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Education, to Buber, means a conscious and willed ‘selection by man of the effective world.’ The teacher makes himself the living selection of the world, which comes in his person to meet, draw out, and form the pupil. In this meeting the teacher puts aside the will to dominate and enjoy the pupil, for this will more than anything else threatens to stifle the growth of his blessings. ‘It must be one or the other,’ writes Buber: ‘Either he takes on himself the tragedy of the person, and offers an unblemished daily sacrifice, or the fire enters his work and consumes it.’ The greatness of the educator, in Buber’s opinion, lies in the fact that his situation is unerotic. He cannot choose who will be before him, but finds him there already.

The teacher is able to educate the pupils that he finds before him only if he is able to build real mutuality between himself and them. This mutuality can only come into existence if the child trusts the teacher and knows that he is really there for him. The teacher does not have to be continually concerned with the child, but he must have gathered him into his life in such a way ‘that steady potential presence of the one to the other is established and endures.’ ‘Trust, trust in the world, because this human being exists -- that is the most inward achievement of the relation in education.’ But this means that the teacher must be really there facing the child, not merely there in spirit. ‘In order to be and to remain truly present to the child he must have gathered the child’s presence into his own store as one of the bearers of his communion with the world, one of the focuses of his responsibilities for the world.’ (Ibid., p. 98.)

What is most essential in the teacher’s meeting with the pupil is that he experience the pupil from the other side. If this experiencing is quite real and concrete, it removes the danger that the teacher’s will to educate will degenerate into arbitrariness. This ‘inclusiveness’ is of the essence of the dialogical relation, for the teacher sees the position of the other in his concrete actuality yet does not lose sight of his own. Unlike friendship, however, this inclusiveness must be largely one-sided: the pupil cannot equally well see the teacher’s point of view without the teaching relationship being destroyed. Inclusiveness must return again and again in the teaching situation, for it not only regulates but constitutes it. Through discovering the ‘otherness’ of the pupil the teacher discovers his own real limits, but also through this discovery he recognizes the forces of the world which the child needs to grow and he draws those forces into himself. Thus, through his concern with the child, the teacher educates himself. (Ibid., pp. 96-101)

In his essays on education Buber points to a genuine third alternative to the either-or’s of conflicting modern educational philosophies. The two attitudes of the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ educators which Buber cited in 1926 are still dominant in educational theory and practice today. On the one hand, there are those who emphasize the importance of ‘objective’ education to be obtained through the teaching of Great Books, classical tradition, or technical knowledge. On the other, there are those who emphasize the subjective side of knowledge and look on education as the development of creative powers or as the ingestion of the environment in accordance with subjective need or interest. Like idealism and materialism, these two types of educational theory represent partial aspects of the whole. Looking at education in terms of the exclusive dominance of the subject-object relationship; they either picture it as the passive reception of tradition poured in from above -- in Buber’s terms, the ‘funnel’ -- or as drawing forth the powers of the self -- the ‘pump.’ (Ibid., p. 89) Only the philosophy of dialogue makes possible an adequate picture of what does in fact take place: the pupil grows through his encounter with the person of the teacher and the Thou of the writer. In this encounter the reality which the teacher and writer present to him comes alive for him: it is transformed from the potential, the abstract, and the unrelated to the actual, concrete, and present immediacy of a personal and even, in a sense, a reciprocal relationship. This means that no real learning takes place unless the pupil participates, but it also means that the pupil must encounter something really ‘other’ than himself before he can learn.

The old, authoritarian theory of education does not understand the need for freedom and spontaneity. But the new, freedom-centered educational theory misunderstands the meaning of freedom, which is indispensable but not in itself sufficient for true education. The opposite of compulsion is not freedom but communion, says Buber, and this communion comes about through the child’s first being free to venture on his own and then encountering the real values of the teacher. The teacher presents these values in the form of a lifted finger or subtle hint rather than as an imposition of the ‘right,’ and the pupil learns from this encounter because he has first experimented himself. The doing of the teacher proceeds, moreover, out of a concentration which has the appearance of rest. The teacher who interferes divides the soul into an obedient and a rebellious part, but the teacher who has integrity integrates the pupil through his actions and attitudes. The teacher must be ‘wholly alive and able to communicate himself directly to his fellow beings,’ but he must do this, in so far as possible, with no thought of affecting them. He is most effective when he ‘is simply there’ without any arbitrariness or conscious striving for effectiveness, for then what he is in himself is communicated to his pupils. (Between Man and Man, ‘Education,’ pp. 83-90) Intellectual instruction is by no means unimportant, but it is only really important when it arises as an expression of a real human existence. As Marjorie Reeves has shown in her application of Buber’s I-Thou philosophy to education, the whole concept of the ‘objectivity’ of education is called in question by the fact that our knowledge of things is for the most part mediated through the minds of others and by the fact that real growth takes place ‘through the impact of person on person.’ (Marjorie Reeves’ Growing up in a Modern Society (London: University of London Press, 1946), pp. 9-12; cf. pp. 34-38.)

Two well-known English thinkers, one a leading educator, and the other a prominent poet and writer, each make Buber’s essay on ‘Education’ the centre of a book on that subject. One of these writers obviously proceeds from the side of the older education with its emphasis on absolute values, the other from the side of the newer education with its emphasis on freedom and relativity of values; yet they are in virtually complete agreement in their acceptance of Buber’s thought about education.

Sir Fred Clarke states in Freedom in the Educative Society that while the popular educational theory in England is that of ‘development,’ the popular practice is that of an imposed code. Following Buber, he redefines education as the creative conquest of freedom through tension and responsibility. Freedom is the goal and discipline is the strategy. This does not mean imposing from above or converting persons into instruments but the recognition that education is releasing of instinct plus encounter. Educational discipline, Clarke says, is just that selection of the effective world by the teacher which Buber has outlined. The teacher concentrates and presents in himself a construct of the world, and this must be understood as a practical artistic activity, not as a technique. The teacher is disinterested, yet he is very much a self, for he is a living embodiment of a world rather than an abstract social code or system of morality. (Sir Fred Clarke, Freedom in the Educative Society, Educational Issues of Today, ed. by W. R. Niblett [London: University of London Press, 1946], pp. 53-67.)

Clarke stresses that Buber’s secret lies not in any science of teaching or philosophy of education but in the supreme artistry that teaching demands in practice. He is joined in this emphasis by Sir Herbert Read, who reports in Education Through Art that his visits to the art classes in a great many schools have shown that good results depend on right atmosphere and that right atmosphere is the creation of the teacher. The creation of this atmosphere, according to Read, depends above all upon the gift of ‘enveloping’ the pupil which Buber has defined. Here Read is referring not only to the teacher’s selective embodiment of the world but also to his experiencing the teaching process from the pupil’s as well as from his own side. He agrees with Buber and Clarke that it is not the free exercise of instinct that matters but the opposition that it encounters, and he states further that the whole structure of education envisaged in his book depends on a conception of the teacher similar to that of Buber. According to Read, Buber’s conception completes the psychological analyses of the child made by such psychologists as Trigant Burrows, Ian Suttie, and Jean Piaget. It avoids the taboo on tenderness on the one hand and undue pampering on the other. It can thus play a part in the ‘psychic weaning’ of the child, for it gives us a new, more constructive conception of tenderness. (Ibid., p. 68; Sir Herbert Read, Education Through Art (New York: Pantheon Books, 1945), 2nd Ed., pp. 279-289.)

Read loses sight of Buber’s concept of dialogue, however, when he suggests that Buber’s teaching shows how to replace the inter-individual tensions of the classroom by ‘an organic mode of adaptation to the social organism as a whole’ and when he reinterprets the teacher’s concentration of an effective world as a selective screen in which what is kept in and what is left out is determined by the organic social pattern through the medium of the teacher’s ‘sense of a total organism’s feeling-behaviour.’ (Education Through Art, p. 287 ff.) Buber does indeed point a way out of both isolated individualism and the ‘oppositeness’ between the pupil and the teacher. He does so, however, not through any attempt to recapture organic wholeness in the classroom nor through any positing of organic wholeness in society, but through the dialogical relation in which the I and the Thou remain separate and really ‘other’ beings.

The task of the educator, writes Buber, is to bring the individual face to face with God through making him responsible for himself rather than dependent for his decisions upon any organic or collective unity. Education worthy of the name is essentially education of character. The concern of the educator is always with the person as a whole both in his present actuality and his future possibilities. The teacher’s only access to the wholeness of the pupil is through winning his confidence, and this is done through his direct and ingenuous participation in the lives of his pupils and through his acceptance of responsibility for this participation. Feeling that the teacher accepts him before desiring to influence him, the pupil learns to ask. This confidence does not imply agreement, however, and it is in conflict with the pupil that the teacher meets his supreme test. He may not hold back his own insights, yet he must stand ready to comfort the pupil if he is conquered or, if he cannot conquer him, to bridge the difficult situation with a word of love. Thus the ‘oppositeness’ between teacher and pupil need not cease, but it is enclosed in relation and so does not degenerate into a battle of wills. Everything that passes between such a teacher and a pupil may be educative, for ‘it is not the educational intention but . . . the meeting which is educationally fruitful.’ (Between Man and Man, ‘The education of Character,’ pp. 103-108)

There are two basic ways by which one may influence the formation of the minds and lives of others, writes Buber. In the first, one imposes one’s opinion and attitude on the other in such a way that his psychic action is really one’s own. In the second, one discovers and nourishes in the soul of the other what one has recognized in oneself as the right. Because it is the right, it must also be living in the other as a possibility among possibilities, a potentiality which only needs to be unlocked -- unlocked not through instruction but through meeting, through the existential communication between one who has found direction and one who is finding it.

The first way is most highly developed in propaganda, the second in education. The propagandist is not really concerned with the person whom he wishes to influence. Some of this person’s individual properties are of importance to the propagandist, but only in so far as they can be exploited for his purposes. The educator, in contrast, recognizes each of his pupils as a single, unique person, the bearer of a special task of being which can be fulfilled through him and through him alone. He has learned to understand himself as the helper of each in the inner battle between the actualizing forces and those which oppose them. But he cannot desire to impose on the other the product of his own struggle for actualization, for he believes that the right must be realized in each man in a unique personal way. The propagandist does not trust his cause to take effect out of its own power without the aid of the loudspeaker, the spotlight, and the television screen. The true educator, in contrast, believes in the power which is scattered in all human beings in order to grow in each to a special form. He has confidence that all that this growth needs is the help which he is at times called to give through his meeting with this person who is entrusted to his care.(‘Elements of the Interhuman’ op. cit., p. 110 f.)

The significance for education of Buber’s distinction between propaganda and legitimate influence can hardly be overestimated. The ordinary approaches to this problem have tended to be anxious and unfruitful. One of these is the desire to safeguard the student by demanding of the teacher an illusory objectivity, as if the teacher had no commitment to a certain field of knowledge, to a method of approaching this field, and to a set of attitudes and value assumptions which are embodied in the questions which he raises. It is also impossible to safeguard the student by any distinctions in content, such as what is ‘progressive’ and what is ‘reactionary,’ what is ‘patriotic’ and what is ‘subversive,’ what is in the spirit of science and what is not. These are in essence distinctions between the propaganda of which one approves and the propaganda of which one disapproves. They betray a lack of real faith in the student as a person who must develop his own unique relation to the truth. The true alternative to false objectivity and to standards set from the outside is not, of course, that subjectivity which imprisons the teacher within his own attachments or the absence of any value standards. It is the teacher’s selection of the effective world and the act of inclusion, or experiencing the other side, to which Buber has pointed.

The real choice, then, does not lie between a teacher’s having values and not having them, but between his imposing those values on the student and his allowing them to come to flower in the student in a way which is appropriate to the student’s personality. One of the most difficult problems which any modern teacher encounters is that of cultural relativism. The mark of our time, writes Buber, is the denial that values are anything other than the subjective needs of groups. This denial is not a product of reason but of the sickness of our age; hence it is futile to meet it with arguments. All that the teacher can do is to help keep awake in the pupil the pain which he suffers through his distorted relation to his own self and thus awaken his desire to become a real and whole person. The teacher can do this best of all when he recognizes that his real goal is the education of great character. Character cannot be understood in Kerschensteiner’s terms as an organization of self-control by means of the accumulation of maxims nor in Dewey’s terms as a system of interpenetrating habits. The great character acts from the whole of his substance and reacts in accordance with the uniqueness of every situation. He responds to the new face which each situation wears despite all similarity to others. The situation ‘demands nothing of what is past. It demands presence, responsibility; it demands you.’ (Between Man and Man, ‘The Educational Character,’ pp. 108-116) The teacher is not faced with a choice between educating the occasional great character and the many who will not be great. It is precisely through his insight into the structure of the great character that he finds the way by which alone he can influence the victims of collectivism. He can awaken in them the desire to shoulder responsibility again by bringing before them ‘the image of a great character who denies no answer to life and the world, but accepts responsibility for everything essential that he meets.’ (Ibid., pp. 113-116)

Just what this attitude toward the education of character means in practice is best shown by Buber’s own application of it to adult education. He conceives of adult education not as an extension of the professional training of the universities but as a means of creating a certain type of man demanded by a certain historical situation. The great need in the state of Israel today is the integration into one whole of the peoples of very different backgrounds and levels of culture who have immigrated there. To meet this need Buber has set up and directed an institute for adult education which devotes itself solely to the training of teachers to go out into the immigration camps and live with the people there. To produce the right kind of teacher the institute has developed a method of teaching based on personal contact and on living together in community. Instruction is not carried on in general classes but individually in accordance with what each person needs. (From an informal address by Professor Buber on ‘Adult Education in Israel,’ edited by me from a transcript of the recording and published in Torch, the Magazine of the National Federation of Jewish Men’s Clubs of the United Synagogue of America, June 1952.) The education of these future teachers toward the task which lies ahead of them would be impossible if the teacher were not in a position to get to know the students individually and to establish contact with every one of them. ‘What is sought is a truly reciprocal conversation in which both sides are full partners.’ The teacher leads and directs this conversation, and enters it without any restraint. The teacher should ask genuine questions to which he does not know the full answer himself, and the student in turn should give the teacher information concerning his experiences and opinions. Conversely, when the teacher is asked a question by the student, his reply should proceed from the depths his own personal experience. (Martin Buber, ‘A New Venture in Adult Education,’ The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Semi-Jubilee Volume [Jerusalem: The Hebrew University, April 1950] p. 117 f.)

In order to be able to teach in an immigration camp, the student has. to learn to live with people in all situations of their lives, and for this. reason the teachers at the institute are prepared to deal with the person lives of the students. This concern with the students’ personal lives do’ not mean that the students do not learn the classics, Jewish and otherwise, but they do so in order that they may become whole persons able to influence others and not for the knowledge itself. ‘Adult education is concerned with character,’ says Buber, ‘and character is not above situation, but is attached to the cruel, hard demand of this hour.’ (‘Adult Education in Israel,’ op. cit ).

‘I have no inclination to systematizing,’ Buber has said, ‘but I am of course and by necessity a philosophizing man.’ (From a letter from Professor Buber to me of August 11, 1951.) The real opposition for Buber is not between philosophy and religion, as it at first appears to be, but between that philosophy which sees the absolute in universals and hence removes reality into the systematic and the abstract and that which means the bond of the absolute with the particular and hence points man back to the reality of the lived concrete -- to the immediacy of real meeting with the beings over against one. (Cf. Eclipse of God, op. cit., ‘Religion and Philosophy,’ pp. 44 ff., 49 f., 53-63.) Human truth is participation in Being, writes Buber, not conformity between a proposition and that to which the proposition refers. It cannot claim universal validity yet it can be exemplified and symbolized in actual life.

In existential thinking man vouches for his word with his life and stakes his life in his thought. ‘Only through personal responsibility can man find faith in the truth as independent of him and enter into a real relation with it.’ The man who thinks ‘existentially’ brings the unconditioned nature of man into his relation with the world. He pledges himself to the truth and verifies it by being true himself. (Between Man and Man, ‘The Question to the Single One,’ p. 81 f.; Images of Good and Evil, p. 55 f.)

Many who see the importance of Buber’s thought for such realms as ethics and religion fail to see its radical significance for epistemology, or theory of knowledge, and many criticize it on the basis of other, incompatible epistemologies without knowing that they are doing so. The significance of Buber’s theory of knowledge lies in the fact that it expresses and answers the felt need of many in this age to break through to a more humanly realistic account of the way in which we know. The independent springing up of other writers who have sought to answer this need in a similar way is as much a testimony to the significance of the general trend of Buber’s thought as is the rapidly increasing number of thinkers who have been directly or indirectly influenced by him.

(Among those who have been particularly influenced by Buber in their epistemology are Gaston Bachelard, John Baillie, Ludwig Binswanger, Emil Brunner Friedrich Gogarten, Karl Heim, Hermann von Keyserling, and, in part, Nicholas Berdyaev and Dorothy Emmet. [Cf. John Baillie, Our Knowledge of God {New York: Scribners, 1939}], pp. 161, 201-216, Gaston Bachelard, ‘Preface’ to Je et Tu trans. from Ich und Du by Geneviève Bianquis, pp. 7-15, Ludwig Binswanger, Grundformen und Erkenntnis menschlichen Daseins [Zurich: Max Nichans Verlag, 1942]; Emil Brunner, Christianity and Civilisation, Gifford Lectures of 1947, First Part: Foundations [London: Nisbet & Co., 1948], chap. iii -- ‘The Problem of Truth’ Emil Brunner, Wahrheit als Begagnung, Friedrich Gogarten, Ich glaube an den dreieinigen Gott; Karl Heim, Glaube und Denken and God Transcendent; Graf Hermann Keyserling, Das Buch vom Ursprung, chaps. ‘Das Zwischenreich’ and ‘Instinkt und Intuition’; Nicholas Berdyaev, Solitude and Society, trans. by George Reavey [London: Geoffrey Bles, 1938], ‘Third Meditation, The Ego, Solitude and Society,’ especially pp. 67-85; Dorothy M. Emmet, The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking [London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1949], chaps. iii, ix, x, especially pp. 207-215. See also Leslie Allen Paul, The Meaning of Human Existence [Philadelphia&New York: J. P. Lippincott Co., 1950], chaps. iv and v. Where facts of publication are not given above, see Bibliography section -- ‘Works other than Buber’s on Dialogue and the I-Thou Relation.’)

(Those who have arrived at a dialogical or I-Thou philosophy independently of Buber and without influencing him include Ferdinand Ebuer, Eberhard Grisebach, Karl Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel, Eugene Rosenstock-Huessy, Franz Rosenzweig, and Max Scheler. The thought of Marcel, the French Catholic existentialist, bears remarkable resemblance to Buber’s even in its terminology, but, according to Marcel’s own statement to Buber when they met in Paris in 1950, he was not influenced by Buber’s Ich und Du in writing his Journal Métaphysique. On the other hand, it is incomprehensible that I. M. Bochenski speaks of Marcel’s use of the I-Thou philosophy as ‘eigenartig’ -- peculiar to Marcel -- and does not even mention Buber or Ferdinand Ebuer, both of whom wrote in German several years before Marcel’s earliest writing on ‘je et toi.’ [Cf. Innocentius M. Bochenski, Europäische Philosophie der Gegenwart {Bern: A. Francke Verlag, 1947}, pp. 178-185, in particular p. 184. Bochenski mentions Buber in the 2nd edition, but inadequately.] The merging of Marcel’s and Buber’s influence can be seen in Maurice Nédoncelle, La Réciprocité des Consciences [Paris: Aubier, Editions Montaignes, 1942]. Aubier, Editions Montaigne also published Marcel’s Étre et Avoir [1935] and Homo Viator [1944] and Je et Tu, the French translation of Buber’s I and Thou [1938]. (Cf. Ferdinand Ebner, Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten; Gabriel Marcel, Journal Métaphysique, 2nd Part; Marcel, Being and Having, pp. 104-111, 149-168, 233-239; Paul Ricaeur, Gabriel Marcel et Karl Jaspers, pp. 151-185, and especially Part II, chap. ii, ‘Le "toi" et la "communication"’;

Eberhard Grisebach, Gegenwart. Eine kritische Ethik; Karl Jaspers, Philosophie 11, Existenzerhellung; Jaspers, The Perennial Scope of Philosophy, trans. by Ralph Manheim [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950]; Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Angewandte Seelenkunde; Franz Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlösung.] For facts of publication not given see Bibliography, Section -- ‘Works other than Buber’s on Dialogue and the I-Thou Relation.’)

(For resumés, discussions, and attempted syntheses of the general trend in the direction of a dialogical theory of knowing, cf. Rosenstock-Huessy, Der Atem des Geistes, Part I, ‘Eine neue Wissenschaft,’ esp. chap. i and Bibliography; Rosenzweig, ‘Das neue Denken’; Baillie ,Our Knowledge of God, chap. v, # 17, ‘The World of Others’; John Cullberg, Das Du und die Wirklichkeit [Uppsala: Uppsala Universitets, 1933, Vol. D, Part I, ‘Historisch-Kritischer Teil,’chaps. i-iv; Hermann Levin-Goldschmidt, Philosophie als Dialogik, first half and Bibliography; Simon Maringer, Martin Bubers Metaphysik der Dialogik im Zusammenhang neuerer philosophischer und theologischer Strömungen [Köln: Buchdruckerei Steiner, Ulrichgasse, 1936] and Buber’s ‘Nachwort’ to Die Schriften über das Dialogische Prinzip, op. cit. This ‘Nachwort’ is Buber’s only historical treatmed of the movement and his place in it. His critique of Jaspers and Grisebach is of especial importance).

In its traditional form epistemology has always rested on the exclusive reality of the subject-object relationship. If one asks how the subject knows the object, one has in brief form the essence of theory of knowledge from Plato to Bergson; the differences between the many schools of philosophy can all be understood as variations on this theme. There are, first of all, differences in emphasis as to whether the subject or the object is the more real -- as in rationalism and empiricism, idealism and materialism, personalism and logical positivism. There are differences, secondly, as to the nature of the subject, which is variously regarded as pure consciousness, will to life, will to power, the scientific observer, or the intuitive knower. There are differences, thirdly, as to the nature of the object -- whether it is material reality, thought in the mind of God or man, pantheistic spiritual substance, absolute and eternal mystical Being, or simply something which we cannot know in itself but upon which we project our ordered thought categories of space, time, and causation. There are differences, finally, as to the relation between subject and object: whether the object is known through dialectical or analytical reasoning, scientific method, phenomenological insight into essence, or some form of direct intuition.

Buber’s ‘I-Thou’ philosophy cuts underneath all of these distinctions to establish the ‘I-Thou’ relation as an entirely other way of knowing, yet one from which the I-It, or subject-object, relation is derived. Buber agrees with Kant that we cannot know any object in itself apart from its relation to a knowing subject. At the same time, through the presentness and concreteness of the meeting with the ‘other,’ Buber avoids the pitfalls of the idealist who removes reality into the knowing subject, of Descartes who abstracts the subject into isolated consciousness, and of Kant who asserts that we cannot know reality but only the categories of our thought.

Although the I-Thou relation was independently discovered by others, some even before Buber, it is he who gave it its classical form, and it is he also who clarified the difference between the I-Thou and the I-It relations and worked out the implications of this distinction in a systematic and thorough-going fashion. The German theologian Karl Heim has spoken of this distinction between I-Thou and I-It as ‘one of the decisive discoveries of our time’ -- ‘the Copernican revolution’ of modern thought. When this new conception has reached fuller clarity, it must lead, writes Heim, ‘to a second new beginning of European thought pointing beyond the Cartesian contribution to modern philosophy.’ (Heim, Glaube und Denken, 1st ed., p. 405 ff.; Heim, Ontologie und Theologie, Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, neue Folge XI (1930), p. 333.)

Buber’s I-Thou philosophy implies a different view of our knowledge of our selves, other selves, and the external world than any of the traditional subject-object theories. From Buber’s basic premise, ‘As I become I, I say Thou,’ it follows that our belief in the reality of the external world comes from our relation to other selves. This view is also held by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Ludwig Feuerbach, Ferdinand Ebuer, Gabriel Marcel, Max Scheler, Karl Löwith, and many others. (Ludwig Feuerbach, Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft [1843], # 64-66; Karl Löwith, Das Individuum in der Rolle der Mitmenschen, Ein Beitrag zur anthropologischen Grundlegung der ethischen Probleme [Munich: Drei Masken Verlag, 1928]. On Jacobi see Buber’s ‘Nachwort’ to Die Schriften über das dialogische Prinzip, p. 287 f. See p. 162, n. 1, above.) This social conception of knowledge is of fundamental significance because it means a complete reversal of the former direction of thought which derived the relation between persons from the relation of the knowing subject to the external world. According to this earlier and still popular way of thinking, we know the external world of the senses directly and other selves only mediately and by analogy. Thus it is thought that the child has direct knowledge of material things through his senses and that through the smiles and gestures of other persons (originally associated with his desire to make use of them) he arrives at a knowledge of them as persons. These theories overlook the fact that the I is not an I, the self not a self, except through its meeting with the Thou. The feral child brought up by the wolves has a human body and originally a human brain, but it is not human: it does not have that distance from the world and other selves which is a necessary presupposition for its entering into relation with a Thou and becoming an I. The child who does come to know others as persons does so through his meeting with persons and through the innate potentiality of becoming a person through meeting (this is what Buber means by speaking of the ‘inborn’ and ‘a priori’ Thou). It is only because the meeting of the I and the Thou precedes the child’s awareness of himself as I that he is able to infer the meaning of the actions of others. (I and Thou, p. 27, Baillie op. cit., pp. 207-218; Herbert H. Farmer, The World and God [London: Nisbet & Co., 1935], pp. 13-19; Heim, Glaube und Denken, pp. 252-269, God Transcendent, pp. 9l-101; Paul, The Meaning of Human Existence, pp. 130-140.)

On the basis of his relationship with others, the child then comes to a knowledge of the external world, that is, through his social relationships he receives those categories that enable him to see the world as an ordered continuum of knowable and passive objects. This is the process which Buber has described as the movement of the child from the I-Thou to an I-It relation with people and things. The child establishes what is ‘objective’ reality for him through the constant comparison of his perceptions with those of others. This dialogue with others is often a purely technical one and hence itself belongs to the world of I-It, but the compelling conviction of reality which it produces is entirely dependent upon the prior (if forgotten) reality of the meeting with the Thou.

In pointing to the prior reality of I-Thou knowing, Buber is not setting forth a dualism such as is implied by Nicholas Berdyaev’s rejection of the world of social objectification in favour of existential subjectivity or Ferdinand Ebner’s relegation of mathematical thinking to the province of the pure isolated I (‘Icheinsamkeit’). (Cf. Berdyaev, Solitudeand Society and Slavery and Freedom; Ebner, Das Wortund die geistigen Realitäten, p. 16 and chap. xii -- ‘Das mathematische Denken und das Ich’) To Buber I-Thou and I-It alternate with each other in integral relation. It is important, on the other hand, not to lose sight of the fact that though the world of It is a social world which is derived from the world of Thou, it often sets itself up as the final reality. Its sociality, as a result, becomes largely ‘technical dialogue’ with the social understood either as an organic, objective whole or as the mere communication and interaction between human beings who may in fact relate to each other largely as Its. Here is where Buber’s terminology shows itself as clearer than Heidegger’s ‘Dasein ist Mitsein’ (existence is togetherness) and Marcel’s understanding of knowledge as the third-personal object of the dialogue between a first and a second person. Both of these thinkers tend to confuse the social nature of I-Thou with the social nature of I-It, the reality of true dialogue with the indirect togetherness of ordinary social relations. (Marcel, Journal Métaphysique, pp. 136-144; Löwith, op. cit., Sec. II -- ‘Strukturanalyse des Miteinanderseins,; Cullberg, Das Du und die Wirklichkeit, chaps. iv, vii-x. Heim, Glaube und Denken, pp. 342-349. The attempts of Löwith, Heim, Cullberg and others to combine Heidegger’s ontology with the I-Thou relation are essentially vitiated by the basic difference between this ontology and that underlying a thoroughgoing dialogical philosophy. This has become increasingly clear as Buber has developed and made explicit his own ontology in ‘What Is Man?’ [Between Man and Man] and ‘Distance and Relation.’ See Buber’s critique of Heidegger in ‘What Is Man?’ [Between Man and Man, pp. 163-181] and ‘Religion and Modern Thinking, [Eclipse of God, pp. 94-104].)

