Transcending the Interlude: Martin Buber

Transcending the Interlude: Between Buber’s I and Thou

‘But whoever abhors the name and fancies that he is godless—when he addresses with his whole devoted being the You of his life that cannot be restricted by any other, he addresses God.’[i]

—Martin Buber

Dialogue becomes answerable to more than the relation between a subject and the world only when its theoretical interest in language is taken up and, eventually taken over by a You devoted enough to be an alternative to It. Man, by placing himself against whatever confronts him in his search for God turns each obstacle (tree, rock, plant, animal, etc.) into something capable of having its It removed and turned into a You. Martin Buber, daring to say You to every I, sought authentic experience in that obscure region between what’s said and what’s not, and thus managed to tap into that purity of heart that helped Kierkegaard will God into being the one thing that is (almost) always being spoken to. Buber’s obsession with God was as much an obsession with God-denying objects placed in God’s way, every It-object that, for the duration of relation itself, man fails to address as a You. There was in Buber’s little book I and Thou[ii] (Ich und Du) first published in Germany in 1923, a consolidation of what has become known as his dialogical or I-You philosophy, a philosophy that encroaches on God only when each I is deemed a suitable (transient) enough substitute for God; i.e. any cosmic load that God transports between man and whatever (at any one moment) he is; thus at this moment of dialogue when confronted with whatever is in relation to him, man, as if about to speak for the first time, is halted by speech, by whatever is not being said that will bring God closer. If we, as an I, remain independent of God, anterior to whatever words we are choosing in which to encounter him with, then our minds can no longer lag behind what God needs to turn our words into. When idling towards God, we were not to rely on desire, a goal, preconception or worse, anticipation of reaching him, no; for what Buber is telling us is this: we cannot call on any I or It-object until all intermediate (and God-superfluous?) thoughts have fallen away from us. After all, to turn the It-world into a You-world is, in effect, to turn everything into a dialogue with what cannot be God, everything in the womb of the unfolding You is a word-courier, a middle-terminus in which, for the duration of each It, even the Trinity seems capable of being herded into broken ranks, herded and perhaps forced (until an encounter is fulfilled or falls away) to know each other only incompatibly. But this can only happen if every dialogue results in eternal disagreement and, in light of a then momentary separation from God, a celebration of linguistic, if not anthropological orphanhood. In short, whatever (whether transitory or eternal) seems but an obstacle still to be eclipsed by God’s light, must for the duration of all dialogues, revert God’s You-stump into something (anything) that begins to incrementally flicker beneath a lampshade made out of our flesh.

Just as Christ when entering into us drives out all obstacles, preventing anything to come between the I-him relation, not one You can ever become something, if it does not remain unique for as long as God must. Only the I-It relation experiences, considers, assesses the It that wants to become a You, and only a You always on the point of departure from dialogue can refuse to become an I until the talking stops; for only when the human I begins to address what of an It it perceives as being (potentially) a You, can God himself seek out encounter, and a new sense of reciprocity with whatever can currently be considered a presence in the world. We might well consider then the I-Thou relation being akin to a pelvic chair-lift towards God, whereby objects (including humans) are fetched back and forth, rising and falling, in search of the real life encounter with a You beyond the altars of feigned form. Above a forest of Is swaying like trees and jostling in the breath of God, until reaching Heaven’s final clearing where everything that we once thought of as an I, is now a You, something God-vaulted into view. Buber would call this the last encounter before all earthly relation gives way to the eternal paradox that God is not a You at all, but only the ultimate and eternally impassable cycle of negation, stopped; that is where all final World-Yous like iron-filings cling to the Youlessness of God himself. Obsessed with the eternally disinherited unity of any failed ‘encounter’, Buber speaks out against any relational attempt likely to dissolve it, that is against the broken wings of each primordial impulse unable to lift the I towards a You. The god of this German thinker, as he conceives of him, displays himself to us in a perpetual double aspect: I and object, or I-him, or I-her, which in one sense (always?) signifies a sheath, a cosmic chrysalis fleshing over whatever gets in the way of God.

