Martin Buber (1878-1965), an Austrian Jewish thinker, felt united to a generation of believing thinkers (Gabriel Marcel, Maritain, Haecker, Scheler, Ebner and others) who, from different origins, emphasized the personal, in the face of the ideological context of the early twentieth century. On the one hand, against the enlightened liberal tradition that, after building from great ideals of freedom, or the political institutions of the West, was worn out by political realism and without a north, when the optimism for progress collapsed in the barbarism of the First World War (1914-1918). On the other hand, there were the utopian socialist theories of the 19th century taking shape in powerful police states (Nazism and communism) with an immense desire to eat the world.
All these thinkers perceived in the two currents, daughters of modernity, serious anthropological deviations. In political liberalism, they deplored the neglect of the social dimension of persons in favor of individual freedoms, which have thus become selfish. In totalitarianism, they are horrified by the sacrifice of freedom and the value of individuals for the benefit of the system. In the face of this, they defend the fullness of the human being, at the same time personal and social: that is why they can be considered personalists. Martin Buber is the most important exponent of what could be called "dialogical personalism".
Moreover, they all agree in describing these errors as excesses of abstraction of modern rationalism. And it seems necessary to them to direct their gaze towards concrete existence, which is where the value of each person is appreciated. In this sense, not in that of Nietzsche or Heidegger, they can also be considered "existentialists".
A little of his life and work
Martin Buber was born in Vienna (1878). When his parents separated, his early education depended on his grandfather, Solomon, a prosperous industrialist, head of the Jewish community of Lviv, and a scholar of rabbinical traditions. From the age of 14, he was educated by his father in Vienna.
He read Kant and Nietzsche, moved away from Jewish practice and studied philosophy (1896). Later he became interested in Kierkegaard, who helped him to think about his relationship with God, although he did not like his individualism. From 1898, he joined the Zionist movement, where he maintained a moderate position until the end.
With that he renewed his Jewish friendships, especially Rosenzweig, and recovered his interest in the Jewish tradition and the Bible (he made a German translation). He became enthusiastic about Hasidism, a Jewish spiritual current that loved wisdom and liked to express itself with parables and stories. He translated many things and cultivated it throughout his life. He would become the most important exponent of this spiritual tradition.
From 1923 to 1933 he was Professor of Philosophy of Jewish Religion in Frankfurt and initiated an extensive study on The Kingdom of Godof which he only published the first part (1932). In 1938 he moved to Palestine, where he worked as professor of Social Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, until he retired in 1951. He was a highly respected personality and a supporter of peaceful solutions, which created some difficulties for him in Israel.
The most important is undoubtedly, Me and you (Ich und Du1923), which he would later accompany with other writings collected in The dialogic principle (The dialogical principle, 1962). In addition, the essay What is man (The Problem of People1942), which is his most widely published philosophical work. He has an interesting collection of writings on philosophy of religion, The eclipse of God (Eclipse of God, 1952). His social thought is collected in Roads of utopia (Pfade in Utopia, 1950), where he criticizes the successive socialist political utopias, and proposes a new model of community that influenced the Israeli Kibbutz.
He is considered the third great Jewish thinker after Philo of Alexandria (20 BC-45 AD) and Maimonides (1138-1204). Or the fourth, if we include Spinoza (1632-1677), who moved away from the Jewish faith.
The style of Me and You
Me and you is not a text of conventional philosophy. Buber attempts to formulate experiences that conventional philosophical vocabulary has bypassed. He wants to show what is deepest in the person, and finds that this is best accomplished by getting closer to the experience than by moving away with abstraction.
The basic vocabulary I-thou alludes, indeed, to the experience of its use, where we make ourselves present and appeal to the other. In this, it depends distantly on Feuerbach (who used it) and closely on the Fragments by Ferdinand Ebner (1882-1931). This author, a schoolteacher, a Catholic with a recovered faith and a short, unhealthy and somewhat difficult life, was fascinated by the mystery of the word (and the Word) as a manifestation and instrument of the spirit. And he had noticed the power of the personal pronouns with which people situate themselves.
The book is divided into three parts. In the first, it analyzes the basic vocabulary and the fundamental relationship, which is the interpersonal (I and Thou). In the second, it deals with the relationship with the "it" (with the impersonal) and the different ways in which the "it" is constituted. And in the third, he speaks of the founding and original relationship (Urbeziehung) with the "eternal Thou" (God); a relationship intuited and present in all other relationships. In 1957 he added an epilogue to answer some doubts.
The vocabulary of the relationship
It begins as follows: "For the human being the world is double, according to his own double attitude towards it. The attitude of the human being is double according to the duplicity of the basic words that he can pronounce". There are two different attitudes that are expressed in two ways of referring to reality. It continues: "Basic words are not single words, but pairs of words. One basic word is the pair I-Thou. The other basic word is the I-It pair, where, without changing the basic word, instead of It, the words He or She can also enter."
