Eric Knickerbocker
May 8, 2007

Martin Buber’s I and Thou: Fate as Dreadful Doom or Divine Destiny?

Should Martin Buber be classified as an existentialist? That is a question that is often disputed and one we will here leave open. What can be said is that if we wish to equate Buber with existentialism, we need to carefully trace how his philosophy of the world differs from both the religious existentialism of Kierkegaard as well as the atheist existentialism of the twentieth century as is associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Using I and Thou as our primary text, we will hopefully demonstrate that Buber’s “existentialism”—if such it may be called—offers a third way between these all-too familiar intellectual currents of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. First, however, a brief historical overview will prove informative in seeing how Buber fits into the history of ideas.

Historical Context: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century

For generations, a theistic understanding of the universe prevailed in the Western world. During the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, rationalism became a dominant focus among intellectuals, and for those given to religious considerations, God was typically seen as the Newtonian clockmaker of the deists: that is, God could be apprehended rationally through the precision of his creation yet was himself altogether remote and distant. For such theists, the idea of a personal God was foreign, the anthropomorphizing of God chief among the cardinal sins of the biblical authors and the uncultured masses. In the following century, Kierkegaard took up protest against this rational approach, suggesting that God cannot be known rationally but must be experienced by first taking a leap of faith, often after a long struggle with existential angst. He characterizes this struggle in Either/Or: A Fragment of Life as consisting first of the aesthetic and then the ethical stage; he returns to the idea again in Stages On Life’s Way to include a third and final religious stage. The aesthetic stage is life lived on its surface in which we indulge our passions, yet at some point owing to the inevitable tensions that arise from such a life, a person may make a clean break—a leap, an “either/or” and not a Hegelian synthesis—from this surface level into the ethical stage, which abandons hedonism and takes responsibility seriously, universalizing morality according to general principles abstracted from experience. Yet the ethical stage itself has its irreconcilable tensions, prompting the bravest and/or most desperate to leap again into the religious stage where they ultimately find and embrace God and where morality becomes a matter of particularity and is no longer parceled out in abstractions.

About fifty years later, Nietzsche proposed “the death of God” in The Gay Science (and also Thus Spoke Zarathustra), suggesting, through the voice of the madman, that we have “killed God”—God in this case being a necessary fiction that held together the fabric of European society for centuries—and his blood is on our hands (Nietzsche, Book III, section 125): what do we do in a world in which we have seen through the illusion? Both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche may be read in response to the eighteenth-century conception of God and science; the writing style of both tended to favor aphorisms and metaphoric expression to the dry, systematic prose of the Enlightenment; both are contributors to the existentialism of the twentieth century; further, both were read and (at least implicitly) commented upon by Buber in I and Thou, which was first published in 1923.

What we have said thus far about Western culture is more or less common knowledge to the student of history; what is perhaps less commonly known is the similar tension going on within the Jewish community, which, given that Buber championed a variant of Hasidic Judaism and was himself Jewish, will prove informative in our attempt to understand Buber and the probable response he would give to the existentialist philosophy of Sartre and Camus (Sartre would have been eighteen and Camus ten when I and Thou went to press).

After the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple in 70 a.d., the Jews no longer had a home, a central place of worship, or a priesthood and were left with only the Torah and the oral rabbinical teachings surrounding it. Josephus identifies four groups of Jews during this period: the Sadducees, the Pharisees, the Essenes, and the Fourth Philosophy. The Sadducees were the Jews who held positions of prominence and authority prior to 70 a.d., as they were the temple administrators, the Essenes were separatists and thus isolated, and the Fourth Philosophy were the Jews who mounted the resistance to the Roman rulers (Ehrman, “The World of the Early Christian Traditions”). The destruction of the temple left the Sadducees powerless, the Romans put down the Fourth Philosophy, and the Essenes separated themselves, leaving only the Pharisees whose complex oral tradition of law was written down around 200 a.d. (Ehrman, A Brief Introduction... 42) in an effort to preserve the Jewish heritage. This oral body of law forms what is known today as the Mishnah, from the Hebrew mišnāh meaning “repetition, teaching.” The Mishnah is the heart of the Talmud, the book of Jewish law consisting of the (1) Mishnah and later commentary collected on it known as the (2) Gemara. The Talmud, in turn, supplies the name to the form of Judaism emerging from this period known as Talmudic Judaism.

