Archives: Book Chapters

Chapter 1: All Children Need Help

Betsy won't give up the bottle. Will I have to let her go to kindergarten with it.

Tommy is just impossible! Everything he does is wrong and he does it on purpose! He's a bad boy!

Pete is always playing with matches. I'm afraid he's going to burn the house down.

Melinda didn't seem to care when her grandmother died. She didn't even cry. Now she hardly misses her. It doesn't seem right; she loved her grandmother so much.

Anita is so unhappy. She won't talk to me about it. What have I done wrong?

Alex fights all the time. He can't seem to get along well with the other boys at all.

Neal still wets the bed. His grandmother says he'll grow out of it. But it worries me.

Jack took some money out of my purse the other day. At this rate he'll become a juvenile delinquent!

Carla took too many pills the other night. I can't understand what she's got to worry so much about.

These statements of parents who were looking for help or were deciding whether to look for help reflect the bewilderment, hurt, confusion and worry about their success as parents and the happiness of their child. It's hard to be a parent -- maybe the hardest job there is. Most of us received almost no training for it. Nevertheless, we tend to be hard on ourselves. We expect of ourselves infinite wisdom, and understanding, unfailing patience, and above all, no mistakes. The remarkable and reassuring fact is that in spite of the difficult job and our lack of training for it most of us do a reasonably adequate job of parenting most of the time.

When things go wrong -- and they do for everyone at times -- we usually have one of three reactions: we fall into the guilt trap -- blaming ourselves for our child's unhappiness; or we blame the child -- he is bad, lazy or stupid; or we ignore the problem -- pretending that it doesn't exist or hoping it will go away. These reactions are different ways of dealing with our anxieties about our success or failure as parents. None of them is usually helpful, either for ourselves or for our children.

Fourteen-year-old Anita spoke up in a group of young people who were discussing their problems and feelings. "I can't talk to my parents when I'm unhappy. They think it's all their fault. They feel so guilty that I feel guilty because I made them feel guilty." To which Nelia added, "They always want to make it better. They think you have to be happy all the time. They don't seem to know that you have to be miserable sometimes. I wish my mother would just cry with frustration -- instead of trying to make it all go away."

These girls are expressing what many children of all ages feel -- the burden of having to feel happy all the time, so that their parents will not feel guilty. Our responsibility as parents is not to protect our children from all unhappiness but to help them to deal with it when, inevitably, it comes. The most helpful question is not "What did I do wrong?" but "What's the best way to help?" Sometimes the answer is simply to share our children's pain with them. Pain is an inevitable part of life. Much of the pain children experience is not the fault of parents. It is the price of being human.

Of course, being human we make mistakes in our relationships. Often it is well to admit our mistakes to our children. This helps them to learn that it is human to be wrong sometimes, and a strength, not a weakness, to be able to admit it.

Sometimes we try to defend ourselves against our guilt and fear of failure by blaming the child.

Seven-year-old Tommy came for play therapy because he was misbehaving at home and at school. He fought with the boys, teased the girls, hurled obscenities at the teachers when they tried to control him. At home he broke his little sister's toys, hurt the baby, and refused to change no matter how frequently or brutally he was spanked. During his first play session as he moved destructively from the blocks to the dolls to the paint and clay, he turned momentarily to the therapist whom he had noticed was making notes. "What are you writing down? That I'm bad?"

Already at seven, Tommy had an inner picture of himself as a "bad boy." Parents, teachers, and other adults continually reinforced this image, verbally and physically, so that Tommy had to keep doing worse things to bring on worse punishments for the bad boy he felt himself to be. Of course we're not ignoring the fact that he had some responsibility for his "bad" behavior. Early in their lives, children must develop increasing and appropriate accountability for their behavior. But blaming the child and expecting him to do all the changing is as futile and destructive as taking all the blame ourselves.

The third way of dealing with our children's problems which tempts all of us at times is the "Maybe if I ignore it, it'll go away" method. And in fact, sometimes it does. But carried to the extreme, this way can be dangerous. l.

Carla, fifteen, seemed depressed. Over a short period of time she had changed from a lively teen-ager to a withdrawn young person who began to avoid her friends, to drop out of activities, stay at home, shut herself in her room. At times she remarked that nothing seemed worthwhile any more. Once her father asked her what the matter was. She replied, "Oh, life just doesn't seem worth living." Her father laughed reassuringly. "Oh, Carla, at your age you don't have that many problems." Some time later she asked her mother how she would feel if she, Carla, committed suicide. Carla's mother laughed reassuringly. "Oh, Carla! You'll get over it." A few days later, Carla took an overdose of tranquilizers. Carla's cry for help was finally heard. Suddenly the doctor, the hospital, the police, her family all were hovering over her. Fortunately the pill bottle had been half empty. And her little brother had been there when it happened. Later, in family therapy, Carla's mother said, "I knew she was unhappy but I thought it was just a stage." Carla's father said, "I thought she just wanted us to feel sorry for her." Carla said, "I've been so miserable for so long, and nobody even cared."

Carla's parents didn't recognize her desperate distress signals. How do you know when your child's problems are serious and he needs more help than you can give? How do you avoid the guilt, blame, and head-in-sand traps? Is there any way of relating to children that will help them to be more secure and help parents not to feel like failures?

Whether your goal in reading this book is to increase your understanding of your children, to develop mutually satisfying parent-child intimacy, to gain insight or guidance in deciding whether your child needs professional help, the model we are suggesting can be summed up in these words, "Don't be afraid of feelings." 

How to Make the Most of the Feeling Level

"When I talk about my feelings, I want my parents to be a long ways away."

Jason's family had come for help because of his severe learning problems at school. In the playroom the children were discovering a new level of relationship. Jason's statement followed the therapist's question, "How would it be to invite your mother and father to join us next week ?" Through their work in the playroom Jason and his brother had learned that people love and hate each other at the same time. Jason had discovered and admitted to himself that he was jealous of his older brother's outstanding school record because he felt he could never measure up. The children had learned to play out their feelings with the puppets and to talk about them freely. But so far the children did not feel that their newfound freedom with feelings could be used with their parents too. So the consensus was expressed by Jason, "No, I don't think they're ready for this sort of thing yet." (Actually they were. They too had been learning new ways of handling feelings in their own sessions. It took time for the children to believe their parents had changed too.)

It is not surprising that the feeling climate in many families is based on the rule, "feelings, especially negative feelings, are to be hidden." We were raised that way; so were our parents. We tend to pass on to our children the same limited range of permitted feeling. But there is a way of relating within families that can enhance the good times, make the bad times more bearable, and provide a way of anticipating and dealing with problems.

Psychiatrist Norman Paul 2. suggests that this way of relating begins with the development of "parental empathy" -- the bond between a husband and wife which enables them to share with each other their fears, anxieties, despairs, joys and triumphs. Parental empathy is the ability of each parent to experience what the other feels -- not should feel, but does feel! A husband and wife who struggle for a deeper level in their relationship can relate to their children at a deeper level.

When Betsy's mother expressed her anxiety about weaning, her husband's reply was, "But she's only a year old! She's not ready to give it up yet !" This interchange began a discussion about what was the appropriate age for a baby to give up the bottle. It lasted for several days, becoming increasingly heated. What began as a simple discussion over an apparently objective issue had mushroomed into a battle. He exclaimed angrily, "You're just like your mother, a hostile old witch, trying to take bottles away from babies!" She retorted, "Your mother is worse. She spoiled you rotten !"

Fortunately, Betsy's parents sought professional help, not so much to decide about weaning as to interrupt their own painful battles. How could a simple remark about a baby and her bottle trigger a marital war? (Similar "objective" issues had triggered major fiascoes before.) They discovered in the course of counseling that the question of Betsy's bottle stirred up many feelings from the past still active in the present, as well as unfaced feelings in their current relationship. Betsy's mother discovered such feelings as, "Will I be a good mother if I let Betsy have the bottle any longer? What would my mother say if she heard Betsy still had the bottle after a year? Will Betsy stop loving me if I make her give up the bottle before she's ready ?" Similarly her husband had mixed and unrecognized feelings in response to his wife's anxieties -- his feelings of what a father and husband should be like, and his uncertainty about success in these roles, and the feelings toward his little daughter which stirred up his forgotten childhood feelings. As mother and father developed some awareness of their own and the other's deeper feelings and became more able to communicate about these feelings, mutual empathy began to develop. As parental empathy develops, external issues become easier to discuss rationally -- is there a right age for weaning, what are the pros and cons, how important is it? When the feelings, positive and negative, which both partners bring to a problem are experienced openly and dealt with directly, they do not cloud and complicate the issue. Furthermore, "the issue" may seem much less important than before.

The rewarding by-product of this way of dealing with problems is increased husband-wife intimacy, which makes the marriage more satisfying and therefore makes them better parents.

Betsy's parents had no difficulty in acknowledging and expressing their anger toward each other. This ability to bring negative feeling out into the open can be an asset in a relationship. Facing and working through anger and conflict is the path to deeper intimacy. Healthy conflict clears the air, clarifies feelings, lets each person know where the other stands, and may lay the foundation for resolution of the problem. But when an argument continues for many days, increasing in heat or widening the gulf of cold resentment, it cannot lead to empathy, intimacy or the negotiation and resolution of differences.

Some couples take a different tack. Instead of a verbal confrontation when a misunderstanding appears likely, they withdraw, keeping all feelings to themselves in order to avoid conflict or pain. Melinda's parents (also quoted earlier) had perfected the "Don't let anybody, even yourself, know how you feel," method. For instance, early in their marriage Melinda's mother felt hurt and disappointment because sexual intercourse was often not satisfying. Because she felt she "shouldn't" feel that way, that it must be her fault, that her husband would be angry if he knew, she kept her feelings to herself. Her husband knew that things were not going as they should. But he felt that it was his fault, that he wasn't the man he thought he was, that his wife must think less of him, that he must try harder the next time. He, too, kept his feelings hidden. Neither dared share painful feelings with the other. Thus, each assumed feelings in the other that were not there. They also lost the opportunity to discover that the sexual relationship is a growing one, usually not fully satisfying at first. Because they could not share their own and experience each other's feelings, they withdrew little by little from each other. Each time one or the other was hurt in any area of their relationship, he stored up more anger which eventually became hidden not only from the other, but from himself. Their hidden, frozen feelings gradually blocked feelings of warmth, love, esteem and even sexual attraction.

Of course, Melinda quickly learned this way of handling her feelings. When she fell down and hurt herself someone always said, "Oh, it doesn't hurt. Don't cry !" When she felt angry at her new baby brother for getting so much attention, someone said, "Of course you love your little brother." When she started to school everyone said, "Don't be afraid. You'll like school." By adolescence Melinda was "programmed" to hide her feelings, even from herself. When grandmother died, she appeared not to care. For some reason, Melinda's mother was upset by her daughter's lack of feeling and sought help. Perhaps she sensed Melinda's loneliness and isolation. Perhaps she was simply tired of her own. The family was soon involved in family therapy, where gradually they learned toshare the gift of their feelings, to tell each other when they were angry or disappointed or hurt. They also began to be able to tell each other when they were glad, or felt good about each other. As Melinda said after many weeks of family therapy, "You know it isn't just that I was never sad. I was never glad either. I just put all my feelings away in a box. But now, when I cry because grandmother died and I miss her, I also remember how she used to sing to me. And that feels good. Isn't it strange that you can be glad and sad at the same time and you can't have either one without the other?"

This bit of wisdom from a fourteen-year-old girl who was discovering her feelings describes the reality of being human. We live fully only if we allow ourselves to experience the full range of feeling. We are free to feel deeply joyful and loving only if we are also free to feel pain and anger and despair.

Betsy's and Melinda's families utilized professional help to discover feelings and unravel problems. They moved on to fuller marital and parent-child intimacy following help. Professional help is by no means always so successful; nor is it always necessary. Parents are often able to develop empathy between themselves and with their children on their own. (The books listed at the end of this chapter provide guidelines for people who want to make the most of the feeling level in their marriage or family.)

Max comes home from the fourth grade class one day feeling angry and discouraged. "Oh, I have so much homework! That teacher makes us work too hard." Max's father says, "Oh now, Max, you can't learn anything if you don't do your homework. The teacher is showing you that you have to work hard in this world." Well, all that may be true, and no doubt Max knows it already. Probably he hadn't really questioned the fact that the homework had to be done. But Max feels, "My father doesn't understand. It's no use telling him how I feel." A consistent diet of non-understanding forces feelings underground. Sooner or later, Max lashes out with some form of misbehavior at school, or he does a poor job with his school work, or he becomes compulsive about his work to try to meet his parents' expectations; he may grow up driving himself to the sort of "success" which will keep him from discovering the deep satisfactions of human relationships or make him more vulnerable to ulcers and heart attacks.

But suppose Max's father had said,

F: "Feeling pretty discouraged about having to work some more when the school day is over, eh Max?"

M: "Boy, and how! I really don't want to do my homework at all !"

F : "You feel like just forgetting it all ?"

M: "Yeah! But I guess I'll get it over with so I can watch TV tonight

What Max feels is, "Boy, my dad really knows what it's like to feel this way." That's empathy! No parent can be empathetic all the time. But a family which communicates empathetically much of the time prevents many problems from arising or from becoming unmanageable. (Of course, unless this way of accepting negative feelings has become a pattern, the story won't end so happily. And even if it is a pattern there are times when parents simply have to insist on the behavior they expect from a child whether he likes it or not.

A pattern of family empathy helps prevent problems from getting out of hand by cultivating a climate in which family members feel free to share their inner fears and disappointments. Recall Carla's story. When Carla said, "Life doesn't seem worth living any more," her father and mother responded with, "Oh, Carla, you don't have that many problems" and "You'll get over it." But what Carla heard inside herself was, "They don't understand. They don't think it's important. They don't know how I feel." She withdrew into her own world of misery. If either parent had been able to say something like, "You're feeling pretty low about things these days," the door might have been opened for Carla to talk about her troubles; the withdrawal, the loneliness, the suicide attempt might have been prevented. Sharing, recognizing, and experiencing feelings in the here and now often keeps them from causing trouble in the future.

Parental Anger and the Setting of Limits 

You may have the impression that we've been saying that parents must always be calm, understanding, patient, and wise. This is definitely not what we believe. Even if it were possible (which it isn't) it wouldn't be desirable. Children need to learn from parental example how to handle negative feelings. Parents are people, too! We also feel confusion, anger, pain, frustration, hurt, disappointment and resentment as well as joy, passion and love. And we have the same need to own and express these feelings. Parents who can argue vehemently, resolve the differences in some way, and become friends again, are showing their children that anger is an acceptable, often useful emotion. They are teaching their children how to use it constructively. Parents who can grieve deeply when there is a sadness of some kind are teaching their children that pain is an important part of being human and needs to be recognized and felt.

How we express anger towards our children is vitally important. Haim Ginott 3. suggests a direct statement of the parent's feeling rather than an attack on the child's character. Instead of "Oh, you bad boy. How could you be so stupid ?" a mother could say, "It makes me furious when you track mud onto my clean rug!" In the first instance, the child feels inside, "I'm bad. I'm stupid." In the second he thinks, "Wow, it sure makes mother mad when I get mud on her carpet!" Ordinarily children don't want to incur their parent's wrath -- at least not consistently (unless that is their only way of getting noticed).

This leads to setting limits. A family cannot be a full democracy. Children should participate in family decisions when it is appropriate but parents must retain the veto power in important matters. Children need to know where the limits are. Matthew, two, runs into the street. His mother brings him back instantly and makes it clear he must not do this again. Here is a firm limit he must accept whether he understands or not. Of course his mother also can expect his fury at being thus controlled. For a two-year-old, a brief explosion of temper would be a normal response.

By the time Matthew is ten, things are different. The rules (limits) are different. He has more freedom according to his growing ability to be responsible for his own safety. Parental discipline is different. It's important that he understand and accept the limits, even if he doesn't like them. But feelings are as important as ever. Matthew now understands and respects the street. He knows how far and under what circumstances he can go on his bike. But one day he goes too far and comes home late. Matt's father is worried and angry and he shows it! He says Matt may not ride his bike at all tomorrow. Matt is furious. He had planned to ride to the park with his friend tomorrow. Instead of a two-year-old temper tantrum he says angrily to his father, "I hate you!" Matt's father recalls his own childhood and how mad he used to get at his father. He knows how it feels from both the child's and the parent's side. He replies, 'I know you're angry. I was mad too when you broke the rule. I was worried about you. I know you wanted to go to the park tomorrow. But you will have to manage without your bike." Matt turns angrily away. On his way through the garage to the house he pounds furiously at the punching bag for several minutes. (Matt's father, on his way in, hits the punching bag hard a few times himself!)

This family has rules. Matt is expected to adhere to them even though they don't always seem reasonable to him. This family experiences conflict. Close relationships and conflict always go together. This family respects feelings. Matt was angry because of the punishment. His father recognized and accepted Matt's anger without allowing it to control his handling of the situation. Matt's father was also free to express his own anger. Matt knows by now there is no use arguing with his father; he'll just have to get to the park some other way, or else stay home. But he can accept the punishment more easily because he knows his feelings are also accepted, even though he doesn't get over his anger right away

As it becomes a family pattern, this way of setting limits and handling anger pays off in less frequent conflict, more constructive handling of it when it does arise, and in increasing respect for necessary authority. In contrast recall Tommy's family. At seven Tommy already saw himself as bad and behaved accordingly. Tommy's parents could not tolerate anger directly expressed by their son. When he misbehaved, they called him a bad boy but they neither listened to his feelings nor let him know ahead of time what the limits were and what consequences would follow.

Sometimes parents succeed in coercing their children into obedience through too rigid limits and punishment without dealing with the inevitable feelings involved. Sooner or later, these feelings make themselves known -- in destructive ways; sometimes not until those children become parents themselves.

Freedom of feeling does not mean freedom of destructive action. It is appropriate for Matt to express his anger verbally to his father and to pound the punching bag. It would not be appropriate for him to strike his father. Children should never be allowed to hit parents since this makes them feel very guilty and teaches them a destructive pattern for expressing anger. Children want and need to learn, through the firm setting of limits, that their angry, destructive impulses can be controlled. A child who learns from the beginning that his strong feelings are healthy and legitimate and that there are appropriate ways of expressing them gradually develops inner controls. He grows up with an inner respect for authority -- his own as well as others. He develops self-control because he has experienced discipline as an expression of caring in a relationship of love.

Some parents are too permissive. They do not provide their children with the security of knowing how far they can go. Destructive acting out behavior by these children is usually a cry for help:

"Please, somebody, stop me. Help me learn how to stop myself." Other parents are too authoritarian. They set too many unreasonable rules, punish too severely, and refuse to allow questioning of limits or expression of anger. Their children become compliant, frightened and submissive or burst out violently with destructive actions.

But between these two extremes is rational authority. Parents who use this means set limits where they are necessary and make them appropriate to the child's age, and encourage and accept the expression of the child's feeling. As they grow older these children gradually take more and more responsibility for setting their own limits until they, like their parents, become responsible adults.

Although this is the ideal, we are all human, and we often fall short of our own goals. Even when we understand the importance of feelings, and make the effort to deal with them honestly, we often fail. There are outside forces -- influences of school, community, the wide, wide world. Since most of us were not raised to deal with feelings openly, we miss many opportunities to meet each other empathetically. Also, most of us adults experienced at least one painful stage in our early lives from which we still carry unhealed wounds or sensitive scars; when our children hit that stage, we feel anxious and inadequate. Some of us are great with babies and inept with teen-agers or vice versa.

It is comforting to realize that if the overall feeling tone and emotional climate of the family is positive we can make many mistakes without permanent damage to our children.

Still, there are times when things go wrong and we need outside help. Chapter Two will discuss how we can recognize those times.

 

Recommended Reading

Axline, Virginia M., Dibs: In Search of Self (Boston: Houghton Muffin Co., 1965). How play therapy helped a little boy and his family.

Baruch, Dorothy W., New Ways in Discipline, You and Your Child Today (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1949). Dealing with children's feelings.

Ginott, Haim G., Between Parent and Child (New York: Avon Books, 1965) and Between Parent and Teenager (New York: Macmillan Co., 1969). Practical suggestions about parent-child and parent-teen communication.

Harris, Thomas, I'm OK, You're OK (New York: Harper & Row, 1969).

 

NOTES;

1. Some parents actually carry this method to the point of irresponsibility, not recognizing or admitting problems until someone outside the family -- the school or the law -- insists on it.

2. Norman Paul in Parenthood: Its Psychology & Psychopathology, ed. E. J. Anthony and T. Benedek (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1970), p. 16.

3. Haim Ginott, Between Parent and Child (New York: Avon Books, 1965).

 

Preface

As a veteran beleaguered parent loaded with guilt and confusion, I decided to step back and try to figure out why, though many of the things I've read are partly helpful, I seem to harbor a sort of resentment toward all the authors of books for parents. I think it's because, while they all give lip service to the fact that parents are human beings, they then go on to expect superhuman behavior and emotional maturity from us.

We are to be firm but not rigid; flexible but not inconsistent; friendly but not palsy-walsy; provide wise, careful and constant guidance but encourage independence; set a good example of course; and never use threats, rewards or punishments. They all give the distinct impression that whatever is wrong with the child is the parents' (especially mother's) fault, and that's such a heavy burden to bear.

These heartfelt lines from a perceptive mother's letter express the intensity with which many parents feel the responsibility of raising children. Is it their fault when things go wrong with their children? Is their influence limited? Must they feel guilty and burdened? All human beings, including children, experience periods of unhappiness, stress, even downright misery. Most parents become concerned at times about whether their child is momentarily unhappy, passing through a stage, or facing a serious problem. They wonder whether to wait until it goes away, try to help their child themselves, or seek professional help.

As they grow, children encounter many large and small crises both expected and unexpected: birth itself, weaning, toilet training, separation from parents, illness, accidents, the birth of a brother or sister, bad dreams, starting school, learning to read, making friends, adolescence -- these and many other experiences provide the potential for problems of varying intensity. Most children cope with most of these experiences with reasonable success. But all children experience difficulty at certain points. Parents wonder, Will it go away? Can we help? Should we get professional help?

No family can avoid crises, either the normal everyday kind, or a sudden and unexpected blow. Serious illness or death in the family, job loss, financial worries, moving, new babies, marital conflict, children growing up and leaving home: these and many other experiences affect all family members profoundly. In the same family one child may be more adversely affected than another. Or a child may not appear to be affected at all. But parents wonder, How is my child taking this? Will it hurt him? How do we know? Does he need help, even if it doesn't show? Or, I know he is troubled. Should we get help for him? Where and how can we get it?

Increasingly, the overwhelming problems of the entire human family press upon us as individuals and families. The frightening seriousness of our destructive potential -- nuclear war, a deteriorating environment, overpopulation -- and the instant mass communication which keeps us constantly aware of the precariousness of human existence, make our anxieties high much of the time. Children are deeply affected both by these realities and by the anxiety they sense in their parents. So we ask ourselves, How can our children have a good life when everything is so uncertain? How can we help them become strong enough to cope with whatever they must face? Is there something special we can do to help our children be as happy and creative as is possible in an insecure, destructive world? Can our religious faith become a more vital force in our family relationships and in coping with crises?

The authors of this book know from personal as well as professional experience how heavily such questions can weigh on one's mind and marriage. As we share our experiences as family counselors, we hope that we will also communicate our empathy as parents and as marriage partners. Worries about parent-child problems are painful. Each couple's pain is uniquely their own. But it helps to know that other parents feel similar pain and that people who try to counsel others have experiences of their own of the self-doubt, remorse, resentment, guilt, and fear, as well as the joy and fulfillment that accompany parent-child relationships.

Through our years of living, parenting, and counseling, we have acquired a deep respect for the strength and cope-ability of human beings. The remarkable resilience of people, including children, and the inner resources which they discover in the toughest circumstances, demonstrate this strength. Our hope is that what we say in these pages will help you as parents to appreciate your strengths and affirm your successes as well as to discover your unused inner resources. We hope that it will help to relieve the burden of guilt and confusion we all feel when things go wrong with our children.

Struggling to get the ideas in this book on paper has reminded us again and again of those persons who have taught us the most about parent-child relationships -- our own parents and our three children. For their gifts of the past and of the future and for the myriad complexities of our relationships with them, we are profoundly grateful.

HOWARD and CHARLOTTE CLINEBELL

Conclusion

In his combination of spiritual tension, breadth of scope, and central unity Martin Buber is similar to three of his most important intellectual and spiritual masters, Kierkegaard, Dostoievsky, and Nietzsche. He has gone beyond them, however, in his unwillingness to emphasize intensity for its own sake or to sacrifice one element of thought for the dramatization of another. He has held in tension and brought toward unity the various elements that they tended to isolate or to convert into irreconcilable antinomies. He has sacrificed the simpler intensity of the ‘Single One,’ the ‘God-man,’ and the ‘Superman’ for the tremendous spiritual tension of the ‘narrow ridge.’ He has not, like Kierkegaard, devalued man’s relation to man and to culture in favour of his individual relation with God; nor has he, like Nietzsche, stressed the dynamic realization of culture and value in individual life at the expense of the relation to God and fellow-man in all their independent ‘otherness.’ Like Dostoievsky, he has embraced rather than chosen between the opposites of self-affirmation and turning to God, of the individual and society, but he has gone beyond Dostoievsky in his ability to bring these opposites into true unity.

Buber’s philosophy of dialogue has made possible a new understanding of the problem of evil because it has reaffirmed the basic significance of the personal relation between the Absolute, the world, and man as against the tendency to submerge man in a mechanistic universe or to reduce God to an impersonal and indirect first cause, an abstract monistic absolute, or an immanent vital force. The answer which Buber finds in the Book of Job, as in the I-Thou relationship, is not an answer which solves or removes the problem. Wrong does not become right, yet God is near to Job once again, and in this nearness Job finds meaning in what has happened to him, a meaning which cannot be stated in any other terms than those of the relationship itself. This answer is not implied in the statement of the question, as it might seem to be, for God’s relation to man as the eternal Thou which never becomes an It does not make any the less real the ‘silence’ or ‘eclipse’ of God when He appears to hide Himself and we cut ourselves off from relation with Him. If He comes near to us again, this must be experienced as a real happening and not as a logical deduction from a set of basic assumptions.

Buber has demanded, as no other modern thinker, the hallowing of the everyday -- the redemption of evil through the creation of human community in relation with God. Does this attitude toward evil meet the challenge of Sartre’s existentialism, which sees evil as radical and unredeemable? Those who understand Buber’s philosophy will not hesitate to answer yes, for that philosophy is essentially concrete, close to experience, and realistic as only a life open to the reality of evil in the profoundest sense could produce.

It is the inclusion of tragedy within the redemption of evil which marks Buber’s deepest realism. Tragedy for Buber, as we have seen, is the conflict between two men through the fact that each of them is as he is. It is the tragedy of the contradiction, which arises from the fact that men cannot and do not respond to the address that comes to them from that which is over against them. They thereby crystallize this overagainstness into simple opposition and prevent the realization of its possibilities of relationship. This concept of tragedy is not an alternative to a religious view of life but an integral part of it. Not only Moses, but the prophets, the ‘suffering servant,’ Jesus and the Yehudi are to be understood in its light. Tragedy is not simply an event that should be removed, but in its deepest meaning an integral part of life. ‘We cannot leave the soil of tragedy,’ Buber has said, ‘but in real meeting we can reach the soil of salvation after the tragedy has been completed.’ For Buber the real distinction is not between a naïve acceptance of the world and the experiencing of its tragedy, but between the Gnostic belief in a contradiction that cuts the world off from God and the Jewish belief that ‘tragedy’ can be experienced in the dialogical situation, that the contradiction can become a theophany.

There is a movement from I-Thou to I-It even as from I-It to I-Thou, and one is sometimes tempted to believe that these movements are of equal force. To believe in the redemption of evil, however, means to believe that the movement from I-It to I-Thou, the penetration of I-It by I-Thou, is the fundamental one. This is a faith born out of the I-Thou relationship itself: it is trust in our relation with the Eternal Thou, in the ultimate oneness of the world with God. But redemption does not depend on God alone. Each man helps bring about the unity of God and the world through genuine dialogue with the created beings among whom he lives. Each man lets God into the world through hallowing the everyday.

Chapter 27: Buber and Christianity

Martin Buber’s influence on religious thought has steadily grown and spread for more than three generations and has been equally great among Christian thinkers as among Jews. Among the prominent Christian religious thinkers whom Buber has significantly influenced are John Baillie, Karl Barth, Nicholas Berdyaev, Emil Brunner, Father M. C. D’Arcy, Herbert H. Farmer, J. E. Fison, Friedrich Gogarten, Karl Heim, Reuel Howe, Hermann von Keyserling, Ernst Michel, Reinhold Niebuhr, H. Richard Niebuhr, J. H. Oldham, Theodore Steinbüchel, and Paul Tillich. Mention should also be made of a number of Christian thinkers whose religious thought has significantly paralleled Buber’s without either influencing or being influenced by him. Of these the most important are Ferdinand Ebner, John Macmurray, Gabriel Marcel, and Eugene Rosenstock-Huessy.

The first of a series of Swiss pamphlets subtitled ‘Building Stones of a Coming Protestantism’ is devoted to ‘Martin Buber’s Way in Our Time.’ In this pamphlet, written in 1940, Walter Nigg says that Martin Buber ‘possesses a paradigmatic significance’ for the religious situation of modern man:

If he was not able to change the face of the present in a decisive way, his groping toward the mainsprings of human existence enables one not only to grasp more deeply the religious situation of our time but also to foresee the direction in which a new breakthrough must be sought. (Nigg, ‘Martin Bubers Weg in unserer Zeit,’ op. cit., p. 5 [my translation])

In 1947 J. H. Oldham, a leader of the ecumenical movement in the Christian Church, made a similar but even more forceful appraisal of Buber’s significance for Christianity:

I am convinced that it is by opening its mind, and conforming its practice, to the truth which Buber has perceived and so powerfully set forth that the Church can recover a fresh understanding of its own faith, and regain a real connection with the actual life of our time. (Joseph Houldsworth Oldham, Real Life Is Meeting [London: The Sheldon Press; New York:The Macmillan Co., 1947] pp. 13-16.)

