become only now apparent in their full significance. In revelation, we heard Buber declare, man is revealed unto himself. In the dialogical situation of ontic participation man surrenders his individuality, which emerged in the cosmic movement of estrangement from Being, and becomes real. Only now, does he know his true self. Having become real, his response to the challenge, though given in dialogical freedom, coincides with “the divine law resting deep within man.” This follows logically from the original pantheism. It is the same Presence everywhere; ergo, if man finds his “true” self, he discovers “the divine law.” He discovers that what he really wants is identical with what God wants of him. Man’s own commitment, undertaken in freedom, and the law of God are one and the same thing. This is the typcial way in which pantheism throughout the ages has solved the problem of heteronomy versus autonomy in ethics. As Meaning and Being are one, so are also Law and Being. Law is simply the manifestation of the nature of Being. Therefore, as long as any being is true to its nature, it is also free and yet within the confines of universal lawfulness.",
"It is this pantheistic commonplace which is also the essence of Buber’s solution of the antinomy of freedom and causality, which we described earlier. The deed is waiting for me and as such, it is prescribed for me; yet I have to choose it, declared Buber. It all depends on me, even though I am commissioned to perform my deed. In choosing one’s deed, one encounters one’s destiny, which is one’s completion. Again, freedom and law are one. We could not see how a man deciding on a course of action in dialogical freedom could know that he was choosing the deed destined for him. There is no such problem for Buber. He is pantheistically logical. The deed that is waiting for me is what is required of me by the nature of Being itself. But I myself am a manifestation of the same Presence. Ergo, if I only act like the presence I truly am, I am bound to perform “my deed.” Being my true self, I cannot fail to find my deed, which of course will coincide with the divine law. Yet, I shall be free, for I shall be acting with my, and the deed’s, true nature, which — rather conveniently — is identical with the divine law. With reference to the Kantian antinomy of freedom, Buber asserts that the conflict between human responsibility and the principle of universal causation cannot be solved theoretically. One must embrace both sides of the paradox. They have “to be lived together, and in being lived they are one.” This is, at least, debatable. However, they are indeed one within the metrics of a pantheistic metaphysics.",
"What Is Man?",
"Let us place the metaphysics in its proper perspective in the history of philosophy. We cannot help being somewhat surprised by the turn Buber’s thought was compelled to take. Originally setting out with a number of existential affirmations, he found himself confronted by the need of buttressing them with an ontology and metaphysics which are variations on old themes of classical philosophy. Man’s inborn yearning for the true Thou reminds one very much of Plato’s anemnesis. The significance of the distinction between the cosmic-metacosmic movements of estrangement and turning is interpreted, almost literally, in the Platonic tradition of the distinction between Becoming and Being. Most obvious, however, is the closeness to neo-Platonism, especially as it found its elaboration by Proclus. The cosmos comes into being in a movement of separation from the One. Since there exists only the One, all reality is an emanation from it. Nevertheless, individual existence is not eliminated. However, as an emanation of the One, the individual reflects the universal. The particular has the same essence as the Absolute, but it is not identical with it. Coming from the One, being of it and yet apart from it, the individual, as well as the cosmos in its entirety, strive to return to their origin. There is one new feature in Buber’s ontology. The movement of return is not allowed to be completed fully. With Buber, it cannot go beyond the I-Thou relation with “the primal source.” The question that has to be raised now is: What are the consequences for the I-Thou relation of a metaphysics that is essentially pantheistic but is stopped short of the ultimate consummation of the return, the reestablished union with “the womb of the great mother?” More explicitly, the question is: In view of the metaphysics, what is the essence of the I, what is the “substance” — Buber uses the term in describing the essential relation — of particular being?",
