## 1. Biographical Background




The setting of Buber's early childhood was late-nineteenth-century Vienna, then still the
cosmopolitan capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a multiethnic
conglomerate whose eventual demise (in the First World War) effectively
ended the millennial rule of Catholic princes in Europe.
*Fin-de-siecle* Vienna was the home of light opera and
heavy neo-romantic music, French-style boulevard comedy and social
realism, sexual repression and deviance, political intrigue and vibrant
journalism, a cultural cauldron aptly captured in Robert Musil's
*The Man Without Qualities* (*Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften,*
1930-1932).




Buber's parents, Carl Buber and Elise nee Wurgast, separated
when Martin was four years old. For the next ten years, he lived with
his paternal grandparents, Solomon and Adele Buber, in Lemberg (now:
Lviv/Ukraine) who were part of what one might call the landed Jewish
aristocracy. Solomon, a "master of the old Haskala" 
("*[ein] ... Meister der alten Haskala*"; 
Buber 1906b, Dedication) who called himself 
"a Pole of the Mosaic persuasion"
(Friedman [1981] p. 11), produced the first modern editions of rabbinic
midrash literature yet was also greatly respected in the traditional
Jewish community. His reputation opened the doors for Martin when he
began to show interest in Zionism and Hasidic literature. The wealth of
his grandparents was built on the Galician estate managed by Adele and
enhanced by Solomon through mining, banking, and commerce. It provided
Martin with financial security until the German occupation of Poland in
1939, when their estate was expropriated. Home-schooled and pampered by
his grandmother, Buber was a bookish aesthete with few friends his age,
whose major diversion was the play of the imagination. He easily
absorbed local languages (Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, German) and acquired
others (Greek, Latin, French, Italian, English). German was the
dominant language at home, while the language of instruction at the
Franz Joseph Gymnasium was Polish. This multilingualism nourished
Buber's life-long interest in language.




Among the young Buber's first publications are essays on, and
translations into Polish of, the poetry of Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo
von Hofmannsthal. Buber's literary voice may be best understood as
probingly personal while seeking communication with others, forging a
path between East and West, Judaism and Humanism, national
particularity and universal spirit. His deliberate and perhaps somewhat
precious diction was nourished by the contrasts between the German
classics he read at home and the fervently religious to mildly secular
Galician Jewish jargon he encountered on the outside. Reentering the
urban society of Vienna, Buber encountered a world brimming with
Austrian imperial tradition as well as Germanic pragmatism, where
radical new approaches to psychology and philosophy were being
developed. This was a place where solutions to the burning social and
political issues of city, nation, and empire were often expressed
in grandly theatrical oratory (Karl Lueger) and in the aestheticizing
rhetoric of self-inscenation (Theodor Herzl). As a student of art
history, German literature, and psychology in Vienna, Leipzig,
Zurich, and Berlin, Buber made himself at home in a bohemian world
of letters.




From 1900 to 1916, Buber and his life-partner, the author Paula
Winkler (1877-1958; pen-name: Georg Munk), moved to Berlin where they
befriended the anarchist Gustav Landauer (1870-1919) and attended the
salon of the Hart brothers, an epicenter of *Jugendstil*
aesthetics. Early on in this period Buber was active in the Zionist
movement of Theodor Herzl, who recruited him as the editor of his
journal *Die Welt.* In 1904, the year Herzl died, Buber finished
his dissertation on the problem of individuation in Nicholas of Cusa
and Jakob Boehme and he took a position as literary editor for Ruetten
& Loening, a publishing house whose mid-nineteenth century Jewish
founders (Rindskopf and Lowental) had made a fortune with the
perennially best-selling *Struwwelpeter*, a politically
incorrect book of drawings about ill-behaved children (Wurm, 1994). At
the beginning of the century, the publisher was looking to move beyond
the gilded editions of Goethe and Schiller that they were publishing at the
time. Buber became their agent of modernization. One of the first books
Buber placed here was his retelling of the stories of Rabbi Nachman,
one of the great figures of Eastern European Hasidism. The flagship
publication edited by Buber was an ambitious forty-volume series of
social studies, titled *Die Gesellschaft*, that appeared between
1906 and 1912. As editor, Buber recruited and corresponded with many of the leading minds of his time.




In 1916, Martin and Paula moved to Heppenheim/Bergstrasse, half-way
between Frankfurt/Main and Heidelberg. At that time, his friend Gustav
Landauer severely criticized Buber's enthusiasm for the salutary
effect that, as Buber saw it, the war was having on a hitherto
fragmented society (*Gesellschaft),* transforming it into a
national community (*Gemeinschaft*). Buber later claimed that it
was at this time that he began to draft the book that was to become
*I and Thou*. In Frankfurt, Buber met Franz Rosenzweig
(1886-1929) with whom he was to develop a close intellectual
companionship. In the early nineteen twenties, Rosenzweig recruited
Buber as a lecturer for his unaffiliated ("free") Jewish
adult education center (*Freies judisches Lehrhaus*) and he
managed Buber's appointment as university lecturer in Jewish
religious studies and ethics, a position endowed by a Jewish community
that initially opposed Buber as too radical. Rosenzweig also became
Buber's chief collaborator in the project, initiated by the young
Christian publisher Lambert Schneider, to produce a new translation of
the Bible into German, a project he continued after Rosenzweig's
death. Dismissed by the Nazis from the university in 1933, Buber served
as the architect of German Jewish teacher re-education through the
so-called *Mittelstelle fur judische
Erwachsenenbildung* (Simon, 1959). In 1937 Buber received a
long-coveted call to teach at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (officially founded in 1925), an institution whose creation he had promoted since 1902 and that he 
represented as a member of its board of overseers. In Jerusalem, Buber
returned to the field of social philosophy, an academic appointment the
university administration wrested from a faculty that deemed the
"Schriftsteller Dr. Martin Buber" neither a genuine scholar of religion nor sufficiently educated as a specialist in Jewish
studies. World-famous in his later years, Buber traveled and lectured
extensively in Europe and the United States.




