Having concluded the presentation of the main trends in Buber’s thought, we cannot but agree with him completely when he says that the validity of his teaching is not to be demonstrated or proved. It is of the very essence of what he tells us about that he can only testify to what he himself has encountered and to what he himself has committed himself. Nevertheless, as he mentions it on various occasions, the witness does not speak about himself alone, about a purely subjetcive experience. He speaks about reality; he testifies to the objective nature of reality, to what being truly is. As we have heard him say, the witness points toward “the hidden realm of existence.” Only because of that is his testimony more than a moving private confession. The testimony obviously means to be teaching for all of us. Buber does not only bear witness, but, as he says, he “calls to witness him to whom he speaks.”46Postscript, I and Thou, 137. It is up to us to encounter what he encounters, to meet whom he meets. The question is, therefore, inescapable: Can the testimony be accepted on the strength of its own internal evidence? We believe that on a number of important points the answer will be in the negative. What is at stake is the objective significance of the testimony in its various ramifications, its value for all those to whom Buber wishes to speak.
Subjectivity of Experience
Any one who wishes to penetrate the nature of the pure relation cannot suppress the question: If the I can reach that far, why not continue in the course and bring it to a culmination by submerging the I in the Thou in a mystical union? We have heard Buber answer the question. In essence, he maintained that there was no such thing as mystical union. The mystic misinterprets his experience. The I and the world, the I and the Thou, are final entities, which cannot be reduced any further. The two may never become one. We do not mean to question the objective validity of the answer. What we should like to understand is, how Buber can bear witness to it. The mystics of all ages also testify. According to their testimony, I and Thou are further reducible to the undifferentiated All. They experience the union no less convincingly than Buber experiences the relation When Buber says that the mystical union never really occurs, may it not just be that it never occurred to him? One might perhaps argue that since in the encounter I and Thou are revealed to each other as real and their relation as the essence of reality, they can never again lose their identity. To argue in this manner would be begging the question. The point may be illustrated by taking another glance at the I-It and the I-Thou relations within the teaching of Buber. Needless to say, Buber never suggested that the It-world did not exist. He never demanded that I-It relations should be dispensed with. On the contrary, he fully realizes that they have their places in the scheme of living, that indeed life without them would be impossible. What he maintains is that they must not be the dominant relations; they must subserve the realm of I-Thou, where alone meaning can be found. Obviously, he to whom — for whatever reason — the access to the realm of I-Thou is closed, evaluates the significance of I-It differently. The status of the It-world is validly established for Buber in the light of his acquaintance with the world of Thou. The It does not cease to exist when man encounters the Thou, but the nature of its existence and its significance are now understood differently. May it not be the same as regards I-Thou, should there be a further realm of complete union in the All? No one need doubt the reality of the encounter. Yet, seen through the eyes of one who knows of the mystical union, Buber’s evaluation of the encounter may be no less distorted than is, from Buber’s point of view, the evaluation of I-It by the man who knows nothing of the pure relation. The problem is all the more serious, since Buber acknowledges that God is unknowable, that his definition of the absolute Person should be understood more like an attribute of personal being among the infinite number of divine attributes.47Ib., Ib. May it not indeed be conceivable that in the encounter with “the absolute Person” one has not yet reached the Ultimate? When he affirms that I and Thou are ultimates, and the relation the very essence of reality, is he still testifying?
Subjectivity of Response and Meaning
However, what of the meaning which unfolds itself dialogically in the relation and is present in the encounter? Is it not ground enough to testify that the relation is indeed not still further reducible? The question only puts the finger on another weak spot in the testimony. It is of the very essence of the dialogue that God calls man and that man answers in freedom. He has to give his own answer. The revelation, which takes place in the encounter, we have heard Buber say, has no contents. It reveals a Presence that assures meaning. The meaning, however, is not to be formulated in intelligible terms. It is unraveled by man when he responds to the call in the freedom of his choice and decision. It emerges from the course of action to which man commits himself in response to the divine call. We assume that the very nature of the dialogue excludes the possibility of the communication of a contents, a law and a command, in the revelation. Such a contents would destroy the mutuality of the relation, the dialogical situation itself. But if so, one should like to know, how does one ascertain that one’s response to the Voice which speaks from the concrete situation is the valid response; that the meaning which has unfolded itself as a result of man’s own participation in the revelation is the authentic one accepted by God? How can one know that one’s own participation has not distorted the meaning? The question touches also on the important issue that we discussed in the preceding section under the heading, Freedom and Destiny. There is this deed, hidden somewhere in the concrete situation, waiting to be done by me, meaning me and destined for me. Yet it is up to me to choose it from among the unlimited number of possibilities. I choose, I act and discover meaning. How do I know that I have chosen correctly? We are quite willing to accept Buber’s assurance that the meaning “is not ‘subjective’ in the sense that it originates in my emotion or cerebration, and then is transferred to objective happenings. Rather, it is the meaning I perceive, experience, and hear in reality. The meaning … is not an idea which I can formulate independent of my personal life. It is only with my personal life that I am able to catch the meaning … for it is a dialogical meaning.”48Israel, 82. But just because it is a dialogical meaning its authenticity is subject to be questioned. There is subjective participation in its revelation. True, man’s response is invited and demanded; but when it is forthcoming, how is it validated? All that is left, is our own experience of the meaningfulness of the course of life in which we are engaged. Is that sufficient? There may indeed be something objectively present as meaning; but what we finally perceive and experience in the creative freedom of the dialogue, could it not be distorted by our own subjective limitations? Buber does occasionally use such phrases as, man’s answer “is accepted by God’s redeeming grace.”49Ib., 27. Does he suggest that every time man responds correctly to the challenge, he is applauded by the Lord of the One Voice, speaking to him from his own deed? If only he wrote less movingly and with greater clarity of thought.50In one passage of his work, Dialogisches Leben, pp. 232-6, Buber is fully conscious of the fact that there is no objective standard by which the validity of the response in each situation may be tested. The certainty is only a “personal” one, an “uncertain certainty.” This, indeed, is the essence of his teaching about the meaning of truth. Every person has his own proper, though inadequate, truth, which may find an entirely different maturing in another human situation. Cf. also Urdistanz und Beziehung, pp. 30-31, and Die Schriften, p. 275. Yet, most of the time Buber seems to overlook that he is offering his readers his own personal uncertain certainties.