"Buber does insist on the reality and the independence of the I, and this seems to run counter the pantheistic tendency. But he does not realize that his I in the I-Thou relation is lacking what it most needs, i.e., selfhood. The idea of the “two notes of the same chord” is so deeply rooted in Buber’s philosophy that one must apply it to the human being himself, no less than to the human response to the challenge. Since it is the same Presence which shines through all reality, and every individual is in essence a finite “disguise” of the absolute Person, wherein lies the nature of individuality? It is not enough to say in answer to the question: “God comprises, but is not the universe. So, too, God comprises, but is not, my Self. In view of the inadequacy of my language about this fact, I can say Thou in my language as each man can in his, in view of this I and Thou live …” The affirmation, however, emphatic, is no longer sufficient. Too much depends for Buber on his pantheistic ontology. If there is, indeed, a self apart from God, then obviously it cannot be the same presence that irradiates all; then, the “two notes of the one chord,” and everything that depends on it, are gone. Buber may, of course, still say that revelation is man’s response to a challenge, but unrelated as the response will be to a divine law, it will be a rather meaningless affectation to call it revelation. Neither will it then be possible to see in man’s destiny a completion of his freedom. To the extent that his real self will act freely, it may easily be in genuine conflict with the deed that is “awaiting” him. If the I does have selfhood apart from God as the basis of its ability of entering into the I-Thou situation, it is inconceivable how the encounters with finite beings should offer partial satisfaction for the yearning for the eternal Thou, or how these encounters could be considered as “portals” leading to the eternal Presence. The I, in its selfhood apart from God, should be able to meet other selves in their identity apart from God. The acceptance of the Presence may lead to God, if all presence stands for him. But if there is selfhood apart from him, then it is meaningless to say that the attitude of meeting reality as a presence will lead one to God.",
"Buber does not see that his metaphysics cuts away the ground from under his I-Thou. For him, selfhood and independent existence are the characteristics of the I in the I-It relation, of the I of estrangement and separation. The I in the I-Thou is not really an independent person, but the cosmic yearning for return to the “primal Source,” imprisoned in a finite vessel. The innate Thou, the so-called a priori of relation, this category of being, does not inhere in a person but is the essence of personal being. There is no selfhood in its own right which yearns for the Thou; there is only a cosmic-metacosmic yearning in finite shape. This finds its expression quite clearly where Buber describes “the fundamental difference’” between the two primary words. According to him, one may see the distinction between them best illustrated in the spiritual history of the primitive, whom we had occasion to mention earlier in our discussion. As we have heard, the original situation of the primitive is relational. It is a state that Buber calls vorgestaltlich, i. e., one in which the primitive has not yet learned to recognize forms about him in their individuality. Everything is experienced as relational, comprehending him as well as that which confronts him. At this stage, neither of the two have as yet separated themselves out of the relation. The I-Thou, says Buber, is not composed of an I and a Thou. The I-Thou precedes the I. The primitive man speaks the primary word of I-Thou in “a natural way,” i. e., even before he is able to recognize himself as I. The I-It, on the other hand, is a composite word. The “natural event” that is the foundation of the I in the I-It realm is the separation of the human body from the surrounding world. The body, in its perceptions and experiences, comes “to know” itself as differentiated from its surroundings. However, the differentiation is not a confrontation, which is possible only on the spiritual level. The original interaction between the human body and the world around it is not relational; it is a situation “of pure juxtaposition.” Hence, the character of an I cannot be implied in it. Only after the I, originally comprehended in the I-Thou situation, has separated itself as an independent entity, may it associate itself with a separated human body and awaken “there the state in which I is properly active.” The I which stepped forth declares itself to be the bearer, and the world around about to be the object of the perceptions. This is another version of the basic theme with which too we are already familiar, that in the beginning is relation.",
