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The first part of I and Thou consists of an extended definition of man’s two primary attitudes and relations: ‘I-Thou’ and ‘I-It.’ These two attitudes are very similar to the ‘realization’ and ‘orientation’ of Daniel. The I of man comes into being in the act of speaking one or the other of these primary words. But the two I’s are not the same: ‘The primary word I-Thou can only be spoken with the whole being. The primary word I-It can never be spoken with the whole being.’ (I and Thou, op. cit., p.3.)

The real determinant of the primary word in which a man takes his stand is not the object which is over against him but the way in which he relates himself to that object. I-Thou is the primary word of relation. It is characterized by mutuality, directness, presentness, intensity, and ineffability. Although it is only within this relation that personality and the personal really exist, the Thou of I-Thou is not limited to men but may include animals, trees, objects of nature, and God. I-It is the primary word of experiencing and using. It takes place within a man and not between him and the world. Hence it is entirely subjective and lacking in mutuality. Whether in knowing, feeling, or acting it is the typical subject-object relationship. It is always mediate and indirect and hence is comprehensible and orderable, significant only in connection and not itself. The It of I-It may equally well be a he, a she, an animal, a thing, a spirit, or even God, without a change in the primary word. Thus I-Thou and I-It cut across the lines of our ordinary distinctions to focus our attention not upon individual objects and their causal connections but upon the relations between things, the dazwischen (‘there in-between’). Experiencing is I-It whether it is the experiencing of an object or of a man, whether it is ‘inner’ or ‘outer,’ ‘open’ or ‘secret.’ One’s life of interior feeling is in no way elevated above one’s life with the external world, nor is the occultist’s knowledge of secret mysteries anything else but the inclusion of the unseen in the world of It. ‘O secrecy without a secret! O accumulation of information! It, always It!’ (Ibid., p.5.)

‘The I is the eternal chrysalis, the Thou the eternal butterfly.’ What at one moment was the Thou of an I-Thou relation can become the next moment an It and indeed must continually do so. The I may again become a Thou, but it will not be able to remain one, and it need not become a Thou at all. Man can live continuously and securely in the world of It. If he only lives in this world, however, he is not a man, for ‘all real living is meeting.’ This meeting with the Thou of man and of nature is also a meeting with God. ‘In each process of becoming that is present to us . . ., in each Thou we address the eternal Thou,’ ‘the Thou in which the parallel lines of relations meet.’ This does not mean that one substitutes an abstract concept of ‘God in man’ for the concrete man before one. On the contrary, it is only when one meets a man as Thou that one really remains concrete. When one faces a human being as one’s Thou, he is no longer an object among objects, a nature which can be experienced and described, or a specific point of space and time. ‘But with no neighbour, and whole in himself, he is Thou and fills the heavens. This does not mean that nothing exists except himself. But all else lives in his light.’ (I and Thou, op. cit., pp. 17, 11, 6, 8.)

In the meeting with the Thou, man is no longer subject to causality and fate, for both of these are handmaidens of the ordered world of continuity and take their meaning from it. It does not even matter if the person to whom the Thou is said is the It for other I’s or is himself unaware of the relation. The I-Thou relation interpenetrates the world of It without being determined by it, for meeting is not in space and time but space and time in meeting. ‘Only when every means has collapsed does the meeting come about.’ Though I-Thou continually becomes I-It, it exists during the moment of meeting as direct and directly present. ‘No deception penetrates here; here is the cradle of the Real Life.’ (Ibid., pp. 12, 9.)

The present of the I-Thou relation is not the abstract point between past and future that indicates something that has just happened but ‘the real, filled present.’ Like the ‘eternal now’ of the mystic, it is the present of intensity and wholeness, but it is not found within the soul. It exists only in so far as meeting and relation exist. In contrast, the I of I-It experiences a moment, but his moment has no present content since it is filled with experiencing and using. His actions only have meaning for him when they are completed, for they are always means and never ends in themselves. Similarly, he knows objects only when they are installed in the ordered world of the past, for he has no interest in their uniqueness but only in their relations to other things through which he can use them. (Ibid., p.12 f.)

The experiencing of It is planned and purposeful. Yet the man who experiences It does not go out of himself to do so, and the It does not respond but passively allows itself to be experienced. The Thou, on the other hand, cannot be sought, for it meets one through grace. Yet the man who knows Thou must go out to meet the Thou and step into direct relation with it, and the Thou responds to the meeting. Man can only enter relation with the whole being; yet it is through the relation, through the speaking of Thou, that concentration and fusion into the whole being takes place. ‘As I become I, I say Thou.’ This relation means suffering and action in one, suffering because one must be chosen as well as choose and because in order to act with the whole being one must suspend all partial actions. (Ibid.,p. 11)

Ideas are not outside or above man’s twofold attitude of I-Thou and I-It, nor can they take the place of Thou. ‘Ideas are no more enthroned above our heads than resident in them.’ They are between man and what is over against him. ‘The real boundary for the actual man cuts right across the world of ideas as well.’ Though many men retire into a world of ideas as a refuge and repose from the experience and use of the world of things, the mankind which they there imagine is no less an It and ‘has nothing in common with a living mankind where Thou may truly be spoken.’ ‘The noblest fiction is a fetish, the loftiest fictitious sentiment is depraved.’ (Ibid., p. 13 f.)

Similarly, the act of relation is not emotion or feeling, which remains within the I. Pure relation is love between the I and the Thou. Feelings accompany love, but they do not constitute it. ‘Feelings dwell in man; but man dwells in his love.’ And the Thou dwells in love as well as the I, for love ‘does not cling to the I in such a way as to have the Thou only for its "content," its object.’ To the man who loves, people are set free from their qualities as good or evil, wise or foolish and confront him in their singleness as Thou. Hence love is not the enjoyment of a wonderful emotion, not even the ecstasy of a Tristan and Isolde, but the ‘responsibility of an I for a Thou.’ (Ibid., p. 14 f.)

Hate sees only a part of a being. If a man sees a whole being and still hates, he is no longer in relation but in I-It, for to say Thou to a man means to affirm his being. ‘Yet the man who straightforwardly hates is nearer to relation than the man without hate and love.’ (Ibid p. 16.) Such a man really has in mind the person whom he hates as distinct from the man whose hatred and love does not mean its object but is void of real intention. (I am indebted to Professor Buber for this interpretation.) The world of the primitive man, even if it was a hell of anguish and cruelty, was preferable to a world without relation because it was real. ‘Rather force exercised on being that is really lived than shadowy solicitude for faceless numbers! From the former a way leads to God, from the latter only one to nothingness.’ (I and Thou, op. cit., p 24.) Thus though a full I-Thou relationship can only mean love, it is better to hate men than to treat them entirely as objects to be known or made use of.

I-It is not to be regarded as simply evil, however. It is only the reliability of its ordered and surveyable world which sustains man in life. One cannot meet others in it, but only through it can one make oneself ‘understood’ with others. The I-Thou relation, similarly, is not an unqualified good. In its lack of measure, continuity, and order it threatens to be destructive of life. The moments of the Thou are ‘strange lyric and dramatic episodes, seductive and magical, but tearing us away to dangerous extremes, loosening the well-tried context, leaving more questions than satisfaction behind them, shattering security.’ Yet the moments of the Thou do what I-It can never do. Though not linked up with one another, each is a sign of the world order and an assurance of solidarity with the world. The Thou comes to bring man out to presentness and reality. If it does not meet one, it vanishes and returns in another form. It is the ‘soul of the soul’ which stirs within the depths. Yet to remove it into the soul is to annihilate it. You cannot make yourself understood with others concerning it. ‘But it teaches you to meet others, and to hold your ground when you meet them.... It does not help to sustain you in life, it only helps you to glimpse eternity.’ (Ibid., p. 33 f.)

The child must find for himself his own world, says Buber, through seeing, hearing, touching, and shaping it. This world is not there ready-made. It rises to meet his senses, thus revealing the essential nature of creation as form. In this process the effort to establish relation (with a Teddy-bear, a tea-pot, it does not matter) comes first and is followed by the actual relation, a saying of Thou without words. Only later is the relation split apart into the I and the thing. Hence ‘in the beginning is relation,’ ‘the inborn Thou’ which is realized by the child in the lived relations with what meets it. The fact that he can realize what is over against him as Thou is based on the a priori of relation, that is, the potentiality of relation which exists between him and the world. Through this meeting with the Thou he gradually becomes I. Finally, however, he loses his relation with the Thou and perceives it as a separated object, as the It of an I which has itself shrunk to the dimensions of a natural object. (Ibid., pp. 25-28)

Thus in the silent or spoken dialogue between the I and the Thou both personality and knowledge come into being. Unlike the subject-object knowledge of the I-It relation, the knowing of the I-Thou relation takes place neither in the ‘subjective’ nor the ‘objective,’ the emotional nor the rational, but in the ‘between’ -- the reciprocal relationship of whole and active beings. Similarly, personality is neither simply an individual matter nor simply a social product, but a function of relationship. Though we are born ‘individuals,’ in the sense of being different from others, we are not born persons. Our personalities are called into being by those who enter into relation with us. This does not mean either that a person is merely a cell in a social organism. To become a person means to become someone who responds to what happens from a centre of inwardness.

To be fully real the I-Thou relation must be mutual. This mutuality does not mean simple unity or identity, nor is it any form of empathy. Though I-Thou is the word of relation and togetherness, each of the members of the relation really remains himself, and that means really different from the other. Though the Thou is not an It, it is also not ‘another I.’ He who treats a person as ‘another I’ does not really see that person but only a projected image of himself. Such a relation, despite the warmest ‘personal’ feeling, is really I-It.

In the German original the I-It relation is the Ich-Es Verhältnis, the I-Thou relation the Ich-Du Beziehung. This difference between Verhältnis and Beziehung, though not carried over in the English translation, is important in indicating the two stages of Buber’s insight into man -- first, that he is to be understood, in general, in terms of his relationships rather than taken in himself; second, that he is to be understood specifically in terms of that direct, mutual relation that makes him human. (Cf. Philip Wheelwright, ‘Buber’s Philosophical Anthropology,’ in Maurice Friedman and Paul Arthur Schilpp, editors, The Philosophy of Martin Buber volume of The Library of Living Philosophers [New York: Tudor Publ. Co., 1961].).

In addition to Hasidism, Kierkegaard, and Dilthey, the most important influences on the development of Buber’s I-Thou philosophy were Ludwig Feuerbach and Georg Simmel. Buber states in ‘What Is Man?’ that Feuerbach gave him a decisive impetus in his youth. Unlike Kant, writes Buber, Feuerbach postulates the whole man and not cognition as the beginning of philosophizing, and by man he ‘does not mean man as an individual, but man with man -- the connection of I and Thou.’

Simmel, too, is concerned with relation -- the relation between man and God, between man and man, and between man and nature. He finds in the concept of the divine the substantial and ideal expression of the relations between men, and he draws an analogy between the relations of man and God and those of man and man which comes quite close to Buber’s own I-Thou relation. To ‘believe’ in God, according to Simmel, means not just a rational belief in His existence but a definite inner relation to Him, a surrender of feeling and direction of life. In the same way to ‘believe’ in a man means to have a relation of trust to the whole man, a relation which takes precedence over any proof concerning his particular qualities. On the other hand, there is a one-sidedness and absence of mutuality in Simmel’s idea of relation which sets it at some distance from that of Buber. The important thing to Simmel is that the individual call up unused potentialities in himself. (Simmel, Die Religion, op. cit., pp. 22 f., 31-5, 39 f., 67 f., 75.) This emphasis on the psychological and emotional effects of relation is one that is utterly foreign to Buber, for it tends to remove reality away from the relation back into the individual himself.

Particularly illustrative of the gradual development of Buber’s dialogical thought is his progressive reinterpretation of the feeling of unity with certain objects of nature. In Buber’s essay on Jacob Boehme (1900) this feeling of unity is used to illustrate the idea of man as the microcosm, or little world which contains the whole. In ‘Ecstasy and Confession’ (1909) it is used to illustrate the oneness in ecstasy of the ‘I’ and the world. In Daniel (1913) it is used to illustrate the unity which is created and realized in the world. And in Ich und Du (1922) it is used to illustrate the I-Thou relation, an event which takes place between two beings which none the less remain separate. Two of the specific experiences which Buber mentions in the essay on Boehme -- that of kinship with a tree and that of looking into the eyes of a dumb animal -- are later used in I and Thou as an example not of unity but of the I-Thou relation. Yet the emotional content of the experiences as described in the two works is almost identical! (‘Ueber Jakob Böhme.’ op. cit., p. 252f.; I and Thou, op. cit., pp. 7f., 96f.)