Buber's wide range of interests, his literary abilities, and the
general appeal of his philosophical orientation are reflected in the
far-flung correspondence he conducted over the course of his long
life. As the editor of *Die Gesellschaft*, Buber corresponded
with Georg Simmel, Franz Oppenheimer, Ellen Key, Lou
Andreas-Salome, Werner Sombart, and many other academics and
intellectuals. Among the poets of his time with whom he exchanged
letters were Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Hermann Hesse, and Stefan
Zweig. He was particularly close to the socialist and Zionist novelist
Arnold Zweig. With poet Chaim Nachman Bialik and the later Nobel
laureate Sh. Y. Agnon Buber shared a deep interest in the revival of
Hebrew literature. He published the works of the Jewish Nietzschean
story-teller Micha Josef Berdiczewsky. He was a major inspiration to
the young Zionist cadre of Prague Jews (Hugo Bergmann, Max Brod,
Robert Weltsch), and the Jewish
adult education system he organized under the Nazis inadvertently provided a last bastion
for the free exchange of ideas for non-Jews as well. Buber's name is
intimately linked with that of Franz Rosenzweig and his circle (Eugen
Rosenstock-Huessy, Hans Ehrenberg, Rudolf Ehrenberg, Viktor von
Weizsacker, Ernst Michel, etc.), an association that manifested
itself, among others, in the journal *Die Kreatur*
(1926-29). The journal *Der Jude,* founded and edited by
Buber from 1916 until 1924, and several editions of his speeches on
Judaism made Buber a central figure of the Jewish cultural
renaissance of the early twentieth century. Buber's work awakened
many young intellectuals from highly assimilated families, such as Ernst Simon, to the possibility of embracing Judaism as a living faith. Others, among them Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem, and Leo Strauss, developed their scholarly and philosophical agendas in critical appreciation of Buber without giving in to the seductions of "Buberism." Buber
counted among his friends and admirers Christian theologians such as
Karl Heim, Friedrich Gogarten, Albert Schweitzer, and Leonard
Ragaz. His philosophy of dialogue entered into the discourse of
psychoanalysis through the work of Hans Trub, and is today among
the most popular approaches to educational theory in German-language
studies of pedagogy.


## 2. Philosophical Influences




Among Buber's early philosophical influences were Kant's
*Prolegomena**,* which he read at the age of fourteen,
and Nietzsche's *Zarathustra*. Haunted by the seeming infinity of space and time, Buber found solace in Kant's understanding that
space and time are mere forms of perception that structure the 
manifold of sensory impressions. At the same time, Kant allows to think of being as transcending the pure forms of human intellection. Buber's mildly religious reading of Kant, which seems both conventional and autodidactic, seems to have been untrammeled by the debates between the various schools of neo-Kantianism that developed since the 1860's and came to dominate much of the academic teaching of philosophy across Germany until the First World War. From Nietzsche and Schopenhauer Buber
learned the importance of the will, the power to project oneself
heroically into a fluid and malleable world, and to do so according to
one's own measure and standard. Though Buber's philosophy
of dialogue is a decisive step away from Nietzschean vitalism, the
focus on lived experience and embodied human wholeness, as well as the
prophetic tone and aphoristic style Buber honed from early on,
persisted in his subsequent writings. Between 1896 and 1899 he studied the
history of art, German literature, philosophy, and psychology in
Vienna, Leipzig (1897/98), Berlin (1898/99), and Zurich (1899). In Vienna he
absorbed the oracular poetry of Stefan George, which influenced him
greatly, although he never became a disciple of George. In Leipzig and
Berlin he developed an interest in the ethnic psychology (*Volkerpsychologie*) of Wilhelm
Wundt, the social philosophy of Georg Simmel, the psychology of Carl
Stumpf, and the *lebensphilosophische* approach to the
humanities of Wilhelm Dilthey. In Leipzig he attended meetings of the
Society for Ethical Culture (*Gesellschaft fur ethische
Kultur*), then dominated by the thought of Lasalle and
Tonnies.