The I-Thou relation is a direct knowing which gives one neither knowledge about the Thou over against one nor about oneself as an objective entity apart from this relationship. It is ‘the genuinely reciprocal meeting in the fullness of life between one active existence and another.’ (Eclipse of God, ‘Religion and Philosophy,’ p. 46.) Although this dialogical knowing is direct, it is not entirely unmediated. The directness of the relationship is established not only through the mediation of the senses, e.g. the concrete meeting of real living persons, but also through the mediation of the ‘word,’ i.e. the mediation of those technical means and those fields of symbolic communication, such as language, music, art, and ritual, which enable men ever again to enter into relation with that which is over against them. The ‘word’ may be identified with subject-object, or I-It, knowledge while it remains indirect and symbolic, but it is itself the channel and expression of I-Thou knowing when it is taken up into real dialogue.

Subject-object, or I-It, knowledge is ultimately nothing other than the socially objectivized and elaborated product of the real meeting which takes place between man and his Thou in the realms of nature, social relations, and art. As such, it provides those ordered categories of thought which are, together with dialogue, primal necessities of human existence. But as such also, it may be, like the indirect and objective ‘word,’ the symbol of true dialogue. It is only when the symbolical character of subject-object knowledge is forgotten or remains undiscovered (as is often the case) that this ‘knowledge’ ceases to point back toward the reality of direct dialogical knowing and becomes instead an obstruction to it. When I-It blocks the return to I-Thou, it poses as reality itself: it asserts that reality is ultimately of the nature of abstract reason or objective category and that it can be understood as something external, clearly defined, and entirely ‘objective.’

When this has taken place, the true nature of knowledge as communication -- as the ‘word’ which results from the relation of two separate existing beings -- is forgotten. ‘Words’ are taken to be entities independent of the dialogue between man and man and the meeting between man and nature, and they are either understood as expressions of universal ideas existing in themselves or as nominative designations for entirely objective empirical reality. The latter way of seeing words attempts to separate the object from the knowing subject, to reduce words to sheer denotation, and to relegate all ‘connotations’ and all that is not ‘empirically verifiable’ to subjective emotion or ‘poetic truth.’ The former retains the true symbolic character of the ‘word’ as something more than a conventional sign and as something which does refer to a true order of being, but it misunderstands the nature of the symbol as giving indirect knowledge of an object rather than as communicating the relation between one existing being and another. Metaphysical analogies, as Dorothy Emmet has shown, are analogies between relationships rather than between one object which is familiar and known as it is in itself and one which is either abstract or unknown. (Emmet, The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking, chaps. v, ix. On ‘the Word’ see Emmet, pp. 224-227; Ebner, op. cit., chaps. ii-viii, x-xiv; Rosenstock-Huessy, Angewandte Seelenkunde and Das Atem der Geistes, Romano Guardini, Welt und Person [Wurzburg; Wekbund-Verlag, 1950], pp. 107-111; Löwith, op. cit., 2. Abschnitt, ‘Miteinandersein als Miteinander Sprechen,’ # 24-32.) A symbol is not a concrete medium for the knowledge of some universal, if not directly knowable reality -- though this is the way in which most writers on symbolism from Plato and Plotinus to Urban, Coomaraswamy, and Jung have treated it. (Cf. Wilbur Marshal Urban, Language and Reality [New York: Macmillan co. 1939], Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Hinduism and Buddhism; Carl G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul [1932], Psychology and Religion [1938], The Integration of the Personality [1940], and The Secret of the Golden Flower [with Richard Wilhelm] [1931]. It is instead a mythical or conceptual representation of a concrete reality. It is first of all the product of the real meeting in the actual present of two separate beings; only when it becomes abstract and universalized is that meeting forgotten.

The difference between Buber’s understanding of the symbol and that of the modern logical positivist, who also rejects Platonic universals, can be seen most clearly in Buber’s use of the term ‘signs.’ Buber, as we have seen, portrays the total moral action in terms of ‘becoming aware’ of the ‘signs’ and responding to them. The ‘signs’ are just everything which we meet, but seen as something really addressing us, rather than as objective phenomena. A ‘sign’ is ordinarily defined as a conventional or arbitrary symbol whereby everybody may derive the same meaning from a thing, and this is the meaning which the logical positivist gives to ‘symbol.’ This would apply equally to red lights, algebraic symbols, and the prediction of future events on the basis of tea leaves or the stars. What Buber means by ‘sign’ in contrast, is something which does not speak to everybody but just to the one who sees that it ‘says’ something to him. Moreover, the same thing may ‘say’ different things to different people, and to a man who rests content to be an ‘observer’ it will say nothing at all. This ‘saying’ is thus nothing other than the ‘I-Thou’ relation whether it be the full, reciprocal I-Thou relation between men or the less complete and non-reciprocal relation with nature or in artistic creation and appreciation. Our inherited mechanisms of defence protect us from seeing the signs as really addressing us. ‘Becoming aware’ is the openness which puts aside this perfected shell in favour of true presentness, that is, of being willing to see each new event as something which is, despite all resemblance to what has gone before, unique and unexpected. (Between Man and Man, ‘Dialogue,’ pp. 10-13, The Education of Character,’ p. 113 f.)

One must understand the full significance of this presentness if one is to understand the symbolic function and the dependent and mediate reality of the I-It relation (Karl Heim has made Buber’s distinction between the presentness of the l-Thou relation and the pastness of I-It the basis for his whole philosophy of dimensions and hence in turn of his theology. He has shown the way in which the present flows into the past and from this the way in which what has become past may again become present reality. He has misunderstood the full significance of Buber’s distinction, however, when he identifies the present with the I and the past with the It -- and an important part of his epistemology is based on this identificafion. [Glaube und Denken, 1st ed., chap. iii, pp. 200-278; God Transcendent, chaps. iv-v.] Real presentness cannot be identified with the I, for the I does not exist in itself, but only in relation to a Thou or an It. Presentness exists, moreover, not in the I but between the I and the Thou. I-It, on the other hand, is always past, always ‘already become,’ and this means that the I of the l-It relation is as much a part of the past as the ‘object, which it knows.) What takes place in the present is ordered through the abstracting function of I-It into the world of categories -- of space and time, cause and effect. We usually think of these categories as reality itself, but they are actually merely the symbolic representation of what has become. Even our predictions of the future actually belong to the world of the past, for they are generalizations based on the assumptions of unity, continuity, cause and effect, and the resemblance of the future to the past. Nor does the partial success of these predictions show that we have real knowledge of the future, for we do not know this ‘future’ until it is already past, that is, until it has been registered in the categories of our knowledge-world.

It is the presentness of the I-Thou relation which shows most clearly the logical impossibility of criticizing I-Thou knowing on the basis of any system of I-It. Although psychology, for example, may show that many human relations which are thought genuine are actually neurotic projections from the past and hence I-It, it cannot question the fundamental reality of the I-Thou relation nor establish any external, ‘objectively’ valid criteria as to which relations are I-Thou and which I-It. The reason it cannot do this is that it is itself an ordered system of knowledge. As such, it observes its phenomena after they have already taken their place in the categories of human knowing. Also, in so far as it is scientific, it excludes the really direct and present knowing of I-Thou. This knowing, when it reaches its full development in ‘seeing the other,’ or making the other present (which surely happens again and again in really effective psychotherapy), is itself the ultimate criterion for the reality of the I-Thou relation.

The presentness of the I-Thou relation is also fatal to the attempt of logical positivism to relegate ethics, religion, and poetry to subjective emotion without real knowledge value. Seen in the light of Buber’s dialogical philosophy, this is nothing other than the attempt of subject-object, or I-It, knowledge to dismiss the ontological reality of the I-Thou knowing from which it derives its own existence. This means that it judges the present entirely by the past as if there were no present reality until that reality had become past and therefore capable of being dealt with in our thought categories. It also means that it abstracts the knowing subject from his existence as a person in relation to other persons and then attempts to establish an ‘objective’ impersonal knowledge abstracted from even that knowing subject.

Still another illustration of the importance of the distinction between the presentness of true becoming and the pastness of having become is the tendency of many thinkers to identify the inheritance of tradition with the forms into which tradition has cast itself. (See, for example, T. S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition Of Culture [New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951].) On the basis of a misleading biological analogy, they think of society, the family, the church, or the law as a living organism and of the individuals of the past, present, and future as cells in this organism. This way of thinking is a distortion of the true way in which tradition is actually inherited, namely through each individual’s making that part of the tradition his own which comes alive for him as Thou. What is more, the fact that it is a distortion is hidden by the false appearance of presentness and dynamism which the biological analogy lends. This analogy, like all social application of evolutionism, is actually entirely a matter of the past and of static categories of cause and effect -- in other words of the I-It, or subject-object, way of knowing.

The contrast between the presentness of I-Thou and the pastness of I-It also provides us with a key to the most misunderstood and most often criticized part of Buber’s I-Thou philosophy -- his assertion of the reality of the I-Thou relation with nature. (John Cullberg has cited this part of Buber’s thought as proof that he still posits a mystical or aesthetic unity which in fact negates the true ‘otherness’ of the Thou. Hermann Levin-Goldschmidt has used it to prove that although Buber talks of dialogue, he has not in fact left the mystical monologue which projects a Thou on to things which obviously cannot be a Thou. [Cullberg, op. cit., pp. 39-46, 162-167; Hermann Levin-Goldschmidt, Hermann Cohen und Martin Buber, Ein Jahrhundert Ringen um jüdische Wirklichkeit, Geneva: Editions Migdal, 1946, pp. 72-76].) What Buber’s critics on this point overlook is that the reason that objects are It to us and not Thou is that they have already been enregistered in the subject-object world of the past. We think that we know the ‘real’ objects although usually we know them only indirectly and conceptually through the categories of I-It. Consequently, we find it difficult to understand Buber’s meaning when he says in ‘Dialogue’ that all things ‘say’ something to us. Similarly, because we tend to associate ‘person’ with the human body-mind individual abstracted from his relation to the Thou, we forget that he is only a ‘person’ when he is actually or potentially in such a relation and that the term ‘personal’ applies as much to the relationship itself as to the members of the relation. As a result, we cannot help suspecting Buber of ‘animism’ or mystical ‘projection’ when he speaks of an I-Thou relation with non-human existing beings: we can only imagine such a relation as possible with things that have minds and bodies similar to ours and in addition possess the consciousness of being an I.

In the presentness of meeting, however, are included all those things which we see in their uniqueness and for their own selves, and not as already filtered through our mental categories for purposes of knowledge or use. In this presentness it is no longer true (as it obviously is in the ‘having become’ world of active subject and passive object) that the existing beings over against us cannot in some sense move to meet us as we them. Because these existing beings are real, we can feel the impact of their active reality even though we cannot know them as they are in themselves or describe that impact apart from our relation to it. This ‘impact’ is not that which can be objectively observed by any subject, for in objective observation the activity of the object is actually thought of as part of a causal order in which nothing is really active of itself. It is rather the ‘impact’ of the relation in the present moment between the human I and that non-human existing being which has become real for him as ‘Thou’. This impact makes manifest the only true uniqueness, for that inexhaustible difference between objects which we sometimes loosely call ‘uniqueness’ is really nothing other than a product of our comparison of one object with another and is nothing that exists in the object in itself.

Though natural things may ‘say’ something to us and in that sense have ‘personal’ relations with us, they do not have the continuity, the independence, or the living consciousness and consciousness of self which make up the person. A tree can ‘say’ something to me and become my Thou, but I cannot be a Thou for it. This same impossibility of reciprocity is found in the work of literature and art which becomes Thou for us, and this suggests by analogy that as the poem is the ‘word’ of the poet, so the tree may be the ‘word’ of Being over against us, Being which is more than human yet not less than personal. (Cf. Between Man and Man, ‘Dialogue,’ p. 14 f. 170) This does not mean, however, any monistic or mystical presupposition of unity between subject and object. Quite to the contrary, this view alone allows to non-human existing beings their true ‘otherness’ as something more than the passive objects of our thought categories and the passive tools of our will to use.

Artistic creation and appreciation, like the I-Thou relation with nature, are modified forms of dialogue which by their very nature cannot be reciprocal. The artist, or ‘onlooker’ as Buber calls him, is not intent on analysing and noting traits, as is the observer, but instead sees the object freely ‘and undisturbed awaits what will be presented to him.’ He perceives an existence instead of a sum of traits, and he makes a genuine response to this existence. This response manifests itself as creation of form rather than as an answering with one’s personal existence of that which addresses one. Yet it retains the betweenness, the presentness, and the uniqueness which characterize the true I-Thou relation as distinct from I-It. (Ibid., pp. 8 ff., p. 25)

In his latest writing Buber has laid greater emphasis than ever before on the difference between our knowledge of other persons and our knowledge of things. We have in common with every thing the ability to become an object of observation, but it is the privilege of man, through the hidden action of his being, to be able to impose an insurmountable limit to his objectification. Only as a partner can man be perceived as an existing wholeness. To become aware of a thing or being means, in general, to experience it, in all concreteness, as a whole, yet without abridging abstractions. But man is categorically different from all things and from all non-human beings. Though he is perceivable as a being among beings and even as a thing among things, he cannot really be grasped except from the standpoint of the gift of spirit which is his alone among all things and beings. This spirit cannot be understood in isolation, however, but only as decisively joined in the personal existence of this living being -- the person-defining spirit. To become aware of a man, therefore, means in particular to perceive his wholeness as person defined by spirit: to perceive the dynamic centre which stamps on all his utterances, actions, and attitudes the tangible sign of oneness. Such an awareness is impossible if and so long as the other is for me the detached object of my contemplation or observation, for he will not thus yield his wholeness and its centre. It is only possible when I step into elemental relationship with the other, when he becomes present for me. For this reason, Buber describes awareness in this sense as personale Vergegenwärtigung, making present the person of the other. (‘Elements of the Interhuman,’ op. cit., p. 109 f. 171)

II.

A recognition of the implications of the I-Thou relation for epistemology would not mean a rejection of those essential and eminently useful objective techniques which the social sciences have developed. These sciences cannot dispense with objectification since science as such deals only with objects. However, they can recognize that the discoveries of science are themselves products of true scientific ‘intuition,’ or rather ‘confrontation.’ Objectification necessarily follows this discovery, but it cannot take its place. (From a letter from Professor Buber to the writer, December 4, 1952.) What is necessary, therefore, is that we overcome the tendency to regard the subject-object relation as itself the primary reality. When this false objectification is done away with, the human studies will be in a position to integrate the I-Thou and the subject-object types of knowing. This implies the recognition that subject-object knowledge fulfills its true function only in so far as it retains its symbolic quality of pointing back to the dialogical knowing from which it derives. The way toward this integration has been indicated by Buber himself in his treatment of philosophical anthropology, psychology, education, ethics, social philosophy, myth, and history.

Walter Blumenfeld, in a book based on Buber’s ‘What Is Man?’, suggests that in order to be accepted as valid Buber’s anthropology would have to be grounded on empirical psychology and an objective and scientific hierarchy of values, in other words, on pure subject-object epistemology. (Walter Blumenfeld, La Antropologia Filósofica de Martin Buber y la Filosofia Antropológica, Un Ensayo, Vol. VI of Colección Plena Luz, Pleno Ser [Lima: Sociedad Peruana de Filosofia, Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Publicaciones del Cuarto Centenano, 1951], pp. 18-25, 97-102, 108-113, 120-126, 138, 141-150.) In so doing he fails to see the integral relation between Buber’s anthropology and his I-Thou epistemology. Although philosophical anthropology cannot replace the specific disciplines dealing with the study of man, neither can those disciplines be entirely separated from it. If the basic purpose of the study of man is defined by the image of man as the creature who becomes what only he can become through confronting reality with his whole being, then the specific branches of that study must also include an understanding of man in this way, and this means not only as an object, but also, to begin with, as a Thou.

It may be objected that Buber’s concern for man’s wholeness prejudges the conclusions to be reached or that it is not a ‘value-free’ method. These objections are likely to be reinforced in the minds of those who make them by the qualifications which Buber sets for the philosophical anthropologist: that he must be an individual to whom man’s existence as man has become questionable, that he must have experienced the tension of solitude, and that he must discover the essence of man not as a scientific observer, removed in so far as possible from the object that he observes, but as a participant who only afterwards gains the distance from his subject matter which will enable him to formulate the insights he has attained. (Between Man and Man, ‘What is Man?’, pp. 124 f., 132 f., 180 f., 199 f.)

The tremendous prestige of the scientific method has led many to forget that science investigates man not as a whole but in selective aspects and as part of the natural world. Scientific method is man’s most highly perfected development of the I-It, or subject-object, way of knowing. Its methods of abstracting from the concrete actuality and of largely ignoring the inevitable difference between observers reduce the I in so far as possible to the abstract knowing subject and the It in so far as possible to the passive and abstract object of thought. Just for these reasons scientific method is not qualified to find the wholeness of man. It can compare men with each other and man with animals, but from such comparison and contrast there can only emerge an expanding and contracting scale of similarities and differences. This scale, consequently, can be of aid in categorizing men and animals as differing objects in a world of objects but not in discovering the uniqueness of man as man.

The objections to Buber’s method of knowing what man is stem for the most part from the belief that there is no other way of knowing than the subject-object, or I-It, and hence that any knowing into which the whole man enters must be a poor combination of ‘objectivity’ and ‘subjectivity’ in which subjective emotion corrupts the otherwise objective power of reason. It is, in fact, only the knowing of the I-Thou relation which makes possible the conception of the wholeness of man. Only I-Thou sees this wholeness as the whole person in unreasoned relation with what is over against him rather than as a sum of parts, some of which are labeled objective and hence oriented around the thing known and some subjective and hence oriented around the knower. A great novelist and great psychological observer such as Proust still does not give us the insight into the essence of man that we find in the novels of Dostoievsky and the poetry of Blake. Proust’s world was preponderantly made up of subjective emotions and objective observations, whereas Dostoievsky and Blake first participated fully in what they experienced and only later attained the distance which enabled them to enter into an artistic relationship with it and give it symbolic and artistic expression.

The observation of the social sphere as a whole, the determination of the categories which rule within it, the knowledge of its relations to other spheres of life, and the understanding of the meaning of social existence and happening are and remain philosophical tasks, writes Buber. Philosophy does not exist, however, without the readiness of the philosophizing man to make decisions, on the basis of known truth, as to whether a thought is right or wrong, an action good or bad. Thus philosophical treatment of social conditions and events includes valuation -- criticism and demand. Living social thinking only comes to a person when he really lives with men, when he does not remain a stranger to its group structures or entirely outside its mass movements. Without genuine social binding there is no genuine social experience, and without genuine social experience there is no genuine social thought.

Knowledge, for all this, remains an ascetic act. The knower, to be sure, must enter with his whole being into what he knows; he must bring unabridged into the act of knowing the experience which his binding with the situation presents him. But he must make himself as free from the influence of this binding as he is able through the strongest concentration of spiritual power. If this has taken place, he need not concern himself with the extent to which his knowledge is influenced against his will by his membership in a group. On the basis of knowledge won in this way, the social thinker values and decides, censures and demands, without violating the laws of his science. (Martin Buber, Pointing the Way, ‘The Demand of the Spirit and Historical Reality,’ p. 181)

The participation of the knower in the situation which he knows must not be confused with Bergson’s concept of an absolute intuition which gives man a sympathetic knowledge of the world without any separation from it. Bergson no longer abstracts the subjective consciousness from the full human person nor static concepts from the dynamic stream of time, as did the earlier metaphysicians whom he criticizes, but he fails to see the real difference or distance between the I and the Thou. Metaphysical knowledge, according to him, is obtained through an inward turning: the thinker by discerning the process of duration within himself is able to intuit the absolute reality in other things. (Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. by T. E. Hulme [New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1949].)

Intuition does not set aside the duality between the beholder and that which is beheld, writes Buber. The beholder places himself in the position of the beheld and experiences his especial life, his feelings and drives, from within. That he can do so is explicable through a deep community between the two, but the fact of duality is not thereby weakened. On the contrary, it is just this division of the original community that lays the foundation for the act of intuition. The intuition which enables us to place ourselves within another person may lessen the difference, but it cannot overcome the tension between our image of the person and the factual existing person. Just as in conversation the tension between the meaning which the word I use has for me and that which it has for my partner can prove itself fruitful and lead to a deeper personal understanding, so out of the tension between the image of a person and the existing person a genuine understanding can arise. The fruitful meeting between two men issues in a breakthrough from image to being. The Thou whom I thus meet is no longer a sum of conceptions, nor object of knowledge, but a substance experienced in giving and receiving.

Intellect operates where we know in order to act with some purpose; instinct operates where we act purposefully without needing knowledge; intuition where our whole being becomes one in the act of knowing. Intellect holds us apart from the world which it helps us use; instinct joins us with the world but not as persons; intuition binds us as persons to the world which is over against us without being able to make us one with it. The vision which intuition gives us is, like all our perceptions, a limited one, yet it affords us an intimate glimpse into hidden depths. (Pointing the Way, ‘Bergson’s Concept of Intuition’ [1943], pp. 81-86. After this book was in proof, I received from Professor Buber ‘Der Mensch und sein Gebild,’ a new lecture on the anthropology of art. The fourth section represents so significant a development in Buber’s epistemology that I feel it should be paraphrased here: Our relation to nature is founded on numberless connections between movements to something and perceptions of something. Even the images of fantasy, dreams, delirium, draw their material from this foundation; our speech and our thinking are rooted in it and cannot withdraw from it without losing their tie with life; even mathematics must concretize itself ever again in the relationship with it. That to which we move and which we perceive is always sensible. Even when I myself am the object of my perceiving movement and moving perception, I must to some extent make use of my corporeality in my perception. The same holds for every other I in genuine communication with me: as my partner, my Thou, he can be comprehended by me in his full independence without his sensible existence being curtailed. It is not so, however, with all that is treated as an object to which I can ascribe no I. I can present all this in its independence only by freeing it from its sensible representation. What remains, is divested of all the properties which it possessed in my meeting with it. It exists, but not as something that may be represented. We know of it only that it is and that it meets us. Yet in all the sense world there is not one trait that does not stem from this meeting. The sense world itself arises out of the intercourse of being with being. [‘Der Mensch und sein Gebild,’ which will be a part of Buber’s forthcoming book on philosophical anthropology, was published by Verlag Lambert Schneider, Heidelberg, 1955.])

It is Buber’s chronicle-novel Gog und Magog (For the Sake of Heaven) which, in Karl Kerenyi’s opinion, has won for Buber a secure place among the ranks of classical writers. This work is breath-taking even more for its insights into the phenomena of the spirit than for its perfection of style, writes Kerenyi. It belongs to the heights of prose epicry next to such master works as Thomas Mann’s Erwählten and Per Lagerqvist’s Barrabbas. The great achievement of this chronicle is its evocation of fighters of the spirit who are without comparison in the whole of epic world literature in the ardour and exclusiveness of the unfolding of their religious powers.

Martin Buber has also accomplished this great feat: he has allowed the good and the evil, the holy and the dangerous to appear in his own and his most beloved sphere. His chronicle rises above conditions of time and people as does every work which is a ‘classic.’ (Kerenyi, op. cit., pp. 96-99)

In For the Sake of Heaven Buber has given a vivid and dramatic embodiment to his attitude toward evil and its redemption. This does not mean, as Buber points out, that he wrote this chronicle in order to give a definitive expression to his teaching. He wrote it rather to point to a reality, a reality which is so real in the actual events that occurred that he needed only supply the connecting links in the spirit of the existing facts and sayings in order to make it complete. ‘He who expects from me a teaching which is anything other than a pointing of this kind will always be disappointed,’ writes Buber. While there is no doubt that Buber’s sympathies lie mainly with one side of the conflict he portrays, he did not write the book until he felt that he had penetrated to the essence of the happenings on both sides. He could not give himself to the service of one of the two sides and still do this. Therefore, the only acceptable standpoint was that of tragedy. By this Buber does not mean tragedy in the classical Aristotelian sense of the downfall of a hero, but rather tragedy in a profounder sense of two men living in opposition to each other, each just as that which he is. The opposition here is not one between a ‘good’ and an ‘evil’ will, but the cruel opposition of existence itself. Buber writes that for twenty-five years he was unable to write this novel as it should be written. But as a result of the Second World War, with its atmosphere of a tellurian crisis, the frightful waging of power, and the signs here and there of a false Messianic, the novel wrote itself. (For the Sake of Heaven, 2nd Edition, op. cit., ‘Preface’; Gog und Magog, op. cit., ‘Nachwort,’ pp. 401-408.)

In its external form For the Sake of Heaven is a historical novel built around the conflicts of two Hasidic communities during the Napoleonic wars. The main characters of the novel were actually famous zaddikim of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the relations between them which Buber describes are based on actual Hasidic manuscripts and legends. The two main characters are Jaacob Yitzhak, the Seer of Lublin, and his disciple, Jaacob Yitzhak, called ‘the holy Yehudi,’ or simply ‘the Yehudi,’ who founded the congregation of Pshysha. Buber says of the Seer in his Introduction to The Tales of the Hasidim, The Early Masters:

Of the Yehudi, Buber says in Tales of the Hasidim, The Later Masters:

We can best get at the heart of For the Sake of Heaven by extracting from it those parts that deal with the character of the Seer and the Yehudi and with the encounters between them. We are told that when the Seer was born he ‘saw’ from one end of the world to the other, but that he ‘was so dismayed by the flood of evil which he beheld engulfing the earth,’ that he begged that his vision be limited. Yet he was passionately concerned with sinners and preferred the evil-doer who knew that he was evil to the just man who knew that he was just. He was greatly interested in the evil impulse, ‘seeing that without it there is no manner of fruitfulness, whether of the body or the spirit.’ Yet he pointed out ‘that fruitfulness alone does not suffice; the test is the quality of the fruit brought forth.’ Despite his advice to avoid melancholy with all one’s might because it promotes the feeling that one is a slave to sin, the Seer found himself troubled by the fact that he lightened the heart of others yet himself remained heavy of heart. This may have been because the power of his eyes was not equaled by the greatness of his heart. Buber describes him in another work as at once humble and proud and as too wrapped up in his personal world of spiritual urges to have a real relation with those outside him. (For the Sake of Heaven, pp. 4-7; Tales of the Hasidim, The Later Masters, p. 34)

The Yehudi is pictured as a younger man of great strength and sincerity who is unusual in his combination of deep study and fervent ecstatic prayer. He is spoken of as a man who does not know anger, yet he angers many of his contemporary Hasidim because of the irregularity of his hours of prayer and his insistence on inward spiritual preparation before praying. He is marked by an intense concern for the truth as something to live and fight for and by the unusual suffering which arises out of his identification with the sufferings of the exiled Shekinah.

The Yehudi comes to Lublin because he hears that the Seer ‘consorts with good and evil,’ and it is with good and evil that the Seer’s first sermon after his arrival deals. The two first human beings knew good and evil, it relates, in terms of what things were forbidden and what were not. But the serpent clearly referred to a different type of knowing when he said that they had to become as God to know good and evil. They would know good and evil as one who creates both, i.e. not as something to do or not to do, but as two contradictory forms of being. But God knows good and evil as clearly opposed whereas the "’first human beings, so soon as they had eaten of the fruit of the tree, knew good and evil as blended and confused."’ Through God’s self-limitation (tsimtsum) He has given genuine power to every human being with which he may rebel against God. The good consists of man’s turning to God with the whole of this power to do evil. God really tempts man, moreover, and demands that he give up everything and go through the extremity of danger and the gate of dread before he can receive the grace which enables him to love God "’in the manner in which only He can be loved."’ But the serpent "’tainted the truth of temptation with a lie"’ because he prevented man from standing voraciously face to face with whatever impels him to act in contradiction to God’s word.