In Ereignisse und Begegnungen (‘Events and Meetings’) (1917) we find the link between Buber’s philosophy of realization and his philosophy of dialogue. What the learned combination of ideas denies, writes Buber in this work, the humble and faithful beholding to any thing confirms. Each thing and being has a twofold nature: the passive, appropriable, comparable, and dissectible and the active, unappropriable, incomparable, and irreducible. He who truly experiences a thing that leaps to meet him of itself has known therein the world. The contact between the inexpressible circle of things and the experiencing powers of our senses is more and other than a vibration of the ether and the nervous system -- it is the incarnate spirit. And the reality of the experienced world is so much the more powerful, the more powerfully we experience it, realize it. There is a common reality which suffices for the comparison and ordering of things. But another is the great reality which we can only make into our world if we melt the shell of passivity with our ardour and strength until the active, bestowing side of things leaps up to meet us and embrace us. The world cannot be known otherwise than through things and not otherwise than with the active sense-spirit of the loving man.

The loving man is one who takes up each thing unrelated to other things. For this hour no other lives than this thing which is alone loved in the world, filling it out and indistinguishably coinciding with it. Where the rationalist draws out the general qualities of a thing and places them in categories, the loving man sees what is unique in a thing, its self. This is the active side which the circle of world comprehensibility misses. In the beloved thing whose self he realizes, the loving man confirms the mysterious countenance of the all. (Martin Buber, Ereignisse und Begegnungen [Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1917], ‘Mit einem Monisten,’ pp. 28-35. Reprinted in Hinweise, pp. 36-43, and in Pointing the Way under the title ‘With a Monist,’ pp. 25-30.)

The ‘loving man’ of Events and Meetings is similar to the realizing man of Daniel. But now the twofold nature of life no longer applies to man alone but is inherent in things themselves. The emphasis, moreover, is not on the unity of things, not even the realized unity of Daniel, but on the meeting between man and what is over against him, a meeting which never becomes an identity. Because this is an encounter and not a perfect unity and because the encounter takes place not between man and passive objects but between man and the active self of things, man is limited in his ability to form and shape the world and hence to overcome the evil in himself and in the world. But he is also greatly aided, for the active self of things responds to his loving experiencing of them so that the force of the world joins his own force to bring his deed to effectiveness.

Buber says in this book that he is not a mystic, and this statement is supported by the emphasis on the life of the senses in many of its essays. (Cf. ‘Der Altar,’ ‘Bruder Leib,’ ‘Der Dämon im Traum,’ and ‘An das Gleichzeitige.’ These essays are all reprinted in Hinweise, pp. 18-35 and 118-120, and in Pointing the Way under the titles ‘The Altar,’ ‘Brother Body,’ ‘The Demon in the Dream,’ and ‘To the Contemporary,’ pp. 11-25, 59-60.) According to Buber’s own later testimony, a personal experience played a decisive part in this conversion from the ‘mystical’ to the everyday. Once after a morning of ‘religious enthusiasm’ he was visited by a young man. Though friendly and attentive, he was not present in spirit. Later he learned that the young man had come to him for a decision. As we are told that he died not long after, we may imagine that the decision was life or death. The elder man answered the questions that the young man asked, but not the ones he did not ask. He did not meet his despair by ‘a presence by means of which we are told that nevertheless there is meaning.’ This was, says Buber, an event of judgment.

Simple immediacy and togetherness, writes Buber, is the most effective form of action. More powerful and more holy than all writing is the presence of a man who is simply and directly there. Productivity is only true existence when it takes root in the immediacy of a lived life. It is the ruling belief of our time that production is the criterion of human worth. But illegitimate production, production without immediacy, is no criterion, for it is not reality but delusion. The overvaluation of productivity is so great in our age that even truly productive men give up the roots of a genuinely lived life and wear themselves out turning all experience to value as public communication. The productivity that is already present in the perception of the artist and the poet is not a will to create but an ability to create. It is the formative element of experience which also accompanies all that befalls the non-artistic man and is given an issue by him as often as he lifts an image out of the stream of perception and inserts it in his memory as something single, limited, and meaningful in itself. But if in perceiving a man already cherishes the intention of utilizing, then he disquiets the experience, deforms its growth, and destroys its meaning. He who meets men with a double glance, an open one which invites fellowship and a secret one which conceals the conscious aim of the observer -- he cannot be delivered from his sickness by any talent that he brings to his work, for he has poisoned the springs of his life. (Ereignisse und Begegnungen, pp. 66-76. Reprinted in Hinweisse, pp. 36-43, and in Pointing the Way under the title ‘Productivity and Existence,’ pp. 5-10. Although it is only with Ereignisse und Begegnungen that Buber’s thought becomes really dialogical, there are a number of hints of dialogue and explicit uses of the ‘I-Thou’ terminology in his earlier writing. In his essay on Boehme in 1901 Buber writes that Boehme’s dialectic of the reciprocal conditioning of things finds its completion in Ludwig Feuerbach’s sentence: ‘Man with man -- the unity of I and Thou -- is God.’ [Ueber Jakob Böhme ‘ p. 252 f.] In ‘Lesser Ury’ [1903] Buber writes: ‘The most personal lies in the relation to the other. Join a being to all beings and you lure out of it its truest individuality.’ [Juedische Kuenstler, ed. by Martin Buber, Berlin: Juedischer Verlag, 1903, p. 45 f.] In 1905 Buber uses the term ‘I and Thou’ in a discussion of the drama and of the tension of the isolated individual [Buber, ‘Die Duse in Florenz,’ Die Schaubichne, Vol. I, No. 15, December 14, 1905], and in the introduction to Die Legende des Baalschem [1908] he speaks of legend as ‘the myth of I and Thou, the inspired and the inspirer, the finite who enters into the infinite, and the infinite who has need of the finite.’ Again in ‘Ekstase und Bekenntnis’ [1909] he speaks explicitly of the ‘I’ that creates a ‘Thou.’ In his later essays of this early period the I-Thou terminology becomes more frequent, especially, as we have seen, in his treatment of community and of theophany. For Buber’s own discussion of the development of his dialogical thinking and the circumstances under which he wrote I and Thou [including his statement that he did not read Rosenzweig and Ebner’s books till later because of a two-year period of ‘spiritual askesis’ in which he could do no work on Hasidism nor read any philosophy], see his ‘Nachwort’ to Martin Buber, Die Schriften über das Dialogische Prinzip [Heidelberg: Verlag’ Lambert Schneider, 1954]. For a far more extensive treatment of the influences on Buber’s thought and the development of his early thought than is possible here see the present author’s unpublished doctoral dissertation, ‘Martin Buber: Mystic, Existentialist, Social Prophet,’Part I -- Introduction, and Part II -- The Development of Buber’s Thought, The University of Chicago, June 1950. University of Chicago Library, Microfilm T 809.)

This double-minded need to exploit life instead of live it makes impossible true life within oneself. It also makes impossible true communication between man and man, for only that man who is simply and directly present can directly communicate with others.

Already in 1916 Buber made his first draft of I and Thou, but it was in 1919 that he ‘first attained decisive clarity.’ In the light of his new understanding he undertakes to explain those parts of his earlier writings which now appear to him inexact or conducive to misunderstanding. Religious reality, he writes, is not what takes place in ‘inwardness,’ as is generally thought today, but what takes place between man and God in the reality of relation. The statement that whether God is transcendent or immanent does not depend on God but on man is consequently inexact. It depends on the relation between God and man, which, when it is actual, is reciprocal action. Also unsatisfactory is the statement that God arises out of the striving for unity. ‘God’ cannot arise, only the image of God, the idea of God, and this also cannot arise out of the human but only out of the meeting of the divine and the human. The form in which men recognize God and the conception which men have of Him cannot, to be sure, come into being without the cooperative participation of the creativity of a human person, but what is at work there is no myth-projecting fantasy but man’s way of going forth to the meeting. The meeting with God does not rise out of ‘experience’ and therefore out of detached subjectivity, but out of life. It does not arise out of religious experience, which has to do with a division of the psychic, but out of religious life, that is, out of the whole life of men and of peoples in real intercourse with God and the world.

The concept of the realization of God is not inexact or improper in itself, writes Buber, but it is improperly applied when one speaks of making God out of a truth into a reality. It can thus mislead one to the opinion that God is an ‘idea’ which only through men becomes ‘reality’ and further to the hopelessly perverted conception that God is not, but rather becomes -- in man or in mankind. This opinion is perverted not because there is no divine becoming in the immanence, but because only through the primal certainty of divine being can we come into contact with the mysterious meaning of divine becoming, the self-division of God in creation and His participation in the destiny of its freedom.

By the same token the summons of our human existence cannot be to overcome the division of being and reality in order to let the divine take seed, grow, and ripen in the perceptible world. We cannot hold with the concept of a reality which is relative and far from God. This concept comes from a division between the ‘thinking’ and the ‘feeling’ relation of the ‘subject’ and makes out of this psychological and relative duality of functions an absolute duality of spheres. If we comprehend ourselves in the God-world fullness in which we live, then we recognize that ‘to realize God’ means to make the world ready to be a place of God’s reality. It means, in other, holy words, to make reality one. (Reden, op. cit., pp. xi-xix.)

Henceforth the emphasis in Buber’s thought is not, as heretofore, on the process of realization but on the meeting of God and man and the theophany that illuminates human life and history as the result of that meeting. Only in this development, which has here reached mature expression, has Buber gone decisively beyond the subjectivistic and time-centred vitalism of Nietzsche and Bergson. Only through this final step has he reached the understanding that, though the external form changes, the essence of theophany -- the meeting between man and God -- remains the same. ‘God wills to ripen in men,’ Buber has written. Yet it is not God Himself who changes and ripens, but the depth and fullness of man’s encounter with God and the ways in which man expresses this meeting and makes it meaningful for his daily life. If God were entirely process, man could not know where that process might lead. There would be no basis then for Buber’s belief that the contradiction and ugliness of life can be redeemed through the life of man in the world.

Buber’s shift in emphasis to the two-directional meeting of God and man leaves no further room for the concept of an impersonal godhead coming to birth in the soul. God is now, to Buber, the Eternal Thou whom we meet outside as well as within the soul and whom we can never know as impersonal. This does not mean that Buber’s new I-Thou philosophy is irreconcilable with the metaphysics of the Kabbalah and Hasidism, but only with his earlier interpretations of that metaphysics. Man’s power to reunite God with His Shekinah, Buber writes in a mature work, has its truth in the inwardness of the here and now but in no way means a division of God, a unification which takes place in God, or any diminution of the fullness of His transcendence.’What turgid and presumptuous talk that is about the "God who becomes"; but we know unshakably in our hearts that there is a becoming of the God that is.’ (Hasidism and Modern Man, op. cit., Book V, ‘The Baal-Shem-Tor’s Instruction in Intercourse with God,’ pp. 215-218; I and Thou, p. 82.)

Buber’s new position thus does not exclude a becoming of God in the world but only the concept of God as pure becoming or as ideal which is not yet reality. If creation were not divine, if God were not immanent as well as transcendent, then we would have a gnostic division between God and the world which would leave the world for ever cut off from God and for ever unredeemable.

True community, writes Buber, can only be founded on changed relations between men, and these changed relations can only follow the inner change and preparation of the men who lead, work, and sacrifice for the community. Each man has an infinite sphere of responsibility, responsibility before the infinite. But there are men for whom this infinite responsibility exists in a specially active form. These are not the rulers and statesmen who determine the external destiny of great communities and who, in order to be effective, turn from the individual, enormously threatened lives to the general multitude that appears to them unseeing. The really responsible men are rather those who can withstand the thousandfold questioning glance of individual lives, who give true answer to the trembling mouths that time after time demand from them decision. (Die Jüdische Bewegung, op. cit., Vol. 11. 1916-20 [1921]. ‘Kulturarbeit [1917], p. 94; Hasidism and Modern Man, ‘My Way to Hasidism,’ p. 67ff. On Buber’s relation to the Christian religious socialist movement, cf. Ephraim Fischoff’s Introduction to Buber’s Paths in Utopia [Boston: Beacon Press. 1958].)

The principle obstacle to the erection of true community is that dualism which splits life into two independent spheres -- one of the truth of the spirit and the other of the reality of life. True human life is life in the face of God, and God is not a Kantian idea but an elementarily present substance -- the mystery of immediacy before which only the pious man can stand. God is in all things, but he is realized only when individual beings open to one another, communicate with one another, and help one another -- only where immediacy establishes itself between beings. There in between, in the apparently empty space, the eternal substance manifests itself. The true place of realization is the community, and true community is that in which the godly is realized between men.

The prophets, says Buber, demanded a direct godly form of community in contrast to the godless and spiritless state. True to Jewish thought, they did not simply deny the earthly state but insisted that it must be penetrated by the spirit of true community. It would have been unthinkable to them to have made a compromise with conditions as they were, but it would have been equally unthinkable for them to have fled from those conditions into a sphere of inner life. Never did they decide between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of man. The kingdom of God was to them nothing other than the kingdom of man as it shall become. When they despaired of present fulfillment, they projected the image of their truth into Messianism. Yet here also they meant no opposition to this human world in which we live, but its purification and completion.

Jesus, like the prophets of Israel, wanted to fulfill rather than do away with human society. By the kingdom of God He meant no other-worldly consolation, no vague heavenly blessedness, and also no spiritual or cultic league or church. What He meant was the perfected living together of men, the true community in which God shall have direct rule. Jesus wished to build out of Judaism the temple of true community before the sight of which the walls of the power state must fall to pieces.