From his early reading of philosophical literature Buber retained some
of the most basic convictions found in his later writings. In Kant he
found two answers to his concern with the nature of time. If time and
space are pure forms of perception, then they pertain to things only
as they appear to us (as *phenomena*) and not to
things-in-themselves (*noumena*). If our experience
of others, especially of persons, is of objects of our experience,
then we necessarily reduce them to the scope of our phenomenal
knowledge, in other words, to what Buber later called
the *I-It* relation. Yet Kant also indicated ways of
meaningfully speaking of the noumenal, even though not in terms of
theoretical reason. Practical reason - as expressed in "maxims of action," categorical imperatives, or principles of duty we choose for their own sake and regardless of outcome - obliges us to consider persons as ends in themselves rather than means to an end. This suggests something like an absolute
obligation. Teleological (aesthetic) judgment, as developed in Kant's
Third Critique, suggests the possibility of a rational grounding of
representation. Taken together, Kant's conceptions of ethics and
aesthetics resonated with Buber's notion that the phenomenon is always
the gateway to the noumenon, just as the noumenal cannot be
encountered other than in, and by way of, concrete phenomena. Thus Buber
managed to meld Kantian metaphysical and ethical conceptions into a
more immediate relation with things as they appear to us and as we
represent them to ourselves. Buber succeeded in translating this theoretical dialectic of immediacy and distance, phenomenal encounter and reflexivity, into a style he cultivated in his writing but also in his manner of personal interactions. Buber sought not only to describe but to live the tension between a Dionysian primacy of life in its particularity, immediacy, and individuality and the Apollonian world of form,
measure, and abstraction as inter-dependent forces. Both are constitutive of
human experience in that they color our interactions with the other in
nature, with other human beings, and with the divine Thou. Buber thus developed his own distinctive voice in the emerging chorus of writers, thinkers, and artists of his time who rallied against the widely-perceived "alienation" associated with modern life.


## 3. The early Buber: *Gestalt* as a means of realization




Buber's early writings include anthologies, such as *The Tales of
Rabbi Nachman* (1906), *The Legend of the Baal Shem Tov*
(1908), and mystical writings from world religions (*Ecstatic
Confessions*, 1909), lectures on Judaism (*On Judaism,*
1967b), and an expressionist dialogue on "realization"
(*Daniel*, 1913). His essays on the arts include reflections on
the Isenheim Altarpiece, the dance of Nijinsky (*Pointing the
Way*, 1957), Jewish art, and the painter Lesser Ury (*The First
Buber*, 1999a). Common to these early productions is the
preoccupation with shape (*Gestalt*), movement, color,
language, and gesture as the means of a "realized" or
"perfected" particular human existence that represents
life beyond the limits of spatio-temporal duration imposed on us in
the manner of a Cartesian grid.




The German words *Form* (form) and *Gestalt* (here
translated as "shape") are not identical, although, in
English, it is easy to confuse one with the other. Buber uses
*Gestalt* as a term of central, constitutive, and animating
power, contrasting it with the Platonic term *Form*, which he
associates with a lack of genuine vitality. Commenting upon a work by
Michelangelo, Buber speaks of *Gestalt* as hidden in the raw
material, waiting to emerge as the artist wrestles with the dead block.
The artistic struggle instantiates and represents the more fundamental
opposition between formative (*gestaltende*) and shapeless
(*gestaltlose*) principles. The tension between these, for
Buber, lay at the source of all spiritual renewal, raging within every
human individual as the creative, spiritual act that subjugates
unformed, physical stuff (1963b: 239). It is the free play of
*Gestalt* that quickens the dead rigidity of form.




The wrestling with form and its overcoming and its reanimation with
living energy in Buber's early work was rooted in a concern with
the embodiment of perception and imagination. Whether writing about
Hasidic masters, Nijinsky, religiosity, Judaism, mysticism, myth,
"the Orient," or the Isenheim Altar, Buber always returned
to the same fundamental dynamics. Everything starts from the most basic
facts of human existence: the body and motion. As understood by the
early Buber (following a Kantian intuition), the world is one in which
the objective spatial order was dissolved, where up and down, left and
right, bear no intrinsic meaning. More fundamentally, orientation is
always related to the body, which is, however, an *objective* datum. Ethical
life remains inextricably linked, within the world of space, to the
human body and to physical sensation as they reach across the divide
toward an unmitigated *Erlebnis*. The "unity," so
important to Buber's early conception of the self, was not an
original one. It was instead the effect of those gestural acts that
"dance it out" (*Pointing the Way*, 1957).




Buber conceived of political community as a type of plastic shape,
an object (or subject) of *Gestaltung* and hence realization.
Just as he had enlivened Kant's distinction between phenomenon and
noumenon with his literary imagination, so too he transformed the
value-theoretical distinction between *Gesellschaft* (society)
and *Gemeinschaft* (community), types of social aggregation
theorized by Ferdinand Tonnies, into a wellspring for his
political speeches and writings. The first arena for his social,
psychological, and educational engagement was the Zionist movement.
Buber's social philosophy was stimulated and decisively influenced by his close friend, the anarchist Gustav Landauer, whom he recruited to write the volume on revolution for his series *Die Gesellschaft*. As a pioneer of social thought and a student of Georg Simmel, Buber participated in the 1909 founding conference of
the German sociological association. Buber's social-psychological
approach to the study and description of social phenomena and his interest in the constitutive correlation between the individual and his and her social experience
remained important aspects of his philosophy of dialogue. It came to
the fore again in his last academic position at Hebrew
University in Jerusalem, where he taught social philosophy (prominent
students: Amitai Etzioni, Shmuel Eisenstadt).




