Turning to the Other. Donovan D. Johnson

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СКАЧАТЬ a multivalent testament to Buber’s breakthrough. Each locates I and Thou in relation to a tradition, whether that of modern German social science, Taoism and the study of Taoism in the West, or Hasidism and the centrality of the zaddik figure in Hasidic tradition.

In one reading, Paul Mendes-Flohr locates I and Thou in the modern field of social science as the publication that inaugurated Buber’s philosophy of dialogue. Mendes-Flohr found Buber’s “‘romantic discontent’ with modernity” to be shared by many European intellectuals of Buber’s generation and limned out an affinity between Buber’s “celebration of I-Thou relations in the face of the insidious prevalence of I-It relationships and Tönnies’ romantic conception of Gemeinschaft [community]—characterized by relations of mutual trust and care.”19 For Mendes-Flohr, therefore, Buber’s philosophy of dialogue and his presentation of it in I and Thou amounts to “a grammar for the reconstruction of Gemeinschaft.”20

In a second reading, Jonathan R. Herman presents I and Thou as a product of Buber’s intense intercultural encounter with Chuang Tzu, “in a manner of speaking, the original dialogical philosopher some twenty-five hundred years ago.”21 Accordingly, Buber’s formulation of the I-Thou relation is “a culturally transplanted accretion to Taoist mysticism, an organic growth of Chuang Tzu’s philosophy in a new historical and spiritual context.”22 Herman’s radical conclusion is that I and Thou can be read as the presentation of “a profound transformation of self before the text of Chuang Tzu.”23

In The Hebrew Humanism of Martin Buber, first published in 1966, Grete Schaeder suggests a third reading when she puts the Hasidic tradition, and in particular the figure of the zaddik, at the core of Buber’s dialogical vision. She points out that Der Grosse Maggid (The Great Maggid, to date still untranslated), first published in 1921, was the direct product of Buber’s transitional years (1912–1919), and therefore it “occupies a central position among his works on Hasidism” and accordingly works as a kind of gloss on I and Thou.24

Beginning with Buber’s spiritual awakening at the age of twenty-six when he received “the calling to proclaim [the “perfect man,” the zaddik] to the world,”25 Buber’s life became more and more identified with the figure of the zaddik, the holy man who serves as leader of the Hasidic community. In “My Way to Hasidism” (1918), Buber traced the stages of “his gradual initiation into the being-tradition of the zaddik.”26 This initiation amounted to a “growing familiarity with the tradition of the zaddik from within.”27 This inner transformation lies at the core of I and Thou.

Schaeder sees Buber’s change during the war years (1912–1919) not as a break with his earlier views but rather as a change in his emphasis “from the power of the zaddik to his service.”28 To Schaeder, Buber’s misencounter with a young man who came to him for help in 1914 and its aftermath constituted a “shattering experience” which “finally placed Buber within the tradition of the zaddik.”29 Like the zaddiks who turned from “all esoteric knowledge, all ecstatic cleaving to God . . . to the daily involvement of [their] entire being, [their] being present for the sake of others,” Buber turned “from realization that remained conceptual and literary to the presentness of the entire person for the sake of others.”30 The new element that emerged during this process, the “turning,” marks Buber’s existential shift from “the realm of thought to the ‘realizing mode’”31 Schaeder then quotes Robert Weltsch, who completed Buber’s first biography, begun by Hans Kohn, to link Buber’s identification with the zaddik figure to the emergence of his dialogical philosophy: “The origin of Buber’s turning to dialogic thinking was at least partly in his immersion in the immediacy of Hasidic speech.”32

      Each of these three readings provides a very different context for understanding I and Thou, yet each in its own way presents a kind of transformation as the dynamic core of the work. Transformation is the issue and the outcome of Buber’s two periods of creative withdrawal, times of focusing inward which initiated him into the realm of the spirit and then later into the world of dialogue.

      3. Recovery

      If we work to approach Buber’s book as Thou, we can see it as a testament not to a doctrine but to Buber’s inner struggle which calls forth a new, deeper “I” within. For the book is much more than merely a philosophical statement—it is a white-hot distillation from the fire of Buber’s imagination when it burned most brightly. It is the product of an intense process of intellectual struggle and marks Buber’s breakthrough to a new level of resolution expressing this process, thereby functioning as a testament to Buber’s life’s work as a path-breaking thinker.

If I and Thou teaches us anything, it teaches us how to read—how to let the text before us become a Thou that confronts us so that “all talk about [the eternal Thou] is sacrificed to the voice that speaks to us.”33 Thus, if we take Buber as our teacher, we can develop an approach to the book that takes us beyond the packaged formulations to the nuances, the layers, the depth—the Presence—to which Buber points and invites us. I and Thou opens up the way to encounter “the Other”—and this includes text as well as person, cat, tree, or rock. Thus, I and Thou can teach us how to read I and Thou.

Steven Kepnes, in a study of Buber’s thinking entitled The Text as Thou, uses the language of hermeneutics to trace how a text can become a Thou.34 Yet Buber, using the compactness of poetic expression, presents just this transformative process within the heart of I and Thou. There he writes that we can learn to read a spiritual text (such as I and Thou) as “the word become life”—Buber’s struggle and potentially ours—and “life become teaching”—an image of “how life is lived in the spirit, in the presence of Thou.” As a testament to such a life lived in the spirit, the text stands before new readers “perpetually ready to become a Thou and thereby to open up the world of Thou once again—no, more than standing ready, it actually comes to them ever again and touches them” (§32h).

      4. Overview of this Book

      The chapters of this book amount to a series of forays into the world of Martin Buber and into the world presented to us by I and Thou. Taken together, these forays constitute a quest for understanding, which in dialogical terms is the quest for an adequate response to Buber’s call to dialogue.

      This introductory chapter has presented I and Thou as a spiritual treasure worthy of reclaiming from the cloud of familiarity that has reduced it to just another piece of cultural goods. Chapter 2 presents the two-part spiritual initiation of Martin Buber as the crucial development, the immediate context out of which I and Thou was created. The first was Buber’s spiritual awakening in response to the testament of the founder of Hasidism when Buber was a young man. The second phase of this spiritual initiation took place when Buber was struck by the loss of his friend at mid-life. His struggle to come to terms with that loss resulted in the breakthrough expressed in I and Thou.

      Chapter 3 lays out the nature of Buber’s message: he felt compelled to proclaim it; at the same time, he had to develop unique, original means to do so. Buber’s struggle with the depths in the face of his loss led him to develop these means, summed up in his metaphor of “pointing,” and in the rhetoric he developed to express his message in his construction of I and Thou.

      Chapter 4 presents I and Thou in the context of the relationships that punctuated Buber’s life, some of which are chronicled in his “Autobiographical Fragments.” The chapter begins with the early loss of his mother, which led to his concept of Vergegnung, “mismeeting,” and his subsequent relationships with his paternal grandmother and his wife, Paula. His spiritual initiation through reading the Testament of Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, the Baal-Shem-Tov, is linked to the influence of his paternal grandfather, Salomon Buber, a scholar of the Jewish Haskalah. Following on Buber’s great mismeeting with his mother, subsequent mismeetings, such as with the Rev. William Hechler and then with a youth named Mehe, became occasions for Buber’s further reflection and growth. Finally, Buber’s friendships with Gustav Landauer and Franz Rosenzweig, both fellow German Jewish intellectuals, became the major remaining СКАЧАТЬ