Nevertheless, even the primeval darkness serves God’s purpose, for where it weighs most heavily it causes a seed of light to awaken. And even though, fearful of the coming of light, it swells and extends beyond the boundary assigned to it, "’it never succeeds in smothering the seed of light."’ The hidden power of the light grows although "’it is full of soreness and sorrow"’ until the final conflict in which the flame of the black fire will roll over the peoples of the world and "’challenge God Himself to combat."’ Thus will arise Gog of the land of Magog who will lead the final battle of the darkness against the light and will be struck down by the Messiah Himself.

Thus the redemption of God waxes in secret and through the very evil which tries to destroy it; for even the power of destruction derives originally from God. The yod, or dot, in Shaddai, the name of God, "’is the primeval originating point of creation which, prior to any creative act, stood above the radiance of God."’

It is after this sermon that the Yehudi has his first important encounter with the Seer. Unlike the Seer he views the power of Gog not as a primeval, metaphysical evil but as the power of evil within us, and it is precisely this inner evil which troubles him. One helps others by meeting their evil lovingly. Otherwise than lovingly one cannot help them. Hatred and condemnation of the evil-doer will make him evil himself and not just in his actions, for it will cause him to cut himself off and imprison himself in the world of his actions. But what am I to do with the evil within me, asks the Yehudi, "’where no element of strangeness has divisive force and no love has redeeming force"’? It is there that one directly experiences an evil which would compel one to use the powers of one’s own soul to betray God.

To the Yehudi’s question of how ‘to prevent the evil from using the good in order to crush it,’ the Seer responds that God Himself uses evil. The Yehudi’s answer to this statement reveals clearly his fundamental opposition to the Seer. The Seer believes that the zaddik may use evil for the purpose of the good because the effect of one’s actions depends on God alone. The Yehudi, on the other hand, believes that mortal good which seeks to make use of evil drowns and dissolves in that evil so that it no longer exists. At the same time, he believes that what God demands of him is to learn to endure the evil which He endures. To endure evil is to meet the temptation which confronts one, but it does not mean to allow oneself to be compelled by it. ‘Freedom dwells with God,’ and human beings have a share in this very freedom which prevents them from being compelled. (Ibid., pp. 58-61)

Later when the Seer develops the implications of his sermon on Gog and Magog into the statement that the Hasidim must strive to intensify the conflict on earth so that it may hasten the coming of the Messiah, the Yehudi tells the Rabbi that he does not believe in miraculous happenings which contradict the course of nature, but regards the miraculous and the natural as two aspects of the same thing -- as God’s pointing finger, or revelation, and God’s creative hand, or creation. The miracle is ‘our receptivity to the eternal revelation, and therefore does not take place through magic and incantations but through openness to God. Similarly the coming of redemption depends not upon our power or on the practice of magic incantation over mysterious forces, but on our repentance and our return to God.

At the Seer’s suggestion the Yehudi leaves him and founds a congregation of his own. He remains a loyal disciple of the Seer’s, however, despite the latter’s growing hatred and distrust of him. By this time the lines of the conflict are clearly drawn: The Seer trusts in magic, the Yehudi in grace, the Seer tries to ‘hasten the end’ while the Yehudi concerns himself with hallowing the everyday and with the turning of the individual to God; the Seer is concerned with keeping the light pure and building the power of darkness while the Yehudi is concerned with helping the light pierce the darkness. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Yehudi’s congregation should develop along lines radically different from those of the Seer’s. Through his own emphasis on the divine power of the zaddik and through the awe of his disciples, the Seer holds the place of an oriental potentate in his congregation. The Yehudi, on the other hand, preserves an informal and democratic relation with his disciples. He sits among them on a temporary seat, ‘so that, despite the deep seriousness of his leadership, the picture presented was one of an uncomplicated and familiar comradeship., The Seer uses the spiritual power of his disciples as a magic force to hasten the coming of redemption, while the Yehudi helps his disciples find the path that ‘they seek to pursue of themselves and for their own sake.’ It is this very path which the individual must take for the sake of the Shekinah. (For the Sake of Heaven, pp. 145 f.,223 f.,230, 249.)

The Yehudi founds his congregation on a positive and coherent body of teaching, and it is in this teaching that we can most clearly find Buber’s own wisdom and belief. Lowly as man is, the Yehudi tells a disciple, he contains within him the image of God and is in relation to Him. Nor is man wholly without power in this relationship. He cannot exercise a magic influence upon God through conscious striving, and such striving is itself a proof of his failure. But when he seeks to effect nothing and turns himself to God, then he is not without effect. Man’s turning is not for the sake of individual redemption alone. It is also for the sake of the Shekinah. For the sake of the Shekinah we must set free good from evil wherever we meet them blended together, and we must do this first of all within ourselves. (Ibid., pp. 35, 115-121, 185, 213 f., 249, 255.)

Immeasurable possibilities of redemption lie in individual souls and in the relations between these souls, the Yehudi teaches. But redemption of the individual cannot take place in isolation. He must find his realization in community. A communal life of justice, love, and consecration such as Pshysha embodied is itself the greatest force for redemption, for redemption depends simply upon our return to the good, and it is in community that the relation to God and man can take its most positive form. The Yehudi teaches that redemption is at hand and cannot wait until future lives, and at the same time he teaches that it depends on our turning to the good. (Ibid., pp. 230 f., 246.256,265.) He thus transforms the apocalyptic tension which accompanied the expectation of the Messiah into the ‘hallowing of the everyday,’ and he loses none of the force of this tension in so doing. On the contrary, his single-mindedness results in a heightening of spiritual tension, for he concentrates his being in what he is doing at the moment rather than using that moment as a means to some future end.

A statement of the Yehudi’s in regard to his enemies shows particularly clearly the basis of his faith in the ultimate redemption of evil:

On the other hand, the Yehudi does not believe that the redemption of evil is something that can take place quickly and easily or without great suffering. To redeem evil is to reunite God with His Shekinah, and this is the ultimate task to which all the ages of men must consecrate their lives. This task can only be fulfilled if men return to the good, and the return to the good is born out of suffering and despair. Only in the depths of suffering and despair do men come to know grace. (Ibid., pp. 278, 202, 282)

When the Yehudi first arrives in Lublin, the exile of the Shekinah is already his greatest concern. Required to tell a story to the disciples, he tells of a wagoner who demanded his help to lift a wagon and then told him after he had lifted it that it was upset in order that he might help. He interprets this story in terms of the exile of the Shekinah:

The Yehudi at one point ascribes his inability to be a good husband or father to the fact that he suffers in himself the exile of the Shekinah. But later in his life he has a vision which suggests that his service to the Shekinah is impaired by his inadequacy in his relation to the created being.

She raised the veil from her face and he recognized the face. (Ibid., 228-230.) The face that the Yehudi recognizes is probably that of his first wife, whom he had abandoned for the sake of God. The naked feet refer to an early experience of the Yehudi’s -- the experience of being tempted one night by the entrance into his room of a woman in a nightgown and with bare feet. (I am indebted to Professor Buber for these interpretations) The Yehudi jumps out of the window to avoid being compelled by her beauty and by his burning compassion for her humanity. The reference to this incident in the dream might suggest that the Yehudi’s denial of the Shekinah lay in his having fled from his ‘evil impulses’ rather than having used them creatively in his relations with others.

The Yehudi did not have an opportunity to complete his work. He died before he was fifty, in the fullness of his strength. ‘The story of his death is enveloped in more mystery than that of any other zaddik,’ writes Buber in Tales of the Hasidim, The Later Masters. Buber relates there several different legends concerning the Yehudi’s death. From these he has chosen for his chronicle the one which is at once the strangest and the most characteristic of the relations between the Seer and the Yehudi as he has described them in the rest of the chronicle. According to this version, the Seer asks the Yehudi to die ‘so that through the Yehudi the Seer might learn from the upper world what next step to take in the great Messianic enterprise.’ (Tales of the Hasidim, The Later Masters.)

Despite the unusual nature of this request, the reader is not unprepared either for the request or its fulfillment. The Seer has continued to ask the Yehudi to co-operate in his enterprises even after the latter removed to Pshysha, and the Yehudi has co-operated in so far as he could conscientiously do so. Moreover, the Yehudi’s loyalty to the Seer has remained unwavering despite the latter’s hatred and suspicion. The Yehudi’s disciple Benjamin pleads with him not to obey the Seer. To this the Yehudi replies that to be a Hasid means that one will not refuse to give his life. But Benjamin asks him how he can bring a message to the Seer when he is opposed to all his goings-on.

Shortly before his death, the Yehudi reveals once again his insight that external evil has its roots in the inner evil of the human heart. He speaks to Rabbi Bunam of "’the three hours of speechless horror after the tumult of the wars of Gog and Magog and before the coming of the Messiah."’ These hours ‘"will be much more difficult to endure than all the tumult and thunder, and . . . only he who endures them will see the Messiah."’

The Yehudi speaks these words in a whisper in the midst of a great ecstasy of prayer such as he has experienced from his youth on, not without danger of death. Shortly thereafter he falls into a new and final state of ecstasy which brings him thirty-six hours later to his death. The moments before his death are given up entirely to the thought of the Shekinah, God’s exiled Glory, for whom he has suffered and endeavoured during his life.

At the very moment of his death, the Yehudi repeats the phrase, ‘The only one to declare Thy oneness.’ These words are symbolic of the Yehudi’s life and are the most fitting for its close; for of all of the characters in this novel, deeply religious though they are, it is only he who has declared God’s oneness, only he who has refused to work for redemption with external means and who has refused to accept a division of the world between God and the devil or a redemption that is anything less than the redemption of all evil and the recognition of God as the only power in the universe.

Buber’s portrayal of the tragic conflict between the Yehudi and the Seer clearly shows that his concept of the redemption of evil does not mean any easy overcoming of the contradictions of life. Instead it includes those contradictions and the tragedy arising from them as an integral part of the redemption. We can gain a deeper understanding of the tragedy inherent in the relations between the Yehudi and the Seer from the fact that the Seer consistently identifies himself with Korah and the Yehudi, by implication, with Moses. According to the Seer, Korah’s intention had been a good one, except for the fact that he had arrogantly emphasized his freedom from sin as against Moses and Aaron who had incurred sin. The Seer has shared Korah’s pride, whereas the Yehudi has approached the meekness of Moses. More important still, the Seer has resembled Korah in his demand for immediate redemption. The Yehudi, in contrast, is like Moses in his recognition that the people are not holy but must become so. The Seer shortly before his death gains some insight into the true nature of his relationship with the Yehudi, and he expresses this in terms of the conflict between Moses and Korah. The soul of Moses and the soul of Korah return in every generation, he says. Korah will be redeemed, he adds, on the day that the soul of Korah will willingly subject itself to the soul of Moses. This realization comes too late, however, for the Yehudi is already dead. Although the Seer feels horror at the thought that he has been among the rebels against God, the contradiction is overcome, if at all, only at the moment of his death when his eyes open wide ‘as in immense astonishment.’ (For the Sake of Heaven, p. 299, 308, Martin Buber, Moses (Oxford: East and West Library, 1946), p. 189 f.)

That the Yehudi actually carries on the task of Moses in a different situation is clear from Buber’s identification of the Yehudi with Deutero-Isaiah’s ‘suffering servant of the Lord.’ (For the Sake of Heaven, 2nd Edition, ‘Preface’; Gog und Magog, ‘Nachwort,’ p. 407.) The servant, in Buber’s interpretation, is neither Israel as a whole nor Christ, but a single figure embodied in different men at different times. The servant takes on himself the afflictions and iniquities of Israel and the nations, and through his sufferings he carries forward the covenant between God and Israel, the covenant to hallow the whole of community life, which Israel has not fulfilled. In so far as they have borne their sufferings willingly, writes Buber, the scattering of the Jews in the Diaspora can be understood as a continuation of the ‘suffering servant.’(The Prophetic Faith, op. cit., pp. 217-235.) The Yehudi, then, stands in the succession of servants who voluntarily accept the sufferings of the exile, both the exile of the Jews from Palestine and the exile of the Shekinah from God. Understood in this way, the tragic conflict between the Yehudi and the Seer is a part of that redemptive process whereby this very world with all its contradictions is hallowed and the kingdom of man transformed into the kingdom of God.

Man’s turning from evil and taking the direction toward God is the beginning of his own redemption and that of the world. God ‘wishes to redeem us -- but only by our own acceptance of His redemption with the turning of the whole being.’ Our turning is only the beginning, however, for man’s action must be answered by God’s grace for redemption to be complete. When we go forth to meet God, He comes to meet us, and this meeting is our salvation. ‘It is not as though any definite act of man could draw grace down from heaven; yet grace answers deed in unpredictable ways, grace unattainable, yet not self-withholding.’ It is senseless, therefore, to try to divide redemption into a part that is dependent on man and a part that is dependent on God. Man must be concerned with his action alone before he brings it about, with God’s grace alone after the action is successfully done. ‘The one is no less real than the other, and neither is a part-cause . . . man’s action is enclosed in God’s action, but it is still real action.’ When man breaks through, he has an immediate experience of his freedom; after his decision has been made, he has an immediate experience that God’s hand has carried him. (The Prophetic Faith, op. cit., pp. 104, 124; Hasidism, op. cit., ‘Spinoza,’ pp. 108-111; Israel and the World, op. cit., ‘The Faith of Judaism,’ p. 18, ‘The Two Foci of the Jewish Soul,’ p. 32 f.) Man’s action and God’s grace are subsumed under the greater reality of the meeting between God and man.

The decisive turning is not merely an attitude of the soul but something effective in the whole corporeality of life. It is not to be identified with repentance, for repentance is something psychological and purely inward which shows itself outwardly only in its ‘consequences’ and ‘effects.’ The turning is something which happens in the immediacy of the reality between man and God.’ It ‘is as little a "psychic" event as is a man’s birth or death.’ Repentance is at best only an incentive to this turning, and it may even stand in the way of it if a man tortures himself with the idea that his acts of penance are not sufficient and thereby withholds his best energies from the work of reversal. (Two Types of Faith, op. cit., p. 26; Israel and the World, ‘The Faith of Judaism,’ p. 20; The Way of Man, op. cit., p. 35 f.)

The teshavah, or turning to God, is born in the depths of the soul out of ‘the despair which shatters the prison of our latent energies’ and out of the suffering which purifies the soul. In his darkest hours man feels the hand of God reaching down to him. If he has ‘the incredible courage’ to take the hand and let it draw him up out of the darkness, he tastes the essence of redemption -- the knowledge that his ‘redeemer liveth’ (Job xix, 18) and wishes to redeem him. But he must accept this redemption with the turning of his whole being, for only thus can he extricate himself from the maze of selfishness where he has always set himself as his goal and find a way to God and to the fulfillment of the particular task for which he is intended. (For the Sake of Heaven, op. cit., pp. 113, 116, 202; Israel and the World, ‘The Man of Today and the Jewish Bible,’ p. 101 f.; The Way of Man, p. 36.)

To turn to God with the whole of one’s being means to turn with all of one’s passion. Passion is the element without which no deed can succeed, the element which needs only direction in order that out of it the kingdom of God can be built. According to Hasidism, it is the yearning of the divine sparks to be redeemed that brings the ‘alien thoughts,’ or impure impulses, to man. The alien thoughts of which the Baal-Shem speaks are in our language fantasy, says Buber. The transformation of these impulses, accordingly, can only take place in our imaginative faculty. We must not reject the abundance of this fantasy but transform it and turn it into actuality. ‘We must convert the element that seeks to take possession of us into the substance of real life.’ The contradictions which distress us exist only that we may discover their intrinsic significance. (Israel and the World, ‘The Faith of Judaism, p. 17 f., Hasidism, ‘The Foundation Stone,’ p. 53 f., ‘The Beginnings of Hasidism,’ p. 30 f.; Kampf um Israel, op. cit. p. 399 f.; Martin Buber, Ten Rungs, Hasidic Sayings, trans. by Olga Marx [New York: Schocken Books, 1947], p. 94 f.; Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim, The Early Masters, trans. by Olga Marx [New York: Schocken Books, 1947], pp. 4 11-14, 29; Hasidism and Modern Man, ‘The Baal-Shem-Tor’s Instruction in Intercourse with God.’)

The very qualities which make us what we are constitute our special approach to God and our potential use for Him. Each man is created for the fulfillment of a unique purpose. His foremost task, therefore, ‘is the actualization of his unique, unprecedented and never-recurring potentialities, and not the repetition of something that another, and be it even the greatest, has already achieved.’ We can revere the service of others and learn from it, but we cannot imitate it. Neither ought we envy another’s particularity and place nor attempt to impose our own particular way on him. (Tales of the Hasidim, The Early Masters, p.29; The Way of Man, p.17 ff.) The way by which a man can reach God is revealed to him only through the knowledge of his essential quality and inclination. Man discovers this essential quality through perceiving his ‘central wish,’ the strongest feeling which stirs his inmost being. In many cases he knows this central wish only in the form of the particular passion which seeks to lead him astray. To preserve and direct this passion he must divert it from the casual to the essential, from the relative to the absolute. He must prevent it from rushing at the objects which lie across his path, yet he must not turn away from these objects but establish genuine relationship with them. ‘Man’s task, therefore, is not to extirpate the evil urge, but to reunite it with the good.’ If man lends his will to the direction of his passions, he begins the movement of holiness which God completes. In the hallowing which results, ‘the total man is accepted, confirmed, and fulfilled. This is the true integration of man.’ (For the Sake of Heaven, p. 117; The Way of Man, p. I9 f.; Images of Good and Evil, op. cit., pp. 39-42; Israel and the World, ‘The Power of the Spirit,’ p. 181 f.)

The belief in the redemption of evil does not mean any security of salvation. The prophets of Israel, writes Buber, ‘always aimed to shatter all security and to proclaim in the opened abyss of the final insecurity the unwished-for God who demands that His human creatures become real . . . and confounds all who imagine that they can take refuge in the certainty that the temple of God is in their midst.’ There is no other path for the responsible modern man than this ‘holy insecurity.’ In an age in which ‘God is dead,’ the truly religious man sets forth across the God-deprived reality to a new meeting with the nameless God and on his way destroys the images that no longer do justice to God. ‘Holy insecurity’ is life lived in the Face of God. It is the life in which one learns to speak the truth ‘no matter whether a whole people is listening, or only a few individuals,’ and learns to speak it quietly and clearly through having been in hell and having returned to the light of day again. (Eclipse of God, ‘Religion and Modern Thinking,’ p. 97 f., ‘Religion and Philosophy,’ p. 63; Kampf um Israel, p. 198; Martin Buber, ‘Our Reply,’ Towards Union in Palestine, Essays on Zionism and Jewish-Arab Cooperation, ed. by Martin Buber, Judah L. Magnes, and Ernst Simon [Jerusalem: Ihud Association, September 1945], p. 34.)

If a man tries to get rid of his insecurity by constructing a defensive armour to protect himself from the world, he has added to the exposedness which is the state of all men the hysteria which makes him run blindly from the thing he fears rather than face and accept it. Conversely, if he accepts his exposed condition and remains open to those things which meet him, he has turned his exposedness into ‘holy insecurity.’ He has overcome his blind fear and has put in its place the faith which is born out of the relation with the Thou. The defensive man becomes literally rigid with fear. He sets between himself and the world a rigid religious dogma, a rigid system of philosophy, a rigid political belief and commitment to a group, and a rigid wall of personal values and habits. The open man, on the other hand, accepts his fear and relaxes into it. He substitutes the realism of despair, if need be, for the tension of hysteria. He meets every new situation with quiet and sureness out of the depths of his being, yet he meets it with the fear and trembling of one who has no ready-made answer to life.

The religious essence of every religion, writes Buber, ‘is the certainty that the meaning of existence is open and accessible in the actual lived concreteness.’ This does not mean that meaning is to be won through any analytical or synthetic reflection upon the lived concrete but through ‘living action and suffering itself, in the unreduced immediacy of the moment.’ Neither can one aim at experiencing the experience, for one thereby destroys the spontaneity of the mystery and thus misses the meaning. ‘Only he reaches the meaning who stands firm, without holding back or reservation, before the whole might of reality and answers it in a living way.’ No meeting with God can take place entirely outside of this lived concrete. Even asceticism is essentially a reduction for the sake of preserving the concreteness of the moment when this no longer seems attainable in the fullness of life. Prayer too is not spirituality floating above concrete reality but lived concreteness. Prayer is the very essence of the immediacy between man and God, and praying is, above all words, the action of turning directly to God. In true prayer, no matter what else the individual asks for, he ‘ultimately asks for the manifestation of the divine Presence, for this Presence’s becoming dialogically perceivable.’ The presupposition of a genuine state of prayer is not religious words, pious feelings, or techniques of spiritual concentration but ‘the readiness of the whole man for this Presence, simple turned-towardness, unreserved spontaneity.’ (Eclipse of God, ‘Religion and Philosophy,’ pp. 49 f., 52 f., ‘God and the Spirit of Man,’ p. 163; Between Man and Man, ‘Dialogue,’ p. 15; Des Baal-Schem-Tow Unterweisung im Umgang mit Gott, p. 12 f.; The Way of Man, p. 21; Two Types of Faith, pp. 28,157,161.)

All religious reality begins with the acceptance of the concrete situation as given one by the Giver, and it is this which Biblical religion calls the ‘fear of God.’ The ‘fear of God’ is the essence of ‘holy insecurity,’ for ‘it comes when our existence becomes incomprehensible and uncanny, when all security is shattered through the mystery.’ By ‘the mystery’ Buber does not mean the as yet undiscovered but the essentially unknowable -- ‘the undefinable and unfathomable,’ whose inscrutableness belongs to its very nature. The believing man who passes through this shattering of security returns to the everyday as the henceforth hallowed place in which he has to live with the mystery. ‘He steps forth directed and assigned to the concrete, contextual situations of his existence.’ This does not mean that he accepts everything that meets him as ‘God-given’ in its pure factuality.

One should not willingly accept evil in one’s life but should will to penetrate the impure with the pure. The result may well be an interpenetration of both elements, but it may not be anticipated by saying ‘yes’ to the evil in advance. (From a conversation between Buber and Max Brod quoted in Max Brod, ‘Zur Problematik des Bösen und des Rituals,’ Der Jude, ‘Sonderheft zu Martin Bubers fünfzigstem Geburtstag,’ X, 5 [March 1928], ed. by Robert Weltsch, p. 109.)

Fear of God is the indispensable gate to the love of God. That love of God which does not comprehend fear is really idolatry, the adoration of a god whom one has constructed oneself. Such a god is easy enough to love, but it is not easy to love ‘the real God, who is, to begin with, dreadful and incomprehensible.’ (Eclipse of God, p. 50 f.; Martin Buber, Israel and Palestine, The History of an Idea [London: East & West Library; New York: Farrar, Straus & Young, 1952], p. 89.)

The fear of God is only a gate, however, and not, as some theologians believe, a dwelling in which man can settle down. When man encounters the demonic, he must not rest in it but must penetrate behind it to find the meaning of his meeting with it. The fear of God must flow into the love of God and be comprehended by it before one is ready to endure in the face of God the whole reality of lived life. (Israel and the World, ‘The Two Foci of the Jewish Soul,’ p. 32; Eclipse of God, ‘Religion and Philosophy,’ p. 50 ff.; Two Types of Faith, pp. 137, 154.)

Contrary to the teachings of many religious men, the love of God does not mean the submission of one’s will in obedience to God. ‘When and so far as the loving man loves he does not need to bend his will, for he lives in the Divine Will.’ God commands that man love Him, but it is not God, but the soul itself, in the original mystery of its spontaneity, that loves Him. Man can be commanded to love God since this means nothing other than the actualization of the existing relationship of faith to Him. ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself,’ in contrast, does not mean loving feeling but loving action. One cannot command that one feel love for a person but only that one deal lovingly with him. Re-ah, or ‘neighbour,’ means, in the Old Testament, anyone with whom one stands in an immediate and reciprocal relationship. "’Love thy re-ah" therefore means in our language: be lovingly disposed towards men with whom thou has to do at anytime in the course of thy life.’ This lovingkindness will also ultimately come to include the feeling of love, for if a person really loves God, he loves every man whom God loves as he becomes aware that God does love him. To find meaning in existence one must begin oneself and penetrate into it with active love: ‘Meet the world with the fullness of your being and you shall meet Him.... If you wish to believe, love!’ (Two Types of Faith, pp. 69 ff., At the Turning, pp. 37, 42 ff.)

The love of the Creator and of that which He has created are finally one and the same. ‘Imitatio Dei’ does not mean becoming like God as He is in Himself but only the following in His way in relation to justice and love -- the divine attributes which are turned toward man. The true meaning of the ethical, writes Buber, is ‘to help God by loving His creation in his creatures, by loving it towards Him.’ ‘People who love each other with holy love bring each other towards the love with which God loves His world.’ (At the Turning, p. 37 ff.; Between Man and Man, ‘The Question to the Single One,’ pp. 51 f., 56 f.; Eclipse of God, ‘Religion and Ethics,’ p. 137 f., Hasidism, ‘God and the Soul,’ p. 158.) The true love of man is not a general love for all humanity but a quite concrete, direct, and effective love for particular individuals. Only because one loves specific men can one elevate to love one’s relation to man in general. (Hasidism, ‘Spirit and Body of the Hasidic Movement,’ p. 86; Introduction by Buber to Hermann Cohen, Der Nächste [Berlin: Schocken Verlag, 1935], p. 6 Martin Buber, ‘Kraft und Richtung, Klugheit und Weisheit’ [From a letter], Das werdende Zeitalter, VII [1928], 97; Eclipse of God, ‘The Love of God and the Idea of Deity,’ p. 77 ff.) ‘"Togetherness,"’ says David of Lelov in For the Sake of Heaven, "’means that each is intimate with the other and each feels lovingkindness for the other."’ The Yehudi extends this togetherness even to the sons of Satan, whom God has made us capable of loving:

In between the self-righteous avoidance of the evil of others and the acceptance and willing of evil lies the difficult path of taking evil upon oneself without being corrupted by it and transforming it into love. This can be done only by the person who has himself reached maturity and quiet of soul. It cannot extend to removing another person’s responsibility before God, but it can help him to escape the whirl into which the evil impulse has plunged him. (Ibid,. p. 56 Tales of Hasidim, The Early Masters, p.4 ff.)

Through genuine dialogical existence the real person takes part in the unfinished process of creation. ‘It is only by way of true intercourse with things and beings that man achieves true life, but also it is by this way only that he can take an active part in the redemption of the world.’ Redemption does not take place within the individual soul but in the world through the real meeting of God and man. Everything is waiting to be hallowed by man, for there is nothing so crass or base that it cannot become material for sanctification. ‘The profane,’ for Hasidism, is only a designation for the not yet sanctified. ‘Any natural act, if hallowed, leads to God.’ The things that happen to one day after day contain one’s essential task, for true fulfilled existence depends on our developing a genuine relationship to the people with whom we live and work, the animals that help us, the soil we till, the materials we shape, the tools we use. ‘The most formidable power is intrinsically powerlessness unless it maintains a secret covenant with these contacts, both humble and helpful, with strange, and yet near being.’ (The Way of Man, pp. 21 f., 42-46; Hasidism, ‘The Foundation Stone,’ p. 58, ‘Spinoza,’ p.111 Israel and the World, ‘The Two Foci of the Jewish Soul,’ p. 34.)