In 1948 Paul Tillich, who has himself been greatly influenced by Buber, wrote of his significance for Protestant theology as lying in three main directions: his ‘existential interpretation of prophetic religion, his rediscovery of mysticism as an element within prophetic religion, and his understanding of the relation between prophetic religion and culture, especially in the social and political realms.’

Buber’s existential ‘I-Thou’ philosophy . . . should be a powerful help in reversing the victory of the ‘It’ over the ‘Thou’ and the ‘I’ in present civilization.... The ‘I-Thou’ philosophy ... challenging both orthodox and liberal theology, points a way beyond their alternatives. (Paul Tillich, ‘Martin Buber and Christian Thought,’ Commentary, Vol. V, No. 6 [June 1948], p. 397. For a further evaluation of Buber’s significance as an alternative to orthodox and liberal Protestantism see Tillich, ‘Jewish Influences on Contemporary Christian Theology,’ Cross Currents, Vol. II [1952], pp. 38-42.)

‘Professor Buber,’ writes J. Coert Rylaarsdam, ‘is in a unique way the agent through whom, in our day, Judaism and Christianity have met and enriched one another.’ The German Catholic theologian Karl Thieme sees Buber’s impact as coming principally through his position of ‘an outspoken "between,"’ the position that we have called ‘the narrow ridge.’ Although deeply identifying himself with Judaism, Buber cannot be classified as either Orthodox, Reform, or political Zionist, writes Thieme. At the same time, he has gone as far as a Jew could go in honouring Jesus of Nazareth. His insistence that God needs man’s help to complete creation brings him close to Catholicism but removes him from Protestant Christianity, while his enmity toward any fixed laws and rules brings him close to radical Protestantism while setting him apart from Catholicism. Such a ‘between-existence’ poses a question to Buber’s contemporaries -- whether they will make use of it as a bridge of understanding between camp and camp or lay it aside as indifferent to all camps because it can be exploited by none. The answer to this question, in Thieme’s opinion, does not depend so much on the influence of Buber’s Hasidic teaching or his existentialist philosophy as on whether Christian theologians will allow themselves in earnest to be fructified by Buber’s interpretation of the Bible. (Rylaarsdam, ‘The Prophetic Faith,’ op. cit., p. 399, Thieme, ‘Martin Buber als Interpret der Bibel,’ op. cit., p. 8 f.)

It is I and Thou which has in particular received great attention, and many recent Continental and English works give evidence that it is already recognized as a classic. Walter Marshall Horton points it out as the most explicit example of the new sense of depth in Continental theology since 1914. J. H. Oldham says of it: ‘I question whether any book has been published in the present century the message of which, if it were understood and heeded, would have such far-reaching consequences for the life of our time.’ (Oldham, op. cit., p. 27 f.) Oldham expands this statement in another place:

The realization of the crucial significance of relations between persons, and of the fundamentally social nature of reality is the necessary, saving corrective of the dominance of our age by the scientific way of thinking, the results of which, as we know, may involve us in universal destruction, and by the technical mastery of things, which threatens man with the no less serious fate of dehumanization. (J. H. Oldham, ‘Life as Dialogue,’ The Christian News-Letter, Supplement to No. 281 [March 19, 1947], p. 7 f.)

Herbert H. Farmer speaks of the central concept of I and Thou as the most important contribution given to us of recent years toward the reflective grasp of our faith. ‘It has already entered deeply into the theological thought of our time, and is, I believe, destined to enter still more deeply.’ (H. H. Farmer, The Servant of the Word [New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons 1942], p.25f.)

 

I and Thou occupies an important place in the Episcopal Church’s re-education of its clergy for its new wholesale, long-range education programme, and it has had a decisive influence on the ‘relational theology’ in terms of which this programme has been oriented. (According to the Rev. James Pike, Dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the Episcopal Church is now engaged in the development of a programme of education from the cradle to the grave, as a part of which its clergy is being systematically trained, at the College of Preachers in Washington, in ‘relational theology,’ an application of the l-Thou relation to sacrament, grace, and redemption, conceived in relational terms, primarily in the family. For one such application, and a particularly successful one, see R. L. Howe, Man’s Need and God’s Answer (Greenwich, Conn.: Seabury Press, 1952). One Anglo-Catholic theologian, J. E. Fison, uses Buber’s philosophy as the central element in his plea for a greater emphasis on the blessing of the Holy Spirit. ‘The whole conception of spirit,’ writes Fison, ‘as much in St. John 3 and in St. Augustine as in the Old Testament, points to that between-ness in which Buber sees the essential meaning of life.’ (J. E. Fison, The Blessing of the Holy Spirit [London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1950], pp. 28, 65, 126 f., 139, 143 f.)

II

The widespread influence of I and Thou on Christian thought does not mean, unfortunately, an equally widespread understanding of Buber’s I-Thou philosophy. Many have not followed Oldham’s warning that I and Thou is a book which must be reread again and again and allowed slowly to remould one’s thought. Not only has Buber’s I-Thou philosophy been applied in the most diverse ways, but it has also, at times, been seriously distorted in the application. Melville Channing-Pearce, for example, speaks of I and Thou as a ‘manifest justification of Christianity as . . . a "cosmic mystery play" of the fall, the redemption and resurrection of being.’ (Nicodemus (pseud.), Renaiscence, An Essay in Faith [London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1943], p. 73 ff.) This statement is incompatible both with Buber’s Jewishness and with the concreteness of the meeting with the Thou. Nicholas Berdyaev has taken over Buber’s I-Thou philosophy in Society and Solitude, but he has never really understood the ontological significance of the sphere of the ‘between.’ Though he recognizes that no I exists without a Thou, his real emphasis is on subjectivity and inwardness. At the same time, he criticizes Buber in a way that no careful reader of I and Thou could possibly do, suggesting that for Buber the I-Thou relation is uniquely between man and God and not between man and man and within the larger human community. (Berdyaev, Solitude and Society, op. cit., p. 79 ff. For a further illustration of Berdyaev’s misinterpretation of Buber, mixed with a strong appreciation, cf. Berdyaev’s review of Die chassidischen Bücher, Ich und Du, Zwiesprache, and Königtum Gottes in an article in the Russian religious journal Put’, Organ russkai reilgioznoi mysli [Paris], No. 38 [May 1933], pp. 87-91.)

The German theologian Karl Heim and the Swedish theologian John Cullberg have both systematized the I-Thou philosophy to the point where it bears unmistakable traces of that reliance on the reality of abstraction which characterizes I-It. This is particularly true of Heim’s recasting of the distinction between the I-Thou and the I-It relations in terms of a mathematical analogy of dimensions. (Heim, Glaube und Denken, op. cit., and God Transcendent, op. cit.; Cullberg, Das Du und die Wirklichkeit, op. cit., Systematic Part.) The greatest danger of this type of overconceptualization is that it may lead one to remain content with dialogical philosophizing in place of lived dialogue. The German Benedictine monk, Fr. Caesarius Lauer, has pointed to this danger with uncommon effectiveness in a letter written to Buber in 1951:

The ‘dialogue’ about dialogue is growing on all sides. That should make one glad, but it disquiets me. For -- if all the signs do not deceive -- the talk about dialogue takes from men the living experience of dialogical life.... In dialogic it is the realization that is decisive, since it is working reality, that means -- Life. Now, the word certainly belongs to this realization, as Ebner has well shown. But just the word, not words, not talk, logicizing dialectic.... It is just the ‘spiritual’ man of today who suffers in a frightful fashion the old temptation of the human spirit, that is to say, that of objectifying the living accomplishment.... These ‘dialogical’ dialecticians do not seem to notice that the dialogic is essentially a way. However, ‘the way is there that one may walk on it,’ as you once said. (Quoted with the permission of the author [my translation]. The quotation in Fr. Caesarius’ letter is from Buber’s Preface to his book Das verborgene Licht (Frankfurt am Main: Rütten & Loening, 1924).

Many of the Christian thinkers and theologians who have adopted the I-Thou philosophy have recast it in the form of a radical dualism between the I-Thou and the I-It relations entirely incompatible with Buber’s own thought. Writers like Friedrich Gogarten, Melville Channing-Pearce, Emil Brunner, and Karl Barth in varying degrees equate I-It with man’s sinful nature, and I-Thou with the grace and divine love which are only present in their purity in Christ. Even though Brunner and Barth both recognize that man’s existence as man is made possible only through the I-Thou relation, they both emphasize the limitations that man’s sinfulness places upon his ability to enter into this relationship. Karl Heim, in contrast, writes that both the movement of sacrifice for the other and that of closing oneself against him are possible within the I-Thou relation. By thus divorcing this relation from the clear ethical implications which both Buber and Ferdinand Ebner have given it, Heim makes possible a dualism on the basis of which he characterizes man’s relation with the eternal Thou as taking place in an altogether different dimension from his relation with his human Thou. Father M. C. D’Arcy mistakenly assumes that Heim is developing what was implicit in Buber and, as a result, ascribes to Buber the dualism which is present in Heim. (Gogarten, Ich Glaube an den dreieinigen Gott, op. cit., pp. 103-116, 142-152, 182-188, Brunner, Wahrheit als Begegnung, op. cit., pp 66 f., 77 f., Man in Revolt, op. cit., chap. vi; Heim, Glaube und Denken, pp. 258-261, 328 ff., 342-349, 370-374; God Transcendent, chap. vii; M. C. D’Arcy, The Mind and Heart of Love, Lion and Unicorn, A Study in Eros and Agape [New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1947], p. 204, cf. pp. 114-123, 218, 318-321.)

The ultimate ethical consequence of this radical split between I-Thou and I-It is a de-emphasis on the possibility and significance of ethical action and a tendency to reduce man to the role of passive recipient of grace. Thus Gogarten says that the I never initiates ethical action but only fulfills or denies the claim of the Thou. (Gogarten, op. cit., pp. 110-116) Another result is the tendency to place the ethical choice in terms of the choice between one’s own interest and that of others. This second result is seen most clearly in Gogarten’s reworking of Buber’s philosophy of I and Thou into a philosophy of I or Thou. One must choose between the I and the Thou, says Gogarten, and in this he is followed by John Cullberg and to a lesser degree by Heim. This same emphasis is found in the thought of Will Herberg, the modern Jewish thinker who, under the influence of Reinhold Niebuhr, has given a strongly Protestant coloration to the I-Thou philosophy which he has taken over from Buber. (Ibid., pp. 109-149; Cullberg, op. cit., pp. 201 ff., 222-226; Heim, Glaube und Denken, pp. 342-349; Will Herberg, Judaism and Modern Man [New York: Farrar, Straus & Young, 1951], pp. 63-66, 72-79, 96, 101 f. Herberg writes: ‘The dominion of sin can only be broken by a power not our own, the power of divine grace’ [p. 77], and ‘In the last analysis, the choice is only between love of God and love of self, between a God-centred and self-centred existence’ [p. 96]. I have devoted a whole section of my article, ‘Martin Buber and Christian Thought,’ to this aspect of Herberg’s thought [The Review of Religion, Vol. XVIII, No. 1/2 November 1953], p. 41 f. [sec. iv].) This position is unrealistic, for it forgets the participation of the I even in so-called ‘altruistic’ actions. It also shows that neither Gogarten nor Cullberg have understood the true basis of the I-Thou philosophy which they have adopted, for reality is not within each of the two individuals in a relationship, as they seem to think, but between them.

Karl Barth has rejected the dualism between eros and agape in his own Christianizing of the I-Thou relation. He has also followed Buber in emphasizing the quality of spontaneity and reciprocity in the I-Thou relation which must rule out any confusion of this relation with dominance or submission. (Karl Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik, Vol. III, Part 2: Die Lehre von Schöpfung [Zurich: Evangelischer Verlag, A. G. Zollikon, 1948], pp. 318-329, 337-340.) Writing in 1948, Barth very possibly had in mind the effects that followed in Germany from a confusion of real relationship with what Erich Fromm would call authoritarian or sadomasochistic relationship. Two earlier German theologians who took over Buber’s I-Thou philosophy -- Friedrich Gogarten and Karl Heim -- both distorted it by reconciling it with an authoritarian attitude. In Gogarten’s case this means submission to the state and, in Heim’s, submission to another person. (For Buber’s criticism of Gogarten’s Political Ethics see Between Man and Man, ‘The Question to the Single One,’ p. 76 f.) Thus Heim writes:

I may submit to you as my authority or my guide. You may submit to me and recognize mine as the higher will. We may arrive at a voluntary agreement of comradeship and co-operation. But that this obedience and this fellowship always have the character of a ‘Thou’ relation, and can never be reduced to an ‘It’ relation, may be seen from the fact that the tension inherent in the ‘Thou’ relation cannot be happily resolved except by submission or fellowship. (God Transcendent, pp. 163-167.)

In the light of Buber’s clear and consistent emphasis on the independence and full freedom of the two partners to the I-Thou relationship, it is ironical to find Karl Barth suggesting that the main difference between his I-Thou philosophy and that of Buber is that he (Barth) makes ‘freedom of the heart between man and man the root and crown of the concept of humanity.’ This freedom implies for Barth just that rejection of the attempt to remove the distance between the I and the Thou through dominance or submission which has always been the simplest pre-supposition of Buber’s I-Thou relationship. (Barth, op. cit., p. 333 ff. That Barth should thus misinterpret Buber is indeed strange in the light of the clearly great influence, both direct and indirect, of Buber’s dialogical thought on Barth’s revision of his theology in the direction of the I-Thou relationship. Although Barth was undoubtedly also influenced by Ferdinand Ebner and Karl Lowith, most of his terminology [Ich und Du, Begegnung, Dialog, Monolog] is Buber’s. Testifying to this influence, Tillich writes: ‘Through the great Swiss theologians, Barth and Brunner, Buber’s basic idea has become a common good of Protestant theology.’ ‘Jewish Influences on Contemporary Theology,’ op. cit., p. 38. In his ‘Nachwort’ to Die Schriften über das dialogische Prinzip [p. 303 ff.] Buber replies at length to Barth’s statements concerning him. For Hasidism, Buber writes, freedom of the heart between man and man is ‘the innermost presupposition the ground of grounds.’) Buber’s emphasis on spontaneity is much stronger, in fact, than that of Barth himself and the other Christian theologians using the I-Thou terminology -- a difference probably caused by the Christian tendency to emphasize the gap between man’s fallen nature and Christian love. The Christian tendency from Augustine to the Reformation to see faith as a gift of God has tended, in Buber’s opinion, to obscure man’s spontaneity:

This sublime conception, with all that goes with it, resulted in the retreating into obscurity of the Israelite mystery of man as an independent partner of God. The dogma of original sin was not, indeed, adapted to further that especial connection of the ethical with the religious that true theonomy seeks to realize through the faithful autonomy of man. (Eclipse of God, ‘Religion and Ethics,’ p. 140 f.)

III

It is not surprising that Christian theologians should have given a more dualistic cast to the I-Thou philosophy than Buber has. It is important that we be aware that this difference exists, however, for Buber’s attitude toward evil is an integral part of his philosophy of dialogue and cannot be divorced from that philosophy without radically transforming it. There are many Christian interpretations of the I-Thou philosophy. For Fison it implies that the significance of the sacrifice on the cross lies in a two-way and reciprocal action in which God on the cross gave and received all. For Friedrich Gogarten it implies that God must be worshipped in the form of Christ, for only this form makes God sufficiently real as a Thou. For Romano Guardini it implies that Christ, through his perfect I-Thou relation with God, shows us the way to God, and for Barth it implies that Christ, as the son of God, has a perfect I-Thou relation with men, while men, being sinners against God, unfold their existence in opposition and closedness to the Thou. (Fison, op. cit., pp. 196-202; Gogarten, op. cit., pp. 142-188; Guardini, Welt und Person, op. cit., pp. 114-126; Barth, op. cit., pp. 265-272.)

For Buber, in contrast, the I-Thou philosophy implies that God becomes an absolute person -- an imageless and sometimes hiding God who cannot be limited to any one manifestation and, hence, cannot be understood as having become incarnate in Christ. (Two Types of Faith, p. 38 f.) On the other hand, Buber has recognized and pointed to the tremendous religious significance of Jesus as possibly no Jew has heretofore done while remaining firmly planted on the soil of Judaism. Buber wrote of Jesus in 1950:

From my youth onwards I have found in Jesus my great brother. That Christianity has regarded and does regard him as God and Saviour has always appeared to me a fact of the highest importance which, for his sake and my own, I must endeavour to understand. . . . My own fraternally open relationship to him has grown ever stronger and clearer, and today I see him more strongly and clearly than ever before. I am more than ever certain that a great place belongs to him in Israel’s history of faith and that this place cannot be described by any of the usual categories. (Ibid., p. 12 f.)

Buber’s forty years of concern with Jesus and Jesus’ significance for Jewish Messianism have culminated in a study of Jesus and Paul, in Two Types of Faith, which cannot fail to be of great significance in both furthering and clarifying the relation between Judaism and Christianity. In this book he identifies faith as trust (emunah) with biblical and Pharisaic Judaism and with the teachings of Jesus; faith in the truth of a proposition (pistis) he identifies with Greek thought and Paulinism. (Ibid., pp. 7-12)

‘The life-history of Jesus cannot be understood, in my opinion,’ writes Buber, ‘if one does not recognize that he . . . stood in the shadow of the Deutero-Isaianic servant of the Lord.’ Reproached for altering the figure of the ‘holy Yehudi’ in For the Sake of Heaven according to a conscious or unconscious Christian tendency, Buber answers that there is not one single trait of this figure which is not already to be found in the tradition of the suffering servant. But Jesus stepped out of the concealment of the ‘quiver’ (Isa. xlix, 2) while the ‘holy Yehudi’ remained therein. (For the Sake of Heaven, 2nd Edition [New York: Harpers and Brothers, 1953], Foreward, p. xii f. [In Gog und Magog, the German original, this is a postlude.]) The Messianic mystery is based on a real hiddenness which penetrates to the innermost existence and is essential to the servant’s work of suffering. Although each successive servant may be the Promised One, in his consciousness of himself he dare not be anything other than a servant of the Lord. ‘The arrow in the quiver is not its own master; the moment at which it shall be drawn out is not for it to determine.’ If the servant should tear apart his hiddenness, not only would his work itself be destroyed but a counter-work would set in. It is in this light that we must understand the attitude of Judaism to the appearance of Jesus. The meaning of this appearance for the Gentiles ‘remains for me the real seriousness of western history,’ writes Buber. But from the point of view of Judaism, Jesus is the first of the series of men who acknowledged their Messiahship to themselves and the world. ‘That this first one . . . in the series was incomparably the purest, the most legitimate of them all, the one most endowed with real Messianic power, does not alter the fact of his firstness.’(Hasidism, ‘Spinoza,’ p. 113 f. The second and last quotations are my own translation from the original, Die chassidische Botschaft [Heidelberg: Verlag Lambert Schneider, 1952], p. 29. Two Types of Faith, p. 107.)

Jesus’s Messianic consciousness was probably influenced by the apocalyptic Book of Enoch, in which the form, but not the person, of the servant has pre-existence, and by the events of the end which may have led Jesus to step out of the concealment of the ‘quiver’ and imagine himself, after the vision of Daniel, as in his own person the one who will be removed and afterwards sent again to the office of fulfillment. Before the events of the end, Jesus undoubtedly did not see himself as anything other than the hidden servant. And even in the end, he did not hold himself divine in the sense in which he was later held. His Messianic consciousness may have been used by Paul and John as the beginning of the process of deification, but this process was only completed by the substitution of the resurrection for the removal of the servant and personal pre-existence for the pre-existence in form of the Jewish Apocalypses. It was only then that ‘the fundamental and persistent character of the Messiah, as of one rising from humanity and clothed with power, was displaced by . . . a heavenly being, who came down to the world, sojourned in it, left it, ascended to heaven and now enters upon the dominion of the world which originally belonged to him.’

Furthermore, whatever was the case with his ‘Messianic consciousness,’ Jesus, in so far as we know him from the Synoptic tradition, did not summon his disciples to have faith in Christ. The faith which he preached was not the Greek pistis -- faith in a proposition -- but the Jewish emunah -- ‘that unconditional trust in the grace which makes a person no longer afraid even of death because death is also of grace.’ Paul and John, in contrast, made faith in Christ (pistis) the one door to salvation. This meant the abolition of the immediacy between God and man which had been the essence of the Covenant and the kingship of God. "’I am the door" it now runs (John x, 9); it avails nothing, as Jesus thought, to knock where one stands (before the "narrow door"); it avails nothing, as the Pharisees thought, to step into the open door; entrance is only for those who believe in "the door."’ (Two Types of Faith, pp. 96f., 102-113, 160.)

The Jewish position regards the fulfillment of the divine command as valid when it takes place in conformity with the full capacity of the person, whereas Jesus demands that the person go beyond what would ordinarily be his full capacity in order to be ready to enter the kingdom of God which draws near. (Ibid., pp. 22 f., 56, 60 f., 79, 94.) Apart from this difference, Jesus’ attitude toward the fulfillment of the commandments is essentially the same as the Jewish position. Both agree that the heart of man is by nature without direction and that ‘there is no true direction except to God.’ They also agree in the belief that God has given man the Torah as instruction to teach him to direct his heart to Him. The Torah is not an objective law independent of man’s actual relationship to God: it bestows life only on those who receive it in association with its Giver, and for His sake.

For the actuality of the faith of Biblical and post-Biblical Judaism and also for the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount, fulfillment of the Torah means to extend the hearing of the Word to the whole dimension of human existence. (Ibid., pp. 56 ff., 63 ff., 136 f.)

Paul, in contrast to Jesus, represents a decided turning away from the Biblical conception of the kingship of God and the immediacy between God and man. He posits a dualism between faith and action based on a belief in the impossibility of the fulfillment of the law. Law as he here conceives it is necessarily external; it derives from the Greek conception of an objectivum and is foreign to the Jewish understanding of Torah as instruction. This external law makes all men sinners before God, but man can be saved from this dilemma by faith in Christ. This faith, however, is essentially the Greek pistis, faith in the truth of a proposition -- faith with a knowledge content. (Ibid., pp. 7 f., 11 f., 36-37, 79 f.)

Trust in the immediacy between man and God is further destroyed through Paul’s strong tendency to split off God’s wrath and His mercy into two separate powers. He regards the world as given over to the power of judgment until the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ brings mercy and redemption, and he regards man as by nature vile and as incapable of receiving pardon from God until the advent of Christ. For Paul, God’s will to harden is no longer a part of His direct relation with a particular person or generation. ‘For the sake of His plan of salvation God hardens all the generations of Israel, from that assembled on Sinai to that around Golgotha, with the exception of His chosen "Election" (Rom. xi, 7).’ Paul’s God has no regard for the people to whom He speaks but ‘uses them up for higher ends.’ (Two Types of Faith, pp. 47, 81 ff., 85-90, 131-134, 137-142, 146-150.)

Paul answers the problem of evil by creating, in effect, two separate Gods, one good and one bad. In Paul’s view it is God alone who makes man unfree and deserving of wrath while in the work of deliverance God almost disappears behind Christ. ‘The Highest Beings stand out from one another as dark omnipotence and shining goodness, not as later with Marcion in dogma and creed, but in the actual experience of the poor soul of man.’ Although the Christian Paulinism of our time softens the demonocracy of the world, it too sees existence as divided into ‘an unrestricted rule of wrath’ and ‘a sphere of reconciliation.’ It raises energetically the claim for the establishment of a Christian order of life, ‘but de facto the redeemed Christian soul stands over against an unredeemed world of men in lofty impotence.’ This dualistic conception of God and his relation to the world is utterly unacceptable to Buber: ‘In the immediacy we experience His anger and His tenderness in one,’ he writes. ‘No assertion can detach one from the other and make Him into a God of wrath Who requires a mediator. ‘In this connection Buber contrasts the modern Paulinism of Emil Brunner with Franz Kafka’s ‘Paulinism of the unredeemed.’ Kafka knows God’s hiddenness, and he describes most exactly from inner awareness ‘the rule of the foul devilry which fills the foreground.’ But Kafka, the Jew, also knows that God’s hiding Himself does not diminish the immediacy: ‘In the immediacy He remains the Saviour and the contradiction of existence becomes for us a theophany.’ (Ibid., pp. 138-142, 162 ff., 168 f.)

IV

Our awareness of the differences between Buber’s thought and that of the Christian thinkers who have adopted the I-Thou philosophy need in no way imply a minimization of the very great similarities that exist between these religious leaders of different faiths. On the contrary, we presuppose this similarity, and we begin with the situation in which the resemblances are so great that the differences are often overlooked or obscured. Even where there are important differences, moreover, they have contributed much to the fruitfulness of Buber’s dialogue and friendship with such eminent Christian thinkers as Paul Tillich, Rudolf Bultmann, Albert Schweitzer, Rudolph Otto, and Leonhard Ragaz. The spirit in which Buber has carried on this dialogue is made clear in his reply to Rudolph Pannwitz’s criticism that Buber’s contrast between Judaism and Christianity has been unfavourable toward the latter: ‘Religions,’ writes Buber, ‘are receptacles into which the spirit of man is fitted. Each of them has its origin in a separate revelation and its goal in the suspension of all separateness. Each represents the universality of its mystery in myth and rite and thus reserves it for those who live in it.’ To compare one religion with another, valuing the one which is seen from within and devaluing the one which is seen from without, is always, therefore, a senseless undertaking. One can only compare the corresponding parts of the buildings according to structure, function, and connection with one another. (Origin and Meaning of Hasidism, op. cit., ‘Christ, Hasidism, Gnosis.’) In an address in Jerusalem commemorating his great Christian socialist friend Ragaz, Buber made perhaps his most concise and impassioned statement on the place of Jesus in the Jewish community, a statement which shows at once the sympathy and the ‘otherness’ which have marked his dialogue with his Christian friends:

I firmly believe that the Jewish community, in the course of its renaissance, will recognize Jesus; and not merely as a great figure in its religious history, but also in the organic context of a Messianic development extending over millennia, whose final goal is the Redemption of Israel and of the world. But I believe equally firmly that we will never recognize Jesus as the Messiah Come, for this would contradict the deepest meaning of our Messianic passion.... There are no knots in the mighty cable of our Messianic belief, which, fastened to a rock on Sinai, stretches to a still invisible peg anchored in the foundations of the world. In our view, redemption occurs forever, and none has yet occurred. Standing, bound and shackled, in the pillory of mankind, we demonstrate with the bloody body of our people the unredeemedness of the world. For us there is no cause of Jesus; only the cause of God exists for us. (Quoted in Ernst Simon, ‘Martin Buber: His Way between Thought and Deed’ [on Buber’s 70th anniversary], Jewish Frontier, XV [February 1948], p. 26.)

The faith of Judaism and that of Christianity will remain separate until the coming of the Kingdom, writes Buber. The Christian sees the Jew as the incomprehensibly obdurate man who declines to see what has happened, and the Jew sees the Christian as the incomprehensibly daring man who affirms redemption in an unredeemed world. Nevertheless, each can acknowledge the other’s relation to truth when each cares more for God than for his image of God. ‘An Israel striving after the renewal of its faith through the rebirth of the person and a Christianity striving for the renewal of its faith through the rebirth of nations would have something as yet unsaid to say to each other and a help to give to one another hardly to be conceived at the present time.’ (Israel and the World, ‘The Two Foci of the Jewish Soul,’ p. 39 f., Two Types of Faith, p. 173 f.)

Chapter 26: Buber and Judaism

Ludwig Lewisohn, writing in 1935, said of Martin Buber:

Dr. Buber is the most distinguished and influential of living Jewish thinkers.... We are all his pupils. The contemporary reintegration of modern Western Jewish writers, thinkers, scientists, with their people, is unthinkable without the work and voice of Martin Buber. (Ludwig Lewisohn, Rebirth, A Book of Modern Jewish Thought [New York: Harper & Brothers, 1935], p. 87; cf. p. 88 f. and Ludwig Lewisohn, Cities and Men [New York: Harper & Brothers, 1927], pp. 200-212.)

No Jewish thinker has had a greater cultural, intellectual, and religious influence than has Buber in the last four decades. He is of significance for Judaism not only as religious philosopher, translator of the Bible, and translator and re-creator of Hasidic legends and thought, but also as a religious personality who has provided leadership of a rare quality during the time of his people’s greatest trial and suffering since the beginning of the diaspora. Since the death of Hermann Cohen, Buber has been generally acknowledged as the representative figure of Western European Jewry. He wielded a tremendous influence not only upon the youth won over to Zionism but also upon the Liberals, and even, despite his non-adherence to the Jewish Law, upon the Orthodox. ‘It was Buber,’ writes Alfred Werner, ‘to whom I (like thousands of Central European men and women devoid of any Jewish background) owe my initiation into the realm of Jewish culture.’ (Franz Rosenzweig, ‘Martin Buber,’ Jüdisches Lexikon [Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1927], Vol. I col. 1190 f. Cf. Franz Rosenzweig, Kleinere Schriften [Berlin: Schocken Verlag, 1917], p. 106. Alfred Werner, ‘Buber at Seventy,’ Congress Weekly, Vol. XV [February 13,1948], p. 10; Liptzin, Germany’s Stepchildren, op. cit., p. 263 f.)

Today, in the third generation of his writing, speaking, and teaching, Martin Buber is without question not only the representative figure of Western European Jewry but of world Jewry as well. No one has done more than he to bring about a rebirth of Judaism, and his works promise to affect generations of thinking religious Jews of the future. The steady spread of his influence from Europe to England and from Israel to America makes it clear that this is no temporary phenomenon but a deep-seated force in the life and destiny of the Jewish people.