This observation is very important to understand what follows. The expression (or basic word) "I-you" represents one attitude towards reality, and the expression "I-it", another. "That is why the I of the human being is also double. For the I of the basic word I-Thou is different from that of the basic word I-It."
It should be noted that the distinction between the relations is not so much in terms of the type of objects as in terms of the attitude of the subject. In the two ways of referring to reality (in front of a "you" or an "it") the subject adopts different attitudes and, therefore, is constituted as a subject in a different way: "The basic words." -says the next point-. "they do not express something that was outside of them, but, pronounced, they found a mode of existence". of the speaker: "The basic I-Thou Word can only be said with the whole being." because the subject is situated as a person. On the other hand, "the basic word Yo-Ello can never be said with the whole being", because in that relationship I don't put everything I am as a person.
The relationship "I and Thou" is the relationship of a spiritual being with another. Moreover, it is the primary relationship, the first in time, which leads the child to acquire self-awareness, to speak, to constitute itself as an "I" in front of others, and to recognize in others other "I's".
The I-Ello relationship
It is the relationship with things, but also with people we do not treat as people. "Three are the spheres in which the world of relationship is reached. The first: life with nature. There the relationship oscillates in darkness and below the linguistic level. The creatures move before us, but they cannot reach us, and our saying You to them remains at the threshold of language. The second: life with the human being. There the relationship is clear and linguistic. We can give and accept the Thou. The third: life with spiritual beings. There the relationship is shrouded in clouds [...]. We do not perceive any Thou, and yet we feel challenged". It probably refers to the deceased and perhaps to angels. He concludes: "In each of the spheres we see the border of the eternal You [...], in everything we perceive a breath that comes from Him, in each You we address the word to the eternal, in each sphere in its own way.".
It is true that we ordinarily objectify the world. In that sense: "As an experience, the world belongs to the basic word Yo-Ello." However, there is an attitude of contemplation that perceives transcendence and then points to a relationship of the type "I-You." even if it does not quite reach it: "The tree is not an impression, nor a game of my representation, nor a simple disposition of the soul, but it possesses a bodily existence, and it has to do with me as I have to do with it, although in a different way. Do not try to weaken the sense of relationship: relationship is reciprocity". In my relationship with the tree, there is not really reciprocity, but there is transcendence, first of all because of the tree's being, which does not depend on me, but also because of its beauty, its unique originality and, in the end, because of its Creator.
The Eternal You
Buber expands on the precariousness of the human Thou, which is never fully stabilized, because real relationships are more or less transitory and fleeting. Therefore, in every authentic relationship with other men, who are a finite and limited Thou, there is a "nostalgia" for God; "in every you, we turn to the eternal You."; "the sense of the you... cannot be satiated until it finds the infinite You". In each you I seek a longing for fullness (of affection and understanding) that only the eternal You can fulfill. Therefore, Thou is the proper name of God.
At the same time, the eternal Thou is the one who founds the other relationships, imperfect and partial. In the first paragraph of the third part, we read: "The lines of relationships, prolonged, meet in the eternal Thou. Each singular Thou is a glance towards the eternal Thou. Through each singular Thou the basic word is directed towards the eternal Thou. From this mediating action of the Thou of all beings comes the fulfillment of the relations between them, or otherwise the non-fulfillment. The innate Thou is fulfilled in every relationship, but is not fulfilled in any relationship. It is only fulfilled in the immediate relationship with the Thou which by its essence cannot become it.".
In the thought of Buber, who was a practicing Jew, the echo of the doctrine of creation can be seen: "The designation of God as a person is indispensable for anyone who like me with the term 'God' [...] designates the One who [...] by means of creative, revelatory, salvific acts, appears to us human beings in an immediate relationship and thus makes it possible for us to enter into relationship with Him, in an immediate relationship.".
Influence on theology
Any thinker in the Judeo-Christian tradition who comes across Buber's thought is captivated by the message. It is not a very extensive subject. That is the point.
Other issues have captured the interest of anthropology: knowledge or political freedom. These have undergone immense developments since the emblematic "I think therefore I am". of Descartes. With him, inadvertently, the starting point was put on the theory of knowledge, which is a particular type of relationship of the human being with the world. From then on, philosophy would be oriented towards idealism (res cogitans), while the sciences were dedicated to matter (res extensa).
Buber's merit has been to call attention to the constitutive dimension of the human being, which is the relationship with the other. Moreover, sustained by the relationship with God. It is not surprising that he had an early and almost universal theological reception. From Guardini to Von Balthasar or Ratzinger or John Paul II. Moreover, it would join Maritain's distinction between person and individual, and his recovery of the idea of divine person in St. Thomas Aquinas, as "subsistent relationship". And it would be reinforced with the idea of Church as "communion of persons". Thus a "theological personalism" that is key in the Trinitarian doctrine, in ecclesiology, in Christian anthropology, in the renewal of fundamental morality (Steinbüchel, although it depends more on Ebner) took shape.