"That the I-Thou precedes the I should be seen in its full significance for the understanding of the person with Buber. If the essence of the person were indeed what the word says, no I-Thou relation could precede man’s awareness of himself as I. If personal existence meant selfhood and individuality, no one could be part of an I-Thou situation without having known oneself a person first. Only because for Buber the person is essentially the inborn Thou, i. e., the finite form of the cosmic yearning for the true Thou, is it possible for man to speak “the primary word I-Thou in a natural way.” There is no need for an I to be the bearer of the longing for return; the longing itself is the I. Actually, this is not only so in the primitive state. Buber’s person is of necessity empty of personal reality. To be conscious of oneself as a person is the end of the I-Thou situation. One is always alone with one’s self. The moment the I knows itself as a self, he is no longer participating; he becomes the I of I-It. Only the I of separation, the I of I-It, has selfhood and personality according to the inherent logic of Buber’s position. However, this I, as the result of the basic pantheism, has to be rejected by Buber. This is the full significance of Buber’s statement that all reality is participation and relation. If, indeed, there existed a form of personal being as bearer of the yearning for the Thou, then such personal being, even when disloyal to its innate yearning, would still be real.",
"Nor are these consequences which follow from the metaphysics affected by anything that Buber has said in his writings about philosophical anthropology. In Das Problem des Menschen, and with obvious reference to a statement in Ich und Du, discussed earlier by us in this section, Buber does say: “It is true that the child says Thou before it learns to say I; but on the height of personal existence one must be truly able to say I in order to know the mystery of the Thou in its whole truth.” Even stronger, he declares, in Urdistanz und Beziehung that the principle of human existence is a twofold one. The first is that of separation and the second, that of entering-into-relation. The first is a precondition for the second. For, obviously, I can enter into relation only with someone that exists at a distance from me, that “has become an independent vis-a-vis” for me. It would seem to us that, notwithstanding the emphasis on the I and on selfhood as a prerequisite for the relation, they still remain empty of contents and reality. We know well what Buber means by “knowing the mystery of the Thou in its whole truth.” It is a knowledge gained by “ontic participation” in an other; it is experiencing the mystery of the being of the other in the act of experiencing the mystery of one’s own being. But this, as we saw, is only possible because “the same Presence irradiates all being” and because individuality is not real. The entering-into-relation is so defined that it can be carried out only because self-being is not of the essence of man’s nature. Actually, the twofold principle of human existence, distance and relation, is the anthropological counterpart of the cosmic-metacosmic principle of separation and turning. The only reality selfhood possesses in the Urdistanz is its being apart for the sake of entering “into ontic participation.” In itself and by itself the I is not real. It is the conclusion one has to draw not only from the metaphysics but also from the anthropology. Man is real only if and as he enters into “essential relations” with the entire realm of existence. Man can attain to self-being only if every possible relationship to the world around him becomes reality for him, i. e., if every one of his relations to life becomes essential. Buber also formulates it in the following manner: “Speaking anthropologically, man does not exist in isolation, but only in the completeness of the relation between one and another.” In other words, man exists only in the act of “ontic participation”; he is real only in essential relations. However, essential relations, in Buber’s sense, are only possible because man has no essential identity of his own. It is rather interesting to note that in the context from which we have just quoted, Buber speaks of an inborn urge of self-realization. What, however, seems to be granted at first glance is immediately withheld by the words: “It would be a mistake to speak here of individuation alone. Individuation is only the necessary person-like mold of all realization of the nature of man. Not the self as such is ultimately essential …” The truth is that, on the basis of Buber’s philosophy, the self is not only not ultimately essential; it is lacking essence altogether. As he puts it very well, the self, or individuality, is only the particular mold for the realization of being human. And the realization of being human consists in not being an individual but existing in “ontic participation” in other beings. The inborn urge for self-realization, which every man is supposed to carry within himself, is the anthropological parallel to the inborn Thou of the metaphysics. Examine it as one may, the I which — according to Buber — enters into the relation with the Thou has no substance; it is a finite vessel that contains a measure of the cosmic yearning for reality by returning to the “primal Source.”",
"Relation and Relatedness",