No renunciation of the object of desire is commanded: it is only necessary that man’s relation to the object be hallowed in his life with nature, his work, his friendship, his marriage, and his solidarity with the community. Hence serving God with the ‘evil impulse’ and ‘hallowing the everyday’ are essentially the same. ‘Hallowing transforms the urges by confronting them with holiness and making them responsible toward what is holy.’ (Hasidism, ‘The Beginnings of Hasidism,’ p. 31 f.; Israel and the World, ‘The Power of the Spirit,’ p. 180 f.) Transforming the evil passion into good cannot take place inside oneself but only in relation. It is just in his relations with others that man finds it possible to serve God with his fear, anger, love, and sexual desire.

The sanctification of the profane has nothing to do with pantheism, writes Buber. Pantheism ‘destroys or stunts the greatest of all values: the reciprocal relationship between the human and the divine, the reality of the I and the Thou which does not cease at the rim of eternity.’ It is because God dwells in the world that the world can be turned into a sacrament. But this does not mean that the world is objectively already a sacrament. It is only capable of becoming one through the redeeming contact with the individual. The foremost meaning of a sacrament is ‘that the divine and the human join themselves to each other, without merging themselves in each other, a lived Beyond-transcendence-and-immanence.’ This covenant also takes place when two human beings consecrate themselves to each other in marriage or in brotherhood, ‘for the consecration does not come by the power of the human partners, but by the power of the eternal wings that overshadow both.’ Sacramental existence, like dialogical existence in general, involves a meeting with the other in which the eternal Thou manifests itself. The sacrament ‘is stripped of its essential character when it no longer includes an elemental, life-claiming and life-determining experience of the other person, of the otherness, as of something coming to meet and acting hitherwards.’ (Tales of the Hasidim, The Early Masters, p. 3; Hasidism, ‘The Foundation Stone,’ p. 59, ‘Spinoza,’ p. 101 ff., ‘Symbolical and Sacramental Existence in Judaism,’ pp. 117, 130.)

The essence of the hallowing of the everyday is kavanah, or intention. Kavanah is identical with the readiness of the Single One to meet all that confronts him. This readiness is an inner preparation, a willingness to remain open and to respond from the depths of one’s being, but it is not a preparation of the act itself.

The sacramental substance cannot be manipulated through special acts or intentions (kavanot). It can only be awakened in each object and act ‘through the presence of the whole man who wholly gives himself, through sacramental existence.’ The essence of kavanah, accordingly, is the direction of the whole of one’s being and power into each act. It is not the nature of the act but the kavanah which determines whether or not it is good or evil, holy or profane, strong or weak in redemptive power.

The basis for the Hasidic attitude toward redemption is the belief that redemption, like creation, takes place at every moment. Man’s work is enclosed in God’s in such a way that each moment of redemption is perfect in itself as well as taking place in the time series of the world. These are not moments of ‘a mystical, timeless now.’ Each moment is filled with all time, for in it true presentness and the movement of history are united. This union of history and the moment involves a tension and a contradiction, for although redemption takes place at every moment, there is no definite moment in the present or the future in which the redemption of the world could be pronounced as having taken place once for all. ‘God’s redeeming power is at work everywhere and at all times, but . . . a state of redemption exists nowhere and never.’ Historical deed means the surmounting of the suffering inherent in human being, but it also means the piling up of new suffering through the repeated failure of each individual and each people to become what it was meant to be. The right answer to the divine revelation is an entire, undivided human life. ‘But splitting up is the historical way of mankind, and the unsplit persons cannot do anything more than raise man to a higher level on which he may thereafter follow his course.’ (Ibid., ‘Spinoza,’ p.111; Moses, op. cit., pp. 88, 199)

The core of the Messianic hope does not belong to eschatology and the margin of history where it vanishes into the timeless but to ‘the centre, the ever-changing centre . . . to the experienced hour and its possibility.’ The Messiah, the righteous one, must rise out of the historic loam of man, out of the dramatic mystery of the One facing the other. Redemption is not dependent upon Messianic calculations or any apocalyptic event, but on the unpremeditated turning of our whole world-life to God. This turning is open to the whole of mankind and to all ages, for all are face to face with redemption and all action for God’s sake is Messianic action. As every sinner can find forgiveness, so every civilization can be hallowed, writes Buber, and this hallowing can take place without primitivizing or curtailment. (Martin Buber, The Prophetic Faith, trans. by Canon Witton Davies [New York: The Macmillan Co., 1949], pp. 137, 142, 144; Hasidism, ‘Spirit of the Hasidic Movement,’ pp. 70, 74 ff., ‘Spinoza,’ pp. 112, 116; Israel and the World, ‘The Faith of Judaism,’ p. 21; Between Man and Man, ‘What Is Man?’, p. 142, At the Turning pp. 21 ff., 50 f.; Two Types of Faith, p. 170 f.; cf. Images of Good and Evil, p. 26.)

The Jewish belief in redemption is not first of all pistis, faith in the proposition that redemption will come at some future date, but emunah, trust in God whose oneness also implies the ultimate oneness of God and the world. This trust in the ultimate oneness of God and the world is a faith in the power of the spirit to penetrate and transform all impulses and desires, to uplift and sanctify everything material. It is the faith ‘that there is really only One Power which, while at times it may permit the sham powers of the world to accomplish something in opposition to it, never permits such accomplishment to stand.’ But this trust in God does not imply any illusions about the present state of the world. ‘The unredeemed soul refuses to give up the evidence of the unredeemed world from which it suffers, to exchange it for the soul’s own salvation.’ The Jew experiences the world’s lack of redemption perhaps more intensely than any other group, writes Buber. He feels it against his skin, tastes it on his tongue.

Judaism does not neglect spiritual inwardness, as Simone Weil believed, but neither is it content with it. It demands that inward truth become real life if it is to remain truth: ‘A drop of Messianic consummation must be mingled with every hour; otherwise the hour is godless, despite all piety and devoutness.’ The corollary of this demand for the redemption of the world and not just of the individual soul is the refusal to accept the Gnostic rejection of creation -- the division between the kingdom of this world and the kingdom of God which leaves the evil of the world forever unredeemable. ‘The world is reality, and it is reality created not to be overcome but to be hallowed.’ Judaism cannot accept a redemption in which half of the world will be eternally damned or cut off from God: ‘There can be no eternity in which everything will not be accepted into God’s atonement.’ (At the Turning, pp. 34-40; Israel and the World, ‘The Faith of Judaism,’ p. 25 ff. ‘The Two Foci of the Jewish Soul,’ p. 34 ff., ‘The Man of Today and the Jewish Bible,’ p. 101, ‘The Spirit of Israel and the World of Today,’ p. 191 f.)

This universal at-onement finds expression in the Jewish concept of yihud, or unification. Yihud is the proclamation of the oneness of God -- not the passive acknowledgment of this oneness, a statement of a subject about an object, but an act of meeting, ‘the dynamic form of the divine unity itself.’ It does not take place through creedal profession or magic manipulation, but through the concrete meeting of I and Thou by which the profane is sanctified and the mundane hallowed. It is ‘the continually renewed confirmation of the unity of the Divine in the manifold nature of His manifestations.’ This confirmation must be understood in a quite practical way: it is brought about through man’s remaining true ‘in the face of the monstrous contradictions of life, and especially in the face of . . . the duality of good and evil.’ The unification which thus takes place ‘is brought about not to spite these contradictions, but in a spirit of love and reconciliation.’ (Ibid., p. 15; Hasidism, ‘Spirit of the Hasidic Movement,’ p. 78.)

The ‘national universalism’ of the prophets, writes Buber, looks to each people to contribute to redemption in its own particular way. This national universalism, in Buber’s opinion, is the only answer to the present conflict between national sovereignty and the need for international co-operation: ‘A new humanity capable of standing up to the problems of our time can come only from the co-operation of national particularities, not from their being leveled out of existence.’ The full response to God’s address to mankind must be made not only as individuals but as peoples, and not as peoples taken as ends in themselves but as ‘holy peoples’ working toward redemption through establishing the kingship of God. To become a ‘holy people’ means, for Israel and for all peoples, to realize God’s attribute of justice in the indirect relations of the people with one another and His attribute of love in their direct relations. It means the fulfillment of God’s truth and justice on earth. ‘To drive the plowshare of the normative principle into the hard sod of political fact’ is ‘a tremendously difficult undertaking,’ writes Buber, ‘but the right to lift a historical moment into the light of superhistory can be bought no cheaper.’ (Israel and Palestine, pp. 118, 136; At the Turning, pp. 37 f., 24.)

This fulfillment can only take place if the synthesis of people, land, and work results in the coming to be of a true community, for only in true community can justice and love be realized and the people hallowed. ‘All holiness means union between being and thing, between being and being, the highest rung of world-holiness, however, is the unity of the human community in the sight of God.’ Only a true community can demonstrate the Absolute and point the way to the kingdom of God: ‘Though something of righteousness may become evident in the life of the individual, righteousness itself can only become wholly visible in the structures of the life of a people.’ The righteousness of a people, in turn, must be based upon real communities, composed of real families, real neighbourhoods, and real settlements, and upon ‘the relationships of a fruitful and creative peace with its neighbours.’ The peacemaker ‘is God’s fellow-worker,’ but we make peace not by conciliatory words and humane projects but through making peace ‘wherever we are destined and summoned to do so: in the active life of our own community and in that aspect of it which can actively help determine its relationship to another community.’ (Martin Buber, ‘Der Chaluz und seine Welt’ [Aus Einer Rede], Almanach des Schoken Verlag auf das Jahr 5697 [1936-37], p. 89 f.; Kampf um Israel, pp. 25 f. [my translation], 253, 268 f., 193, ‘The Gods of the Nations and God,’ p. 210, ‘And If Not Now, When?’, p.239.)

The decisive test of brotherhood is not within the community but at the boundary between community and community, people and people, church and church, for this is the place where diversity of kind and mind is felt most strongly. ‘Every time we stand this test a new step is taken toward a true humanity, gathered in the name of God.’ One of the central emphases of Buber’s Zionism, correspondingly, has been his insistence that the Jews live with the Arabs and not just next to them. (The first two sentences are from an unpublished address by Buber on ‘Fraternity’ to the World Brotherhood Association in California in 1952; Kampf um Israel, p. 451.) For many years one of the leaders of Ihud (Unity) and of the League for Jewish-Arab Rapprochement and Co-operation, Buber wrote in 1939 in an open letter to Gandhi:

Whether Buber speaks of the establishment of community or religious redemption, his goal is ‘the goal of the ages,’ and the way to that goal is through the fulfillment and redemption of individual human beings in direct and upright relation with one another.

Although in the final analysis the only thing that can help is what is true and right, in an emergency this is not always possible. Living entails doing injustice: the fact that we cannot breathe and eat without destroying organic life has symbolic meaning for our human existence. But the humanity of our existence begins there where we say: We shall do no more injustice than we must to live. Only then do we become responsible to this life, and this responsibility cannot be laid down according to any set principle but must be ever again recognized in the depths of the soul according to the demands of each concrete situation.

True community is the link between the social Utopia of modern man and the direct theocracy of the Bible. This does not mean, writes Buber, that religious socialism and the kingdom of God are to be identified. The one is man’s action while the other cannot be completed without God’s grace. But neither can they be separated, for man’s action and God’s grace are intimately bound together. The essence of Buber’s religious socialism is his belief that the centre of community must be the relation of the individual members of the community to God. Though the Single One ‘cannot win to a legitimate relation with God without a legitimate relation to the body politic,’ the prior relation is that with God, for this is ‘the defining force.’ The importance of Hasidism does not lie in its teaching, writes Buber, but in its ‘mode of life which shapes a community.’ Yet Hasidic life is characterized first of all by its wholly personal mode of faith, and it is only through the action of this faith that a community is formed. (Martin Buber, Königtum Gottes, Vol. I of Das Kommende. Untersuchungen zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Messianischen Glaubens [Berlin: Schocken Verlag 1932], p. 144; Kampf um Israel, p. 260 f.; Martin Buber, ‘Drei Sätze eines religiösen Sozialismus,’Neue Wege, Zurich, XXII [1928], No. 7/8, 328; Between Man and Man, ‘The Question to the Single One,’ p. 76; Hasidism, ‘The Beginnings of Hasidism,’ p. I f.)

True community cannot be built on the basis of either new institutions, on the one hand, or individual good-will, on the other, so long as the relations between men remain fundamentally unchanged. The absence of directness in the relations between men in the modern world can only be overcome by men who respond to the concrete situations which confront them with openness and with all of their power, by men who mean community in their innermost heart and establish it in their natural sphere of relations. Such men do not proceed out of community; they prove themselves ready for community by living genuinely with other men. Genuine education for community is identical, therefore, with genuine education of character -- the education of real persons who deny no answer to life and the world but are ready to respond out of a living unity to everything essential that they meet. (Kampf um Israel, pp. 268 f., 273, 291 f.; Between Man and Man, ‘The Education of Character,’ p. 116.)

To establish true community man must rise in rebellion against the illusion of modern collectivism: he must rescue his real personal self from the domination of the collective. The first step in this rebellion must be to smash the false alternative of our epoch -- that of individualism and collectivism. In its place he must put the vital, living knowledge that ‘the fundamental fact of human existence is man with man.’ This knowledge can only be attained through man’s personal engagement, through his entering with his whole being into dialogue. The central question for the fate of mankind, accordingly, the question on the answer to which the future of man as man depends, is the rebirth of dialogue. This means, above all, the overcoming of the massive existential mistrust in ourselves and others, for it is this that stands in the way of genuine relation between man and man. (Between Man and Man, ‘What is Man?’ p. 201 ff.; ‘Hope for This Hour,’ op. cit.)

The will to overcoming this existential mistrust must begin with a ‘criticism of criticism’ which will assign proper boundary lines to those newly discovered elements by means of which the sociological and psychological theorists have attempted to unmask and ‘see through’ the motivations of individuals and groups of men. Man is not to be ‘seen through’ but ‘to be perceived ever more completely in his openness and his hiddenness and in the relation of the two to each other.’ This is a clear-sighted trust of man which perceives his manifoldness and wholeness without any preconceptions about his background and which accepts, accredits, and confirms him to the extent that this perception will allow. Only those who can in this way overcome the mistrust in themselves and recognize the other in the reality of his being can contribute to the re-establishment of genuine dialogue between men. (‘Hope for This Hour.’) Only through this renewal of immediacy between man and man can we again experience immediacy in the dialogue with God. ‘When the man who has become solitary can no longer say "Thou" to the "dead" known God, everything depends on whether he can still say it to the living unknown God by saying "thou" with all his being to another living and known man.’ If after long silence and stammering we genuinely say Thou to men who are unlike ourselves and whom we recognize in all their otherness, then we shall have addressed our eternal Thou anew. (Ibid. Between Man and Man, ‘What is Man?’, p.168) Before we can genuinely address the Thou, however, we must escape from that modern idolatry which leads us to sacrifice ‘the ethical’ on the altar of our particular causes. A new conscience must arise in men which will summon them to guard with the innermost power of their souls against the confusion of the relative with the Absolute.

We have to deal with the meaningless till the last moment, writes Buber in a comment on Franz Kafka, but in the very act of suffering its contradiction we experience an inner meaning. This meaning is not at all agreeable to us yet it is turned toward us, and it ‘pushes straight through all the foulness to the chambers of our hearts.’ Kafka depicted the course of the world in gloomier colours than ever before, yet he also proclaimed emunah anew, ‘with a still deepened "in spite of all this," quite soft and shy, but unambiguous.’ ‘So must Emunah change in a time of God’s eclipse in order to preserve steadfast to God, without disowning reality.’ The eclipse of the light of God is no extinction. Although the l-Thou relation has gone into the catacombs, something is taking place in the depths that even tomorrow may bring it forth with new power. Until this happens it is worthier not to explain the eclipse ‘in sensational and incompetent sayings, such as that of the "death" of God, but to endure it as it is and at the same time to move existentially toward a new happening . . . in which the word between heaven and earth will again be heard.’ (Kampf um Israel, ‘Ein Wort über Franz Kafka,’ p. 213; Two Types of Faith, p. 168 f.; Eclipse of God, ‘God and the Spirit of Man,’ p. 167, ‘Religion and Modern Thinking,’ p. 91.) The cry of the Job of the Bible and the Job of the gas chambers must become our own. We too must contend with God.

The absolute affirmation of the self in the second stage of evil is an extreme form of man’s hiding from the ‘signs’ which address him. A more common form of cutting oneself off from dialogue is the action of the man who ‘masters’ each situation or approaches it with a formulated technique or programme. Another is the various types of ‘once for all’ which make unnecessary the ‘ever anew’ of real response to the unique situation which confronts one in each hour. This false security prevents us from making our relationships to others real through opening ourselves to them and thereby leads us to ‘squander the most precious, irreplaceable and irrecoverable material’ of life. It also prevents us from making real our relationship to God, for the meeting with God takes place in the ‘lived concrete,’ and lived concreteness exists only in so far as the moment retains its true dialogical character of presentness and uniqueness. (Between Man and Man, ‘Dialogue, p. 16, What Is Man?’, p. 170; Eclipse of God, op. cit., ‘Religion and Philosophy,’ p. 49.)

The logical and dialectical God of the theologians -- the God who can be put into a system, enclosed in an idea, or thought about philosophically as ‘a state of being in which all ideas are absorbed’ -- is not the God who can be met in the lived concrete. The ‘once for all’ of dogma resists the unforeseeable moment and thereby becomes ‘the most exalted form of invulnerability against revelation.’ ‘Centralization and codification, undertaken in the interests of religion, are a danger to the core of religion, unless there is the strongest life of faith, embodied in the whole existence of the community, and not relaxing in its renewing activity.’ (Between Man and Man, ‘The Question to the Single One,’ p. 57 f.; Israel and the World, op. cit., ‘The Love of God and the Idea of Deity,’ p. 53; Kampf um Israel op. cit., p. 203 f; Between Man and Man, ‘Dialogue,’ p. 18; The Prophetic Faith op. cit., p. 70.)

It is only one step from dogma to ‘magic,’ for a God that can be fixed in dogma can also be possessed and used. ‘Always and everywhere in the history of religion, the fact that God is identified with success is the greatest obstacle to a steadfast religious life.’ Magic operates wherever one celebrates rites ‘without being turned to the Thou and . . . really meaning its Presence.’ In magic God becomes a bundle of powers, present at man’s command and in the form in which man wishes them. (Moses, op. cit., pp. 88, 185; Eclipse of God, ‘God and the Spirit of Man,’ trans. by Maurice S. Friedman, p. 161 f.; Israel and the World, ‘The Faith of Judaism,’ pp. 21-24; Hasidism, ‘Spirit and Body of the Hasidic Movement,’ p. 79, ‘Symbolical and Sacramental Existence in Judaism,’ p. 142 f. Cf. Moses, p. 22 f. for Buber’s contrast between ‘technical magic’ and ‘magic of spontaneity.’)

As a step in one direction leads from dogma to magic, a step in another leads to ‘gnosis,’ the attempt to raise the veil which divides the revealed from the hidden and to lead forth the divine mystery. Gnosis, like magic, stands as the great threat to dialogical life and to the turning to God. Gnosis attempts to see through the contradiction of existence and free itself from it, rather than endure the contradiction and redeem it. Buber illustrates this contrast through a comparison between Hasidism and the Kabbalah.

This gnosis is not found in the modern world in theosophies and occult systems alone. ‘In many theologies also, unveiling gestures are to be discovered behind the interpreting ones.’ Gnosis has even found its way into modern psychotherapy through the teachings of Carl Jung:

Concern with revelation of the future, the attempt to get behind the problematic of life, the desire to possess or use divine power, the acceptance of tradition and law as a ‘once for all’ in which one can take refuge -- all these prevent the meeting with God in the lived concrete. Even the belief in immortality may be a threat to the relation of faith, for by making death appear unreal or unserious, it may hinder our recognition of the limits of finitude as the threshold of Eternity. (For the sake of Heaven op. cit., p. 238 f.; Martin Buber, ‘Nach dem Ted’, Münchener Neuesten Nachrichten, February 8, 1928.) Similarly, the very symbols which man uses to address God often stand in the way of that address.

‘God, so we may surmise, does not despise all these similarly and necessarily untrue images, but rather suffers that one look at Him through them.’ But there inevitably comes a time when the symbol, instead of enabling men to enter into relation with God, stands in the way of that relation. (Eclipse of God, ‘Religion and Philosophy,’ p. 62 f., ‘The Love of God and the Idea of Deity,’ p. 84.)

The philosopher helps restore the lived concrete to the religious man through destroying the images which no longer do justice to God. But the ‘pure idea,’ which he raises to the throne of reality in their place, also stands between man and God. Philosophy begins with ‘the primary act of abstraction,’ that ‘inner action in which man lifts himself above the concrete situation into the sphere of precise conceptualization.’ The concepts which man develops in this sphere ‘no longer serve as a means of apprehending reality, but instead represent as the object of thought Being freed from the limitations of the actual.’ From the lived togetherness of I and It, philosophy abstracts the I into a subject which can do nothing but observe and reflect and the It into a passive object of thought. The ‘God of the philosophers,’ in consequence, is a conceptually comprehensible thing among things, and no longer a living God who can be the object of imagination, wishes, and feelings. Nor is this situation changed by the special place which philosophy gives the absolute as the object from which all other objects are derived, or as ‘Speech’ (Logos), ‘the Unlimited,’ or simply ‘Being.’ ‘Philosophy is grounded on the presupposition that one sees the absolute in universals.’ As a result philosophy must necessarily deny, or at the very least turn away from, the reality on which religion is grounded, ‘the covenant of the absolute with the particular, with the concrete.’ (Ibid, ‘Religion and Philosophy,, pp. 44 f., 53-63, ‘Religion and Reality,’ p. 28.)

Both the philosophizing and the religious person wonder at phenomena, says Buber, but ‘the one neutralizes his wonder in ideal knowledge, while the other abides in that wonder.’ (Moses, p. 75) When man has felt at home in the universe, his thought about himself has only been a part of his cosmological thought. But when man has felt himself shut in by a strict and inescapable solitude, his thinking about himself has been deep and fruitful and independent of cosmology. Buber criticizes Aristotle, Aquinas, and Hegel because in their systems of thought man attains to consciousness of himself only in the third person. Man is no longer problematic for himself, and the wonder at man is simply wonder at the universe as a whole. Hegel’s theoretical certainty is derived from his incorporation of cosmological rather than actual human time into the groundwork of his image of the universe. ‘Cosmological time’ is abstract and relativized. In it all the future can appear theoretically present. ‘Anthropological time,’ in contrast, has reality only in the past. Since the future depends in part on man’s consciousness and will, on decisions which have not yet taken place, no certainty of the future is possible within the boundaries of the human world. Marx takes over Hegel’s cosmological time to provide the proletariat the security of an assured victory in the future. This security, like Hegel’s, is a false one since it ignores man’s powers of decisions. ‘It depends on the direction and force of this power how far the renewing powers of life as such are able to take effect, and even whether they are not transformed into powers of destruction.’ (Between Man and Man, pp. 126-129, 131 f., 139-145.)

The submersion of the dialogical life by the ‘once for all’ of gnosis, theology, philosophy, and social doctrine is only a part of a larger development of civilization. All great civilizations at their early stages are ‘life-systems’ built up around a supreme principle which pervades the entire existence of the group. This principle is at once a religious and a normative one since it implies a concrete attachment of human life to the Absolute and an attempt to bring order and meaning into earthly existence through the imitation of transcendent Being. All spheres of being are essentially determined by the relationship to this principle. In proportion to the development of its specific forms, however, every civilization strives increasingly to become independent of its principle.

Once the spheres have become independent of the original principle of the civilization, ‘religion’ no longer means just the whole of one’s existence in its relation to the Absolute but a special domain of dogma and cult. ‘The original evil of all "religion," writes Buber, is ‘the separation of "living in God" from "living in the world."’ This separated religion is man’s greatest danger whether it manifests itself in the form of a cult in which sacramental forms are independent of everyday life or of a soul detached from life in devotional rapture and solitary relation with God. ‘The sacrament . . . misleads the faithful into feeling secure in a merely "objective" consummation without any personal participation.’ In such a service the real partner of the communion is no longer present. Similarly, when the soul cuts itself off from the world, God is displaced by a figment of the soul itself: the dialogue which the soul thinks it is carrying on ‘is only a monologue with divided roles,’ (Hasidism, ‘Spinoza,’ pp. 104, 99 f., ‘Symbolical Existence in Judaism,’ p. 132.)

This dualism between the life of the spirit and the life of the world was already present in biblical Judaism, but it gained still greater ground in Christianity because of the latter’s surrender of the concept of a ‘holy people’ for that of personal holiness. ‘Those who believed in Christ possessed at every period a twofold being: as individuals in the realm of the person and as participants in the public life of their nations.’ Although ‘in the history of Christian peoples there has been no lack of men of the spirit afire and ready for martyrdom in the struggle for righteousness,’ the norm of realizing the religion in all aspects of social existence can no longer occupy a central place. As a result it is made easy for the secular law to gain ever more ground at the expense of the religious. At the point at which the public sphere encroaches disastrously on the personal, as it does in our time, ‘the disparity between the sanctification of the individual and the accepted unholiness of his community’ is transferred to an inner contradiction in the redeemed soul. (Eclipse of God, ‘Religion and Ethics,’ pp. 138-141; Two Types of Faith, op. cit., p. 173.)

The apocalyptic element in religion also tends to lead to a dualism between the secular and the religious. The eschatological expectation of the imminent rule of God leads to a desire to do away with law in the name of the divine freedom which is or will be directly present in all creatures without need of law or representation. As soon as this expectation slackens, ‘it follows historically that God’s rule is restricted to the "religious" sphere, everything that is left over is rendered unto Caesar; and the rift which runs through the whole being of the human world receives its sanction.’ This dualism enters deeply into Paul’s essentially Gnostic view of the world. It is also found in Judaism, where the autochthonous prophetic belief is opposed by an apocalyptic one built up out of elements from Iranian dualism. The one ‘promises a consummation of creation,’ the other ‘its abrogation and suppression by another world completely different in nature.’

The prophetic and Hasidic belief in the hallowing of the earth also stands in contrast to the pagan world’s glorification of the elemental forces and the Christian world’s conquest of them. Christianity, through its ascetic emphasis, desanctified the elemental and created a world alien to spirit and a spirit alien to world. ‘Even when Christianity includes the natural life in its sacredness, as in the sacrament of marriage, the bodily life is not hallowed, but merely made subservient to holiness.’ The result has been a split between the actual and the ideal, between life as it is lived and life as it should be lived. (Israel and the World, ‘The Power of the Spirit,’ pp. 176-179)

All historical religion must fight the tendency of metaphysics, gnosis, magic, and politics to become independent of the religious life of the person, and it must also fight the tendency of myth and cult to aid them in this attempt. What is threatened by these extra-religious elements is the lived concrete -- the moment ‘in its unforeseeableness and . . . irrecoverableness . . . its undivertible character of happening but once.’ The lived concrete is also threatened by those religious elements that destroy the concreteness of the memory of past moments of meeting with God that have been preserved in religious tradition -- theology, which makes temporal facts into timeless symbols, and mysticism, which dilutes and weakens the images of memory by proclaiming all experience accessible at once. (Eclipse of God, ‘Religion and Philosophy,’ p. 48 f.; Martin Buber, ‘Religion und Philosopie,’ Europäische Revue, Berlin, V [August 1929], p. 330 f.)