Occasionally, one has the feeling that Buber would like to provide more solid foundations to assure the objectivity of the testimony. While he does not admit any contents or definitive teaching in the encounter and revelation, yet he does seem to acknowledge divine commandments addressed to man. Of the Decalogue, for instance, he affirms that “they were uttered by an I and addressed to a Thou. They begin with the I and every one of them addresses the Thou in person. An I “commands’ and a Thou — every Thou who hears this Thou — ‘is commanded.’ ”51Israel, 85. In itself, this sounds like good Orthodox teaching. The phrase, however, every Thou who hears this Thou, indicates that the dialogical situation is not given up. As he explains later, as everything else, the Decalogue too is revealed to man dialogically. The human being “in the midst of a personal experience hears and feels himself addressed by the word ‘Thou.’ ‘Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain,’ or ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.’ ”52Ib., 87. We must not overlook the phrase, in the midst of a personal experience. It is our old familiar friend, the concrete situation. Buber is still standing on his own ground that there is no contents or command communicated in revelation. There are divine commandments which emerge dialogically from personal experience. The elucidation of his meaning may be derived from a passage, where he declares: “… God wants man to fulfill his commands as a human being, and with the quality peculiar to human beings. The law is not thrust upon man; it rests deep within him, to waken when the call comes. The world which thundered down from Sinai was echoed by the word that is ‘in thy mouth and in thy heart.’ Again and again, man tries to evade the two notes that are one chord; he denies his heart and rejects the call.”53Ib., 142. We are given here an interpretation of the revelation at Sinai in terms of the dialogical freedom that has to choose but chooses rightly only if it decides for the deed which is waiting for man. Man is called, but he is called to perceive the law that is implanted within his own heart. He does not have to hear and thus the decision is his very own; yet he chooses the law of God, which “means” him. In this way, one might surmise, man’s response — and the dialogically emerging meaning — receive validation. The call and the response are two notes of the one chord: The law given is the same as the law chosen. However, does the concept of the divine law, resting deep within man, remove the quandry in which Buber’s testimony got entangled? How does man in the dialogue know that this something, deep down within him, is indeed a divine law? How can he know that there is such a thing at all as a divine law embedded in human nature? Again, we emphasize, we do not question the correctness of the statement as such. That God created man in his image is good Orthodox teaching. We question Buber’s testimony. How can he make the statement on the basis of his understanding of the I-Thou relation? Hearing himself addressed, man knows of a Presence. He has to respond. Groping for an answer, he perceives the law within himself. Is he compelled to obey it? This would be the end of the dialogue. Is he free to accept it, as one of the innumerable possibilities open to him? Who is then to say which is the divine law within him and which is not divine? Does he, on the other hand, receive explicit divine confirmation that in his response he has embraced the law of God? That would be a new revelation with a contents and a law unilaterally communicated; it too would abolish the dialogical situation. We would have a form of revelation which according to Buber’s testimony was not possible. Try as we may, the problem of the authenticity of the response and the meaning remains unresolved.
Absolute Obligation?
The question of the validity of the meaning “revealed” bears of course heavily on the question of the relationship between religion and ethics. We have heard Buber maintain that all ethics instituted by men is of necessity relativistic. This of course is commonplace. But he went on and, in his search for the ethical absolute, tied ethics to religion. Absolute obligation may originate only in the absolute Person. “Only out of a personal relationship with the Absolute can the absoluteness of the ethical coordinates arise …”, Buber proclaimed. Let us now take a closer look at the idea. How can the absoluteness of the ethical coordinates arise out of the dialogical relation? Needless to say, Buber cannot mean that the absoluteness of the obligation is explicitly transmitted. This would introduce contents into the relation; it would mean the end of the dialogue. He makes this clear himself when he protests against the assumption that he was upholding “so-called moral heteronomy or external moral laws in opposition to so-called moral autonomy or self-imposed moral laws.”54Eclipse, 129; cf. also Israel, 142. Only when man attempts to derive the quality of moral obligation from his own soul may we speak of autonomy; and only when laws are imposed upon man from without can we speak of heteronomy. In the relation, however, heteronomy, or theonomy, and autonomy are one.