Buber's thought matured under the impact of Landauer's harsh critique, which persuaded Buber that he had unduly romanticized the war. Buber's 1916 lead essay
for the new journal *Der Jude* still praised the war as an
opportunity for the modern Jew to forge, out of the chaos of rupture, a
feeling for community, connection, a new unity, a unified
*Gestalt*, one that could restore the Jewish people to a
condition of wholeness. For Buber's friend Landauer, such
thoughts were "very painful...very repugnant, and borderline incomprehensible. Object though you will, I call this way of thinking aestheticism and formalism and I say that you have no right...to try and tuck these tangled events into your philosophical scheme
(*schonen und weisen Allgemeinheiten*): what results is
inadequate and outrageous" (*Letters of Martin Buber,* p.
189; transl. modified). Landauer continued to argue, "Historical matters can only
be talked about historically, not in terms of formal patterns
(*formalem Schematismus*) ... I gladly grant that behind
this is the desire to see greatness; but desire alone is not sufficient
to make greatness out of a confused vulgarity" (ibid., 190-1).
Landauer's challenge to the grotesque fusion of
*Erlebnis*, *Gemeinschaft,* and *Gestalt* out of
world war and mass slaughter precipitated the end of aesthetic
religiosity in Buber's work.


## 4. Philosophy of Dialogue: *I and Thou*




Buber's best-known work is the short philosophical essay *I and
Thou* (1923), the basic tenets of which he was to modify, but never
to abandon. In this work, Buber gives expression to the intuition that
we need to withstand the temptation to reduce human relations to the
simple either/or of Apollonian or Dionysian, rational or romantic
ways of relating to others. We are beings that can enter into dialogic
relations not just with human others but with other animate beings,
such as animals, or a tree, as well as with the Divine Thou. The
duality of relations and, at its extreme, their coincidence, may serve
as the key to Buber's mature thought on everything from his
approach to biblical faith to his practical politics in matters of
Jewish-Arab relations in Palestine. *I and Thou* was first
translated into English in 1937 by Ronald Gregor Smith and later again
by Walter Kaufmann. The German original was an instant classic and remains in print today. In the 1950s and 60s, when Buber first traveled
and lectured in the USA, the essay became popular in the
English-speaking world as well.




Whereas before World War I Buber had promoted an aesthetic of unity
and unification, his later writings embrace a rougher and more
elemental dualism. Buber always opposed philosophical monism, which he
identified with Bergson, and objected to "doctrines of
immersion," which he identified with Buddhism. Complicating the
undifferentiated shape of mystical experience (as sought by the
medievals, including Eckhart, as an annihilation of self), the
profoundly dualistic world-view proffered in *I and Thou*
references Cusa's *coincidentia oppositorum* as an
expression of human limits. Buber's text reduces the relation
between persons, animate objects, and deity to three expressive
signifiers: "I", "You", and "It". 
They are the elemental variables whose
combination and re-combination structure all experience as relational.
The individuated elements realize themselves in relations, forming
patterns that burst into life, grow, vanish, and revive. Human
inter-subjectivity affirms the polymorphous *I-Thou* encounter.
Resting upon the claim that no isolated I exists apart
from relationship to an other, dialogue or "encounter"
transforms each figure into an ultimate and mysterious center of value
whose presence eludes the concepts of instrumental language. The
heteronomous revelation of a singular presence calls the subject into
an open-ended relationship, a living pattern, that defies sense, logic,
and proportion; whereas the *I-It* relationship, in its most
degenerate stage, assumes the fixed form of objects that one can measure and manipulate.
At the core of this model of existence is the notion of encounter as
"revelation." As understood by Buber, revelation is the
revelation of "presence" (*Gegenwart*). In contrast
to "object" (*Gegenstand*), the presence revealed by
revelation as encounter occupies the space "in between" the
subject and an other (a tree, a person, a work of art, God). This
"in between" space is defined as "mutual"
(*gegenseitig*). Contrasting with the Kantian concept of
experience (*Erfahrung*), *Erlebnis* (encounter), or
revelation of sheer presence, is an ineffable, pure form that carries
not an iota of determinate or object-like conceptual or linguistic
content. Buber always insisted that the dialogic principle, i.e., the
duality of primal words (*Urworte*) that he called the
*I-Thou* and the *I-It*, was not an abstract conception
but an ontological reality that he pointed to but that could not be
properly represented in discursive prose.




The confusion (and/or con-fusion) between philosophy and religion is
especially marked in *I and Thou*. While Buber seems to lack a
fully worked-out epistemology and occasionally revels in paradoxes that
border on mystical theology, it has been argued that Buber did indeed
solve the inherent "difficulty of dialogics that it reflects on,
and speaks of, a human reality about which, in his own words, one
cannot think and speak in an appropriate manner" (Bloch [1983] p.
62). Debates about the strength and weakness of *I and Thou* as
the foundation of a system hinge, in part, on the assumption that the
five-volume project, to which this book was to serve as a prolegomenon
(a project Buber abandoned), was indeed a philosophical one.
Buber's lectures at the *Freies judisches Lehrhaus*
and his courses at University of Frankfurt, as well as letters to
Rosenzweig show that, at the time of its writing, he was preoccupied
with a new approach to the phenomenology of religion (cf. Schottroff,
Zank). In Buber's cyclical conception of the history of
religions, the revelation of presence mixes into and animates the
living and lived forms of historical religion (institutions, texts,
rituals, images, and ideas), becoming over time ossified and rigid and
object-like, but structurally open to the force of renewal based on new
forms of encounter as revelation. The history of religion as described
by Buber in the closing words of *I and Thou* is a contracting,
intensifying spiral figure that has redemption as its telos. It would
be artificial, however, to separate Buber's interest in religious
phenomena from his interest in a general philosophical anthropology.
Rather, Buber seems to have tried to find one in the other,
or--put differently--to make religious belief and practice
perspicacious in light of a general philosophical anthropology.