In the modern world the moment is expropriated and dispossessed in four different ways. Through the historicizing of the moment it is regarded as a pure product of the past. Through the technicizing of the moment it is treated as purely a means to a goal and hence as existing only in the future. Through the psychologizing of the moment its total content is reflected upon and reduced to a process or experience of the soul. Through the philosophizing of the moment it is abstracted from its reality. Modern life is divided into levels and aspects. Modern man enjoys erotic, aesthetic, political, and religious experiences independently of one another. As a result, religion is for him only one aspect of his life rather than its totality. The men of the Bible were sinners like us, says Buber, but they did not commit the arch sin of professing God in the synagogue and denying him in the sphere of economics, politics, and the ‘self-assertion’ of the group. Nor did they believe it possible to be honest and upright in private life and to lie in public for the sake of the commonwealth. (‘Religion und Philosophie,’ p. 334; Martin Huber, ‘Religion und Gottesherrschaft,’ a criticism of Leonhard Ragaz’s Weltreich, Religion und Gottesherrschaft. Frankfurter Zeitung, ‘Literaturblatt,’ No. 9, April 27, 1923; Israel and the World ‘The Man of Today and the Jewish Bible,’ p. 90 f., ‘And If Not Now, When?’ p. 235 f.,’Hebrew Humanism,’p. 246 f.; Des Baal-Schem-Tow Unterweisung, op. cit., p. 116 f.)

The dualistic character of our age is shown particularly clearly in its relation to work. In times when the relation with the Absolute enters into every sphere of existence men see meaning in their work, but in times like ours when life is divided into separate spheres men experience work as an inescapable compulsion. The nature of work itself is perverted in the modern world by the divorce of technical means from value ends, I-It from I-Thou. The modern industrial worker has to perform meaningless and mechanical work because of an inhuman utilization of human power without regard to the worthiness of the work performed. The modern worker divides his life into hours on a treadmill and hours of freedom from the treadmill, and the hours of freedom cannot compensate for the others for they are conditioned by them. To accept the treadmill and try to reduce working hours is merely to eternalize this condition. (Kampf um Israel, pp. 281, 277)

‘Man is in a growing measure sociologically determined,’ writes Buber. In the technical, economic, and political spheres of his existence he finds himself ‘in the grip of incomprehensible powers’ which trample again and again on all human purposes. This purposelessness of modern life is also manifested in the worship of freedom for its own sake. Modern vitalism and Lehensphilosophie have exchanged a life-drunk spirit for the detached intellect against which they reacted. Progressive education has tended to free the child’s creative impulses without helping him to acquire the personal responsibility which should accompany it. This sickness of modern man is manifested most clearly of all, however, in the individualism and nationalism which make power an end in itself. ‘Power without faithfulness is life without meaning,’ writes Buber. If a nation or civilization is not faithful to its basic principle, it can know no real fruitfulness or renewal. (Between Man and Man, ‘Dialogue,’ p. 39, ‘What Is Man?’, p. 158; Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, Die Schrift und ihren Verdeutschung (Berlin: Schocken Verlag, 1936), ‘Der Mensch von heute und die jüdische Bibel,’ p. 31 f., from a section of this essay of Buber’s which is not included in the translation in Israel and the World; Between Man and Man, ‘Education,’ p. 90 ff., ‘What Is Man?’, pp 150-153; Martin Buber, Die Stunde und die Erkenntnis, Reden und Aufsätze, 1933-1935 (Berlin: Schocken Verlag, 1936), pp. 16 f., 37 f.; Israel and the World, ‘Nationalism,’ pp. 216, 219 ff., 225; At the Turning, ‘Judaism and Civilization,’ p. 23 f., Two Types of Faith, p. 171; Israel und Palästina, op. cit., pp. 180 f., 12 [my translation].)

The inevitable result of the ‘will to power,’ whether on the national or individual level, is the tendency to use others as means to one’s end. This tendency is found not only in those governed by the ‘profit motive’ but also in the professional men who give others technical aid without entering into relationship with them. Help without mutuality is presumptuousness, writes Buber, it is an attempt to practise magic. The educator who tries to dominate or enjoy his pupils ‘stifles the growth of his blessing,’ and it is the same with the doctor and the psychotherapist: ‘As soon as the helper is touched by the desire, in however subtle a form, to dominate or to enjoy his patient, or to treat the latter’s wish to be dominated or enjoyed by him as other than a wrong condition needing to be cured, the danger of falsification arises, beside which all quackery appears peripheral.’ The writer and observer of life who associates with people out of ulterior motives and the ‘religious’ man who forgets his relation with God in his striving to attain higher and higher spiritual levels are subtler examples still of the will to power. (Between Man and Man, ‘Education,’ p. 94 f.; For the Sake of Heaven, pp. 140 f. 216. The sentence on presumptuousness is from a lecture on the belief in rebirth given by Buber at Amersfoort in the summer of 1925 and is quoted by Hans Trub in ‘J. C. Blumhardt über unheimliche Hilfe,’ Aus unbekannten Schriften, op. cit., p. 157)

Yet another product of the dualism of the modern age is the separation of means and ends and the belief that the end justifies the means. The essence of the essays that Buber has written on Zionism over a period of fifty years is the teaching that ‘no way leads to any other goal but to that which is like it.’ ‘It is only the sick understanding of this age that teaches that the goal can be reached through all the ways of the world.’ If the means that are used are not consistent with the goal that has been set, then this goal will be altered in the attainment. ‘What knowledge could be of greater importance to the men of our age, and to the various communities of our time,’ wrote Buber in 1947, than that ‘the use of unrighteousness as a means to a righteous end makes the end itself unrighteous?’ The person or community which seeks to use evil for the sake of good destroys its own soul in the process.

The use of evil for the sake of good not only produces inner division and dishonesty, it also betrays it, as Buber shows in his portrayal of the Seer in For the Sake of Heaven. If this divided motivation goes far enough, it may even lead to that Gnostic perversion which elevates evil into something holy in itself. The radical Sabbatians believed that they could redeem evil by performing it as if it were not evil, that is by preserving an inner intention of purity in contrast to the deed. ‘That is an illusion,’ writes Buber, ‘for all that man does reacts on his Soul, even when he fancies that his soul hovers over the deed.’ Buber Speaks of this revolt against the distinction between good and evil as ‘the lust for overrunning reality.’

This demonic ‘lust for overrunning reality’ is not simply a product of unbelief but a crisis within men’s souls, a crisis of temptation, freedom, and dishonesty:

The fascination with the demonic in modern literature, the tendency of many to turn psychoanalysis or ‘psychodrama’ into a cult of self-realization, and the illusory belief that personal fulfillment can come through ‘release’ of one’s deep inward energies all show the peculiarly modern relevance of the ‘crisis of temptation and dishonesty’ which Buber describes. In Carl Jung’s teaching, for example, the integrated soul ‘dispenses with the conscience as the court which distinguishes and decides between right and wrong. ‘The precondition for this integration is the "’liberation from those desires, ambitions, and passions which imprison us in the visible world," through "intelligent fulfillment of instinctive demands."’ What this means becomes clear through Jung’s statement that it is necessary to succumb ‘in part’ to evil in order that the unification of good and evil may take place. Jung thus resumes, under the guise of psychotherapy, the Gnostic motif ‘of mystically deifying the instincts.’ (Eclipse of God, ‘Religion and Modern Thinking,’ pp. 112-121, ‘Reply to C. G. Jung,’ p. 176.)

What lends especial impetus to the various psychological and theosophical cults through which the individual seeks to overrun reality in the modern world is the dualism in the soul of modern man.

In the philosophical anthropology of Max Scheler, as in the Freudian psychoanalysis from which it in part derives, this division of spirit and impulse is regarded as basic to man’s nature. In Buber’s opinion this is a mistaken identification of the state of modern man with the state of man in general. The ‘central significance of repression and sublimation in Freud’s system,’ derives from the pathological condition of modern man and is valid in terms of it. Modern man is sick in his very soul, and this sickness springs, in its turn, from his sickness in his relations to others. Freud’s categories are of importance precisely because of the decay of organic community, the disappearance of real togetherness in our modern world.

Vital dissociation is the sickness of the peoples of our age, writes Buber, and this sickness is only apparently healed by forcing people together in centralized states and collectivities. The price which the modern world has paid for the liberation of the French Revolution has been the decay of those organic forms of life which enabled men to live in direct relation with one another and which gave men security, connection, and a feeling of being at home in the-world. These organic forms -- the family, union in work, and the community in village and town -- were based on a vital tradition which has now been lost. Despite the outward preservation of some of the old forms, the inward decay has resulted in an intensification of man’s solitude and a destruction of his security. In their place new community forms have arisen which have attempted to bring the individual into relation with others; but these forms, such as the club, the trade union, and the party, ‘have not been able to re-establish the security which has been destroyed,’ ‘since they have no access to the life of society itself and its foundations: production and consumption.’ (Die Stunde und die Erkenntnis, p. 121 f; Between Man and Man, ‘What Is Man?’ p. 157 f.; Paths in Utopia, op. cit., p. 139.)

The corollary of this decay of organic forms is the growing difficulty of genuine conversation, ‘and most especially of genuine conversation between men of different kinds and convictions.’ ‘Direct, open dialogue is becoming ever more difficult and more rare, the abysses between man and man threaten ever more pitilessly to become unbridgeable.’ This difficulty of conversation is particularly discernible in the dominance of ‘false dialogue,’ or ‘monologue disguised as dialogue.’ In false dialogue the participants do not really have each other in mind, or they have each other in mind only as general and abstracted opponents and not as particular beings. There is no real turning to the other, no real desire to establish mutuality. ‘Technical dialogue’ too is false dialogue because it ‘is prompted solely by the need of objective understanding and has no real concern with the other person as a person. It belongs, writes Buber in one of his rare notes of sarcasm, ‘to the inalienable sterling quality of "modern existence."’ It is for monologue that disguises itself as dialogue, however, that Buber reserves his full scorn. Here men have the illusion of getting beyond themselves when actually each speaks only with himself. This type of ‘dialogue’ is characteristic of our intensely social age in which men are more alone than ever before.

By far the largest part of what is called conversation today would be more correctly described as talk. In general, people do not really speak to one another. Each turns to the other, to be sure, but he speaks in reality to a fictitious audience which exists only to listen to him. The understanding of true conversation is so rare in our time that one imagines that one can arrange a genuine dialogue before a public of interested spectators with the assistance of proper publicity. But a public debate, on no matter how high a level, can neither be spontaneous, direct, nor unreserved. Such public discussion is unbridgeably separate from genuine dialogue. It is much closer to propaganda, which seeks to win the individual over for a cause. To propaganda the individual as such is always burdensome. Its only concern is more members, more followers, a larger supporting base. Propaganda means mastering the other through depersonalizing him. It is variously combined with coercion, supplementing or replacing it according to need and prospect, but ultimately it is itself nothing other than sublimated coercion, invisibly applied. It sets the soul under a pressure which still allows the illusion of autonomy.

Almost all that one understands in our time as specifically modern stands in opposition to the awareness of one’s fellow as a whole, single, and unique person, even if, in most cases, a defectively developed one. In the modern age an analytic, reductive, and derivative glance predominates between man and man. It is analytic, or rather pseudoanalytic, because it treats the whole body-soul being as composite in nature and hence as dissectible -- not the so-called unconscious alone, which is susceptible to a relative objectification, but also the psychic stream itself, which can never in reality be adequately grasped as an object. This glance is reductive because it wishes to reduce the manifold person, nourished by the microcosmic fullness of possibility, to a schematically surveyable and generally repetitive structure. And it is derivative because it hopes to grasp what a man has become, and even his becoming itself, in genetic formulas, because it tries to replace the individual dynamic central principle of this becoming by a general concept. Today a radical dissolution of all mystery is aspired to between man and man. Personality, that incessantly near mystery which was once the motive-ground for the stillest inspiration, is levelled out. (‘Elements of the Interhuman,’ op. cit., sections 2, 4, 5.)

Corresponding to the absence of genuine dialogue between men is the absence of real communication between peoples of different situations and points of view. ‘The human world,’ Buber wrote in 1952, ‘is today, as never before, split into two camps, each of which understands the other as the embodiment of falsehood and itself as the embodiment of truth.’ Man not only thinks his principle true and the opposing one false, as in earlier epochs, but he now believes ‘that he is concerned with the recognition and realization of right, his opponent with the masking of his selfish interest.’ The mistrust that reigns between the two camps has been decisively enhanced by the theory of ‘ideology’ which has become prevalent through the influence of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. This theory consists of seeing through and unmasking the other in terms of individual psychology or sociology. One assumes that the other dissembles of necessity and looks for the unconscious motive, ‘complex,’ or group interest that clothes itself in his seemingly objective judgment. These psychological and sociological theories of ‘seeing through’ have again and again fallen into the boundless simplification of reducing man to the newly discovered elements instead of inserting these elements into man’s total structure. As a result, the mistrust between man and man has become in a double sense existential.

The result of this progressive decline of dialogue and growth of universal mistrust is that man’s need for confirmation no longer finds any natural satisfaction. Man seeks confirmation either through himself or through membership in a collective, but both of these confirmations are illusory. He whom no fellow-man confirms must endeavour to restore his self-confirmation’ with ever more convulsive exertions . . . and finally he knows himself as inevitably abandoned.’ Confirmation is by its very nature a reciprocal process: the man who does not confirm his fellow-man will not only receive no confirmation from others but will find it increasingly difficult to confirm himself. ‘Confirmation through the collective, on the other hand, is pure fiction.’ Though the collective employs each of its members in terms of his particular ability and character, it ‘cannot recognize anyone in his own being and therefore independently of his usefulness for the collective.’ (‘Hope for This Hour.’ Cf. Images of Good and Evil, op. cit., p. 77.)

These two types of illusory confirmation correspond to the false dichotomy which dominates our age, that between individualism and collectivism. Despite their apparent opposition, the individualist and the collectivist are actually alike in that neither knows true personal wholeness or true responsibility. The individualist acts out of arbitrary self-will and in consequence is completely defined and conditioned by circumstances. The collectivist acts in terms of the collectivity and in so doing loses his ability to perceive and to respond from the depths of his being. Neither can attain any genuine relation with others, for one cannot be a genuine person in individualism or collectivism, and ‘there is genuine relation only between genuine persons.’ (Between Man and Man, ‘The Question to the Single One,’ p. 80 f., ‘What Is Man?’, p. 200 ff.)

Collectivism is the greater danger to the modern world. Whether in the form of totalitarianism or of self-effacing loyalty to political parties, it represents the desire of this age to fly ‘from the demanding "ever anew"’ of personal responsibility ‘into the protective "once for all"’ of membership in a group. ‘The last generation’s intoxication with freedom has been followed by the present generation’s craze for bondage; the untruth of intoxication has been followed by the untruth of hysteria.’

Collectivism is typical of our age in giving the appearance but not the reality of relation, for in our age the great hopes and dreams of mankind have been fulfilled one after another -- ‘as the caricature of themselves.’ Collectivism imperils ‘the immeasurable value which constitutes man,’ for it destroys the dialogue between man and God and the living communion between man and man.

‘We experience this not only as an hour of the heaviest affliction,’ Buber wrote in 1952, ‘but also as one that appears to give no essentially different outlook for the future, no prospect of a time of radiant and full living.’ (‘Hope For this Hour’) With each new crisis in man’s image of the universe ‘the original contract between the universe and man is dissolved and man finds himself a stranger and solitary in the world.’ As a result of this insecurity, man questions not only the universe and his relation to it, but himself. Today, writes Buber, ‘the question about man’s being faces us as never before in all its grandeur and terror -- no longer in philosophical attire but in the nakedness of existence.’ (Between Man and Man, ‘What Is Man?’, pp. 132 f. 145.) In other eras of cosmic insecurity there was still ‘a social certainty’ resulting from ‘living in real togetherness’ in ‘a small organic community.’ Modern man, in contrast, is homeless both in the universe and in the community. Our modern crisis, as a result, is the most deep-reaching and comprehensive in history. (Ibid.,p. 196 f.) In it the two aspects of social and cosmic insecurity have merged into a loss of confidence in human existence as such:

The loss of confidence in human existence also means a loss of trust in God. ‘At its core the conflict between mistrust and trust of man conceals the conflict between mistrust and trust of eternity.’ In the way leading from one age of solitude to the next, ‘each solitude is colder and stricter than the preceding, and salvation from it more difficult.’ It is only in our time, however, that man has reached a condition in which ‘he can no longer stretch his hands out from his solitude to meet a divine form.’ This inability to reach out to God is at the basis of Nietzsche’s saying, ‘God is dead.’ ‘Apparently nothing more remains now to the solitary man but to seek an intimate communication with himself.’ Modern man is imprisoned in his subjectivity and cannot discern ‘the essential difference between all subjectivity and that which transcends it.’ (Ibid., Between Man and Man, ‘What Is Man?’, p. 167; Eclipse of God, ‘Religion and Reality,’ p. 33.)

This mounting spiral of subjectivism has manifested itself most clearly in the progressive relativizing of all values.

The roots of this relativism lie in part in the philosophy which ‘seeks to unmask the spiritual world as a system of deceptions and self-deceptions, of "ideologies" and "sublimations."’ Buber traces the development of this philosophy through Feuerbach and Vico to Marx, who made the distinction between good and evil a function of the class struggle, and Nietzsche, who, ‘like Marx, saw historical morals as the expression and instruments of the power struggle between ruling and oppressed classes.’ (Eclipse of God, ‘Religion and Ethics,’ pp. 141-14)

Sartre accepts Nietzsche’s cry ‘God is dead,’ as a valid statement of fact. Recognizing, like Nietzsche, that ‘all possibility of discovering absolute values has disappeared with God,’ Sartre adopts as his own Dostoievsky’s phrase, ‘all is permitted’ to man. Since "’life has no meaning a priori . . . it is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing else than this meaning which you choose."’ But, Buber points out, this is just what one cannot do. The very nature of value as that which gives man direction depends on the fact that it is not arbitrarily invented or chosen but is discovered in man’s meeting with being. (Ibid., ‘Religion and Modern Thinking,’ pp. 88, 93 f. [Cf. Jean Paul Sartre, L’Existentialisme est un Humanisme, pp. 33, 89].) Because value guides man in the process of becoming what he is not, it cannot be derived from what he is. Sartre’s concept of the free invention of meaning and value is reminiscent of Buber’s second stage of evil in which ‘truth’ and ‘good’ are what the individual ordains as such.

Subjectivism dominates not only the attitude of our age toward values but modern thinking in general. In the progress of its philosophizing the human spirit is ever more inclined to regard the absolute which it contemplates as having been produced by itself, the spirit that thinks it: ‘Until, finally, all that is over against us, everything that accosts us and takes possession of us, all partnership of existence, is dissolved in free-floating subjectivity.’ In the next age, which is the modern one, the human spirit annihilates conceptually the absoluteness of the absolute. Although the spirit may imagine that it still remains ‘as bearer of all things and coiner of all values,’ it has annihilated its own absoluteness as well. ‘Spirit’ is now only a product of human individuals ‘which they contain and secrete like mucus and urine.’ (Ibid., ‘God and the Spirit of Man’ p. 159 ff.)

In these two stages we can recognize idealism and the various types of modern relativism which have succeeded it -- immanentism, psychologism, historicism, naturalism, and materialism. What is in question in this process is not just atheism. The traditional term ‘God’ is preserved in many cases ‘for the sake of its profound overtones.’ But this ‘God’ is utterly unlike the traditional conception of God as an absolute that transcends man. ‘Specifically modern thought can no longer endure a God who is not confined to man’s subjectivity, who is not merely a "supreme value."’ It seeks ‘to preserve the idea of the divine as the true concern of religion’ and at the same time ‘to destroy the reality of the idea of God and thereby also the reality of our relation to Him.’ ‘This is done in many ways,’ writes Buber, ‘overtly and covertly, apodictically and hypothetically, in the language of metaphysics and of psychology.’ (Ibid., ‘Religion and Reality,’ pp. 28, 32, 26.)

Even more eloquent than Nietzsche’s proclamation that God is dead, writes Buber, are the attempts to fill the now-empty horizon. Heidegger, for example, intimates that after our present imageless era -- the era in which ‘God is dead’ -- a new procession of divine images may begin. But he does not hold, says Buber, that man will again experience and accept his real encounters with the divine as such. (Eclipse of God, ‘Religion and Reality,’ pp. 27-34.) What brings about the reappearance of the divine, in Heidegger’s view, is human thought about truth; for being, to Heidegger, attains its illumination through the destiny and history of man. ‘He whose appearance can be effected or co-effected through such a modern-magical influence,’ writes Buber ‘clearly has only the name in common with Him whom we men, basically in agreement despite all the differences in our religious teachings, address as God.’ Heidegger ends, Buber points out, by allying to his own historical hour this clarification of the thought of being to which he has ascribed the power to make ready for the sunrise of the holy. "’History exists,"’ writes Heidegger, "’only when the essence of truth is originally decided."’ Yet the hour that he has affirmed as history in this sense is none other than that of Hitler and the Nazis, ‘the very same hour whose problematics in its most inhuman manifestation led him astray.’ When Heidegger proclaims Hitler as "’the present and future German reality and its law,"’ writes Buber, ‘history no longer stands, as in all believing times, under divine judgment, but it itself, the unappealable, assigns to the Coming One his way.’ (Ibid., Religion and Modern Thinking,’ pp. 94-97, 99-103.) Here again we are reminded of the absolute self-affirmation of the second stage of evil!

In modern philosophy of religion the I of the I-It relation steps ever more into the foreground as the ‘subject’ of ‘religious feeling,’ the ‘profiter from a pragmatist decision to believe.’ Even more important than this is the subjectivizing of the act of faith itself, for this latter has penetrated to the innermost depth of the religious life. This subjectivization threatens the spontaneous turning toward the Presence with which the man who prays formerly overcame what distracted his attention. ‘The overconsciousness of this man here that he is praying, that he is praying, that he is praying . . . depossesses the moment, takes away its spontaneity.’ His subjectivity enters into the midst of his statement of trust and disturbs his relation with the Absolute. (Ibid., ‘God and the Spirit of Man,’ p. 162 ff.)

When he has to interpret his encounters with God as self-encounters, ‘man’s very structure is destroyed,’ writes Buber. ‘This is the portent of the present hour.’ (Ibid., ‘Religion and Reality’ pp. 21, 32 f.)

‘Eclipse of the light of heaven, eclipse of God,’ this is, as Buber sees it, ‘the character of the historical hour through which the world is passing.’ This eclipse is not taking place in human subjectivity ‘but in Being itself.’ It is the human side of ‘the silence of God,’ of ‘God’s hiding His face.’ (Ibid., ‘Religion and Reality’ pp. 21, 32 f.)

‘He who refuses to submit himself to the effective reality of the transcendence,’ writes Buber, ‘. . . contributes to the human responsibility for the eclipse.’ This does not mean that man can effect ‘the death of God.’ Even if there is no longer ‘a God of man,’ He who is denoted by the name ‘lives intact’ in the light of His eternity. ‘But we, "the slayers," remain dwellers in darkness, consigned to death.’ Thus the real meaning of the proclamation that God is ‘dead’ is ‘that man has become incapable of apprehending a reality absolutely independent of himself and of having a relation with it.’ Heidegger is right in saying that we can no longer image God, but this is not a lack in man’s imagination. ‘The great images of God . .’: are born not of imagination but of real encounters with real divine power and glory.’ Man’s power to glimpse God with his being’s eye yields no images since God eludes direct contemplation, but it is from it that all images and representations are born. When the I of the I-It relation comes in between man and God, this glance is no longer possible, and, as a result, the image-making power of the human heart declines. ‘Man’s capacity to apprehend the divine in images is lamed in the same measure as is his capacity to experience a reality absolutely independent of himself.’ (Ibid, ‘Religion and Reality,’ pp. 34 f., 22, ‘God and the Spirit of Man,’ p. 164 f. ‘On the Suspension of the Ethical,’ p. 154 f.) In all past times men had, stored away in their hearts, images of the Absolute, ‘partly pallid, partly crude, altogether false and yet true....’ These images helped to protect them from the deception of the voices. This protection no longer exists now that ‘God is dead,’ now that the ‘spiritual pupil’ cannot catch a glimpse of the appearance of the Absolute.

The most terrible consequence of the eclipse is the silence of God -- the loss of the sense of God’s nearness. ‘It seems senseless to turn to Him who, if He is here, will not trouble Himself about us; it seems hopeless to will to penetrate to Him who may . . . perhaps be the soul of the universe but not our Father.’ When history appears to be empty of God, ‘with nowhere a beckoning of His finger,’ it is difficult for an individual and even more for a people to understand themselves as addressed by God. ‘The experience of concrete answerability recedes more and more . . . man unlearns taking the relationship between God and himself seriously in the dialogic sense.’ During such times the world seems to be irretrievably abandoned to the forces of tyranny. In the image of Psalm 82, the world is given over by God to judges who ‘judge unjustly’ and ‘lift up the face of the wicked.’ This situation is nowhere more clearly described in modern literature than in the novels of Franz Kafka: ‘His unexpressed, ever-present theme,’ writes Buber, ‘is the remoteness of the judge, the remoteness of the lord of the castle, the hiddenness, the eclipse....’ Kafka describes the human world as given over to the meaningless government of a slovenly bureaucracy without possibility of appeal: ‘From the hopelessly strange Being who gave this world into their impure hands, no message of comfort or promise penetrates to us. He is, but he is not present.’ (For the Sake of Heaven, p. 116, At the Turning, p. 58 ff.; Right and Wrong, ‘Judgment on the Judges’ (Psalm 82), pp. 30-33; Two Types of Faith, pp. 165-168.)

Not only Kafka, the unredeemed Jew, but even the redeemed Christian soul becomes aware in our day of the eclipse of the light of God, ‘of the still unredeemed concreteness of the human world in all its horror.’ Nothing in our time has so confirmed Kafka’s view or made the silence of God appear so terrifying as the concentration camps of Nazi Germany in which millions of human beings were systematically and scientifically exterminated as if they were insects. Never has the world appeared so forsaken, so engulfed in utter darkness.

How is a life with God still possible in a time in which there is an Oswiecim? The estrangement has become too cruel, the hiddenness too deep. One can still ‘believe in the God who allowed these things to happen,’ but can one still speak to Him? Can one still hear His word? . . . Dare we recommend to . . . the Job of the gas chambers: ‘Call to Him; for He is kind, for His mercy endureth forever’? (Two Types of Faith, pp. 162 f., 166 f.; At the Turning, p. 61.)

Buber’s philosophy of dialogue is the source, ultimately, both for his answer to the question of what man is and to the problem of evil. It is entering into relation that makes man really man; it is the failure to enter into relation that in the last analysis constitutes evil, or non-existence; and it is the re-establishment of relation that leads to the redemption of evil and genuine human existence. Thus at the heart of Buber’s philosophy the problem of evil and the problem of man merge into one in the recognition of relation as the fundamental reality of man’s life.

In the Preface to Images of Good and Evil Buber writes that he has been preoccupied with the problem of evil since his youth. It was not until the year following the First World War, however, that he approached it independently, and it is only in this, one of the very latest of his books, that he has achieved full maturity and clarity on the subject. (Images of Good and Evil, p. 9) The Yehudi in Buber’s chronicle-novel reproaches the Seer of Lublin for dwelling on Gog, the mythical incarnation of an external, metaphysical evil:

It is to this speech of the Yehudi’s that Buber points in the Preface to Images of Good and Evil as the answer to the question of the point of attack for the struggle against evil. (Images, p. 11) This point of attack must not be understood simply as man against what is not man but as what the individual knows from his own inner experience as against what he encounters outside of himself.