But not so did the coming generations understand Him. In the place of the Jewish knowledge of the single world, fallen through confusion but capable of redemption through the struggling human will, came the postulation of a fundamental and unbridgeable duality of human will and God’s grace. The will is now regarded as unconditionally bad and elevation through its power is impossible. Not will in all its contrariness and all its possibility is the way to God, but faith and waiting for the contact of grace. Evil is no longer the ‘shell’ which must be broken through. It is rather the primal force which stands over against the good as the great adversary. The state is no longer the consolidation of a will to community that has gone astray and therefore is penetrable and redeemable by right will. It is either, as for Augustine, the eternally damned kingdom from which the chosen separate themselves or, as for Thomas, the first step and preparation for the true community, which is a spiritual one. The true community is no longer to be realized in the perfect life of men with one another but in the church. It is the community of spirit and grace from which the world and nature are fundamentally separated. (Martin Buber, Der heilige Weg [Frankfurt am Main: Rütten & Loening, 1919], pp. 11-44. Later reprinted in Reden über das Judentum, op. cit, without the introduction, pp. 9-11).

This atmosphere of the dualism of truth and reality, idea and fact, morality and politics is that, writes Buber, in which our present age lives. Corresponding to it is the egoistic nationalism which perverts the goal of community by making it an end itself. It is not power itself which is evil, Buber states, in disagreement with the historian Jacob Burckhardt. Power is intrinsically guiltless and is the precondition for the actions of man. It is the will to power, the greed for more power than others, which is destructive.

Not renunciation of power but responsibility in the exercise of power prevents it from becoming evil This responsibility is lacking in modern nations, for they are constantly in danger of slipping into that power hysteria which disintegrates the ability to draw lines of demarcation. Only in the recognition of an obligation and a task that is more than merely national can the criterion be found which governs the drawing of the distinction between legitimate and arbitrary nationalism. (Israel and the World, op. cit., ‘Nationalism’ [1921], pp. 216-225.)

The mature expression of Buber’s concern with realizing the divine through true community is the religious socialism which he developed in the period immediately after the First World War. This development was decisively influenced by the socialism of Buber’s friend Gustav Landauer, the social anarchism of Michael Kropotkin, and the distinction between ‘community’ and ‘association’ in Ferdinand Tönnies’s work, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887). Community (‘Gemeinschaft’) Buber defines as an organic unity which has grown out of common possessions, work, morals, or belief. Association (‘Gesellschaft’) he defines as a mechanical association of isolated self-seeking individuals. It is an ordered division of society into self-seeking individuals held together by force, compromise, convention, and public opinion.

Modern western culture, states Buber, is on the way from ‘Gemeinschaft’ to ‘Gesellschaft.’ The mechanical type of social living has replaced the organic. Marxism, the dominant form of modern socialism, desires to overcome the atomization of present-day life and sees itself as the bearer and executor of an evolutionary process. Yet it is nothing other than the process of development from community to association that it is completing. For what today is still left of an autonomy of organic community of wills must, under the working of this tendency, be absorbed into the power of the state. The state will indeed guarantee justice through laws, but the power of the state will be raised to an all-controlling dogma which will make impossible any spontaneous righteousness. Community which once existed universally, and which today exists almost alone in personal life and unnoticed fellowships, will not be able to withstand the all-embracing power of the new socialist state.

In opposition to that socialism which promotes and completes the evolution to ‘Gesellschaft’ stands another which wills to overcome it. The first movement desires to gain possession of the state and set new institutions in the place of those existing, expecting thereby to transform human relations in their essence. The second knows that the erection of new institutions can only have a genuinely liberating effect when it is accompanied by a transformation of the actual life between man and man. This life between man and man does not take place in the abstraction of the state but rather there where a reality of spatial, functional, emotional, or spiritual togetherness exists -- in the village and city community, in the workers’ fellowship, in comradeship, in religious union.

In this moment of western culture a great longing for community possesses the souls of men. This longing can only be satisfied by the autonomy of the communal cells which together make up true commonwealth. But this autonomy will never be accorded by the present state, nor by the socialist state which will not renounce its rigid centralization to bring about its own decentralization, nor abandon its mechanical form in favour of an organic one. Hence the renewal of communal cells and the joining of these cells into larger communities and commonwealths must depend on the will of individuals and groups to establish a communal economy. Men must recognize that true participation in community demands no less power of soul than participation in a parliament or state politics and is the only thing that can make the latter effective and legitimate.

The decisive problem of our time, however, is that men do not live in their private lives what they seek to bring to pass in public. Wholly ineffective and illusory is the will for social reality of circles of intellectuals who fight for the transformation of human relations yet remain as indirect and unreal as ever in their personal life with men. The authenticity of the political position of a man is tested and formed in his natural ‘unpolitical’ sphere. Here is the germinating ground of all genuine communal-effecting force. No lived community is lost, and out of no other element than lived community can the community of the human race be built. (Martin Buber, Gemeinschaft, Vol. II of Worte an die Zeit [Munich: Dreiländerverlag, 1919], pp. 7-26. On Buber’s relation to Landauer see Martin Buber, ‘Landauer und die Revolution,’ Masken, Halbmonatschrift des Duesseldorfer Schauspielhauses, XIV [1918-19], No. 18/19, pp. 282-286; Hinweise, op. cit., ‘Erinnerung an einen Tod’ [192]), pp. 252-258, and Pointing the Way, op. cit., ‘Recollection of a Death,’ pp. 115-120; Martin Buber, Paths in Utopia, trans. by R. F. C. Hull [London: Routledge, 1949], chap. vi, pp. 46-57; and Kohn, op. cit., pp. 29-31. On his relation to Kropoekin see Paths in Utopia, chap. v, pp. 38-45. On his relation to Tönnies, see Kohn, op. cit., pp. 195-197, 348.)

Buber’s religious socialism is built on closeness to the land, on the meaningfulness of work and of mutual help, on the leadership of those men who can take responsibility for individual lives, on community built out of direct relationship between men and between groups of men, on the spirit of an eternal yet ever-changing truth, and above all on the reign of God. Der heilige Weg, op. cit., pp. 85-87 [my translation]. See also Martin Buber, Worte an die Zeit, vol. I, Grundsätze [München: Dreiländerverlag, 1919], pp. 5-11. 47) In this religious socialism Buber’s call for the realization of God on earth and his concern for the relations between man and man have merged into one mature whole -- the message of true community. This community starts not with facts of economics and history but with the spirit working silently in the depths. Even in 1919 Buber saw the true nature of the socialist power-state which, in the name of compulsory justice and equality, makes impossible spontaneous community and genuine relationship between man and man. True to the ‘narrow ridge,’ he refused the clamouring either-or of the modern world -- the demand that one accept the centralized socialist state because of the defects of capitalism or the capitalist society because of the defects of socialism.

Buber’s socialism of this period is religious but it is not ‘Utopian,’ for it does not base its claims and its hopes on any easily workable scheme or any facile trust in human nature. Rather it demands the thing that is hardest of all, that men live their lives with one another with the same genuineness and integrity as they desire to establish in the pattern of the total community. And it demands it in the face of ‘history’ and of ‘determinism’ and by the strength of the power of the spirit to come to man in his deepest need. It does not expect community to be established simply through the grace of God or simply through the will of man, but through the will of man which in extremis becomes one with the will of God.

The socialist power-state is not, for Buber, evil in itself any more than the capitalist state. Both are evil in so far as they prevent the springing-up of the good, the socialist state in that it makes impossible even those remnants of true community which exist in the capitalist state, the capitalist state in that the relations between man and man are indirect and perverted, based on desire for exploitation rather than true togetherness. The remedy for these evils is not the immediate establishment of some super-society but simply the strengthening of the forces of good through the will for genuine relationship and true community. The surging tides of inexorable world history are slowly pushed back and reversed by the invisible forces working in the souls of men and in the relations between man and man.

Closely related to Buber’s philosophy of realization, and like it an important element in the development of his I-Thou philosophy, is his dialectic of religion and culture. Influenced by Nietzsche, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Georg Simmel, (Cf. Nietzsche’s contrast between the Dionysian and the Apollonian in The Birth of Tragedy and The Will to Power, Dilthey’s contrast between Geisteswissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften, and Simmel’s contrast between ‘religiousness’ and ‘religion’ in Die Religion, Vol. II of Die Gesellschaft. Sammlung sozialpsychologischer Monographien, edited by Martin Buber [Frankfurt am Main: Rütten & Loening 1906], pp. 7-17. Dilthey and Simmel were both Buber’s teachers.) this dialectic combines a theory of religious symbolism with a philosophy of history. Culture and religiousness replace one another in the history of peoples, writes Buber. Culture is the stabilization of the life impulse and life forms between two religious upheavals. Religion is the renewal of the life impulse and life forms between two cultural developments. In the religious upheaval the powers become free. In culture they bind themselves again in new life forms, bind themselves ever faster and tighter, until they lie caught, dull and lifeless, in the forms. Then there comes again a moment when life revolts against the law that has ceased to contain the spirit which created it. In this moment the form is broken and life is summoned to new creation out of the chaos. But this shattering is no simple turning-point. It is much more a fearful crisis that is often decisive not for renewal but for death. And yet there is no other way not only to a new religiousness but also to a new culture. This upheaval can at first find no other expression than the religious, for before man creates new life forms, he creates a new relation to life itself, a new meaning of life. But this renewal must be accompanied by the inner strength to withstand the crisis. Power of the storming spirit to stir up the conflagration, security of the constructing soul to hold itself in the purifying fire: these are the forces which guide a people to rejuvenated life. (Die jüdische Bewegung, Vol. I, op. cit., ‘Zwiefache Zukunft’ [1912], pp. 216-220.)

This dialectic recognizes a conservative and retaining influence as a necessary accompaniment of the dynamic and creative, if stable life is to result. Yet it also recognizes the process by which the forms encroach on the life that created them until that life must destroy the forms in order to continue its existence. Evil in this scheme is not a separate principle but an undue predominance of one force over the other, especially an imbalance so great that it can no longer be corrected through a religious renewal.

This dialectic is further clarified by Buber’s distinction between ‘religion’ and ‘religiousness.’ ‘Religiousness’ is the astonished and worshipful feeling of man that above his conditionality there stands an Unconditioned whose desire is to form a living community with him and whose will he may realize in the world of men. ‘Religion’ is the sum of customs and teachings in which the religiousness of a certain epoch of a people has been expressed and formed, crystallized in precepts and dogma, and handed down to all future generations as inalterably binding. Religion is true only as long as it is fruitful, and it is fruitful only as long as religiousness is able to fill precept and dogma with new meaning and inwardly transform them to meet the need of each new generation. Religiousness means activity -- an elementary setting oneself in relation to the Absolute; religion means passivity -- taking upon oneself inherited laws. (Reden über das Judentum, op. cit., ‘Jüdische Religiosität’ [1916], pp. 103-105.)

Dogmas and precepts are only the changing products of the attempts of the human spirit to fix the working of the Absolute which it experiences in a symbolic order of the knowable and the do-able. The primary reality is the action of the Absolute on the human spirit. Man experiences the Absolute as the great presence that is over against him, as ‘Thou’ in itself. He grasps the ineffable through the creation of symbols, in signs and speech which reveal God to men for this age. But in the course of ages these symbols are outgrown and new ones bloom in their place until no symbol performs what is needful and life itself in the wonder of its togetherness becomes a symbol.

Religious truth is vital rather than conceptual. It can only be intimated in words and can first be satisfactorily proclaimed only by being confirmed in the life of a man, in the life of a community. The word of the teaching loses its religious character as soon as it is cut loose from its connection with the life of the founder and his disciples and recast into an independently knowable and thoroughly impersonal principle. Each religiously creative age is only a stage of religious truth, for, in distinction from philosophic truth, it is no tenet but a way, no thesis but a process. It is a powerful process of spiritual creation, a creative answer to the Absolute. (Ibid., ‘Cheruth. Ein Rede über Jugend und Religion’ [1919], pp. 202-209, 217-224.)

Theophany happens to man, and he has his part in it as God has His. Forms and ideas result from it; but what is revealed in it is not form or idea but God. Religious reality means this, for it is the undiminished relation to God Himself. Man does not possess God; he meets Him.

That through which all religion lives, religious reality, goes in advance of the morphology of the age and exercises a decisive effect upon it; it endures in the essence of the religion which is morphologically determined by culture and its phases, so that this religion stands in a double influence, a cultural, limited one from without and an original and unlimited one from within. This inner reality, from the moment that it is incorporated in religion, no longer works directly, but through religion it affects all spheres of life. Thus theophany begets history. (Reden über das Judentum, op. cit., ‘Vorwort’ [1923], pp. ix-xii (my translation).

Religion is thus influenced from the side of religious experience on the one hand and culture on the other. The Absolute enters into the forms of religion and through religion influences culture and history. From this point of view history cannot be understood as a purely immanent development, for it is partially a product of an encounter with a primary reality which transcends culture and gives rise to it. Each of the cultures of history originated in an original relation event, and each must return to such an event before it can find renewal. Similarly, religious forms and symbols arise out of elemental religious experience and must be renewed and transformed by such experience if they are to retain their living reality.