Whether considered evil, good, ineffectual or powerful, or even as something to be loved or idolized, no object, if it is interested in encountering God, can remain unsubstantial, unacknowledged, unless God himself escapes us in the act of encountering an object in the way of him; in fact anything that cannot, by transcending its own presence, go beyond whatever is hampering its progress towards God, will not reach him. Whenever man catches himself confronting an object, God catches himself confronting man and the object on which man concentrates; before manifesting himself in objects (prime matter turned actual) God, to enable men to grow tongues, humanized dialogue which, in the mind of any of us attempting to speak to him, seems like hardly the largest concession made by one capable of creating planets, stars, and black holes! Consequently, there is little, if any merit (that I can see), in talking any longer about ‘objects’ born only of the Big Bang, for if God (drawn always into a position of truth) took any further interest in such things, other than what we say about them, then they’d be no need for an I or It or He or She or You, or in fact for anything prepared to enter into a dialogue with what God knows more than anyone else about, i.e. himself. When Heidegger said that being (Dasein) is closer to us than angels or God, what he meant is that God, while not a being, is also not a god unless we encounter him limited by the objects central to our own ontological solitude. You-relation, Buber writes, is the very ‘cradle of real life’[iii], for all real life is encounter, and, most importantly, he believes with his whole being that life is unreal, remains so, until that point when we feel blessed by the love of every little encounter experienced between I and You:

Love does not cling to an I, as if the You were merely its ‘content’ or object; it is between I and You. Whoever does not know this, know this with his being, does not know love, even if he should ascribe to it the feelings that he lives through, experiences, enjoys, and expresses.[iv]

Martin Buber, throughout his three realms of relation and encounter, attempted always to stay in advance of conventional preachments on faith, religion, by seeking to remain on the outside of any talk about the substance of Divinity, i.e. Christ and his body in the doctrine of the Eucharistic transubstantiation, on the church-destroying grounds that even Christ (if no cosmic or eternal relation between him and God could be found) would have to remain an I abandoned by God’s You. Buber spent no time proving the rationality of religion, as, for him, the ‘pragmatist’ thinker or Christian philosopher remains never wholly present at the birth of anything other than their own ideas on what or who God is. Animals, kept at arm’s length by both theologians and philosophers on the path to God, are themselves in relation to exterior objects, but whether that relation can be reciprocated is and has, for scholars of Buber, proved something of a sore point; but the dispute in general rests on this central point: if Buber says that all relations between an I and It-objects must be reciprocated for that encounter to bear the fruition of being wholly present at the birth of a possible You, why then does Buber also admit that animals (probably) can affect and be affected by an I? well, because nature, when in partnership with either a tree, animal or man, is predominantly a mystery which, for the sake of giving our own non-celestial biographies back to God, must remain that way. That said, Buber himself lamented the fact that so much of what exists cannot break through what he called the ‘crust of thingness’[v], not even God, or not unless God, reducing objects to only potential relation, becomes, for the time being, more familiar with what we are saying about him, rather than what he really is:

...and say to him the basic word I-You, he is neither a thing among things nor composed of things. He is not a He or a She among neighbouring Hes and Shes, a point inscribed in a world-grid of space and time...Distinct and all of a piece, he is you and he fills the heavens. Not as though nothing exists apart from him, but all else lives in his light.[vi]

For me, what is on Earth an It, for God is, under the protection of heaven, an (eternally) armour-plated ‘object’ under cosmic lock and key; until any encounter with the possibility of an absolutized You, when our I is exposed for what, in God, it truly is: an It masquerading as a blocked You. To be capable of removing or dismantling all objects in the way of God (every It being a sum of artificial or phenomenal parts still to be upgraded to a You) is to cease being eternally duped by what sits uncontested in front of our own eyes; for what mysteriously awakens man to a level of relational lucidity and parts the curtains of our flesh to see the true Christ (if only to take a quick peek at God behind) exists to betray not just God’s false appearances on earth, but also the objects which are unable to shake off the illusion of what, in reality, God is: a post-reciprocal You too contaminated with the twilight of It to be seen. From the humblest pebble to a plant to a gorilla to the highest mountain, all are involved in blockading consciousness, from preventing our return to the light of God. To take up a God-high vantage point of love in the universe is not to reside in feelings, spirituality or the emotion needed to ascend to that height, no, it is only to help man look away from the bustle, the crowd, to re-view the world alone, to look up and see himself nailed to an It-cross of failed relation, ‘The sacrifice: infinite possibility is surrendered on the altar of the form;’ but what form? the form of deed, or what in German is known as those of geistige wesenheiten, which, by definition of its multiple (failed?) translations is known as either ‘intelligible forms’ (Ronald Gregor Smith), or ‘spiritual beings’ (Smith and Walter Kaufmann), or ‘intelligible essences’ (Friedman), or finally ‘forms of the spirit’, all of which, provide us with unsatisfactory names for the forms (commonly divided between Substantia humana and Substantia rerum, or human substance and the substance of things) which Buber himself, in search of an absolute encounter with a final You, could never quite manage to decide on.