Let us see how Buber explains this. Says he: “Where the Absolute speaks in the reciprocal relationship, there are no longer such alternatives. The whole meaning of reciprocity, indeed, lies in just this, that it does not wish to impose itself but to be freely apprehended. It gives us something to apprehend, but it does not give us the apprehension.” Clearly, this is once again “the two notes that are one chord.” Should anyone have any doubts about it, let him read on: “Our act must be entirely our own for that which is to be disclosed to us to be disclosed, even that which must disclose each individual to himself. In the theonomy the divine law seeks for your own, and true revelation reveals to you yourself.”55Eclispe, 130. It is only now that Buber’s idea of revelation may be completed. The divine law, as we have heard him say, “rests deep within man.” Thus, it is identical with man’s true self. This is the meaning of man having been created in the image of God.56Israel, 31, 73. When man apprehends this, he apprehends himself; at the same time he has also embraced the law of God. But how are we to understand that reciprocity “gives us something to apprehend?” Once again, it does not give us teaching or commandment. It gives us the opportunity to apprehend, if we are willing to apprehend. In the reciprocity the Voice calls us to responsibility. It is then up to us to “waken” the law implanted within us. It is then we who must apprehend the law within us as divine and it is we who do decide that what we have “wakened” is indeed what has been implanted there originally by God. Can this be the source of the absoluteness in the moral obligation? How mistaken Buber is, one may see clearly in the most succinct formula in which, consistently with all his other opinions on the subject he defines his concept of revelation by saying: “… it must be mentioned here for the sake of full clarity that my own belief in revelation, which is not mixed up with any ‘Orthodoxy,’ does not mean that I believe that finished statements about God were handed down from heaven to earth. Rather it means that human substance is melted by the spiritual fire which visits it, and there now breaks forth from it a word, a statement, which is human in its meaning and form, human conception and human speech, and yet witnesses to Him who stimulated it and His will. We are revealed to ourselves — and cannot express it otherwise than as something revealed.”57Eclipse, 173. In this clarification by Buber the point we have been arguing becomes manifest. A revelation that reveals dialogically can indeed reveal only man unto himself. The meaning revealed must be human meaning, the speech, human speech; and for the same reason, the obligation perceived in the meaning, human obligation. Dialogical revelation cannot provide the quality of absoluteness in ethical values and moral obligations.
Responsibility?
The question into which we have been probing reaches deeper still. It poses not only the problem of absolute obligation, but that of obligation in general. By everything that a man experiences he is being addressed. We know, however, that the address is only a challenge. Beyond that, it contains no guidance, no teaching; it provides no direction. All this is left to human choice and decision. The question that arises is: Assuming that man is so addressed, what is the source of the obligation to answer? Why does he have to answer? We cannot maintain that while the address has no contents of teaching, it does carry within itself the command of respond. This would violate man’s freedom and partnership in the dialogue. What is more, once the obligation to respond becomes the contents of a revelation, why not some other obligation as well? Whence, then, does Buber derive the responsibility to respond to the challenge? It is true, man may be able to answer, to participate in a dialogue. But how may such an ability of human nature be turned into an obligation? How may one speak here about an “Erzgebot?”58Dialogisches Leben, 229. Is this original command anything else but the voice of human conscience, a sense of responsibility that man discovers within himself? Buber does hint at this possibility in a few places.59Ib., 234. But for him conscience is not what most people understand by the word. It is something deep down in human nature. It is Meister Eckhart’s “spark.” Be that as it may, either the obligation to respond comes from the Presence that confronts man, in which case we have contents, command, and teaching in revelation; or the obligation has its source in man’s obligating himself in freedom to respond. Since the first alternative is excluded, we are left with an essentially relativistic ethics, which Buber otherwise is most anxious to reject.
Nor is Buber’s “philosophical anthropology” of much help here. He may rightly affirm that human nature is only revealed in the fulness of human realtion with all the world and that without the “dialogical life” man is lacking reality.60Cf. Buber’s writings, Das Problem des Menschen, Urdistanz und Beziehung, Elemente des Zwischenmenschlichen.
61. Between Man and Man, 35. We shall not get obligation this way. Man may indeed be unreal, if he does not enter into the dialogue with his whole being. But supposing, he — very foolishly, perhaps, and rather unrealistically — prefers being a mere ghost, how can it be shown that he is ethically wrong? That the human being has a certain nature is a statement of fact; by itself, it does not imply the obligation to be human.
Whereas in the main body of Buber’s work the concept of man’s obligation to respond is taken for granted, there is at least one passage where the author allows himself to draw the conclusions clearly from the logical implications of his position. In “Zweisprache” Buber says to his “dear opponent”: “… I beg you to notice that I do not demand. I have no call to that and no authority for it. I try only to say that there is something and to indicate how it is made: I simply record. And how could the life of dialogue be demanded? There is no ordering of dialogue. It is not that you are to answer, but that you are able.”62Ib. 16. Exactly so! This is the decisive point. Buber cannot show that man is obligated to enter into the dialogical situation. He may well say: Woe unto him if he does not. He will fail to realize himself. He will “carry away a wound that is not to be forgotten.”63As is well known, Heidegger reinterprets the Christian dogma of the original sin as the fundamental guilt of being. It ian dogma of the original sin as the fundamental guilt of being. It consists in man’s inability to free himself from the impersonal and thus to understand as well as to embrace his own authentic self-being. As against this, Buber declares: “Original guilt consists in remaining with oneself.” (Between Man and Man, p. 166.) A man who does not go out to meet the present is guilty. It would seem to us that the issue at hand will not be decided by bandying about affirmations. Both Heidegger and Buber miss the point. No matter how we interpret the nature of being or of man’s being, our statements concerning it will only be statements of fact. There may indeed be a distinction between authentic and unauthentic being, as Heidegger would have it, as there may be one between man’s being-with-himself and his being-with-others, as Buber maintains; but being itself, in whichever way one may understand it, does not carry in itself any obligation for man to be. This would seem to us elementary. It may be excellent mental hygiene to follow the advise of the doctor, but it does not yield ethical obligation.