As far as Buber goes beyond transcendental idealism, he still starts with Kant’s teaching that we ourselves impose the order of space and time upon experience in order that we may orient ourselves in it. From Kant, Buber says, he gained an inkling ‘that being itself was beyond the reach alike of the finitude and the infinity of space and time, since it only appeared in space and time but did not itself enter into this appearance.’ But the problem that Buber faced and that he inherited from the age when idealism had begun to break up was that of how man can reach ‘reality’ without returning to the naïve, preKantian ‘objective’ view of the universe. (Between Man and Man, op. cit., ‘What Is Man?’ pp. 136-137, Kohn op. cit. pp. 244 245; Hugo Bergmann, ‘Begriff und Wirklichkeit. Ein Beitrag zur Philosophie Martin Bubers und J. G. Fichtes,’ Der Jude, Berlin, X, No. 5 [March 1928], ‘Sonderheft zu Martin Bubers fünfzigstem Geburtstag,’ pp. 96-97.)

Buber found this reality through perceiving that in addition to man’s orienting function he also possesses a ‘realizing’ function which brings him into real contact with God, with other men, and with nature. The thought of his teacher Wilhelm Dilthey provided an important bridge to this philosophy of ‘realization,’ for Dilthey based his thought on the radical difference between the way of knowing proper to the ‘Geisteswissenschaften’ -- the human studies such as philosophy, the social sciences, and psychology -- and that proper to the ‘Naturwissenschaften’ -- the natural sciences. In the former the knower cannot be merely a detached scientific observer but must also himself participate, for it is through his participation that he discovers both the typical and the unique in the aspects of human life that he is studying. (H. A. Hodges, Wilhelm Dilthey, An Introduction [New York: Oxford University Press, 1944], pp. viii-ix, 12-16.)

Another important influence on Buber’s philosophy of realization, as on his closely related philosophy of Judaism, was the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche. In one of his earliest articles Buber spoke of Nietzsche as ‘the first pathfinder of the new culture,’ ‘the awakener and creator of new life-values and a new world-feeling.’ Nietzsche’s influence may account in part for the dynamism of Buber’s philosophy, for its concern with creativity and greatness, for its emphasis on the concrete and actual as opposed to the ideal and abstract, for its idea of the fruitfulness of conflict, and for its emphasis on the value of life impulses and wholeness of being as opposed to detached intellectuality. (Martin Buber, ‘Ein Wort über Nietzsche und die Lebenswerte ‘ Kunst und Leben, Berlin, December 1900; quoted in Kohn, op. cit., p. 36; Kohr, pp. 21-22, 26-27, 227).

Probably the strongest influence on Buber’s concept of realization, however, was the existentialist philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard. In Kierkegaard’s earlier works are found the germ of some of Buber’s most important early and later ideas: the direct relation between the individual and God in which the individual addresses God as ‘Thou,’ the insecure and exposed state of every individual as an individual, the concept of the ‘knight of faith’ who cannot take shelter in the universal but must constantly risk all in the concrete uniqueness of each new situation, the necessity of becoming a true person before going out to relation, and the importance of realizing one’s belief in one’s life. These similarities plus Buber’s own treatment of Kierkegaard in his mature works make it clear that Kierkegaard is one of the most important single influences on Buber’s thought. (Cf. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, translated by Walter Lowrie [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941], pp. 55-56, 118-120, 189-190. For Buber’s treatment of Kierkegaard see Martin Buber, I and Thou, translated by Ronald Gregor Smith, 2nd edition, with Postscript by the Author added [New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958], pp. 106-109, Hasidism and Modern Man op. cit., Book VI, ‘Love of God and Love of Neighbor,’ pp. 227-233, Between Man and Man, op. cit., ‘The Question to the Single One,’ pp. 48-82, and ‘What Is Man? ‘pp. 161-163, 171-181; and Eclipse of God, op. cit., ‘On the Suspension of the Ethical,’ translated by Maurice Friedman, pp. 149-156.)

Buber has spoken of Kierkegaard and Dostoievsky together as the two men of the nineteenth century who will, in his opinion, ‘remain’ in the centuries to come. In Dostoievsky Buber found spiritual intensity, fervour, depth of insight, and an understanding of man’s inner cleavage. He also found in him something of that dynamism and concern for realization in life that mark both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. Finally, he found in him a dialectic very similar to his own intellectual processes and a world-affirming mystic religion of ecstasy, love, and brotherhood which bears a remarkable resemblance to his own thought.

In Daniel (1913) we find Buber’s concern for unity, realization, and creativity expressed for the first time entirely in its own terms and not as the interpretation of some particular thought or religious or cultural movement. Daniel is the first mature and comprehensive expression of Buber’s philosophy, and it is at the same time the most creative and organically whole of his books to appear up till that time.

‘In each thing,’ writes Buber in Daniel, ‘there opens to you the door of the One if you bring with you the magic that unlocks it: the perfection of your direction.’ But direction is only complete when it is fulfilled with power: the power to experience the whole event. Power alone gives one only the fullness, direction alone only the meaning of the experience -- power and direction together allow one to penetrate into its substance, into oneness itself.

The vortex of happenings sweeps over one like a sandstorm which threatens to destroy one. Which type of soul one has is decided by how one withstands it. One type of person thinks only of protection, of the inherited arts of self-defence; he educates his senses to perceive in place of the vortex an ordered world conceived within the framework of basic principles of experience. He no longer meets the world but only his own cause-and-purpose oriented conceptions of it. The other type of person lets stand, to be sure, the ordered world -- the world of utility in which he can alone live with other men; he accepts it and learns its laws. But deep within him grows and endures the readiness to go out to meet the naked chaos armed with nothing but the magic of his inborn direction.

Direction is that primeval tension of a human soul which moves it to choose and to realize this and no other out of the infinity of possibilities. In direction the soul does not order reality but opens and delivers itself to it, and not with the senses and understanding alone but with its whole being. Direction is thus a finding of one’s own way and a realization of one’s inmost being that gives one the strength to withstand in openness the confused stream of outer and inner happenings. But direction is neither individuality, determinism, nor arbitrary self-will. It is the realization of what was already potentially the one true direction of one’s personality. Nor does this self-realization exclude fellowship with others. Rather it makes possible true community, from being to being. (Martin Buber, Daniel, Gespräche von der Verwirklichung [Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1913], ‘Von der Richtung,’ pp. 13, 16-22.)

There is a twofold relation of men to their experience: the orienting and the realizing. That which man experiences, doing and suffering, creating and enjoying, he can order in the continuity of experience for the sake of his goals or he can comprehend in its power and splendour for its own sake. If man orders it, he works with it according to its forms and laws. And this ordering is not to be despised. How should we not honour the unsurveyable edifice of science and its wonderful development? But everywhere where orienting knowledge rules by itself, it takes place at the cost of the experience of reality.

Realization refers to that enhanced meaning of life which springs from moments of intensified existence and intensified perception. This is what it means to realize: to relate experience to nothing else but itself. And here is the place where the strength of the human spirit awakens and concentrates and becomes creative. Whereas in the system of experiencing one has only to arrange and order, and living with only one part of one’s being can come to terms with the all; in realizing one. must bring forth the totality of one’s being in order to withstand a single thing or event. But because power thus gives itself to the thing or event, it creates reality in it and through it. For that alone is reality which is so experienced.

There is no purely realizing or purely orienting type of man. As in the life of the community attained reality must ever again be placed in the continuity of experience, so in the life of the individual hours of orienting follow hours of realization and must so follow. But the creative man is he who has the most effective power of realization; he is the man in whom the realizing force of the soul has so concentrated into work that it creates reality for all. The creative man possesses the unbroken power of realization, for in his creativity mature orientation is also included as a dependent and serving function.

Realized experience creates the essential form of existence; only here can what we call ‘things’ and what we call ‘I’ find their reality. For all experience is a dream of being bound together; orientation divides and sunders it, realization accomplishes and proclaims it. Nothing individual is real in itself, for it is only preparation: all reality is fulfilled binding. In each man there lives, utilized or suppressed, the power to become unified and to enter into reality.

Men of realization are few in our time, which makes up for them with the doers and performers -- those who act without being, who give what they do not have, who conquer where they have not fought. The undue predominance of orientation has settled in the blood of our time and has dissolved its reality. Men have objects and know how to attain them. They have a milieu, and they have information about their milieu. They also have spirituality of many kinds, and they talk a great deal. Yet all of this is outside of reality. Men live and do not realize what they live, for their experience is ordered without being comprehended. Their limitations are so closely bound to them that they call them elegant names -- culture, religion, progress, tradition, or intellectuality; ‘ah, a thousand masks has the unreal!’ (Ibid., ‘Von der Wirklichkeit,’ pp. 29-47)

All living with the whole being and with unconstrained force means danger; there is no thing, relation, or event in the world that does not reveal an abyss when it is known, and all thinking threatens to shatter the stability of the thinker. He who lives his life in genuine, realizing knowledge must perpetually begin anew, perpetually risk all; and therefore his truth is not a having but a becoming. The orienting man wants security and security once for all: he wants to know his way about, and he wants a solid general truth that will not overturn him. But the man who forgets himself in order to use his power of realization loves the underived truth which he who ventures creates out of the depths. He does not want to know where he is at; for he is not always at the same place, but is ever at the new, at the uttermost, at God. God cannot realize Himself in men otherwise than as the innermost presence of an experience, and the God of this experience is therefore not the same, but always the new, the extreme. Orientation which acts as the all-embracing is thoroughly godless; godless also is the theologian who places his god in causality, a helping formula of orientation, and the spiritualist who knows his way about in the ‘true world’ and sketches its topography.

The realizing man is unprotected in the world, but he is not abandoned; for there is nothing that can lead him astray. He does not possess the world, yet stands in its love; for he realizes all being in its reality. He has that before which all security appears vain and empty: direction and meaning. When he comes to a crossroads, he makes his choice with immediate decision as out of a deep command. When he acts, he does his deed and no other, and he decides with his being. The deed is not limited for him, as it is for the orienting man, to causality and evolution; he feels himself free and acts as a free man. The orienting man places all happening in formulas, rules, and connections; the realizing man relates each event to nothing but its own intrinsic value. He receives what befalls him as a message; he does what is necessary as a commission and a demonstration. He who descends into the transforming abyss can create unity out of his and out of all duality. Here no ‘once for all’ is of value; for this is the endless task. This is the kingdom of God: the kingdom of ‘holy insecurity.’ (Martin Buber, ‘Daniel. Gespräche von der Verwirklichung [Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1913], ‘Von dem Sinn,’ pp. 55-82. ‘Today,’ writes Buber, ‘I would not any more describe the kingdom so extravagantly! [Daniel is still too much a book of the "easy word"].’ From a letter from Professor Buber to the author of August 8, 1954.)

All wisdom of the ages has the duality of the world as its subject. However it names the two forces that it makes known -- spirit and matter, form and material, being and becoming, reason and will, or positive and negative element -- it has in mind the overcoming of their tension, the union of their duality. The longing for unity is the glowing ground of the soul; but the man who is true feels that he would degrade this longing if he surrendered something of the fullness of his experience to please it. He feels that he can only become obedient to it in truth if he strives to fulfill it out of his completeness and preserves his experienced duality undiminished in the force of its distance.

For this reason the faithful man rejects the Absolute of the Vedantic non-dualist as a life-denying unity found apart from the main highroad on which the faithful man must travel. He rejects in like manner the abstract unity of European idealist philosophy and the empty unity of the Taoist who indifferentiates all opposition in himself. True unity is the unity of the world as it is, a unity which excludes nothing and destroys nothing but transforms the stubborn material of life into oneness through the realizing action of men. It is the unity of man and man, of man and the world, of life and death; the unity which is realized by the man who in his own life has direction and meaning. It is the unity which includes all evil, even the kingdom of Satan; for it can accept nothing less than the whole. But just because this is a realized unity, it is one that is never completely attained, one which ever again comes forth as purer and sharper duality. This new duality, in turn, provides the material for an ever higher and more nearly perfect oneness. Each new act of inner unification enables the individual to take unto himself ever greater tensions of world-polarity and bring them to unity. (Ibid., ‘von der Einheit,’ pp. 139-152. Erich Przywara, S.J., identifies the three wrong ways in Daniel as the Hindu, the European, and the Chinese, respectively in ‘Judentum und Christentum,’ Stimme der Zeit, CX [1925-26], 87.)

Hereafter, however Buber may change his philosophy, he never forsakes his belief in a redemption which accepts all the evil of real life and transforms it into the good. Between the extremes of pantheism and an absolute divorced from the world lies the duality of a God who is real in Himself yet must be realized in the world through man’s life. In this middle sphere the mystic’s demand for a life lived in terms of the highest reality and the existentialist’s demand for self-realization and genuine existence may meet in spirit. In Daniel this meeting has resulted in a new unity -- the philosophy of realization.