The problem with Talmudic Judaism was that it made involved study essential for the devout Jew, a process that took hours of time and was taxing to the intellect. For the common Jew struggling through the tumultuous events and anti-Semitism of the eighteenth century, there was little relief to be found in such a religion, for most working-class Jews simply did not have the time nor had they developed the intellectual capacity for such a pursuit. Rising up in response to this need and appealing to the everyday Jew was Hasidism, developed by a reputed worker of miracles who lived from 1698 to 1760 named Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, better known as Ba’al Shem Tov (a Kabbalist title meaning “Master of the Good Name,” suggesting that he had learned one of the secret names of God and was thus able to work miracles) (Rexroth). Hasidism brought Judaism to the level of mysticism; in addition to being esoteric, it made God available to the everyday person who could interact with God through prayer, singing, dancing, and entering into trances. Buber, born a century later, was a proponent of this approach to Judaism, though he distanced himself from its more occult elements in favor of what he deemed a more practical approach that brought the mundane events of one’s life into the totality of the spiritual sphere. As Kenneth Rexroth writes in his 1959 essay “The Hasidism of Martin Buber”:

The great trouble with Talmudic Judaism is that it was used up emotionally—it had become a religion of rules and prescriptions, very difficult to get excited about. Hasidism changed all this. The Torah, the Law, became a source of endless intoxicating joy. To use the vulgar phrase of a bad American revivalist, they discovered that it was fun to do good and to be good. It is curious that with the exception of the Quakers, Christianity and the religions influenced by it teach or at least imply that it is very, very hard to be a good human being. This is simply not true, not at least for a person uncorrupted by manufactured guilts. It is not only easy to avoid lying, stealing, fornication, covetousness, idolatry, lust, pride, anger, jealousy, and the rest, it is a positive pleasure. Essential to such a life are magnanimity, courage, and the love and trust of other men. These are above all others the Hasidic virtues, along with humility, simplicity, and joy. These are all virtues of direct dealing with other men—the virtues of dialogue. To the Hasid the mystical trance is a dialogue. The self does not unself itself, but “forgets itself” in conversation with the Other; and from the Other, i.e., God as the ultimate and perfect partner of dialogue, flows out the conversation with all others—the life of dialogue, the philosophy of Martin Buber.

We can see from this description just how life-affirming Hasidism is; as Rexroth writes in the paragraph preceding: “The joke, ‘Good food, good drink, good God, let’s eat,’ could well be a brief Hasidic ‘grace.’” Hasidism did not see a dichotomy between the sacred and the secular, but instead saw the working of God through and in even the most ordinary of events, sanctifying the totality of life and imbuing it with a sort of grace. Serving God did not involve asceticism, but brought all the sensual aspects of humanity to bear into the relationship: one served God with one’s total being, the aspect in Buber’s philosophy that sometimes earns him the existentialist moniker. Now that we have a historical context in place, let’s turn to the heart of this essay: a discussion and partial explication of Buber’s I and Thou.

The Building Blocks “You,” “I,” and “It” form the Binaries “I-It” and “I-You”

Buber’s I and Thou can be seen as rejecting on the one hand the rationalistic God of the eighteenth century as well as the atheism of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and others of the nineteenth century, all the while being influenced by and schooled in both traditions. Thus, Buber “learned ... both how to reason like a philosopher, and how to believe like a Hassid” (“Context”). In many ways, I and Thou anticipates the existentialism of the twentieth century as a continuance of the atheism of the nineteenth; Buber deems Nietzsche’s response entirely appropriate, for the dried-up God of the rationalists is deservedly dead: such a God was never living to begin with. There is a reason both the rationalists and the atheists live in existential angst and Buber offers a third alternative to these two prevailing intellectual streams, as we shall soon see.