In his early twenties Buber associated himself with the great Zionist leader, Theodore Herzl, and in 1901 he became the editor of the Zionist journal, Der Welt. He broke shortly with Herzl, however, because of the latter’s purely political Zionism, and he became the leader of those Zionists (including Chaim Weizmann) who demanded that the movement be founded on the basis of a Jewish cultural renaissance. In 1902 this group founded the Jüdscher Verlag, which later became the publishing house for the most important Zionist literature, and in 1916 Buber founded the journal Der Jude, which became the central point for the higher spiritual strivings of the Zionist movement. As a result of its high level, moreover, Der Jude became the leading organ of German-speaking Jewry. (Robert Weltsch, ‘Martin Buber,’ Jüdische Lexikon, op. cit., Vol. I, col. 1191; Adolf Böhm, Die zionistische Bewegung bis zum Ende des Weltkrieges, 2nd enlarged edition [Tel Aviv: Hozaah Ivrith Co., 1935], Vol. I, pp. 203 f., 297 ff., 535.)

Although Buber gave up active leadership in the Zionist movement in favour of his broader religious, philosophical, and social interests, he continued to exert a strong influence on the Zionist movement through his speeches and writings. Through his emphasis on the building of a real Jewish community, he became a co-creator of the idea of the Chaluzim, or pioneers. For the furtherance of this goal, his circle joined forces in 1919 with the Palestinian ‘Hapoel Hazair,’ led by A. D. Gordon. Adolf Böhm lists Buber, Nathan Birnbaum, and A. D. Gordon as the three most influential leaders of Zionism after Herzl. The new perspective which Buber gave to Zionism was not understood outside of a narrow circle, and it evoked the most intense enmity of all the nationalistic-political Zionists. Yet, according to Böhm, whoever was able to follow Buber was freed by his point of view from torturing doubts and inspired to more intensive work. In the whole sphere of Zionist activity, even that of political organization, it was Buber’s disciples who accomplished what was essential. (Böhm, Die zionistische Bewegung, Vol. I, pp. 521-540. 259) 

Buber’s attitude toward Zionism is integrally related to his conviction that in the work of redemption Israel is called on to play the special part of beginning the kingdom of God through itself becoming a holy people. This election is not an occasion for particularist pride but a commission which must be carried out in all humility. It is not to be understood as an objective fact or a subjective feeling but as an uncompleted dialogical reality, the awareness of an address from God. In it the Biblical covenant to make real the kingship of God through partnership with the land is combined with the Deutero-Isaianic concept of the ‘servant’ under whose leadership Israel will initiate God’s kingdom. (Israel and Palastine, op. cit., pp. 34 f., 49 ff.,54; The Prophetic Faith, p. 232 ff.)

Israel’s special vocation is not just another nationalism which makes the nation an end in itself. The people need the land and freedom to organize their own life in order to realize the goal of community. But the state as such is at best only a means to the goal of Zion, and it may even be an obstacle to it if the true nature of Zion as commission and task is not held uppermost. (Israel and the World, ‘On National Education,’ p. 159; ‘Der Chaluz und seine Welt,’ op. cit., p. 90 ff.; Israel and Palestine, pp. 70 f., 74, 76 f., 117 ff., 121, 125, 144, 147 f.; Two Letters to Gandhi, op. cit., p. 10 f.)

Zion means a destiny of mutual perfecting. It is not a calculation but a command; not an idea but a hidden figure waiting to be revealed. Israel would lose its own self if it replaced Palestine by another land and it would lose its own self if it replaced Zion by Palestine. (Israel and Palistine, p. 142.)

If Israel reduces Zionism to ‘a Jewish community in Palestine’ or tries to build a small nation just like other small nations, it will end by attaining neither. (Ibid., p. 144 f.)

One of the means by which Buber exerted the greatest influence on the Zionist movement was through his discovery and re-creation of Hasidism. According to Robert Weltsch, ‘Buber’s discovery of Hasidism was epochal for the West: Buber made his thesis believable that no renewal of Judaism would be possible which did not bear in itself elements of Hasidism.’ (Jüdisches Lexikon, Vol. I, col. 1191 [my translation]). Through this discovery Buber opened up important new aspects of Jewish experience to the Jews of Western Europe and at the same time helped bridge the growing gap between them and the Jews of Eastern Europe.

Buber proved conclusively that the despised ‘poor relations’ in the East possessed inner treasures of great power and depth which it was impossible any longer to ignore.... Thus he came to embody the ultimate synthesis of the two cultural traditions and to become its living symbol as well as its finest flower. (Wolf, ‘Martin Buber and German Jewry,’ op. cit., p. 348.)

In his earlier writings Buber regarded Hasidism as the real, though subterranean Judaism, as opposed to official Rabbinism which was only the outer husk. He has since come to feel that in Hasidism the essence of Jewish faith and religiosity was visible in the structure of the community but that this essence has also been present ‘in a less condensed form everywhere in Judaism,’ in the ‘inaccessible structure of the personal life.’ Buber differs from other thinkers in regarding the life of the Hasidim as the core of Hasidism and the philosophical texts as a gloss on the life as it is depicted in the legends. In his first Hasidic books Buber exercised a great deal of freedom in the retelling of the Hasidic legends in the belief that this was the best way to get at the essence of the Hasidic spirit. (Israel and the World, ‘The Faith of Judaism,’ p. 13; Hasidism, ‘The Beginnings of Hasidism,’ p. 4 f., Die Legende des Baalschem, op. cit., ‘Einleitung.’ Lazar Gulkowitsch writes of Buber’s early poetic recreations of Hasidism: ‘Since Martin Buber is a poet who himself inclines to mysticism, Hasidism in his representation takes on an all too mysterious colouring while its natural childlike quality and its sheer naïveté do not receive adequate emphasis.’ Gulkowitsch, Der Hasidismus, op. cit., p. 66 [my translation]). In 1921 he rejected this method of translating on the grounds that it was ‘too free.’ His later tales, accordingly, are closely faithful to the simple and rough originals. They are often fragmentary sayings and anecdotes rather than complete stories. (Tales of the Hasidim, The Early Masters, op. cit., p. xi. Cf. pp. v-xii and Martin Buber, Der grosse Maggid und seine Nachfolge [Frankfurt am Main: Rütten & Loenig, 1922], Vorwort, pp. v-ix.) Technical criticism of Buber’s retelling of the Hasidic legends is beside the point, writes Ludwig Lewisohn.

These legends will remain a permanent possession of mankind in the form he has given them by virtue of that form which has itself become a part of their message and meaning. Thus, too, his reinterpretation of the Jewish past is beyond the arbitrament of factual scholarship; it has the permanence of great artistic vision; it has created that past in the soul of the present and is itself an enduring part of Jewish reality. (Lewishon, Rebirth, op. cit., p. 87)

No one who has read carefully Buber’s later Hasidic tales and Biblical interpretations could now accuse him of undue freedom, no matter how much they might disagree with his methods or with the conclusions that he reaches. A much more serious and frequent criticism is the fact that Buber does not regard the Jewish law as essential to the Jewish tradition. To understand this attitude we must go back to the last of his ‘Talks on Judaism’ in which he contrasts the false desire for security of the dogmatists of the law with the ‘holy insecurity’ of the truly religious man who does not divorce his action from his intention. Religious truth is obstructed, writes Buber, by those who demand obedience to all the commandments of the Jewish law without actually believing that law to be directly revealed by God. To obey the Mizwot without this basic feeling means to abandon both them and oneself to an autonomous ethic. The relation to the Absolute is a relation of the whole man, undivided in mind and soul. To cut off the actions that express this relation from the affirmation of the whole human mind means to profane them. The image of man toward which we strive is one in which conviction and will, personality and its deed are one and indivisible. (Reden über das Judentum, op. cit., ‘Cheruth’ [1919], pp. 202-209, 217-224.)

The dogmatists of the law reply to Buber that spirit remains a shadow and command an empty shell if one does not lend them life and consciousness from the fountain of Jewish tradition. Otherwise, they say, your direction will be self-will and arbitrariness rather than what is necessary. How can you decide between that part of God’s word which appears to you fresh and applicable and that which appears to you old and worn out? Buber answers this challenge in terms of the ‘holy insecurity’ which makes one willing to risk oneself ever again without hoping to find once for all a secure truth.

O you secure and safe ones who hide yourselves behind the defence-works of the law so that you will not have to look into God’s abyss! Yes, you have secure ground under your feet while we hang suspended, looking out over the endless deeps. But we would not exchange our dizzy insecurity and our poverty for your security and abundance. For to you God is one who created once and not again; but to us God is he who ‘renews the work of creation every day.’ To you God is one who revealed himself once and no more; but to us he speaks out of the burning thorn-bush of the present . . . in the revelations of our innermost hearts -- greater than words.

We know of his will only the eternal; the temporal we must command for ourselves, ourselves imprint his wordless bidding ever anew in the stuff of reality.... In genuine life between men the new word will reveal itself to us. First we must act, then we shall receive: from out of our own deed. (Ibid., ‘Der heilige Weg’ [1919], pp. 65, 71 [my translation]).

There is a significant continuity between Buber’s present attitude and that of these early essays. To Buber Zionism represents the opportunity of the people to continue its ancient existence on the land which has been interrupted by the generations of exile. This implies that Jewish existence in the diaspora from the time of the exile to the present cannot be understood as Judaism in the full sense of the term. The religious observances developed in the exile have the character, in Buber’s opinion, of conserving what was realized in the Jewish state before the exile. Following Moses Hess, he holds that the spirit of the old Jewish institutions which is presented by these obsenances will have the power to create new laws in accordance with the needs of the time and the people once it is able to develop freely again on the soil of Palestine. (Israel and Palestine, p. 122.)

Buber’s position on the law has been interpreted by many, such as the Orthodox leader Jacob Rosenheim, as a dangerous glorification of subjective feeling at the expense of the objective content of actions.) Jacob Rosenheim, Beiträge zur Orientierung im jüdischen Geistesleben der Gegenwart (Zurich: Verlag ‘A’zenu,’ 5680, 1920), pp. 10, 19-23, 27 ff.) This criticism reveals a total misunderstanding of Buber’s philosophy of dialogue which is, as we have seen, a narrow ridge between the abysses of objectivism on the one side and subjectivism on the other. Even some critics who accept the fundamental reality of the I-Thou relation as ‘the centre of any genuine religious experience’ treat ‘revelation’ as the objective -- ‘the act of God whereby He has disclosed the way and destiny of Israel’ -- and meeting, or the I-Thou relation, as the subjective -- ‘the act of man whereby that destiny and its divine source are drawn into the inner life of the individual.’ Man’s response to God thus becomes subjective ‘apprehension’ of an objective truth, and the objectified law becomes more important than the relation with God itself. (Arthur A. Cohen, ‘Revelation and Law, Reflections on Martin Buber’s Views on Halakah,’ Judaism, Vol. I, No. 3 [July 1952], pp. 250-256. For a fuller criticism of Cohen see my article, ‘Revelation and Law in the Thought of Martin Buber,’ Judaism, Vol. III, No. I [Winter 1954], p. 16. For an attitude similar to Cohen’s see Will Herberg’s treatment of the law in Judaism and Modern Man [New York: Farrar, Straus & Young, 1951]).

Another not infrequent misunderstanding of Buber’s attitude toward the law is that it is in reality a form of antinomianism. Here as elsewhere those who think exclusively in terms of either-or find it very difficult to follow Buber’s thought. What Buber is really stressing is the danger of ‘anticipated objectification’ -- the danger of preventing the personal renewal of the instruction when it becomes objectified and rigid as it inevitably must.)From a statement made by Professor Buber at a small discussion group in New York City, December 1951.)Personal responsibility is as far from lawlessness on the one side as it is from rigidified formal law on the other. The history of antinomian sects and movements, Buber writes, shows clearly that the isolated divine freedom abolishes itself when it rebels against divine law. ‘Without law, that is, without any clear-cut and transmissible line of demarcation between that which is pleasing to God and that which is displeasing to Him, there can be no historical continuity of divine rule upon earth.’ The reciprocity between man and God implies, however, that the divine law must be freely apprehended by one’s own act. (Moses, op. cit., p. 187 f.; Eclipse of God, ‘Religion and Ethics,’ p. 129 f.) This in no way implies the position of the antinomians who claim that the law as such displaces freedom and the spirit and therefore ought to be replaced by them.

The true argument of the rebellion is that in the world of the law what has been inspired always becomes emptied of the spirit, but that in this state it continues to maintain its claim of full inspiration; or, in other words, that the living element always dies off but that thereafter what is left continues to rule over living men. And the true conclusion is that the law must again and again immerse itself in the consuming and purifying fire of the spirit, in order to renew itself and anew refine the genuine substance out of the dross of what has become false. (Moses, p. 188.)

Franz Rosenzweig has written the best-known and most persuasive criticism of Buber’s position on the law. In ‘Die Bauleute’ Rosenzweig makes clear that his support of the law is based upon the covenant that God has made, not with our fathers, ‘but with us, us, these here today, us all, the living.’ The content of the teaching must be transformed into the power of our actions; general law must become personal command. The selection of that part of the law which the individual shall perform is an entirely individual one since it depends not upon the will but upon what one is able to do. This selection cannot err for it is based upon obedience of the whole person rather than arbitrary choice. (Franz Rosenzweig, ‘Die Bauleute. "Über das Gesetz." An Martin Buber.’ Kleinere Schriften, op. cit., pp. 109-117, 120.)

In his reply to ‘Die Bauleute’ Buber makes a distinction between revelation and the giving of the law which Rosenzweig has failed to make: ‘I do not believe that revelation is ever lawgiving, and in the fact that lawgiving always comes out of it, I see the fact of human opposition, the fact of man.’ Rosenzweig recognizes the importance of making the law one’s own, but he affirms the whole of the law to be divine prior to this personal appropriation, while Buber cannot. Rosenzweig accepts the command as from God and leaves open the question of whether the individual can fulfill it, whereas Buber remains close to the dialogue and makes the real question whether it really is a command of God to oneself. To Buber the law cannot be accepted unless it is believed in, and it cannot be believed in as something general or universal but only as an embodiment of a real address by God to particular individuals. ‘Is that said to me, really to me?’ Buber asks. On this basis he can at times join himself to the Israel to whom a particular law is addressed and many times not. ‘And if I could with undivided heart name anything mitzwa (Divine command or prescription.) in my own life, it is just this, that I thus do and thus leave undone.’ (Martin Buber, ‘Offenbarung und Gesetz’ [from letters to Franz Rosenzweig], Almanach des Schocken Verlags auf das Jahr 5697 (1936-37), pp. 149-153 [my translation]. [The dates of the letters are 1/10/22; 1/7/24- 5/7/24.] Cf. Franz Rosenzweig, Briefe, ed. by Edith Rosenzweig with the co-operation of Ernst Simon [Berlin: Schocken Verlag, 1935], # 399 To Martin Buber [16/7/24], p. 504 f.; # 398 To Martin Buber[(29/6/24], p. 503 f., and # 400 To Martin Buber [July 1924], p. 505.)

Rosenzweig wished to induce Buber to accept the law as a universal. This, to Buber, would be ‘faith in a proposition’ (pistis) as opposed to that trust (emunah) which he feels to be the essence of Judaism.

The Torah of God is understood as God’s instruction in His way and therefore not as a separate objectivum. It includes laws, and laws are indeed its most vigorous objectivizations, but the Torah itself is essentially not law. A vestige of the actual speaking always adheres to the commanding word, the directing voice is always present or at least its sound is heard fading away. (Two Types of Faith, op. cit., p. 57.)

This dialogical quality of the Torah is endangered by the hardening process which brought Torah near the conception of law as an objective possession of Israel and which thereafter tends to supplant the vital contact with the ever-living revelation and instruction. The struggle against this tendency to make the keeping of rules independent of the surrender to the divine will runs through the whole history of Israelite-Jewish faith -- from the prophet’s protest against sacrifice without intention and the Pharisees’ protest against the ‘tinged-ones’ whose inwardness is a pretence up till its peculiarly modern form in Hasidism, in which every action gains validity only by a specific devotion of the whole man turning immediately to God. Thus though the tendency toward the objectivizing of the Torah gained ground in Israel from the beginning, the actuality of faith again and again liberated the living idea. ‘This inner dialectic of Having and Being is . . . the main moving force in the spiritual history of Israel.’ (Ibid., p. 58 f.)

Today, however, ‘Israel and the principle of its being have come apart.’ Despite a national home and freedom to realize itself, the rift between the people and the faith is wider than ever. (At the Turning, op. cit., p. 24) In this breaking-up of the nation and faith the purpose of becoming a holy nation is repudiated. Reform Judaism tends to look on Judaism as religious creed, Orthodox Judaism tends to look on it as religious laws, both without the real existence of a people as a people. Zionists tend to look on it as a national destiny and perhaps also a culture but not as a people embodying an essential relationship to God in the life of the community. The only remedy for this splitting-apart of nation and faith is a great renewal of the national faith.

The dialectic of Israel between those giving up themselves to guidance and those ‘letting themselves go’ must come to a decision in the souls themselves, so that the task of becoming a holy nation may set itself in a new situation and a new form suitable to it. The individuals, regenerated in the crisis, who maintain themselves in Emunah, would have fulfilled the function . . . of sustaining the living substance of faith through the darkness. (Two Types of Faith, p. 171 f.)

What it means to sustain the living substance of faith through the eclipse is perhaps best shown by Buber’s own leadership of the German Jews in their spiritual war against Naziism. After the rise of Hitler, Buber was appointed as director of the Central Office for Jewish Adult Education in Germany, where ‘he was responsible for the training of teachers for the new schools which had to be established as a result of the exclusion of Jewish students from all German educational institutions.’ He also helped guide the teaching, learning, and training activities of the numerous Jewish youth organizations, and he headed the Frankfurter Jüdische Lehrhaus, a free college for Jewish adult education. (Wolf, ‘Martin Buber and German Jewry,’p. 351.)

From these central and strategic positions, Buber directed his spiritual energies to the remotest corners of the Jewish community. To the thousands who were reached and electrified by his words it meant the difference between the suffering of a meaningless fate and the liberating insight into the ultimate triumph of Jewish spirit which knows no defeat.... He was able to save many from spiritual despair. (Ibid., p. 351 f.)

Martin Buber led a whole community of Jews to a deeper affirmation of their Jewishness, Ernest Wolf concludes. And Jacob Minkin writes:

He counselled, comforted, raised their dejected spirits.... Perhaps not many of those who listened to him survived the fiendish slaughter, but if they perished, they died with a firmer faith in their hearts and a deeper conviction in their minds of their people’s spiritual destiny. Martin Buber had taught them to die as Jews had always died -- sanctifying the Name. (Jacob S. Minkin, ‘The Amazing Martin Buber,’ Congress Weekly, Vol. XVI (January 17, 1949), p. 10 ff.)

In the spring of 1952 Buber was awarded the Goethe Prize by the University of Hamburg for his ‘activity in the spirit of a genuine humanity’ and for ‘an exemplary cultural activity which serves the mutual understanding of men and the preservation and continuation of a high spiritual tradition.’ In accepting this award Buber recalled the number of Germans whom he knew during the time of Hitler who risked punishment and death in order to help the German Jews. ‘I see this as a more than personal manifestation and a symbolic confession,’ he wrote, ‘and accept it as such.’ This award was indeed a more than personal symbol, but it was of great personal significance as well: Martin Buber is the only person who stands in such a relation to the Germans, the Jews, and the people of the world that he might receive such a confession for his people.

Chapter 25: The Faith of the Bible

Buber’s philosophy of dialogue has been of particular importance in the Biblical interpretation with which he has been mainly concerned in his later years. One of the most significant of his Biblical works is his translation of the Hebrew Bible into German with the aid of his friend Franz Rosenzweig. The Buber-Rosenzweig translation of the Bible, according to Solomon Liptzin, ‘has been universally acclaimed as a miracle of fidelity and beauty.’ Ernest M. Wolf has explained this translation as an attempt to reproduce in the German some of the basic linguistic features of Hebrew. ‘The result of their endeavour was the creation of a new Biblical idiom in German which followed the original meaning of the Hebrew more faithfully than any other German translation -- or any translation in any other language -- had ever done.’ The translation is set in the form of cola (Atemzüge) rhythmic units based on natural breathing pauses. These serve the purpose of recapturing the original spoken quality of the Bible. (Solomon Liptzin, Germany’s Stepchildren [Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1944], p. 256; Ernest M. Wolf, ‘Martin Buber and German Jewry, Prophet and Teacher to a Generation in Catastrophe,’ Judaism, Vol. I, No. 4 [October 1952], p. 349; Walter Nigg, Martin Bubers Weg in unserer Zeit, first issue of Religiöse Gegenwartsfragen, Bausteine zu einem kommenden Protestantismus, ed. by Josef Boni and Walter Nigg [Bern: Verlag Paul Haupt, 1940], pp. 21-25; Franz Rosenzweig, ‘Die Schrift und das Wort,’ in Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, Die Schrift und ihrer Verdeutschung [Berlin: Schocken Verlag, 1936], pp. 76-87. For an unfavourable criticism of the Buber-Rosenzweig translation see Emanuel bin Gorion [Emanuel Berdyczwesky], Ceterum Recenseo. Kritische Aufsäitze und Reden [Tübingen: Alexander Fischer Verlag, 1939], pp. 21-38.)

This translation was accompanied by a volume in which Buber and Rosenzvveig explained the new principles of translation that they used. (Die Schrift und ibrer Verdeutschung, op. cit. 239) Both the translation and the new methods helped to produce a renaissance of Bible study among German-speaking Jews.

Had the generation of young Jews that went through the Buber-Rosenzweig school of Bible reading and Bible interpreting been permitted to grow up and to remain together, they would probably have become the most Bible-conscious Jews since the days before the ghetto-walls had fallen in Europe. (Wolf, ‘Martin Buber and German Jewry,’ op. cit., p. 350)

Despite the pressing demands on his time, Buber has succeeded in carrying out his original plan of tracing the development of the Messianic idea from the earliest periods of the Hebrew Bible through Jesus and Paul. The volumes of Biblical interpretation in which he has traced this development -- Königtum Gottes, Moses, The Prophetic Faith, Two Types of Faith, Right and Wrong, and the first section of Israel and Palestine -- constitute an extremely significant and creative contribution to the field of Biblical scholarship. Commenting on Buber’s translation of the Bible and on his Biblical criticism in Königtum Gottes, the Old Testament scholar Ludwig Feuchtwanger writes:

The new total viewpoint of Buber’s science of Biblical study has without question created a new situation in Old Testament scholarship. For the first time there has arisen a real Jewish critical study of the Bible -- Jewish and critical at once -- which does not allow its way to be dictated to it by foreign tendencies. (Ludwig Feuchtwanger, ‘Bibelforschung aus jüdischem Geist, Martin Bubers Erneuerung der Bibel aus Geist des Judentums,’ Der Morgen, Vol. VIII, No. 3 [August 1932], p. 222 [my translation]. See Karl Thieme, ‘Martin Buber als Interpret der Bibel,’ Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte [Köln], Vol. VI, No. I [19S4], pp. 1-9, and Hans-Joachim Kraus, ‘Gespräch mit Martin Buber. Zur jüdischen und christlichen Auslegung des Alten Testaments,’ Evangelische Theologie [Munich], Vol. XII, No. 1/2 [July-August 1952], pp. 59-77, for two recent evaluations of Buber’s interpretation of the Bible by Catholic and Protestant theologians respectively.)

Creation

God created man through love, says Buber, as a Thou for His I, an I for His Thou. He created man as a free being because He wished to be freely known, willed, and loved. The action of creation goes on incessantly, for God incessantly calls man and the world into being. Every person in the world represents something original, unique, and unrepeatable. Despite all analysis into elements and all attempts to explain the origin of personality, every man must in the end recognize in his personality an untouched residue, underived and underivable. To seek the origin of this residue means in the final analysis to discover oneself as created. Though man’s personality becomes a reality through the relation of the I to the human Thou, it is already potential in his created uniqueness, his relation to the eternal Thou. This uniqueness is not given to man for mere existence but for the fulfillment of a purpose that only he can fulfill. (Hasidism, op. cit., ‘Spirit and Body of the Hasidic Movement,’ pp. 64-68, ‘God and the Soul,’ pp. 155-158; The Prophetic Faith, op. cit., p. 195; The Way of Man op. cit., p. 17; Israel and the World, op. cit., ‘The Man of Today and the Jewish Bible,’ p. 100; Images of Good and Evil, op. cit., p. 82 f.)

Not only is there in everybody a divine particle, but there is in everybody one peculiar to him, to be found nowhere else.... Everyone has in the eyes of God a specific importance in the fulfillment of which none can compete with him. (Hasidism, ‘Love of God and Love of Ones’s Neighbor,’ p. 178 f.)

The mystery of our existence, the superhuman chance of mankind is that God places Himself in man’s hands: He wants to come into the world through man. Man is the completor of God’s creation and the imitator of His redemption. (Ibid., ‘God and the Soul,’ p. 158; I and Thou, p. 82; Eclipse of God, op. cit., ‘Religion and Modern Thinking,’ p. 100 f.; Images of Good and Evil, p. 82 f.; The Way of Man, p. 44 f.) He has, accordingly, real freedom -- the freedom of a separate person to go the way of his own personality, to do good and to do evil.

Man, while created by God, was established by Him in an independence which has since remained undiminished. In this independence he stands over against God. So man takes part with full freedom and spontaneity in the dialogue between the two which forms the essence of existence. That this is so despite God’s unlimited power and knowledge is just that which constitutes the mystery of man’s creation. (Eclipse of God, ‘Religion and Ethics,’ p. 138)

If man’s redemptive movement toward God is to be real, so also must his fall away from God be real. But this does not mean that an inherited ‘original sin’ is able to remove immediacy between God and man. Man sins as Adam sinned and not because he sinned. Although he is increasingly burdened by history, he is always capable of proving true before God. (Images of Good and Evil, pp. 36-40; Hasidism, ‘Spinoza,’ p. 109; The Prophetic Faith, p. 210; Two Types of Faith, pp. 136 f., 158.)

Man’s freedom properly understood is not freedom from external limitations but freedom, despite these limitations, to enter into dialogue with God. This dialogue is implicit, as we have seen, in God’s very creation of man. ‘The creation itself already means communication between Creator and creature.’ (The Prophetic Faith, p. 195. 241) In contrast to the customary view that it is monotheism which is the contribution of Judaism to the religions of the world, Buber regards the dialogue with God as the centre and significance of the Jewish religion.

The great achievement of Israel is not so much that it has told man of the one, real God, the origin and goal of all that exists, but rather that it has taught men that they can address this God in very reality, that men can say Thou to Him, that we human beings can stand face to face with Him, that there is communion between God and man. (Hasidism, ‘Spinosa,’ p. 96)

This communion between God and man implies partnership and nearness, ‘but in everything which grows out of it an ultimate distance persists which is not to be overcome,’ This absolute distance between God and man establishes the unconditional in man’s relation with God and at the same time discloses the place of redemption. Man remains utterly inferior and God utterly superior; yet if only man truly speaks to God, there is nothing he may not say. (Two Types of Faith, p. 9; Images of Good and Evil, p. 20; Between Man and Man, ‘The Question to the Single One,’ p. 77; The Prophetic Faith, p. 164 f.)

Again and again God addresses man and is addressed by him. . . . To God’s sovereign address, man gives his autonomous answer; if he remains silent, his silence is an answer, too.... The basic doctrine which fills the Hebrew Bible is that our life is a dialogue between the above and the below. (At the Turning, op. cit., p. 47 f.)

Man must enter into this dialogue with his whole being: it must be ‘an exclusive relationship which shapes all other relations and therefore the whole order of life.’ This exclusiveness demands a ‘religious realism,’ a will to realization of one’s belief in the whole of one’s existence, that cannot be present in a polytheism which sees a different God in each phenomenon of life. ‘The man in the Israelite world who has faith is not distinguished from the "heathen" by a more spiritual view of the Godhead, but by the exclusiveness of his relationship to God and by his reference of all things to Him.’ (Königtum Gottes, op. cit., p.91 f.; Two Types of Faith, p. 39) This exclusiveness makes it impossible to allow any part of one’s life to remain a sphere separate from God, and it makes it necessary to recognize God as He is, and that is as not limited to any one form, image, or manifestation. The exclusive Thou of prayer and devotion is the imageless God, who cannot be confined to any outward form. (Moses, op. cit., p.7 f.; Two types of Faith, p. 130 f.)This reality of faith and life is restricted, says Buber, by those Christians who leave God open to human address only in conjunction with Christ. Although imageless in religious idea, the God of the Christian is imaged in actual experience. We have, indeed, the power to glance up to God with our being’s eye, writes Buber; but this glance yields no images though it first makes all images possible. To identify God with one of the images that is thus produced is to allow the image to conceal the imageless One, and this means a limitation by man of the fullness of his dialogue with God. (Two Types of Faith, p. 131 f.; Hasidism, ‘Spinosa’ p. 96 f.)

Revelation

The Holy is not a separate and secluded sphere of being, writes Buber. It is open to all spheres of being and is that through which they find their fulfillment.

The genuine life of faith develops on the spiritual heights, but it springs from the depths of the distress of the earth-bound body.... Wherever the action of nature as well as spirit is perceived as a gift, Revelation takes place.

God may not be limited to the spiritual and the supersensual. Not only does His imagelessness not prevent Him from manifesting Himself in the visible world, but it is just this imagelessness which makes His manifestation possible: ‘He is the history God which He is, only when He is not localized in Nature; and precisely because He makes use of everything potentially visible in Nature, every kind of natural existence, for His manifestation.’ (Israel and Palestine, op. cit. pp. 149, 26, 40; Eclipse of God, ‘Religion and Reality,’ p. 32; Two Types of Faith, p. 39; Moses, pp. 194, 127.) God pushes through nature and history to that earthly consummation in which spirit and nature will be unified, the profane sanctified, the kingdom of God established out of the kingdom of man, and all of time and creation drawn back into eternity.

There is not one realm of the spirit and another of nature; there is only the growing realm of God. God is not spirit, but what we call spirit and what we call nature hail equally from the God who is beyond and equally conditioned by both, and whose kingdom reaches its fullness in the complete unity of spirit and nature. (Israel and the World, ‘Biblical Leadership,’ p. 131, ‘The Two Foci of Jewish Soul,’ p. 34.)

