Copyright
ANDREA CARTWRIGHT, M.S.
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Introduction
Although Martin Buber (1878-1965) is chiefly known as a philosopher/theologian and
the author of I and Thou, Buber as poet and as hermeneut are of particular
interest today.
Educated in turn-of-the-century Germany, Buber is a Romantic disenchanted with
Enlightment thinking. His best poetry is found in his reconstructed Hasidic tales.
However, we must begin with his philosophy of dialogue and relational
mysticism as the ground for his poetry.
Buber's Philosophy of Dialogue and Relational Mysticism
Perhaps it is the decision to turn imagination into "presentness"
that makes I-Thou meetings as powerful as synaptic connections.
Imagination in the present moment is power and as such
can make connections where there are seemingly no connections.
Therefore presentness is the chemistry of the "I-Thou" meeting.
In Buber's "meeting" with the Hasidic tales, his presentness
with the tales made them more than a mere tale of the
past. He reconstructed them by involving
his wholeness and presence to imagine the reality
of the tale thereby making it a present event. In his book,
The Text as Thou,
Steven Kepnes sees Buber as a mythmaking poet. He quotes
him and explains the
romantic influences that affect Buber's hermeneutics.
Buber believed the "moribund myth", the hidden life of the Jewish people, was
waiting to be released from the Hasidic tales. They were the solution to the
cultural
malaise of the Jews and in reconstructing them in the manner described above,
Buber was bringing his people forward into the present.
In writing about the Hasidic tales, Maurice Friedman describes the tale as
being:
"You have passed through the fifty gates of
reason. You begin with a question and think and
think up and answer - and the first gate opens, and
to a new question! And again you plumb it, find the
solution, fling open the second gate - and look into a
new question. On and on like this, deeper and
deeper, until you have forced open the fiftieth gate.
There you stare at a question whose answer no man
has ever found, for if there were one who knew it,
there would no longer be freedom of choice. But if
you dare to probe still further, you plunge into the
abyss.
"So I should go back all the way, to the very
beginning?" cried the disciple.
"If you turn, you will not be going back,"
said Rabbi Barukh. You will be standing beyond the
last gate: you will stand in faith."13
Although Buber's reconstructed Hasidic tales did not speak to the
German and Central
European Jews of the early 20th century, Maurice Friedman points out how they
are used today. Both Kepnes and Friedman applaud Buber as hermeneut and
Friedman describes the application of Buberian hermeneutics to everyday living.
Buber's "Between"
Buber's mysticism began as an alternative to the determinism so prevalent in
his day. Unlike most mystics, he related to the world without ever forgetting
that the world was made up of unique and concrete particulars that might
reveal themselves to him in an encounter. He was a different kind of mystic in
that he sought relation rather than union with God. The God he believed in
was both transcendent and immanent, absolute and particular, revealing
himself in history. To relate to his paradoxical God, Buber placed himself in
between the seeming opposites. This "between," like the synaptic cleft, was a
place where connections were revealed.
It was from this place of "between"
that Buber's syntheses occurred. He had originally seen Rabbinic Judaism to be
the opposite of Hasidism. However, he grew in his ability to let them be
unique and mutual, and by acknowledging their uniqueness, their relatedness
was revealed. Buber's way of finding connections between Rabbinic Judaism
and Hasidism and later Zionism and Hasidism was done
through recognition of uniqueness.
With his poetry of the synapse, hidden
connections were revealed.
Perhaps Buber's uniqueness is revealed to the
greatest extent in his hermeneutical abilities. His view expresses
the uniqueness of each event as an entity in itself which can relate to other
events without need of chronological or categorical linkage. As such, it invites
one to be fully present to the particularity of a thing, be it a person, nature, art
or an event. An example of this fragmentary method is his autobiography.
Buber told his life story by presenting a collection of separate meetings.
Stephen Kepnes observes that Buber's relational self was drastically unlike
Western notions of a singular self.
End Notes
1 Will Herberg: The Writings of Martin Buber,
Meridian Books,
World Publishing Co., Cleveland and New York, 1956, p. 20.
2 Martin Buber: Good and Evil, Charles Scribner's
Sons, New York, 1953, p. 142.
3 Will Herberg: The Writings of Martin Buber,
Meridian Books,
World Publishing Co., Cleveland and New York, 1956, p. 44.
4 Will Herberg: The Writings of Martin Buber,
Meridian Books,
World Publishing Co., Cleveland and New York, 1956, pp. 49 and 50.
5 Maurice Friedman, Martin Buber: Life Dialogue, Harper
and Row (New York, 1960), p. 20.
6 Maurice Friedman, Martin Buber: Life Dialogue, Harper
and Row (New York, 1960), pp. 232-233.
7 Ibid, p. 231.
8 Steven Kepnes, The Text as Thou, Indiana
University Press (Bloomington & Indianapolis, 1992), p. 10.
9 Ibid, p. 11.
10 Maurice Friedman:A Dialogue with Hasidic Tales,
Human Science Press, N. Y., 1988, p. 26.
11 Ibid, p. 26.
12 Ibid, pp. 49-50.
13 Maurice Friedman:A Dialogue with Hasidic Tales,
Human Science Press, N. Y., 1988, pp. 80-81.
14 Gilya Gerda Schmidt: Martin Buber's Formative Years,
The University of Albama Press, Tuscaloosa and London, 1995, p. 102.
15 Maurice Friedman:A Dialogue with Hasidic Tales,
Human Science Press, N. Y., 1988, p. 29.
16 Stephen D. Kepnes, "Buber's 'Autobiographical Fragments'",
Soundings: Vol LXXII, No. 2-3, (Summer/Fall 1990), p. 413.
17Ibid.
18 Will Herberg: The Writings of Martin Buber,
Meridian Books,
World Publishing Co., Cleveland and New York, 1956, p. 19.
19 Maurice Friedman: A Dialogue with Hasidic Tales,
Human Science Press, N. Y., 1988, p. 89.
"The situation demands nothing of what is past. It demands
presence, responsibility; it demands you."1
Within every philosophy there is a view of time. Martin Buber
saw time as present. To be responsible to the present situation, he drew from
the past only that which connected him to his divinely created uniqueness in
response to the world. Buber's direction came with the affirmation of his
uniqueness.
"In decision, taking the direction thus means: Taking the direction
toward the point of being at which, executing for my part the
design which I am, I encounter the divine mystery of my created
uniqueness, the mystery waiting for me."2
Self-affirmation neccessitates confirmation by an other for responsiveness to
go in the direction of good deeds in the world. Therefore the decision for
relation with another is essential. Buber understood relation as one of the two
attitudes built into the nature of human beings. The other attitude was
experience.
"The man who experiences has no part in the experience.
For it is in him', and not between him and the world, that the
experience arises.
The world has no part in the experience. It permits itself to
be experienced, but has no concern in the matter. For it does
nothing to the experience, and the experience does nothing to it.
As experience, the world belongs to the primary word I-It.
The primary word I-Thou establishes the world of
relation."3
Buber gives us a full understanding that it is the presentness and the decision
for uniqueness that characterizes the true I-Thou relation. The presentness of
the meeting enables a non-human being to become a Thou for us even though,
by their very forms, they cannot reciprocate. With human beings, it is a fully
reciprocal meeting. The I-Thou meeting is not intended to last. It confirms
one's uniqueness, enables wholeness, direction and responsiveness to the
world.
"But this is the exalted melancholy of our fate, that every
Thou in our world must become an It. It does not matter how
exclusively present the Thou was in the direct relation. As soon as
the relation has been worked out, or has been permeated with a
means, the Thou becomes an object among objects - perhaps the
chief, but still one of them, fixed in its size and its limits.
Every Thou in the world is by its nature fated to become a
thing, or continually to re-enter into the condition of things.
The It is the eternal chrysalis, the Thou the eternal butterfly
- except that situations do not always follow one another in clear
successions, but often there is a happening profoundly twofold,
confusedly entangled."4
Like neural synapses, the occurrence of I-Thou meetings are dependent on sensitivity
to the other and whatever conditions are found at the site of the encounter.
This is to say that the decision for relation is made within a particular
situation at a particular time rather than being a decision for all times and all
places. Continuing with the synapse metaphor, some synaptic
transmissions are more dependent on chemistry than others. And the synaptic
firing in one part of the nervous system requires different chemicals than
another part. In both the I-Thou encounter and the human nervous system,
connection is dependent on the decision to be responsive. Therefore synaptic
transmission doesn't always occur. In synapses as in Buberian encounters
there is a dependency on sensitivity to an "other." In an I-Thou encounter this
sensitivity to the other is called "inclusion." Buber saw it as "experiencing the
other side." It was not about fantasizing what the other's possibilities might
be but rather about including the imagination to "image the other as they
actually are." Buber's turning of imagination from fantasizing possibilities to
"presentness" is a very important part of his philosophy of dialogue. Because
it was only in the present that the I-Thou encounter could occur, being fully
present and inclusive was crucial. The immediacy and intensity needed for
confirming the other required sacrificing appearances.
"Many are the ways in which the self tries to evade its responsibility
in the existential dialogue of life, but they all add up in the end to the
erection of some protective structure of fixed and final general rules
(ideas, programs, values, standards, etc.) to stand between the individual
person and the concrete here-and-now which makes its demand upon
him, so that it is not he who is deciding, but the general rule that decides
for him."5
The kind of thought process associated with the I-Thou relation is "mythical"
and comes out of a state of "wholeness." Professor and Mrs. Henri Frankfort
describe the Thou as a presence known only in so far as it reveals itself.
"Thou is not contemplated with intellectual detachment; it is
experienced as life confronting life . . . The whole man confronts a
living Thou' in nature; and the whole man - emotional and
imaginative as well as intellectual - gives expression to the
experience."6
In addition to choosing relation over experience, individuals need to
remember the I-Thou relation that occurred. Myth was the only form of
language capable of giving full expression to the I-Thou encounter. It was
therefore necessary for Buber.
" Real myth', he wrote in 1950, is the expression, not of an
imaginative state of mind or of mere feeling, but of a real meeting
of two Realities.'"7
In saying this, Buber expresses his dialogical understanding of myth. His
stance is somewhere between the traditionalist's literal truth and modern
critics' merely symbolic truth. Buber is always in the synaptic cleft. Reality is
never with either the axon or the dendrite of the synapse but at the site of
their meeting.
"The present of the I-Thou relation is not the abstract point
between past and future that indicates something that has just
happened, but the real, filled present.' Like the eternal now' of
the mystic, it is the present of intensity and wholeness, but it is not
found within the soul. It exists only in so far as meeting and
relation exist."8
Buber's Poetry and Hermenuetics
"I have received it and told it anew. I have not transcribed it like some piece of
literature; I have not elaborated like some fabulous material. I have told it anew
as one who was born later. I bear in me the blood and spirit of those who created
it, and out of my blood and spirit it has become new. I stand in the chain of
narrators, a link between links; I tell once again the old stories, and if they sound new,
it is because the new already lay dormant in them when they were told for the first
time."8
"If Buber was not very successful as a poet, Buber as a Hasidic storyteller was
quite successful. Indeed, it was as a storyteller that Buber won his place among
the New Romantic poets. Presenting Hasidic legends as the Jewish mystical
representation of Jewish mysticism, Buber was able to educate Jews and non-Jews
alike to the 'oriental', mystical element in the Jewish past."
9
"...never the mere reflection of the past, but a fully present,
multidimensional lived event in itself. That this is so is shown by
numerous of the Hasidic tales themselves."10
The following two tales demonstrate the turn from imagining future
possibilities to imaging options in the present situation.
A rabbi, whose grandfather had been a
disciple of the Baal Shem, was asked to tell a story.
"A story," he said, "must be told in such a way that
it constitutes help in itself." And he told: " My
grandfather was lame. Once they asked him to tell a
story about his teacher. And he related how the
holy Baal Shem used to hop and dance while he
prayed. My grandfather rose as he spoke, and he
was so swept away by his story that he himself
began to hop and dance to show how the master had
done. From that hour on he was cured of his
lameness. That's the way to tell a story!"11
Once Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev met a man
hurrying along the street, looking neither to the left
nor to the right. When he asked the man why he
was rushing so, the man replied: "I am after my
livelihood." "And how do you know," continued
the rabbi, "that your livelihood is running on before
you, so that you have to rush after it? Perhaps it is
behind you and all you need to do to encounter it is
to stand still - but you are running away from it."12
With the tales, Buber
reconstructed what he thought to be the Jewish myth in hopes of reconnecting
the European Jews to their Jewish roots. Gilya Schmidt explains the outcome
of Buber's reconstructed myth.
"With his reconstruction of the Jewish myth via the
examples of Hasidic legends, Buber turned the current order of
things upside down, hoping once more to bring Jewish religiosity to
the surface as the guiding principle for Jewish life. At the end of
1908, Buber had truly succeeded in appropriating material that was
intrinsically Jewish but exotic for the cultural expectations of the
German and central European Jews."14
"In my book, The Human Way: A Dialogical Approach to Religion and
Human Experience" , I speak of 'theology as event'-the way that we walk
in the concrete situations of our existence. To speak thus means an inversion
of traditional theology, which rests upon a set of traditional beliefs or a traditional
interpretation of 'sacred history' and biblical events. Rather it is the event itself
that again and again gives rise to religious meaning, and only out of that meaning,
apprehended in our own history and the history of past generations that we have
made present to ourselves, do religious symbols and theological interpretations
arise. Such theology as event makes the staggering claim it is in our lives that we
apprehend the divine-not through sacred time and places and rituals alone but in the
everyday happening, 'the days of our years'."
15
"Buber's self is the mirror image of Gusdorf's singular self. It is
not opposed to others,' nor does it exist outside of others.'
Indeed it defines itself with others."16
By communicating his life in fragments, he could tell each separate one in a
way that allowed his readers to encounter him as a Thou and to relate to him
dialogically rather than to know him objectively. Kepnes describes Buber and
his "Autobiographical Fragments."
Buber's autobiography is one of the few that takes seriously the
relational and process qualities of the self and tries to develop an
autobiographical form that reflects these qualities."17
Will Herberg says of Buber:
"Buber's whole outlook is existential and situational. The
dialogic man is the man who thinks existentially,' that is, the man
who stakes his life on his thinking,' for him, faith is . . . the
venture pure and simple."18
Buber saw education as a restoration to wholeness. Knowledge was not for
the sake of knowledge itself, but for ethical response to concrete situations.
Education was to train the whole person to respond to the world of their time
with their unique contribution. In all cases, education required dialogue of the
kind described in this paper.
The following Hasidic tale provokes thought how we communicate with our
academic colleagues and with students.
"Men can meet, but mountains never." "When one man considers
himself just a human being, pure and simple, and the other does so
too, they can meet. But if the one considers himself a lofty
mountain, and other thinks the same, then they cannot meet."
19
Copyright
ANDREA CARTWRIGHT, M.S.
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