by Maurice Friedman1
When Dag Hammarskjöld’s plane crashed in Northern Rhodesia, the Secretary General of the United Nations had with him the manuscript of a translation that he was making of Martin Buber’s classic work I and Thou. It is because of this book and the philosophy of dialogue that it presents that Dag Hammarskjöld repeatedly nominated Martin Buber for a Nobel Prize in literature. I and Thou is recognized today as among the handful of writings that the twentieth century will bequeath to the centuries to come, but for many readers this compact and poetic little book needs an introduction to be properly understood and applications to concrete fields of human experience to be properly appreciated. More than any other work of Buber’s, Between Man and Man provides this introduction and these applications. The opening essay on “Dialogue,” in particular, with its contrast between “dialogue” and “monologue” and its personal anecdotes, represents the best introduction to Buber’s philosophy of dialogue, while the other essays in this volume show its applications for such concerns as religious ethics, politics, social philosophy, marriage, education, psychology, art, the development of character, and philosophical anthropology, or the study of the problem of man.
In his Foreword to Between Man and Man, Martin Buber states that the five works brought together in this volume fill out and apply what was said in I and Thou. “Dialogue” clarifies the “dialogical” principle presented in I and Thou, illustrates it, and makes “precise its relation to essential spheres of life.” The terminology and scope of I and Thou are different from those of “Dialogue,” however. In I and Thou, Buber contrasts man’s two primary attitudes— the two ways in which he approaches existence. One of these is the “I-Thou” relationship, the other the “I-It.” The difference between these two relationships is not the nature of the object to which one relates, as is often thought. Not every relation between persons is an I-Thou one, nor is every relation with an animal or thing an I-It. The difference, rather, is in the relationship itself. I-Thou is a relationship of openness, directness, mutuality, and presence. It may be between man and man, but it may also take place with a tree, a cat, a fragment of mica, a work of art—and through all of these with God, the “eternal Thou” in whom the parallel lines of relations meet. I-It, in contrast, is the typical subject-object relationship in which one knows and uses other persons or things without allowing them to exist for oneself in their uniqueness: The tree that I meet is not a Thou before I meet it. It harbors no hidden personality that winks at me as I pass by. Yet if I meet it in its uniqueness, letting it have its impact on me without comparing it with other trees or analyzing the type of leaf or wood or calculating the amount of firewood I may get out of it, then I may speak of an I-Thou relationship with it. The person that I meet is, by courtesy of our language and our attitudes, a “person” before I meet him. But he is not yet a Thou for me until I step into elemental relationship with him, and if I do not step into this relationship, even the politest forms of address do not prevent his remaining for me an It. I cannot, of course, produce an I-Thou relationship by my own action and will, for it is really mutual only when the other comes to meet me as I him. But I can prevent such a relationship from coming into being if I am not ready to respond or if I attempt to respond with anything less than my whole being insofar as my resources in this particular situation allow.
I-Thou and I-It stand in fruitful and necessary alternation with each other. Man cannot will to persevere in the I-Thou relationship. He can only desire again and again to bring the indirectness of the world of It into the directness of the meeting with the Thou and thereby give the world of It meaning. So long as this alternation continues, man’s existence is authentic. When the It swells up and blocks the return to the Thou, then man’s existence becomes unhealthy, his personal and social life inauthentic. This applies equally to the contrast between “dialogue” and “monologue” that Buber makes in “Dialogue.” However, here the concern is basically the relationship between man and man and, only insofar as the term is extended to art, the relationship between the human and the nonhuman.
In defining “dialogue,” Buber introduces a concept that exists only implicitly in I and Thou, that of “experiencing the other side” of the relationship. This act of “inclusion,” as Buber calls it in “Education,” is that which makes it possible to meet and know the other in his concrete uniqueness and not just as a content of one’s experience. In “technical dialogue,” of course, no such experiencing of the other side takes place, since here the concern is only with what is communicated and not with the partners in the dialogue themselves. Still less is there “inclusion” in “monologue disguised as dialogue,” that absolutization of oneself and relativization of the other that makes so much conversation between men into what Buber, in a later essay, calls “speechifying.” The mark of contemporary man is that he does not really listen, says Buber. Only when one really listens—when one becomes personally aware of the “signs of address” that address one not only in the words of but in the very meeting with the other—does one attain to that sphere of the “between” that Buber holds to be the “really real.”