## 5. Zionism




At the very beginning of his literary career, Buber was recruited by
the Budapest-born and Vienna-based journalist Theodor Herzl to edit the
main paper of the Zionist party, *Die Welt*. He soon found a
more congenial home in the "democratic faction" of
"cultural Zionists" led by Chaim Weizmann, then living in
Zurich. Buber's phases of engagement in the movement's political
institutions alternated with extended phases of disengagement, but he
never ceased to write and speak about what he understood to be the
distinctive Jewish brand of nationalism. Buber seems to have derived an
important lesson from the early struggles between political and
cultural Zionism for the leadership and direction of the movement. He
realized that his place was not in high diplomacy and political
education but in the search for psychologically sound foundations on
which to heal the rift between modern *realpolitik* and a
distinctively Jewish theological-political tradition. Very much in
keeping with the nineteenth-century Protestant yearning for a Christian
foundation of the nation-state, Buber sought a healing source in the
integrating powers of religious experience. After a hiatus of more than
ten years during which Buber spoke to Jewish youth groups (most
famously the Prague Bar Kokhba) but refrained from any practical
involvement in Zionist politics, he reentered Zionist debates in 1916
when he began publishing the journal *Der Jude*, which served as
an open forum of exchange on any issues related to cultural and
political Zionism. In 1921 Buber attended the Zionist Congress in
Carlsbad as a delegate of the socialist Hashomer Hatzair ("the
young guard"). In the debates that followed the first
anti-Zionist riots in Palestine, Buber joined the *Brit Shalom,*
which argued for peaceful means of resistance. During the Arab revolt
of 1936-39, when the British government imposed quotas on immigration
to Palestine, Buber argued for demographic parity rather than trying to
achieve a Jewish majority. Finally, in the wake of the Biltmore
Conference, Buber (as a member of *Ihud*) argued for a
bi-national rather than a Jewish state in Palestine. At any of these
stages Buber harbored no illusion about the chances of his political
views to sway the majority but he believed that it was important to
articulate the moral truth as one saw it. Needless to say, this
politics of authenticity made him few friends among the members of the
Zionist establishment.




At the theoretical core of the Zionism advanced by Buber was a
conception of Jewish identity that was neither entirely determined by religion nor by nationality, but constituted a unique hybrid. From early on, Buber rejected any state-form for the Jewish people in Palestine. This was clear already in a
widely-noted 1916 exchange of letters with the liberal philosopher
Hermann Cohen. Cohen rejected Zionism as incommensurate with the Jewish
mission of living as a religious minority with the task of maintaining
the idea of messianism that he saw as a motor of social and political
reform within society at large. In contrast, Buber embraced Zionism as
the self-expression of a particular Jewish collective that could be
realized only in its own land, on its soil, and in its language. The
modern state, its means and symbols, however, were not genuinely
connected to this vision of a Jewish renaissance. While in the writings
of the early war years, Buber had characterized the Jews as an oriental
type in perpetual motion, in his later writings the Jews represent no
type at all. Neither nation nor creed, they uncannily combine what he
called national and spiritual elements. In his letter to Gandhi, Buber
insisted on the spatial orientation of Jewish existence and defended
the Zionist cause against the critic who saw in it only a form of
colonialism. For Buber, space was a necessary but insufficient material
condition for the creation of culture based on dialogue. A
*Gesamtkunstwerk* in its own right, the Zionist project was to
epitomize the life of dialogue by drawing the two resident nations of
Palestine into a perfectible common space free from mutual
domination.


## 6. Political Theology




Buber honed his political theology in response to the conflict
between fascism and communism, the two main ideologies dominating
mid-twentieth century Europe. His national-utopian thought shared
traits with both of these extreme positions and made him, in fact, one
of the few Jewish personages "acceptable" as a partner for
debate with moderate National Socialists in the early 1930s, a
proximity he himself vigorously dismissed as a misperception. His
political position remained indissolubly linked to his
philosophical-theological commitment to the life of dialogue developed
in *I and Thou*. According to Buber, politics was the work by
which a society shapes itself. He rejected any hardened ideological
formations of "the collective" and thus objected to the
solutions articulated on either political extreme. He understood these
to recognize neither an I nor a Thou in social life. Buber particularly
opposed the notion that the political sphere rested on the friend/enemy
distinction, as theorized by the ultra-conservative jurist Carl
Schmitt. Buber's political ideal, "a-cephalic" and
utopian as it was, was derived from his reconstruction of the ancient
Israelite polity as reflected in the Book of Judges. Conversely, it has been argued, his reading of Judges was inspired by the anarchism of Landauer. (See Brody (2018))