"We may now be in a better position to appreciate the significance of our criticism of Buber’s concept of the exclusive-inclusive pure relation as well as of his definition of the true community. At the same time, the ultimate roots of Buber’s disagreement with the Biblical encounter will become uncovered.",
"The result of our investigation of Buber’s notion of the I has been that it is empty of personal substance; it has no genuine selfhood. By means of his idea of ontic participation in all being. Buber overcomes man’s isolation and solitude by eliminating man’s personal reality. But where there is no selfhood, where the I has no personal substance which he may rightly call his very own, there can be no relation either. Only an I existing in all realness as a clearly definable and separate person can confront and meet another I of the same category. In his pantheistic predilection, Buber confuses relatedness with relation. What he calls an I-Thou relation is in truth a situation of relatedness. Being, in its finite mode, relates itself to the rest of being in order to overcome separation. In the condition of relatedness, an original harmony and connectedness is restored. If Buber’s interpretation of the secret of primitive speech is correct, it would still not reveal, as Buber thinks, that primitive man experiences reality in an I-Thou situation of relation. Where there is no genuine separateness, there can be no genuine relation. It would, however, yield a good example of relatedness in an essentially impersonal situation. This is certainly so in the case of the early development of the infant. To call it an I-Thou situation preceding I-awareness is meaningless. What is taking place at this stage of human growth is the attempt on the part of a distinctive being, not yet conscious of its personal existence, to relate itself to the world around it. Forms of connectedness may thus arise, but no relation.",
"In this connection Buber’s misinterpretation of Spinoza’s amor dei is rather enlightening. Since the love with which God loves himself is, according to Spinoza’s pantheism, identical with the love with which man loves God, Buber believes that the amor dei means the encountering of the reality of God. Says Buber: “… it is truly an encounter, for it takes place here in the realization of the identity … of His love and our, although we, finite natural and spiritual beings, are in no wise identical with Him, who is infinite.” Now, it is of course perfectly correct to say that man, the finite natural and spiritual being is not identical with God, who is infinite. Yet, he is a mode of the infinite; and only because of that, because he has no independent personal existence in his own right, is his love for God identical with God’s love for himself. There is no possibility for a genuine encounter with God within the system of Spinoza. The very identity of God’s love with man’s love, the pantheistic “two notes of the one chord,” excludes the encounter. There is no I-Thou relation here. There is, of course, a relatedness between the infinite substance and its finite modes. The amor dei is an expression of this relatedness. It is worth noting that in the Postscript to I and Thou, Buber defines personal existence in terms of Spinoza’s philosophy. He does add to Spinoza’s two attributes of the Infinite a third one, that of “personal being.” However, of it he says: “From this attribute would stem my and all men’s being as person, as from those other attributes would stem my and all men’s being as spirit and being as nature.” In other words, finite person is a mode of the absolute Person. This is in keeping with his concept of the one Presence which shines through all being. As for Spinoza, so for Buber, personal existence has no reality. The personal for both is the particular, which is the Absolute in its mode of finitude. Buber, however, conceives it more in the dynamic sense of neo-Platonic pantheism. The particular, which he calls the person, has “history.” It starts out as the inborn Thou, a finite form of cosmic yearning for the true Thou, and ends up as yearning satisfied in what Buber calls the true relation, which, however, is a restored form of relatedness between the absolute Person and one of his finite modes.",