The corollary of this unity of spirit and nature is the belief that there is no essential difference between natural events and ‘miracles.’ Any natural event may be revelation for him who understands the event as really addressing him and is able to read its meaning for his personal life. In the same way, ‘miracle’ to Buber is neither an objective event which suspends the laws of nature and history nor a subjective act of the imagination. It is an event which is experienced by an individual or a group of people as an abiding astonishment which no knowledge of causes can weaken, as wonder at something which intervenes fatefully in the life of this individual and this group. The current system of cause and effect becomes transparent so that one is allowed a glimpse of the sphere in which a sole power, not restricted by any other, is at work. ‘To recognize this power on every given occasion as the effecting one . . . is religion generally as far as it is reality.’(Israel and the World, ‘The Man of Today and the Jewish Bible,’ p. 97 f. Moses, p. 75 ff. Cf. For the Sake of Heaven, op. cit., p. 112.)

The God of spirit and nature is also the God of history. The promise of the land to the people of Israel is the promise of a work of community which land and people must undertake in common, and as such it is at once a work of history and nature. History, however, is predominant, for history includes nature. ‘In the biblical, which is a history religion . . . there is no Nature in the Greek, the Chinese or the modern Occidental sense. What is shown us of Nature is stamped by History.’ During the period of the Kings, the magnification of God into the Cosmic King made a symbolical allegiance to God seem satisfactory in the place of the allegiance in every sphere of life which is demanded by the Lord of history. God should indeed be recognized as Lord of the world, writes Buber, but not as removed to the far heavens, for the God of the universe is the God of history who walks with His creatures along the hard way of history. (Israel and Palestine, pp. x-xii, 9 f., 14, 19; Königtum Gottes, p. 85; Moses, pp. 78 f., 158; The Prophetic Faith, pp. 85 f., 94.)

Although in the biblical view nature ultimately bears the stamp of history, it is necessary to distinguish between the way in which God reveals Himself in these two spheres. The self-communication of God through nature is indirect, impersonal, and continuous, while that through history is direct, personal, and discontinuous. It is the creating God who uninterruptedly speaks in nature, but in history it is the revealing God who speaks, and His revelation ‘breaks in again and again upon the course of events and irradiates it.’ Following the Maggid of Mesritch, Buber distinguishes between the original Godhead, which desires to impart Itself directly, and Elohim, the impersonal spirit of God working through creation. God’s imparting of Himself to man starts as indirect through nature and becomes more and more direct until man is led to meet YHVH Himself, who is at one and the same time the complete unity and the limitless person. It is this limitless original Godhead, and not the self-limited God, that speaks the I of revelation. (At the Turning, p. 57 f.; Hasidism, ‘God and the Soul,’ pp. 153-156.)

It is this second, ‘gracious and unforeseeable,’ form of spirit through which God reveals Himself to man in history. Here we come to know God not only as a revealing God but also as ‘a God who hides Himself,’ for there are times when God’s revelation in history seems clear and unmistakable and others when He seems absent altogether. Just as God’s imagelessness is necessary that He may manifest Himself in any form, so His hiding is necessary that He may reveal Himself.

God ever gives Himself to be seen in the phenomena of nature and history and remains invisible. That He reveals Himself and that He ‘hides Himself ‘ (Isa. x1v, 15) belong indivisibly together; but for His concealment His revelation would not be real and temporal. Therefore He is imageless; an image means fixing to one manifestation, its aim is to prevent God from hiding Himself; He may not be allowed any longer to be present as the One Who is there as He is there (Exod. iii, 14).

Christianity aims, in effect, to prevent God from hiding Himself, says Buber, in so far as it fixes Him in the image of Christ. (At the Turning, p. 58; Two Types of Faith, p. 130 f.)

In his concept of revelation Buber combines the meeting of I and Thou with the idea of ‘momentary Gods’ which Usener has presented as characteristic of the most primitive stage of mythical thinking. God does not arise for us out of inherited tradition, writes Buber, but out of the fusion of a number of ‘moment Gods.’ If we are addressed by the signs of life, we cannot say that he who speaks is God if we do not reply ‘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 self-contrived, no shred of knowledge, and were plunged into the night.’ What we can know of God in such an experience is only what we experience from the signs themselves, so that the speaker of the speech ‘is always the God of a moment, a moment God.’ But as one comes to know the poet through the separate experience of a number of poems, so ‘out of the givers of the signs, the speakers of the words in lived life, out of the moment Gods there arises for us with a single identity the Lord of the voice, the One.’ (Between Man and Man, op. cit., p. 14 f.) Not only does our world of It experience ever new creation through the flaming forth of the Thou, but each new Thou renews in all presentness the past experiences of Thou. It is this which is the essence of faith: not the past deadening the present, but the present recalling the past to life so that the moments of the past and the moment of the present become simultaneously present and joined in living unity.

In I and Thou Buber wrote of revelation as not imparting any specific ‘content’ but a Presence as power. ‘The Word of revelation is I am that I am.’ In Königtum Gottes and in Moses Buber rejects ‘I am that I am’ for ‘I shall be there as I shall be there.’ When Moses at the burning bush asks God His name, he is told: ‘Ehyeh asher ehyeh.’ ‘This is usually understood to mean "I am that I am" in the sense that YHVH describes himself as the Being One or even the Everlasting One, the one unalterably persisting in his being.’ The Biblical verb does not include this shade of meaning of pure being. ‘It means happening, coming into being, being there, being present . . . but not being in an abstract sense.’ (I and Thou, op. cit., p. 110 ff.; Moses, op. cit., pp. 51 f., 160; Königtum Gottes, op. cit., p. 83 ff.) God promises that He will always be present, but not in any known or expected form. He identifies Himself only as the Presence which comes and departs, as the imageless God who hides and reveals Himself.

The true meaning of YHVH, the inherited divine name, is unfolded in the ehyeh asher ehyeh: YHVH is He who is present in every now and in every here. And in order to make clear that the direct verb explains the indirect name, Moses is first instructed to tell the people ‘Ehyeh, I shall be present, or I am present, sends me to you,’ and immediately afterwards: ‘YHVH the God of your fathers sends me to you.’ (Moses, op. cit., pp. 49-53) Thus Moses at the burning bush clearly experiences the identity of the God whom he meets in the full and timeless present with the God of tradition revealed in time. He recognizes the God of the fathers as the eternal Thou, and he understands the present revelation of God as the assurance of His future presence.

Revelation is thus man’s encounter with God’s presence rather than information about His essence. Buber rejects the either-or of revelation as objective or subjective in favour of the understanding of revelation as dialogical. To be revelation and not just literature it must come from outside man, but that does not mean that man has no part in the form which it takes.

My own belief in revelation . . . does not mean that I believe that finished statements about God were handed down from heaven to earth. Rather it means that the 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 to His will. We are revealed to ourselves -- and cannot express it otherwise than as something revealed. (Eclipse of God, op. cit., ‘Supplement: Reply to C. G. Jung,’ trans. by Maurice S. Friedman, p. 173.)

Before the word is spoken to man in human language, it is spoken to him in another language, from which he has to translate it into human language. He does not convey a finished speech but shapes to sound a hidden, soundless speech. But this does not mean that he translates subjective emotions into objective speech and then pretends to have the word of God. The word is spoken to him as between person and person, and he must be in the full sense of the word a person before God can speak to him. (The Prophetic Faith, op. cit., p. 164 f.; Hasidism, op. cit., ‘Symbolical Existence in Judaism,’ pp. 119-129; The Prophetic Faith, op. cit., pp. 110-113.)

The anthropomorphism of the Hebrew Bible serves a valid purpose in preserving the concrete quality of the encounter with the divine. In the encounter itself ‘we are confronted by something compellingly anthropomorphic, something demanding reciprocity, a primary Thou.’ We owe to anthropomorphism the two great concepts of YHVH’s divine love for Israel and of His fatherhood. In the Hebrew Bible God is not seen in Himself but in His relation to man, and His revelation changes according to the historical situation. In the pre-exilic period God addressed individuals as members of the people into which they were incorporated and from which they were undetachable. The Ten Commandments were addressed to a single Thou rather than a collective You, yet to every individual as a part of the nation in which he was embedded. Only later in history when the individual discovers and becomes aware of himself does God speak to him as such. (Eclipse of God, op. cit., ‘Religion and Reality,’ p. 22 f.; Moses, op. cit., pp. 160, 194, The Prophetic Faith, op. cit., p. 89; At the Turning, op. cit., ‘The Silent Question,’ p. 37 f.)

The differences between the prophets, similarly, arise from the fact that each prophet discovered the divine demand meant by his particular historic situation. What is essential in prophecy is that it be based on the reality of history as it is happening and that its tie with this situation reach to the secret ground of creation in which existence is rooted. Jeremiah attacks the dogmatics of a guardian deity during a situation of false security, and Deutero-Isaiah opposes the dogmatics of a punishing deity during a situation of adversity. ‘Both prophesy so for the sake of the covenant between godhead and manhood, for the sake of the kingdom of God.’ (Ibid., op. cit., pp. 43 f., 49, 178, 182 f.; Königtum Gottes, op. cit., pp. 150-153; Moses, op. cit., p. 131)

The prophets sought God to ‘know’ Him, to be in direct contact with Him, and not in order to hear future things. Even their predictions of the future were for the sake of the present, that the people might turn again to the way of God. The pure prophets are distinguished from the apocalyptic ones, as from the seers and diviners of other religions, by the fact that they did not wish to peep into an already certain and immutable future but were concerned only with the full grasping of the present, actual and potential. Their prophecy was altogether bound up with the situation of the historical hour and with God’s direct speaking in it. They recognized the importance of man’s decision in determining the future and therefore rejected any attempts to treat the future as if it were simply a fixed past which had not yet unfolded. Their attitude corresponds to the basic Biblical view that man is set in real freedom in order that he may enter the dialogue with God and through this dialogue take part in the redemption of the world. (The Prophetic Faith, pp. 103 f., 116, 175 f.; At the Turning, p. 54.)

Even when the prophet announced an unconditional disaster, this announcement contained a hidden alternative. By the announcement the people were driven into despair, and it was just this despair which touched their innermost soul and evoked the turning to God by which they were saved. The false prophets tell the people what they wish to hear. They set up ‘over against the hard divine word of demand and judgment the easy word of a pseudo-deity . . . who is ready to help unconditionally.’ The true prophets, in contrast, present the hard demand of God in this historic situation without weakening or compromise. And God does not lighten the choice between the hard truth and the easy fraud. He speaks to the people only in the language of history and in such a way that they can explain what happened as the coincidence of adverse circumstances. ‘This God makes it burdensome for the believer and light for the unbeliever; and His revelation is nothing but a different form of hiding His face.’ (Ibid., pp. 104, 175-179; At the Turning, p. 54 f.)

‘Our path in the history of faith is not a path from one kind of deity to another, but in fact a path from the "God Who hides Himself " (Isa. xlv, 15) to the One that reveals Himself.’ Amos’s ‘righteousness,’ Hosea’s hesed, or ‘lovingkindness,’ and Isaiah’s ‘holiness’ represent three important developments of the meaning of the divine kingship for the life of the community. All three are ways of imitating God for the sake of His work.

In one generation Israel’s faith developed these three basic concepts of the relationship to God, and only all together could express what is meant by the being present of the One Who is present to Israel, Who is ‘with it.’ The name YHVH was unravelled at the revelation to Moses in the thorn bush; in the revelation to three prophets it has been unfolded. (Ibid., pp. 44, 101 f., 114 f., 128 f.)

This unfolding does not eliminate the periods of terror when God seems to withdraw from the world or the periods of insecurity when inherited conceptions of God are tested and found inadequate. The faith relationship has to stand the test of an utterly changed situation, and it must be renewed in a modified form. The force of extreme despair results in a new pondering of dogmatic conceptions which will either result in the sapping of the last will to live or the renewal of the soul. Emunah, the faith of the Hebrew Bible, is a trust in the faithfulness of God despite His different manifestations in different historic situations. (The Prophetic Faith, op. cit., pp. 44, 183; Two Types of Faith, op. cit., p. 34)

The midpoint between creation and redemption is not the revelation at Sinai or at the burning bush but the present perceiving of revelation, and such perception is possible at any time. What is given to an individual in this present moment leads to the understanding of the great revelations, but the vital fact is one’s own personal receiving and not what was received in former times. ‘At all times,’ writes Buber, ‘only those persons really grasped the Decalogue who literally felt it as having been addressed to themselves.’ We must feel creation, revelation, and redemption as happening to ourselves before we can understand them in the Bible. In our meeting with God in the daily events of life we experience all three: knowledge of our origin, awareness of His presence, and the touch of His saving hand in our darkest hour. (Moses, op. cit., p. 130; Israel and the World, op. cit., ‘The Man of Today and the Jewish Bible,’ pp. 94 f., 98-102.)

The Bible has, in the form of a glorified memory, given vivid, decisive expression to an ever-recurrent happening. In the infinite language of events and situations, eternally changing, but plain to the truly attentive, transcendence speaks to our hearts at the essential moments of personal life.... This fundamental interpretation of our existence we owe to the Hebrew Bible; and whenever we truly read it, our self-understanding is renewed and deepened. (At the Turning, op. cit., ‘The Dialogue between Heaven and Earth,’ p. 49 f.)

The Kingship of God

The Biblical dialogue between God and man finds its most significant expression in the concept of the kingship of God. Buber’s work of Biblical interpretation, accordingly, is principally devoted to tracing the development of this idea from its earliest expression in the tribal God, or Melekh, to its sublimest development in ‘the God of the Sufferers.’

The Israelite Melekh, the God who led Abraham in his wanderings, differs from other gods of the way in that He does not serve the purposes of the people by leading them to a place that they know and wish to go to. Instead He drives them to do the uncustomary, the untraditional -- to overcome enmity of clan and tribe and unite into one people, to take the unbeaten path into the land He has chosen for them. (Ibid., p. 68; Moses, op. cit., p. 125 f.; Israel und Palästina, p. 38. Cf. Israel and Palestine, p. 21.) The people of Israel recognize YHVH as their Melekh, their King, and they recognize themselves as chosen by Him. This does not mean that He is their God in the sense that He belongs to them or they in any way possess Him. He whom heaven itself cannot contain (I Kings viii, 27) belongs to no people or place. Yet at the very time when it becomes necessary to destroy Israel’s illusion that it has a monopoly on its God, at the time when it becomes unmistakably clear that YHVH is not the God of a tribe, even then and just then He is proclaimed as God of the tribe for ever and ever, as the God who liberated the people from Egypt and brought them forth to the land. (Königtum Gortes, op. cit., pp. 73, 81) (my translation). The one God, the God of heaven and earth, is the king whose kingship the people must make real through themselves becoming a holy people, a people who bring all spheres of life under His rule.

The time when this recognition of God’s kingship takes place is that of the Covenant at Mount Sinai. This covenant between God and the people of Israel is not a contract, as is sometimes thought. It ‘means no legal agreement, but a surrender to the divine grace and power.’ Not only is it unique among all religions, says Buber, but even in the Old Testament itself there is no analogy to it: ‘Only in the Sinai Covenant . . . does an action take place which sacramentally founds a reciprocity between’ an Above and a Below.’ This reciprocity is a free action, a ‘choice’ by both YHVH and the people. Israel cannot be understood as merely YHVH’s congregation of faith nor YHVH simply as Israel’s protector God. This reciprocal choice entails an active ‘over-againstness’ of the two partners such as is impossible in the magical view in which the divine side remains passive and in the ordinary sacramental view in which the human remains passive. (The Prophetic Faith, op. cit., p. 51; Königtum Gottes, op. cit., pp. 111-119; Eclipse of God, op. cit., ‘Religion and Ethics,’ p. 136.)

The Sinai Covenant is not to be understood as a limitation in the essence of God, as if He were somehow less absolute for having entered into it. Like His revelation to Moses, it says only that He, the hiding and revealing God, will be present with the people in the future, that He will be there as He will be there. It does not mean that Israel is in some way dearer to God than other peoples. Israel is chosen only to fulfill a charge, to become a ‘holy people.’ Until this charge is fulfilled the choice exists only negatively. When the people are unfaithful, God says to them through His prophet, ‘You are not my people and I am not ehyeh ("I am present") for you.’ (Königrum Gottes, op. cit., p. 115 f.; At the Turning, op. cit., ‘Judaism and Civilization,’ p. 14; Moses, op. cit., pp. 103, 105, 53 f.) God’s demand that Israel become ‘a holy people’ means the spontaneous and ever-renewed act whereby the people dedicate themselves to YHVH with their corporeal national existence, their legal forms and institutions, their internal and external relationships, the whole factuality of worldly life. The ‘religious’ and the ‘social’ are here closely connected, for Israel cannot become the people of YHVH without just faith between men. The direct relation of each of the children of Israel to YHVH makes them equal to one another and makes their duties to each other duties to YHVH as well. (Königtum Gottes, p. 106 ff., 144; The Prophetic Faith, p. 55)

After Moses, the most serious attempt to realize the kingship of God was in the period of the judges. The judge judged not as an appointed official but as one who remained in direct relation to the spirit as an open receiver. There is no security of power here, only the streams of a fullness of power which presents itself and withdraws. In the absence of any means for succession other than the recognition of someone possessing charisma, there comes to the front what Buber calls the ‘paradox of all original and direct theocracy.’ The very absence of restraint and compulsion which enables the men of faith to wait for the grace which they wish to follow enables those without faith not to follow anyone. The highest binding cannot by its very nature make use of any compulsion; it calls for a perfected community based on spontaneity. But this trust in spontaneity may lead in the end to an anarchy passionately sanctioned in the name of the freedom of God. This paradox is that of the kingship of God itself: it stands in the historical conflict between those who bear the message and those who resist it. It is the visible manifestation of the historical dialogue between the divinity that asks and mankind that refuses an answer yet also seeks one. (Ibid., op. cit., pp. 3 f., 31 f., 60, 106 f., 139 f., 143-146, 179-182; 2nd enlarged edition [Berlin: Schocken Verlag, 1936] p. xxvii; Moses, pp. 184-190) This tragedy of the contradiction confronted not only Moses but also the judges, the prophets, the ‘suffering servant,’ and Jesus.

The unity of spirit and law in the judge is succeeded by the king, who had security of power without spirit, and the prophet, who had spirit without power. The kings were commissioned by God and responsible to Him, but they tended to sublimate the irresponsibility into a divine right granted without obligation and to regard their anointing as demanding of them a merely cultic acknowledgment of YHVH’s kingship. It is this failure of the kings in the dialogue with YHVH which resulted in the mission of the prophets. The ‘theopolitical’ realism of the prophets led them to reject any merely symbolic fulfillment of the divine commission, to fight the division of community life into a ‘religious’ realm of myth and cult and a ‘political’ realm of civic and economic laws. YHVH passes judgment on the nations not for their iniquity against Him but for their iniquity against each other. He demands ‘righteousness’ and ‘justice’ of the people for the sake of the completion of his work (Amos). He seeks not ‘religion’ but community. (Ibid., op. cit., pp. 144, 175; Israel and the World, op. cit., ‘Biblical Leadership,’ 129 f.; The Prophetic Faith, pp. 66 ff., 85 f., 97, 101 f., 152 f., 172.)

The God of Isaiah whom one knows to be Lord of all is not more spiritual or real than the God of the Covenant of whom one knows only that ‘He is King in Jeshurun,’ for already He makes the unconditional demand of the genuine kingship. The way of the kingship is the way from failure to failure in the dialogue between the people and God. As the failure of the judge leads to the king and the failure of the king to the prophet, so the failure of the prophet in his opposition to the king leads to the conception of two new types of leader who will set the dialogue aright -- the Messiah of YHVH and the ‘suffering servant of the Lord.’ (Königtum Gottes, op. cit., 89 f., 181 f.; Israel and the World, op. cit., ‘Biblical Leadership’ pp. 124-133.)

Isaiah’s Messiah, or ‘Immanuel,’ is the anti-king, but he is not a spiritual anti-king, as many see it. He is the king of the remnant, from which the people will renew itself, and his Messianic kingship is a real theopolitical kingship endowed with political power for the realization of God’s will for the peoples. ‘Immanuel’ is not simply a leader of the people of Israel nor is there any question of the sovereignty of Israel in the world. God leads all peoples to peace and freedom and demands that ‘in freedom they shall serve him, as peoples, each in its own way and according to its own character.’ The Messiah of Isaiah is the vice-regent who is to make God’s leadership of the people real. ‘He is anointed to set up with human forces and human responsibility the divine order of human community.’ He is in no way divine or more than man; he is godlike as is the man in whom the likeness to the divine has unfolded. ‘He is not nearer to God than what is appointed to man as man; . . . he too stands before God in indestructible dialogue.’ He does not take the place of man’s turning or bring about a redemption which man has merely to accept and enter into. The ‘Messianic’ prophecy is no prediction of an already certain future: it too conceals an alternative, for there is something essential that must come from man. The belief in the coming of a Messianic leader is in essence the belief that at last man shall speak with his whole being the word that answers God’s word. God awaits an earthly consummation, a consummation in and with mankind. The Messianic belief is ‘the belief in the real leader, in the setting right of the dialogue, in God’s disappointment being at an end.’ (The Prophetic Faith, op. cit., pp. 140-144, 151, 153 f.; Israel and the World, op. cit., ‘Biblical Leadership,’ p. 131.)

The God of the Sufferers

Although YHVH’s sovereignty in every field of life was proclaimed at the time of the Covenant, it was only by a long and slow process that men came to recognize God and His activity in the spheres which seemed necessarily foreign to Him. This difficulty is particularly strong in connection with those unusual events where men feel the presence of the demonic and the irrational, events that arouse terror, threaten security, and disturb faith. The Biblical concept of holiness is that of a power capable of exerting both a destructive and a hallowing effect. The encounter with this holiness is, therefore, a source of danger to man. As in the story of Jacob’s wrestle with the angel, it is the perilous test that the wanderer must pass before he enjoys the final grace of God. (The Prophetic Faith, op. cit., pp. 71, 52; Moses, op. cit., pp. 106, 118.)

The early stage of Israelite religion knows no Satan; if a power attacks a man and threatens him, it is proper to recognize YHVH in it or behind it, no matter how nocturnally dread and cruel it may be; and it is proper to withstand Him, since after all He does not require anything else of me than myself.

In ‘events of the night,’ such as that in which the Lord met Moses and tried to kill him (Exod. iv, 24-26), Buber finds one of the deepest roots of Deutero-Isaiah’s words (Isa. xlv, 7): ‘Who makes peace and creates evil, I YHVH do all this.’ (Moses, p. 57 ff.)

The danger is turned into a grace for those like Jacob and Moses who stand the test. This is the experience of Abraham too when God commands him to sacrifice Isaac. Like the despair which draws forth the ‘turning,’ the extremest demand here draws forth the innermost readiness to sacrifice out of the depths of Abraham’s being. God thus allows Abraham’s relation to Him to become wholly real. ‘But then, when no further hindrance stood between the intention and the deed, He contented Himself with Abraham’s fulfilled readiness and prevented the action.’ This is what is called ‘temptation’ by the faith of the Old Testament, a faith which takes the over-againstness of God and man more seriously than does any other. (Ibid, pp. 83, 118; The Prophetic Faith, op. cit., pp. 83, 91 f.; Königtum Gottes, op. cit., pp. 99-104; Eclipse of God, op. cit., ‘On the Suspension of the Ethical,’ trans. by Maurice S. Friedman, p. 153.)

Job’s trial can also be understood as a ‘temptation,’ for God’s apparent absence occasions a despair in Job which causes his innermost nature to become manifest. Through the intensity of his ‘turning,’ through his demand that God speak to him, he receives a revelation of God such as could not otherwise be his. It is ‘just at the height of Job’s trial . . . just in the midst of the terror of the other, the incomprehensible, ununderstandable works, just from out of the secret,’ that God’s ways of working are revealed. Job accuses God of injustice and tries in vain to penetrate to Him through the divine remoteness. Now God draws near Job and Job ‘sees’ Him. It is this nearness to God, following His apparent hiddenness, which is God’s answer to the suffering Job as to why he suffers -- an answer which is understandable only in terms of the relationship itself. (The first sentence of this paragraph is based on a letter from Professor Buber to me of June 18, 1952; Israel and the World, op. cit., ‘Imitatio Dei,’ p. 76; The Prophetic Faith, op. cit., pp. 192-196.)

Job remained faithful even when God seemed to hide His face from him. He could not renounce his claim that his faith in God and his faith in justice should once again be united. (The Prophetic Faith, p. 92.)

At all times in Israel people spoke much about evil powers, but not about one which, for longer than the purpose of temptation, was allowed to rule in God’s stead; never, not even in the most deadly act of requital by God, is the bond of immediacy broken. (Two Types of Faith, op. cit., p. 140)

God sets creation free and at the same time holds it. He does not put an end to man’s freedom despite his misuse of it, but neither does He abandon him. Even God’s hiding His face is only an apparent hiding which does not contradict the statement in I and Thou that only we, and not God, are absent. God does not actually withdraw His presence; He only seems to do so. Yet this must not be understood as a purely immanent event. It does not take place in man but between man and God. ‘To those who do not want to be near to Him God replies by not giving to them any more the experience of nearness’ (cf. Ps. x, 1; Jer. xxxi, 3). He lets the resisting experience his fate in history, the fate resulting from his own deeds. (Ibid, p. 151 f.; I and Thou, op. cit., p. 99; The Prophetic Faith, op. cit., p. 94. The quotation and the sentence preceding it are from two letters from Professor Buber to me, both of June 18, 1952.)

God’s anger and His seeming withdrawal are a part of His love for man -- a love which wishes man to enter the dialogue with Him but will not compel him to do so. Hence there is no real division between God’s mercy and His justice. God’s wrath in the Old Testament is always a fatherly anger toward a disobedient child from whom He still does not withdraw His love. Although He may at times harden, He also forgives. Thus Amos knew that God would stay with the people in the midst of the desolation which was the work of His own judgment, and Hosea wrote of God’s mercy, ‘I will heal their turnings away, I will love them freely.’ (Ibid., pp. 90, 139, 164; The Prophetic Faith, pp. 109-113. 254)

Jeremiah, like Amos and Hosea, recognized that both YHVH’s blessing and His curse flow from His love. He also recognized that because of His love for man, God takes part in man’s suffering. Whoever helps the suffering creature comes close to the Creator, writes Jeremiah. God shares in the trouble and suffering of His nature and even suffers by His own actions at the hour when He comes near to destroying the work of His hands. This ‘God of the sufferers’ is also acknowledged by Deutero-Isaiah, who writes not only of the God of heaven and earth, who perceives and is above all, but also of the God who remains near the outcast, who dwells ‘with the contrite and lowly of spirit.’ (The Prophetic Faith, pp. 161 ff., 167,182 f.)

It is from among the ‘lowly of spirit’ that God finds His special servant in whom He is glorified. This is Deutero-Isaiah’s ‘suffering servant of the Lord,’ the righteous man who suffers for the sake of God. Deutero-Isaiah’s ‘servant’ stands in the succession of men whom God has designated as His servant -- Abraham, Moses, David, Isaiah, and Job. Of these he is especially linked through his sufferings with Job, the ‘faithful rebel.’ Like Job he experiences God’s nearness in his suffering, and like Job, too, his suffering has a super-personal meaning. The ‘servant’ differs from Job, however, in that he voluntarily takes on himself all the griefs and sicknesses of the people’s iniquities in order to bring them back to YHVH. (Ibid., pp. 181, 189, 196, 227, 232; Two Types of Faith, p.143 f.) In suffering for the sake of God he comes to discover the meaning of his own suffering: he recognizes that God suffers with him and that he is working together with God for the redemption of the world. In the figure of the servant the meaning of God’s answer to Job becomes clear.

Man penetrates step by step into the dark which hangs over the meaning of events, until the mystery is disclosed in the flash of light: the zaddik, the man justified by God, suffers for the sake of God and of His work of salvation, and God is with him in his suffering. (Two Types of Faith, p. 144.)

The ‘servant’ is bowed down by sorrow, disfigured by disease, despised and shunned by the people. Yet it is just he who experiences God’s nearness and receives God’s promise that he will be preserved for the task of ushering in God’s kingdom.

Deutero-Isaiah’s ‘servant’ cannot be identified either with Israel or with Christ. He is not a corporate but a personal being, yet he is more than a single person. ‘This person takes shape in many likenesses and life-ways, the bearers of which are identical in their innermost essence.’ But no supernatural event or resurrection of the dead leads from one of these figures to the next. The servant is ‘preserved’ for the day in which God’s salvation shall be to the end of the earth, but it is only the ‘servant’ who is preserved and not the person who embodies him at any particular time.

There are three stages on the servant’s way. The first is the prophetic stage of the futile labour of the prophet to bring Israel back to YHVH, the stage in which he sees himself as an arrow which is fated to remain in the quiver, hidden and unused (Isa. xlix, 2). He is promised a great future work reaching all nations and, sustained by this promise, is willing to bear an immense affliction for God’s sake. The second stage is the acting of the affliction. He not only endures it but also, as it were, accomplishes it: it becomes his act. The third stage is that of the ‘success’ of the work born out of affliction, the liberation of the subject peoples, and the establishment of the covenant of the people with God, the human centre of which is the servant. Only now is the arrow taken from the quiver and hurled forth. It is laid on the servant to inaugurate God’s new order of peace and justice for the world.

The servant thus completes the work of the judges and the prophets, the work of making real God’s kingship over the people. Though a prophet, he is no longer a powerless opposition to the powerful, but a real leader like the Israelite nabi of early times. Here, in contrast to the Messianic promise of Isaiah, it is not the king but the nabi who is appointed to be deputy of God’s kingdom. This kingdom now signifies in reality all the human world. Yet there remains a special tie between the personal servant and the servant Israel. Through the nucleus that does not betray the election, the living connection between God and the people is upheld, and from their midst will arise ‘the perfected one.’ Through his word and life, Israel will turn to God and become God’s people. When the suffering servant is allowed to go up and be a light for the nations, the servant Israel, redeemed and cleansed, will establish God’s sovereignty upon itself and serve as the beginning of His kingdom.