Inseparable from these investigations of the validity of the dialogically revealed meaning and truth is the ultimate issue that has its place here, i. e., the question, who is it that addresses man in the dialogue which constitutes the pure relation. It is the question that Buber asks himself in the “Zwiesprache.”64Between Man and Man, 14-15. Everything that happens to us is a sign by which we are addressed. “Who speaks?” asks Buber. Before giving the answer, he warns us that we must not reply with the traditionally handed down word, “God.” We must reply existentially, “out of that decisive hour of personal existence when we had to forget everything we imagined we knew of God, when we dared to keep nothing handed down or learned or selfcontrived, no shred of knowledge, and were plunged into the night.” How do we know, then, who is the giver of the sign, who it is who addresses us through the daily experiences of our lives? Obviously, from Buber’s point of view, we can know him only from the experience itself, “from time to time from the signs themselves.” The speaker is always the speaker in a single experience, addressing man in a unique, never-again recurring situation. Buber concludes, therefore, correctly that “if we name the speaker of this speech God, then it is always the God of a moment, a moment God.” But we did hear Buber speak of the Lord of the One Voice. How does one get from the innumerable moment gods to the One God? In order to explain this, Buber uses what he calls a “gauche” comparison. Because of the importance of the matter, we shall let him speak for himself.
Says he: “When we really understand a poem, all we know of the poet is what we know of him in the poem — no biographical wisdom is of value for the pure understanding of what is to be understood: the I which approaches us is the subject of this single poem. But when we read other poems by the poet in the same true way their subjects combine in all their multiplicity, completing and confirming one another, to form the one polyphony of the person’s existence. In such a way, out of the givers of the signs, the speakers of the words in lived life, out of the moment Gods arises for us with a single identity the Lord of the voice, the One.” We remain so unconvinced by this interpretation that the only part of it which we are able to accept is that the comparison is a very “gauche” one indeed. The many assumptions of the example itself are, from the point of view of literary appreciation, highly questionable. Our concern, however, is mainly with the application to our immediate problem. The assumptions granted, the basic difference between the “true and real” understanding of a poem and the signs that reach us through our daily experiences is that a poem does have content, it does reveal a meaning, a teaching, a truth, that it desires to communicate. The “signs,” however, only challenge us. They are question marks addressed to us. They reveal no contents, they must give no indication as to what kind of a response is expected of man. The answer must be altogether man’s own. How can one identify the speaker in such circumstances? The question, what now little man? may be addressed to us by a devil no less than by a god. How to know, how to distinguish? If there is no indication in the address what the response ought to be, who can tell who the speaker is, whether there is one speaker or whether there are many speakers? It is quite interesting to note that as Buber sees life as “a sign language” addressed to man by the absolute Person, similarly does Karl Jaspers recognize a code of Transcendence which is incorporated in Existence and which requires deciphering. However, Jaspers is careful to point out that the code of the devil may not be less visible than that of the deity. Buber is, of course, right in saying that such a remark shows how different his position is from the position of Jaspers. What he does not prove is that he makes more sense than Jaspers does. He argues with Jaspers very eloquently, exclaiming: All due respect to the devil, surely one should not concede him so much power as to enable him not only to disarray but also to distort the code writing of God. Continuing the argument, he also reasons in the following manner: “If the ‘code’ is to have a uniform meaning, one must predicate an authority that instituted it, and that desiring that I decipher that part of the code destined for my life, though rendering the task difficult, enables me to do so.”65See Nachwort, Die Schriften, p. 301; our own, not literal, translation. This is bravely exclaimed, but — unfortunately — rather poorly reasoned. Buber is right, if the code is to have a uniform meaning and if the one who instituted it does desire that I decipher it. But Buber does not speak hypothetically; he is rhetorically affirming, and thus he begs the question of questions, i. e., “who speaks?” In that “decisive hour of personal existence,” when, according to Buber, man has to forget everything he ever imagined he knew about God, all he is confronted with is a sign and an unknown speaker, a moment god. He perceives a code but it is entirely up to him to break its secret. He may add moment gods to moment gods, he will still have nothing but moment codes. How will he know whether the codes do have one uniform meaning, whether it is indeed the kind of god speaking whose signals could not be interpreted by assuming a less respectable presence than a deity! In spite of all Buber’s eloquence, the question remains unanswered.