Man knows evil when he recognizes the condition in which he finds himself as the ‘evil’ and knows the condition he has thereby lost and cannot for the time being regain as the good. It is through this inner encounter alone that evil becomes accessible and demonstrable in the world; for ‘it exists in the world apart from man only in the form of quite general opposites,’ embracing good and ill and good and bad as well as good and evil. The specific opposition good-evil is peculiar to man because it can only be perceived introspectively:

When the demon is encountered at the inner threshold, there is no longer any room for taking attitudes toward it: ‘the struggle must now be fought out.’ Despite the real difficulty of this inner struggle, man can overcome temptation and turn back to God. For if evil, in Buber’s conception, is rebellion against God with the power He has given man to do evil, good is the turning toward God with this same power. If evil is a lack of direction, good is a finding of direction, of the direction toward God. If evil is the predominance of I-It, good is the meeting with the Thou, the permeation of I-It by I-Thou. Thus in each case good and evil are bound together as they could not be if evil were an independent substance with an existence of its own.

Good and evil are usually thought of as ‘two structurally similar qualities situated at opposite poles.’ But this is because they are treated as ethical abstractions rather than as existent states of human reality. When one looks at them ‘in the factual context of the life of the human person,’ one discovers their ‘fundamental dissimilarity in nature, structure, and dynamics.’ (Images, p. 62 f)

Evil, for Buber, is both absence of direction and absence of relation, for relation and direction as he uses them are different aspects of the same reality. The man who cannot say Thou with his whole being to God or man may have ‘the sublime illusion of detached thought that he is a self-contained self; as man he is lost.’ Similarly, the man who does not keep to the One direction as far as he is able may have ‘the life of the spirit, in all freedom and fruitfulness, all standing and status -- existence there is none for him without it.’ (Between Man and Man, ‘What is Man?’, p. 168 Images, p. 83.)

The clearest illustration of the ultimate identity, for Buber, of evil as absence of direction and evil as absence of relation is his treatment of ‘conscience.’ Conscience, to him, is the voice which calls a man to fulfill the personal intention of being for which he was created. It is ‘the individual’s awareness of what he "really" is, of what in his unique and non-repeatable created existence he is intended to be.’ Hence it implies both dialogue and direction -- the dialogue of the person with an ‘other’ than he now is which gives him an intimation of the direction he is meant to take. This presentiment of purpose is ‘inherent in all men though in the most varied strengths and degrees of consciousness and for the most part stifled by them.’ When it is not stifled, it compares what one is with what one is called to become and thereby distinguishes and decides between right and wrong. Through this comparison, also, one comes to feel guilt.

Guilt is the product of not taking the direction toward God. The guilty man is he who shuns the dialogue with God, and this means also he who does not enter into the dialogue with man and the world. ‘Original guilt consists in remaining with oneself.’ If the being before whom this hour places one is not met with the truth of one’s whole life, then one is guilty.

The fact that one discovers guilt in relation with something other than oneself does not contradict the fact that one discovers evil first of all in the meeting with oneself. This meeting takes place only if one remains aware of the voice of conscience. The man who fails to face the evil within him or affirms it as good is precisely the man who remains with himself and suppresses his awareness of direction, his awareness of the address of God which comes to him from what is ‘other’ than he.

The specific structure of evil in the human person cannot be explained as a result of the ‘moral censorship’ of society. ‘There can be no question at all here of the psychology of "inhibitions’, and "repressions," which operate no less against some social convention or other than when it is a matter of that which is felt to be evil in the full meaning of the word.’ One’s inner encounter with evil does not presuppose that ‘self-analysis’ of modern psychology which seeks to penetrate ‘behind’ the experience, ‘to "reduce" it to the real elements assumed to have been "repressed."’ What is needed here, rather, is the technique of the philosophical anthropologist who first participates in the experience and then gains the distance indispensable for objective knowledge. ‘Our business is to call to mind an occurrence as reliably, concretely and completely remembered as possible, which is entirely unreduced and undissected.’ The state of evil is experienced within ourselves in such a way that ‘its differentiation from every other state of the soul is unmistakable.’ This experience leads us to inquire as to the existence of evil as an ontological reality. (Images, pp. 59, 63 ff.; cf. Between Man and Man, ‘What Is Man?’, pp. 123-126.)

If this inquiry is to be successful, says Buber, it must make use of the truth found in the myths of the origin of evil. The experience which has taken place in countless factual encounters with evil has been directly embodied in these myths without passing through any conceptual form. Rightly interpreted, therefore, ‘they tell us of the human constitution and movement of evil’ and of its relation to good. We can only interpret them rightly, however, if we accord to their account that manner of belief which comes from our personal experience of evil. ‘Only out of the conjunction of these two, primordial mythic intuition and directly experienced reality, does the light of the legitimate concept arise for this sphere too, probably the most obscure of all.’ The concept which arises from this conjunction serves as an indispensable bridge between myth and reality which enables man to see the two together. Without it man ‘listens to the myth of Lucifer and hushes it up in his own life.’ (Images, pp 57-60, 12)

The myths that Buber interprets in Images of Good and Evil are the Biblical and the Zoroastrian, for, in his opinion, ‘these correspond with two fundamentally different kinds and stages of evil.’ He portrays the first of these stages, decisionlessness, through an interpretation of the myths of Adam and Eve, Cain, and the Flood. When Adam and Eve take the fruit, they do not make a decision between good and evil but rather imagine possibilities of action and then act almost without knowing it, sunk in ‘a strange, dreamlike kind of contemplation.’ Cain, similarly, does not decide to kill Abel -- he does not even know what death and killing are. Rather he intensifies and confirms his indecision. ‘In the vortex of indecision . . . at the point of greatest provocation and least resistance,’ he strikes out. Man grasps at every possibility ‘in order to overcome the tension of omnipossibility’ and thus makes incarnate a reality which is ‘no longer divine but his, his capriciously constructed, indestinate reality:’ It is this, in the story of the Flood, which causes God to repent of having made man. The wickedness of man’s actions does not derive from a corruption of the soul but from the intervention of the evil ‘imagery.’ This imagery is a ‘play with possibility,’ a ‘self-temptation, from which ever and again violence springs.’ The place of the real, perceived fruit is taken by a possible, devised, fabricated one which can be and finally is made into the real one. Imagination, or ‘imagery,’ is not entirely evil, however. It is man’s greatest danger and greatest opportunity, a power which can be left undirected or directed to the good. It is in this understanding of imagery that the Talmudic doctrine of the two ‘urges’ originated. Yetser, the Biblical word for ‘imagery,’ is identical, in fact, with the Talmudic word for the evil and good urges. The ‘evil urge’ is especially close to the ‘imagery of man’s heart’ which the Bible speaks of as ‘evil from his youth,’ for it is identical with ‘passion, that is, the power peculiar to man, without which he can neither beget nor bring forth but which, left to itself, remains without direction and leads astray.’ (Images, pp. 13-42)

Man becomes aware of possibility, writes Buber, ‘in a period of evolution which generally coincides with puberty without being tied to it.’ This possibility takes the form of possible actions which threaten to submerge him in their swirling chaos. To escape from this dizzy whirl the soul either sets out upon the difficult path of bringing itself toward unity or it clutches at any object past which the vortex happens to carry it and casts its passion upon it. In this latter case, ‘it exchanges an undirected possibility for an undirected reality, in which it does what it wills not to do, what is preposterous to it, the alien, the "evil."’ It breaks violently out of the state of undirected surging passion ‘wherever a breach can be forced’ and enters into a pathless maze of pseudo-decision, a ‘flight into delusion and ultimately into mania.’ Evil, then, is lack of direction and what is done in and out of it: ‘the grasping, seizing, devouring, compelling, seducing, exploiting, humiliating, torturing and destroying of what offers itself.’ It is not an action, for ‘action is only the type of evil happening which makes evil manifest.’ The evil itself lies in the intention: ‘The project of the sin and the reflecting upon it and not its execution is the real guilt.’ (Ibid., pp.66-73, 80; Two Types of Faith, op. cit., p. 64 f.)

Evil is not the result of a decision, for true decision is not partial but is made with the whole soul. ‘Evil cannot be done with the whole soul; good can only be done with the whole soul.’ There can be no wholeness ‘where downtrodden appetites lurk in the corners’ or where the soul’s highest forces watch the action, ‘pressed back and powerless, but shining in the protest of the spirit.’ (Images, p. 70 f.) The absence of personal wholeness is a complement, therefore, to the absence of direction and the absence of relation. If one does not become what one is meant to be, if one does not set out in the direction of God, if one does not bring one’s scattered passions under the transforming and unifying guidance of direction, then no wholeness of the person is possible. Conversely, without attaining personal wholeness, one can neither keep to direction nor enter into full relation.

Buber portrays the second stage of evil, the actual decision to evil, through an interpretation of the Zoroastrian myths found in the Avesta and in post-Avestic literature. Here we meet good and evil as primal moving spirits set in real opposition to one another, and here, for the first time, evil assumes a substantial and independent nature. In the hymns of Zoroaster God’s primal act is a decision within himself which prepares and makes possible the self-choice of good and evil by which each is first rendered effectual and factual. Created man, similarly, finds himself ever again confronted by the necessity of distinguishing deception from truth and deciding between them. The primal spirits stand between God and man and like them choose between good and evil. But in the case of Ahriman, the evil spirit, this choice takes place in pure paradox since in choosing he acknowledges himself precisely as the evil.

This paradox is developed further in the saga of the primeval king Yima, who assumes dominion over the world at the bidding of the highest God, Ahura Mazdah. After a flood similar to the Biblical one, Yima lets loose the demons whom he has hitherto held in check and allows the lie to enter through lauding and blessing himself. Yima’s lie is ‘the primal lie . . . of humanity as a whole which ascribes the conquest of the power of nature to its own superpower. It is the existential lie against being in which man sees himself as a self-creator. Man chooses in decisive hours between being-true and being-false, between strengthening, covering, and confirming being at the point of his own existence or weakening, desecrating, and dispossessing it. He who chooses the lie in preference to the truth intervenes directly in the decisions of the world-conflict. ‘But this takes effect in the very first instance at just his point of being’: by giving himself over to non-being which poses as being, he falls victim to it. Thus Yima falls into the power of the demons whose companion he has become and is destroyed by them.

Corresponding to the myth of Yima’s rebellion and of his self-deification and fall are the Old Testament stories of the tower of Babel and of the foolhardy angels, such as Lucifer (Isa. xiv), who imagined themselves godlike and were cast down. Similarly, good and evil appear again and again in the Old Testament, as in the Avesta, as alternative paths before which man stands and which he must choose between as between life and death (Deut. xxx, 19). The human reality corresponding to the myths of Ahriman’s choice and Lucifer’s downfall, writes Buber, can only be understood through our own observations, supplemented by historical and biographical literature. These give us some insight into the crises of the self which make the person’s psychic dynamic secretive and obdurate and lead him into the actual decision to evil.

This second stage of evil as decision follows from the first stage of evil as indecision. The repeated experiences of indecision merge in self-knowledge into ‘a course of indecision,’ a fixation in it. ‘As long as the will to simple self-preservation dominates that to being-able-to-affirm oneself,’ this self-knowledge is repressed. But when the will to affirm oneself asserts itself, man calls himself in question. Buber explains the crisis of the self which results from this questioning through a development of his philosophical anthropology. For this anthropology man is the creature of possibility who needs confirmation by others and by himself in order that he may be and become the particular man that he is. ‘Again and again the Yes must be spoken to him . . . to liberate him from the dread of abandonment, which is a foretaste of death.’ One can in a pinch do without confirmation from others, but not that of oneself. When a person’s self-knowledge demands inner rejection, he either falls into a pathologically fragile and intricate relationship to himself, readjusts self-knowledge through that extreme effort of unification called ‘conversion,’ or displaces his knowledge of himself by an absolute self-affirmation. In this last case, the image of what he is intended to be is totally extinguished, and in its place he wills or chooses himself just as he is, just as he has resolved to intend himself. This self-affirmation in no sense means real personal wholeness but just its opposite -- a crystallized inner division. ‘They are recognizable, those who dominate their own self-knowledge, by the spastic pressure of the lips, the spastic tension of the muscles of the hand and the spastic tread of the foot.

The man who thus affirms himself resembles Yima, who proclaims himself his own creator. It is in this light too that we can understand the paradoxical myth of the two spirits, one of whom chose evil precisely as evil. The ‘wicked’ spirit, in whom evil is already present in a nascent state, has to choose between the affirmation of himself and the affirmation of the order which establishes good and evil. ‘If he affirms the order he must himself become "good," and that means he must deny and overcome his present state of being. If he affirms himself he must deny and reverse the order.’ The ‘good’ is now just that which he is, for he can no longer say no to anything that is his. This absolute self-affirmation is the lie against being, for through it truth is no longer what he experiences as truth but what he ordains to be true. (Images, pp. 43-56 60 f. 73-79.)

In ‘Imitatio Dei,’ Buber says that Adam’s fall consisted in his wanting to reach the likeness to God intended for him in his creation by other means than that of the imitation of the unknown God. This substitution of self-deification for the ‘imitation of God’ lies at the heart not only of the fall of Adam but also that of Yima. In Adam’s case, however, it is a matter of ‘becoming-like-God’ through knowing good and evil, whereas in Yima’s it is a matter of ‘being-like-God’ through proclaiming oneself as the creator both of one’s existence and of the values by which that existence is judged. The first stage of evil does not yet contain a ‘radical evil’ since the misdeeds which are committed in it are slid into rather than chosen as such. But in the second stage evil becomes radical because there man wills what he finds in himself. He affirms what he has time and again recognized in the depths of self-awareness as that which should be negated and thereby gives evil ‘the substantial character which it did not previously possess.’ ‘If we may compare the occurrence of the first stage to an eccentric whirling movement, the process of the freezing of flowing water may serve as a simile to illustrate the second.’ (Israel and the World, op. cit., p. 73; Images, pp. 62,80 f.)

In his interpretation of Psalm 1 in Right and Wrong, Buber makes an essential distinction between the ‘wicked’ man and the ‘sinner’ corresponding to the two stages of evil which we have discussed. The sinner misses God’s way again and again while the wicked opposes it. ‘Sinner’ describes a condition which from time to time overcomes a man without adhering to him, whereas ‘wicked’ describes a kind of man, a persistent disposition. ‘The sinner does evil, the wicked man is evil. That is why it is said only of the wicked, and not of the sinners, that their way vanishes . . .’ Although the sinner is not confirmed by the human community, he may be able to stand before God, and even entry into the human community is not closed to him if he carries out that turning into God’s way which he desires in the depths of his heart. The ‘wicked,’ in contrast, does not ‘stand’ in the judgment before God. His way is his own judgment: since he has negated his existence, he ends in nothing. Does this mean that the way of God is closed to the wicked man? ‘It is not closed from God’s side . . . but it is closed from the side of the wicked themselves. For in distinction to the sinners they do not wish to be able to turn.’ Here there arises for us the question of how an evil will can exist when God exists. To this question, says Buber, no human word knows the answer: ‘The abyss which is opened by this question advances still more uncannily than the abyss of Job’s question into the darkness of the divine mystery.’ (Good and Evil, Right and Wrong,’ ‘The Ways, Psalm 1,’ pp. 51 f., 58 ff. 109)

Although Buber’s distinction between the two stages of evil did not reach its mature form until 1951, a much greater emphasis on the reality of evil is evident in his works since 1940 than in his earlier writings. In Moses (1944) we find a new emphasis on the demonic, one which in no way conflicts, however, with the conception of God as the ultimate source of both good and evil. A further step in the direction of radical evil is indicated by the story of Korah’s rebellion. Korah’s assertion that the people are already holy is the choice of evil, the choice of the people to follow the wrong path of their hearts and reject the way of God. This rebellion of the Korahites seems all the more evil since we are told that it is precisely Moses’ humility, his fundamental faith in spontaneity and in freedom, which provokes the ‘Korahite’ reaction among men of the Korah type. Nor is Moses able to transform this evil into good; he can only extirpate it:

Although ‘here the eternal word is opposed by eternal contradiction,’ this is not to be understood as a metaphysical statement implying the absolute and independent reality of evil. It is rather the ‘tragedy of Moses,’ who cannot redeem the evil of Korah because ‘men are as they are.’ (Martin Buber, Moses [Oxford: East & West Library, 1946] pp. 56-59, 184-190.)

It is the tragedy of ‘the cruel antitheticalness of existence itself,’(For the Sake of Heaven, 2nd Edition, op. cit., Foreword, p. x.) the tragedy implicit in man’s misuse of the freedom which was given him in his creation.

Closely similar to Korah’s antinomian revolt in the name of divine freedom is that of the two self-proclaimed Messiahs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Sabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank. Buber’s distinction between these two men in an essay written between 1940 and 1943 contains the seed of his later distinction between evil as decisionlessness and evil as self-affirmation. Sabbatai Zevi clearly believes in something absolute and in himself in relation to it. When he becomes an apostate to escape martyrdom, ‘it is not the belief as such but his belief in himself that does not stand firm.’ Frank believes in nothing, not even in himself. He is not a liar but a lie, and ‘he can only believe in himself after the manner of the lie by filling the space of the nothing with himself.’ As a result he knows no inner restraint, and his very freedom from restraint gives him a magical influence over his followers. When, however, his nihilistic belief in himself is threatened by the crisis of self-reflection, it must draw nourishment from ‘the warm flesh and blood of the belief of others in him,’ or else it would cease to exist. His group of disciples with its orgies and raptures and its unconditioned self-surrender ‘to a leader who leads it into nothing’ affords ‘an unsurpassable spectacle of disintegration.’ ‘The abyss has opened,’ writes Buber in an historical present that strongly suggests the real present as well. ‘It is no more allowed to any man to live as if evil did not exist. One cannot serve God by merely avoiding evil; one must grapple with it.’ (Hasidism, op. cit., ‘The Beginnings of Hasidism,’ pp. 10 ff., 25 f., 29 f.)

There is undoubtedly a close relation between Buber’s growing tendency to ascribe reality to evil and the events of the past decades -- in particular, the Nazi’s persecution of the Jews, the Second World War, and the war in Palestine (‘for me the most grievous of the three [wars]’ [Two Types of Faith, p. 15.]) In the case of Nazism this connection is made explicit in Buber’s comparison of Jacob Frank with Hitler. ‘It is significant,’ writes Buber, ‘that it is in our time that the man has arisen in whom the tension between what one is and what one should be is dissolved -- the man without conscience. The secret of Hitler’s effectiveness lies, in fact, in his complete and fundamental absence of restraint.’ The only person in an earlier age whom Buber can find to compare to Hitler is Jacob Frank, for only these two believed in nothing else than their own power. Such a belief in oneself is ordinarily only possible to one who feels himself in the fullest sense of the term commissioned and empowered by the absolute. Those who do not believe in any absolute cannot believe in this sense in the self, but the absence of restraint is accompanied by the natural ability and perfected readiness to avoid that reflection on oneself that would make one’s own emptiness apparent. (Martin Buber, Pointing the Way, op. cit., ‘People and Leader,’ pp. 151-156, 158 ff.)

Does this new emphasis on a ‘radical’ and ‘substantive’ evil mean that we can no longer place Buber in that middle position which regards evil as real but redeemable, thus refusing to ascribe to it an absolute and independent reality? Does Buber’s use of the Iranian myths, the most important historical fountainhead of dualism, not only serve to illustrate an anthropological reality but also imply a dualistic metaphysics? Images of Good and Evil itself supplies the answer to our question. Buber makes it clear there that it is not man’s nature which is evil but only his use of that nature. There are, to be sure, wicked men whose end is non-existence -- this accords with the simple facts -- but there are no men whom God cuts off as simply evil and therefore by nature hostile to His purpose. If some men bring evil to a ‘radical’ stage where it possesses a substantial quality, this does not mean that evil is here independent and absolute, nor even ultimately unredeemable, but only that it has crystallized into a settled opposition by the individual to becoming what he is meant to become. ‘Good . . . retains the character of direction at both stages,’ writes Buber, indicating clearly that there is a good for the second stage even as for the first. (Images, pp. 36,73,81 ff.)

Further evidence that Buber has not left the narrow ridge in his attitude toward evil is his discussion of ‘God’s will to harden’ in Two Types of Faith (1950). On the three occasions when the Old Testament speaks of God as ‘hardening the heart’ of a person or people, it is because of his or their persistent turning away. The hardening comes in an extreme situation as a consequence of perversion ‘and . . . dreadfully enough . . . makes the going-astray into a state of having gone-astray from which there is no returning.’ ‘Sin is not an undertaking which man can break off when the situation becomes critical,’ Buber explains, ‘but a process started by him, the control of which is withdrawn from him at a fixed moment.’ (Two Types of Faith, pp. 83-90.)

The ‘special strength to persevere in sin’ which God grants the sinner when He ‘hardens’ his heart is a counterpart, we may surmise, of that absolute self-affirmation with which the ‘wicked’ closes himself off from God. God will not abridge the freedom which He has given man in creation, and therefore He allows this process of closing off to take place. His ‘hardening’ is His response to man’s decision against Him. It is at once the judgment with which He confirms the wicked in his non-existence and the ‘severe grace’ with which He points out to him the one road back to real existence.

God remains open to man’s turning, but for the man whose way has vanished nothing less than a ‘conversion’ -- a turning of the whole being -- will suffice.

Despite the importance in Buber’s recent thought of such terms as contradiction, tragedy, eclipse of God, and ‘radical evil,’ he remains essentially different from even the least extreme of the dualists. His affirmation of the oneness of God and the ultimate oneness of God and the world has deepened in its paradoxical quality as he has taken more and more realistic cognizance of the evil of the world, but it has not wavered or weakened. The great significance, indeed, of that second stage of evil which is the newest development in Buber’s thought is its concrete base in human existence which makes understandable such extreme phenomena as Hitler and the Nazis without resorting to the dogma of original sin or agreeing with Sartre’s assertion that the events of recent years make it necessary to recognize evil as absolute and unredeemable.

The fundamental fact of human existence, according to Buber’s anthropology, is man with man. But the sphere in which man meets man has been ignored because it possesses no smooth continuity. Its experience has been annexed to the soul and to the world, so that what happens to an individual can be distributed between outer and inner impressions. But when two individuals ‘happen’ to each other, then there is an essential remainder which is common to them, but which reaches out beyond the special sphere of each. That remainder is the basic reality, the ‘sphere of between’ (das Zwischenmenschliche). (Between Man and Man, op. cit., ‘What Is Man?’, pp. 202-205) The participation of both partners is in principle indispensable to this sphere, whether the reciprocity be fully actual or directly capable of being realized through completion or intensification. The unfolding of this sphere Buber calls ‘the dialogical.’ The psychological, that which happens within the souls of each, is only the secret accompaniment to the dialogue. The meaning of this dialogue is found in neither one nor the other of the partners, nor in both taken together, but in their interchange.

The essential problematic of the sphere of the between, writes Buber, is the duality of being and seeming. We must distinguish between two different types of human existence, one of which proceeds from the essence -- from what one really is -- the other of which proceeds from an image -- from what one wishes to appear to be. Like the I-Thou and the I-It relations, these types are generally mixed with one another since no man lives from pure essence and none from pure appearance. None the less, some men may be basically characterized as ‘essence men’ (Wesensmensch) and some as ‘image men’ (Bildmensch). The essence man looks at the other as one to whom one gives oneself. His glance is spontaneous and unaffected. He is not uninfluenced by the desire to make himself understood, but he has no thought for the conception of himself that he might awaken in the beholder. The image man, in contrast, is primarily concerned with what the other thinks of him. With the help of man’s ability to allow a certain element of his being to appear in his glance, he produces a look that is meant to affect the other as a spontaneous expression reflecting a personal being of such and such qualities. There is, in addition, a third realm of ‘genuine appearance’ in which a young person imitates a heroic model and becomes something of what he imitates. Here the mask is a real mask and not a deception. But where the appearance arises from a lie and is permeated by it, the ‘sphere of the between’ is threatened in its very existence.

Whatever the word ‘truth’ may mean in other spheres, in the realm between man and man it means that one imparts oneself to the other as what one is. This is not a question of saying to the other everything that occurs to one, but of allowing the person with whom one communicates to partake of one’s being. It is a question of the authenticity of what is between men, without which there can be no authentic human existence. The origin of the tendency toward appearance is found in man’s need for confirmation. It is no easy thing to be confirmed by the other in one’s essence; therefore, one looks to appearance for aid. To give in to this tendency is the real cowardice of man, to withstand it is his real courage. One must pay dearly at times for essential life, but never too dearly. ‘I have never met any young man who seemed to me hopelessly bad,’ writes Buber. It is only the successive layers of deception that give the illusion of individuals who are ‘image men’ by their very nature. ‘Man is, as man, redeemable.’

True confirmation means that one confirms one’s partner as this existing being even while one opposes him. I legitimize him over against me as the one with whom I have to do in real dialogue, and I may then trust him also to act towards me as a partner. To confirm him in this way I need the aid of ‘imagining the real.’ This is no intuitive perception but a bold swinging into the other which demands the intensest action of my being, even as does all genuine fantasy, only here the realm of my act ‘is not the all-possible’ but the particular, real person who steps up to meet me, the person whom I seek to make present as just so and not otherwise in all his wholeness, unity, and uniqueness. I can only do this as a partner, standing in a common situation with the other, and even then my address to the other may remain unanswered and the dialogue may die in seed.

If it is the interaction between man and man which makes possible authentic human existence, it follows that the precondition of such authentic existence is that each overcomes the tendency toward appearance, that each means the other in his personal existence and makes him present as such, and that neither attempts to impose his own truth or view on the other. It would be mistaken to speak here of individuation alone. Individuation is only the indispensable personal stamp of all realization of human being. The self as such is not ultimately essential but the created meaning of human existence again and again fulfills itself as self. The help that men give each other in becoming a self leads the life between men to its height. The dynamic glory of the being of man is first bodily present in the relation between two men each of whom in meaning the other also means the highest to which this person is called and serves the fulfillment of this created destiny without wishing to impose anything of his own realization on the other.

In genuine dialogue the experiencing senses and the real fantasy which supplements them work together to make the other present as whole and one. For this dialogue to be real, one must not only mean the other, but also bring oneself, and that means say at times what one really thinks about the matter in question. One must make the contribution of one’s spirit without abbreviation and distortion: everything depends here upon the legitimacy of what one has to say. Not holding back is the opposite of letting oneself go, for true speech involves thought as to the way in which one brings to words what one has in mind. A further precondition of genuine dialogue is the overcoming of appearance. If, even in an atmosphere of genuine conversation, the thought of one’s effect as speaker outweighs the thought of what one has to say, then one inevitably works as a destroyer. One irreparably deforms what one has to say: it enters deformed into the conversation, and the conversation itself is deformed. Because genuine conversation is an ontological sphere which constitutes itself through the authenticity of being, every intrusion of appearance can injure it.

Genuine conversation is most often found in the dialogue between two persons, but it also occurs occasionally in a dialogue of several voices. Not everyone present has to speak for this dialogue to be genuine, but no one can be there as a mere observer. Each must be ready to share with the others, and no one who really takes part can know in advance that he will not have something to say. (Martin Buber, ‘Elements of the Interhuman,’ translated by Ronald Gregor Smith, Psychiatry, Vol. XX, No. 2 [May 1957], pp. 105-113.)

Genuine dialogue can thus be either spoken or silent. Its essence lies in the fact that ‘each of the participants really has in mind the other or others in their present and particular being and turns to them with the intention of establishing a living mutual relation between himself and them.’ The essential element of genuine dialogue, therefore, is ‘seeing the other’ or ‘experiencing the other side.’ There is no human situation which is so rotten and God-forsaken that the meeting with otherness cannot take place within it. The ordinary man can, and at times does, break through ‘from the status of the dully-tempered disagreeableness, obstinacy, and contraryness’ in which he lives into an effective reality. This reality is the simple quantum satis, or sufficient amount, ‘of that which this man in this hour of his life is able to fulfill and to receive -- if he gives himself.’

It is also possible for a leader of business to fill his business with dialogue by meeting the men with whom he works as persons. Even when he cannot meet them directly, he can be ‘inwardly aware, with a latent and disciplined fantasy, of the multitude of these persons,’ so that when one of them does step before him as an individual, he can meet him ‘not as a number with a human mask but as a person.’ (Between Man and Man, ‘Dialogue,’ pp. 20-24, 27, 36-39; Kampf um Israel, op. cit., p. 279.)