The unity between the personal servant and the servant Israel passes over to their unity in suffering. In so far as Israel’s great suffering in the dispersion was willingly and actively borne, it is interpreted in the image of the servant. ‘The great scattering which followed the splitting-up of the state . . . is endowed with the mystery of suffering as with the promise of the God of sufferers.’ This is the mystery of history, the mystery of the arrow which is still concealed in the quiver. (The Prophetic Faith, pp. 224-234.)

The way, the real way, from the Creation to the Kingdom is trod not on the surface of success, but in the deep of failure. The real work, from the Biblical point of view, is the late-recorded, the unrecorded, the anonymous work. The real work is done in the shadow, in the quiver. (Israel and the World, ‘Biblical Leadership,’p. 133)

‘Whosoever accomplishes in Israel the active suffering of Israel, he is the servant, and he is Israel, in whom YHVH "glorifies Himself."’ Thus the ancient God of the way, the God who caused Abraham to ‘stray’ from his father’s house and went before him in his wanderings, is acknowledged by suffering generations as their Shepherd in the way of exile. (Hasidism, ‘Spinoza,’ p. 112 f.; The Prophetic Faith, p. 234 f.)

When one has given serious consideration to Buber’s Biblical exegesis, one is no longer tempted to fall into the easy assumption that Buber has read his dialogical philosophy into his interpretation of Biblical Judaism. It becomes clear instead that it is precisely in the Bible itself that Buber’s dialogical philosophy finds its most solid base. Indeed, the full working out of this philosophy would not have been possible without the years that Buber spent in the translation and interpretation of the Bible. ‘Only a viewpoint that is Biblical in a very profound sense,’ writes the Old Testament scholar J. Coert Rylaarsdam in a discussion of Buber’s The Prophetic Faith, ‘could so consistently illuminate every part of the Bible it touches.’ (J. Coert Rylaarsdam, ‘The Prophetic Faith,’ Theology Today, Vol. VII [October 1950], p. 399 ff. At the same time, Rylaarsdam accuses Buber of undue subjectivity: ‘Basically his interpretation of the Old Testament is a documentation of his own views.... Buber’s work would have been more generally acceptable if he had more fully permitted objective historical reconstruction to perform an adequate critical function. Questions of literary criticism and history are frequently settled by a too easy reliance on the writer’s a priori assumptions.... Buber’s profound insights will be scorned by many on the ground that he is "uncritical" and "too philosophical"., That Rylaarsdam’s criticism is in part, at least, based on a misunderstanding of Buber’s position and a difference in Rylaarsdam’s own a priori assumptions is shown by his further statements that ‘Because of his individual and personal emphasis the notion of an objective revelation of God in nature and history involving the whole community of Israel in the real event of the Exodus does not fit well for him,’ that Buber’s view of revelation is ‘essentially mystical and nonhistorical,’ and that ‘the realistic disclosure of Yahweh as the Lord of nature and of history recedes into the background because of an overconcern with the experience of personal relation’ -- criticisms which are all far wide of the mark, as is shown by the present chapter.) This does not exclude the obvious fact that there has been a fruitful dialectic in Buber’s thought between his interpretations and the development of his personal philosophy. ‘There are things in the Jewish tradition that I cannot accept at all,’ Buber has said, ‘and things I hold true that are not expressed in Judaism. But what I hold essential has been expressed more in Biblical Judaism than anywhere else -- in the Biblical dialogue between man and God.’ (From a statement made by Professor Buber at a small discussion group in New York City, December 1951)

Chapter 24: Symbol, Myth, and History

One of the aspects of Buber’s thought on God which is most difficult to understand is his characterization of God as an ‘Absolute Person,’ as Being which becomes Person in order to know and be known, to love and be loved by man. This concept decisively sets Buber off from those mystics who look at the ground of being as impersonal Godhead and regard God as only the personal manifestation of this ground. It seems to the impersonalist and the mystic that Buber is limiting God, for they think of personality as limitation and the Eternal Thou as a designation for God as He is in Himself. What Buber really means is made unmistakably clear in ‘Religion and Philosophy,’ in which he speaks of Buddha’s relation to the ‘Unborn, Unoriginated, Uncreated’ as an I-Thou relation because Buddha stands essentially related to it with his whole being.

The personal manifestation of the divine is not decisive for the genuineness of religion. What is decisive is that I relate myself to the divine as to Being which is over against me, though not over against me alone. (Eclipse of God, op. cit., p. 39 f.)

Thus the ‘Eternal Thou’ is not a symbol of God but of our relation with God. What is more, no real symbol of God is possible for we do not know Him as He is in Himself!

It is indeed legitimate to speak of the person of God within the religious relation and in its language; but in so doing we are making no essential statement about the Absolute which reduces it to the personal. We are rather saying that it enters into the relationship as the Absolute Person whom we call God. One may understand the personality of God as His act -- it is, indeed, even permissible for the believer to believe that God became a person for love of him, because in our human mode of existence the only reciprocal relation with us that exists is a personal one. (Eclipse of God, ‘Religion and Ethics’ p. 126 f.)

Some critics, on the other hand, point to just such statements as the above to assert that Buber is really still a mystic postulating an impersonal, monistic ground of being. (Cf. E. La B. Cherbonnier, ‘The Theology of the Word of God,’ Journal of Religion, XXXIII, No. I [January 1953], 28 f.) That they do so is, in my opinion, because they misunderstand the meaning of personality to the extent of thinking of it as an objective description of a being taken for himself rather than as something that exists in relation and pre-eminently in the relation between God and man. Because, at least in part, they think of personality as objective, they hope to safeguard God’s personality, or His personal relations with man, by limiting His nature to the personal alone. The Biblical God, on whom they base this limitation, is actually the imageless God, the God who manifests Himself in nature and in history but cannot be limited to any of these manifestations.

It is not necessary to know something about God in order really to believe in Him: many true believers know how to talk to God but not about Him. If one dares to turn toward the unknown God, to go to meet Him, to call to Him, Reality is present. (Eclipse of God, ‘Religion and Philosophy,’ p. 40)

Thus Buber walks the narrow ridge between the mystic and the non-mystic, between one who asserts unity with the ground of being and the other who either removes God into the transcendence beyond direct relation or limits Him to objective ‘personal’ existence.

To the metaphysician, and particularly to the Whiteheadian metaphysician, it cannot be comprehensible that Buber speaks of God as an Absolute Person, for a person is in relation and therefore is limited and in that sense relative. Yet it is precisely on this paradox that Buber rests his thought. To speak of God as the Eternal Thou, as Being in relation to Becoming, is to express the same paradox. Whitehead is similar to Buber in his emphasis upon the concrete meeting between God and the world as opposed to the valuation of the abstract unity of God. Like Buber, too, he conceives of the redemption of evil as taking place through the relation and mutual love of God and the world. He differs from Buber, however, in that he is less concerned with our relation to God than with the generic relation of God to creatures, relation in the end is for him an objective matter -- I-It rather than I-Thou. Moreover, Whitehead does not emphasize, as does Buber, that God is transcendent as well as immanent, absolute as well as in relation. Though God and the world are, for Whitehead, opposites, they complete one another through a flowing dialectical interaction which lacks the marked polar tension of Buber’s ‘meeting’ or ‘over-againstness.’ (Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making [New York: The Macmillan Co., 1946], pp. 90-100, 150-160; Whitehead, Process and Reality, An Essay in Cosmology [New York: The Macmillan Co., 1929], pp. 521-532. For a further comparison of Buber and Whitehead cf. Hugo Bergmann, ‘Der Physiker Whitehead,’ Die Kreatur, Berlin, Vol. II [1927-28], pp. 356-362, especially p. 361 ff., and Maurice Friedman, Martin Buber: Mystic, Existentialist, Social Prophet. op. cit., pp. 326-331, 428. Cf. Charles Hartshorne, ‘Buber’s Metaphysics’’ The Philosophy of Martin Buber, loc. cit). Buber thus stands at a half-way point between Whitehead and Kierkegaard, having greater tension and paradox than Whitehead but less tension and more direct relation than Kierkegaard. He agrees with Kierkegaard in his rejection of the religion of immanence, but he does not consider the subjective relation to the transcendent a paradox or absurdity, as does Kierkegaard in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, for his I-Thou category includes both inwardness and relation. [For an extended comparison between Buber and Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript see again my dissertation, Martin Buber. op. cit., Appendix])

This problem of the immanence and transcendence of God is an especially vexatious one, and here too Buber walks the narrow ridge. That not many others walk with him on this ridge is suggested by the fact that Karl Heim and Melville Channing-Pearce make use of Buber’s thought to point to the unqualified transcendence of God, while J. B. Coates writes, ‘I find the experience of Buber’s "I-Thou" world a convincing demonstration of divine immanence’! Gogarten stresses the ‘otherness’ of the divine Thou, Marcel and Nedoncelle the togetherness, making the I-Thou relation into a ‘we.’ (Note A, pp. 539-543 Cf. also Maringer, p. 122, ‘Anmerkungen 12.’ VI. Heim, Glaube und Denken and God Transcendent: Nicodemus, Renascence: Coates, The Crisis of the Human Person, op. cit., p. 244 f.; Gogarten. Ich glaube an den dreieinigen Gott: Marcel, Journal Métaphysique, op. cit.. Part II. especially pp. 170, 293 f.; Nédoncelle, La Reciprocité des Consciences. op. cit.. especially Part I -- ‘La Communion des Consciences’ and chap. iii -- ‘La Découverte de l’Absolu Divin.’) Buber himself denies that God is either merely immanent or merely transcendent.

Of course God is the ‘wholly Other’; but He is also the wholly Same, the wholly Present. Of course He is the Mysterium Tremendum that appears and overthrows; but He is also the mystery of the self-evident, nearer to me than my I. (I and Thou, p.79)

Romano Guardini, very possibly under Buber’s influence, makes use of this same terminology of God as at once ‘the other’ and ‘the same,’ other than man but not hostile or alien, the same as man but not identical. (Guardini, Welt und Person, op. cit., chap. iii --‘Gott und "der Andere",’ pp. 23-29.) J. E. Fison, under Buber’s influence, also shows a clear grasp of the narrow ridge between transcendence and immanence:

The antithesis of either God objective and apart from us or else God subjective and a part of us needs to be overcome in the higher and deeper synthesis towards which Professor Buber points with his emphasis on the I-Thou relationship of meeting. (Fison, The Blessing of the Holy Spirit, op. cit., p. 23)

In the light of Buber’s clear statement of this middle position, it is strange to find John Baillie criticizing him for making God ‘Wholly Other’ and too simply Thou and not I. (Baillie, Our Knowledge of God, op. cit., pp. 233-229) Baillie’s criticism is perhaps based on the confusion of Buber’s Eternal Thou with a symbol of God as He is in Himself. Even though God is within us as well as outside us, we must still relate to him as Thou. His Thou-ness by no means implies simple transcendence, for if God were simply transcendent we could have no relation to Him at all. He would then be merely a hostile and terrifying ‘Other’ or some Gnostic divinity entirely cut off from our world and our life.

This same misunderstanding has been expressed in connection with the problem of whether the reciprocity of man and God in the I-Thou relationship must necessarily imply an equality that denies man’s creatureliness and discourages the humility which man should have before God. Guardini, Maurice Nedoncelle, and H. H. Farmer have convincingly shown that reciprocity does not imply equality, as has Buber himself. Gogarten and Cullberg have taken the contrary view and have sought to protect the distance between man and God by positing God as the subject and man the object, God as always the I and man as always the Thou. This denial of reciprocity and this equation of the Thou with the object both constitute a fundamental distortion of the I-Thou relationship which takes from it much of its meaning. For Buber, in contrast, the mystery of creation implies that God gives man the independent existence and real spontaneity that enable him to recognize himself as an I and to say Thou to God. A genuinely reciprocal relationship demands that man regard himself not as an object of God’s thought but as a really free person -- a partner in dialogue. (Guardini, Welt und Person, pp. 23-29,111-114; Nedoncelle, pp. 86-109; Herbert H. Farmer, The World and God, op. cit., pp. 23-31, 60 66, 97 f., 201 f.; Eclipse of God, ‘Religion and Ethics,’ p. 138. Cf. my review of Abraham J. Heschel’s Man Is Not Alone in the Journal of Religion, October 1951.)

Our relation to the Eternal Thou is perhaps best understood from the nature of the demand which one person makes on another if the two of them really meet. The demand is not, as Gogarten would say, that the I choose between the I and the Thou and give up his own self for the other. Rather it is the demand of the relationship itself -- the demand that if you are to meet me, you must become as much of a person as I am. God places on man an unconditional demand. In order to remain open to God, he must change in his whole being. This demand makes more comprehensible God’s double aspect of love and justice: judgment is the individual’s judgment of himself when he cuts himself off from relationship with God. This ‘judgment of his non-existence,’ as Buber calls it, does not mean that God ceases to love him.

This emphasis on reciprocity in no way jeopardizes true humility before God, but an undue emphasis on humility does jeopardize reciprocity. True humility means that one sees oneself as addressed with one’s very life and one’s life task as that of responding to this address. False humility goes beyond this and denies the reality of the address and the response by denying the reality of the self and of man’s freedom to answer or remain silent. For this reason, an undue emphasis on humility actually becomes a form of not responding to God. It allows a man the illusion that he is escaping from the burden of freedom and responsibility, and it thus destroys true personal relationship. In the end these two must go together -- genuine reciprocity and utter humility. On the narrow ridge of their togetherness the man of faith walks, avoiding the abyss of self-affirmation on the one hand and self-denial on the other.

Everyone must have two pockets, so that he can reach into the one or the other, according to his needs. In his right pocket are to be the words: ‘For my sake was the world created,’ and in his left: ‘I am dust and ashes.’ (A Hasidic saying from Ten Rungs, op. cit., p.106)

The Symbol and the Concrete

Buber’s I-Thou philosophy implies a radical reversal of the idealist and mystical attitude toward symbolism which sees the symbol as the concrete manifestation of some universal if not directly knowable reality. For Buber the meaning of the symbol is found not in its universality but in the fact that it points to a concrete event which witnesses just as it is, in all its concreteness, transitoriness, and uniqueness, to the relation with the Absolute. The symbol does, of course, become abstract when it is detached from a concrete event. But this is a metamorphosis of the central content of the symbol, a metamorphosis which deprives the symbol of its real meaning just by giving it the all-meaning of the ‘universal’ and the ‘spiritual.’ This all-meaning is always only a substitute for the meaning apprehended in the concrete. It never really means a particular time, a particular place, and a particular event happening to individuals in all their uniqueness. Symbolic events are instead regarded as merely manifestations of the universal and hence as not having meaning in themselves but only to the extent that they have lost their particularity.

Here we have again the distinction between the I-It relation which leads back to the reality of I-Thou and that which obstructs the entrance into I-Thou, the distinction between religion which sees meaning as the bond between the Absolute and the concrete and philosophy which sees it as the bond between the Absolute and the universal. The true symbol, as Buber understands it, is that which derives from and points back to the concrete relationship.

It does not belong to the nature of symbols to hover timelessly over concrete actualities. Whenever the symbol appears, it owes its appearance always to the unforeseen, unique, occasion, to its having appeared the first time. The symbol derives its enduring character from a transitory event.... For the image of the unbroken meaning . . . serves always in the first instance our born, mortal body -- everything else is only repetition, simplification, imitation.... The covenant which the Absolute enters into with the concrete, not heeding the general, the ‘idea,’ . . . chooses movements made by the human figure.... And this sign endures. It may lose in immediate validity, in ‘evidential value,’ but it may also renew itself out of later human existence, which accomplishes anew. (Hasidism, op.cit., ‘Symbolical and Sacramental Existense in Judaism,’p.117 f.)

Because the symbol means the covenant between the Absolute and the concrete, its meaning is not independent of lived human life in all its concreteness. Not only does this lived concreteness originally produce the symbol, but only this can renew its meaning for those who have inherited it and save it from becoming merely spiritual and not truly existential.

All symbols are ever in danger of becoming spiritual, and not binding images, instead of remaining real signs sent into life; all sacraments are ever in danger of becoming plain experiences, leveled down to the ‘religious’ plane, instead of remaining the incarnate connection between what is above and what is below. Only through the man who devotes himself is the original power saved for further present existence. (Ibid., p. 118)

The highest manifestation of the symbol is, in fact, a human life lived in relation to the Absolute. The prophets were symbols in that sense, for God does not merely speak through their mouths, as through the Greek oracle or prophet, but the whole human being is for Him a mouth. Passivity and activity, possession and speech, go together here in ‘one single, inclusive function, and the undivided person is necessary to establish the indivisible function.’ (Ibid., pp. 118-123; The Prophetic Faith, op. cit., p. 112 f.)

Myth

The most concrete and dramatic form of the symbol is the myth. To such writers as C. G. Jung and Ananda K. Coomaraswamy the myth is an embodiment in different forms and cultures of a perennial reality, the spiritual process whereby the one becomes the many and the many returns unto the one or the psychological process whereby integration of the personality is achieved and the divine Self realized within the unconscious. (Cf. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul [1933], Psychology and Religion [1938], The Integration of the Personality [1940]; Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Hinduism and Buddhism.) In his early thinking Buber also thought of myth as a particular manifestation of a universal mystical reality. Yet by 1907 he was already developing in a different direction by distinguishing between the ‘pure myth’ in which there is variety without differentiation and the ‘legend’ in which the subject is divided and God and the hero or saint stand opposed to one another as I and Thou. (Foreword to Die Legende des Baalschem, op. cit.) In 1921 he expanded and developed this concept into a distinction between myth, saga, and legend. Myth is the expression of a world in which the divine and the human live next to and in one another; saga is the expression of a world in which they are no longer intertwined and man already begins to sense with a shudder what is over against him; legend expresses a world in which the separation is completed, but now a dialogue and interchange takes place from sphere to sphere and it is of this that the myth tells. (Der grosse Maggid und seine Nachfolge, op. cit., ‘Vorwort ‘ p. v f.)

Since Ich und Du (1923) Buber’s dialogical understanding of myth has become increasingly clear. ‘Real myth,’ he wrote in 1950, ‘is the expression, not of an imaginative state of mind or of mere feeling, but of a real meeting of two Realities.’(Introductory note by Buber, written in 1950, to Martin Buber, ‘Myth in Judaism,’ trans. by Ralph Manheim, Commentary, Vol. IX ([June 1950], p. 565 f. For the original of this essay see’Der Mythos der Juden,’ in Vom Geist des Judentums op. cit., also reprinted in Reden über das Judentum, op. cit.) Myth is not a human narrative of a one-sided divine manifestation, as Buber once thought, but a ‘mythization’ of the memory of the meeting between God and man. Some myths contain within themselves the nexus of a concrete historical event experienced by a group or by an individual while many have lost their historical character and contain only the symbolic expression of a universal experience of man. To this latter class belong the Jewish and Zoroastrian myths of the origin of evil which Buber uses to illustrate his anthropological treatment of good and evil. He writes concerning them: ‘We are dealing here, as Plato already knew, with truths such as can be communicated adequately to the generality of mankind only in the form of myths.’ (Moses, op. cit., p. 17; Israel and the World, op. cit., ‘Biblical Leadership,’ p. 119 f.; Images of Good and Evil, op. cit., p. 12.) It is important to recognize, however, that even here countless concrete meetings of I and Thou have attained symbolic expression in the relatively abstract form. It is just this in fact which gives these myths their universality and profundity. Because these myths are products of actual human experience, they tell us something of the structure of human reality which nothing else can tell us. (Images of Good and Evil, op. cit., p. 12)

Buber’s characterization of myth as a product of the I-Thou relation finds significant support in the thought of two important modern writers on myth, Ernst Cassirer and Henri Frankfort. Buber’s distinction between the I-It and the I-Thou relations is closely similar to Cassirer’s distinction between ‘discursive’ and ‘mythical’ thinking. Discursive thinking, writes Cassirer, denotes what has already been noticed. It classifies into groups and synthesizes parts into a whole. It does not contemplate a particular case but instead gives it a fixed intellectual ‘meaning’ and definite character through linking it with other cases into a general framework of knowledge. The particular is never important in itself but only in terms of its relation to this framework. Mythical thought, on the contrary, is not concerned with relating data but with a sudden intuition, an immediate experience in which it comes to rest. ‘The immediate content . . . so fills his consciousness that nothing else can exist beside and apart from it.’ This content ‘is not merely viewed and contemplated, but overcomes a man in sheer immediacy.’ (Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth, trans. by Suzanne Langer [New York: Harper & Brothers, 1946], pp. 11, 18, 27.)

This similarity between mythical thinking and the I-Thou relation is made explicit through Professor (and Mrs.) Frankfort’s use of Buber’s distinction between I-It and I-Thou, their identification of myth with the dynamically reciprocal I-Thou relation in which every faculty of man is involved, and their recognition of the unique and unpredictable character of the Thou -- ‘a presence known only in so far as it reveals itself.’

‘Thou’ is not contemplated with intellectual detachment; it is experienced as life confronting life.... The whole man confronts a living ‘Thou’ in nature; and the whole man--motional and imaginative as well as intellectual). -- gives expression to the experience. (H. and H. A. Frankfort, et. al., The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man, An Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East [Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1946], p. 4 ff.)

History

Buber goes significantly beyond Cassirer and even Frankfort, however, in his understanding of the relation between history and myth. Identifying history with discursive thinking, Cassirer speaks of the historical fact as meaningful only as a member of a course of events or a teleological nexus and not in its particularity and uniqueness. Frankfort recognizes that myth arises not only in connection with man’s relation to nature, the cosmos, and the change of the seasons, but also in his relation to a transcendent God in the course of history. But when he speaks of the will of God, the chosen people, and the Kingdom of God as ‘myths,’ he tends to remove from history that concreteness which is of its very essence.

The doctrine of a single, unconditioned, transcendent God . . . postulated a metaphysical significance for history and for man’s actions.... In transcending the Near Eastern myths of immanent godhead, they [the Hebrews] created . . . the new myth of the will of God. It remained for the Greeks, with their peculiar intellectual courage, to discover a form of speculative thought in which myth was entirely overcome. (Ibid., concluding chapter, ‘The Emancipation of Thought from Myth’; also found in H. and H. A. Frankfort, et al., Before Philosophy [Pelican Books A 198], chap. viii, pp. 241-248.)

Thus myth to Frankfort is primarily important as a form of thought rather than as an embodiment of concrete events. For Buber, as we have seen, the emphasis is the other way around. For this reason the meeting with God in history is even more important to him than the meeting with God in nature. True history, in consequence, must include just that concreteness and uniqueness which Cassirer attributes to mythical thinking. Much of history is, of course, universal and abstract; yet real history also contains at its core the memory of the concrete and particular meeting between I and Thou. ‘I hold myth to be indispensable,’ writes Buber, ‘but I do not hold it to be central.... Myth must verify itself in man and not man in myth.... What is wrong is not the mythization of reality which brings the inexpressible to speech, but the gnosticizing of myth which tears it out of the ground of history and biography in which it took root.’ (Origin and Meaning of Hasidism, op. cit., ‘Christ, Hasidism, Gnosis.’)

This attitude toward the relation between history and myth is developed by Buber in his books of biblical commentary, Königtum Gottes, Moses, and The Prophetic Faith, and it is this which constitutes one of the most significant contributions of these remarkable works. Emil Brunner has written of the first of these, Königtum Gottes, that it is ‘a book which shows what history is better than any philosophy of history.’ (Emil Brunner, Man in Revolt (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1947, London: Lutterworth, 1948), p. 448, n. 2.) In these studies Buber leads us on a narrow ridge between the traditionalist’s insistence on the literal truth of the biblical narrative and the modern critic’s tendency to regard this narrative as of merely literary or symbolic significance. The former tend to regard the events of the Bible as supernatural miracles and the quest for any reality comparable to our own experiences as illicit. The latter see them as impressive fantasies or fictions, interesting from a purely immanent and human point of view. Between these two approaches Buber sets down a third:

We must adopt the critical approach and seek reality, here as well, by asking ourselves what human relation to real events this could have been which led gradually, along many by-paths and by way of many metamorphoses, from mouth to ear, from one memory to another, and from dream to dream, until it grew into the written account we have read. (Israel and the World, ‘The Man of Today and the Jewish Bible,’ pp. 97-100; Moses, p. 61 f.)

This third way is one which refuses the alternatives of factual history or universal and timeless myth and proclaims the history which gives rise to myth, the myth which remembers history:

What is preserved for us here is to be regarded not as the ‘historization’ of a myth or a cult drama, nor is it to be explained as the transposition of something originally beyond time into historical time: a great history-faith does not come into the world through interpretation of the extra-historical as historical, but by receiving an occurrence experienced as a ‘wonder,’ that is as an event which cannot be grasped except as an act of God. (The Prophetic Faith, p. 46.)

The saga is the direct and unique expression of the reporter’s ‘knowledge’ of an event. Rather, this knowledge is itself a legendary one, representing through the organic work of mythicizing memory the believed-in action of God on His people. It is not fantasy which is active here but memory, that believing memory of the souls and generations of early times which works unarbitrarily out of the impulse of an extraordinary event. Even the myth which seems most fantastic of all is creation around the kernel of the organically shaping memory. ‘Here, unlike the concept familiar in the science of religion, myth means nothing other than the report by ardent enthusiasts of that which has befallen them.’

Here history cannot be dissevered from the historical wonder; but the experience which has been transmitted to us, the experience of event as wonder, is itself great history and must be understood out of the element of history. (Moses, pp. 14-17; Israel and the World, ‘Biblical Leadership,’ p. 119 ff., Königtum Gottes, op. cit., p. 9 f.)

Buber’s third way does not mean a dismissal of the comparative aspects of the history of religions but it guards against the blurring of the historical figure which is caused by the now widespread shifting into the primitive. It recognizes the connections of historical celebrations with ancient nature rites but also points out the essential transformation of those rites which took place when they were given a historical character. (Königium Gottes, p. 120 ff.; Moses, pp. 56 f., 81, 128, 158.) Moreover, in addition to understanding an event comparatively and in terms of the stages of religious development, it leaves room for the criterion of uniqueness.

There are in the history of religion events, situations, figures, expressions, deeds, the uniqueness of which cannot be regarded as the fruit of thought or song, or as a mere fabrication, but simply and solely as a matter of fact.... (The Prophetic Faith, p. 6)

This criterion of uniqueness must be used with ‘scientific intuition,’ and it cannot be applied to all events but only to unusual ones. One such unusual event is that which Buber calls a ‘historical mystery.’ ‘A historical mystery always means a relation between a super-personal fate and a person, and particularly that which is atypical in a person; that by which the person does not belong to his type.’ Buber’s criterion of the uniqueness of the fact is of especial importance because, as in the concept of the historical mystery, it goes beyond the phenomenological approach which at present dominates the study of the history of religions. ‘Irrespective of the importance of the typological view of phenomena in the history of the spirit, the latter, just because it is history, also contains the atypical, the unique in the most precise sense.’ This concern with uniqueness is a natural corollary of Buber’s belief that the absolute is bound to the concrete and not to the universal and his corresponding valuation of the particular over the general. This valuation of the particular provides Buber with another criterion, that of the ‘historically possible’ which leaves room for the unique: ‘It is a basic law of methodology not to permit the "firm letter" to be broken down by any general hypothesis based on the comparative history of culture; as long as what is said in that text is historically possible.’ By the ‘historically possible’ Buber does not mean that which is merely not impossible but rather that which accords with the historical conditions of the epoch. (Moses, pp. 35, 64, 136, 158; Königtum Gottes, p. 11)

Buber calls his treatment of Biblical history ‘tradition criticism’ as distinct from ‘source criticism.’ This tradition criticism seeks to penetrate beneath the layers of different redactions of tradition to a central unity already present in the first redaction and developed, restored, or distorted in the later ones. It is important in this connection to distinguish very clearly within each tradition between its fundamental unity and the unity of harmonization, fruit of the ‘Biblical’ spirit, ‘between saga produced near the historical occurrences, the character of which is enthusiastic report, and saga which is further away from the historical event, and which derives from the tendency to complete and round off what is already given.’ Even in the work of harmonization, however, there may be found the influence of a primitive unity, preserved in the memory of generations in spite of different editorial tendencies. (The Prophetic Faith, p.6 f.; Moses, p. 18 f.)

Tradition is by its nature an uninterrupted change in form; change and preservation function in the identical current. Even while the hand makes its alterations, the ear hearkens to the deeps of the past; not only for the reader but also for the writer himself does the old serve to legitimize the new. (Moses, p. 18)

The mythical element may, of course, become so strong that the kernel of historical memory tends to be obscured. Where event and memory cease to rule, myth replaces them by a timeless image. This weakening of the bond with history tends, in particular, to be the case with eschatology, which misses the special, concrete, historical core. This retreat from the historical itself tends to be expressed in myth. ‘In so far as faith expresses more and other than its actual relation to the divine, in so far as it wishes to report and describe and not merely call and address, to that extent it must mythicize its object.’ (Königtum Gottes, p. 120 ff. [my translations]. Cf. The Prophetic Faith, pp. 142, 153; Moses, p. 109.)

The Bible as ‘literal truth’ and the Bible as ‘living literature’ are thus supplanted in Buber’s thought by the Bible as a record of the concrete meetings in the course of history between a group of people and the divine. The Bible is not primarily devotional literature, nor is it a symbolic theology which tells us of the nature of God as He is in Himself. It is ‘anthropogeny,’ the historical account of God’s relation to man seen through man’s eyes. (Israel and the World, ‘The Man of Today and the Jewish Bible,’ pp. 89, 92 f.; The Prophetic Faith, p. 89.)

Buber does not regard his concept of history as applying only to Biblical history but merely as most clearly in evidence there.

What we are accustomed to call history is from the Biblical stand point only the façade of reality. It is the great failure, the refusal to enter into the dialogue, not the failure in the dialogue, as exemplified by Biblical man. (Ibid., ‘Biblical Leadership,’ p. 133; cf. ibid., ‘The Man of Today and the Jewish Bible,’ p. 94 f., ‘False Prophets,’ p. 114.)

Outer history sees only success. Inner history knows that ‘the way, the real way, from the Creation to the Kingdom is trod not on the surface of success but in the deep of failure.’ It is the unrecorded and anonymous work of the secret leadership, the work which leads to the final, Messianic overcoming of history in which outer history and inner history will fuse. Since world history is the advance of the peoples toward the goal of making real the kingship of God, it is essentially holy history. Every great civilization is founded on an original relational event, writes Buber, a concrete religious and normative relation with the Absolute. Man rebels against this relation: ‘he wills and wills not to translate the heavenly truth into earthly reality.’ It is here in this struggle of man with the spirit that great civilizations rise, and it is this which determines all their wisdom and their art. (Ibid., ‘Biblical Leadership,’ pp. 124-133, ‘In the Midst of History,’ p. 78 ff.; At the Turning, op. cit., ‘Judaism and Civilization,’ p. 11 f., ‘The Dialogue between Heaven and Earth,’ p. 51. Cf. Eclipse of God, ‘Religion and Ethics.’ The American theologian H. Richard Niebuhr takes an attitude toward history closely similar to that of Buber, and he identifies his distinction between ‘objective, external history’ and the personal, or ‘internal,’ history of revelation with Buber’s distinction between I-It and I-Thou. H. Richard Niebuhr, The Meaning of Revelation [New York: The Macmillan Co., 1941], pp. 59, 64 f., 145 ff.)

History is customarily understood as an interrelation of events none of which are significant in themselves but only in terms of their connection with the past from which they spring and the future to which they give rise. Even when a great emphasis is placed upon the richness of historical fact, these facts are usually felt to be significant only as expressions of historical trends or of periods of culture. As a result ‘meaning’ in history tends to be associated with the universal and the general to the exclusion of the particular and the unique. The modern historian, as Friedrich Gogarten has pointed out, sees history as a linear process of evolution, comparable to the flow of experience reflected in the consciousness of the unrelated I. This historical evolutionism is a distortion of reality whether it leans toward the idealist side and emphasizes the suprahistorical meaning which is revealed in history or toward the empirical side and emphasizes the never-ceasing flow and relativity of all events. In both cases it takes no account of the prior reality of the I-Thou relation -- the dialogue between man and man and between man and God. Hence it can never know the event in its uniqueness and particularity, nor can it really know the extent to which the future is determined by man’s genuine response and his failure to respond to what meets him. (Gogarten, Ich glaube an den dreieinigen Gott, pp. 5, 9, 19-38. In his ‘Nachwort’ to Die Schriften über das dialogische Prinzip Buber points out that although Gogarten understands history as ‘the meeting of Thou and I,’ he holds at the same time the undialectical thesis, ‘History is God’s work,’ and thus must ultimately fail to grasp the character of history as meeting.)

Subject-object history cannot adequately understand events because the I of the historian is that of the disinterested spectator while the persons whom he describes are usually treated as Its rather than as Thous. I-It history, moreover, takes only the human, immanent side of events into consideration. No room is left for the ‘wonder’ which arises when the encounter with the Thou in the world is perceived to be not only an event within a causal nexus but a meeting with God. The worship of historical process, the identification of history with success, is a part of that shell of impersonality which enables men to remain unaware of ‘the signs’ which address them through history as well as through the other parts of their lives. True history, in contrast, can only be understood through our participation in it -- through its becoming alive for us as Thou. ‘If history is a dialogue between Deity and mankind,’ writes Buber, ‘we can understand its meaning only when we are the ones who are addressed, and only to the degree to which we render ourselves receptive.’

We are, then, flatly denied the capacity to judge current history and arrive at the conclusion that ‘This or that is its true meaning’ . . . What we are permitted to know of history comes to this: ‘This, in one way or another, is history’s challenge to me; this is its claim on me; and so this is its meaning as far as I am concerned.’ This meaning, however, is not ‘subjective.’ . . . It is the meaning I perceive, experience, and hear in reality.... It is only with my personal life that I am able to catch the meaning of history, for it is a dialogical meaning. (Israel and the World, ‘In the Midst of History,’ pp. 78-82. 238)

Chapter 23: Social Philosophy

Modern man is insecure and repressed -- isolated from his fellows yet desperately clinging to the collectivity which he trusts to protect him from the might of other collectivities. Divided within himself into instincts and spirit, repressions and sublimations, he finds himself incapable of direct relation with his fellows either as individuals in the body-politic or as fellow members of a community. The tremendous collective power with which he allies himself gives him neither relationship nor freedom from fear but makes his life a sterile alternation between universal war and armed peace. The modern crisis is thus a crisis both of the individual and of society at large.

Though many social reformers of the last century have recognized the double character of this crisis, few of them have really faced the problem in both of its aspects. Some have argued that it is necessary to change society first and that this change will in itself produce a change in the individual. Others have said that we must start with the individual and that change in individuals will inevitably result in changed social relationships and a new pattern of society. Martin Buber has refused to fall into this dilemma as he has refused the either-or of individualism and collectivism. In both cases he has resolved the tension between the two poles through a creative third alternative -- the relation between man and man. This relation takes place not only in the I-Thou of direct meeting but also in the We of community. Similarly, it must be based not only on the personal wholeness of the individual but also on a social restructuring of society. Relation is the true starting-point for personal integration and wholeness and for the transformation of society, and these in turn make possible ever greater relation.

Both moral and social philosophy are basically determined by whether one believes the individual, the organic group, or the dialogue between man and man to be of basic reality and value. For the radical individualist, both interpersonal relations and society can be nothing but the sum of separate individuals. For those who make society the basic reality, on the other hand, the individual is only a derivative reality and value. For these latter, also, the relations between individuals are essentially indirect, mediated through their common relationship to society. For the dialogical philosopher, however, both the individual and society exist as reality and value but they are derived from the basic reality of the meeting between man and man. Thus for him the ‘individual’ and ‘society’ are abstractions which must not be taken for reality itself.

The individual is a fact of existence in so far as he steps into a living relation with other individuals. The aggregate is a fact of existence in so far as it is built up of living units of relation. (Between Man and Man, ‘What is Man?’, p. 202 f.)

Buber designates a category of ‘the essential We’ to correspond on the level of the relation to a host of men to the ‘essential Thou on the level of self-being.’ As the primitive Thou precedes the consciousness of individual separateness whereas the essential Thou follows and grows out of this consciousness, so the primitive We precedes true individuality and independence whereas the essential We only comes about when independent people have come together in essential relation and directness. The essential We includes the Thou potentially, for ‘only men who are capable of truly saying Thou to one another can truly say We with one another.’ Through this essential We and only through it can man escape from the impersonal ‘one’ of the nameless, faceless crowd. ‘A man is truly saved from the "one" not by separation but only by being bound up in genuine communion.’ (Ibid., p. 175 ff.)

There is, of course, a reality of society which is something more than a complex pattern of dialogical relationships. Buber himself warns against blurring the distinction between the ‘social’ in general and the togetherness of true dialogue. In 1905 Buber used the term ‘das Zwischenmenschliche’ (a now familiar expression which he was the first to employ) as the social-psychological in general, ‘the life of men together in all its forms and actions,’ ‘the social seen as a psychological process.’ Half a century later he restricted the use of the term to that in human life which provides the basis for direct dialogical relations. In distinction to it he now set the sphere of the ‘social’ in which many individual existences are bound into a group with common experiences and reactions but without any personal relation necessarily existing between one person and another within the group. There are contacts, especially within the life of smaller groups, which frequently favour personal relationships, and not seldom, also, make them more difficult. But in no case does membership in the group already involve an essential relation between one member and another. What is more, the direction of groups in general, at least in the later periods of human history, has been toward the suppression of the elements of personal relation in favour of the elements of pure collectivity. (Introduction by Martin Buber to the first edition of Werner Sombart’s Das Proletariat [Frankfurt am Main: Rütten & Loening, 1906], the first volume of Die Gesellschaft, a collection of forty social-psychological monographs edited by Martin Buber from 1906 to 1912. Quoted in Kohn, Martin Buber, op. cit., pp. 310-313 [Footnote 2 to p. 89]; ‘Elements of the Interhuman,’ op. cit., section 1, ‘The Social and the Interhuman.’)

The structure of modern society makes true dialogue difficult, and the tremendous force of social and psychological conditioning often brings society close to that deterministic and organic social structure that many accept as reality. But it is precisely here that the ethical question enters in most forcefully. If the basic reality and value is the organic group, then there is nothing to be done about this condition, and what is is what ought to be. If, on the other hand, the basic reality and value is the concrete dialogical relations between men, then there is a vital necessity for a restructuring of society that will enable the relations between men to be of a more genuinely dialogical nature. For this reason Buber has called for a socialist restructuring of society into a community of communities, and for this reason also he has stressed the danger of the confusion between the ‘social’ and the ‘political’ principles and the need for transforming the political, in so far as possible, into the social sphere.

II

The ‘social principle,’ for Buber, means the dialogical while the ‘political’ means the necessary and ordered realm of the world of It. The former means free fellowship and association, the latter compulsion and domination. (Martin Buber, ‘Society and the State,’ World Review, May 1951, New Series 27, p. 5.) A social restructuring of society is necessary, in Buber’s opinion, because capitalism is inherently poor in organic community and is becoming poorer every day. Marxist socialism cannot remedy this poverty of structure because its means -- unity and centralization -- are entirely unlike and cannot possibly lead to its ultimate ends -- multiplicity and freedom. Both the Marxist movement and the Soviet regime have constantly subordinated the evolution of a new social form to political action. They have oscillated in practice between radical centralization and tolerance of relative decentralization (in the form of producer Soviets and compulsory co-operatives when these served a political purpose), but they have never put the social principle above the political nor attempted to realize Marx’s dictum that the new society will be gestated in the womb of the old. True socialism, in contrast, summons the reality of community from out of the depths of a people where it lies hidden and undeveloped underneath the incrustations of the state. Communal living grows most easily out of closeness of people in mode of life, language, tradition, and common memories. There is, for this reason, a legitimate connection between the nation and socialism which supports rather than obstructs the international character of socialism as a force for world unity and peace. Socialism based on the political principle starts from the top with an abstract and uniform political order. Socialism based on the social principle starts at the bottom and discovers those elements of genuine community which are capable of development. ‘True socialism is real community between men, direct life-relations between I and Thou, just society and fellowship.’ (Paths in Utopia, op. cit., pp. 13 f., 48 f., 56, 98 f., 118, 124 f.; Kampf um Israel op. cit., p. 291.)

The social restructuring of society cannot take place as a result of the blind working of economic forces or success in production. It demands a consciousness and will -- setting a goal and demanding extraordinary efforts in order to reach that goal. This goal is based on the longing for ‘rightness’ -- the vision of perfection that in religious expectation takes the form of Messianism -- perfection in time and in social expectation the form of Utopia -- perfection in space. The Utopian systems that grow out of this longing for social rightness are by no means essentially the same, for they tend to two opposite forms. One is ‘schematic fiction’ which starts from a theory of the nature of man and deduces a social order which shall employ all man’s capacities and satisfy all his needs. The other undertakes to transform contemporary man and his conditions on the basis of an impartial and undogmatic understanding of both. This latter form is aware of the diversity and contrariety of the trends of the age and tries to discover which of these trends are aiming at an order in which the contradictions of existing society will truly be overcome. (Paths in Utopia, pp. 11 f., 26, 58 f,)

This latter, according to Buber, is genuine ‘Utopian’ socialism. If it does not expect blind providence to save man through technical and material change, neither does it trust to a ‘free-ranging human intellect which contrives systems of absolute validity.’ True community can only be built if it satisfies a situation and not an abstraction. For this reason the movement to community must be ‘topical,’ that is, growing out of the needs of a given situation and realizing itself to the greatest possible degree here and now. At the same time this local and topical realization must be nothing but a point of departure for the larger goal of organic cells unified in a restructured society. (Ibid., pp. 26, 81,134)

The reconstruction of society can only begin, writes Buber, with ‘a radical alteration of the relationship between the social and the political order.’ The state must cease to be a machina machinarum which ‘strangles the individuality of small associations’ and must become instead a communitas communitatum - - a union of communities within which the proper autonomous life of each community can unfold. In this latter form of state the compulsive order that persisted would not be based on the exploitation of human conflicts but would represent the stage of development which had been reached. There is a degree of legitimate compulsion, writes Buber, and this is determined by the degree of incapacity for voluntary right order. In practice, however, the state always greatly exceeds this degree of legitimate compulsion because accumulated power does not abdicate except under necessity. Only the vigorous pressure of those groups that have increased their capacity for voluntary order can force the state to relinquish some measure of its power. (Paths in Utopia, pp. 27, 39 f., 47.)

The essential point is to decide on the fundamentals: a restructuring of society as a League of Leagues, and a reduction of the State to its proper function, which is to maintain unity; or a devouring of an amorphous society by the omnipotent State.... The right proportion, tested anew every day according to changing conditions, between group-freedom and collective order; or absolute order imposed indefinitely for the sake of an era of freedom alleged to follow ‘of its own accord.’ (Ibid.,p. 148)

The essential thing which enabled man to emerge from Nature and to assert himself, writes Buber, is, more than his technical efficiency, the fact that he banded together with others in a social life which was at once mutually dependent and independent. The line of human progress up till now has been ‘the forming and re-forming of communities on the basis of growing personal independence’ -- ‘functional autonomy, mutual recognition and mutual responsibility.’ Buber calls this mutual dependence of increasingly free and independent individuals the ‘decentralistic social principle.’ This principle has been subordinated in the modern world to the ‘centralistic political principle,’ and modern industrial development and economy have aided this process through creating a struggle of all against all for markets and raw materials. Struggles between whole societies have replaced the old struggles between States. The resulting emphasis on the organization of power has caused democratic forms of society no less than totalitarian forms to make complete submission to centralized power their guiding principle. (Ibid., pp. 129-132)

‘The social vitality of a nation,’ writes Buber, ‘and its cultural unity and independence as well, depend very largely upon the degree of social spontaneity to be found there.’ This social spontaneity is continually threatened and diminished by the fact that the political principle is always stronger in relation to the social principle than the given conditions require. (‘Society and the State,’p. 11 f.) This difference between the strength of the political and the social principles is called the ‘political surplus’ by Buber and is explained in terms of the difference in nature between ‘Administration’ and ‘Government.’

By Administration we mean a capacity for making dispositions which is limited by the available technical facilities and recognized in theory and practice within those limits; when it oversteps its limits, it seals its own doom. By Government we understand a nontechnical, but ‘constitutionally’ limited body; this signifies that, in the event of certain changes in the situation, the limits are extended and even, at times, wiped out altogether. (Ibid.)

The excess in the capacity for making dispositions beyond that required by given conditions is what we understand by political power, and the measure of this excess, the ‘political surplus,’ represents the difference between Administration and Government. This political surplus cannot be determined exactly, nor can it be done away with entirely, for it depends upon the latent state of crisis between nations and within every nation. As long as this latent crisis exists, the state must have that excess of decision which will make possible special powers in the event that the crisis becomes active. Nevertheless, even in this situation a movement toward righting the balance in the direction of the social principle is possible. ‘Efforts must be renewed again and again to determine in what spheres it is possible to alter the ratio between governmental and administrative control in favour of the latter.’ The change in the apportionment of power in the direction of decentralization must be accompanied by a continuous change in the nature of power, and political Government transformed into social Administration as far as the particular conditions permit. (Ibid., p. 12)

The continued supremacy of the centralistic political principle, however, is in general assured by the negative nature of the present peace and the preparation for new war. The unifying power of the state rests primarily on this general instability and not on the punitive and propagandistic facilties at the state’s disposal. It is necessary, therefore, that we begin the social restructuring of society with the establishment of a true, positive, and creative peace between peoples. This peace cannot be attained through political organization, writes Buber, but through ‘the resolute will of all peoples to cultivate the territories and raw materials of our planet and govern its inhabitants, together.’ (Ibid. P. 11; Paths in Utopia, p. 132.)

If, instead of the prevailing anarchical relationships among nations, there were co-operation in the control of raw materials, agreement on methods of manufacture of such materials, and regulation of the world market, Society would be in a position, for the first time, to constitute itself as such. (‘Society and the State,’ p. 11.)

The great danger in such planetary production is that it will result in ‘a gigantic centralization of power’ which will devour all free community. If international co-operation is to lead to true world peace, it must rest on the base of a confederation of commonwealths all of which are in turn based on ‘the actual and communal life of big and little groups living and working together.’ (Paths in Utopia, p. 132 f.)

Everything depends on whether the collectivity into whose hands the control of the means of production passes will facilitate and promote in its very structure and in all its institutions the genuine common life of the various groups composing it . . . on whether centralist representation only goes as far as the new order of things absolutely demands. (Ibid., p. 133f.)

This is not a question of either-or, but of an unwearying scrutiny which will draw ever anew the right line of demarcation between those spheres which must be centralized and those which can be reserved to the autonomous regulation of the individual communities. The larger the measure of autonomy granted to local, regional, and functional groups, the more room will be left for the free unfolding of social energies. (Ibid., p. 134, ‘Society and the State,’ p. 12)

The excess power of the state cannot be destroyed by revolution, for it is the result of a relationship between men which makes the coercive order necessary and, in particular, the weakness of those communal groups which could force the state to yield this excess power. The creation and renewal of a real organic structure itself destroys the state and replaces superfluous compulsion. ‘Any action . . . beyond this would be illegitimate and bound to miscarry because . . . it would lack the constructive spirit necessary for further advance.’ Revolutions are tragically destined to produce the opposite of their positive goal so long as this goal has not taken shape in society before the revolution.

In the social as opposed to the political sphere, revolution is not so much a creative as a delivering force whose function is to set free and authenticate . . . it can only perfect, set free, and lend the stamp of authority to something that has already been foreshadowed in the womb of the pre-revolutionary society. (Paths in Utopia, pp. 44-48.)

The real way for society to prepare the ground for improving the relations between itself and the political principle, according to Buber, is ‘social education.’ Social education seeks to arouse and develop the spontaneity of fellowship which is ‘innate in all unravaged souls’ and which is entirely harmonious with the development of personal existence and personal thought. This can only be accomplished, however, by the complete overthrow of the political trend which nowadays dominates education. True education for citizenship in a state is not education for politics but ‘education for the effectuation of Society.’ (‘Society and the State,’p. 12.) Politics does not change social conditions’ It only registers and sanctions changes that have taken place. (Israel and Palestine, op. cit., p. 140)

III

"’Utopian" socialism regards the various forms of Co-operative Society as being the most important cells for social re-structure,’ writes Buber. This does not mean that consumer and producer co-operatives in their present form can serve that purpose, for the co-operative movement has not developed in the direction of an organic alliance of production and consumption in a comprehensive communal form or a true federation of local societies. Instead the consumer co-operatives have tended to become large-scale, capitalistic bureaucracies, and the producers co-operatives have become specialized and impersonal or have succumbed to the temptation of getting others to work for them. Consumer co-operatives are least suited to act as cells for social reconstruction because common purchasing ‘brings people together with only a minimal and highly impersonal part of their being.’ Buber finds the remedy for these deficiencies in what he calls the ‘Full Co-operative’ (Vollgenossenschaft). The Full Co-operative at its best combines production and consumption, industry and agriculture in a co-operative community centering around commonly-held land. Although less widespread and successful than the consumer and producer co-operatives, these Full Co-operatives have existed in many places as an outgrowth of consumer or producer co-operatives or as separate communal experiments. (Paths in Utopia, pp. 61-67, 78 f., 81)

Full Co-operatives have usually been unsuccessful, writes Buber, for they have often been built on the flimsy base of sentiment or the inflexible base of dogma. Common sentiment is not enough to hold a community together, and dogma results in the paralysis, isolation, or fragmentation of a community. Moreover, unlike consumer co-operatives which grew out of local needs, they have often taken their point of departure from an abstract idea or theory without reference to given localities and their demands. For this reason they have lacked the basis for federation which the consumer co-operatives possessed through the identity of local problems in different places. A third reason for the failure of these communal experiments, or ‘Colonial’ Full Co-operatives is their isolation from society and from each other. This isolation can be remedied by federation of the communities with each other, for federation makes up for the smallness of communal groups by enabling members to pass from one settlement to another and by allowing the groups to complement and help each other. Furthermore, because of the need for markets for their surplus production, the refusal of youth to be cut off from the outside world, and the need to influence the surrounding world, it is important that these communities maintain some real, if variable, relation with society at large. (Paths in Utopia, pp. 71-74, 79.)

The most powerful effort in the direction of Full Co-operatives, in Buber’s opinion, has been the Village Communes which have taken the form of an organic union of agriculture, industry, and the handicrafts and of communal production and consumption. The modern communal village possesses a latent pervasive force which could spread to the towns if further technological developments facilitate and actually require the decentralization of industry. Already many countries show significant beginnings in the direction of organically transforming the town and turning it into an aggregate composed of smaller units.

The most promising experiment in the Village Commune, according to Buber, has been that of the Jewish communes in Palestine. These have been based on the needs of given local situation rather than on abstract ideas and theories. At the same time they have not been limited to the purely topical but have combined it with ideal motives inspired by socialistic and Biblical teachings on social justice. The members of these communes have combined a rare willingness to experiment and critical self-awareness with an ‘amazingly positive relationship -- amounting to a regular faith -- . . . to the inmost being of their Commune.’ The communes themselves, moreover, have worked together in close co-operation and at the same time have left complete freedom for the constant branching off of new forms and different types of social structure, the most famous of which are the kvuza and the kibbuz. ‘Nowhere, as far as I see, in the history of the Socialist movement,’ writes Buber, ‘were men so deeply involved in the process of differentiation and yet so intent on preserving the principle of integration.’ (Ibid., pp. 140-148.)

The rapid influx of Jewish refugees into Palestine has resulted in many cases in the rise of a quasi-elite who have not been able to provide true leadership for the communes and have come into conflict with the genuine chaluzim. The failure of the quasi-chaluzim lies not in their relationship to the idea, to the community, or to their work, but in their relationship to their fellows. This is not a question of intimacy such as exists in the small kvuza and is lost in the big. It is rather a question of openness.

A real community need not consist of people who are perpetually together; but it must consist of people who, precisely because they are comrades, have mutual access to one another and are ready for one another.... The internal questions of a community are thus in reality questions relating to its own genuineness, hence to its inner strength and stability. (Ibid.,p. 143 ff.)

Despite an inadequate development of neighbourly relationship between the communes, Buber feels that the Jewish communes are of central significance in the struggle for a structurally new society in which individual groups will be given the greatest possible autonomy and yet will enjoy the greatest possible interrelationship with each other. This picture of the socialist restructuring of society is based on the awareness of an underlying trend toward social renewal -- a trend which is not at present dominant but has the potentiality of becoming so. This trend ‘is thoroughly topical and constructive,’ Buber writes. The changes at which it aims are feasible in the given circumstances and with the means at its disposal. Of equal importance, it is based on an eternal human need: ‘the need of man to feel his own house as a room in some greater, all-embracing structure in which he is at home, to feel that the other inhabitants of it with whom he lives and works are all acknowledging and confirming his individual existence.’ (Ibid., p. 139 f.) The decision between the centralistic socialism of political power and the spontaneous socialism of genuine social change is, for this reason, the most important decision of the next generation. ‘The coming state of humanity in the great crisis,’ said Buber in 1952, ‘depends very much on whether another type of socialism can be set up against Moscow, and I venture even today to call it Jerusalem.’ (From an address on Israel given by Professor Buber at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York City, April 1, 1952.)

IV

Commenting on Buber’s social philosophy, Paul Pfuetze writes:

It seems to be a remedy which . . . cannot be taken by the patient until he is already well. Communities incorporating the I-Thou attitude and the Utopian socialism of Buber cannot be manufactured to order -- except perhaps in a small new land like modern Israel, or at certain plastic points within the established order, there to work as yeast in the lump. (The Social self, op. cit., p. 347 f.)

Pfuetze’s comment is not so much a criticism of Buber’s social philosophy as a reminder of the difficulties which would attend the attempt to apply it in any large-scale industrial society, difficulties Buber himself would be the first to recognize. Buber is not advocating a simple substitution of one social structure for another but a direction of movement, a ‘restructuring.’ He is not advocating simple decentralization, but the greatest measure of decentralization compatible with the need of the state to maintain unity. Nor does he suggest that this social restructuring will come about through any revolution or merely political change, but through social education -- ‘the education of a generation with a truly social outlook and a truly social will.’ (‘Society and the State,’ p. 12.) In this connection, as we have seen, Buber redefines education for citizenship as education for the effectuation of society, or the social principle. This redefinition of true citizenship is of particular significance at the present time when ‘citizenship’ is almost universally regarded as a purely political virtue. Not only the blind loyalty of the totalitarian conception of citizenship and the compulsory conformity of the democracies, but even the exclusive emphasis of the liberal on the citizenship of political organization and votes serves to increase the power of the centralized state and to strengthen the political principle at the expense of the social. This diminution of social spontaneity has grown to such a degree in our time that education throughout the world is dominated by the political trend and society is generally politicized.

The crucial thing here was not that the State, particularly in its more or less totalitarian forms, weakened and gradually displaced the free associations, but that the political principle with all its centralistic features percolated into the associations themselves modifying their structure and their whole inner life, and thus politicized society to an ever-increasing extent. (Ibid., p. 11f.; Paths in Utopia, p. 131.)

It is this domination of the political principle that stands in the way of recognizing the realistic significance of Buber’s social philosophy. That a genuine social revolution can only take place from below will first become convincingly clear, writes Heinz-Joachim Heydorn, when we are able to free ourselves from the predominance of a purely political thought that does not understand the long-term problems of our modern life.

Buber’s inquiries represent, in my opinion, the most important contribution that has been made in many years to the question of socialism. Here the basic question of all renewal is posed once again: the question about man. But this question remains closely bound to reality; it is concerned with man in his present-day form, with man in our time. The reality in which this man lives, the reality of his technical greatness, has barred him in growing measure from the true road to himself. We shall not be able to reopen this road for him if we wish to redeem him through purely political means without restoring to him the immediacy of his existence. (Heydorn, ‘Martin Buber und der Sozialismus,’ op. cit., p. 709 [my translation].)

A significant confirmation of Buber’s social philosophy is contained in Kurt Riezler’s article, ‘What Is Public Opinion?’ Riezler defines public opinion as the concern of an I and a You about ‘what They, the others, taken collectively, are thinking and saying,’ and he defines society itself as a growing and changing group based on the mutual response of I and Thou. ‘I and Thou,’ he writes, ‘are the eternal cell of any living body social.’ He uses the term ‘response’ as including genuine responsibility, listening as well as speaking, and an element of possible surprise -- all in clear contrast to ‘the general interest in salesmanship, the worship of efficiency for its own sake,’ and ‘the emphasis of psychological schools on stimuli, conditioned responses and the manipulation of emotions.’ These emphases ‘conjoin in inflating the concept of propaganda and allow the simple fact of Adam’s and Eve’s mutual response . . . to fall into scholarly oblivion.’ This mutual response is the real cohesive force of society, for when a crisis comes it is this which is tested: ‘Only a response of honesty to honesty can re-establish the common ground, face the facts, revise the assumptions, and keep the society flexible enough to withstand the storm.’ (Kurt Riezler, ‘What Is Public Opinion?’, Social Research. XI [1944], pp. 398-415.)

This flexibility is endangered by the formation of large social groups which receive their opinions ready made and cease to communicate with one another. Such cleavages are the inevitable result of the mass society of our age. If they grow and ‘split the society on a nationwide scale into parts that no longer understand one another’s language, the free society faces its doom.’ This is just what took place in Germany, Riezler points out, years before Hitler captured the machinery of the state. (Ibid., p. 418 ff.) He concludes:

Only if and in so far as the mass society of the industrial age can be and remain a universe of mutual response, in which responsive and responsible people respond to one another in matters of common concern, will this mass society remain a society . . . mutual response must exist in an understandable form between those who know and those who do not know; the former must call for and listen to the latter’s response. (Ibid., p. 426.)

The conclusion to be drawn from Riezler’s treatment of public opinion is that true community must be re-established in mass society if that society is to remain a free one which serves the people. Thus Buber’s restructuring of society into genuine communities, however ‘impractical’ it may seem, is a necessity toward which we must work. This does not mean any optimism about the ease with which Buber’s social philosophy can be applied. On the contrary, to turn one’s face in the right direction is to see how far we have to go. The dominance of the social principle over the political cannot be achieved through any rearrangement of existing relations but only through really changed relations within and between communities.

Here not only the present mass structure of individual nations stands in the way but also the relations between nations. Faith in dialogue is perhaps the one antidote to the fear which makes us see a country with an ideology different from our own as the alien, the ‘other,’ which has to be destroyed in order that we can live in a truly ‘human’ world, that is, a world dominated solely by our own ‘world-view’ or ego-perspective. Yet no faith in dialogue can be genuinely founded unless it includes the whole man, with all of his irrationality and ‘evil impulses,’ as the bearer of this dialogue. Nor can it be genuinely founded if it thinks in terms of the ‘dialogue’ between states rather than between peoples, between the representatives of states rather than between the responsible and tested leaders of genuine communities. What is more, as Buber has pointed out, the resumption of true dialogue between peoples will only be possible when the existential mistrust which divides the world into two hostile camps is overcome. Commenting on Robert Maynard Hutchins’ call for a Civilization of the Dialogue which can be attained when we induce the other party to talk through ‘exhibiting an interest in and a comprehension of what he might say if he were willing to speak,’(Robert Maynard Hutchins, ‘Goethe and the Unity of Mankind,’ Goethe and the Modern Age, ed. by Arnold Bergstraesser [Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1950), p. 399 f. ) Buber writes:

Nothing stands so much in the way of the rise of a Civilization of Dialogue as the demonic power which rules our world, the demonry of basic mistrust. What does it help to induce the other to speak if basically one puts no faith in what he says? The meeting with him already takes place under the perspective of his untrustworthiness. And this perspective is not incorrect, for his meeting with me takes place under a corresponding perspective. (‘Hope for This Hour’, op. cit.)

‘The factual life of factual men,’ writes Buber, ‘is smeared and crusted over with the varnish of political fiction.’ Some of the reproaches which the one side hurls at the other are realistic enough, he adds, but in order for this reality to be regarded concretely it must first be freed from its incrustation of catchwords. In the closed sphere of the exclusively political there is no way to penetrate to the factual nor to relieve the present situation. ‘Its "natural end" is the technically perfect suicide of the human race.’ It is just this powerlessness of politics which must be recognized today before it is too late, and it must be recognized by men who will come together out of the camps and will talk with one another, despite their criticism of the opposing system and their loyalty to their own. If-these men will begin to speak with one another not as pawns on a chessboard but as they themselves in the chamber of human reality, a tiny seed of change will have been started which could lead to a transformation of the whole situation.

I mean especially just those who are basically convinced of the rightness of the idea from which their government ultimately stems and know, just for that reason, that the catastrophe which would flow from the victory of the regime would mean the collapse of the idea. (Martin Buber, ‘Abstrakt und Konkret,’ Hinweise, op. cit., p. 327 ff., an additional note to ‘Hoffnung für diese Stunde,’ the German original of ‘Hope for This Hour.’ Hoffnung für diese Stunde’ was published in Hinweise pp. 313-326.)

If men such as these arise, they will have behind them an unorganized group for whom they speak. Although they will be ‘independent persons with no other authority than that of the spirit,’ they may yet be effective in the time that approaches as no merely political representatives can be. Unlike the latter, they will not be bound by the aims of the hour and hence will be able to distinguish between the true and the exaggerated needs of their own and other people. When they have sifted out of the alleged amount of antagonisms the real conflicts between genuine needs, they will be ready to move toward a settlement of those conflicts on the base of the fundamental question: What does every man need in order to live as man? ‘If the globe is not to burst asunder,’ writes Buber, those who stand in the authority of the spirit must come to one another out of the camps and dare to deal with this question in terms of the whole planet. There is one front of such men, writes Buber, the representatives of a true humanity who fight together even without knowing it, each in his own place. Only through genuine dialogue between them in which each of the partners, even when he stands in opposition to the other, attends to, affirms, and confirms him as this existing other, ‘can the opposition, certainly not be removed from the world, but be humanly arbitrated and led toward its overcoming.’ (Pointing the Way, ‘Genuine Dialogue and the Possibilities of Peace, Hope for This Hour,’ ‘Validity and Limitation of the Political Principle’ (1953 ).

SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE (1959): For an important statement by Buber on the problem of Jewish-Arab co-operation in the Near East see his essay, ‘Israel and the Command of the Spirit,’ trans. by Maurice Friedman, Congress Weekly, XXV, No. 14 (Sept. 8, 1958), p. 10 ff. On international relations in general see Buber’s statement in the ‘Hydrogen Cobalt Bomb’ special issue of Pulpit Digest XXXIV, No. 194 (June 1954), p. 36, and Irwin Ross’s interview with Buber in the New York Post, Vol. 156, No. 300 (November 7, 1957), M2, ‘Voice of the Sages,’ Article II. In an address at Cambridge University on June 5, 1958 Dag Hammarskjold, the Secretary General of the United Nations, echoes Buber’s call for renewed ‘contact and communications across geographical and political boundaries.’ Hammarskjold quotes at length from Buber’s statement on unmasking in Pointing the Way, ‘Hope for This Hour,’ p. 223 f., referring to Buber as ‘one of the influential thinkers of our time whose personal history and national experience have given him a vantage point of significance.’ (United Nations Press Release SG/684, June 5, 1958.) In a recent press conference Secretary General Hammarskjold announced his intention of translating into Swedish some of the essays from the ‘Politics, Community, and Peace’ section of Pointing the Way. ‘I think that Martin Buber has made a major contribution’ in these essays, said Hammarskjold, ‘and I would like to make that more broadly known.’ (Note to Correspondents # 1934, February 5, 1959. P. 5)

Although Reinhold Niebuhr considers Buber the greatest living Jewish Philosopher, he is, in contrast to Hammarskjold, highly critical of Buber’s social philosophy. In his review of Pointing the Way Niebuhr suggests that Buber’s thought becomes utopian when its illuminating insights into personal life are applied to the relations of the ‘we’ and ‘they’ of organized groups or nations. (New York Times Book Review, April 13, 1958.) In a letter to me of June 22. 1956, Niebuhr writes: ‘Personal relations exist in transcendence over the basic structure of society, which is partly organic and partly an artifact . . . insofar as the justice, particularly in modern technical society, depends upon artfully constructed equilibria of power.’ To this Buber replied in two letters to me: ‘There is indeed a norm of justice. . . But man tends to accept and to realise this norm only in general and abstract laws . . . and without justice in personal relations justice becomes poisonous.’ (July 1956.) ‘What Niebuhr calls the basic structure of society is . . . based on personal relations, and where it subdues them it becomes wrong. As to modern technical society, of course it depends upon "artfully constructed equilibria of power," but what depends on them is its order and not its justice.... I cannot see the God-willed reality of justice anywhere other than in "being just," and this means of course: being just as far as it is possible here and now, under the "artful" conditions of actual society.... Sometimes, striving to be just, I go on in the dark, till my head meets the wall and aches, and then I know: Here is the wall, and I cannot go further. But I could not know it beforehand, nor otherwise.’ (November 29. 1956.) The political order embodies justice in the sense of making it possible and of putting limits on the practice of injustice. But real justice does not exist until men actually make use of the foundation and material provided by this impersonal political order to build just relationships in concrete situations. (This correspondence between Buber and Niebuhr will be published in Maurice Friedman, ed., ‘Martin Buber’ section, Interrogations of Contemporary Philosophers, ed. by Sidney C. Rome. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. 1960.)

Chapter 22: Ethics

Buber defines the ethical as the affirmation or denial of the conduct and actions possible to one ‘not according to their use or harmfulness for individuals and society, but according to their intrinsic value and disvalue.’

We find the ethical in its purity only there where the human person confronts himself with his own potentiality and distinguishes and decides in this confrontation without asking anything other than what is right and what is wrong in this his own situation. . . . One may call the distinction and decision which rises from these depths the action of the preconscience.

He goes on to explain that the criterion by which the distinction and decision are made may be a traditional one or one perceived by the individual himself. What really matters ‘is that the critical flame shoots up ever again out of the depths’ and the truest source for this critical flame is ‘the individual’s awareness of what he "really" is, of what in his unique and nonrepeatable created existence he is intended to be.’ (Eclipse of God, op. cit., p. 125 f.)

It is clear that one foundation of Buber’s definition of ethics is his philosophy of dialogue with its emphasis on wholeness, decision, presentness, and uniqueness. Another is his philosophical anthropology with its emphasis on the potentiality which only man has and on the direction which each man must take to become what only he can become. It might seem, however, that this emphasis on an inner awareness which gives one the power of distinguishing and deciding between right and wrong is a type of moral autonomy which contradicts the dialogical nature of the rest of Buber’s philosophy. Buber makes it clear, however, that he is talking about neither ‘moral autonomy’ nor ‘moral heteronomy,’ neither self-created morality nor morality imposed from without. (Ibid., p. 129 f.) Pure moral autonomy is a freedom that is simply ‘freedom from’ without any ‘freedom for.’ Pure moral heteronomy is a ‘responsibility’ that is simply imposed moral duty without any genuine freedom or spontaneity. The narrow ridge between the two is a freedom that means freedom to respond, and a responsibility that means both address from without and free response from within.

Thorough-going moral autonomy destroys all concept of morality because it destroys all notion of value. Buber criticizes, for this reason, Sartre’s definition of value as the meaning of life which the individual chooses:

One can believe in and accept a meaning or value . . . if one has discovered it, not if one has invented it. It can be for me an illuminating meaning, a direction-giving value, only if it has been revealed to me in my meeting with being, not if I have freely chosen it for myself from among the existing possibilities and perhaps have in addition decided with a few fellow creatures: This shall be valid from now on. (Ibid., ‘Religion and Modern Thinking,’ p.93.)

Kant’s ‘moral autonomy’ is not thorough-going in this same sense, for its self-legislation does not refer to the self as the final judge of value but rather to universal reason and to the kingdom of ends to which one belongs by virtue of being a rational being.

Looking back now on all previous attempts to discover the principle of morality, we need not wonder why they all failed. It was seen that man was bound to laws by duty, but it was not observed that the laws to which he is subject are only those of his own giving, though at the same time they are universal, and that he is only bound to act in conformity with his own will -- a will, however, which is designed by nature to give universal laws.... I will therefore call this the principle of Autonomy of the will, in contrast with every other which I accordingly reckon as Heteronomy. (Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. by Thomas K. Abbott, with an Introduction by Marvin Fox [New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1949], p. 49 f.)

Kant’s categorical imperatives, ‘Act always on such a maxim as thou canst at the same time will to be a universal law’ and ‘So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as means only,’ are actually in one sense imposed from without. In order to follow Kant one must suppress one’s existential subjectivity in favour of a rational objectivity in which one participates only by virtue of having previously defined the essence of value as one’s rational nature. It is, in fact, a clear example of the ‘objective’ masquerading as the ‘subjective,’ and nothing makes this clearer than Kant’s suspicion of all empirical actions as probably in fact tainted by some non-moral motive. Nothing is good for Kant except a ‘good will,’ nor does he ever seriously envisage the possibility of turning to the good with the ‘evil impulse’ in such a way as to unify impulse and will (Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. By Thomas K. Abbott, with an Introduction by Marvin Fox [New york: The Liberal Arts Press, 2949] pp. 11, 16025, 31, 38, 47 f. The inclinations themselves, being sources of want, are so far from having an absolute worth for which they should be desired that, on the contrary, it must be the universal wish of every rational being to be wholly free from them’ [p. 45].) It is just such a split as this that Buber avoids, and it is for this reason that he can speak of ‘intrinsic value and disvalue’ in a more genuine sense than either Kant or Sartre.

Buber’s concept of the responsibility of an I to a Thou is closely similar to Kant’s second formulation of the categorical imperative: Never treat one’s fellow as a means only but always also as an end of value in himself. But even here, where Kant’s and Buber’s ethics seem to join, there is an essential difference. Kant’s sentence grows out of an ‘ought’ based on the idea of human dignity. Buber’s related concepts of making the other present and not imposing one’s own truth on him are based on the ontological reality of the life between man and man. (Buber, ‘Elemente des Zwischenmenschlichen,’ Op. Cit., section 4). To Kant the respect for the dignity of others grows out of one’s own dignity as a rational being bound to act according to universal laws. For Buber the concern for the other as an end in himself grows out of one’s direct relation to this other and to that higher end which he serves through the fulfillment of his created uniqueness. Thus Kant’s imperative is essentially subjective (the isolated individual) and objective (universal reason) whereas Buber’s is dialogical. In Kant the ‘ought’ of reason is separated from the ‘is’ of impulse. In Buber ‘is’ and ‘ought’ join without losing their tension in the precondition of authentic human existence -- making real the life between man and man.

The dominant ethical debate in our age, that between moral absolutism and moral relativism, is carried on exclusively in terms of the subject-object relationship. The ‘objectivists’ posit the absolute nature of values and tend to ignore the fact that a value is always a value for a person rather than something with an absolute, independent existence. They speak, like Wolfgang Köhler, of the ‘objective requiredness’ of values, and, like Eliseo Vivas, they describe the relation to these values as the relation of a subject to an independent object to which man simply responds. (Wolfgang Köhler, The Place of Values in a World of Facts [New York: Liveright Publishing Corp., 1938]; Vivas, The Moral Life and the Ethical Life, op. cit., pp. 187, 190, 215-219, 237-246.) Wishing to rescue ethics from the identification of the ‘ought’ and the ‘is’ which is characteristic of the interest theories of ethics and of cultural relativism, objectivists tend to fall into a dualism which radically sunders man’s nature and his moral norms. Vivas, for example, posits the ‘objectivity of evil’ as the only alternative to its being merely subjective and defines morality in terms of the opposition between objective duty and subjective inclination:

The search for the right alternative forces on one a distinction between obedience to something objective and obedience to what one desires, obedience to self.... The ideal, of course, of moral education is that the distinction be totally erased. But only a weak, sentimental, shallow, Pelagian attitude toward human nature would conceive of the ideal as within the reach of men. The City of God is not the City of Man; man cannot hope to rear a perfect city. Normally, therefore, the distinction between what we desire and what is right is very sharp, and the two terms of the distinction are apprehended as more or less exclusive. (Vivas, The Moral Life, p. 239)

The ‘subjectivists,’ on the other hand, reduce all value to the subjective interest of individuals or cultural groups. This type of objective description of subjective phenomena tends to make the ‘is’ equal to the ‘ought’: it implies that one ‘ought’ to accept the values of his cultural group just because they are those values, or that one ‘ought’ to follow subjective interest just because one has this interest. This subjective-objective confusion destroys the essence of moral philosophy because it cannot in fact establish any distinction between sheer objective description of what takes place and the discovery of the ‘normative,’ that is, of the values which determine what man ought to do. (Cf. Ibid., Part I -- ‘Animadversions upon Naturalistic Moral Philosophies.’)

The fact that different groups have different values is usually immensely oversimplified in popular thought. ‘Groups’ are regarded as static, distinct, and homogeneous units rather than as dynamic and interacting ones. The individuals in these groups, moreover, are regarded as cells of an organic whole rather than as persons interacting with each other in relations some of which are of a more and some of a less determined nature. As a result, the cultural relativist tends to lose sight of his concrete existence in the overwhelming preponderance of the collectivity. Insecure as an individual, he tends to project his forgotten ‘I’ on the group and to absolutize the group and its values.

Here we see the clear path that is taken in our day from the denial of all values to their false absolutization. It is no accident, in my opinion, that the most important historical application of Nietzsche’s philosophy of the superman was not in the direction of individualism but of collectivism. Both nihilism and cultural relativism leave the individual apparently free to do as he pleases without referring to moral values but actually in terrible insecurity until he can find something more than himself that is of value. The superman and totalitarianism offer this something more than oneself, and both are characterized by the fact that they do in fact remove all intrinsic value from the individual and make him simply a means to a greater goal in which he can symbiotically participate. Hence, both in the end mean the denial of freedom, personal integrity, and personal responsibility in the name of a value which turns out to be more tyrannically absolute than any that preceded it.

Thus whether the I or the It, the subjective or the objective is stressed, the failure to see moral problems in terms of the relation of I and Thou ends in the submission of the I to the world of It. Buber, through his dialogical philosophy, avoids not only the ‘objectivism’ of the moral absolutists but also the ‘subjectivism’ of the cultural relativists. If values do not exist for him apart from persons, neither can they be reduced to subjective feeling or ‘interest.’ The value lies in the between -- in the relation of the I to a Thou which is not an It yet is really other than the I.

Here we find the crucial distinction between Buber’s dialogical philosophy and pragmatism, which resembles it in a number of other ways. As Paul Pfeutze has pointed out, both the dialogical philosophy and pragmatism emphasize the concrete and the dynamic, both reject starting with metaphysical abstractions in favour of starting with human experience, both insist upon ‘the unity of theory and practice, inner idea and outer deed,’ and both insist on the element of faith and venture. (Paul E. Pfuetze, The Social Self [in the thought of George Herbert Mead and Martin Buber], New York: Bookman Associates, 1954, pp. 274, 295 n. 131. William James writes in ‘The Will to Believe’: ‘The more perfect and more eternal aspect of the universe is represented in our religions as having personal form. The universe is no longer a mere It to us, but a Thou, if we are religious; and any relation that may be possible from person to person might be possible here.... We feel too, as if the appeal of religion to us were made to our own active goodwill, as if evidence might be forever withheld from us unless we met the hypothesis half-way.’ William James, Essays in Pragmatism, ed. by Alburey Castell [New York: Hafner Publishing Co., 1949], p. 106 f.) Despite these resemblances, the ethics of pragmatism differs from that of Buber’s dialogical philosophy in two central points. First, pragmatism is entirely based upon the subject-object relationship, and this means that, contrary to its claims, it is actually given over to the abstract and static world of the past rather than the concrete and dynamic present. This is shown clearly in the appeal to scientific empiricism as the test of values rather than to the direct and concrete experience of the I-Thou relation. Second, pragmatism, like all interest theories of ethics, has no way of escaping the subjectivism which grounds all value ultimately on subjective feeling, nor is this any less the case because of the objective methods that pragmatism supports for the judgment of whether our actions will in fact produce the values that we think they will. (Cf. Marvin Fox, ‘Discussion on the Diversity of Methods in Dewey’s Ethics Theory,’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. XII, No. I [September 1951], pp. 123-129.)

It is the domination of subjective-objective thinking that has produced the traditional but false dichotomy between ‘selfishness’ and ‘unselfishness,’ egoism and altruism. There can be no such thing as pure ‘selfishness since no self originates or exists in isolation from others and even the most subjective interest is still of a social nature. On the other hand, since in every action we enter into relations with others which involve both ourselves and them, there can be no such thing as pure ‘unself ’ishness. Karl Löwith suggests that the real meaning of egoism versus altruism is the question of whether we relate to others for our sakes or for theirs. The situation is better described, in my opinion, by Erich Fromm’s suggestion that true love of others does not mean denial of self nor true self-love denial of love for others. (Löwith, Das Individuum in der Rolle des Mitmenschen, op. cit., pp. 71-76; Fromm, Man for Himself, op. cit., pp. 119-141. On the implications of dialogue for egoism and altruism cf. also Karl Barth, Die kirchliche Dogmatik, Vol. III -- Die Lehre von der Schöpfung, Zweiter Teil [Part 2 of third volume published separately] ]Zurich: Evangelischer Verlag, A. G. Zollikon, 1948], p. 312 ff.)

One cannot divide up a relationship into two separate parts one of which is ‘mine’ and one of which is ‘thine’ and then choose between them. One can only choose by one’s actions and attitudes to move in the direction of relationship and reciprocity --I-Thou -- or separateness and mutual exploitation -- I-It. One’s giving to the other may indeed be at the expense of something that one wants and needs oneself for the best of reasons. But this does not mean that one is sacrificing one’s self in the giving. One is rather affirming one’s self through a response that takes one out of the realm of domination and enjoyment into the realm of real personal existence. Up to a certain point, this applies even in a relationship in which the other person treats one strictly as It, for the other must be a Thou for us unconditionally and not dependent on how he treats us. No I-Thou relationship can be complete without reciprocity, however, and our ability to treat the other person as Thou is, in fact, limited by the extent to which he does or does not treat us as a Thou. True giving is giving in relationship, whether it be the gift of material support or the gift of a caress or a word. It is only possible to give in a very limited degree to one who remains resolutely closed to relationship.

Buber’s philosophy of dialogue not only finds the narrow ridge between the subjectivist identification and the objectivist sundering of the ‘is’ and the ‘ought,’ but it also radically shifts the whole ground of ethical discussion by moving from the universal to the concrete and from the past to the present -- in other words, from I-It to I-Thou. Buber does not start from some external, absolutely valid ethical code which man is bound to apply as best as possible to each new situation. Instead he starts with the situation itself.

The idea of responsibility is to be brought back from the province of specialized ethics, of an ‘ought’ that swings free in the air, into that of lived life. Genuine responsibility exists only where there is real responding. (Between Man and Man, ‘Dialogue,’ p. 16)

Most of the traditional ethical values -- not killing, stealing, committing adultery, lying, cheating, and so forth -- are in fact implied in the I-Thou relation, but not as an absolute code. Rather these traditional ethical values must be understood as the symbolic expression of what takes place when people stand in true dialogical relation to each other. It is unlikely in most cases, for example, that one could truly express one’s responsibility to a Thou by killing him. The traditional values are useful and suggestive, but one may not for all that proceed from them to the situation. Rather one must move from the concrete situation to the decision as to what is the right direction in this instance.

No responsible person remains a stranger to norms. But the command inherent in a genuine norm never becomes a maxim and the fulfillment of it never a habit. Any command that a great character takes to himself in the course of his development does not act in him as part of his consciousness or as material for building up his exercises, but remains latent in a basic layer of his substance until it reveals itself to him in a concrete way. What it has to tell him is revealed whenever a situation arises which demands of him a solution of which till then he had perhaps no idea. Even the most universal norm will at times be recognized only in a very special situation.... There is a direction, a ‘yes,’ a command, hidden even in a prohibition, which is revealed to us in moments like these. In moments like these the command addresses us really in the second person, and the Thou in it is no one else but one’s own self. Maxims command only the third person, the each and the none. (Ibid., ‘The Education of Character,’ p.114)

The responsible quality of one’s decision will be determined by the degree to which one really ‘sees the other’ and makes him present to one. It is here, in experiencing the relationship from the side of the other, that we find the most important key to the ethical implications of Buber’s dialogue -- an implication that none of the other thinkers who have written on the I-Thou relationship has understood in its full significance. Only through ‘seeing the other’ can the I-Thou relationship become fully real, for only through it can one be sure that one is really helping the other person. To deal lovingly with thy neighbour means to recognize that he is not just another I but a Thou, and that means a really ‘other’ person. Only if we see a man in his concrete otherness is there any possibility of our confirming him in his individuality as that which he must become. ‘Seeing the other’ is for this reason of central significance, not only for ethical action, but for love, friendship, teaching, and psychotherapy.

To see through the eyes of the other does not mean, as we have seen, that one ceases to see through one’s own. The Thou ‘teaches you to meet others,’ but it also teaches you ‘to hold your ground when you meet them.’ (I and Thou, p. 33) Ethical action is not altruism and self-denial. Nor is it an impartial objectivity which adjudicates conflicting interests as if from the standpoint of a third person. It is the binding of decision and action in the relation of I and Thou. The best example of what this means in practice is Buber’s reply to a public statement of Gandhi about Zionism and the Nazi persecution of the Jews. Gandhi, in December 1938, suggested that the Jews in Germany use satyagraha, or soul-force, as the most effective reply to Nazi atrocities. The Jews, said Gandhi, should refuse to be expelled or submit to discriminating treatment but should, if necessary, accept death voluntarily. ‘If the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even a massacre could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant. For to the God-fearing, death has no terror.’ In his reply Buber pointed out that Gandhi both misunderstood the nature of the Nazi regime and ignored the importance of the existence of India in his own successful work with the Hindus of South Africa.

No Jew in Germany could have spoken as did Gandhi in South Africa without being killed immediately . . . the martyrdom to which German Jews were subjected in concentration camps and dungeon-cells had no witnesses and, being unnoticed and unknown, could not affect public opinion or modify public policy. Gandhi, as the leader of 150,000 Hindus in South Africa, knew that Mother India with its hundreds of millions would ultimately stand in back of him. This knowledge . . . gave him and his followers the courage to live, to suffer, to resist, and to fight stubbornly -- though non-violently -- for their rights. (Quoted in Solomon Liptzin, Germany’s Stepchildren [Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1944], pp. 264-267.)

What Buber was essentially pointing out to Gandhi was that each one must have his own ground in order to deal justly with the other, that pure spirituality divorced from the concrete is futile and ineffective: ‘Would the Mahatma,’ he wrote, ‘who advises the Jews that Palestine is not a geographic district but an ideal within their hearts, accept the doctrine that India was not a subcontinent but merely an ideal wholly divorced from any soil? Is it not rather an ideal because it exists in reality?’ (The Jews cannot be responsible without experiencing from the side of the Arabs what it means for the Jews to have settled in Palestine, but neither can they give up their own claim.

We considered it a fundamental point that in this case two vital claims are opposed to each other, two claims of a different nature and a different origin which cannot objectively be pitted against one another and between which no objective decision can be made as to which is just, which unjust. We . . . consider it our duty to understand and to honour the claim which is opposed to ours and to endeavour to reconcile both claims.... Where there is faith and love, a solution may be found even to what appears to be a tragic opposition. (Israel and the World, op. cit., ‘The Land and Its Possessors’ (from an open letter to Gandhi, 1939), p. 231 f. For the complete text of Gandhi’s statement and of Buber’s reply to Gandhi see Martin Buber and Judah Magnes, Two Letters to Gandhi (Jerusalem: Reuben Mass, 1939), pp. 39-14 and 5-21 respectively.)

One can only be ‘responsible’ if one is responsible to someone. Since the human Thou must constantly become an It, one is ultimately responsible to the Eternal Thou who never becomes an It. But it is just in the concrete that we meet the Eternal Thou, and it is this which prevents dialogue from degenerating into ‘responsibility’ to an abstract moral code or universal idea. The choice, therefore, is not between religion and morality but between a religion and morality wedded to the universal and a religion and morality wedded to the concrete.

Only out of a personal relationship with the Absolute can the absoluteness of the ethical co-ordinates arise without which there is no complete awareness of self. Even when the individual calls an absolute criterion handed down by religious tradition his own, it must be reforged in the fire of the truth of his personal essential relation to the Absolute if it is to win true validity. But always it is the religious which bestows, the ethical which receives. (Eclipse of God, ‘Religion and Ethics,’ p.129)

The reason why it is always the religious which bestows and the ethical which receives is to be found in the nature of good as Buber understands it. The good for Buber is not an objective state of affairs nor an inner feeling, but a type of relationship -- the dialogue between man and man and between man and God. This means that the good cannot be referred back to any Platonic universals or impersonal order of the cosmos, nor can it be founded in any general system of utility or justice. It grows instead out of that which is most particular and concrete, not the pseudo-concreteness of the ‘empirically verifiable’ but the actual present concreteness of the unique direction toward God which one apprehends and realizes in the meeting with the everyday.

Good conceived thus cannot be located within any system of ethical co-ordination, for all those we know came into being on its account and existed or exist by virtue of it. Every ethos has its origin in a revelation, whether or not it is still aware of and obedient to it; and every revelation is revelation of human service to the goal of creation, in which service man authenticates himself. (Images of Good and Evil, p. 83. For a further study of Buber’s ethics and its relation to his philosophical anthropology and his philosophy of religion and the problems of the person and trust, cf. my essay ‘The Bases of Buber’s Values’ in Friedman and Schilpp, eds., The Philosophy of Martin Buber, loc. cit).

 

 

 

 

Chapter 21: Psychotherapy

Because Buber’s dialogical philosophy does not imply any dualistic rejection of the ordered world of I-It but only an interpenetration of that world by I-Thou, it does not exclude the findings of the more scientifically or mechanistically oriented schools of psychology, such as behaviourism, associationism, or Freudian psychoanalysis. To the extent, however, that these schools of psychology are given over to pure subject-object knowledge of the nature of man, the philosophy of dialogue must limit their competence to judge the essence of man as a whole in relation to other men. The attempt of behaviouristic psychology, for example, to externalize reality into pure action-response not only denies the reality of the participating subjective consciousness but, equally important, the reality of personality as a more or less integral whole and the reality of the relations between persons as that which calls the personality into existence. (Cf. Paul, The Meaning of Existence. op. cit., chap. iii, ‘The Crisis for Psychology.’)

If psychology and psychoanalysis are to be successful in their endeavour to understand and to heal men, they must be grounded in a realistic conception of what man is. This conception must not only be able to deal with the individual in isolation and in terms of individual complexes and aspects of his personality but also as a whole person in relation to other persons and to society. It is just here -- in the conception of what makes up a person and how he relates to other individuals and to society -- that the different schools of psychology part company. This divergence is as much a matter of method as of final aim, for both are affected by the underlying conception of what man is.

One who understands the essence of man in terms of the dialogical relation between men must walk a narrow ridge between the individualistic psychology which places all reality within the isolated individual and the social psychology which places all reality in the organic group and in the interaction of social forces. An American psychoanalyst who comes remarkably close to this narrow ridge is Erich Fromm. Fromm criticizes Freud for picturing all interpersonal relations as the use of the other to satisfy biologically given drives and hence as a means to one’s ends. He redefines the key problem of psychology as ‘that of the specific kind of relatedness of the individual towards the world and not that of the satisfaction or frustration of this or that instinctual need per se.’ Fromm, like Buber, holds that man’s nature is a social product and also holds that man is genuinely free and responsible. He takes over Harry Stack Sullivan’s concept of psychology as fundamentally social psychology, or ‘psychology of interpersonal relationships.’ At the same time, he rejects those theories, ‘more or less tinged with behaviouristic psychology,’ which assume’ that human nature has no dynamism of its own and that psychological changes are to be understood in terms of the development of new "habits" as an adaptation to new cultural patterns.’ (Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom [New York: Rinehart & Co., 1941] chaps. i, ii, and Appendix, see especially pp. 9-l5, 26, 289-294, 298 f.; Erich Fromm, Man for Himself, An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics [New York: Rinehart & Co., 1947], pp. 20-24. It is probable that Buber exercised some direct influence on Fromm’s thought since as a young man Fromm belonged to the Frankfurt circle of students of the Bible and Judaism led by Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber.)

The psychological significance of the I-Thou relation was recognized, independently of Buber, in Ferdinand Ebner’s Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten. Insanity, writes Ebner, is the end product of ‘Icheinsamkeit’ and ‘Dulosigkeit’ -- the complete closedness of the I to the Thou. It is a spiritual condition in which neither the word nor love is any longer able to reach the individual. The irrationality of the insane man lies in the fact that he talks past men and is unable to speak to a concrete Thou. The world has become for him the projection of his I, not just theoretically, as in idealism, but practically, and for this reason he can only speak to a fictitious Thou. (Ebner, op. cit., pp. 47 f., 81, 155.)

This type of psychosis is explained by Buber in poetic terms in I and Thou. ‘If a man does not represent the a priori of relation in his living with the world,’ writes Buber, ‘if he does not work out and realize the inborn Thou on what meets it, then it strikes inwards.’ As a result, confrontation of what is over against one takes place in oneself, and this means self-contradiction -- the horror of an inner double. ‘Here is the verge of life, flight of an unfulfilled life to the senseless semblance of fulfillment, and its groping in a maze and losing itself ever more profoundly.’ (I and Thou, p. 69 f.)

Ebner’s and Buber’s intuitions of the origin of insanity have been confirmed by Viktor von Weizsäcker, a doctor and psychiatrist who has made an important contribution to the field of psychosomatic medicine. Buber unquestionably exercised an important influence on von Weizsäcker since it was during the years in which the two men associated as co-editors of the periodical Die Kreatur that von Weizsäcker began his application of dialogical philosophy to medicine and psychotherapy. What makes us mistrustful of many psychotics, writes von Weizsäcker, is that their self-deification and self-degradation lack all moderation. The cause of this overvaluation of the self is the isolation of the psychotic, the fact that he has no Thou for his I. The result of this absence of a Thou is just such an inner double as Buber pointed to in I and Thou. This illusion of the double is unavoidable after a man has lost his connection with a Thou, writes von Weizsäcker, for the state of aloneness that he has reached then is unbearable. ‘The splitting of the I represents -- for an instant -- the now unattainable relation of the I to the Thou.’ (Viktor von Weizsäcker, Fälle und Probleme. Anthropologische Vorlesungen in der medizinischen Klinik [Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke Verlag, 1947], p. 187 ff. (my translation).

Von Weizsäcker has pointed out the implications of the I-Thou philosophy not only for psychotherapy but for medicine in general. He sets forth a ‘medical anthropology’ which begins with the recognition of the difference between the objective understanding of something and the ‘transjective’ understanding of someone. The patient, like the doctor, is a subject who cannot become an object. The doctor can, none the less, understand him if he begins not with objective knowledge but with questions. Only through the real contact of the doctor and the patient does objective science have a part in the history of the latter’s illness. As soon as this contact is lacking, all information about functions, drives, properties, and capacities is falsified. This too is a doctrine of experience, writes von Weizsäcker, a doctrine of the comradeship of doctor and patient along the way of the illness and its cure. This comradeship takes place not despite technique and rationalization but through and with them. The smooth functioning of the objective practitioner lasts just as long as there is a self-understood relation between doctor and patient, unnoticed because unthreatened. But if the de facto assent to this relation falls away, then the objectivity is doubtful and no longer of use. (Viktor von Weizsäcker, Arzt und Kranker, Vol. I, 3rd Ed. (Stuttgart: K. F. Koehler Verlag, 1949), ‘Stucke einer medizinischen Anthropologie’ [first appeared in Die Kreatur, Vol. II, 1927], pp. 79-88, 136-147, ‘Kranker und Arzt’ [1928], p. 166 ff.)

Von Weizsäcker expands this relationship of doctor and patient into an all-embracing distinction between objective and ‘inclusive’ (‘umfassender’) therapy. He uses ‘inclusive’ here in the same sense as that in which Buber uses ‘inclusion’ (‘Umfassung’) in his discussion of education, that is, as experiencing the other side. The most important characteristic of an inclusive therapy, in von Weizsäcker’s opinion, is that the doctor allows himself to be changed by the patient, that he allows all the impulses that proceed from the person of the patient to affect him, that he is receptive, not only with the objective sense of sight but also with hearing, which brings the I and the Thou more effectively together. Only through this ever-new insertion of his personality can the doctor bring his capacities to full realization in his relation with his patient. (Ibid., pp. 169-179. Cf. Between Man and Man, op. cit., ‘Education,’ pp. 98-101; Dialogisches Leben, op. cit., ‘Über das Enieherische,’ pp. 281-285. Cf. Viktor von Weizsäcker, Diesseits und jenseits der Medizin, Artz und Kranker, new series [Stuttgart: K. F. Koehler Verlag, 1950], ‘Grundfragen Medizinischer Anthropologie’ [1947], pp. 143-147, ‘Nach Freud’ [1948] p. 258. See also: Viktor von Weizsäcker Anonyma [Bern: Verlag A. Francke, 1916], ‘Es-Bildung,’ p. 24 ff., ‘Begegnung der Monaden,’ p. 27 f.)

A number of European psychologists and psychoanalysts in addition to von Weizsäcker have recognized the importance of Buber’s I-Thou philosophy for psychology and have made contributions to the understanding of the relationship between the two. One of the most important of these contributions is Ludwig Binswanger’s voluminous Grundformen und Erkenntnis menschlichen Daseins, in which Binswanger reorients his psychology entirely around the I-Thou relation and relies heavily on Buber’s concept of ‘meeting.’ Binswanger sees particularly clearly that the loving meeting of I and Thou can in no sense be equated with Heidegger’s ‘Mitsein’ (togetherness) or ‘Fürsorge’ (solicitude), and he also follows Buber in his recognition that the I-Thou relation is an ontological reality which cannot be reduced to what takes place within each of the members of the relationship. (Binswanger, op. cit., pp. 16 ff., 21, 29-34, 46 f., 57, 82 ff., 85 f., 97 ff., 105 f., 130-133, 163, 166 f., 210-215, 234 f., 264 f. For a more comprehensive discussion of Binswanger’s Grundformen, see Edith Weigert ‘Existentialism and Psychotherapy,’ Psychiatry, XII [1949], 399-412).

Another application of Buber’s thought to psychology is that of the psychoanalyst Arie Sborowitz. Sborowitz compares the teachings of Buber and C. G. Jung and suggests an approach that would combine the essential elements of both. He shows how Buber stresses the positive -- the elements of true relationship -- and Jung the negative -- the obstacles to relationship, such as ‘introjection,’ ‘projection,’ and ‘identification,’ and he suggests that the one is necessarily the ground for the reality of the other. Jung has given important emphasis to destiny, Buber to relationship, and these two, in Sborowitz’s opinion, may go together to make up an adequate conception of psychology. This conception must include both the individual’s relations to others and his relation to his own self, both grace and freedom, responsibility and destiny, oneness with the world and oneness in oneself. (Arie Sborowitz, ‘Beziehung und Bestimmung, Die Lehren von Martin Buber und C. G. Jung in ihrem Verhältnis zueinander,’ Psyche, Eine Zeitschrift für Tiefenpsychologie und Menschenkunde in Forschung und Praxis, II [1948], 9-56.)

The emphases of Buber and Jung are not so compatible as Sborowitz thinks. Buber sees reality as between selves, Jung as within the self, and their concepts of relationship to others and of personal vocation correspond to those basic views. To Jung destiny is something that takes place within the soul or self whereas to Buber destiny, or vocation (Bestimmung), is the response of the self to that outside it which addresses it. To Buber every man has something unique to contribute, but he is called to fulfill this potentiality, not destined. The integration of the personality, correspondingly, is not an end in itself to Buber, as it is to Jung: one becomes whole in order to be able to respond to what addresses one. Jung ignores the fact that the essential life of the individual soul ‘consists of real meetings with other realities,’ writes Buber. Although he speaks of the self as including both the I and the ‘others,’ the ‘others’ are clearly included not in their actual ‘otherness,’ but ‘only as contents of the individual soul that shall, just as an individual soul, attain its perfection through individuation.’ Both God and man are incorporated by Jung in ‘the self,’ and this means that they are included not as Thou but as It. It is not surprising, therefore, that Jung speaks of the integrated self as ‘indistinguishable from a divine image’ and of self-realization as ‘the incarnation of God.’ The fact that this process of self-deification takes place through the ‘collective unconscious’ does not give it the universality that it at first appears to, for Jung makes it dear that ‘even the collective unconscious . . . can enter ever again into experience only through the individual psyche.’ (Eclipse of God, op. cit., ‘Religion and Modern Thinking,’ pp. 104 121, ‘Supplement: Reply to C. G. Jung,’ pp. 171-176; I and Thou, p. 86. Cf. Jung, The Integration of the Personality, op. cit.)

Sborowitz also fails to see the difference between Jung’s system with its universally valid conceptions and Buber’s anti-systematic emphasis on the concrete, the unique, and the unexpected. Jung’s system, like that of most schools of psychoanalysis, is based on the reality of the typical, the general, the past -- what has already become and is already enregistered in our categories of thought. As such it cannot possibly understand the real uniqueness of each person nor the reality of the healing which takes place in the relationship between analyst and patient. The analyst-patient relationship may, in fact, be an I-Thou relationship similar to that between the teacher and the pupil, and it is probable that in practice the success of any analytic cure is due quite as much to whether or not such a relationship exists as to the technical competence of the doctor. (Cf. The Meaning of Human Existence, pp. 85-93) Particularly important in this relationship is what Buber has variously called ‘seeing the other,’ ‘experiencing the other side,’ ‘inclusion,’ and ‘making the other present.’ This ‘seeing the other’ is not, as we have seen, a matter of ‘identification’ or ‘empathy,’ but of a concrete imagining of the other side which does not at the same time lose sight of one’s own. The analyst may tend, however, to reduce the patient’s history and present happenings to general categories, and the patient may tend to lose his own sense of being a whole person engaged in present meetings. Analysis helps the patient to avoid the neurotic identifications and projections which he has carried over from the past, but it may hinder his responding to the unique and unexpected in the real present. Analysis may tend to turn the patient back in on himself, and it may lead him to regard true as well as pseudo-relationships as internal events within separate individuals.

Buber has himself made several important distinctions between the philosophy of dialogue and the theory of psychoanalysis. He points out that serving God with the ‘evil urge’ is like psychoanalytic ‘sublimation’ in that it makes creative use of basic energies rather than suppressing them. He speaks of the evil urge in connection with ‘the uplifting of sexuality,’and he identifies alien thoughts and the evil urge with imagination and fantasy. But he also shows that serving God with the evil urge differs from sublimation, as it is conceived by Freud, in that it takes place as a by-product of the I-Thou relationship rather than as an essentially individual event in which the individual uses his relationship with other things for his own self-realization. "’Sublimation" takes place within the man himself, the "raising of the spark" takes place between man and the world.’ It is ‘a real encounter with real elements of Being, which are outside ourselves.’ (Tales of the Hasidim, The Early Masters, op. cit., p. 21; Hasidism, op. cit., ‘The Beginnings of Hasidism,’ p. 31 f., ‘The Foundation Stone,’ pp. 50 f., 54 f.)

Hasidic teaching is like psychoanalysis, writes Buber, in that it refers one from the problematic of external life to that of the inner life, and it shows the need of beginning with oneself rather than demanding that both parties to a relationship change together. It differs from psychoanalytic theory, however, in that it does not proceed from the investigation of individual psychological complications but rather from the whole man. Pulling out separate parts and processes always hinders the grasping of the whole, and only the understanding of wholeness as wholeness can lead to the real transformation and healing of the individual and of his relations with his fellow-men. This does not mean that the phenomena of the soul are not to be observed, but none of them is to be placed in the centre of observation as if all the rest were derived from it. One must rather begin with all points, and not in isolation but just in their vital connection. Finally, and most important of all according to Buber, the person is not treated here as an object of investigation but is summoned ‘to set himself to rights,’ to bring his inner being to unity so that he may respond to the address of Being over against him. (The Way of Man, op. cit., p. 29 f.)

Buber gives us the fullest insight into the implications of dialogue for psychotherapy in his discussion of the way in which the great zaddikim healed those who came to them for help. To obtain a right perspective we must remember, he says, ‘that the relation of a soul to its organic life depends on the degree of wholeness and unity attained by the soul.’

The more dissociated the soul is, so much the more is it at the mercy of the organic life; the more unified it is in itself, so much the more is it the master of its physical ailments and attacks; not as if it vanquished the body, but because through its unity it ever saves and guards the unity of the body.

This process of healing can best be effected, writes Buber, ‘through the psycho-synthetic appearance of a whole, unified soul, which lays hold of the shattered soul, agitates it on all sides, and hastens the event of crystallization.’ Here the term ‘psycho-synthetic’ is clearly used in conscious contrast with ‘psychoanalytic’ to suggest the procedure from wholeness as contrasted with the procedure from isolated parts and complexes. The unified soul shapes a centre in the soul which is calling to her and at the same time takes care that this soul does not remain dependent upon her. The helper does not place his own image in the soul that he helps. Instead ‘he lets her see through him, as through a glass, the essence of all things.’ He then lets her uncover that essence in herself and appropriate it as the core of her own living unity. (Hasidism, ‘Spirit and Body of the Hasidic Movement,’ p. 87 f.)

That Buber does not feel that such a way of healing is closed to the professional psychotherapist is shown by his preface to Hans Trub’s posthumous book, Heilung aus der Begegnung (‘Healing Out of Meeting’). In this preface he treats of the paradox of the analyst’s profession. The doctor analyses the psychic phenomena which the patient brings before him according to the theory of his school, and he does so in general with the co-operation of the patient, whom the tranquilizing and to some extent orienting and integrating procedure tends to please. But in some cases the presentiment comes over him that something entirely other is demanded of him, something incompatible with the economics of the calling and threatening to its regulated procedures. What is demanded of him is that he draw the case out of the correct methodological objectification and himself step forth out of his protected professional superiority into the elementary situation between one who asks and one who is asked. The abyss in the patient calls to the abyss, the real, unprotected self, in the doctor and not to his confidently functioning security of action. (Martin Buber, ‘Heilung aus der Begegnung,’ Neue Schweizer Rundschau, XIX, Heft 6 [October 1951], pp. 382-386. This is the preface to Hans Trüb, Heilung aus der Begegnung. Eine Auseinandersetzang mit der Psychologie C. G. Jungs, edited by Ernst Michel and Arie Sborowitz [Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, 1952].)

The analyst returns from this paradox into the methodic, but he does so as a changed person returning into a changed method, namely as one for whom the necessity has opened of a genuine personal meeting between the one in need of help and the helper. In this new methodic the unexpected, that which contradicts the prevailing theories and demands his personal participation, finds place.

He has left in a decisive hour . . . the closed room of psychological treatment in which the analyst rules by means of his systematic and methodological superiority and has gone forth with his patient into the air of the world where selfhood is opposed to selfhood. There in the closed room, where one probed and treated the isolated psyche according to the inclination of the self-encapsulated patient, the patient was referred to ever-deeper levels of his inwardness as to his proper world; here outside, in the immediacy of human standing over against each other, the encapsulation must and can be broken through, and a transformed, healed relationship must and can be opened to the sick person in his relations to otherness -- to the world of the other which he cannot remove into his soul. A soul is never sick alone, but always through a betweenness, a situation between it and another existing being. The psychotherapist who has passed through the crisis may now dare to touch on this. (Ibid., p. 384 f. [my translation])

A significant confirmation of Buber’s attitude toward psychotherapy is found in the recent developments in the ‘client-centred’ therapy of Dr. Carl R. Rogers and the University of Chicago Counseling Center. In Client-Centered Therapy (1951) Dr. Rogers states that the role of the counsellor in ‘nondirective’ therapy is not, as is often thought, a merely passive laissez-faire policy, but an active acceptance of the client as a person of worth for whom the counsellor has real respect. Client-centred therapy stresses above all the counsellor’s assuming the internal frame of reference of the client and perceiving both the world and the client through the client’s own eyes. (Carl R. Rogers, Client-Centered Therapy, Its Current Practice, Implications and Theory [Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1951], pp. 20-29.)

The striking parallel between this conception and Buber’s concepts of ‘seeing the other,’ ‘experiencing the other side,’ and ‘making the other present’ is strengthened by Roger’s descriptions of what seeing through the client’s eyes actually means. For Rogers as for Buber it is important in the process of the person’s becoming that he know himself to be understood and accepted, or in Buber’s terms made present and confirmed, by the therapist. For both men this means ‘an active experiencing with the client of the feelings to which he gives expression,’ a trying ‘to get within and to live the attitudes expressed instead of observing them.’ For both this implies at the same time a certain distance and absence of emotional involvement -- an experiencing of the feelings from the side of the client without an emotional identification that would cause the counsellor to experience these feelings himself, as counsellor. Finally, it implies for both a laying aside of the preoccupation with professional analysis, diagnosis, and evaluation in favour of an acceptance and understanding of the client based on true attitudes of respect which are deeply and genuinely felt by the therapist. (Carl R.Rogers, Client-Centered Therapy, op. cit., pp. 29-45, 55.) Rogers is willing to extend this respect and trust even to a patient in danger of committing suicide or one who has been institutionalized. He explains this attitude in a statement remarkably close to Buber’s spirit:

To enter deeply with this man into his confused struggle for selfhood is perhaps the best implementation we now know for indicating the meaning of our basic hypothesis that the individual represents a process which is deeply worthy of respect, both as he is and with regard to his potentialities. (Ibid., pp. 43-49, quotation from p. 45)

A corollary of client-centred therapy is the recognition that good interpersonal relationships depend upon the understanding and acceptance of the other as a separate person, ‘operating in terms of his own meanings, based on his own perceptual field.’ Here too Rogers is like Buber, and like him also he sees the recognition of the separateness of others as made possible through a relationship in which the person is himself confirmed in his own being. A person comes to accept others, in Rogers’s opinion, through his acceptance of himself, and this in turn takes place through the acceptance of the child by the parent or of the client by the therapist. (Ibid., p. 520 ff.) In this same connection Rogers discusses the possibility that the real essence of therapy is not so much the clients memory of the past, his explorations of problems, or his admission of experiences into awareness as his direct experiencing in the therapy relationship.

The process of therapy is, by these hypotheses, seen as being synonymous with the experiential relationship between client and therapist. Therapy consists in experiencing the self in a wide range of ways in an emotionally meaningful relationship with the therapist. (Ibid., pp. 158-172, quotation from p. 172)

Although this new concern with the experiential relationship between client and therapist was ‘still in an infant and groping stage’ in 1951, there are indications that Rogers himself, if not the counselling group as a whole, has moved somewhat further in this direction since then. In a recent paper Rogers defines a person as a fluid process and potentiality ‘in rather sharp contrast to the relatively fixed, measurable, diagnosable, predictable concept of the person which is accepted by psychologists and other social scientists to judge by their writings and working operations.’ The person as process is most deeply revealed, he writes, in a relationship of the most ultimate and complete acceptance, and he himself describes this relation as ‘a real I-Thou relationship, not an I-It relationship.’ Like Buber, too, he sees the person as moving in a positive direction toward unique goals that the person himself can but dimly define. (From an unpublished paper of Professor Rogers entitled ‘Some Personal Formulations,’ written in 1952 and quoted with the permission of the author.)

More significant parallels still are found in a recent description by Rogers of the role of the therapist. The therapist, he writes, ‘enters the relationship not as a scientist, not as a physician who can accurately diagnose and cure, but as a person, entering into a personal relationship.’ Like Buber in the Preface to Heilung aus der Bcgegnung, Rogers recognizes that the therapist must really risk himself in the therapeutic relationship. He must risk the client’s repudiation of him and the relationship, and the consequent loss of a part of himself. The therapist conducts the therapy without conscious plan and responds to the other person with his whole being, ‘his total organismic sensitivity.’ In describing the results of this total personal response, Rogers again makes use of Buber’s concept of the I-Thou relation:

When there is this complete unity, singleness, fullness of experiencing in the relationship, then it acquires the ‘out-of-this-world’ quality which therapists have remarked upon, a sort of trance-like feeling in the relationship from which both client and therapist emerge at the end of the hour, as if from a deep well or tunnel. In these moments there is, to borrow Buber’s phrase, a real "I-Thou" relationship, a timeless living in the experience which is between client and therapist. It is at the opposite pole from seeing the client, or oneself, as an object. (From an unpublished paper of Professor Rogers entitled ‘Persons or Science? -- A Philosophical Question,’ written in 1952 and quoted with the permission of the author.)

Through his willingness to risk himself and his confidence in the client, the therapist makes it easier for the client to take the plunge into the scheme of experiencing. This process of becoming opens up a new way of living in which the client ‘feels more unique and hence more alone’ but at the same time is able, like Buber’s ‘Single One,’ to enter into relations with others that are deeper and more satisfying and that ‘draw more of the realness of the other person into the relationship.’ (From an unpublished paper of Professor Rogers entitled ‘Persons or Science? -- A Philosophical Question,’ written in 1952 and quoted with the permission of the author. The last two sentences have been slightly altered from the original under instructions from Professor Rogers in a letter to me of December 12, 1952.)

In his preface to Hans Trüb’s book Buber points primarily to the trail which Trüb himself broke as a practising psychoanalyst who saw the concrete implications of Buber’s thought for psychotherapy. Trüb, like Sborowitz, was deeply influenced by both Buber and Jung, but he has shown more clearly than Sborowitz the limitations of Jung’s thought. He describes how he went through a decade-long crisis in which he broke with his personal and doctrinal dependence on Jung in favour of the new insights that his relationship with Buber gave him. What had the greatest influence on Trüb was not Buber’s doctrine but the meeting with him as person to person, and it is from this meeting that the revolutionary changes in Trüb’s method of psychotherapy proceeded. Trüb writes that he found himself fully disarmed in time by the fact that in conversation Buber was not concerned about the ideas of his partner but about the partner himself. It became ever clearer to Trüb that in such unreserved interchange it is simply not possible to bring any hidden intention with one and to pursue it. In this dialogic one individuality did not triumph over the other, for each remained continually the same. Yet Trüb emerged from this meeting "’renewed for all time," with my knowledge of the reality of things brought one step nearer to the truth.’ ‘What gives Buber his imperishable greatness and makes his life into symbolic existence,’ writes Trüb, ‘is that he steps forth as this single man and talks directly to men.’ (Hans Trüb, ‘Individuation, Schuld und Entscheidung. Über die Grenzen der Psychologie,’ in Die kulturelle Bedeutung der Komplexen Psychologie, ed. by Psychologischen Club Zurich [Berlin: Julius Springer Verlag, 1935], pp. 529~542, 553, quotations from pp. 542, 553 [my translation]. This essay will be found in whole or in part in Trüb, Heilung aus der Begegnung)

Martin Buber is for me the symbol of continually renewed decision. He does not shut the mystery away in his individuality, but rather from out of the basic ground of the mystery itself he seeks binding with other men. He lets a soft tone sound and swell in himself and listens for the echo from the other side. Thus he receives the direction to the other and thus in dialogue he finds the other as his partner. And in this meeting he consciously allows all of his individuality to enter . . . for the sake of the need and the meaning of the world. (Ibid., p. 554 [my translation]).

Trüb describes how in his work with his patients he became aware of the invariable tendency of the primary consciousness to become monological and self-defeating. He also tells how this closed circle of the self was again and again forced outward toward relationship through those times when, despite his will, he found himself confronting his patient not as an analyst but as human being to human being. From these experiences he came to understand the full meaning of the analysts responsibility. (Ibid., pp. 543-550) The analyst takes responsibility for lost and forgotten things, and with the aid of his psychology he helps to bring them to light. But he knows in the depths of his self that the secret meaning of these things that have been brought to consciousness first reveals itself in the outgoing to the other.

Psychology as science and psychology as function know about the soul of man as about something in the third person.... They look down from above into the world of inner things, into the inner world of the individual. And they deal with its contents as with their ‘objects,’ giving names and creating classifications.... But the psychotherapist in his work with the ill is essentially a human being.... Therefore he seeks and loves the human being in his patients and allows it . . . to come to him ever again. (Ibid, p. 550 f. [my translation]. Cf. Hans Trüb, Aus einem Winkel meines Sprechzimmers [Berlin: Verlag Lambert Schneider, 1930], also to be found in whole or in part in Heilung aus der Begegnung).

The personal experience which caused Trüb to break through from the security of Jung’s system to the insecurity of Buber’s meeting and relationship was an overwhelming sense of guilt. This guilt was no longer such as could be explained away or removed, for it was subjectively experienced as the guilt of a person who had stepped out of real relationship to the world and tried to live in a spiritual world above reality. (‘Individuation, Schuld und Entscheidung,’ pp. 531-539.) Both Trüb and Buber show that guilt is an essential factor in the person’s relations to others and that it performs the necessary function of leading him to desire to set these relations to rights. It is just here, in the real guilt of the person who has not responded to the legitimate claim and address of the world, that the possibility of transformation and healing lies. (Martin Buber, ‘Heilung aus der Begegnung,’ op. cit.)

Buber’s and Trüb’s understanding of guilt as a primal reality sets them in marked contrast to the predominant modern trend toward explaining it away as the product of social and psychological conditioning. True guilt, of course, is not the neurotic, tormented self-preoccupation which so often goes by that name. ‘There is a sterile kind of heart-searching,’ writes Buber, ‘which leads to nothing but self-torture, despair and still deeper enmeshment.’ This latter is not a true awareness of the voice, but ‘reflexion,’ a turning back on oneself which uses up the energies that one could spend in turning to the Thou. True guilt, in contrast, takes place between man and man. It has an ontic, superpersonal character of which the feeling of guilt is only the subjective and psychological counterpart. ‘Guilt does not reside in the human person. On the contrary, he stands in the most realistic sense in the guilt which envelops him.’ Similarly, the repression of guilt and the neuroses which result from this repression are not merely psychological phenomena but real events between men. (The Way of Man, pp. 14, 36; Buber, ‘Heilung aus der Begegnung,’ op. cit).

Real guilt is the beginning of ethos, or responsibility, writes Trüb, but before the patient can become aware of it, he must be helped by the analyst to become aware of himself in general. This the analyst does through playing the part both of confidante and big brother. He gives the neurotic the understanding which the world has denied him and makes it more and more possible for him to step out of his self-imprisonment into a genuine relation with the analyst. In doing this, says Trüb, the analyst must avoid the intimacy of a private I-Thou relationship with the patient, on the one hand, and the temptation of dealing with the patient as an object, on the other. (Trüb, ‘Individuation, Schuld und Entscheidung,’ p. 533 f.; Hans Trüb, ‘Vom Selbst zur Welt,’ Psyche I [1947], 41-45.) This means, in effect, that he must have just that dialogical relationship of concrete but one-sided inclusion which Buber has designated as that proper for the teacher. (Between Man and Man, ‘Education,’pp. 97-101) It cannot become the mutual inclusion of friendship without destroying the therapeutic possibilities of the relationship. But neither can it make the patient into an It. The analyst must be able to risk himself and to participate in the process of individuation. (Trüb, ‘Vom Selbst zur Welt,’ p. 55 f.)

The analyst must see the illness of the patient as an illness of his relations with the world, writes Trüb. The roots of the neurosis lie both in the patient’s closing himself off from the world and in the pattern of society itself and its rejection and non-confirmation of the patient. Consequently, the analyst must change at some point from the consoler who takes the part of the patient against the world to the person who puts before the patient the claim of the world. This change is necessary to complete the second part of the cure -- that establishment of real relationship with the world which can only take place in the world itself. ‘On the analyst falls the task of preparing the way for the resumption in direct meeting of the interrupted dialogical relationship between the individual and the community.’ The psychotherapist must test the patient’s finding of himself by the criterion of whether his self-realization can be the starting-point for a new personal meeting with the world. The patient must go forth whole in himself, but he must also recognize that it is not his own self but the world with which he must be concerned. This does not mean, however, that the patient is simply integrated with or adjusted to the world. He does not cease to be a real person, responsible for himself, but at the same time he enters into responsible relationship with his community. (Ibid., pp. 48-67, quotation from p. 44 [my translation]).

‘This way of frightened pause, of unfrightened deliberation, of personal participation, of rejection of security, of unsparing stepping into relationship, of the bursting of psychologism -- this way of vision and of risk is that which Hans Trüb went,’ writes Buber. ‘Surely other psychotherapists will find the trail that Trüb broke and carry it still further.’ (Buber, ‘Heilung aus der Begegnung,’ op. cit.)

Supplementary Note (1959):

‘Heilung aus der Begegnung’ now appears in English translation in Pointing the Way, ‘Healing through Meeting,’ pp. 93-97. In ‘Guilt and Guilt Feelings,’ trans. by Maurice Friedman, Psychiatry, Vol. XX, No. 2 (May 1957), pp. 114-129, Buber distinguishes between ‘groundless’ neurotic guilt and ‘existential guilt.’ ‘Existential guilt occurs when someone injures an order of the human world whose foundations he knows and recognizes as those of his own existence and of all common human existence.’ In a chapter in his forthcoming philosophical anthropology Prof. Buber sets forth a theory of the unconscious as existing prior to the split between the physical and the psychic and therefore as not identifiable with the psyche. In his important Postscript to the second edition of I and Thou Buber stresses the need of a one-sided ‘inclusion’ in the relationship between therapist and patient which is, nonetheless, an I-Thou relation founded on mutuality, trust, and partnership in a common situation.

Carl Jung in The Undiscovered Self (Boston: Little, Brown, 1958) emphasizes the psychotherapist’s concern with the particular, unique individual before him and his concrete problems. ‘Today, over the whole field of medicine it is recognized that the task of the doctor consists in treating the sick patient, not an abstract illness.’ (p. 12) A large sample of Ludwig Binswanger’s thought is now available in English in Rollo May, Ernest Angel, Henri F. Ellenberger, editors, Existence, A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1958), Chaps. VII-IX, pp. 191-364. (Cf. also pp. 80-i6, 119-124.) One may question whether by adding the I-Thou relation as one further existential category to those Heidegger has provided us, Binswanger has succeeded in the synthesis of Heidegger’s ontology and Buber’s dialogue that forms the core of his existential analysis. (Cf. my article, ‘Shame, Existential Psychotherapy, and the Image of Man,’ Commentary, fall or winter 1959.) Carl R. Rogers’s essay, ‘Persons or Science? A Philosophic Question,’ appears in American Psychologist, X (1955), pp. 267-278. The differences between Rogers and Buber became particularly clear in a dialogue that I moderated between them at the University of Michigan on April 18, 1957. Rogers emphasizes subjective becoming, Buber the ‘between.’ Rogers emphasizes unqualified acceptance of the client by the therapist whereas Buber emphasizes a confirmation which begins with acceptance but goes on to helping the other in the struggle against himself for the sake of what he is meant to become. (Cf. Rogers’s articles on ‘Becoming a Person’ in Pastoral Psychology, Vol. VII, January and February 1956). Cf. items by Farber & Friedman in supplementary bibliography.