The Problem of the Community
The question of the objective significance of the I-Thou relation with God has to be raised in yet another sense. The man who goes out to meet the Presence is a lonely soul. We also know that all I-Thou relations with finite beings are of necessity exclusive. How does the complete absorption of the individual in the pure relation affect his relationships with other people and with the world? Is this another case of the “alone flying to the Alone?” This, as we have seen, is not Buber’s view. In our presentation we noted that being exclusive as well as inclusive was one of the specific features of the pure relation. In utter loneliness man turns towards God only to find that his relation to the eternal Thou includes all his other I-Thou relations which he ever entertained, because He is the Presence in all the presences. This is, of course, a difficult concept. It is yet a new variation on the theme of “the two notes that are one chord.” How important the thought is for Buber’s teaching, one may judge by the fact that it forms the theme of one of his major tomes, the one entitled: “Die Frage an den Einzelnen.” It is mainly a discussion of the case of Kierkegaard, who dissolved his engagement to Regina Olsen because she was the “object” that stood between him and his love for God. For Kierkegaard the I-Thou relation to God is exclusive. It is so exclusive that one has to choose between God and the world. Turning to God, one must be “the Single One.” One must give up Regina, or whatever else takes her place in one’s life; indeed, one must give up the world. Kierkegaard sums up his position in the sentence: “Every one should be chary about having to do with ‘the others,’ and should essentially speak only with God …” The tragic greatness of Kierkegaard’s life found expression in his ceaseless striving to become “the Single One” who speaks essentially only to God. Kierkegaard’s course runs counter to Buber’s affirmation that the pure relation is exclusive and inclusive in one. As against this Buber maintains that God desires that we come to him “by means of the Reginas he has created and not by renunciation of them.” One does not come to God by renouncing creation but by embracing it. He reaffirms the position he has evolved in his Ich und Du by maintaining that the “exclusive love to God is, because he is God, inclusive love ready to accept and to include all love.” The true nature of his argument we discern in the exclamation: “… who could suppose in decisive insight that God wants Thou to be truly said only to him, and to all others only an unessential and fundamentally invalid word — that God demands of us to choose between him and his creation?”66Between Man and Man, 50-54. For once, one is inclined to remind Buber that no less a man than Kierkegaard supposed just that. It is reasonable to assume that he did so “in decisive insight,” since he did give up Regina and the world and did choose in fact between God and his creation. It would seem to us that in this case it is Kierkegaard who testifies and Buber who “theologizes.” The whole life of Kierkegaard is testimony that for this great soul the relation to God was exclusive and not inclusive. Buber is meeting the testimony with arguments, with theories, and with philosophy. Surely, God the creator could not have created the world and yet demanded of man that he renounce it. This, and his other arguments, may or may not be good theology; they do not show how in fact an intensively exclusive relation to God may in reality include and preserve man’s all other I-Thou relations. Buber believes he can refute Kierkegaard by quoting the latter’s saying that “the only means by which God communicates with man is the ethical.” To this Buber adds: “But the ethical in its plain truth means to help God by loving his creation in his creatures, by loving it towards him.” Assuming this to be correct, he has still failed to show how in the act of loving God’s creation in one or the other of his creatures, one may actually remain in the I-Thou relation to God himself at the same time. No doubt, Kierkegaard could not do it.67In order to strengthen his point, Buber quotes the famous sentence from the Journal, “Had I had faith I would have stayed with Regina” Interpreting it one way first, Buber continues: “But while meaning this he says something different, too, namely, that the Single One, if he really believes, and that means if he is really a Single One, can and may have to do essentially with another (than God).” Now, anyone who is as familiar with Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling as Buber must be, should on no account impute such an idea to the author of the Journal. For Kierkegaard, the man who had faith was Abraham. He gave up Isaac unquestioningly and without any hope of ever regaining him. But because he had faith, he was allowed to stay with Isaac in the end. Similarly, had Kierkegaard had the faith of Abraham, he would have been permitted to stay with Regina, even though he had renounced her. In this passage, Kierkegaard is not doubting the correctness of his decision to sacrifice his “Isaac.” What he means to say is that the outcome of the sacrifice, so very different from that of Abraham’s, proves that he was lacking in faith. Neither does Buber succeed anywhere in showing that it can be done.
The concept of an exclusive-inclusive relation is so difficult to grasp that Buber deemed it necessary to elaborate it further in a Postcript to his I and Thou. How may exclusiveness be one with inclusiveness? In his answer he treats us to a short dissertation about God. He asserts that to the two attributes, named by Spinoza, we have to add a third one, that of personal being. We have direct knowledge of this from the pure relation. However, God is absolute; therefore, we have to describe him paradoxically as “the absolute Person.” With all this we are, of course, familiar from Buber’s other writings. Having explained his notion of the absolute Person, he believes he is now in a position to clear up the difficulty of the inclusiveness in the pure relation. He continues: “But no limitation can come upon him as the absolute Person, either from us or from our relations with one another; in fact we can dedicate to him not merely our persons but also our relations to one another. The man who turns to him therefore need not turn away from any other I-Thou relation but he properly brings them to him, and lets them be fulfilled ‘in the face of God.’ ”68I and Thou, 136. Let us disregard all hazy rhetorics and see whether what he says makes sense. That the absolute Person cannot be limited is obvious. Therefore, he includes all personal existence. He is “the Being of beings,” of trees encountered as “persons,” of people met as Thou, of intelligible being confronted as a presence. But are we not now at the brink of tumbling into mystical union with the All? Buber parried this danger in the text to which he supplied the Postscript by declaring: “God comprises, but is not the universe. So, too, God comprises, but is not my Self. In view of the inadequacy of any language about this fact, I can say Thou in my language as each man can in his, in view of this I and Thou live, and dialogue and language …, and the Word in eternity.”69Ib., 95. In other words, God as eternal Person embraces all personal existence, yet selfhood remains inviolate. This, of course, cannot be proved; but it is so. We know it, says Buber, because of the experience of the encounter with the absolute Person. But does it follow from this that “man who turns to him therefore need not turn away from any other I-Thou relation?” His interpretation of the absolute Person means that within God exclusiveness of personal being and inclusiveness of all personal existence are one. However, it certainly cannot mean that because God is absolute and personal, therefore in the pure relation the finite individual I can encounter in the eternal Thou every other personal presence of his experience as the Thou that it is. It is believable to testify that in the relation with the eternal Thou one has the experience of having encountered “the Being of beings” — and this in itself will have its profound implications for all of one’s future encounters with finite beings; but it makes little sense to maintain, as Buber does, that confronting the “Being of beings” one also confronts all finite beings in actual I-Thou relations. If these finite beings retain their personal identity, without which they cannot enter into I-Thou relations, and are so in the integrity of selfhood mysteriously comprised in the absolute Person, then the inclusiveness of the pure relation would require on the part of the I entering into innumerable I-Thou relations at the same time. In order to accomplish such a feat, the capacity of the finite self for the encounter would have to be akin to the capacity of the absolute Person. If, on the other hand, the selfhood of the finite beings does not remain inviolate but merges into that of the absolute Person, then, while the pure relation may well be described as all inclusive, it will not “include all other I-Thou relations of this man”; it will absorb and dissolve them.