One cannot begin a discussion of I and Thou without making explicit the three terms that Martin Buber employs throughout the text and the resultant dichotomy they form. These three words are “I,” “You,” and “It” and are seen as comprising two pairs or relations, the relation of “I-It” and the relation of “I-You.” The very first sentence of I and Thou begins: “The world is twofold for man in accordance with his twofold nature” (Buber 55). This sentence is important, for it first tells us we will be reading about the world as seen from the vantage point of humanity—“the world is twofold for man”—and that humanity has a binary, or “twofold” way of viewing the world. This “twofold nature” is explained in the next sentence/paragraph: “The attitude of man is twofold in accordance with the two basic words he can speak,” and he then suggests that these are not single words but word pairs: I-It and I-You (55). In the style of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Buber then traces these ideas in a series of aphorisms, sketching for us what the I-It and I-You involve: everything about Buber’s philosophy in I and Thou hinges on these distinctions. To help us gain some understanding of this “twofold nature” of I-It and I-You, let’s look at Buber’s portrayal of the formation of civilization and the unfolding of the individual person as he or she gradually progresses from newborn infant into a center of increasingly conscious awareness.

In the early languages of our ancestors, we see a number of relational words instead of words that are abstractions of reality: what are the ideas of “height,” “width,” and “depth,” for example, but highly abstracted concepts involving spatiality? One would be hard pressed to find a “height” in nature or a “width”: both are conceptual words abstracted from concrete objects. We simply take for granted such abstract concepts in our culture, but that is not as true with animistic cultures, for whom words are typically relational with respect to persons. The Zulu, for example, have a “sentence-word” that roughly translates to “where one cries, ‘mother, I am lost’”; if we consider where such a place might be in which a child would cry out “mother, I am lost,” we can get a sense that the Zulu mean far away from home (69–70). “Far away” for us is a concept extracted from the physical world that is only implicitly relational; for the Zulu, their word is overtly relational. The Zulu, like many “primitive” groups—Buber defines the word “primitive” as “those who have remained poor in objects and whose life develops in a small sphere of acts that have a strong presence” (69)—see people as inextricably linked in and to the world and there are no clearly demarcated boundaries between persons and things (70). The world of such cultures is something like the child in the womb who shares in a complete and total relationship with its mother: a “bodily reciprocity” (76).

When a child is born, that perfect relationship is destroyed and it is thrust into a new world. It is through repeated contacts with this outer world—including its mother now seen externally—that the individual first learns of its own identity, or, as Buber suggests, “[m]an first becomes an I through a You” (80). The newborn infant does not have a sense of being an I; it does not have a sense of itself as a distinct and separate entity or center of consciousness but initially lives in a state of undifferentiated unity and relationship (76–77). Gradually it begins to notice that while the outside world around it continues to change, the one constant underlying all these interactions is its own awareness: the child gradually becomes aware of its own consciousness through the You of the outer world—and most especially its mother now seen externally.

The description of this You may still be somewhat cryptic to one unfamiliar with Buber’s terms and the manner in which he employs them. Perhaps an illustration of our own would offer further insight: when I speak to you—yes, you—and when I really speak and listen to you carefully, I am not at that moment considering you as a sum of parts. While I may notice your relative height and eye color and other features, you become to me a total person, and if I devote to you my undivided time and attention as you do with me, the passage of minutes and the existence of space are effectively forgotten for us in that instant, and the experience is a total one, a mutual reciprocity taking place between us. When I encounter you in this way, I encounter Buber’s You: I am interacting in an undifferentiated relationship, however brief, that transcends the sum of its parts and you become for me the universe, filling both time and space.

And so, we return to the infant, to whom the world is undifferentiated, undivided, unparceled, unanalyzed. How could it be otherwise? For in order to analyze and differentiate, we must have built up a fairly extensive body of knowledge—stored memory—and this is only just beginning to be formed in a newborn infant; what is more, knowledge involves differentiation and categorization, something unknown to the newborn who has previously lived in complete unity with its mother inside the womb. The world of the infant, then, remains the world of the You even after birth. It is only through the gaze of its mother that the child fully learns it is an I: as contemporary philosopher Arthur C. Danto writes in his 1981 effort The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: “I come to know that I am an object simultaneously with coming to know that another is subject: that those eyes are not just pretty bits of color, but are looking at me: I discover I have an outside in a way logically inseparable from my discovery that others have an inside” (10).