"Let us now have another look at the specific nature of Buber’s pure relation. He maintained that it was both exclusive as well as inclusive. We could not make much sense of it, because we took his concept of the I-Thou relation literally. As long as we assumed that the I had personal selfhood and validity as such, it could not be conceived how even in the pure relation the I could preserve all its other I-Thou relations intact. But Buber’s I-Thou relations are really forms of relatedness between the finite modes of the one Presence. It is, therefore, understandable that Buber should assert that this life of relatedness may be preserved in the relatedness of a particular final mode of the Presence to its primal Source, which — in its turn — comprises all its modes of finitude. If one is ontically participating in the Being of all beings, one is eo ipso also participating in all particular being. This is also the clue to the mystery of the true community. As we saw, it just yielded no sense to say that the true community was constituted by the people living in mutual relation with a living center and, at the same time, in mutually living relations with each other. It was not possible to see how all members of a people or a society could at the same time establish such a mutual relation to the living center; far less was it possible to understand that human beings, with their very limited capacity for I-Thou relations, could stand to each other in such rich forms of I-Thou relations that they would constitute a community or a holy people. All this was well reasoned on our part, because we took Buber at his word. This, however, we can no longer do. Since his I-Thou relations are in their essence forms of relatedness between various manifestations of the same Presence, it may be possible to make the metaphysical assertation that the same “I” may indeed be related in innumerable ways to Being in all its manifestations, which is essentially the same everywhere; just as one might affirm with the same metaphysical plausibility that the numerous finite modes of the Presence might conceivably be related to the “living Center” or “the womb of the eternal mother” or “the primal Source.” Buber’s true community is as little a genuine community as his relation is genuine relation. The true community is Being have completed the second movement of its cosmic-metacosmic history, i. e., having turned to its source after the movement of separation from it and having related itself to it by an act of ontic identification.",
"Since, however, the I is no genuine person, neither can its Thou be truly personal. Buber’s eternal Thou is as little convincingly personal as the One of neo-Platonism or Spinoza’s infinite substance. It remains forever “the womb of the eternal mother.” The “eternal Thou” is the goal of the cosmic yearning of being, estranged from its origin, for the primal Source. It is true, Buber does not seem to be much concerned about that. In the Preface to his book on Moses, he makes, for instance, the remark: “It is a fundamental error to register the faith with which I deal as simple ‘Monotheism’ … It is not so decisive whether the existence of a Unity exalted over all is assumed in one’s consideration, but the way in which this Unity is viewed and experienced, and whether one stands to it in an exclusive relationship which shapes all other relations and thereby the whole order of life.” It would seem to us that the matter is just not that simple. Buber, of course, is not a mere agnostic concerning the nature of the Unity; nor does he only testify to the nature of an experience of encounter and relation with it. He definitely rejects the idea of “a Unity which is exalted over all” and his entire testimony is meaningless without the acceptance of the existence of a Unity which permeates all and whose being is ontologically the being of all beings. But a Unity so conceived does have its implications for the relationship. What Buber is testifying about is not a genuine confrontation between an I and a Thou, but a “plugging-in” by the particularized modes of being to the mainstream of Unity. Speaking of the pure relation, Buber once explains: “Who wishes to make division and define boundaries between sea and streams? There we find only the one flow from I to Thou, unending, the one boundless flow of the real life.” Buber ought to realize that what he is talking about all the time is indeed “the one boundless flow.” He ought to appreciate also that in “the one boundless flow of real life” there can be neither a genuine I nor a genuine Thou. There is no encounter, no genuine “meeting with the Meeter.” There is either relating oneself to the flow as part of it or stepping out of it and becoming unreal in the separation of selfhood. No wonder, he knows nothing of the fear and trembling of the Biblical encounter. Only a real person can be afraid. His eternal Thou does not threaten man’s I in the encounter, for what Buber calls encounter is at best the absolute Person’s self-encounter with the finite modes of his self. Can there be in such a situation of relatedness a genuine dialogue? The freedom of which Buber speaks is in reality man’s freedom to persevere in a state of separation; the response to the challenge, on the other hand, is knowing oneself as part of “the one boundless flow of real life.” The response is not an answer, but an act of self-recognition as being one and the same with the “challenger.” Where there is no genuine personal distinctiveness, there can be no dialogue. Buber’s “two notes of the same chord” cannot imply a true dialogical situation. The pure relation which he propagates is a form of ontic connectedness, which — if achievable — would yield the restored unity of Being. Needless to say, such ontic connectedness would indeed “shape all other relations and thereby the whole order of life.” Only, it would do so by making effective and manifest the ontic order of Being. To call it an ethical or spiritual order would be justified only on the grounds that a particular mode of the all-pervasive Unity, in this case a man called Martin Buber, wills to do so.",