Related to this problem is the question of the community. How is one to establish a community on the basis of the I-Thou relation? Community between an individual I and an individual Thou, yes! but a community of people, a society of men, how? Buber is well aware of the seriousness of the problem. We have noted that he is of the opinion that the element of exclusiveness in all I-Thou relations may even become an injustice to the rest of the world. We reach such an intimacy between I and Thou that it threatens to undermine all community in the broader sense of the word. Buber tackles the dilemma by declaring that the very essence of community is to be found in the spirit that unites men with each other. The spirit for him is of course not spirituality. “The spirit in its human manifestation is a response of man to his Thou.”70Ib., 39. Community exists only where “the spirit that says Thou” is dominant.71Ib., 49. But is not this a contradiction? Does not the spirit that says Thou exclude community with all those who are not included in the Thou? Buber meets the problem by laying down two conditions which must prevail in order that “true community” may come into being. We discussed those conditions in our presentation of Buber’s criticism of historic religions in the first section of this study. We shall list them here once again. Community arises where people stand in living reciprocal relation to a living center and also stand in such living relation of mutuality to each other.72Ich und Du, 56, 132. Even though the community thus defined seems to reflect the Hasidic fellowship around the living center of the Tsadik, we believe that if Buber’s conditions are indeed the requiremens, then a “true community” never existed on this earth. The second condition is obviously never to be fulfilled. People can never stand together in living mutual relation with one another. It is always in the isolation of I-Thou that they can so stand. One and the same person is, of course, capable of a varied number of such relations. He may be a father, a husband, a son, a disciple. But he can stand only in one living relation of reciprocity at a time. In moments when I-Thou relation is realized between husband and wife, all other I-Thou relations may only be latent. They may be called into actuality, each one by itself and in its own time. But whenever this happens, the newly actualized relation forces the preceding one back into latency. Even if one should admit the latent relations into the category of the living mutual ones, how limited is the human capacity for the I-Thou encounter! Shall we say that the boundaries of the true community are identical with man’s subjective capacity for entering into I-Thou situations? But perhaps the “living center” might help us here. Buber calls it “the Architect” of the community. Let us examine whether the architect may help us. If “the living center” is a finite Thou, then it cannot be a living center. No finite Thou can enter into relation with more than one Thou at a time. If the center is a finite person, there can be no “radii’ of I-Thou emanating from it to form a periphery. The “common quality of relation to the Center” will be missing. We have then to conceive of the living center as the eternal Thou. This would, of course, limit the true community to the specifically religious community. However, thus we are back to our previous problem of the inclusiveness in the pure relation. While it is true that innumerable “radii” may join innumerable beings to the absolute Person in reciprocal relations, it is not conceivable that the individual being, standing in the pure relation, should at the same time be able to stand in living mutual relations with all other beings. What is more, even if we accepted the possibility of inclusiveness in the pure relation, the true community would last only as long as the pure relation lasts. It would be a momentary incident, without historic reality and without living constancy.
We must consider Buber’s attempt to base community on the interplay of living, mutual relations a failure. His inability to deal with the problem comes to full expression in his discussion of economics and of the state. Those are obviously areas of the It-world. Their very existence depends on the effective functioning of the principle of utility. Both have to use and organize people according to their ability to produce and to serve in the context of the innumerable needs of society. It is as He and not as Thou that people must be treated by the state as well as by the economic system. But, says Buber, look where this has led man! Is man still the master of his fate, does he still control intelligently the economic order of society! Is it not rather that we have been overwhelmed by the tyranny of the It and delude ourselves imagining that we are the masters?
It is very easy to agree with Buber’s social criticism. We are also prepared to follow him when he declares that “the communal life of man can no more than man himself dispense with the world of It” and that, therefore, his will to profit and to be powerful has its proper place and function in life, “as long as they are linked with, and upheld by, his will to enter into relation.” However, into how many relations may each of us have to enter, in order to bring the state under “the supremacy of the spirit that says Thou?”73Ib., 57-60. That economics and the state “share in life as long as they share in the spirit,” that if “they abjure spirit they abjure life” is nobly said. But what next? Let us not forget that by spirit Buber means man’s “response to his Thou.” How, then, are economics and the state to be expected to respond to their Thou, especially if we bear in mind all the intricacies of the dialogical nature of the response! Buber insists that they can “share in the spirit” if they stand “in living relation with the Center.” What he has in mind must be the true community, and whatever we have said in criticism of that idea applies here too. On the basis of Buber’s teaching, as the true community is inconceivable, so must also the state and society forever remain unredeemed from the thraldom of the tyranny of the It.