Thus we see that for Buber, the concept of You always comes first in existence for both the births of civilization and the individual. Through this undifferentiated You, the I is discovered: the child recognizes that “I” exists. And now that I is born to conscious awareness, it can gaze at the mother and the external world from a totally new and detached perspective. Simply put, it can see the world as an It. Now that the subject—the I—has been born, the object—the It—is also brought into conscious awareness (80). So, to put these individual ideas together, we have first You, then I, then It, in the order of conscious awareness, which returns us again to the Buber’s opening sentence: “The world is twofold for man in accordance with his twofold nature” (55). Why is the world only twofold? Don’t we have three ideas: You, I, and It? Yes, but “the world for man” suggests the I already, for who is looking out into the world if not the I? Thus, the world is “twofold for man,” twofold for the I.

There are, then, two ways that persons may look out into the world—as I-It or as I-You—and either of these ways will shape or fail to shape them. They may first look at the world as the relationship between I and It (74): for the most part, this I-It approach to the world is the one we see around us in everyday society. The It world is one in which the I remains distinct and separate from the world: the I is here, the It is there, and the two do not intersect. Rather, the I takes from the It what it wants and the It passively lets it. This world is the one of science, the one of analysis and abstraction, of cool objectivity (80–81). Whether we are analyzing the It that goes on inside of us (for thoughts and emotions can become their own objects of study) or the It that appears outside of us, we do not interact with It, we only speak about It (83): It becomes an object to be used and experienced (88). While this description of the I-It orientation may sound entirely negative from Buber’s perspective, he reminds us that we could not function without the It world.

Imagine if every morning you awoke and did not recognize the sun, if the bed in which you slept was unfamiliar, if the face lying next to you was that of a stranger, if the room was foreign: you would not get very far in life, for the world of It is the world of the past (85): the world of remembered experiences. The world of It allows us to live normal lives where everything has its place, where everything is mapped out and positioned in time and space (82). However, if humanity never goes beyond the realm of the I-It, Buber believes life is impoverished. Thus, we are led to the second potential of humanity’s binary nature: the I-You.

The I-You, in its purest form, is a fully present encounter in which relation and reciprocity take place (85). It is a specific way of interacting with the world that does not experience and use but instead interacts and relates. This world, unlike that of the It, is not differentiated and ordered but is always new and renewing. Words mean nothing, however: it is possible to say “You” but in truth our actions are those of I-It; it is also possible to say “It” but in actuality be entering into the timelessness of You, which sometimes breaks in from beyond into the comfortable It world and disrupts it (84). While the You cannot consistently be maintained because we require the orderliness of the It world, the It world can become a sort of backdrop against which the I-You nature of humanity is actualized (83). Also, because we are human, all finite Yous necessarily alternate between It and You: that is, we cannot always be in I-You relationship with other people or other things, and when we are not in relationship with them, they recede into the pastness of memory: they recede into the world of It (146). Yet they have meaning because they have been Yous and can again become Yous.

Let us summarize, then, what we have just said. There are three basic constituents of Buber’s philosophy: You, I, and It. We, as humans—as Is—can choose to relate to the world from one of two orientations: either we approach the world as if it were an object and the relationship that exists between ourselves and the world—I-It—has no overlap of boundaries and is one in which the I uses and experiences, or else we approach the world with open arms, as it were, embracing it and fully interacting with and entering into it. In this sense, our relationship to the world is one of encounter, not experience and use: of reciprocal relationship: Buber describes this orientation as an I-You relationship. The I-It and the I-You are the halves that comprise the twofold nature of humanity. Now let us look at how these binaries play out in modern culture.

“I-You”: A Third Way?