“All real living is meeting,” says Buber in I and Thou, and Between Man and Man again and again points to this seemingly evanescent sphere of the “between” as ontological reality. To say that “all real living is meeting” is not to say that one leaves one’s ground in order to meet the other or that one lets oneself get swallowed up in the crowd and trades in one’s individuality for a social role. “In the graciousness of its comings and the solemn sadness of its goings”—gracious because one cannot will both sides of the dialogue and sad because every I-Thou relationship must inevitably turn into an It, while the It need not become a Thou—the I-Thou relationship “teaches us to meet others and to hold our ground when we meet them.” This means that experiencing the other side, or, as Buber later calls it, “imagining the real,” goes hand in hand with remaining on one’s own side of the relationship. Therefore, even the imaginative experiencing of the blow that I give to the other or of the pleasure that the other’s skin feels beneath my caress must not be confused with “empathy,” in which I give up my own ground for a purely aesthetic identification. Also, as Buber points out in “Education” and further develops in his “Postscript” to the second edition of I and Thou, in the helping relationships—those of teacher and pupil, parent and child, doctor and patient, minister and parishioner—this experiencing of the other side cannot be expected to be mutual without destroying the relationship or converting it into friendship.
It is this emphasis upon the ontological reality of the “between” and upon the possibility of experiencing the other side of the relationship that distinguishes Buber from such existentialists as Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre, and even Tillich. “The Question to the Single One” makes clear a fundamental critique of the existentialism of Kierkegaard, who posits an exclusive I-Thou relationship between the “Single One” and God and leaves the relationship between man and man secondary and inessential. But in “What Is Man?” Buber shows that even Martin Heidegger, for all his emphasis upon solicitude and upon Dasein ist Mitsein (being-there-in-the-world as being-with-others), does not reach the ground of genuine dialogue. In fact, as I make clear in the “Inter-subjectivity” section of The Worlds of Existentialism, the concern of thinkers like Sartre and Heidegger with “intersubjectivity” does not imply the I-Thou relationship, for many interpersonal, intersubjective relations remain fundamentally I-It. One need only contrast Sartre’s attitude toward love in Being and Nothingness with Buber’s attitude toward love in “Dialogue,” “The Question to the Single One,” and “Education” to recognize how Sartre limits human relationships a priori to my knowing the other as subject only when he knows me as object or, at best, to my recognizing his freedom only as a freedom that I wish to possess and dominate by my own freedom through seducing him to incarnate his freedom in his body. Buber, in contrast, sees love as precisely the recognition of the other’s freedom, the fullness of a dialogue in which I turn to my beloved in his otherness, independence, and self-reality with all the power of intention of my own heart. It is this recognition that makes Buber the leading representative of those existentialists, such as Gabriel Marcel, Albert Camus, Karl Jaspers, and Franz Rosenzweig, who see dialogue, communication, and the I-Thou relationship not as a dimension of the self but as the existential and ontological reality in which the self comes into being and through which it fulfills and authenticates itself.2
But what is the reader to make of the fact that Buber extends the I-Thou relationship from the meeting with man, nature, and art to that with God? Can creation’s “signs of address” really be compared with the conscious address made to me by my fellowman? Yes, if the concept of dialogue is properly understood. Dialogue is not merely the interchange of words—genuine dialogue can take place in silence, whereas much conversation is really monologue. It is, rather, the response of one’s whole being to the otherness of the other, that otherness that is comprehended only when I open myself to him in the present and in the concrete situation and respond to his need even when he himself is not aware that he is addressing me. The God that speaks here is the God one meets only when one has put aside everything one thinks one knows of God and is plunged into the darkness, when the “moment Gods” fuse into the “Lord of the Voice.” This “Lord of the Voice” does not speak to us apart from creation but right through it. Woman may be the “temptation to finitude,” as Kierkegaard thought when he sacrificed his fiancée Regina Olsen to God, but the road to God is through “fulfilled finitude.” “The Regina Olsens of this world are not the hurdles on the road to God. They are the road.” Marriage is the “exemplary bond” through which we touch on the real otherness of the other and learn to understand his truth and untruth, his justice and injustice. Each man’s shortest road to God is the longest available to him— the creation in which he is set and with which he has to do.
God is not met by turning away from the world or by making God into an object of contemplation, a “being” whose existence can be proved and whose attributes can be demonstrated. God is met only as Thou. As I know the person of the other only in dialogue with him, I know God only in dialogue. But this is the dialogue that goes on moment by moment in each new situation, the dialogue that makes my ethical “ought” a matter of real response with no preparation other than my readiness to respond with my whole being to the unforeseen and the unique. I can know neither God nor moral values as transcendent realities knowable in themselves apart from the dialogue in which I meet God and discover values. For this reason, Buber is best understood not as a theologian—he has no theological assumptions or dogmas on which to build—or even as a philosopher of religion, but as a philosophical anthropologist, an investigator of the problem of man.3
It is as a philosophical anthropologist that Buber approaches I and Thou. He is concerned there not with deducing man’s place from some over-all concept of being or the cosmos but with that twofold attitude that makes man man. Man becomes man with the other self. He would not be man at all without the I-Thou relationship. And man becomes more fully human through moving from the separateness of the man who is no longer a child to the mature I-Thou relationship. Similarly, in the works in Between Man and Man, the genuineness of man’s existence is seen as dependent upon his bringing all his separate spheres of activity into “the life of dialogue,” a life in which one does not necessarily have much to do with others but really has to do with those with whom one has to do. In “The Question to the Single One,” man is recognized as the one creature who has potentiality, the potentiality of each man to realize that unique direction and task that only he can. “When I get to heaven,” said the Hasidic rabbi Susya shortly before his death, “they will not ask me, ‘Why were you not Moses?’ but ‘Why were you not Susya?’ ” Why did you not become what only you could become? This is the existential guilt that comes when one realizes one’s vocation and fails to respond to it.