The Problem of Israel
What we have called the problem of the community cannot but have its most serious implications for our understanding of the place that must be rightly alloted to the Jewish people and to Judaism in the context of Buber’s teachings. Buber has said a great many fine things about both Israel and the nature of Judaism. In an essay on Hebrew Humanism, for instance, he declares: “Israel is not a nation like other nations, no matter how much its representatives have wished it during certain eras. Israel is a people like no other, for it is the only people in the world which, from its earliest beginnings, has been both a nation and a religious community. In the historical hour in which its tribes grew together to form the people, it became the carrier of a revelation. The covenant which the tribes made with one another and through which they became ‘Israel’ takes the form of a common covenant with the God of Israel.”74The subject of the community is taken up again and again in Buber’s writing; Cf. Zwiesprache, Die Frage an den Einzelnen, Das Problem des Menschen. Whatever he says in criticism of collectivism is most pertinent and valid. But nowhere has he gone beyond his original statement in Ich und Du. So that the problem of the community, as it arises from his concept of I-Thou remains unresolved. This is said in the best of Orthodox Jewish tradition. Many are the passages in Buber’s writings and speeches that manifest the same attitude. The uniqueness of the Jewish people Buber, in common with good Orthodox teaching, sees in the fact that whereas in all history creed and nationhood are separated from each other, in the one instance of Israel they coincide. “Israel receives its decisive religious experience as a people …” At the very outset of its history, Israel experienced the Divine as a people.75Israel, 248. Let one more quotation show with what passionate fervor Buber believes in the universal significance in the uniqueness of Israel. In the essay, The Spirit of Israel and the World of Today, he says: “We men are charged to perfect our own portion of the universe — the human world. There is one nation which once upon a time heard this charge so loudly and clearly that the charge penetrated to the very depth of its soul. That nation accepted the charge, not as an inchoate mass of individuals but as a nation. As a nation it accepted the truth which calls for its fulfillment by the human nation, the human race as a whole. And that is its spirit, the spirit of Israel. The charge is not addressed to isolated individuals but to a nation. For only an entire nation, which comprehends peoples of all kinds, can demonstrate a life of unity and peace, of righteousness and justice to the human race, as a sort of example and beginning. A true humanity, that is, a nation composed of many nations, can only commence with a certain definite and true nation. The hearkening nation was charged to become a true nation.”76Ib., 169, 199.
We are rather inclined to agree with him on all this. At the same time, we cannot forget that Buber often uses the traditional terminology of Judaism but invests it with his own meaning. We confess to a sense of mental discomfort, caused by his use of the term, “a true nation.” It reminds us too much of “the true community,” which we had occasion to discuss earlier. And when he speaks of the Jewish people as “the carrier of revelation,” we felt sure that the phrase should be understood in the light of what Buber means by revelation. So interpreted, what he has in mind will turn out to be quite different from what most of his readers may think he wishes to say. If anyone should think that by “the charge” addressed to the people and accepted by the people, Buber refers to traditional concepts of Mattan Torah and Kabbalat haTorah, let him turn, for instance, to the Two Focii of the Jewish Soul. The God who appears to Israel is encountered in the same manner as in the I-Thou relation. He appears “in infinte manifestations in the infinite variety of things and events.” The people is “the carrier of revelation” in the same sense in which the individual person was described to be one. Buber maintains that “the community of Israel experiences history and revelation as one phenomenon, history as revelation and revelation as history.”77Ib., 186. This is, of course, nothing else but “the concrete situation,” out of which one hears the Voice speak ‘in the guise of everything that happens, in the guise of all world events.” Only this time, it is the concrete situation of a people. It is not an I that hears, but a We. This then is what Buber means by “the hearkening nation” that was “charged to become a true nation.” It was charged in the same way in which the individual is charged in the I-Thou relation to become a true human being, i. e., charged dialogically. The revelation of which the people is a carrier comes about in the same manner in which the I is able to receive revelation. History, which is one and the same phenomenon as revelation, is also called “a dialogue in which man, in which the people, is spoken to.”78Ib., 169. As man, by responding, discovers meaning and “the divine law within him,” so too the people becomes “the carrier of revelation” by participating in the revelation in the act of responding.
How then does Buber explain the Biblical story of the revelation at Sinai? He cannot accept it as the report of a supernatural event, but as “the verbal trace of a natural event.” It is the record of “an event which took place in the world of the senses common to all men and fitted into connections which the senses can perceive. But the assemblage that experienced this event experienced it as revelation vouchsafed to them by God … Experience undergone in this way is not self-delusion on the part of the assemblage; it is what they see, what they recognize and perceive with their reason, for natural events are the carriers of revelation, and revelation occurs when he who witnesses the event and sustains it experiences the revelation it contains. This means that he listens to that which the voice, sounding forth from this event, wishes to communicate to him, its witness, to his constitution, to his life, to his sense of duty.”79Ib., 127. If one reads this important passage carefully, bearing in mind some of the basic concepts of Buber’s teaching, one need not be confused by its Buberian opacity. What is told here is the, by now for us, familiar story of the encounter, the dialogue, and the dialogical revelation. However, the rather surprising aspect of this interpretation of the revelation at Sinai is that what was originally maintained as regards the I-Thou relation is now asserted of a We-Thou relation. The people encountered the eternal Thou in a concrete situation. This happened when at some juncture in their history they as a people accepted “the concrete situation as given to them by a Giver” and thus were able to hear a voice addressing them. The voice was not uttering any explicit statement, or pronouncing any divine truth. It was a wordless voice, challenging the people to choose and to decide to respond to the demand inherent in the natural event, which in its givenness was carrying a message to them. The message, however, was in code and could only be deciphered dialogically. They “sustained” the event, which, in Buber’s terminology means that they endured the challenge of the situation and responded to it. Through their response they broke the code of the sign communication and experienced revelation. In order to complete Buber’s idea, we ought to add that in the dialogical response they found “the divine law resting deep within them.” And indeed we hear Buber say that “the true spirit of Israel is the divine demand implanted in our hearts.”80Ib., 98.