The modern world is to large degree divided into two component parts: Buber describes these as the “I-District” and the “It-District” (93). The “It-District” is composed of our various bureaucracies and institutions (including marriage and our houses of worship), the “I-District” is the sense of self that typically is fostered by the It-District and that attempts to navigate this modern maze; the It-District and the I-Disctrict are compartmentalized and neither actualizes the potentiality of the total human being, leaving modern man fragmented and impoverished (93). We are understandably lessened because of the It-District and feel our poverty acutely as a sort of existential angst manifest in the I-District, the sphere in which we otherwise tend not to notice the loss of separation (94). To make up for this loss, we tend to try to add feeling to our institutions and increase feeling within ourselves as well, failing to recognize that only genuine relationship will unite our fragmented lives; put another way, we fail to recognize that feelings are not the essence of genuine encounter but simply accompany it (94). If we can use a crude metaphor, feelings are something like exhaust fumes issuing from the tailpipe: they do not propel the car, but rather issue from cars that are propelled. If all we have are increased feelings, we are still alienated, for: “[t]hese feelings are not between an I and a You, but, rather, they are had by an I toward an It” (“Part II, aphorisms 1–6: The It-World”). Thus, we are still isolated, for these feelings are taking place within ourselves only and there is still no true community or reciprocity.

Not even husband and wife relationships can be predicated on feelings alone but only by “revealing the You to one another” (95). Put differently, two things are required for genuine relationship, genuine encounter: all “[1] have to stand in a living, reciprocal relationship to a single living center [the eternal You], and they [2] have to stand in a living, reciprocal relationship to one another” (94). The You, as a sort of third party, is always required for real relationship (95). Real love, then, may be thought of as something like a spiritual force that takes place between two people, not simply within them (67) and that is another reason why all earthly Yous must become Its when the encounter ends: for Buber, then, the idea of unrequited love is not a picture of true love at all but simply a part of the I-world, the world of feelings.

Now all the components are in place for the point at which real meaning may be found, something not available to us in the atheism of the nineteenth century—and still not available in the existentialism of Camus and Sartre to follow where meaning is always spelled with a little “m” and is at best provisional and contingent. The reason meaning cannot be given us by such philosophies will require a little more exegesis on our part.

A World of Causality and Doom or Divine Relation and Destiny?

As part of the modern It-world, “causality holds unlimited sway” (100): science and the whole of our mentality is geared toward the notion of cause and effect because it is located in time and space, positioning all its ideas and concepts, like so many pawns, on a spatial-temporal chessboard. Traced back far enough, there was an uncaused first cause, and, like dominoes, the whole chain is not only causal but necessarily determined, much like the sealed monism/panentheism[1] of Spinoza, the historical thesis, antithesis, and synthesis of Hegel, the related counterpart in Marx, Nietzsche’s circle of time that endlessly repeats itself, and so forth. But when we take as a given, along with Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, that there is no You out there—or anywhere—we have a determinism that is oppressive and frightening: a cosmological determinism and fatalism that is meaningless, fickle, capricious, and which informs the later existentialism of Sartre and Camus, casting a dark shadow on the meaning they attempt to create for themselves in such a “You-less” world. In such a world, there is only It, or at best, only contingent yous with a little “y.” Whereas the ancients believed in many gods, we moderns believe in many laws: Darwin’s “law of life,” Freud’s “psychological law,” Hegel’s “social law,” or Marx’s “cultural law” (105—at least one assumes these are the thinkers Buber has in mind). The bulk of intelligentsia and higher education all cry the same thing: these modern “many laws” do not

tolerate any faith in liberation. It is considered foolish to imagine any freedom; one is supposed to have nothing but the choice between resolute and hopelessly rebellious slavery. Although all these laws are frequently associated with long discussions of teleological development and organic evolution, all of them are based on the obsession with some running down, which involves unlimited causality. The dogma of a gradual running down represents man’s abdication in the face of the proliferating It-world. Here the name of fate is misused: fate is no bell that has been jammed down over man; nobody encounters it, except those who started out from freedom. But the dogma of some running down leaves no room for freedom or for its most real revelation whose tranquil strength changes the countenance of the earth: returning. The dogma does not know the human being who overcomes the universal struggle by returning; who tears the web of drives, by returning; who rises above the spell of his class by returning; who by returning stirs up, rejuvenates, and changes the secure historical forms. The dogma of running down offers you only one choice as you face its game: to observe the rules or drop out. But he that returns knocks over the men on the board. The dogma will at most permit you to carry out conditionality with your life and to “remain free” in your soul. But he that returns considers this freedom the most ignominious slavery. (105–106)

Unlike the causality of the It world, the world of You is always present and thus is not causal: the person who is not confined within the I-world is free to step into and out of himself at any time “into the world of relation” (100). All live within the same world under the same sky and clouds, but the difference is one of relation and orientation: do we operate out of the I-It sphere more often or out of the I-You? Nobody consistently operates purely out of one or the other, but many reach a point where the one drastically overshadows the other: for Jesus, the I-You prevailed as he communed with the Father (116), with Napoleon, the I-It prevailed to the point even he became an It (117).

Evoking the metaphor of marriage betrothal, Buber suggests that “Fate and freedom are promised to each other” (102). Buber’s idea is that only the person whose life has been oriented toward an I-You axis has true freedom, for when he faces his fate, he finds not an oppressive force, but true destiny. If he did not orient his life around the You, fate would then be an arbitrary task master without point or purpose and rather than finding destiny, fate would spell doom. Thus, destiny, and not doom, is what the truly free man finds; for him fate “is not his limit but his completion; freedom and fate embrace each other to form meaning; and given meaning, fate—with its eyes, hitherto severe, suddenly full of light—looks like grace itself” (102). In the It-District where God is either far removed, only his fingerprints remaining upon the It-world, or else is altogether non-existent, fate mocks a man, making him desirous of infinity yet constantly reminding him of his own limit and finitude. There is no nuptial light to be found emitting from the eyeless sockets of ceaseless and senseless causality—of “demonic absurdity” (102)—and so Sisyphus must meet his fate with scorn (Camus).

Is Buber an Existentialist?

Finding the You—in this case the infinite You—does not involve a change in life circumstances or an alteration of actions, but simply a new way of interacting in the same circumstances: it involves a “finding without seeking” (128). A person is always prepared to meet his destiny which could be waiting at any turn, but, confident it awaits him, he is not desperate to find it. This tendency grants his life a serenity, enabling him to benefit and prosper all that he touches (128).

Just as feelings do not constitute but merely accompany human relationship, “creature-feelings” or the numinous sense proposed by such theologians as Rudolf Otto are not the essence of an encounter with the infinite You (129). Rather, contained within the infinite You are all other yous, and thus the “smashing of idols” proposed first by German philosopher Max Scheler and later by Protestant theologian Paul Tillich is for Buber misguided, for it assumes that the relationship one shares to the idol is the same as the relationship one shares with God. Put another way, it is assumed that if one removes the idol, then all that is left to attach to is God (153). For Buber, this conflates the nature of the relationship to either God or the idol: to the person who worships the idol, God would only be another It: something to be used and experienced. Likewise, it is possible to enter into all lesser yous in such a way that is not idolatrous but is imbued with the full meaning of the infinite You that gives them form.

For a very similar reason, Buber partially rejects Kierkegaard’s conception (namely the three stages), even though appearing to agree with him in many ways:

It is said further that the “religious” man steps before God as one who is single, solitary, and detached insofar as he has also transcended the stage of the “ethical” man who still dwells in duty and obligation to the world. The latter is said to be still burdened with responsibility for the actions of agents because he is wholly determined by the tension between is and ought, and into the unbridgeable gap between both he throws, full of grotesquely hopeless sacrificial courage, piece upon piece of his heart. The “religious” man is supposed to have transcended this tension between world and God; the commandment for him is to leave behind the restlessness of responsibility and of making demands on himself; for him there is no longer any room for a will of one’s own, he accepts his place in the Plan; any ought is dissolved in unconditional being, and the world, while still persisting, has lost its validity; one still has to do one’s share in it but, as it were, without obligation, in the perspective of the nullity of all activity. Thus men fancy that God has created his world to be an illusion and his man to reel. Of course, whoever steps before the countenance has soared way beyond duty and obligation—but not because he has moved away from the world; rather because he has come truly close to it. Duties and obligations one has only toward the stranger: toward one’s intimates one is kind and loving. When a man steps before the countenance, the world becomes wholly present to him for the first time in the fullness of the presence, illuminated by eternity, and he can say You in one word to the being of all beings. There is no longer any tension between world and God but only the one actuality. He is not rid of responsibility: for the pains of the finite version that explores effects he has exchanged the momentum of the infinite kind, the power of loving responsibility for the whole unexplorable course of the world, the deep inclusion in the world before the countenance of God. Ethical judgments, to be sure, he has left behind forever: “evil” men are for him merely those commended to him for a deeper responsibility, those more in need of love; but decisions he must continue to make in the depths of spontaneity unto death—calmly deciding ever again in favor of right action. Thus action is not null: it is intended, it is commanded, it is needed, it belongs to the creation; but this action no longer imposes itself upon the world, it grows upon it as if it were non-action. (156–157)

In this extended excerpt, we see that Buber believes that the entire world is transformed for the person who encounters the You—an ongoing encounter in which man does not live by bread alone but must gain sustenance from the bread of heaven eaten again and again—and such a person relates to the world differently. This conception is very much in keeping with Kierkegaard, considered by many to be the father of religious existentialism, but Buber disagrees with the idea of leaping from one world into another. Nevertheless, Buber’s conception of humanity’s encounter with God is startlingly similar to that of Kierkegaard’s in many other ways and in particular in its sense of immediacy.

As with Kierkegaard, God is neither remote nor absent, but fully present. Further, humanity has within its power the ability to relate to him, a feat made more difficult by the fact that advancing civilizations tend more and more to objectify the world and implicitly think in terms of I and It. In fact, for many the tenet that there is no You at all is taken as an unquestioned and unquestionable article of faith: this factor seems especially pronounced in the intellectual world with its many cosmic laws. For Buber, however, God is not an ought that can be distilled and passed along to others; God can be known, but never proven (159). One can only encounter God as I to You, as person to Person. The best communities—in fact the origins of all societies for Buber—are based on this encounter: something like Moses coming down the mount with shining face, men encounter God and take him back into the world with them and in healthy ages unlike our own, all men alike share in the encounter and flourish and thrive.

Religious systems have their place and are all originally based on genuine revelation, but soon enough they tend to become fossilized by their very nature, for they attempt to preserve what can only be encountered (163). There are many reasons for this phenomenon, but in the end, it speaks of humanity’s desire to experience continuity in time and space: humanity’s desire to have an ordered world: humanity’s comfort in the world of It where things stay in place.

Men have addressed their eternal You by many names. When they sang of what they had thus named, they still meant You: the first myths were hymns of praise. Then the names entered into the It-language; men felt impelled more and more to think of and to talk about their eternal You as an It. But all names of God remain hallowed—because they have been used not only to speak of God but also to speak to him.

Behind all other Yous, God is the You that gives to life its ultimate meaning; the eternal You is neither a part of creation nor absent from it but is fully present in all things (123). Thus, “the pure relation can [only] be fulfilled as the beings become You, as they are elevated to the You, so that the basic holy word sounds through them all” (163). That “basic holy word,” the most sacred name of God, is You. When we speak of God as he or it (or even she), we are only speaking allegorically: such pronouns are but metaphors (146). Only when we say “You” to God is he fully encountered. The most sacred name of God, then, is You (148).

---

[1] This spelling is not an error. As I write in Enlightenment Thinkers: The Death of Teleology: “’Panentheism’ is distinguished from ‘pantheism’ mainly insofar as it emphasizes the idea of ‘everything in God’ more so than the other way around. ... To illustrate, think of the color yellow. Does it exist by itself? Or rather must something else first exist that has the property of yellowness before yellow can exist? In other words, something has to be yellow for us to speak of the color: the color does not exist otherwise.... Like the color yellow, [for Spinoza] we are modes of the one eternal substance: we do not exist except as it exists; put another way, we do not exist except as God exists: we exist through and in God.” Seen in this way, human beings become one of what philosophers call “emergent properties,” a bit like the exhaust fumes we mentioned earlier emitting from the tailpipe.

Works Cited