As presented by Buber in the 1930s, the primary governing trope of
Jewish political theology--divine kingship (*Konigtum
Gottes*)--represents an answer to Schmitt, whose political
theology allowed divine power to be absorbed by the human sovereign.
Buber resisted this slippage, privileging instead the anti-monarchical
strata of the Hebrew Bible. In his 1932 book on the *Kingship of
God*, the biblical hero Gideon from chapter eight of the Book of
Judges stands out as the leader who, beating back the Philistine
enemy, declines any claim to hereditary kingship. What Buber reads as
a genuine, unconditional "no" to political sovereignty
rests on an unconditional "yes" affirming the absolute
kingship of God. Against the theory staked out by Schmitt, the
assertion that God alone is sovereign means that God's authority is
non-transferable to any human head or political institution. Thus
Buber preserves the notion of divine sovereignty over all forms of
state apparatus and tyranny. Buber privileged simple, preliminary,
primitive, and immediate forms of government, insisting that genuine
"theocracy" is not a form of government at all, but rather
a striving against the political tide. No "theological work of
art," the messianic ideal of divine kingship found in the Hebrew
Bible is presented as a reliable image preserved by the collective
memory of tradition. Buber maintained that once upon a time the
Israelite deity YHWH was, in fact, the
*heretog* or warrior-king of the people. But he also knew that
he was unable to posit this for certain, and so proceeded to admit
that the image reflects not a historical actuality that we can know
but only a historical *possibility*.




In *Paths in Utopia* (1947), Buber was to plot the "image
of perfect space" as one composed of lines that allow no fixed
definition, the zone between the individual and collective constantly
recalibrated according to the free creativity of its
members. "The relationship between centralism and
decentralization is a problem which...cannot be approached in
principle, but...only with great spiritual tact, with the
constant and tireless weighing and measuring of the right proportion
between them." A "social pattern," utopia was based
on a constant "drawing and re-drawing of lines of
demarcation" (*Paths in Utopia*, 1996, p. 137). An
"experiment that did not fail," the Jewish village
communes in Palestine (i.e. the *kvutza*, *kibbutz*, and
*moshav*) owed their success to the pragmatism with which their
members approached the historical situation, to their inclination
towards increased levels of federation, and to the degree to which they
established a relationship to the society at large. Single units
combine into a system or "series of units" without the
centralization of state authority (ibid., 142-8).
"Nowhere...in the history of the Socialist movement were men so
deeply involved in the process of differentiation and yet so intent on
preserving the principle of integration" (ibid., 145). They
discovered "[t]he right proportion, tested anew every day
according to changing conditions, between group-freedom and collective
order" (ibid., 148). It is not difficult to recognize in
this description of the modern Jewish agricultural collective an
updated version of the biblical tribal past that Buber idealized in his
work on the primitive Israelite polity of the age of the biblical
judges.


## 7. Distance and Relation: Late Philosophical Anthropology




Responding to the unfolding political chaos in Europe and to the
struggle between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, Buber's philosophical
*oeuvre* assumed a more occasionalist and essayistic form in the
late 1930s and 1940s. In addition to the works cited above and works
on religion, the Bible, and prophetic faith, his last major
philosophical publication was *The Eclipse of God* (1951). What
unites all of the late works as a group is the common emphasis on
philosophical anthropology, the place of the individual person in the
world vis-a-vis other human beings in human community. Whether
reflecting on "man," "the Jew," or "the
single one," always critical to Buber's late thought is the
tension between distance and relation, and the role of mediated images
in dialogical, open-ended, non-fixed relation to the social and
natural world. In this, Buber addressed, but never directly, the
tension between "fact" and "value," explored
with more rigor in later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German
philosophy and in post-war Anglo-American analytic philosophy.




One of the signature pieces from this period is the essay on
Kierkegaard, "The Question to the Single One" (1936). Buber
turns to Kierkegaard in order to force the question of solipsism. For
Buber, the Danish philosopher stands for a modern alienation from the
world. The question Buber asks is whether it is even possible to
conceive of the human being as a "single one." According to
Buber, Kierkegaard's love of God excludes the love of his
neighbor, the fellow creature with whom we constitute "the
world" in human terms. With his eye on the creation of Genesis,
Buber describes man as a subject hovering over and embracing the
creaturely world. In this model, there is no renunciation of objects
and political life. At the same time, relation does not mean the giving
oneself over to the crowd. The embrace of creaturely existence remains
vexing. Buber characterizes the human being in terms of
"potentiality" within factual and finite limits, not in
terms of the "radicality" he sees in Kierkegaard. That is
to say, instead of positing a radical dichotomy between community and
the single one, Buber argues that they are compatible with, and
necessary for, one another.




This critique of the single one in relation to a larger social world
belongs to the world-picture established by Buber in the essay
"What is Man?" (1938). At stake for Buber was a knowledge
of the human person as a whole, i.e., a complete understanding of human
subjectivity. The methodological key to the essay is a philosophical
anthropology. Buber assumed that only by entering
into the act of self-reflection can the philosophical anthropologist
become aware of human wholeness based on a structural distinction
between epochs of human habitation and epochs of human homelessness. In
the former, philosophical anthropology is cosmological, i.e.
fundamentally related to the world and to human environments. In the
latter, human subjectivity is conceived of as self-standing and
independent. The conceptual tension is between being at home in a
universe of things in contrast to what is presented as the collapse of
a rounded and unified world vis-a-vis self-divided forms of
consciousness. In order to preserve the imbrication of singular
selfhood and the bonding of human personhood, Buber rejected the false
choice between individualism and collectivism. As Buber always
understood it, human wholeness lies in the meeting of the one with the
other in a living fourfold relation to things, individual persons, the
mystery of Being, and self. Every living relation is essential and
contributes to human wholeness because human wholeness
("man's unique essence") is known or posited only in
living out a set of relations.