The two great movements which revolutionized Judaism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were the Haskalah, or enlightenment, and Hasidism. At its outset the rational Haskalah turned naturally to western Europe for its inspiration and looked with contempt on the emotional Hasidim. In the same way early Hasidism found in the skeptical and intellectual Haskalah an even greater opponent than traditional Rabbinism. It was only in the wave of a new renaissance that these two movements flowed together, and it was in Buber that this synthesis reached both depth and completeness. (Kohn, op. cit. pp. 13-15)

Buber’s early essays on Judaism set forth with marked clarity the concern for personal wholeness, for the realization of truth in life, and for the joining of spirit and of basic life energies which consistently appears in all of his later writings and determines, as much as any other element of his thought, his attitude toward evil. Almost every important statement which he makes in these early writings about the psychology of the Jewish people (their dynamism, their concern with relation, their inner division, their desire for realization and unity), he later translates into his general philosophy.

The primary task of the Jewish movement, writes Buber, is the removal of the schism between thought and action and the re-establishment of the unified personality who creates out of a single ardour of will. The truly creative person is not the intellectual, nor is he simply the artist. He is the strong and many-sided man in whom human happenings stream together in order to attain new developments in spirit and deed. The redeeming affirmation of a conflict is the essence of all creativity; in the creative person a deep inner division is brought to harmony. To effect this harmony the creative person must have roots in a people through whom he is enriched and fortified. Today faith lies to life and does violence to its surging meanings. But for him who has lost his God the folk can be a first station on his new way. Today Satan tempts the creative man to lose himself in the inessential, to roam about in the great confusion in which all human clarity and definiteness has ceased. The creative kingdom is there where form and formation thrive, and rootedness is a mighty helper to the individual to remain therein. (Die jüdische Bewegung. Gesammelte Aufsätze und Ansprachen, Vol. I, 190014 [Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1916], pp. 12-15, 52, 66-73.)

Man experiences the fullness of his inner actuality and possibility as a living substance which pulls toward opposite poles; he experiences his inner way as a traveling from crossroad to crossroad. In no men was and is this basic duality so central and dominant as in the Jews, and in consequence nowhere has there been such a monstrous and wonderful paradox as the striving of the Jews for unity. For the ancient Jew objective being is unity and Satan a servant of God. It is man’s subjective being which is cleaved, fallen, become inadequate and ungodlike. Redemption takes place through the creature’s overcoming his own inner duality. The true meaning of the Galut, the exile of the Jews, is the falling away from the ancient striving for unity into an unproductive spirituality and intellectuality divorced from life. As a result Judaism split into two antagonistic sides: an official, uncreative side and an underground of Jewish heretics and mystics who carried forward in glowing inwardness the ancient striving for unity. (Martin Buber, ‘Das Judentum und die Menscheit,’ Drei Reden über das Judentum [Frankfurt am Main: Rütten & Loening, 1911], pp. 35-56. The essays in Drei Reden are also included in a collected edition, Reden über das Judentum [Frankfurt am Main: Rütten & Loening, 1923, Berlin: Schocken Verlag, 1932])

The spiritual process of Judaism manifests itself in history as the striving after an ever more perfect realization of three interrelated ideas: the idea of unity, the idea of the deed, and the idea of the future. The Jew has always been more concerned with the whole than with the parts, with movement than with the senses, with time than with space. For this reason he has always considered the deed and not faith to be the decisive relation between man and God. These three ideas of unity, the deed, and the future are interrelated through Buber’s emphasis on a dynamic realization of the unconditional in the lives of men. Unity is not a static refusal to change, but unity in change. Action is not a reliance on external deeds and formal laws; it is the action of the total being. The future is not the end of time but the fullness of time, not the transcending of the world and mankind but fulfillment through the world and through mankind -- it is a fulfillment of the unconditioned will of God in the conditioned lives of men. (‘Die Erneuerung des Judentums,’ Drei Reden, op. cit., pp. 75-96.)

Sin is living divided and unfree, and it is the indolence and decisionlessness which makes this possible. Decisionlessness allows one to be conditioned and acted upon, for without decision one’s power remains undirected. It is, therefore, just this failure to direct one’s inner power which is the inmost essence of evil. In the soul which decides with its whole being there is unity of power and direction -- the undiminished force of the passionate impulse and the undiverted rectitude of intention. There is no impulse that is evil in itself; man makes it so when he yields to it instead of controlling it. The Mishnah interprets the command ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart’ as loving God with both the ‘good’ and the ‘evil’ impulses; this means loving Him with and through the act of decision, so that the ardour of passion is transformed and enters with its whole power into the single deed.

Decision is the realization on earth of divine freedom and unconditionality. Not the material of an action but the strength of the decision which brings it forth and the dedication of the intention which dwells in it determine whether it will flow off into the kingdom of things or press into the All-holy. The name of the act of decision in its last intensity is teshavah, turning. Teshavah means the caesura of a human life, the renewing revolution in the middle of the course of an existence. When in the middle of ‘sin,’ in decisionlessness, the will awakes to decision, the integument of ordinary life bursts and the primeval force breaks through and storms upward to heaven. When man has raised the conditioned in himself to the unconditioned, his action works on the fate of God. Only for him who lets things happen and cannot decide is God an unknown being who transcends the world. For him who chooses, God is the nearest and most trusted of things. Whether God is ‘transcendent’ or ‘immanent’ thus does not depend on God; it depends on men. (‘Der Geist des Orients und das Judentum’ and ‘Jüdische Religiosität,’ Reden über das Judentum, op. cit., pp. 81-84, 103-113. These essays were originally published together with ‘Der Mythos der Juden’ in Vom Geist des Judentums [Leipzig: Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1916])

Thus in Buber’s early philosophy of Judaism good is identified with decision of the whole being, evil with the directionlessness that results from failure to decide. Every important step forward in the development of Buber’s philosophy is reflected in his philosophy of Judaism. His existentialism, his philosophy of community, his religious socialism, and his dialogical philosophy all develop within his philosophy of Judaism as well as outside of it. There is, thus, an essential unity of what are in Buber’s writings two separate streams of developing thought.

The development of Buber’s thought from his earliest essays in 1900 to the statement of his mature philosophy in 1922 can best be understood as a gradual movement from an early period of mysticism through a middle period of existentialism to a final period of developing dialogical philosophy. Most of the ideas which appear in the early periods are not really discarded in the later but are preserved in changed form. Thus Buber’s existentialism retains much of his mysticism, and his dialogical philosophy in turn includes important mystical and existential elements.

The revival of mysticism at the turn of the century was in part a reaction against determinism and against the increasing specialization of knowledge. It was also a continuation of the mystical tendencies of the German romantics who could trace their ancestry back through Goethe and Schelling to the Pietists and Jacob Boehme. It was, finally, a result of the growing interest in mythology and in the religions of the Orient. All of these movements exercised a strong influence on Buber’s thought. The influence of Hinduism and Buddhism was most important at an early period. That of Taoism came slightly later and has persisted into Buber’s mature philosophy. At least as important was the influence of the German mystics from Meister Eckhart to Angelus Silesius. Of these mystics, the two most important for Buber were Meister Eckhart and Jacob Boehme, the former of whom Buber has called ‘the greatest thinker of western mysticism.’ These mystics provided a bridge for Buber to Jewish mysticism. The German mystical idea of the birth in the soul of the Urgrund, or godhead, resembles the Kabbalistic and Hasidic idea of the unification of God and His exiled immanence. The two concepts together led Buber, he says, ‘to the thought of the realization of God through man’ which he later abandoned for the idea of the meeting of God and man. )Hans Kohn, Martin Buber, Sein Werk und seine Zeit, Ein Versuch über Religion und Politik [Hellerau: Jakob Hegner Verlag, 1930], p. 56; Hasidism, op. cit., ‘God and the Soul,’ p. 148; Between Man and Man, op. cit., ‘What Is Man?’ pp. 184-185. In addition to his many translations and recreations of Hasidic tales and other Jewish legends, Buber edited and wrote introductions to a selection of the parables of Chuang-Tse -- Reden und Gleichnisse des Tschuang-Tse [Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1914], a book of Chinese ghost and love stories -- Chinesischen Geister- und Liebesgeschrchten [Frankfurt am Main: Rütten & Loening, 1911], a book of Celtic sayings --.Die yier Zweige des Mabinogi [Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1914], and a translation of the national epic of Finland.--.Kalewala [Munich: Georg Müller, 1914]. Buber’s introduction to the Kalewala was reprinted under the title ‘Das Epos des Zauberers’ in Hinweise, op. cit., pp. 84-103.)

One of the basic motivations for Buber’s interest in mysticism in this period was his concern with the problem of the relation between the individual and the world. On the one hand, he recognized as prime facts of his experience the division between the ‘I’ and the world and the duality within man. On the other, he posited the unity of the ‘I’ and the world in both intellectual and emotional terms. It is this very experience of aloneness and division which may have provided the great attraction of the mystic unity of all things. But it is this experience, too, which probably caused Buber to reject his earlier monistic formulations of an already existing unity which only needs to be discovered for a later emphasis on the necessity of realizing unity in the world through genuine and fulfilled life.

‘God is not divided but everywhere whole, and where he reveals himself, there he is wholly present.’ This wonderful world-feeling has become wholly our own, writes Buber. We have woven it in our innermost experience. There often comes to us the desire to put our arms around a young tree and feel the same surge of life as in ourselves or to read our own most special mystery in the eyes of a dumb animal. We experience the ripening and fading of far-distant stars as something which happens to us, and there are moments in which our organism is a wholly other piece of nature. (Martin Buber. ‘Ueber Jakob Böhme,’ Wiener Rundschau, V, No. 12 [June 15, 1901], pp. 251-253.)

The unity which the ecstatic experiences when he has brought all his former multiplicity into oneness is not a relative Unity, bounded by the existence of other individuals. It is the absolute, unlimited oneness which includes all others. The only true accompaniment of such experience is silence, for any attempt at communication places the ecstatic back in the world of multiplicity. Yet when the ecstatic returns to the world, he must by his very nature seek to express his experience. The need of the mystic to communicate is not only weakness and stammering; it is also power and melody. The mystic desires to bring the timeless over into time -- he desires to make the unity without multiplicity into the unity of all multiplicity. This desire brings to mind the great myths of the One which becomes the many because it wishes to know and be known, to love and be loved -- the myths of the ‘I’ creates a ‘Thou,’ of the Godhead that becomes God. Is not the experience of the ecstatic a symbol of the primeval experience of the world spirit? (Ekstatische Konfessionen [Jena: Eugen Diedrichs Verlag, 1909], pp. xi-xxvi.)

Corresponding to this dialectic between primal unity and the multiplicity of the world is the dialectic between conflict and love. The movement of conflict leads to individuation, that of love to God. Conflict is the bridge in and through which one ‘I’ reveals itself in its beauty to another ‘I.’ Love is the bridge through which being unites itself with God. Out of the intermixture of the two comes life, in which things neither exist in rigid separation nor melt into one another but reciprocally condition themselves. This concept finds its completion, writes Buber, in Ludwig Feuerbach’s sentence: ‘Man with man -- the unity of I and Thou --is God.’ The most personal lies in the relation to the other. Join a being to all beings and you lure out of it its truest individuality. (‘Ueber Jakob Bohme,’op. cit., p. 252; Lesser Ury,’p. 45f.)

God is immanent within the world and is brought to perfection through the world and through the life of man. The world is no being over against one. It is a becoming. We do not have to accept the world as it is; we continually create it. We create the world in that we unknowingly lend our perceptions the concentration and firmness that make them into a reality. But deeper and more inwardly we consciously create the world in that we let our strength flow into the becoming, in that we ourselves enter into world destiny and become an element in the great event. )‘Ueber Jacob Böhme,’ p. 251.)

Human life itself is the bearer and reality of all transcendence. Tao, ‘the way,’ is unity in change and transformation, and the perfect revelation of Tao is the man who combines the greatest change with the purest unity. Though Tao is the path, order, and unity of everything, it exists in things only potentially until it becomes living and manifest through its contact with the conscious being of the united man. Tao appears in men as the uniting force that overcomes all deviation from the ground of life, as the completing force that heals all that is sundered and broken. (Martin Buber, Die Rede, die Lehre, und das Lied [Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1920], pp. 40-79. ‘Die Lehre von Tao’ was originally published as a ‘Nachwort’ to Reden und Gleichnisse des Tschuang-Tse. It was most recently reprinted in Hinweise, op. cit., pp. 44-83, and in Pointing the Way, op. cit., ‘The Teaching of the Tao,’ pp. 31-58.)