All encounters between an I and It, between an It and You, have first to shed what we might consider their God-chrysalis; thus the larval presence of anything that cannot yet be God sets itself up as an obstacle in our consciousness, for each It, to be free even of its planet, must shed its world-layers before God can welcome what is to become the completed state of its being; all must become post-I, or the pre-You of what has not yet been, in dialogue, registered as such. Not until we as humans confess that we have hewn ourselves into an unresponsive idol, admit that we have found nothing more worthy than our own bodies with which to serve God, can we even start to deem ourselves capable of aborting a relation half-way through an encounter with an object that can never become a You. For every It unable to become a You snags on the potential of what it might become, rather than what it will become, having already disengaged itself from God’s attention while, in short, portraying nothing but its own invulnerability to Godlessness; until every It has become finally a You, and all that once empirically stood in God’s way falls back into an It-shaped abyss; for religion to exist, truth must be contingently wrong, must be neither known or believed in, whether God is rationally demonstrable or not, with the I-It relation being no consolation at all at the time of God’s absence. That said, Buber, an eternal postscript of a man, whose intellectual hiddenness and metaphysical fideism conceals so much that is misleading about what God, for him, truly is, never allows us to arrive at a conclusion in his work, that is a non-religious solution, and what is probably worse, he never manages to banish himself into the ‘thingness’ of a new immortal formula for man. But what we do get is this: a cosmic struggle between relation (which always comes first) and encounter, of which Buber believes ‘All real life is’.

Again, it is important to reiterate (and many more times in eternity) that the goal of Buber is in every relation, for as he himself said, ‘A great relation exists only between real persons’ and by ‘real’ he means those who give all of themselves in every moment of every encounter ; solitude must be breached, must be turned into a field of presence, in which a sort of animal pen of Is is set up, all of which are ready in every moment to be let loose into a realm in which the only shepherd is a You, and whose staff used to move all Its forward and is only the latest I in a long line superseded already by You’s presence. That said, we cannot say You before we say I, though children can, Buber tells us, even if in their innocence they are not yet ready to bring their relation with each exterior object to the heights of a more perfect realization of You. Buber says man must persist in his endeavour to make the connection between I and It into something that can be called a real encounter, an encounter so metaphysically gripping that the I, committing itself entirely to the moment, seems sometimes (though not always) capable of obtaining a new reality for itself; so much so that the a priori You (inborn in the womb of the future’s unfolding) begins to eternally persist in itself, that is when in relation with a He or a She or an It; for the I, no longer wanting to exist in an unrealized realm towards which nothing can be drawn, begins metaphysically to break down, to comprehend itself only as a destructible part of a future He-You, She-You and It-You combination. Thus, when an object appears incapable of responding to what, in effect, it is soon to be turned into, we may either consider it flagrantly unresponsive or part of a non-relation world, a world in which case all encounter becomes superfluous, with the I a now blind and indefinable thing, for as Buber says, relation in its beginning is ‘primitive’ and devoid of ‘pure action, action without arbitrariness’; after all, if man is to transcend his encounter with other men, women or objects in the world, then he must (in a cosmic or metacosmic sense) pass onto an entirely different level of association, a pre-You existence which, by assuming an anti-anthropomorphic wholeness, becomes divorced from religious identity.

Consequently, no effort should be made by the reader to imagine that whilst experiencing an encounter with a possible You, a world without You can possibly survive as the same world; but only because the presence that Buber talks about must always conceive of itself as not existing, not at least until the thingness of things has given itself up to whatever is (eternally) in the process of redeeming the always static God of the pulpits; not until God himself begins to love what obstacle prevents us from reaching him, can we ourselves escape what Buber calls the ‘world-grid of time and space’[vii]; but what Buber calls time and space has nothing in common with what empirical realists (Kant, Schopenhauer) call the spatiotemporal realm, a phenomenal arena which for a ‘creative anti-realist’[viii] like Kant was nothing but a mental cell, one cramped enough to prevent even an angel from extending its wings, let alone God. Buber, without such philosophical restrictions, habitually sacrificed his body to time and its relations; that and to a kind of metaphysical entropy, an everlasting lunge for love capable of biting God down to Buber’s own fingernails! For the price was high, the expectation unrelenting, as even if one everlasting lung fails to inflate, then Christ’s pain, suspending man upon the precipice of everything, was but a mere presentiment, an apparition of a dead weight dangled above our souls. If Buber was not a philosopher, then he can hardly be described as a dogmatic thinker; rather, he lived only what a Spinozian might be inclined to call an ‘adequate or inadequate’ existence, or, if a follower of that interminable tug-of-war between materialism and immaterialism, an ‘existence’ amounting to little more than a battle between what is and what that ‘is’ might still one day become.

In light of this, we might say then that no one is real in the world that is not a You, no one except God who, on waking from our consciousness, stops being himself, for the time that it takes each I, in every encounter, to become him. The only thing then that struggles to feign God’s gait and be identified as doing so is what’s not present; is what doesn’t rely on the crutches of its own human bones to carry itself towards God. Ever since the Greek Ages, western metaphysics has been struggling to achieve only one thing: to draw Plato’s essence out of man and back into daily life, not in the way that Plato explained anamnesis in terms of how we, in our innate pre-birth and unbodied state, see the forms that we would one day remember, but by making man worthy again of the question of whether or not man is capable of ever perceiving a pure fictive existence amid the world of objects, of things among things. That said, as Hume so eloquently put it, what causes one object to follow another cannot be observed, and is in fact only the result of what plays on the mind every time that we experience one thing happening after another; so, in light of that, how can we even know then that anything (ever) follows the I? that anything actually observable happens at all in the relation of I to It or It to You? we can’t, says Buber, and thus he is reduced to obscuring the issue further by saying:

Every You in the world is doomed by its nature to become a thing or at least to enter into thinghood again and again. In the language of objects: everything in the world can—either before or after it becomes a thing—appear to some I as its You.[ix]

For all I-It-relations to start being I-You ones, immortality has to stop originating religions and start populating You-churches with an enfilade of many phantom Is in the process of being converted into the final You; so maybe all that is stopping men from loving God, and turning their I into his You are their own failed pre-You idols that they, still falsely, worship? the non-relational iconography that they attribute to no god? only when the response of one object to the next breaks down, can God even partly render himself responsible for his own You? To lift the word of God up from the dust, which generations of men have failed to achieve, is the whole burden which Buber demands of himself; those yelling ‘He He’ rather than ‘You You’ are those that need amending, those who can only grow new tongues in God and say You from the inside; and while Buber failed (miserably) to understand just what Heidegger was doing with being, he did instinctually call out from a region where even Heideggerian Being authentically seeks nearness, i.e. the nearness of whatever is still too far away to be Being, that is those non-entities that still wait (‘custodians of the dwelling’[x]) in oblivion for that one essential relationship to Being to begin. Buber, listening always for that ‘cry uttered in the loneliest darkness’[xi], ensured that it would be him, and no one else, who would be the one to share an everlasting lung with a You freshly consecrated by an encounter with an imagined presence still too indistinguishable from God to be called him. If Hobbes was right (which I seriously doubt) when he said that imagination was nothing but ‘decaying sense’,[xii] then that ultimate immaterial construct that we hold inside of our minds when we think of God is undoubtedly not what God is when being imagined; God, never in motion, cannot be hindered, and likewise cannot be distinguished from anything else we dream of. Inside god’s mind there are no objects, things, only himself: a fatidical phantom feigning our imaginations, for as long as it takes mankind to imagine an eternal counterfeit body in place of him.

Reading the work of Buber, we feel as if we have already witnessed both the advance and demise of gods unable to survive their twilight, the way that his thought, ethereal, immeasurable, draws us into only the presentiment of a realm, rather than the realm itself. Buber espouses no specific transcendent realm other than silence, or what he calls ‘the silence of the Transcendent’,[xiii] for what he idolizes is a kind of primeval prophecy of God, not God himself, which culminates in an almost supernatural ‘drive to turn everything into a You’.[xiv] Images of God frustrate what Buber calls ‘encountered reality’ [xv]when the moment of dialogue is not preserved, maintained, when God ultimately himself loses consciousness in us. Once all our images of God have fallen away, God is allowed to return to what he was before we entered into a dialogue with him, thus every encounter, every response by God to the personal propulsion of each I into the It-world is then imbued with the futility of a reciprocation that cannot reciprocate faith:

how can the buried power to relate be resurrected in a being in which a vigorous ghost appears hourly to stamp down the debris under which this power lies? How long is a being to collect itself as long as the mania of his detached I-hood chases it ceaselessly around an empty circle?[xvi]

Thus, every relational event that does not prove essential to the spirit (i.e. subject to only subjectless relation), every It that fails to secure a You and remains deprived of the possible reality of You, can only truly advance towards God when all of the old institutions and formulations of religion have assumed the guise of what God, to be cosmically loved, needs them to be. ‘Love is responsibility of an I for a You’ [xvii]; so what by man does Buber think can be done to remove those images obstructive enough to cut short an encounter with God? Only this: encourage relation between ‘every’ presence and object, turn stone or tree into a You-stone and a You-tree; that, or set up a false boundary, whereby selves, adrift and floating, flit like flies about whatever in every You is dying; thus only when an It feels authentic enough to become a You can this world feel absolute. By reducing the universe to a ‘region’ or, in an ontological sense to a matchstick model of itself, a microcosm of I-You relations, Buber erected a crucial barrier between himself and objects in the world, a bone-railing which, if it was not to end up circling and ultimately fencing off Buber himself (and the rest of humanity) inside the dialogical pen of the It-world, then must (always) allow for the possibility of being leapt over by any It capable of seeking a You no longer capable of being God:

But a man’s relation to the “particular something” that arrogates the supreme throne of his life’s values, pushing eternity aside, is always directed toward the experience and use of an It, a thing, an object of enjoyment. For only this kind of relation can bar the view to God, by interposing the impenetrable It-world;[xviii]

Experienced as an empirical realist might experience an encounter between an I and It (subject and object) is not to split (further) apart the world of appearance from the world as it is ‘in itself’, no, Buber is not saying this at all; he believed he was offering philosophy a new language, and if not that, at least a new ‘type’ of dualism between the It-world in time and space and the You-world on the other side of relation (the You that becomes an It again once the ‘event of relation’ has run its course); that said, this is only to differentiate an I from an It when the nearest You begins to enter the dialogue. Schopenhauer believed that while we are basically thinking knowing minds (with the appendage of a body, objectified by the will), what we are not is what George Berkeley thought: finite spirits, of which in the world as it is in itself, the “idea” of the body has been left out. Buber, on the other hand, felt that not even Kant’s a priori and ‘unknowable’ (by humans) realm can be known by God, and so in fact makes God there unreal, unactualized, deciding that the only thing that happens for God in this world is encounter; for not until God’s You has first attained the dramatic new reality gained by the I-You relation can God himself be treated as an ever-available deity and company for every It in the world; but Buber, being no traditional Christian apologist, could only do this by contemplating objects that could never be God; thus he pictured God by making of him the most anti-anthropomorphic ‘object’ in the universe, and by ‘pushing eternity aside’ in the hope that, one day, he might shed the chrysalis of the final object in God’s way, so as if to stop himself being

always directed toward the experience and use of an It, a thing, an object of enjoyment. For only this kind of relation can bar the view to God, by interposing the impenetrable it-world[xix]

To reach the You in this world is not necessarily to escape this world, rather the only task for the relation of I to You is to stop God being a presence in this realm; but does this mean that God must likewise stop being a being? This is the bold claim made by Buber, that if we are silent towards God and he towards us, then it is not God or us that must be altered, but being itself; so that we might then also say that the cost to man in failing to enter into a real relation with God has no consequences for religion whatsoever; and that what, in God’s mind (for the duration that it takes relation to run its course), resides in a state of non-being is not his You trapped still in the It-world, but only what we perceive of God when our thought begins to break down the ontological argument into what it was before mankind, i.e. unrelated data, telepathy, self-erected rationality, in short, God, unfought-for and unthought-of, a deity unable to either a) think himself into reality or b) separate himself from it.

To never be an object is not the same of course as man hoping that God might be one, yet for Buber it was impossible to conceive of God as either existing or not existing, or at least impossible to conceive until the I has become eternalized by a You (man by God); if Buber’s distinction, ontologically, sounds too simple, then it is only because the distance travelled between the I and the You is not an earthly one, but rather only what of the soul has been best developed by the relational course run between heaven and Earth; for as William James said ‘the man must die to an unreal life before he can be born into a real life’,[xx] and in light of what Heidegger thought, that nothing is closer to us than Being, Buber’s distinction between the It-world and the You-world has nothing to do with Being at all, but simply is what can be better understood by loving (with the whole self) the nearness of what’s far:

I know nothing of a ‘world’ and of ‘worldy life’ that separate us from God. What is designated that way is life with an alienated It-world, the life of experience and use. Whoever goes forth in truth to the world, goes forth to God. Concentration and going forth, both in truth, the one-and-the-other which is the One, are what is needful. [xxi]

After all, God is as far as near is to us when attempting to break down the conceived distance between material reality and a deity’s; thus to understand what God means to Buber is to understand what gestation means to God, he who, has never carried anything within himself (apart from man’s eternally miscarried foetus) . Neither anthropological or religious, Buber’s vision, (mostly) unacknowledged by both Heideggerians and Kantians alike, partakes in truth in one thing: the tragic sense of the heart, the heart that endures the fleeting approach and withdrawal of what the heart loves most, God. And while Buber maintains that nothing exists that cannot become a You, he acknowledges that those in relation to something outside themselves can never truly feel in a human sense everlasting; for who can assert that what they believe will ever be what they feel, or better, see? only angels. So if God is to be drawn and withdrawn into and out of the world, he must carry underarm the relational It-mannequin of our bodies, but only for the period in which each It exterior to us is loving the mannequin more. When an address to God fails, man drops back into the It-wilderness, naked but for the cosmological You-caul that clings and flaps still like cellophane about him, as, for the time that it takes It to become You and It again, the encounter, unable to be made absolute by dialogue, remains an imperfect womb failing to deliver God, that is for the time that it takes for each encounter to run its relational course from I to You in this world. When Buber speaks to God, he doesn’t speak, rather he names what God is representing, he unfolds and seeks presentness where there is no longer any difference between validity and identity; in short, Buber wants anything in the way of God to decompose, and if it refuses to decompose, then it must be loved.

It does seem at times as if Buber has become a biologist of the bacteria of God, for he notices evidence of God in every nook and cranny of existence; thus we witness every last oozing, every last moss-like inching of God back and forth across the planet; dialogue and its duration are, by all accounts, the only time-zone in which Buber aged at all, for where speech is God can be found gathering words, speaking himself into banishing what cannot be restored by simply being called ‘holy’; likewise every tree, rock, animal or human exist in relation to Buber’s God only when language itself allows them to be gathered towards it. Buber’s diagnosis of the alienation of all God-lapsed objects in the world is both the symptom and corrective of God’s fallenness, for what God is is precisely what he is when language approaches him in dialogue, what Buber calls ‘perfect relation’ which can occur when language (‘unique in the history of philosophy’[xxii]) begins to return God to a world re-split by the twofold personal autonomy of relation and irrelation. When the I begins to doubt You, when man cannot believe in anything beyond ontic being, then he has no choice but to turn the erosion of his faith into the erosion of language, for the alternative is complete and utter immersion into atheism, that is into its language that fails eternally to persuade even itself; into the forever unintelligible purity of non-being, non-believing, or what an atheist might call the glory of transcendental passivity.

As long as you can say You to an It, then the twofold reality of Ich und Du can stand alone: an arch, under which all matter and appearance of matter crawl; for Buber’s theory of an eternal You speaks not just for those who address God in church, but to those who, having addressed God after all human dialogue and ritual has fallen away, no longer require body-parts, senses or even thought to understand what God is telling them. To insist on, but never quite complete a dialogue is, for Buber, the equivalent of not just a verbal death, but a sacramental one also; after all, only the deaf and dumb (muffled by whatever occurs in Heaven) seem capable of saying what Christ couldn’t on the cross; for every It pretending to love Christ on Golgotha was by God turned into a tongue-tied version of himself, a counter-truth to all that, until the resurrection, was meant to remain silent:

The You-sense of the man who in his relationships to all individual Yous experiences the disappointment of the change into It, aspires beyond all of them and yet not all the way toward his eternal You. [xxiii]

The surest means of not speaking to God is to, on the spot, do without him, but in words; hence the feeling when reading Buber that he is in fact something of a disguised nihilist who ponders each obstacle in God’s way in the same way that a prophet ponders every vision that is not a burning bush; for every not-quite Torah that un-scrolls from his speech feels not just something of a self-born voice born anew in the Jewish Tradition, but moreover a voice in which God himself (unspoken) has still not been elevated to the status of You; for what Buber’s faith feeds on is what feels lost to its origins, thus Buber tells us ‘the place of the sacred is not a house of God, no church, synagogue’ [xxiv]; that said, when Walter Kaufmann stated that Buber’s book ‘will survive theology’[xxv] it feels too easy to admit that he is correct, because everything, if it is worth anything at all, must survive theology. Resignation to an always becoming state of religionlessness was, for Buber, to address what, inside, felt still like a loss of God, or worse, a dissipation of his relationship with each You pretending to be God; all objects which, ontically, remain eternally independent of God, remain empty vessels for the (mistaken) duration between man’s You and God’s You, and only begin to fill again with Christ’s blood when hurried towards any true encounter. In God the I-You relation has already run its human course, yet Buber knew also that no I, a degenerate of It, can ever love what is still to become a You. After all, what remains trapped between the I and You is only, in truth, what resembled Christ on the cross, the not-yet fully bloomed Christ who, before the resurrection, could not yet separate petals from nails. Upon the cross, Christ , unable to express absolutely his love for God, was reduced to the ultimate and most horrifying state of any I since the beginning of time: an I abandoned to an It-world without Yous; a twofold existence that consisted of nothing, nothing that is but heaven or hell.

To be drawn into a relation with an It, which then by ceasing to remain an It, crawls incrementally towards the nearest You was the summation of what, in this world, Buber’s existence amounted to; for only when Christ was not wholly Christ nor God God, could Buber even begin to suggest that he was alive. When centuries before, men like Aquinas, St Augustine, Avicenna and Duns Scotus started to contaminate every It with reason, genus, species etc. the Christian had no choice but to become confused by whether God was a) Being b) essence or c) (when adding the definite article to him) the primary substance; for it was clear that such epistemological increments of faith would survive, for they survive in Buber, though only in the way that God’s foreknowledge of things becomes lost in this I-You dialogue. We are, in Buber’s work, occasionally reminded of Boethuis’ version of Being (in order to be absolute it has also to participate in something else) which pre-empted Buber’s It to You transference; yet whatever Buber needed each It to become in the world, one thing is clear, no It can ever be mentioned in Heaven. Only what awakens man back into the light can reach the subterranean and still hidden temperaments of those now wanting to breathe forever.

The subcutaneous effort to define the I was, for Buber, the only incremental path to God that he accepted as true love. But to behold the self is not to occupy the ego’s I, or occupy what can only ever be an apparition of knowing. That said, it cannot be denied that Buber, in all of his writing, confuses nearness of Being with God; indeed, the need to be eternally summoned, to be incrementally willed by God while disguised as an I, It, You, is always for Buber associated with the actuality of an always functional object, i.e. each object knows it will remain an It for as long as it is not God. In light of this, Buber never falls prey to loving his own mind. Consequently his philosophical and poetic ‘theory’ of the I-You dialogue remains inseparable (thankfully) from what his heart called God, hence when in dialogue with himself we hear him ask:

But what if a man’s mission requires him to know only his association with his cause and no real relation to any You, no present encounter with any You, so that everything around him becomes It and subservient to his cause?[xxvi]

Yet it is not the ego, or some adumbrated take on the ego that makes him ask this, no, it is his emotions, his thinking, his desire to understand what of the ego, after God, can be left if he himself fails to reach God’s You. Each You which on the final planet will most likely resemble an archway under which an enfilade of Its solemnly pass (hooded to hide their own Godless face?) while chanting collectively You, You, You... That said, God, if he is to achieve anything, must, in a psychological sense, continue to carry us as far from the ontic introspection and impurity of Buber’s own version of dialogical psychoanalysis as humanly possible, and by doing that, stop anthropological nearness from ever feigning (successfully) the far-awayness of God. That said, Buber could never be called a narcissus, far from it, but he was consumed by a narcissistic need to be nearly God; for how else can we explain the fact that for Buber the only realm in which God cannot inhabit is the one that must itself run its course before man can? we can’t, but Buber tries to:

The It-world hangs together in space and time.

The You-world does not hang together in space and time.

The Individual You must become an It when the event of relation has run its course.

The Individual It can become a You by entering into the event of relation.[xxvii]

Romanticism as a model for worship, which Buber sought (mostly) to demolish, is largely what ensures that his writing will last, and why he himself in us will continue to be present. Doubts can only be cast upon his work, and his dialogical ‘theory’ rejected, if we as seekers of God persist in accepting obstacles on the path to God as signposts, rather than what they actually are: tombstones. Consequently, Buber, a lover of God, is quick to warn us that the journey from each (first) tentative finite I to each (final?) infinite You is Herculean; is indeed fraught with quite necessary difficulty, and must not at any cost be avoided, lest, as Kierkegaard informs us, man ‘in reality’ ends up being no more than ‘a sort of marionette, very deceptively imitating everything human’[xxviii]; for if man is not human, then no encounter can be real, and as Buber constantly reminds us, there would then be no easy route to that eternal You:

Nothing of anything that has been contrived or devised through the ages of the human spirit by way of instruction, preparation, training or meditation has to do with the most simple fact of encounter[xxix]

Only when speech has come to an end, can God’s silence begin to turn down the dials of all human noise that gets in the way of hearing him; So if we reach It simply by saying You, and likewise depart God by not saying it, is it acceptable then to ask whether Buber prefers the ‘relational’ duration of an It believed in, rather than a You not so? Yes, for the simple reason that the security of being drawn inwards by an It, proved for Buber more of a You than the instability of a You never meant to (eternally) give up its It-ness. In light of this, one thing we can say for sure about Buber is that his work does have the air of the visionary about it, in his explanations of the shadowy aspects of a world blocked-off and denied transcendence; for a world eclipsed by God and his light must also be spiritually blinded. But a world in which man’s only way forward is by negation, means that his sole objective cannot be, as you might expect, to reach the You of God, but rather whatever inside him (throughout dialogue) abhors the idolizing of his own I. Nothing inside Buber assumed a more calamitous, transcendental and infinitely more profound aspect then when he was addressing what, inside God, he himself was not. And so near the end of the book I and Thou, we find Buber informing us (admittedly in euphoria, not rejection) that

The concept of personhood is, of course, utterly incapable of describing the nature of God, but it is permitted and necessary to say that God is also a person...

Thus, by pretending to add a third attribute to Spinoza’s two[xxx], which he (for himself?) called ‘personlikeness’, Buber assented to his original assertion that it is only what of God we ourselves can personalize and make less human in eternity that will enable us to reach those most anti-anthropomorphic aspects of God that are not in fact just God, but also what, for the duration of each ungraspable encounter, is in fact man dressed up in the disguise of a chrysalis of God. And it is this assertion, without the denial of what each You is not, that Buber (a lifetime condensed into a single drop of God) sought continually to address, address and direct his own imperishable voice towards.

Paul Stubbs

October 2019

[i] Martin Buber, I and Thou, A new translation by Walter Kaufmann (Simon & Schuster, 1970).

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] Ibid.

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] Ibid.

[viii] Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil (WM. B. EERDMANS Publishing, 1977).

[ix] Martin Buber, I and Thou.

[x] George Steiner, Heidegger, (Fontana Modern Masters, 1989).

[xi] Martin Buber, I and Thou.

[xii] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, (Penguin Classics, 2016).

[xiii] Martin Buber, Eclipse Of God, Studies in the Relation Between Religion and Philosophy (Humanity Books, 1996).

[xiv] Martin Buber, I and Thou.

[xv] Ibid.

[xvi] Ibid.

[xvii] Ibid.

[xviii] Ibid.

[xix] Ibid.

[xx] William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Penguin Classics, 1985).

[xxi] Martin Buber, I and Thou.

[xxii] Ibid.

[xxiii] Ibid.

[xxiv] Ibid.

[xxv] Ibid.

[xxvi] Ibid.

[xxvii] Ibid.

[xxviii] Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Translated by David F. Swenson, (Princeton University Press, 1971).

[xxix] Martin Buber, I and Thou.

[xxx] Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), Jewish philosopher, posited the idea that God was one single and infinite substance, consisting of infinite attributes, but which we as humans are capable of knowing only two: ‘Extension’ and ‘Thought’.