If relationship constitutes the fundamental datum of human
wholeness, it remains also true that relation was not understood by
Buber independent of its conceptual antipode, namely
"distance." As developed in the essay "Distance and
Relation" (1951), relation cannot take shape apart from or without
the prior setting of things, persons, and spiritual beings at a
distance. For Buber, this setting of things, persons, and beings at a
distance is the only way to secure the form of otherness without which
there can be no relation. For without the form of otherness there can be no
confirmation of self insofar as the confirmation of the I is always
mediated by the other who confirms me, both at a distance and in
relation, or rather in the distance that is relation and the relation
that is difference.




While Buber most famously understood the *I-Thou* relationship as one
based on immediacy, he always steeped his thought in the power of
mediating images and other plastic forms as the material stuff of
inter-subjective relationship. In the essay "Man and his Image-Work,"
Buber set out to understand something about the formation of images in
relation to the world, the world encompassed by art, faith, love, and
philosophy. Buber postulated three levels of world formation. The first
two levels are the familiar Kantian concepts of a noumenal
"x" world and a phenomenal sense-world of form, comprising
the world as shaped by and in images and concepts. Buber's
conception of the third level, what he calls the world of perfect form,
derives from the mystical tradition. This paradoxical level of world
formation is expressed in terms of perfected form-relations. In art,
faith, and philosophy, the human image-work emerges out of relational
encounters between persons and an independent "world" that exists on
its own, but is not imaginable. 




The concern about "images" in relation to distance and
dialogue surfaced again in Buber's last major work, *The
Eclipse of God* (1952). The so-called "eclipse of God"
was Buber's symbol for the spiritual crisis in postwar Western
civilization. It designated a philosophical collapse as much as a moral
one. Like Sartre and Heidegger, Buber directed his attention to
concrete existence. But unlike his fellow
"existentialists," Buber was moved by the interaction
between humans, individually and collectively, and an absolute reality
that exceeds the human imagination. Against Sartre, Heidegger, and also
Carl Jung, Buber rejected the picture of self-enclosed human subjects
and self-enclosed human life-worlds beyond which there are no external,
independent realities. Towards the end of his career as a writer and
thinker, Buber sought to maintain the distinction and relation between
the human subject and an external other in order to
sustain an ontological source of ethical value in opposition to the
false absolutes of a modern world that had fused the absolute with the
political and historical products of the human spirit.


## 8. Criticism




Philosophical criticism of Buber tends to focus on three areas: [1]
epistemological questions regarding the status of the *I-Thou*
form of relationship and the status of the object-world delimited by
the *I-It* form of relationship, [2] hermeneutical questions
regarding Buber's reading of Hasidic source material, and [3] doubts
regarding the author's rhetoric and style that touch upon the
philosophy of language. All three lines of criticism have at their
core the problem of the conflict between realism and idealism,
world-affirmation and world-denial.




The nature of the world picture in Buber's magnum opus has
always been among the most contested aspects of Buber's
philosophy in the critical literature. *I and Thou* is
considered to have inaugurated "a Copernican revolution in
theology (...) against the scientific-realistic attitude"
(Bloch [1983], p. 42), but it has also been criticized for its
reduction of fundamental human relations to just two--the
*I-Thou* and the *I-It*. Writing to Buber after the
publication of *I and Thou*, Rosenzweig would not be the last
critic to complain, "In your setting up the I-IT, you give the
I-Thou a cripple for an opponent." He continued to rebuke,
"You make of creation a chaos, just good enough to provide
construction material (*Baumaterial*) for the new
building" (Franz Rosenzweig, *Briefe und Tagebucher*,
pp. 824-5). In Jewish philosophical circles, it has been long argued
that Buber was unable to ward off the relativism, subjectivism, and
antinomianism that are said to permeate non-realist epistemologies and
ontologies. Building on Rosenzweig's complaint against
Buber's epistemology, Steven Katz called for a
"realism" that affirms the rich world of stable objects
extended in time and space. It is still widely assumed by his critics
in Jewish philosophy that in his critique of Jewish law and the
*I-It* form of relationship Buber rejected the world of
object-forms *in toto.*




In addition to hermeneutical arguments regarding historicism,
anti-historicism, literary style and poetic license, arguments about
the picture of Hasidism that emerged out of Buber's research and
writing are also based upon the philosophical world picture as it took
shape in Buber's philosophical universe. Against Buber's corpus of
Hasidica, the doyen of Kabbalah scholarship, Gershom Scholem, was one
of the first to throw down the gauntlet. Scholem argued that Buber's
focus on the genre of folk-tales obscured the theoretical works within
the corpus Hasidic literature, where the phenomenon of (gnostic) world
denial was more pronounced than in the popular tales. Buber's later
collections of Hasidic tales in particular reflect a this-worldly
ethos at odds with important tenets of Hasidic mysticism. Whereas
Buber's early, neo-romantic Hasidica assumed a more distant and even
antagonistic relation to the world of time and space, critics, such as
Scholem, Katz, and Schatz-Uffenheimer, focused their critique almost
exclusively on the later body of work, in which a this-wordly
cosmology was more sharply articulated, in line with Buber's own
renewed interest, starting in the mid to late 1920s, with quotidian
forms of existence.