The lived unity of the Tao cannot be attained by knowledge and action as men ordinarily conceive them; for what men call knowledge consists of the sunderance of the senses and mental power, and what men call action consists of the sunderance of intention and deed. Moreover, what men call human love and righteousness has nothing in common with the love of the perfect man, for it is perverted by being the subject of a command. The true action, the appearance of which is non-action, is a working of the whole being. To interfere with the life of things is to harm both them and oneself. But to rest is to effect, to purify one’s own soul is to purify the world, to surrender oneself to Tao is to renew creation. He who performs this action, or non-action, stands in harmony with the essence and destiny of all things. )‘Die Lehre von Tao,’ op. cit., pp. 80-94. Cf. Buber’s important Foreword to Pointing the Way, p. ix-x, in which he states that he has included ‘The Teaching of the Tao’ in this collection because it belongs to that ‘mystical’ ‘stage that I had to pass through before I could enter into an independent relationship with being.’ This experience of the unity of the self is understood by the mystic as the experience of the unity, and this leads him to turn away from his existence as a man to a duality of ‘higher’ hours of ecstasy and lower’ hours in the world which are regarded as preparation for the higher. ‘The great dialogue between I and Thou is silent; nothing else exists than his self, which he experiences as the self. That is certainly an exalted form of being untrue, but it is still being untrue.’)

Thus for Buber’s early mystical philosophy, evil is equivalent to inner division and separation from the ground of life, and the redemption of evil is the realization of a lived unity which not only removes the dissension in the individual but makes actual the unity and perfection of the world. Buber does not treat evil as pure illusion but as a negative force interacting with the good in a process leading back to the original unity. For Buber, as for the Baal-Shem, evil is no essence but a lack -- the throne of the good, the ‘shell’ which surrounds and disguises the essence of things. Though negative, evil is real and must be redeemed through the wholeness and purity of man’s being.

Apart from his philosophy of dialogue, Martin Buber is best known for making Hasidism a part of the thought and culture of the western world. Hasidism is the popular mystical movement that swept East European Jewry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In his essay, Mein Weg zum Chassidismus (‘My Road to Hasidism’), Buber tells of how his father took him on occasional visits to the Hasidic community of Sadagora in Galicia when he was a child. Although estranged by the conspicuous grandeur of the zaddik (the leader of the Hasidic community) and by the wild gestures of the Hasidim in prayer, when he saw the rebbe stride through the rows of the waiting he felt that here was a leader, and when he saw the Hasidim dance with the Torah, he felt that here was a community. Later he went through a period of uncreative intellectuality and spiritual confusion, living without centre and substance. Through Zionism he gained new roots in the community, but it was only through Hasidism that the movement which he had joined took on meaning and content. One day on reading a saying by the founder of Hasidism about the fervour and daily inward renewal of the pious man, he recognized in himself the Hasidic soul, and he recognized piety, hasidut, as the essence of Judaism. This experience occurred in his twenty-sixth year. As a result of it, he gave up his political and journalistic activity and spent five years in isolation studying Hasidic texts. (Martin Buber, Hinweise. Gesammelte Essays [Zurich: Manesse Verlag, 1953], pp. 179-196; Hasidism and Modern Man, Vol. I of Hasidism and the Way of Man, ed. and trans. by M. Friedman [N.Y.: Horizon Press, 1958], pp. 47-69.) It was only after he emerged from this isolation into renewed activity that he entered on his real life work as a writer, a speaker, and a teacher.

Of the many different cultural strains that converged in Buber’s thought, Hasidism is perhaps the least familiar. The Hebrew word hasid means ‘pious.’ It is derived from the noun hesed, meaning lovingkindness, mercy, or grace. The Hasidic movement arose in Poland in the eighteenth century and, despite bitter persecution at the hands of traditional Rabbinism, spread rapidly among the Jews of eastern Europe until it included almost half of them in its ranks. The founder of Hasidism was Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer (1700-60), who is more commonly known as the Baal-Shem-Tov, the master of the good name of God. Originally a simple teacher, then later a magic healer, he finally gathered about him a group of disciples dedicated to a life of mystic fervour, joy, and love. Reacting against the tendency of traditional Rabbinism toward strict legalism and arid intellectualism, the Baal Shem and his followers exalted simplicity and devotion above mere scholarship.

Despite its excommunication and persecution at the hands of traditional Rabbinism, Hasidism was firmly rooted in the Jewish past and was perhaps more truly an expression of that past than any Jewish movement in modern times. The Hasidic emphasis on piety, on love of God and one’s neighbour, and on joy in God’s creation goes clearly back to the Prophets, the Psalms, and the school of Hillel. Within the context of post-biblical Judaism Hasidism may be considered as a union of three different currents. One of these is the Jewish law as expressed in the Talmudic Halakhah; the second is the Jewish legend and saying as expressed in the Talmudic Haggadah and in later Jewish mythology; and the third is the Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical ‘tradition.’ The central concepts of Hasidism derive from and can only be understood in terms of the theoretical Kabbalah of the Middle Ages and the Lurian Kabbalah of sixteenth-century Safed.

The theoretical Kabbalah (as it is set forth in the Zohar, the ‘Book of Splendour’) is in essence a complex theosophical system which explains creation in terms of ten sefirot, aspects or emanations of God. The origin of evil is explained in terms of a disharmony arising within these emanations so that God’s quality of judgment became separate from His quality of mercy. To some extent this evil is believed to be prior to man, but to some extent also it is felt to be actualized by the fall of man. The result of this evil is a separation between the En-Sof, the hidden nature of God, and the Shekinah, His Glory which is immanent in the world. This separation is expressed in terms of ‘the exile of the Shekinah,’ and redemption is spoken of in terms of the yihud, or the reunification of God and His Glory. This reunification can be initiated and in part brought about through the pious actions of man and through his cleaving to God (devekuth); for man is created with free will and with the power to be a co-worker with God in the restoration of the original harmony.

The Lurian Kabbalah is largely based on the Zohar, and like it bears marked resemblances to Neo-Platonism and various forms of Gnosticism. It differs from it, however, in a number of new and highly complex concepts which make it of a more theistic nature than the earlier Kabbalah and yet cause it to lay much stronger emphasis on the power of man to bring about the Messianic redemption of Israel and the world. In the Zohar the sefirot were derived almost directly from the hidden Absolute, passing first through a ‘region of pure absolute Being which the mystics call Nothing.’ In the Lurian Kabbalah the outgoing movement of creation is thought to have been preceded at every point by a voluntary contraction or self-limitation of God (tsimtsum) which makes room for creation and gives man real freedom to do evil as well as good. Thus God is removed from rather than directly present in His creation. However, something of the favor of divinity remains in the space that God has left, and this flavor is preserved in the various sefirot and worlds that then evolve.

Evil here, as in the Zohar, is explained as a waste-product of creation and an inevitable result of the limitation, or judgment, that must take place if separate things are to exist at all. But the origin of evil is explained here under a different figure, that of shevirath ha-kelim -- the breaking of the vessels which contain the divine grace. As the result of the breaking of the vessels, the divine harmony is disrupted, the Shekinah is exiled, and sparks of divinity fall downward into physical creation. In the physical world the sparks are surrounded by hard shells of darkness (qelipot), a type of negative evil. This whole process is further confirmed by the fall of man, but it is also within man’s power to liberate the divine sparks from their imprisonment in the shells and send them upward again to union with their divine source. Through this liberation the power of darkness is overcome and tikkun, the restoration of the original harmony, is effected.

This restoration in itself causes the redemption of man and the world. Though it cannot be completed by man’s action, man can start the movement which God will complete by sending down His grace to the world in the form of the Messiah. For this purpose man must not only observe every injunction of the law but he must practice mystical prayer, and he must bring to his actions and prayers special types of mystical intention, or kovanot. Kavanah represents a deliberate concentration of will, an inner attitude which is far more effective than the particular nature of the action being performed. However, the greatest effectiveness is only secured by the practice of special kavanot for each of the different actions. Thus, what was at its best a concern for inward devotion became at its worst an attempt to use magic to bring about the advent of the Messiah. (Gershom G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism [New York: Schocken Books, 1946], chaps. vi-vii; Ernst Mueller, History of Jewish Mysticism [Oxford: East and West Library, 1946], chaps. vi-vii. 18)

Hasidism preserved the Messianic fervour of the people, yet it turned that fervour away from the future to the love of God and man in the present moment. It taught that the present moment is itself the moment of redemption that leads to the ultimate consummation. It infused a new and warm life-feeling into Kabbalistic theory, and it shifted its emphasis away from theosophical speculation to mystical psychology -- to a concern with the progress of the individual soul in its efforts to purify itself, to help others, and to cleave to God. Kabbalistic doctrine was replaced by the personality of the zaddik in whom the Hasidim found the embodiment of those very virtues which they needed for their redemption and from whom they learned the right way for each of them to travel while in the life of the body. This way varied from Hasid to Hasid, for the Hasidim believed that as God is represented differently by each man, so each must discover his individuality and bring it to ever purer perfection, Not only were individual differences looked on as of value, but it was believed that it was only through them that the perfection of the whole could be reached. ( Mueller, op. cit., p. 140 f.; Scholem, op. cit., pp. 338-341; Torsten Ysander, Studien zum B’estschen Hasidismus in seiner religionsgeschichtlichen Sonderart [Uppsala: A. B. Lundequistska Bokhandeln, 1933], p. 139; Lazar Gulkowtisch, Der Hasidismus, religionswissenschaftlich untersucht ([Leipzig: 1927], pp. 31, 56.) This Hasidic individuality is strikingly embodied in a saying of Rabbi Zusya: ‘In the coming world, they will not ask me: "Why were you not Moses?" They will ask me: "Why were you not Zusya?"’

The individuality of the Hasidim went hand in hand with a more intimate communal life than had yet been known in the Judaism of the Diaspora, and it is this communal life, centring around the personality of the ‘true illuminate,’ that Scholem has called Hasidism’s greatest originality. Unlike the rav of traditional Rabbinism, the zaddik, or rebbe, was at once a saint, dwelling with God in the solitude of the mountain-tops, and a man of the people, transforming his mysticism into ethos and bringing it to the community in the valley below. (Scholem, op. cit., p. 342 ff.; Mueller, op. cit., p. 148.) The strength of Hasidism lay in the zaddik, and the amazing spread of the movement in the first fifty years of its existence is a tribute to the true spiritual charisma of its leaders -- ‘a whole galaxy of saint-mystics,’ writes Scholem, ‘each of them a startling individuality.’ (Scholem, op. cit., p. 337 f.)

Unfortunately the strength of the Hasidic movement was also its weakness. The dependence of the Hasidim on the zaddik left the way open to a grasping for power which eventually tended to produce a degeneration of the zaddik as a spiritual type and the consequent degeneration of the movement. Faith and religious enthusiasm were replaced in many cases by obscurantism and superstition, and the true charismatic was almost obscured by hereditary dynasties of zaddikim who lived in oriental luxury and exploited the credulity of the people. (Ibid, pp. 336 f., 344-348; Mueller, op. cit., p. 145.)

Hasidism takes over from the Lurian Kabbalah most of its principal concepts in somewhat simplified and popularized form, but it gives these concepts an emotional content that sometimes makes them very different from the original. Thus the idea of tsimtsum, or the self-limitation of God, is given a metaphorical rather than a literal interpretation which enables it to coexist with the strongest possible emphasis on the immanence of God, or God’s Glory, in all things. The world is in the closest possible connection with God, and nature is in fact nothing but the garment of God. God clothed Himself in the world in order to lead man step by step to the place where he can see God behind the appearances of external things and can cleave to Him in all his actions.

The Hasidic emphasis on the immanence of God is not to be regarded as pantheism, but as panentheism. The godly in the world must be brought through our action to ever greater and purer perfection. Man has a part in the Shekinah which enables him to be a co-worker with God in the perfection of the world toward redemption. Thus the stress of Hasidism is on the actual consummation of religious life -- the inward experience of the presence of God and the actualization of that presence in all one’s actions.

The attitude of Hasidism toward evil grows out of its concept of God. Since God is embodied in the world, there is no absolute but only relative evil. Evil is the lowest rung or the throne of the good -- an appearance, a shell, or a lesser grade of perfection. Evil only seems real because of our imperfect knowledge which causes us to fail to see the deep connections between happenings. Sin correspondingly is selfassertion, not seeing God’s immanence in all things. Evil serves the good precisely through its opposition to it, for through evil man comes to know God even as through darkness he comes to know light. Moreover, evil can itself be redeemed and transformed into the good. Not only the sparks of divinity but the qelipot, or shell of darkness, may ascend and be purified, and the ‘evil impulse’ in man, the yezer ha-ra, can be redirected and used to serve God. ( Scholem, op. cit., p. 347 f.; Mueller, op. cit., pp. 141, 143; Chajim Bloch, Priester der Liebe. Die Welt der Chassidim [Zurich: Amalthea-Verlag, 1930], p. 22 f. Simon Dubnow, Geschichte des Chassidismus [Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1931] 2 vol., I, 95 f.; Gulkowitsch, op. cit., pp. 48-51, 30 f.; Ysander, op. cit., pp. 134-142, 145 f., 200, 208, 272-276; Paul Levertoff, Die religiöse Denkweise der Chassidim [Leipzig: F. C. Hinrischs’sche Buchhandlung, 1918], pp. 10, 38 f.)

The fact that Hasidism lays less emphasis upon the knowledge of God’s immanence than on the confirmation of that knowledge through dedicated action shows that evil is not for Hasidism, as for the Hindu Vedanta, pure illusion. It has reality, even though this reality is only relative. The sparks must in truth be liberated, the shells must in truth be transformed, and the ‘evil impulse,’ which God created and which man made evil through his sin, must be turned once more to the service of God. This turning to God is spoken of by Hasidism as the teshuvah -- a repentance and purification in which one cleaves to God with all the power with which he formerly did evil. Through the teshavah man not only redeems himself but he liberates the divine sparks in the men and objects around him. The redemption of the individual prepares the way for the ultimate Messianic redemption, but the latter is only brought about through God. The individual redemption is like the ultimate one in that it is a redemption rather than a conquest of evil -- a redemption which transforms it into good and realizes the oneness of God in all things. The individual’s turning to God is thus the most effective action possible for the yihud -- the reunification of God with His exiled Shekinah.

For this reason Hasidism transforms the Lurian kavanah from a special, magical intention into a general consecration or inner dedication which man brings to all his actions. The Hasidic kavanah ‘signifies less an effort of the will centred on the attainment of a definite end than the purposeful direction of the whole being in accordance with some feeling springing from the depths of one’s nature.’(Mueller, op. cit., p. 141 f.) Without kavanah no service of God (abadah) has any value, for right moral action is dependent on the intensity of inner religious feeling. Thus Hasidism does not recognize any division between religion and ethics -- between the direct relation to God and one’s relations to one’s fellows, nor is its ethics limited to any prescribed and peculiar action. In Hasidism, writes Buber, the Kabbalah became ethos. This meant a true religious revolution in which devotion absorbed and overcame gnosis. The Hasidic movement took from the Kabbalah only what it needed for the theological foundation of an inspired life in responsibility -- the responsibility of each individual for the piece of the world entrusted to him. ( Martin Buber, The Origin and Meaning of Hasidism, Vol. II of Hasidism and the Way of Man, ed. and trans. by Maurice Friedman [New York: Horizon Press, 1960], IX. ‘Supplement: Christ, Hasidism, Gnosis.’)

The Hasidic attitude toward the law, revelation, and the life of the senses is consistent with its concept of kavanah. The Torah is a priceless gift of God when it is used to conquer the evil impulse and to transform the inner life of man, but not when it is made an end in itself -- a joyless burden or an occasion for intellectual subtlety. Similarly, although Hasidism believes in the historical revelation of God, it regards the feeling and consciousness of God’s nearness as equally as important as the acceptance of tradition. The revelation of God to the fathers of Israel must be confirmed and renewed in the inner life of every believer. In the same way Hasidism rejects the Lurian tendency to asceticism for its own sake and emphasizes instead a holy joy in the sensual life which will hallow and sanctify it. The redemption of the individual is twofold: the freeing of the soul from externals which enables it to enter into God and the entrance of God into the world through which the world is purified and uplifted. The life of the senses is, therefore, to be set aside only when the individual becomes attached to it for its own sake so that it becomes a hindrance to his meeting with God. (Ysander, op. cit., pp. 275 f., 251 f., 256, 178 f., 281, 260-270, 140 ff., 170, 279; Bloch, op. cit., p. 30; Mueller, op. cit., p. 140.)

The real essence of Hasidism is revealed not so much in its concepts as in the three central virtues which derive from these concepts: love, joy, and humility. For Hasidism the world was created out of love and is to be brought to perfection through love. Love is central in God’s relation to man and is more important than fear of God, justice, or righteousness. The fear of God is only a door to the love of God -- it is the awe which one has before a loving father. God is love, and the capacity to love is man’s innermost participation in God. This capacity is never lost but needs only to be purified to be raised to God Himself. Thus love is not only a feeling; it is the godly in existence. Nor can one love God unless he loves his fellow man, for God is immanent in man as in all of His creation. For the same reason the love of God and the love of man is to be for its own sake and not for the sake of any reward.

The Hasidic emphasis on joy also comes from the knowledge of the presence of God in all things. This joy has a double character. It is at once a joyous affirmation of the external world and a joyous penetration into the hidden world behind the externals. In perfect joy the body and the soul are at one: this precludes both extreme asceticism and libertinism. To cultivate joy is one of Hasidism’s greatest commandments, for only joy can drive out the ‘alien thoughts’ and qelipot that distract man from the love of God. Conversely, despair is worse than even sin; for it leads one to believe oneself in the power of sin and hence to give in to it.

Humility for Hasidism means a denial of self, but not a self-negation. Man is to overcome the pride which grows out of his feeling of separateness from others and his desire to compare himself with others. But man is at the same time not to forget that he is the son of a king, that he is a part of the godly. Thus Hasidic humility is a putting off of man’s false self in order that he may affirm his true self -- the self which finds its meaning in being a part and only a part of the whole. Humility, like joy and love, is attained most readily through prayer. Prayer is the most important way to union with God and is the highest means of self-redemption. Hasidic prayer, however, was not always prayer in its most ordinary sense. Sometimes it took the form of traditional prayer, sometimes of mystical meditation in preparation for the prescribed prayers, and sometimes of hitlahabut, or an ecstatic intuition into the true nature of things. (Ysander, op. cit., pp. 149, 166-171, 176, 335, 137, 279, 189 f., 134 f., 246, 283; Levertoff, op. cit,, p. 10; Gulkowitsch, op. cit., pp. 51 f., 57, 59 f., 72; Martin Buber, For the Sake of Heaven, trans. by Ludwig Lewisohn [Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1945; 2nd Edition, with new Foreword, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1953], p. 7; Dubnow, op. cit., I, 96 f.) Even the Hasidic singing and dancing might be justifiably conceived, at its highest, as a way of praying.

In no other area of human experience is it more difficult to preserve the attitude of the ‘narrow ridge’ than in one’s encounter with evil, yet here too the metaphor of the ‘narrow ridge’ expresses the central quality of Buber’s thought. Many in our age who discover the inadequacy of the simple moral opposition between good and evil tend to reduce evil to illusion or objective error, or to absolutize it as something radical, pure, and unredeemable. As a result, most of those who think and write about this problem do so from the standpoint of a choice between that attitude which sees good and evil as part of a higher unity and that which sees them as irreconcilable opposites. Although shadings from the two extremes exist and are recognized, neither side recognizes the independent reality of the position between -- the dialectical attitude toward evil which sees it as both real and redeemable. Those philosophers and theologians who have followed Martin Buber in the ‘I-Thou’ philosophy have usually not seen that this dialectical attitude toward evil is inseparable from it as he understands it.

Evil is one of the deepest and most central problems of human existence -- a problem which every individual and every age must face for itself. The problem of evil is significant not primarily because of one’s conscious concept of evil but because of the total attitude expressed in the whole of one’s life and thought. This attitude, in Buber’s words, is ‘a mode of seeing and being which dwells in life itself. ‘It underlies all our valuations, for valuing is nothing other than the decision as to what is good and evil and the attitude which one then takes toward the possibility of avoiding evil or transforming it into good. Valuing lies in turn at the heart of most fields of human thought. This is clearest of all in ethics, which is essentially the study of the relation between the ‘is’ of human nature and the ‘ought’ of human possibility. But it is no less important in psychology and the social sciences, for all of these fields are conditioned by the fact that their subject of study is the human being in his relation to other human beings. This implies a recognition not only of the central importance of valuing in human life but also of the way in which the values of the psychologist and the social scientist affect their methods. In literature and the arts valuing affects the relation of the arts to human life and the critical standards by which the intrinsic merit of works of art are judged. This does not mean that all these fields are subject to the censure of some external standard of morality but rather that inherent in the very structure of each are value assumptions. These value assumptions rest upon an implicit and often unconscious attitude toward good and evil.

Buber’s system of valuing is so closely connected with the problem of evil that this problem can be used as a unifying centre for his work without doing injustice to the many different fields in which he has written. This is, of course, to use the phrase in a somewhat different and broader sense than is traditional. Traditionally, the problem of evil has been limited to the fields of metaphysics and theology. In our use of it it must be broadened to include other important phases of human life -- philosophical anthropology, ethics, psychology, social philosophy, and even politics. This does not mean a change in the problem itself so much as a shift of emphasis and a greater concern with its concrete applications in the modern world.

In theology and philosophy the problem of evil is ordinarily treated under the two headings of natural and moral evil. For the primitive man no such distinction existed, for everything to him was personal. Misfortune was looked on as caused by hostile forces, and these forces were conceived of not as manifestations of one personal God but as many ‘moment Gods’ or specialized personal deities. The Book of Job, in contrast, rests on faith in one God who transcends the nature which He created. Nature is no longer personal in the old sense, yet God is felt to be responsible for what happens to man through nature, for it is He who directly sustains nature. The Greek view, on the other hand, tends to make God into an impersonal first cause. The development of science and secular civilization since the Renaissance has fortified this view. By the time of Hume, God is no longer considered the direct but only the indirect cause of nature, and nature is not only considered as impersonal but also as mechanical. There is no ‘problem of evil’ for this mechanistic and deterministic view of the world, for the place of God is finally taken altogether by blind chance, causality, and impersonal law. Yet the reality underlying the problem of evil is present all the time and in intensified form. The consequences of this view are reflected in writers such as Melville, Matthew Arnold, and Thomas Hardy, who picture the universe as a cold, impersonal reality hostile to the very existence of man. ‘The heartless voids and immensities of the universe’ threaten to annihilate all personality and human values.

Few modern philosophies supply a standpoint from which the problem of evil can be adequately recognized and dealt with. For scientific realism ‘evil’ is simply technical error. For pragmatism it is ultimately anything which threatens subjective interest by creating deficiencies or preventing their being overcome. For philosophical vitalism evil is the static, anything that stands in the way of vital evolution, while good is vital movement, which it is assumed will ultimately be triumphant, as if there were still another principle of good underlying the whole process. In criticism of this non-dialectical immanentism as it is expressed in the philosophy of Bergson Buber writes:

There are four types of evil of which the modern age is particularly aware: the loneliness of modern man before an unfriendly universe and before men whom he associates with but does not meet; the increasing tendency for scientific instruments and techniques to outrun man’s ability to integrate those techniques into his life in some meaningful and constructive way; the inner duality of which modern man has become aware through the writings of Dostoievsky and Freud and the development of psychoanalysis; and the deliberate and large-scale degradation of human life within the totalitarian state.

What new attitudes toward evil do these typically modern manifestations of evil evoke in the modern man? A greater belief in the reality of evil, certainly, and an impatient rejection of the shallow optimism and naïve faith in progress of preceding ages. For some this has meant a more and more complete determinism and naturalism, for others a return to Gnostic ideas of dualism or early Protestant emphases on original sin. Many have lost the belief in the dignity of man or have tended to move away from life in the world to the certainty of a mystic absolute. Finally, a new attitude original with our age has been the atheistic existentialism which grits its teeth in the face of despair and, assigns to man the task of creating for himself a reality where none now exists. A striking example of the way in which the attitude toward evil has been influenced by the horror of recent events is found in a statement of Jean-Paul Sartre born out of the experience of the French underground:

What unites all these attitudes toward evil is their common origin in a deadly serious recognition of the power of evil in the modern world and the intensity with which those who hold them attempt to work out a means of meeting this evil which will enable them to retain their personal integration. But they do not all hold, as does Sartre, that evil is absolute and unredeemable. For those who hold the dialectical attitude toward evil, good cannot exist in solitary splendour, nor is it opposed by a radically separate evil with which it has nothing to do. Evil must exist in this middle position, but it is bound up with good in such a way that both are parts of a larger process, of a greater whole, which is at once origin and goal. Thus evil is in one way or another recognized as having reality, even if only that of a temporary accompaniment of unredeemed creation, but its reality is never permanent, nor is it ever completely divorced from the good. Hence it is capable of redemption by the process of the world spirit, the grace of God, or the redemptive activity of man.

Although many significant changes occur in Buber’s thought during the fifty years of his productivity, it is in this middle position between the unreality and the radical reality of evil that we shall always find him. His attitude has changed from a tendency to regard evil in largely negative terms to a tendency to ascribe to it greater and greater emotional and ontological reality. But he has never considered evil an absolute, nor has he lost faith in its possible redemption. Elizabeth Rotten has quoted Buber as saying, ‘One must also love evil . . . even as evil wishes to be loved.’ (Elizabeth Rotten, ‘Aus den Offenbarungen der Schwester Mechtild von Magdeburg,’ Aus unbekannten Schriften. Festgabe für Martin Buber, ed. by Franz Rosenzweig and Ludwig Strauss [Berlin: Lambert Schneider Verlag, 1928], p. 65 f.)This statement is symbolic of the way in which he has consistently answered this question: good can be maximized not through the rejection or conquest of evil but only through the transformation of evil, the use of its energy and passion in the service of the good.

‘I have occasionally described my standpoint to my friends as the "narrow ridge,"’ writes Buber. ‘I wanted by this to express that I did not rest on the broad upland of a system that includes a series of sure statements about the absolute, but on a narrow rocky ridge between the gulfs where there is no sureness of expressible knowledge but the certainty of meeting what remains undisclosed.’ (Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. by Ronald Gregor Smith [London: Kegan Paul, 1947] p.184). Perhaps no other phrase so aptly characterizes the quality and significance of Martin Buber’s life and thought as this one of the ‘narrow ridge.’ It expresses not only the ‘holy insecurity’ of his existentialist philosophy but also the ‘I-Thou,’ or dialogical, philosophy which he has formulated as a genuine third alternative to the insistent either-or’s of our age. Buber’s ‘narrow ridge’ is no ‘happy middle’ which ignores the reality of paradox and contradiction in order to escape from the suffering they produce. It is rather a paradoxical unity of what one usually understands only as alternatives -- I and Thou, love and justice, dependence and freedom, the love of God and the fear of God, passion and direction, good and evil, unity and duality.

In the light of this quality in Buber’s thought, it is not surprising that many find his works difficult to understand. Most of us approach a book expecting little other than an extension and application of concepts which we already possess or at the most a stretching of these concepts through the introduction of new perspectives. We find it painful, therefore, to come up against a thinker like Buber who questions the fundamental channels of our thinking and forces us to think -- if we are to follow him at all -- in radically other ways.

The German theologian Karl Heim wrote in 1934 that every age has a vital question that particularly belongs to it. To Heim the question for our age is that of the transcendence versus the immanence of God. For others the issue is naturalism versus anti-naturalism or ‘humanitarian’ religion and ethics versus the ‘authoritarian.’ Not only in philosophy and theology, but in education, art, politics, economics, and, in fact, every important field of thought, the typical pattern of our age is the increasing division of issues into conflicting and irreconcilable opposites. Thus in education ‘objective’ classical education battles with education for the individual or education based on ‘subjective’ interest. Again, science and religion or science and the humanities are set in opposition to each other, or the relation between them is falsified by still another pair of opposites: an objective ‘scientific truth’ and a subjective ‘poetic truth.’ In aesthetics art tends to be looked at as imitation of ‘objective’ reality or as ‘subjective’ expression. In politics civilization itself is threatened by a growing rift between democracy and communism -- with an increasingly ominous insistence that ‘peace’ is to be obtained through the universalization of one of these points of view and the complete destruction of the other. Those who resort to an analysis of the underlying causes and value presuppositions of modern man’s situation in the hope of finding there some clue for his salvation establish the either-or on still another plane: universalism versus exclusivism, knowledge versus will, error versus sin, collectivism versus individualism, environment versus heredity, reason versus emotion, discipline versus permissiveness, security versus freedom -- ‘objectivism’ versus ‘subjectivism.’

The gravest danger of these either-or’s is not the increasing division of men within and between countries into hostile and intolerant groups, nor is it even the conflict and destruction which results and seems likely to result from these divisions: It is the falsification of truth, the falsification of life itself. It is the demand that every man fit his thought and his way of life into one or the other of these hostile camps and the refusal to recognize the possibility of other alternatives which cannot be reduced to one of the two conflicting positions. In the light of this danger and its tremendous implications for our age, I should ‘venture to say that the vital need of our age is to find a way of life and a way of thought which will preserve the truth of human existence in all its concrete complexity and which will recognize that this truth is neither ‘subjective’ nor ‘objective’ -- neither reducible to individual temperament on the one hand, nor to any type of objective absolute or objective cultural relativism on the other.

In all of Martin Buber’s works we find a spiritual tension and seriousness, coupled with a breadth of scope which seeks constantly to relate this intensity to life itself and does not tolerate its limitation to any one field of thought or to thought cut off from life. More remarkable still, Buber has accomplished the rare feat of combining this breadth and intensity into an integral unity of life and thought, and he has done this without sacrificing the concrete complexity and paradoxicality of existence as he sees it. Buber’s writings are unusual in their scope and variety, dealing with topics in the fields of religion, mythology, philosophy, sociology, politics, education, psychology, art, and literature. Despite this variety, Buber’s philosophy attains a central unity which pervades all of his mature works.

Buber’s thought has had a great influence on a large number of prominent writers and thinkers in many different fields, and it seems destined to have a steadily greater influence as its implications become clearer. His influence as a person, what is more, has been almost as great as the influence of his thought. It is this integral combination of greatness as a person and as a thinker which makes Buber one of the rare personalities of our time. The characteristic of both Buber’s personality and his work, according to the German educator Karl Wilker, is ‘the greatest conceivable consciousness of responsibility.’

The German Catholic thinkers Eugene Kogon and Karl Thieme speak of Buber in a similar fashion: ‘In everything that he writes the undertone reveals that here speaks a man of faith, and, indeed, a man of active faith.’ The most astonishing thing that one can say of Buber, they add, is that his person does not give the lie to his works. (Eugene Kogon and Karl Thieme, ‘Martin Buber,’ Frankfurter Hefte, VI, 3 [March 1951], pp. 195-199.) The socialist thinker, Dr. Heinz-Joachim Heydorn, goes even further in this direction. What makes Buber’s life great, he writes, cannot be discovered through what he has written in his books or through any sum of his sayings.

One who has met Buber knows that he is marked above all by simplicity, humour, seriousness, genuine listening, and an unwavering insistence on the concrete. One of the most striking testimonies to Buber as a whole man is that of Hermann Hesse, the famous Swiss novelist and poet:

Hesse’s high estimate of Buber as a literary figure has been forcefully echoed by the noted authority on Greek religion and myth Karl Kerenyi, who impressively asserts Buber’s claim to belong to the ranks of ‘classical writers’ in the fullest and deepest sense of the term. Classical writers, he says, possess the power of calling back to life and inspiriting the past and of recognizing in it a deep level of the soul. ‘They are all discoverers and conquerors, reconquerors of what has apparently been lost, and, with every discovery . . . rediscoverers of man.’ Buber brings to this task the multiple genius of one of the most gifted of living men, and the sphere of his gift is the universally human. To assess his significance for German and world literature it will be necessary to compare him with his early contemporaries, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Rainer Maria Rilke, with whom he shared a common atmosphere of style and spirit, but also to go far beyond this atmosphere to the world of the Hasidic Jew which Buber discovered in the fundamental sense of the term. (Karl Kerenyi, ‘Martin Buber als Klassiker,’ Neue Schweizer Rundschau, XX, 2 [June 1952], pp. 89-95, my translation. The poet Rilke wrote with enthusiasm of Buber’s Daniel [1913] and, according to the English Rilke scholar, J. B. Morse, was influenced by it in the writing of the ninth Duino Elegy. In 1950 J. B. Morse sent Professor Buber an essay on the influence of Buber’s early ideas on Rilke, but I have not been able to discover where or whether this essay was published. See Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe an seinen Verleger, pp. 180, 182.)

From the time of his earliest writings Buber has been generally recognized as a master German stylist. Buber belongs, writes Ludwig Lewisohn, ‘to the very thin front ranks of living German masters of prose.’ Buber’s books, according to the German writer Wilhelm Michel, belong stylistically to the noblest that the essay art of this time has brought forth. His style is a mature one, says Michel, one that has developed with the years and come into its own. It is the speech of an ordered and fully disciplined spirit. ‘It is rich with presence and corporeality; it has drunk much of the sensual into itself and has become dense with it. But it has remained full of deep feeling and organic; each of its forms gleams with living meaning.... It is the pure devotion to the word of a man simplified for the sake of God.’ (Ludwig Lewisohn, Rebirth, A Book of Modern Jewish Thought [New York: Harper & Brothers, 1935], p. 87; Wilhelm Michel, Martin Buber, Sein Gang in die Wirklichkeit [Frankfurt am Main: Rütten & Loening, 1926], pp. 11 14.)

In the quarter of a century since Michel wrote the above characterization, the richly sensual quality of Buber’s style has tended to decrease in favour of an ever greater simplicity and concreteness on the one hand and a more considered and meditative style on the other. At the same time, even in his scholarly and philosophical works, his writing has never wholly lost that poetic and emotive quality through which he has so remarkably integrated philosophical, religious, and artistic communication into one total address to the reader. In 1954 the German poet Fritz Diettrich said of Buber’s style: ‘He has made our speech into so choice an instrument of his thought that he has taken his place by the side of Goethe and Schopenhauer as a master stylist.’

The integral nature of Buber’s style defies adequate translation and interpretation. None the less, even the English reader can glimpse in translation the amazing achievement of condensation, concreteness, and integrality which is found in some of the most recent of his writings: Images of Good and Evil, Right and Wrong, At the Turning, and, most especially, ‘The Way of Man’ in Hasidism and Modern Man.

(a line is missing here from the published text -- Online editor)

the age of fourteen in the Galician home of his grandfather, Solomon Buber, one of the last great scholars of the Haskalah (Jewish enlightenment). He studied philosophy and the history of art at the University of Vienna and the University of Berlin, and in 1904 he received his Ph.D. from the latter university. In his twenties he was the leader of those Zionists who advocated a Jewish cultural renaissance as opposed to purely political Zionism. In 1902 Buber helped found the Judischer Verlag, a German-Jewish publishing house, and in 1916 he founded Der Jude, a periodical which he edited until 1924 and which became under his guidance the leading organ of German-speaking Jewry. From 1926 to 1930 he published jointly with the Catholic theologian Joseph Wittig and the Protestant doctor and psychotherapist Viktor von Weizsäcker the periodical Die Kreatur, devoted to social and pedagogical problems connected with religion. Prom 1923 to 1933 Buber taught Jewish philosophy of religion and later the history of religions at the University of Frankfurt. In 1938 Buber left Germany to make his home in Palestine, and from that year through 1951 he served as professor of social philosophy at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. After he became emeritus, the government of the state of Israel asked him to double the size of the Institute for Adult Education that he founded in 1949 and directed until 1953 (‘After four years of a very vital existence, the Institute has been closed, following the cessation of mass immigration,’ Buber writes. ‘There survives a certain activity under the same name, being essentially the merit of my excellent co-worker, Dr. Gideon Freudenberg.’ From a letter from Professor Buber to the author of August 8, 1954.) This Institute trains teachers to go out to the immigration camps to help integrate the vast influx of immigrants into the already established community.

Those who have met Buber or have heard him lecture have discovered the prophetic force of his personality and the tremendous strength and sincerity of his religious conviction. Everywhere he has spoken, the arresting man with the white beard and the penetrating, yet gentle, eyes has shown those present what it means to ask ‘real questions’ and to give real answers. He has also shown again and again what it means to walk on the narrow ridge not only in one’s thinking but in the whole of one’s life. One of the foremost Zionist leaders and thinkers, he has also been the leader of those Jews who have worked for Jewish-Arab co-operation and friendship. Pioneer and still the foremost interpreter of Hasidism, he has preserved in his thinking the most positive aspects of the Jewish enlightenment, Hasidism’s traditional enemy. Translator and interpreter of the Hebrew Bible and spokesman for Judaism before the world, he has been deeply concerned since his youth with Jesus and the New Testament and has carried on a highly significant dialogue with many prominent Christian theologians, Protestant and Catholic alike.

Perhaps the most striking example of how Buber has followed the narrow ridge in his life is his attitude toward the German people after the war. He was the leader of the German Jews in their spiritual battle against Nazism, and he counts himself among ‘those who have not got over what happened and will not get over it.’ Yet on September 27, 1953, in historic Paulskirche, Frankfurt, Germany, he accepted the award of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. In his acceptance speech Buber pointed out that less than a decade before several thousand Germans killed millions of his people and fellow-believers ‘in a systematically prepared and executed procedure, the organized cruelty of which cannot be compared with any earlier historical event.’

At the same time Buber pointed to other classes of Germans who knew of these happenings only by hearsay, who heard rumours but did not investigate, and some who underwent martyrdom rather than accept or participate in this murder of a whole people. The inner battle of every people between the forces of humanity and the forces of inhumanity, writes Buber, is the deepest issue in the world today, obscured though it is by the ‘cold war’ between gigantic camps. It is in the light of this issue that Buber understands both the award of the prize and his duty to accept it:

(Martin Buber, Das echte Gespräch und die Möglichkeiten des Friedens, speech made by Buber on occasion of receiving the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels, Frankfurt am Main, Paulskirche, September 27, 1953 [Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider Verlag, 1953], pp. 5-8. Das echte Gespräch is also found as part of Martin Buber: Fünf Ansprachen anlässlich der Verleibung des Friedenspreises des Deutschen Buchhandels [Frankfurt am Main: Börsenverein Deutscher Verleger- und Buchhandler-Verbände, 1953], pp. 33-41 [my translation]. Das echte Gespräch [‘Genuine Conversation and the Possibilities of Peace] was published in English in Martin Buber, Pointing the Way, Collected Essays, ed. and trans. by Maurice S. Friedman [New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957]. [A line is missing here from this footnote. -- Online editor] misguided purists [see Dr. Trude Weiss-Rosmarin’s vitriolic attack ‘Martin Buber in St. Paul’s Church’ in the Jewish Spectator, November 1953, and my reply in the Jewish Spectator, April 1954, pp. 26 ff.], Paulskirche, Frankfurt, has not been a church for over a century. In 1848 it was the seat of the German revolutionary parliament and not long after of a congress of German rabbis!)