The true teacher is not the one who pours information into the student’s head as through a funnel—the old-fashioned “disciplined” approach—or the one who regards all potentialities as already existing within the student and needing only to be pumped up—the newer “progressive” approach. It is the one who fosters genuine mutual contact and mutual trust, who experiences the other side of the relationship, and who helps his pupils realize, through the selection of the effective world, what it can mean to be a man. In the end education, too, centers on the problem of man. All education worthy of the name is education of character, writes Buber, and education of character takes place through the encounter with the image of man that the teacher brings before the pupil in the material he presents and in the way he stands behind this material.
“What Is Man?” is the culmination of the philosophical anthropology of I and Thou and the earlier works in Between Man and Man. Here the problem of man is dealt with historically and analytically. The ages when man is at home in the cosmos are set in contrast to those when he is not at home, those when he becomes a problem to himself. Our age is seen as the most homeless of all because of the loss of both an image of the world—modern physics can offer us only alternative equations—and a sense of community. The split between instinct and spirit that Freud and Max Scheler take to be the nature of man is actually the product of the decline of trust in communal existence, of the divorce between man and man. The real problem is not the conflict between the individual and the society but is the individualism or collectivism that in equal and opposite ways destroys the true life of dialogue. Man is neither a gorilla nor a termite. He is a creature of the “between,” of the happening between man and man that cannot be reduced to a sum of two individuals or to a merely psychological reality within the minds of each.
“What Is Man?” also lays the groundwork for the last important stage of Buber’s philosophy, his systematic development of his philosophical anthropology in The Knowledge of Man.4 The essays in this volume—“Distance and Relation,” “Elements of the Interhuman,” “What Is Common to All,” “Guilt and Guilt Feelings,” “The Word That Is Spoken,” “Man and His ImageWork,” and “The Dialogue Between Martin Buber and Carl Rogers”—represent a new development in Buber’s thought, and their significance can hardly be overestimated. They bring Buber within the ranks of “technical philosophers,” in the strictest sense of that term, and they show in all fullness and concreteness the implications of Buber’s anthropology for theories of knowledge, social philosophy, language and speech, art, education, and psychotherapy. Yet they would be unthinkable without the method of the philosophical anthropologist that Buber has developed in “What Is Man?”: the participation of the knower in that which is known, the recollection of the whole event as opposed to the psychologist’s attempt to observe his own experience as it is happening, the toleration of the strictness of solitude and aloneness as well as of the belonging to groups in which one still retains a boundary line of personal responsibility.
Between Man and Man is itself a classic, one whose reissuing has long been demanded. Walter Kaufmann makes central use of Buber’s essay “The Question to the Single One” in his study of Nietzsche, and William Barrett acknowledges in The Irrational Man that Buber has put his finger on the weakness of Barrett’s own master, Martin Heidegger, in the criticism of the latter in “What Is Man?” Aristotle, Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Scheler, Freud, Augustine, Pascal, and a host of other thinkers of the present and the past are encountered and brought within the focus of Buber’s developing dialogical thought in the five works in Between Man and Man. This new edition of Between Man and Man contains an Afterword on “The History of the Dialogical Principle.” In it Buber presents the first account in English of the development of the I-Thou philosophy from the eighteenth-century philosopher Jacobi and the nineteenth-century writers Feuerbach and Kierkegaard to such eminent thinkers of the twentieth century as Gabriel Marcel, Karl Löwith, Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Ferdinand Ebner, Karl Jaspers, and Karl Barth. This Afterword adds richly to the understanding of Buber’s own thought and of the central place he holds in the ever-broadening movement of thought in our age that is concerned with the life of dialogue.
1 Author of the comprehensive study Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960).
2 Cf. The Worlds of Existentialism: A Critical Reader, edited and with Introductions and a Conclusion by Maurice Friedman (New York: Random House, 1964), Part IV: Intersubjectivity and pp. 535–44 of Part VII: Issues and Conclusions.
3 Buber himself makes this point in all explicitness in his “Replies to My Critics,” translated by Maurice Friedman, in The Philosophy of Martin Buber volume of The Library of Living Philosophers series, edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp and Maurice Friedman (La Salle, Ill.: The Open Court Publishing Co., 1965).
4 Martin Buber, The Knowledge of Man, edited with an Introductory Essay by Maurice Friedman, translated by Maurice Friedman and Ronald Gregor Smith (London: George Allen & Unwin; New York: Harper & Row, 1965).