The analytic philosopher Steven T. Katz, author of an important
essay about the particularism of mystical language, articulated a range
of criticisms directed against Buber's writings (Katz, 1985).
More recently, Katz revisited and mitigated some of these earlier
criticisms that included the charge of antinomianism, the lack of an
account for the enduring character of the *I-Thou* relation, and
the misrepresentation of Hasidic thought (Katz in Zank, 2006). What
remains most objectionable in Buber is the tendency toward an
aestheticization of reality and the problem of Buber's often
slippery poetic rhetoric. Walter Kaufmann, who produced a second
English translation of *I and Thou*, articulated his displeasure
with Buber most strongly. While he did not regard the lack of deep
impact of Buber's contributions to biblical studies, Hasidism, and
Zionist politics as an indication of failure, Kaufmann considered *I
and Thou* a shameful performance in both style and content. In
style the book invoked "the oracular tone of false
prophets" and it was "more affected than honest."
Writing in a state of "irresistible enthusiasm," Buber
lacked the critical distance needed to critique and revise his own
formulations. His conception of the *I-It* was a
"Manichean insult" while his conception of the
*I-Thou* was "rashly romantic and ecstatic," and
Buber "mistook deep emotional stirrings for revelation."
(Kaufmann [1983] pp. 28-33). The preponderance in Buber's writings of
rhetorical figures, such as "experience,"
"realization," "revelation,"
"presence" and "encounter," and his
predilection for utopian political programs such as anarchism,
socialism, and a bi-national solution to the intractable national
conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, are in line with a
vagueness in his philosophical writing that often renders Buber's
thought suggestive, but elusive. Similar criticisms apply to
Buber's claim that language has the power to reveal divine
presence or uncover Being.




Buber's early *Jugendstil* rhetoric was a far cry from
the *neue Sachlichkeit* of the nineteen twenties (Braiterman,
2007). While similarly inclined literary authors like Hermann Hesse
praised Buber's German renditions of Hasidic lore and his Bible
translation later gained popular praise among German theologians,
others, among them Franz Kafka, Theodor W. Adorno, and Siegfried
Kracauer, spoke of Buber's style disparagingly.




On a more biographical note, the
philosopher of the "I and Thou" allowed very few people to
call him by his first name; the theorist of education suffered no
disturbance of his rigorous schedule by children playing in his own
home; the utopian politician alienated most representatives of the
Zionist establishment; and the innovative academic lecturer barely
found a permanent position in the university he had helped to create--the 
Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Some of the most dedicated students
of this inspiring orator and writer found themselves irritated by the
conflict between their master's ideas and their own attempts at putting
them into practice. In the final analysis it seems as if Buber always
remained the well-groomed, affected, prodigiously gifted, pampered
Viennese boy, displaced in a land of horses and chemists, whose best
company were the works of his own imagination and whose self-staging
overtures to the outside world were always tainted by his enthusiasm
for words and for the heightened tone of his own prodigious voice.


## 9. Honors and Legacy




Largely ignored by academic philosophers, Buber was already widely
recognized and reviewed across the larger field of German letters
before World War I. He rose to renewed prominence in Germany
after World War II, where his Bible translation, collections of Hasidic
stories, and writings on the philosophy of dialogue have remained in
print ever since. Among the honors Buber received after 1945 were the
Goethe Prize of the City of Hamburg (1951), the Friedenspreis des
Deutschen Buchhandels (Frankfurt am Main, 1953), and the Erasmus Prize
(Amsterdam, 1963). Significant students who considered their own work a
continuation of Buber's were Nahum Glatzer (Buber's only
doctoral student during his years at the university in Frankfurt,
1924-1933, later an influential teacher of Judaic Studies at Brandeis
University), Akiba Ernst Simon (historian and theorist of education in
Israel who first met Buber at the Freies judisches Lehrhaus in
Frankfurt, and who returned from Palestine to work with Buber for the
*Mittelstelle fur judische Erwachsenenbildung*), and
important Israeli scholars, such as Shmuel Eisenstadt, Amitai Etzioni,
and Jochanan Bloch, who knew Buber in his later years when he taught
seminars on social philosophy and education at the Hebrew University
of Jerusalem. As for the United States, Buber's American translator
and biographer Maurice Friedman, a prolific author in his own right,
almost single-handedly introduced Buber to post-war American religion
scholars and the larger reading public. In addition to Friedman,
Walter Kaufmann, the author of one of the first English-language
studies of Nietzsche as well as books on religion and existentialism,
helped to popularize Buber in the United States, despite the
above-cited critique of Buber's *I and Thou*. It was Kaufmann
who first included Buber in the canon of religious existentialism in
the 1950s and 1960s. In Jewish philosophy, Buber's name has since been
eclipsed by those of Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas.