The Eternal Thou: Martin Buber and the Religious Life

Philosophy of Religion
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The mind changes directions like the flight of a bird, and it takes a great deal of strength and wisdom to hunt that bird down. - Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav

People tend to look upwards, contemplating the mysteries of the heavens. They would do well to look inward and examine what’s happening within themselves. - Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk

Through the Thou a person becomes I. - Martin Buber, I and Thou

Martin Buber is perhaps one of the greatest proponents of Jewish existentialism (although I feel he would not at all like that labeling), the philosophy of dialogue, and exposing many people to Hasidic thought and spirituality. I personally see Buber as a Jewish version of Soren Kierkegaard, whom Buber was fond of, and his thought has left a lasting impression on me.

I was first exposed to Buber by reading his Tales of the Hasidim, a collection of stories and parables associated with Hasidic Judaism. Searching for something bigger than myself at that time, I was absolutely blown away by what I was reading. The book is split into “The Early Masters” and “The Later Masters.” Take the following, for example:

Freedom of Choice

Rabbi Heshel said: “It is God’s will that there be freedom of choice. That is why he has waited until this day. For in the days of the Temple they had the death penalty and whipping, and so there was no freedom. After that Israel had penal codes, so there was still no freedom. But now everyone can sin openly and without shame, and prosper. And so whoever leads a good life today is worthy in the eyes of God, and redemption depends on Him.”

Or this:

There and Here

Rabbi Uri taught: “We read in the psalm: ‘If I ascend up into heaven, Thou art there; if I make my bed in the nether world, here Thou art.’ When I consider myself great and think I can touch the sky, I discover that God is the faraway There, and the higher I reach, the farther away He is. But if I make my bed in the depths, if I bow my soul down to the nether world, He is here with me.”

Reading stories like this allowed me to question the typical legalist idea of God “punishing His only Son for my sake” and also question the idea that several college professors of mine adhered to, that the Old Testament/Tanakh was all just a bunch of rubbish. However, scholarship on Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim suggests that he edited or “romanticized” them to emphasize the importance of his original thinking; Buber is commonly associated with Neo-Hasidism rather than the traditionalist variant found within Orthodox Judaism. This led me to his most famous book, Ich und Du, or I and Thou. Buber proposes that human beings analyze the world around them in pairs of relationships: the I-It relationship, in which individuals see those they interact with as objects as means to a specific end, and the I-Thou relationship, in which the individual sees those they interact with as a subject with their own freedom and goes as far as to see themselves in them. Buber believed that the I-Thou relationship was not just a sense of empathy for someone else. It is an encounter with the “Eternal Thou,” God, in the eyes of everyone you interact with daily. Buber writes:

“You need God in order to be, and God needs you for that which is the meaning of your life.” - I and Thou

This echoes the Kierkegaardian religious stage of life. Everyone passes through the aesthetic life, guided by hedonic enjoyment, and finds himself in the midst of the ethical life, a mode of moral inquiry, and finds solace in the religious life, taking a leap of faith towards what is transcendent. The religious life, of course, can be experienced by anybody. One does not have to drop everything and become a born-again Christian, a strict Catholic, a pious Lutheran, or a monk on Mount Athos. These are not terrible things to consider; ironically, it’s why you want to do it in the first place that matters the most. The penultimate idea of Buber’s philosophy of dialogue is that if we cannot see the world as a series of relationships and ultimately find God in our fellow man, then there is really no concrete meaning to anything at all. Personally, I think we need his thought now more than ever in our world today.

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I am reluctant to take up Buber because his writings involve all sorts of controversies that are not my problem. Or, I have not taken on as my problem. Or, not what concerns me now.

But since you mention Kierkegaard, I think it would be good to mention Buber’s Two Types of Faith. Buber acknowledges Kierkegaard’s vision of faith but says it does not address the distance Buber establishes between his view and Pauline Christianity.

The book closes with hoping for a closer approach of views while marking the distance that would have to be traveled to get there.

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If you’ve considered him, what do yoi think of Levinas’s ‘ethics of the other’ in relation to Buber’s ‘I-Thou relationship’?

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I really should read more of him. Levinas has always interested me, but I find myself being more drawn to Buber. Levinas wrote an essay, Ethics as First Philosophy, and I think his notion that ethos, our character, is the starting point of philosophical thinking is a very Socratic dictum. His take on “The Other” is very sublime:

“To approach the Other in conversation is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity. But this also means: to be taught. The relation with the Other, or Conversation, is a non-allergic relation, an ethical relation; but inasmuch as it is welcomed this conversation is a teaching. Teaching is not reducible to maieutics; it comes from the exterior and brings me more than I contain. In its non-violent transitivity the very epiphany of the face is produced.” - Totality and Infinity

I think that they both come to strikingly similar conclusions, but they do differ in their religious thinking; Buber was more unorthodox in his thinking about Judaism, while Levinas stressed the importance of traditional Jewish ideas and practices such as keeping the mitzvot.

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Interestingly, I personally encountered Buber’s “I and Thou” after I had already arrived at similar ideas myself. When I began sharing these ideas with a more experienced specialist, he told me, “Buber already has all this.” That’s why Buber is so important to me personally.

At the same time, there’s a slight difference: my interest was primarily in proving that the “Other” is the ontological condition of the subject’s existence. Without religious mysticism.

I think I grasped the idea you shared with this quote. That is, the presence of greater freedoms confers greater value on choosing God. However, I’d like to draw attention to a few details.

I’d like to begin with the very concept of “freedom of choice.” It’s striking here that the concept of “freedom” is binary, and its antonym is “prohibition,” or, more broadly, “restriction” (I’ll try to differentiate these concepts below). This is a kind of analogy similar to Buber’s idea: “I cannot be without Thou.” The point here is that a place without restrictions does not imply freedom. Freedom itself is a state of renunciation (the overcoming of restrictions). But the concept of “freedom” in language is too multilayered at once. We can distinguish between the freedom to choose to live (which is opposed to not living), the freedom to choose in favor of God (which is opposed to atheism), the freedom to choose to observe the Law (which is opposed to Crime), and so on.

To illustrate this idea, I give the example of a loner on a desert island. Look, he is completely free from any human prohibitions. He can do whatever he wants: walk naked, swear obscenely, do any nasty thing he can think of. But is such a human state freedom? Does such a subject remain human? What, then, constitutes “humanity”?

And here, unexpectedly, we return to Buber’s ideas: I argue that humanity depends on the presence of another. The Other as another person, or the Other as God (an omniscient super-observer who knows your every step and every thought or as “Thou” in the sense of Buber).

So, I would say that what makes us “being” is the limitations of another “being,” while what makes us “human” is the “prohibition” of another person. Consequently, “Freedom” (in the human sense) arises only within society as the (imaginary) notion of an absence of prohibitions. Freedom presupposes a boundary against which it can be defined.

In one of my works, I call freedom “a weight on an elastic band”: the elastic band is stretched to a certain point, but it still remains. Freedom is the tension between impulse and prohibition. Thus, just as (according to Buber) “You” is an ontological condition for the “I,” so prohibition is an ontological condition for the (chimera) “freedom.” If we remove all prohibitions and all “Others,” the very matrix that holds the structure of the “human” disappears. A person on a desert island without the memories, language, and norms of the Other regresses back to the state of “animal.”

But let’s return to the quote you cited. According to the author, during times of strict prohibitions, there was less freedom to independently choose God. Now, in times of greater freedom, choosing God becomes more valuable.

In light of the arguments above, I find this logic inconsistent. The fact is that the author of this quote did not live in a time of “great” restrictions. After all, there was always scope for violating the commandments without being noticed. A person could always choose against God. It was simply that this choice was more understandable to them (in the sense that for many societies, the sacred scriptures themselves previously served as ethics). And choosing God in the past was much more rigorous: it wasn’t enough to simply declare oneself a believer. One had to try very hard, since the criteria for choosing God were more stringent.

So, both freedom and the choice in favor of God are at all times both complex and no less valuable (if we proceed from faith in God as a value).

My answer is a bit rushed, as it’s quite difficult to fit so many ideas into one message, but I think you’ll get the gist of it straight away (without further explanation).