‘Experiencing the other side’ means to feel an event from the side of the person one meets as well as from one’s own side. It is an inclusiveness which realizes the other person in the actuality of his being, but it is not to be identified with ‘empathy,’ which means transposing oneself into the dynamic structure of an object, hence ‘the exclusion of one’s own concreteness, the extinguishing of the actual situation of life, the absorption in pure aestheticism of the reality in which one participates.’

Experiencing the other side is the essence of all genuine love. The ‘eros’ of monologue is a display or enjoyment of subjective feelings. The eros of dialogue, on the other hand, means the turning of the lover to the beloved ‘in his otherness, his independence, his self-reality,’ and ‘with all the power of intention’ of his own heart. He does not assimilate into his own soul what lives and faces him, but he vows it faithfully to himself and himself to it.

The ‘inclusion’ of the other takes place still more deeply and fully in marriage, which Buber describes as ‘the exemplary bond’ and ‘decisive union.’ He who has entered into marriage has been in earnest ‘with the fact that the other is,’ with the fact that he ‘cannot legitimately share in the Present Being without sharing in the being of the other.’ If this marriage is real it leads to a ‘vital acknowledgment of many-faced otherness -- even in the contradiction and conflict with it.’ (Ibid., ‘The Question to the Single One,’p. 60 f.)

The crises of marriage and the overcoming of them which rises out of the organic depths lead men to recognize in the body politic in general that other persons have not only a different way of thinking. but ‘a different perception of the world, a different recognition and order of meaning, a different touch from the regions of existence, a different faith, a different soil.’ To affirm this difference in the midst of conflict without relaxing the real seriousness of the conflict is the way in which we can from time to time touch on the other’s ‘truth’ or ‘untruth,’ ‘justice’ or ‘injustice.’

‘Love without dialogic, without real outgoing to the other, reaching to the other, and companying with the other, the love remaining with itself -- this is called Lucifer.’ This ‘love’ is evil because it is monological. The monological man is not aware of the ‘otherness’ of the other, but instead tries to incorporate the other into himself. The basic movement of the life of monologue is not turning away from the other but ‘reflexion’ (Rückbiegung), bending back on oneself. ‘Reflexion’ is not egotism but the withdrawal from accepting the other person in his particularity in favour of letting him exist only as one’s own experience, only as a part of oneself. Through this withdrawal ‘the essence of all reality begins to disintegrate.’ (Ibid., ‘Dialogue,’ pp. 21-24)

Renewed contact with reality cannot be made through the direct attempt to ‘remove’ or ‘deny’ the self nor even through despair at one’s selfishness, for these entail another and related form of monologue: preoccupation with one’s self. The soul does not have its object in itself, nor is its knowing, purifying, and perfecting itself for its own sake ‘but for the sake of the work which it is destined to perform upon the world.’ One must distinguish here between that awareness which turns one in on oneself and that which enables one to turn to the other. The latter is not only essential to the life of dialogue, but is dialogical in its very nature: it is the awareness of ‘the signs’ that continually address us in everything that happens. These signs are simply what happens when we enter into relation with occurrences as really having meaning for us. ‘Each of us is encased in an armour whose task it is to ward off signs,’ for we are afraid that to open ourselves to them means annihilation. We perfect this defence apparatus from generation to generation until we can assure ourselves that the world is there to be experienced and used as we like but that nothing is directed at us, nothing required of us. (Martin Buber, The Way of Man according to the Teachings of Hasidism [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950: Chicago: Wilcox & Follett, 1951], pp. 14 f., 36 ff.; Between Man and Man, ‘Dialogue,’ p. 10 f.)

In shutting off our awareness of ‘the signs’ we are shutting off our awareness of the address of God, for He who speaks in the signs is the ‘Lord of the Voice,’ the eternal Thou. Every man hides, like Adam, to avoid rendering accounts. ‘To escape responsibility for his life, he turns existence into a system of hideouts’ and ‘enmeshes himself more and more deeply in perversity.’ The lie displaces ‘the undivided seriousness of the human person with himself and all his manifestations’ and destroys the good will and reliability on which men’s life in common rests. The external conflict between man and man has its roots in the inner contradiction between thought, speech, and action. One’s failure to say what one means and do what one says ‘confuses and poisons, again and again and in increasing measure,’ the situation between oneself and the other man. Unaware that the roots of the condict are in our inner contradiction, we resist beginning with ourselves and demand that the other change at the same time. ‘But just this perspective, in which a man sees himself only as an individual contrasted with other individuals, and not as a genuine person whose transformation helps towards the transformation of the world, contains the fundamental error.’ (Between Man and Man, p. 14 f.; The Way of Man, pp. 12 f., 30 ff.; Martin Buber, Right and Wrong, trans. by Ronald Gregor Smith [London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1952], ‘Against the Generation of the Lie’ [Psalm 12] pp. 11-16 [also found in Martin Buber, Good and Evil, Two Interpretations {New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953}], pp. 7-14, which book includes both Right and Wrong and Images of Good and Evil, trans. by Michael Bullock [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952]; Martin Buber, Hasidism [New York: The Philosophical Library, 1948], ‘The Beginnings of Hasidism,’ pp. 9-12.)

To begin with one’s own soul may seem senseless to one who holds himself bankrupt. But one cannot honestly hold oneself bankrupt until one has taken a genuine inventory of one’s personality and life, and when one has done so, one usually discovers hitherto unsuspected reserves. ‘The man with the divided, complicated, contradictory soul is not helpless: the core of his soul, the divine force in its depths, is capable of . . . binding the conflicting forces together, amalgamating the diverging elements.’ This unification of the soul is never final. Again and again temptation overcomes the soul, and ‘again and again innate grace arises from out of its depths and promises the utterly incredible: you can become whole and one.’ (Martin Buber, ‘Erkenutnis tut not,’ Almanach des Schocken Verlags auf das Jahr 5696 [1935-36] [Berlin], pp. 11-14; The Way of Man, pp. 12 ff., 25 f., 31; Images of Good and Evil, p. 68 f. [Good and Evil, p. 127 f.]). This is no easy promise, however, but one demanding a total effort of the soul for its realization:

It is no wonder, writes Buber, that these situations frequently terminate in a persistent state of indecision. Yet even if the effort of unification is not entirely successful, it may still lay the groundwork for future success. ‘The unification must be accomplished before a man undertakes some unusual work,’ but any ordinary work that a man does with a united soul acts in the direction of new and greater unification and leads him, even if by many detours, to a steadier unity than he had before. ‘Thus man ultimately reaches a point where he can rely upon his soul, because its unity is now so great that it overcomes contradiction with effortless ease.’ In place of his former great efforts all that is now necessary is a relaxed vigilance. (Ibid., p. 70 [p. 129] The Way of Man, p. 25 ff.)

In Hasidism ‘the holiest teaching is rejected if it is found in someone only as a content of his thinking.’ In religious reality a person becomes a whole. In philosophizing, in contrast, there is a totalization but no wholeness, for thinking overwhelms all the faculties of the person. ‘In a great act of philosophizing even the finger-tips think -- but they no longer feel.’ This contrast must not be understood as one between feeling and thought. The wholeness of the religious person includes thought ‘as an autonomous province but one which no longer strives to absolutize its autonomy.’ One cannot substitute feeling for this personal wholeness since feeling at most only indicates that one is about to become whole, and it often merely gives the illusion of wholeness. (Hasidism, ‘The Place of Hasidism in the History of Religion,’ p. 192, cf. ‘The Foundation Stone,’ p. S6 f., ‘Spirit and Body of the Hasidic Movement,’ pp. 88, 94; Eclipse of God, op. cit., ‘Religion and Philosophy,’ p. 60 f.; Martin Buber, Two Types of Faith, trans. by Norman P. Goldhawk [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951; New York: The Macmillan Co., 1952), p. 8.]) It is not the dominance of any one faculty but the unity of all faculties within the personality that constitutes the wholeness of man, and it is this that Buber calls ‘spirit.’

Man’s wholeness does not exist apart from real relationship to other beings. In I and Thou, as we have seen, Buber defines spirit in its human manifestation as ‘a response of man to his Thou.’ These two elements of wholeness and relation are invariably linked together in Buber’s mature thought. He defines the relation of trust, for example, as a contact of the entire being with the one in whom one trusts. He posits as the first axiom of the Bible that man is addressed by God in his life and as the second that the life of man is meant by God as a unit. And he couples the recognition that true freedom comes only from personal wholeness with the assertion that freedom is only of value as a springboard for responsibility and communion. The true person is again and again required to detach and shut himself off from others, but this attitude is alien to his innermost being: man wants openness to the world, he wants the company of others. (I and Thou, p. 39; Two Types of Faith, p. 8; Martin Buber, At the Turning (New York: Farrar, Straus & Young, 1952), ‘The Dialogue between Heaven and Earth,’ p. 53; Between Man and Man, ‘Education,’ p. 90 ff.; Martin Buber, ‘Remarks on Goethe’s Concept of Humanity,’ Goethe and the Modern Age, ed. by Arnold Bergstraesser [Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1950), p. 231 ff.]) Through relation the whole man shares in an absolute meaning which he cannot know in his life by himself.

The child knows the Thou before it knows the separated I. ‘But on the height of personal existence one must truly be able to say I in order to know the mystery of the Thou in its whole truth.’ (Ibid., p.175) Thus partial relation precedes inner wholeness but full relation follows it.

‘Not before a man can say I in perfect reality -- that is, finding himself,’ writes Buber, ‘can he in perfect reality say Thou -- that is, to God. And even if he does it in a community he can only do it "alone."’ Yet the saying of Thou to God must include the saying of Thou to the world and to men.

The ‘Single One’ need not hold himself aloof from crowds. ‘The Man who is living with the body politic . . . is not bundled, but bound.’ He is bound in relation to the destiny of the crowd and does what he can to change the crowd into Single Ones. He takes up into his life the otherness which enshrouds him, but he takes it up ‘only in the form of the other . . . the other who meets him, who is sought, lifted out of the crowd, the "companion." The Single One passes his life in the body politic, for the body politic is ‘the reservoir of otherness’ -- ‘the basic structure of otherness, in many ways uncanny but never quite unholy or incapable of being hallowed, in which I and the others who meet me in my life are in-woven.’ (Ibid., ‘The Question of the Single One,’ pp. 61-65)

Thus Buber changes Kierkegaard’s category of the Single One (‘der Einzelne’) into the man for whom the relation to God includes all other relations without curtailing them. The essence of this new category is responsibility, and responsibility, for Buber, means responding -- hearing the unreduced claim of each particular hour in all its crudeness and disharmony and answering it out of the depths of one’s being. This responsibility does not exclude a man from membership in a group or community, but it means that due membership in a community includes a boundary to membership so that no group or person can hinder one’s perception of what is spoken or one’s answer from the ground of one’s being. This perception is not an ‘inner light’ from God that presents one the answer at the same time as the question. God tenders the situation, but the response comes from the ‘conscience’ -- not the routine, surface, discredited conscience but ‘the unknown conscience in the ground of being, which needs to be discovered ever anew.’ Something of God’s grace enters into this response, to be sure, but man cannot measure the share of grace in the answer. "Conscience" is human and can be mistaken, it is a thing of "fear and trembling," it can only try to hear.’ (Between Man and Man, ‘The Question to the Single One,’ pp. 54, 65-69. The final quotation is from a letter of August 18, 1952, from Professor Buber to the author.) None the less, if one responds as a whole person, one can have confidence in one’s response as one cannot have confidence in any objective knowledge or universal prescriptions of morality. ‘What is here called person is the very person who is addressed and who answers.’ The ‘Hinderer,’ or Satan, writes Buber, is the person who prompts one with an answer in such a way as to hinder one’s recognizing the situation presented in ‘the very ground where hearing passes into being.’ (Between Man and Man, The Question to the Single One,’ p.68 f.)

The ‘Single One,’ then, is the man whose aloneness means not only self-containment but a readiness to respond out of the depths of his being.

This unity of being also means readiness again to become the Single One when I-Thou becomes I-It. The Single One ‘must let himself be helped from time to time by an inner-wordly "monastery"’ which will not tear him away from relation but will prepare him for new meeting:

To the extent that the soul achieves unification, it becomes aware of ‘direction’ and of itself as sent in quest of it. This awareness of direction is ultimately identical with the awareness of one’s created uniqueness, the special way to God that is realized in one’s relations with the world and men.

‘Decision’ is here both the current decision about the immediate situation which confronts one and through this the decision with the whole being for God. ‘In the reality of existence all the so diverse decisions are merely variations on a single one, which is continually made afresh in a single direction.’ This single direction must itself be understood in a double sense as the direction toward the person purposed for one and the direction toward God. This dual understanding means nothing more than ‘a duality of aspects’ provided one understands by God something really other than oneself, the author of one’s created uniqueness that cannot be derived from within the world. Direction is apprehended through one’s inner awareness of what one is meant to be, for it is this that enables one to make a genuine decision. This is a reciprocal process, however, for in transforming and directing one’s undirected energies, one comes to recognize ever more clearly what one is meant to be. (Ibid., p. 81 f. (p. 126 f.)

One experiences one’s uniqueness as a designed or preformed one, intrusted to one for execution, yet everything that affects age participates in this execution. The person who knows direction responds with the whole of his being to each new situation with no other preparation than his presence and his readiness to respond. He is identical, therefore, with the Single One who becomes a whole person and goes out to relation with the Thou. ‘Direction is not meeting but going out to meet.’ It is not identical with dialogue, but it is, along with personal wholeness, a prerequisite of any genuine dialogue. It is also a product of dialogue in the sense that the awareness of direction comes into being only in the dialogue itself. One discovers the mystery waiting for one not in oneself but in the encounter with what one meets. Although ‘the one direction of the hour towards God . . . changes time and again by concretion,’ each moment’s new direction is the direction if reality is met in lived concreteness. (Images of Good and Evil,’ p. 82; Letter of August 18, 1952 [see p. 94, n. 1 above]; Between Man and Man, ‘The Question to the Single One,’ p. 78 f.)

The goal of creation that we are intended to fulfill is not an unavoidable destiny but something to which we are called and to which we are free to respond or not to respond. Our awareness of this calling is not a sense of what we may become in terms of our position in society nor is it a sense of what type of person we should develop into. ‘The purpose of my uniqueness may be felt more or less dimly, it cannot be sensed.’ (Letter of August 18, 1952.) Direction is neither conscious conception nor subconscious fantasy. It is the primal awareness of our unique way to God that lies at the very centre of our awareness of ourself as I. We cannot make direction more rationally comprehensible than this, for it is ultimately a mystery, even as are our freedom and our uniqueness to which it is integrally related.

Closely related to Buber’s concept of direction is the Biblical concept of emunah, or trust. Emunah is the perseverance of man ‘in a hidden but self-revealing guidance.’ This guidance does not relieve man of taking and directing his own steps, for it is nothing other than God’s making known that He is present. Emunah is the realization of one’s faith in the actual totality of one’s relationships to God, to one’s appointed sphere in the world, and to oneself. ‘By its very nature trust is substantiation of trust in the fullness of life in spite of the course of the world which is experienced.’ (Two Types of Faith, pp. 40, 170; cf. Right and Wrong [Good and Evil], ‘The Heart Determines, Psalm 73,’ ‘The Ways, Psalm 1.’) In this exclusion of a dualism between ‘life in the soul’ and ‘life in the world’ emunah brings together the wholeness of the Single One, the ‘direction’ of the man of true decision, and the relation with the concrete of the dialogical man.

The lived unity of the life of dialogue, born out of response to the essential mystery of the world, makes this response ever more possible.

The ‘sphere of the between,’ mutual confirmation, making the other present, overcoming appearance, genuine dialogue, experiencing the other side, personal wholeness, the Single One, responsibility, decision, direction, trust -- these are all aspects of the life of dialogue. This life is a part of our birthright as human beings, for only through it can we attain authentic human existence. But this birthright cannot be simply inherited, it must be earned. We must follow Buber in not underestimating the obstacles to the life of dialogue, but we must also follow him in refusing to magnify them into an inexorable fate.

The tendency toward appearance which mars the life of dialogue has its origin not only in the interdependence and need for confirmation that Buber has indicated, but also in the specific social structures that have arisen on this anthropological base: in the ordinary amenities of civilized life which make us habitually pretend toward others what we do not feel; in the institutionalization of social life which makes us tend to relate to others on the basis of our relative positions in these institutions; in the emphasis on prestige and authority which grows out of our social differentiations; in our inner divisions which make us unable to relate to others honestly because we cannot relate as whole persons; in our unawareness of the extent to which our values and attitudes arise, not from a genuine relation to truth, but from the social attitudes of the groups to which we belong.

To emphasize the hold of appearance on our lives is to point out how difficult and also how important it is to become a ‘Single One.’ This is especially so if one understands by the Single One not Kierkegaard’s man, who finds truth by separating himself from the crowd, but Buber’s man of the narrow ridge, who lives with others yet never gives up his personal responsibility nor allows his commitment to the group to stand in the way of his direct relationship to the Thou. Another product of the narrow ridge, one equally essential to the life of dialogue, is the realistic trust which recognizes the strength of the tendency toward appearance yet stands ready to deal with the other as a partner and to confirm him in becoming his real self. This open-eyed trust is at base a trust in existence itself despite the difficulties we encounter in making our human share of it authentic. It is the trust, in Buber’s words, that ‘man is, as man, redeemable.’

Since I and Thou Buber had enjoyed thirty years of continuous productivity in an extended range of interests. During this period he has made an unusual translation of the Bible into German in collaboration with Franz Rosenzweig and has written several important works of biblical interpretation. He has also expanded and deepened his interest in Hasidism, Judaism, Zionism, and religious socialism, and he has explored the implications of his I-Thou philosophy for education, community, sociology, psychology, art, and philosophical anthropology.

Though Buber’s ideas have validity for the various fields in which he has expressed them, they also retain their nature as integral parts of his philosophy. Buber has himself stressed this unity in his Forewords to Kampf um Israel (1933) and Dialogisches Leben (1947). In the former he states that all the works which he had published in the last twelve years belong to ‘the beginning of a proper expression of my real relation to truth.’ In the latter he states that the intention of the essays and talks in the volume, written between 1922 and 1941, is to point to a reality which has been neglected by thought, a reality ‘of which I am today, as in the beginning of this work, certain that it is essential for the existence of men, mighty in meaning and in saving power.... "I and Thou" stands at the head while all of the others stand in an illustrative and supplementary relation to it.’ (Martin Buber, Kampf um Israel. Reden und Schriften [1921-1932] [Berlin: Schocken Verlag, 1933], p. Vii [my translation]; Martin Buber, Dialogisches Leben. Gesammelte philosophische und padagogische Schriften [Zurich: Grtegor Muller Verlag, 1947], pp.9-10 [my translation].)

It should be recognized at the same time that the supplementary function of Buber’s works since I and Thou includes not only an elaboration of the I-Thou philosophy and its extension into new fields, but also, as an integral part of this extension, a deepening and solidification. This deepening and solidification has produced several highly significant developments in Buber’s thought: a growing concern with the nature and meaning of evil as opposed to his earlier tendency to treat evil as a negative aspect of something else; a growing concern with freedom and grace, divine and human love, and the dread through which man must pass to reach God; a steady movement toward concern with the simpler and more concrete aspects of everyday life; and an ever greater simplicity and solidity of style.

An especially important and still uncompleted development in Buber’s thought is his philosophical anthropology -- the study of the problem of man. Buber defines ‘philosophical anthropology’ as the study of ‘the wholeness of man,’ and he lists the following as among the problems ‘which are implicitly set up at the same time by this question’:

The concern with the wholeness of man rules out the attempt to answer the question of what man is in terms of particular philosophical disciplines:

At the same time Buber disagrees with Heidegger in his belief that philosophical anthropology can provide a foundation for metaphysics or for the individual philosophical sciences. In doing so it would become so general that it would reach a false unity instead of the genuine wholeness of the subject based on ‘the contemplation of all its manifold nature.’

Buber proceeds to set up philosophical anthropology as a systematic method which deals with the concrete, existential characteristics of man’s life in order to arrive at the wholeness of man:

In defining philosophical anthropology as the problem of finding one essence of man in the constant flux of individuals and cultures, Buber has once again made visible the way of the ‘narrow ridge.’ For only through this approach can we avoid the abyss of abstract unity on the one hand and that of meaningless relativity on the other. In a further definition of the problem Buber writes: Man’s existence is constituted by his participation, at the same time and in the same actions, in finitude and infinity. Related to this definition is his designation of man in ‘The Question to the Single One’ as the only creature who has potentiality. Even though this wealth of possibility is confined within narrow limits, these limits are only factual and not essential. Man’s action is unforeseeable in its nature and extent. (Ibid., p. 77 f.) It is because of this potentiality that Buber is able to speak in terms of the freedom of man and the reality of evil.

A corollary of Buber’s emphasis on the wholeness of man is his rejection of the traditional idea that man is human because of his reason.

II

Through contrasting man with the rest of nature Buber derives a twofold principle of human life consisting of two basic movements. The first movement he calls ‘the primal setting at a distance,’ the second ‘entering into relation.’ The first movement is the presupposition for the second, for we can only enter into relation with being that has been set at a distance from us and thereby has become an independent opposite. Only man can perform this act of setting at a distance because only man has a ‘world’ -- an unbroken continuum which includes not only all that he and other men know and experience but all that is knowable now and in the future. An animal does not have a world but only an environment or realm. An animal selects from his realm those things which he needs, but he does not see it as a separate whole nor, like man, complete what is perceived by what can be perceived. This primal distancing is true not only of man’s connection with space but of his connection with time. An animal’s actions are concerned with its future and that of its young, but only man imagines the future. ‘The beaver’s dam is extended in a time-realm, but the planted tree is rooted in the world of time, and he who plants the first tree is he who will expects the Messiah.’

Buber characterizes the act of entering into relation with the world as a ‘synthesizing apperception,’ the apperception of a being as a whole and as a unity. Only by looking at the world as a world can man grasp being as a wholeness and unity. This is done not simply through ‘setting at a distance’ but also through entering into relation.

Distance makes room for relation, but relation does not necessarily follow. The real history of the spirit begins in the extent of the mutual interaction, reaction, and co-operation of the two movements. They may complete or contend with one another; each may see the other as the means or as the obstacle to its own realization. The great phenomena in history on the side of acts of distance are preponderantly universal while those on the side of acts of relation are preponderantly personal. The first movement shows how man is possible, the second how man is realized. ‘Distance provides the human situation, relation provides man’s becoming in that situation.’

An animal makes use of a stick as a tool, but only man sets it aside for future use as a specific and persisting It with a known capacity. But it is not enough for man to use and possess things. He also has a great desire to enter into personal relation with things and to imprint on them his relation to them. It is here, in man’s relation to things, that we find the origin of art. A work of art is not the impression of natural objectivity nor the expression of spiritual subjectivity. It is the witness of the relation between the human substance and the substance of things.

In men’s relation to one another the twofold principle of human life can be seen still more clearly. An insect society has division of labour, but it allows neither variation nor individual award. In human societies, in contrast, persons confirm each other in a practical way in their personal qualities and capacities. Indeed, a society may be termed human in the measure to which this mutual confirmation takes place. Apart from the tool and the weapon, it is this mutual individual completion and recognition of function which has enabled man to achieve lordship of the earth. An animal cannot see its companions apart from their common life, nor ascribe to the enemy any existence beyond his hostility. Man sets man at a distance and makes him independent. He is therefore able to enter into relation, in his own individual status, with those like himself.

This mutual confirmation is best illustrated by speech. Animals call to one another, but only man speaks to other men as independent and particular others. Man sets his calls or words at a distance like his tools. He gives them independence in order that they may come to life again in genuine conversation. This process is perverted and the reality of speech misused when conversations take place without real dialogue. Genuine conversation, like every genuine fulfillment of relation between men, means acceptance of otherness. This means that although one may desire to influence the other and to lead him to share in one’s relation to truth, one accepts and confirms him in his being this particular man made in this particular way. One wishes him to have a different relation to one’s own truth in accordance with his individuality. The manipulator of propaganda and suggestion, in contrast, wishes to make use of men. He relates to men not as independently other beings but as to things, things moreover with which he will never enter into relation and which he is eager to rob of their distance.

Thus mutual confirmation of men is most fully realized in what Buber calls ‘making present,’ an event which happens partially wherever men come together but in its essential structure only rarely. Making the other present means to ‘imagine’ the real, to imagine quite concretely what another man is wishing, feeling, perceiving, and thinking. In the full making present something of the character of what is imagined is joined to the act of imagining. One to some extent wills what he is willing, thinks what he is thinking, feels what he is feeling. The particular pain which I inflict on another surges up in myself until paradoxically we are embraced in a common situation. It is through this making present that we grasp another as a self, that is as a being whose distance from me cannot be separated from my distance from him and whose particular experience I can make present. This event is not ontologically complete until he knows himself made present by me and until this knowledge induces the process of his inmost self-becoming. ‘For the inmost growth of the self is not accomplished, as people like to suppose today, in man’s relation to himself, but . . . in the making present of another self and in the knowledge that one is made present in his own self by the other.’ An animal does not need confirmation because he is what he is unquestionably. Man, in contrast, needs to have a presence in the being of the other.

Sent forth from the natural domain of species into the hazard of the solitary category, surrounded by the air of a chaos which came into being with him, secretly and bashfully he watches for a Yes which allows him to be and which can come to him only from one human person to another. (Martin Buber, ‘Distance and Relation,’ translated by Ronald Gregor Smith, The Hibbert Journal, January 1951, Vol. XLIX, pp. 105-113. ‘The connection of the whole work with my writings on dialogical existence . . . is probably clear to the reader,’ writes Buber in the ‘Vorwort’ to the German original, Urdistanz und Bezichung [Heidelberg: Verlag Lambert Schneider, 1951].)

III

It is clear that ‘entering into relation’ means entering into an I-Thou relation, yet it is equally clear that one cannot identify distance with I-It. When man fails to enter into relation, however, the distance thickens and solidifies, so that instead of being that which makes room for relation it becomes that which obstructs it. This failure to enter into relation corresponds to I-It, and distance thus becomes the presupposition for both I-Thou and I-It. Entering into relation is an act of the whole being -- it is in fact the act by which we constitute ourselves as human, and it is an act which must be repeated ever again in ever new situations. Distance, in contrast, is not an act and neither is failure to enter into relation: both are states of being.

When Buber speaks in I and Thou of I-Thou as preceding I-It in the primitive man and the child, he is speaking of the genesis of these relations. In ‘Distance and Relation,’ on the other hand, he is speaking ontologically of what constitutes the human being as a human being: he is not here interested in discovering just when, in the life of the race and the individual, man really becomes man but only in discovering what makes up the essence of man once he is man. Even ontologically speaking, however, it might appear that if distance is the presupposition for relationship and I-It is the thickening of distance, then the I-It relation precedes rather than follows the I-Thou. This apparent contradiction rests on a misconception, namely, that the thickening of the distance is closer to the original situation than the entrance into relation. Distance precedes the I-Thou and I-It relations which make up personal existence. This distance given, man is able to enter into relation with other beings or, as we have seen, he is able to enlarge, develop, accentuate, and shape the distance itself. In this shaping of the distance the primary state of things is elaborated as it is not in I-Thou. The I-Thou relation changes nothing in the primary state of things, but the thickening of distance into I-It changes the whole situation of the other being, making it into one’s object. Looking at and observing the object, we make it part of an objective world with which we do not enter into relationship. Hence the I-It, or subject-object, relationship is not the primary one but is an elaboration of the given as the I-Thou relationship is not.