Let us now consider whether this makes sense within the context of Buber’s own testimony about the encounter, the dialogue, and revelation. The Jewish people became Israel as a result of their becoming the carrier of a revelation. The revelation was completed in the dialogue, when they responded to the challenge of the concrete situation. At that moment, we assume they were a true community. They stood in living mutual relation to a living Center and also stood in living mutual relations to each other. Prior to the great event of the founding of Israel, however, they were a nation like any other nation. In other words, from the point of view of a possible encounter with the eternal Thou, they were “an inchoate mass of individuals,” who as a people and as a society lived essentially in the It-world. What we should like to know is how such an inchoate mass of individual souls could encounter the Divine as a people. How is it conceivable that millions of human beings should as a people be able to encounter the Presence in the givenness of the concrete situation, in the natural events of their everyday experience? It is difficult enough to imagine that they would all hear the same wordless challenge reaching them from the event as one people; but it is certainly beyond all comprehension that, standing in the full freedom of the dialogical situation, they could as one people render the one response that alone established “the supremacy of the spirit that says Thou.’ This would seem to us so fantastic that, compared with it, the simple soul’s most naive acceptance of supernatural revelation would have to be considered a triumph of sheer rationalism.81Ib., 193; Cf. also Buber’s Moses, p. 31, where the fact is mentioned that “this ‘Israel’ understood as a divine charge something that was potential within him.”
Buber is unable to appreciate the fact that the I-Thou relation, as he describes it, is a relation of isolation. It is so charged with subjective insights and commitments, be they however existential, that they cannot serve as a basis of community or constitute “a holy people.” Buber is right when he insists that, as far as he is concerned, “just as the meaning itself does not permit itself to be transmitted and made into knowledge generally current and admissable, so confirmation of it cannot be transmitted as a valid Ought; it is not prescribed, it is not specified on any tablet, to be raised above all men’s heads. The meaning that has been received can be proved true by each man only in the singleness of his being and the singleness of his life.”82In Buber’s work, Moses, there is no sign of the idea that the people as a people encountered God and experienced revelation. There, the encounter and the experience are all Moses.’. On the strength of what was revealed to him, Moses endeavors to form the tribes into a people and to formulate for them the laws of God. All this follows indeed logically from the I-Thou, as Buber understands it. It is of the very essence of Buber’s concept of meaning that what is revealed dialogically refers to the single person that encounters the Thou, to his specific situation at a given moment, to be proved true by his personal commitment to a definite course of realization. If this were to apply to a people, then the people would have to be in existence as a single entity already prior to the encounter, in the same way as the I is. As one entity it would have to establish the relation with the Thou, as one entity it would have to respond. In other words, it would have to be a true community already prior to the encounter and the revelation in order to consummate both relation and revelation, as the result of which alone — according to Buber — it may become a true community. This, of course, is completely fallacious.
On the basis of Buber’s premises only individual souls can enter into relation and only individual souls may come out of it with individual meanings for their individual lives. Even if a multitude should encounter the eternal Thou at the same time, each one of them would be alone with his Thou at the moment of the encounter. Even if they all should come out of the encounter with meanings commiting each one to the same course of action, each one of them would still stand alone with his meaning and his life. The “charge’ would still be addressed to each one of them individually and not to all of them as to one people. There is no bridge from Buber’s I-Thou to a We; nor is there a possibility for a We-Thou, as a result of his interpretation of the encounter.83I and Thou, 111.
In our presentation of Buber’s teaching, in the paragraph Philosophy,Ethics, and the Eclipse of God, we referred to Buber’s remark on the distinction between Judaism and Christianity. In Christianity individual piety replaced the concept of the holy people of Judaism. As a result, the public life of the people was withdrawn from direct commitment to faith as well as from its ethical implications. The people as a people remained “unbaptized.” Unfortunately, Buber fails to show how a people “as a people” can enter into a covenant with God. While it is correct to say that the concept of the holy people is fundamental to Judaism, Buber’s interpretation of the encounter does not allow such a people to arise. It is, perhaps, the most bizarre aspect of Buber’s work that although he has been teaching, preaching, and interpreting Judaism through a long and rich life, the basic principles of his teaching renders Judaism inexplicable.
* * * * *
We may now summarize the result of our examination of Buber’s testimony. We have found that on the basis of his testimony
a. the relation between I and Thou need not be considered the ultimate form of reality — the possibility of a further reduction through the mystical merging of the I in the All is left open;
b. the meaning, received in dialogical revelation, may have existential significance for the I; it lacks objective validity;
c. the concept of absolute obligation is mistakenly derived from the relation with the absolute Person; nor is there any basis for the concept of obligation in general;
d. there is no way from I-Thou to We or to We-Thou, no bridge between mutuality of relation and the community or society;
e. the singularity of the I-Thou relation may serve as a basis for the personal religion of the individual soul; it cannot account for Judaism and the concept inseparable from it, that of the holy people.