Turning to the Other. Donovan D. Johnson

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СКАЧАТЬ from inner feelings of utter isolation, even abandonment—such as Buber did following the loss of Landauer.131 At this time in his life, Buber did almost all of his work as a scholar and editor in the solitude of his study in his home in Heppenheim. Thus, his circumstances fostered the isolation which Ellenberger describes; yet at the same time, he continued to be engaged in the household with his wife Paula and their two children.

      Winokuer and Harris characterize the impact of loss in a way that fits the phases of the process of creative illness, which Ellenberger outlines thusly:

The trauma, shock, and anguish of a major loss assault an individual’s fundamental assumptions about the world. Meaning-making can result through reinterpretation of the negative events as opportunities to learn . . . about one’s self or life in general, as a means of helping others, or contributing to society in some way that is related to the experience that occurred.132

In relation to the survivor’s world view, the loss is an “assault on an individual’s fundamental assumptions.” This challenge to one’s basic assumptions necessitates the extremely difficult task of reworking one’s inner models of reality. It precipitates a new departure in the person’s search for meaning. According to Ellenberger, because the person struggles “in utter spiritual isolation and has the feeling that nobody can help him,” he must plunge into the unknown and figure out how to fathom the depths of the issue that grips him. Yet, throughout this process, he relentlessly pursues the thread of his dominant concern.133 In this way, Landauer’s death, coming when it did, shook Buber until it provoked him to deepen and reorient his thinking. Buber worked through the abyss that opened under him with his loss until he was able to reinterpret and reconstruct the blow into his emerging sense of dialogical reality. Thus, he struggled with his loss until he could make the loss into his opportunity to learn, and he thereby developed a deeper sense of the nature of dialogue. The drafting of I and Thou became the screen upon which he worked this out. In this way, the book became for him a means of helping others and contributing to society while giving him a new standing as a survivor of Landauer’s death.

According to Ellenberger, when a grieving person breaks through to a new level of understanding, he may experience this as his “liberation from a long period of suffering”; however, it is also an illumination. He becomes possessed by a new idea which he regards as a revelation.134 The breakthrough to a new level of insight becomes the turning point in the process and opens up a rapid return to involvement in the outer world.135

In late 1921, Buber struck up a friendship with Franz Rosenzweig, who was his equal as a German-Jewish thinker, although eight years his junior. Rosenzweig invited Buber to deliver a series of lectures at the Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus, the Independent Jewish Study Center, in Frankfurt, and Buber surprised himself by accepting the opportunity. Accordingly, Buber prepared and delivered eight lectures on “Religion as Presence” in the winter of 1922. The focus and coherence required for this effort gave him the necessary language that catapulted him into composing the final version of I and Thou that spring. As Buber stated in the postscript to I and Thou, “Then when I achieved the appropriate language with which to express the vision, I was free to write it down in its final form.”136 Buber later claimed he was in an exalted state of mind when he wrote the final draft of I and Thou: “At that time I wrote what I wrote in an overpowering inspiration. And what such inspiration delivers to one, one may no longer change, not even for the sake of exactness.”137

Ellenberger points out that because the person has undergone such an intense spiritual adventure, he “attributes a universal value to his own personal experience”: he takes what he has learned through his own lived experience as a great truth of universal value which must be proclaimed to mankind.138 Like others who have undergone a period of creative withdrawal, Buber claims that the principle of dialogue as ontological is universal by nature:

In all ages, it has clearly been intuited that the reciprocal essential relation between two beings signifies a primal opening of Being. . . . And it has repeatedly been intuited that when one steps into essential reciprocity, the human being becomes revealed as human. That is, in this way he arrives at the authentic participation in Being that lies in store for him and that therefore the saying of Thou by the I stands at the origin of all individual human becoming.139

Only when he was finishing the third and last part of I and Thou in the spring of 1922 was Buber able to break out of his constricted focus, his “ascesis of reading.” It was then he began to see “the almost uncanny similarity with which people of the time, in spite of diverse styles and traditions, had set off on comparable quests for the buried treasure of dialogical thinking.”140 His own “quest for the buried treasure” had been his period of withdrawal and ascesis which made possible his book, I and Thou.

I had known precursors such as Feuerbach and Kierke­gaard in my student days . . . Now a growing number of people in the present generation surrounded me who to varying degrees were focused on the one thing that had ever more become my “life-theme.” I already had a sense of this in the distinction between a reifying stance and a making present in Daniel in 1913 which was the seed of the distinction between I-It and I-Thou in I and Thou. The latter was no longer grounded in the realm of subjectivity but in “the between.” This is the decisive transformation that came to fullness for a number of thinkers during the period around the First World War. The commonality of our thinking emerged out of the fundamental shift in the human situation of that era.141

      With this account, Buber put his own transformation in the context of a larger, emerging cultural pattern, that brought about by the universal change of circumstances resulting from the First World War.

Ellenberger points out that, as a result of the person’s solitary struggle to understand, he has won a boon to share with humanity: he “is convinced that he has gained access to a new spiritual world, or that he has attained a new spiritual truth . . . a universal truth . . . that he will reveal to the world.”142 In the process he has been transformed through a deep-reaching metamorphosis: he has become the person who can and must do the work of disseminating the gift, the key concept he has uncovered. The discovery becomes the basis of his life’s work, for his task becomes to explain and elaborate the vision that has come to him.143 Like others who had undergone a period of creative withdrawal, Buber returned from it with a new book, I and Thou, and a new basis for his further work, the work of elaborating his hard-won vision. Some time after completing I and Thou, Buber stated “it became clear that much was needed to complete the picture but that that work had to find its own place and form. As a result, I wrote a number of shorter pieces” to clarify and develop the breakthrough vision expressed in I and Thou. “Later, further material, whether anthropological foundations or sociological consequences, came to me as well.”144

In Ellenberger’s history of the unconscious, Freud and Jung were two of those who, as the outcome of such a process, produced the breakthrough books that became the foundations of their mature theories and made possible their contributions to human advancement. As persons who have undergone a creative illness, an initiatory period without a guide or mentor, such persons become pathfinders who lay down means for others to pursue a similar path.145

For a time Buber considered making the following words the motto of I and Thou, showing that he saw the book as the distillation and manifesto of his newly emerging vision and as the foundation for his continuing work: “This book presents the beginning of a way that I intend to continue in and in which I intend to lead others.”146 Buber’s use of the word “Weg,” way or path, here emphasizes the existential, concrete, lived quality of his work as witness, as opposed to the abstractness of a merely conceptual-discursive philosophical construct.

      Thus, Buber underwent a period of creative withdrawal, characterized by both the preoccupation and the breakthrough Ellenberger described, which was the process that led to I and Thou. For Buber, the death of his closest friend, Gustav Landauer, precipitated this period.

      5. Spiritual Initiation: Transmission of the Transcendent

In a late СКАЧАТЬ