"Conclusion",
"Quite obviously, it has not been our intention to develop a Jewish position as regards the weighty issues which are treated by Buber in the area of his teachings which we have reviewed. Judiasm does have to articulate its own point of view in relationship to the problems of human existence as raised in modern philosophy. It is to be regretted that Buber’s philosophy cannot be accepted as the sorely needed modern articulation of the Judaism of the ages. The distinction between I-Thou and I-It is indeed fundamental and vital. However, by speaking of “the possibility and reality of a dialogical relation between man and God, i. e., of man’s free partnership in his dialogue between heaven and earth,” as Buber does, he places himself outside the historically authentic Jewish tradition. When Buber maintains that “the same Thou that goes from man to man also descends from the Divine to us and ascends from us to him,” he is much closer to Christian teaching than to Judaism. It was the sameness of the Thou that constituted Kierkegaard’s dilemma. It is understandable that against the background of the Christian tradition, the deity could become so intimately humanized and personalized that a Regina might well turn into “the obejct” standing between a man and his true love. Buber, of course, believes that he has been more successful in solving the dilemma. It is “the same Thou” in the deity as well as in the Reginas, but they do not exclude each other. He does not humanize the deity, he deifies Regina by making her a finite mode of the all-pervading Unity. Unfortunately, in this manner poor Regina loses, at least metaphysically, all the charms of personal identity.",
"The Jew does turn to God, addressing Him endearingly with the almost impudent “Gottenyu.” He does call Him with the word Thou. He knows that God is present, that He hears and answers. He prays to a living and personal God. But the distinction between creation and Creator, between creature and Creator is irremovable and insurmountable. In the light of this basic distinction, one would have to define, the I, the Thou, the It, and the We, as well as the human I and the divine Thou and the relationship between them all. There is encounter between God and man; it is the very essence of Biblical religion. But it is fundamentally different from the I-Thou encounter, or the dialogue, which are of such importance between man and man. Because of that difference, love for God cannot compete with love for man. And perhaps, just because one cannot hug God as one hugs a fellow man, or participate in him ontically, one should show one’s love for Him by loving His creatures and His creation."
],
"Postscript": [
"This study of the philosophy of Martin Buber is based on his writings Dialogisches Leben, 1947, Die Schriften ueber des Dialogische Prinzip, 1954, Urdistanz und Beziehung, 1960, Eclipse of God, 1952, Israel and the World, 1948, and Moses, 1947. References to Ich und Du follow the pagination of the original Insel Verlag edition of 1923.",
"The contents of the volumes, Eclipse of God, Israel and the World, Moses, were accessible to us only in the English versions. Most quotations from the otherworks are from the translations by Ronald Gregor Smith, from the volumes I and Thou, second edition, and Between Man and Man. Only occasionally did we depart from his translation or indicated, in parenthesis, a more adequate rendering of the German original.",
"In the notes, the Eclipse of God is quoted as Eclipse; Israel and the World, as Israel; Die Schriften ueber das Dialogische Prinzip, as Die Schriften."
]
},
"versions": [
[
"New York: Yeshiva University, 1962",
"https://www.nli.org.il/he/books/NNL_ALEPH001918336/NLI"
]
],
"heTitle": "ביקורת יהודית על הגותו של מרטין בובר",
"categories": [
"Jewish Thought",
"Modern",
"Eliezer Berkovits"
],
"schema": {
"heTitle": "ביקורת יהודית על הגותו של מרטין בובר",
"enTitle": "A Jewish Critique of the Philosophy of Martin Buber",
"key": "A Jewish Critique of the Philosophy of Martin Buber",
"nodes": [
{
"heTitle": "הקדמת העורך",
"enTitle": "Editor's Introduction"
},
{
"heTitle": "א. תורתו של בובר",
"enTitle": "I The Teachings of Buber"
},
{
"heTitle": "ב. עדותו של בובר",
"enTitle": "II Buber's Testimony"
},
{
"heTitle": "ג. המפגש התנ\"כי",
"enTitle": "III The Biblical Encounter"
},
{
"heTitle": "ד. המטאפיזיקה של בובר; שני תווים במיתר אחד",
"enTitle": "IV Buber's Metaphysics; Two Notes of the One Chord"
},
{
"heTitle": "הערה",
"enTitle": "Postscript"
}
]
}
}