In the actual development of the human person, entering into relation precedes the thickening of distance that obstructs relation. The baby does not proceed directly from complete unity with its mother to that primary I-Thou relation which Buber has described in the child. Already in its first days, according to Buber, a child has the fact of distance, that is, the sense of beings as different from and over against him. In entering into relation with its mother the child completes this distance, and it is only later when he ceases to enter into relation that he sees her as an object and falls into the I-It’s shaping and elaboration of the distance. (I am indebted to Professor Buber for oral elucidation of these problems.) This same thing happens later when the child goes through that process of emergence of the self which Erich Fromm has described. (Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom [New York: Rinehart & Co., 1941], chap. ii.) As consciousness of one’s separateness grows, it becomes more and more difficult to overcome the distance through relation; heightened insecurity and need for decision produce an ever greater temptation to accentuate the distance and take refuge in the pseudosecurity of the world of It, the world of ordered objectivity and private subjectivity.

In ‘Religion and Modern Thought’ Buber criticizes Sartre’s statement that man ‘should affirm himself as the being through whom a world exists.’ ‘That ordering of known phenomena which we call the world,’ writes Buber, ‘is, indeed, the composite work of a thousand human generations.’ But, he goes on to say, this world has come into existence through our meeting with existing being unknowable to us in its own nature. Though the becoming of a world takes place through us, our social ordering of the world rests, in its turn, on the priority of the meeting with existing being, and this meeting is not our work. (Martin Buber, Eclipse of God, Studies in the Relation between Religion and Philosophy [New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952], ‘Religion and Philosophy,’ translated by Maurice S. Friedman, p. 58 f., ‘Religion and Modern Thought,’ also my translation, p. 91 f.) Hence here too entering into relation precedes the elaboration of distance, I-Thou precedes I-It.

While I-It can be defined as the enlarging and thickening of distance, it can also be defined as the objectification of the I-Thou relation which sometimes serves as the way back to it and sometimes obstructs the return. The I-Thou relation supplies the form for I-It, the form in which the distance is thickened. The form of the I-Thou relation remains as a means of re-entering relation, of executing anew the essential human act; but this form may block the return to the I-Thou relation through its false appearance of being itself the real thing.

The inborn Thou is expressed and realized in each relation, writes Buber, but it is consummated only in the direct relation with the Eternal Thou, ‘the Thou that by its nature cannot become It.’ This Thou is met by every man who addresses God by whatever name and even by that man who does not believe in God yet addresses ‘the Thou of his life, as a Thou that cannot be limited by another.’ ‘All God’s names are hallowed, for in them He is not merely spoken about, but also spoken to.’ Our speaking to God, our meeting Him is not mere waiting and openness for the advent of grace. Man must go forth to the meeting with God, for here too the relation means being chosen and choosing, suffering and action in one. Hence we must be concerned not about God’s side -- grace -- but about our side -- will. ‘Grace concerns us in so far as we go out to it and persist in its presence; but it is not our object.’ (I and Thou, op. cit., p. 75 f.)

To go out to the meeting with the Eternal Thou, a man must have become a whole being, one who does not intervene in the world and one in whom no separate and partial action stirs. To go out to this meeting he need not lay aside the world of sense as though it were illusory or go beyond sense-experience. Nor need he have recourse to a world of ideas and values. Ideas and values cannot become presentness for us, and every experience, even the most spiritual, can yield us only an It. Only the barrier of separation must be destroyed, and this cannot be done through any formula, precept, or spiritual exercise. ‘The one thing that matters’ is ‘full acceptance of the present.’ Of course, the destruction of separateness and the acceptance of the present presuppose that the more separated a man has become, the more difficult will be the venture and the more elemental the turning. But this does not mean giving up the I, as mystical writings usually suppose, for the I is essential to this as to every relation. What must be given up is the self-asserting instinct ‘that makes a man flee to the possessing of things before the unreliable, perilous world of relation.’ (Ibid., p. 76 ff.)

‘He who enters the absolute relation is concerned with nothing isolated any more.’ He sees all things in the Thou and thus establishes the world on its true basis. God cannot be sought, He can only be met. Of course He is Barth’s ‘wholly Other’ and Otto’s Mysterium Tremendum, but He is also the wholly Same, ‘nearer to me than my I.’ He cannot be spatially located in the transcendence beyond things or the immanence within things and then sought and found.

It is foolish to seek God, ‘for there is nothing in which He could not be found.’ It is hopeless to turn aside from the course of one’s life, for with ‘all the wisdom of solitude and all the power of concentrated being,’ a man would still miss God. Rather one must go one’s way and simply wish that it might be the way. The meeting with God is ‘a finding without seeking, a discovering of the primal, of origin.’ The man who thus waits and finds is like the perfected man of the Tao: ‘He is composed before all things and makes contact with them which helps them,’ and when he has found he does not turn from things but meets them in the one event. Thus the finding ‘is not the end, but only the eternal middle, of the way.’ Like the Tao, God cannot be inferred in anything, but unlike the Tao, God can be met and addressed. ‘God is the Being that is directly, most nearly, and lastingly over against us, that may properly only be addressed, not expressed.’ (Ibid., p. 80.)

To make the relation to God into a feeling is to relativize and psychologize it. True relation is a coincidentia oppositorum, an absolute which gathers up the poles of feeling into itself. Though one has at times felt oneself simply dependent on God, one has also in this dependence felt oneself really free. And in one’s freedom one acts not only as a creature but as co-creator with God, able through one’s actions and through one’s life to alter the fate of the world and even, according to the Kabbalah, to reunite God with His exiled Shekinah. If God did not need man, if man were simply dependent and nothing else, there would be no meaning to man’s life or to the world. ‘The world is not divine sport, it is divine destiny.’

This primal reality of relation is not contradicted by the experience of the mystics if that experience is rightly understood. There are two kinds of happening in which duality is no longer experienced. The first is the soul’s becoming a unity. This takes place within man and it is decisive in fitting him for the work of the spirit. He may then either go out to the meeting with mystery or fall back on the enjoyment and dissipation of his concentrated being. The second takes place not within man but between man and God. It is a moment of ecstasy in which what is felt to be ‘union’ is actually the dynamic of relation. Here on the brink the meeting is felt so forcibly in its vital unity that the I and the Thou between which it is established are forgotten.

In lived reality, even in ‘inner’ reality, there is no ‘unity of being.’ Reality exists only in effective, mutual action, and ‘the most powerful and deepest reality exists where everything enters into the effective action, without reserve . . . the united I and the boundless Thou.’ The doctrine of mystical absorption is based on ‘the colossal illusion of the human spirit that is bent back on itself, that spirit exists in man.’ In renouncing the meaning of spirit as relation, as between man and what is not man, man makes the world and God into functions of the human soul. In actuality, the world is not in man nor is man entirely included within the world. The image of the world is in man but not its reality, and man bears within himself the sense of self, that cannot be included in the world. What matters is how man causes his attitude of soul to grow to real life that acts upon the world.

The misinterpretation of relation as union has led both eastern and western mystics to make union with God a goal in itself and to turn away from the responsibility of the I for the Thou. To seek consciously to become a saint, or attain ‘union,’ as is advocated by some modern mystics, (See for example the writings of Gerald Heard, in particular The Third Morality [New York: William Morrow, London: Cassell, 1937], chaps. viii-xi, Pain, Sex, and Time [New York: Harper & Brothers, London: Cassell, 1939], chaps. xi-xii, xvi; A Preface to Prayer [New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944 London: Cassell, 1945]; and The Eternal Gospel [New York: Harper & Brothers 1946, London: Cassell, 1948, chap. xi]) is to abandon oneself to the world of It -- the world of conscious aims and purposes supported by a collection of means, such as spiritual exercises, abstinence, and recollection. Greater for us than this ‘phenomenon of the brink,’ writes Buber, is ‘the central reality of the everyday hour on earth, with a streak of sun on a maple twig and the glimpse of the eternal Thou.’ (I and Thou, op. cit., p.87 f.) Reality is to be found not in the pure and lasting but in the whole of man, not in ecstasy beyond the world of the senses but in the hallowing of the everyday.

We may know remoteness from God, but we do not know the absence of God, for ‘it is we only who are not always there.’ ‘Every real relation in the world is consummated in the interchange of actual and potential being, but in pure relation -- in the relation of man to God -- potential is still actual being. It is only our nature that compels us to draw the Eternal Thou into the world and the talk of It. By virtue of this great privilege of pure relation there exists the unbroken world of Thou which binds up the isolated moments of relation in a life of world solidarity.

It is this unbroken world of Thou which assures us that relation can never fall apart into complete duality, that evil can never become radically real and absolute. Without this limit to the reality of evil we would have no assurance that I-It can become I-Thou, that men and cultures can turn back to God in the fundamental act of reversal, the teshavah. Without this limit the world of It would be evil in itself and incapable of being redeemed. Buber describes the relation of the world to what is not the world as a

This primal twofold movement underlies three of the most important aspects of Buber’s I-Thou philosophy. The first is the alternation between I-Thou and I-It. The second is the alternation between summons, the approach to the meeting with the eternal Thou, and sending, the going forth from that meeting to the world of men. The third is the alternation between revelation, in which the relational act takes place anew and flows into cultural and religious forms, and the turning, in which man turns from the rigidified forms of religion to the direct meeting with the Eternal Thou. Evil for Buber is the predominance of I-It through a too great estrangement from the primal Source and good the permeation of the world of It by I-Thou through a constant return to the primal Source. As in Buber’s Hasidic philosophy the ‘evil impulse’ can be used to serve God, so I-It, the movement away from the primal Source, can serve as the basis for an ever greater realization of I-Thou in the world of It.

There are three spheres, says Buber, in which the world of relation is built: our life with nature, our life with men, and our life with ‘intelligible essences.’ Each of these gates leads into the presence of the Word, but when the full meeting takes place they ‘are united in one gateway of real life.’ Of the three spheres, our life with man ‘is the main portal into whose opening the two side-gates leads, and in which they are included.’ It is here alone that the moments of relation are bound together by speech, and here alone ‘as reality that cannot be lost’ are ‘knowing and being known, loving and being loved.’ The relation with man is thus ‘the real simile of the relation with God,’ for ‘in it true address receives true response.’ But in God’s response all the universe is made manifest as language. (I and Thou, op. cit., p. 101 ff.)

Solitude is necessary for relation with God. It frees one from experiencing and using, and it purifies one before going out to the great meeting. But the solitude which means absence of relation and the stronghold of isolation, the solitude in which man conducts a dialogue with himself, cannot lead man to God. Similarly, we do not come to God through putting away our ‘idols’ -- our finite goods such as our nation, art, power, knowledge, or money -- and allowing the diverted religious act to return to the fitting object. These finite goods always mean using and possessing, and one cannot use or possess God. He who is dominated by an idol has no way to God but the turning, ‘which is a change not only of goal but also of the nature of his movement.’ (Ibid., pp. 103-106.)

He who has relation with the Eternal Thou also has relation with the Thou of the world. To view the religious man as one who does not need to take his stand in any relation to the world and living beings is falsely to divide life ‘between a real relation with God and an unreal relation of I and It with the world.’ No matter how inward he may be, the ‘religious’ man still lives in the world. Therefore, if he does not have an I-Thou relation with the world, he necessarily makes the world into an It. He treats it as a means for his sustenance or as an object for his contemplation. ‘You cannot both truly pray to God and profit by the world. He who knows the world as something by which he is to profit knows God also in the same way.’ (Ibid., p. 107)

In the moment of supreme meeting man receives revelation, but this revelation is neither experience nor knowledge. It is ‘a presence as power’ which transforms him into a different being from what he was when he entered the meeting. This Presence and power include three things: ‘the whole fullness of real mutual action,’ ‘the inexpressible confirmation of meaning,’ and the call to confirm this meaning ‘in this life and in relation with this world.’ But as the meaning cannot be transmitted and made into knowledge, so the confirmation of it cannot be transmitted as ‘a valid Ought,’ a formula, or a set of prescriptions.

Man can only succeed in raising relation to constancy if he embodies it ‘in the whole stuff of life,’ ‘if he realizes God anew in the world according to his strength and to the measure of each day.’ This is not a question of completely overcoming the relation of It but of so penetrating it with Thou ‘that relation wins in it a shining streaming constancy: the moments of supreme meeting are then not flashes in darkness but like the rising moon in a clear starlit night.’ Man cannot gain constancy of relation through directly concerning himself with God; for ‘reflexion,’ bending back towards God, makes Him into an object. It is the man who has been sent forth to whom God remains present. (Ibid., p. 114 ff.)

The mighty revelations at the base of the great religions are the same in being as the quiet ones that happen at all times. Revelation ‘does not pour itself into the world through him who receives it as through a funnel; it comes to him and seizes his whole elemental being in all its particular nature and fuses with it.’ But there is a qualitative difference in the relation of the various ages of history to God. In some, human spirit is suppressed and buried; in some, it matures in readiness for full relation; in some, the relation takes place and with it fresh expansion of being. Thus in the course of history elemental human stuff is transformed, and ‘ever new provinces of the world and the spirit . . . are summoned to divine form.’

The form that is created as a result of this theophany is a fusion of Thou and It. God remains near this form so long as belief and cult are united and purified through true prayer. With degeneration of prayer the power to enter into relation is buried under increasing objectification, and ‘it becomes increasingly difficult . . . to say Thou with the whole undivided being.’ In order to be able to say it, man must finally come out of the false security of community into the final solitude of the venture of the infinite.

The fundamental beliefs of Buber’s I-Thou philosophy are the reality of the I-Thou relation into which no deception can penetrate, the reality of the meeting between God and man which transforms man’s being, and the reality of the turning which puts a limit to man’s movement away from God. On the basis of these beliefs Buber has defined evil as the predominance of the world of It to the exclusion of relation, and he has conceived of the redemption of evil as taking place in the primal movement of the turning which brings man back to God and back to solidarity of relation with man and the world. Relation is ‘good’ and alienation ‘evil.’ Yet the times of alienation may prepare the forces that will be directed, when the turning comes, not only to the earthly forms of relation but to the Eternal Thou.

Our culture has, more than any other, abdicated before the world of It. This abdication makes impossible a life in the spirit since spirit is a response of man to his Thou. The evil which results takes the form of individual life in which institutions and feelings are separate provinces and of community life in which the state and economy are cut off from the spirit, the will to enter relation. In both cases I-It is not evil in itself but only when it is allowed to have mastery and to shut out all relation. Neither universal causality nor destiny prevent a man from being free if he is able to alternate between I-It and I-Thou. But without the ability to enter relation and cursed with the arbitrary self-will and belief in fate that particularly mark modern man, the individual and the community become sick, and the I of the true person is replaced by the empty I of individuality.

In the history of both the individual and the human race, writes Buber, the proper alternation between I-It and I-Thou is disturbed by a progressive augmentation of the world of It. Each culture tends to take over the world of It from its predecessors or contemporaries. Hence in general the world of objects is more extensive in successive cultures. As a result, there is a progressive development from generation to generation of the individual’s ability to use and experience. For the most part this development is an obstacle to life lived in the spirit, for it comes about in the main ‘through the decrease of man’s power to enter into relation.’ (I and Thou, op. cit., p. 37ff.)

Spirit is not in the I but between I and Thou. To respond to the Thou man must enter into the relation with his whole being, but ‘the stronger the response the more strongly does it bind up the Thou and banish it to be an object.’ Only silence before the Thou leaves it free and unmanifest. But man’s greatness lies in the response which binds Thou into the world of It, for it is through this response that knowledge, work, image, and symbol are produced. All of these Thou’s which have been changed into It’s have it in their nature to change back again into presentness. But this fulfillment of their nature is thwarted by the man who has come to terms with the world of It. Instead of freeing, he suppresses; instead of looking, he observes; instead of accepting, he turns to account. (Ibid., p.39 f.)

Buber illustrates this statement from the realms of knowledge, art, and action. In knowledge the thing which is seen is exclusively present and exists in itself. Only afterwards is it related to other events or expressed as a general law, i.e. turned into an It so it can enter the structure of knowledge. ‘He who frees it from that, and looks on it again in the present moment, fulfills the nature of the act of knowledge to be real and effective between men.’ But it can be left as It, experienced, used, and appropriated to ‘find one’s bearings’ in the world. (Ibid., p. 40 f.)

‘So too in art; form is disclosed to the artist as he looks at what is over against him. He banishes it to be a "structure".’ The nature of this ‘structure’ is to be freed for a timeless moment by the meeting with the man who lifts the ban and clasps the form. But a man may simply experience art: see it as qualities, analyse how it is made, and place it in the scheme of things. Scientific and aesthetic understanding are not necessary in themselves. They are necessary in order that man ‘may do his work with precision and plunge it in the truth of relation, which is above the understanding and gathers it up in itself.’ (Ibid., p. 41 f.)

Finally, in pure effective action without arbitrary self-will man responds to the Thou with his life, and this life is teaching. It ‘may have fulfilled the law or broken it; both are continually necessary, that spirit may not die on earth.’ The life of such a person teaches those who follow how life is to be lived in the spirit, face to face with the Thou. But they may decline the meeting and instead pin the life down with information as an It, an object among objects. (Ibid., p. 42.)

The man who has come to terms with It has divided his life into two separated provinces: one of institutions -- It -- and one of feelings -- I.

Institutions are ‘outside,’ where all sorts of aims are pursued, where a man works, negotiates, bears influence, undertakes, concurs, organizes, conducts business, officiates, preaches.... Feelings are ‘within,’ where life is lived and man recovers from institutions. Here the spectrum of the emotions dances before the interested glance. (Ibid., p. 43.)

Neither institutions nor feelings know man or have access to real life. Institutions know only the specimen; feelings know only the ‘object.’ That institutions yield no public life is realized by many with increasing distress and is the starting-point of the seeking need of the age. But few realize that feelings yield no personal life, for feelings seem to be the most personal life of all. Modern man has learned to be wholly concerned with his own feelings, and even despair at their unreality will not instruct him in a better way -- ‘for despair is also an interesting feeling.’ (I and Thou, op. cit., p. 44 f.)

The solution to this lack of real public and personal life is not freedom of feeling, writes Buber. True community arises through people taking their stand in living mutual relation with a living Centre and only then through being in living mutual relation with each other. Community cannot be set up as a goal and directly attained, but can only result from a group of people being united around a common goal, their relation to the Eternal Thou. Similarly, true marriage arises through each partner’s revealing the Thou to the other. The erotic literature of the age which is so exclusively concerned with one person’s enjoyment of another and the pseudo-psychoanalytical thinking which looks for the solution to the problem of marriage through simply freeing ‘inhibitions’ both ignore the vital importance of the Thou which must be received in true presentness if human life, either public or personal, is to exist. (Ibid., p. 45 f.)

In communal life as in the individual it is not I-It but its mastery and predominance which are evil. Communal life cannot dispense with the world of It any more than man himself.

Man’s will to profit and to be powerful have their natural and proper effect so long as they are linked with, and upheld by, his will to enter into relation. There is no evil impulse till the impulse has been separated from the being; the impulse which is bound up with, and defined by, the being is the living stuff of communal life, that which is detached is its disintegration. Economics, the abode of the will to profit, and State, the abode of the will to be powerful, share in life as long as they share in the spirit. (Ibid., p. 48)

Man’s will to profit and to be powerful are impulses which can be given direction by I-Thou in the life of the individual and of the community. I-Thou is not only a direction, it is the direction; for it is itself the ultimate meaning and intrinsic value, an end not reached by any means, but directly present. I-Thou is the foundation underlying I-It, the spark of life within it, the spirit hovering over it.

What matters is not that the organization of the state be freer and economics more equitable, though these things are desirable, but that the spirit which says Thou remain by life and reality. To parcel out community life into separate realms one of which is spiritual life ‘would mean to give up once and for all to tyranny the provinces that are sunk in the world of It, and to rob the spirit completely of reality. For the spirit is never independently effective in life in itself alone, but in relation to the world.’ (Ibid., p. 50.) Thus what is good is not pure spirit, any more than what is evil is matter. Good is the interpenetration of spirit into life, and evil is spirit separated from life, life untransformed by spirit.

‘Causality has an unlimited reign in the world of It’ and is ‘of fundamental importance for the scientific ordering of nature.’ But causality does not weigh heavily on man, who can continually leave the world of It for the world of relation. In relation I and Thou freely confront each other in mutual effect, unconnected with causality. Thus it is in relation that true decision takes place.

Only he who knows relation and knows about the presence of the Thou is capable of decision. He who decides is free, for he has approached the Face.... Two alternatives are set side by side -- the other, the vain idea and the one, the charge laid on me. But now realization begins in me. For it is not decision to do the one and leave the other a lifeless mass, deposited layer upon layer as dross in my soul. But he alone who directs the whole strength of the alternative into the doing of the charge, who lets the abundant passion of what is rejected invade the growth to reality of what is chosen -- he alone who ‘serves God with the evil impulse’ makes decision, decides the event.... If there were a devil it would not be one who decided against God, but one who, in eternity, came to no decision. (Ibid., p. 51 f.)

Direction alone is not enough. To be fulfilled it must be accompanied by all of one’s power. If power of impulse is regarded as an evil to be suppressed, then it will accumulate in the soul and turn negative and will frustrate the very fulfillment that direction and the conscious self desire. But if the passion of the temptation is brought into the service of responsibility, then what otherwise appears a mere duty or an external action is transfigured and made radiant by the intention which enters into it.

To use the evil impulse to serve the good is to redeem evil, to bring it into the sanctuary of the good. It is this which is done by the man whose life swings between Thou and It, and it is this which reveals to him the meaning and character of life. ‘There, on the threshold, the response, the spirit, is kindled ever anew within him; here, in an unholy and needy country, this spark is to be proved.’ (Ibid., p. 53.) Thus man’s very freedom to do evil enables him to redeem evil. What is more, it enables him to serve the good not as a cog in a machine but as a free and creative being. Man’s creativity is the energy which is given to him to form and to direct, and the real product of this creativity is not a novel or a work of art, but a life lived in relation, a life in which It is increasingly interpenetrated by Thou.

We make freedom real to ourselves, says Buber, by forgetting all that is caused and making decision out of the depths. When we do this, destiny confronts us as the counterpart of our freedom. It is no longer our boundary but our fulfillment. ‘In times of healthy life trust streams from men of the spirit to all people.’ But in times of sickness the world of It overpowers the man who has come to terms with it, and causality becomes ‘an oppressive, stifling fate.’ Every great culture rests on an original response, and it is this response, renewed by succeeding generations, which creates for man a special way of regarding the cosmos, which enables him to feel at home in the world. But when this living and continually renewed relational event is no longer the centre of a culture, then that culture hardens into a world of It. Men become laden with the burden of ‘fate that does not know spirit’ until the desire for salvation is satisfied by a new event of meeting. The history of cultures is not a meaningless cycle but a spiral ascent to the point ‘where there is no advance or retreat, but only utterly new reversal -- the break-through.’ (l and Thou, op. cit., p. 56. Except here, Smith changes ‘reversal’ to ‘turning’ in the 2nd edition.)

Thus there is a limit to the evil which man can bring on himself, a limit to the overrunning mastery of the world of It. Smith’s translation of Buber’s ‘Umkehr’ as ‘reversal’ does not adequately convey the idea of the Hebrew teshuvah, man’s wholehearted turning to God, and it is in this sense that Buber has used ‘Umkehr’ in earlier works (‘Die Erneuerung des Judentums,’ ‘Zwiefache Zukunft.’ Der Geist des Orients und das Judentum,’ and Gemeinschaft) and continues to use it in later ones. It is not merely that man arrives at the last pitch of desperation, the place where he can no longer help himself. When he arrives there he himself performs the one great act which he can perform, the act which calls forth God’s grace and establishes new relation. At the very point when man has completely given over his life to the domination of the lifeless mechanism of world process, he can go forth with his whole being to encounter the Thou.

The one thing that can prevent this turning, says Buber, is the belief in fate. It is this belief which threatens to engulf our modern world as a result of the quasi-biological and quasi-historical thought of the age. Survival of the fittest, the law of instincts and habits, social process, dialectical materialism, cultural cycles --all work together to form a more tenacious and oppressive belief in fate than has ever before existed, a fate which leaves man no possibility of liberation but only rebellious or submissive slavery. Even the modern concepts of teleological development and organic growth are at base possession by process -- ‘the abdication of man before the exuberant world of It.’

The free man is he who wills without arbitrary self-will. He knows he must go out to meet his destiny with his whole being, and he sacrifices ‘his puny, unfree will, that is controlled by things and instincts, to his grand will, which quits defined for destined being.’

In the ‘free man’ of I and Thou we meet once again the ‘non-action’ of the Tao and the kavanah, or consecrated action, of the Hasid.

In contrast to the free man stands the self-willed man who, according to Buber, neither believes nor meets. He does not know connection but only the outside world and his desire to use it. He has no destiny, for he is defined by things and instincts which he fulfills with arbitrary self-will. Incapable of sacrifice, he continually intervenes to ‘let things happen.’ His world is ‘a mediated world cluttered with purposes.’ His life never attains to a meaning, for it is composed of means which are without significance in themselves. Only I-Thou gives meaning to the world of It, for I-Thou is an end which is not reached in time but is there from the start, originating and carrying-through. The free man’s will and the attainment of his goal need not be united by a means, for in I-Thou the means and the end are one.

When Buber speaks of the free man as free of causation, process, and defined being, he does not mean that the free man acts from within himself without connection with what has come to him from the outside. On the contrary, it is only the free man who really acts in response to concrete external events. It is only he who sees what is new and unique in each situation, whereas the unfree man sees only its resemblance to other things. But what comes to the free man from without is only the precondition for his action, it does not determine its nature. This is just as true of those social and psychological conditioning influences which he has internalized in the past as of immediate external events. To the former as to the latter, he responds freely from the depths as a whole and conscious person. The unfree person, on the other hand, is so defined by public opinion, social status, or his neurosis that he does not ‘respond’ spontaneously and openly to what meets him but only ‘reacts.’ He does not see others as real persons, unique and of value in themselves, but in terms of their status, their usefulness, or their similarity to other individuals with whom he has had relationships in the past.

‘Individuality,’ the I of I-It, becomes conscious of itself as the subject of experiencing and using. It makes its appearance through being differentiated from other individualities and is conscious of itself as a particular kind of being. It is concerned with its My -- my kind, my race, my creation, my genius. It has no reality because it has no sharing and because it appropriates unto itself. ‘Person,’ on the other hand, the I of I-Thou, makes its appearance by entering into relation with other persons. Through relation the person shares in a reality which neither belongs to him nor merely lies outside him, a reality which cannot be appropriated but only shared. The more direct his contact with the Thou, the fuller his sharing; the fuller his sharing, the more real his I. (I and Thou, op. cit., p. 62 f.) But the I that steps out of the relational event into consciousness of separation retains reality as a seed within it.

No man is pure person and no man pure individuality; no man is entirely free and none, except a psychotic, entirely unfree. But some men are so defined by person that they may be called persons, and some are so defined by individuality that they may be called individuals. ‘True history is decided in the field between these two poles.’ (Ibid., p. 65.)

When it is not expressed outwardly in relation, the inborn Thou strikes inward. Then man confronts what is over against him within himself, and not as relation or presence but as self-contradiction, an inner Doppelgänger. The man who has surrendered to the world of outer and inner division ‘directs the best part of his spirituality to averting or at least to veiling his thoughts,’ for thinking would only lead him to a realization of his own inner emptiness. Through losing the subjective self in the objective whole or through absorbing the objective whole into the subjective self, he tries to escape the confrontation with the Thou. (Ibid., pp. 61,65-72) He hopes to make the world so ordered and comprehensible that there is no longer a possibility of the dread meeting which he wishes to avoid. And because he dares not meet the Thou in the casual moments of his daily life, he builds for himself a cataclysmic reversal, a way of dread and despair. It is through this way at last that he must go to confront the eternal Thou.