What Kind of God Does Buber’s “I-Thou” Offer to the World: An Introduction to Buber’s Religious Thought ^†

Abstract

This article has three main goals: (1) To explain in a clear and comprehensible way the difficult basic-word “I-Thou”, which is the basis of Buber’s concept of dialogue, and in fact is the core of his entire teaching (even though it eventually spread over many fields). My main argument in this article is that “I-Thou” is not the “dialogue” that is often spoken of in the name of Buber (not only on the popular level but also in academic circles, and even commonly among those who deal directly with Buber’s teaching) but, rather, that “I-Thou” is a pointing-toward-word—pointing the way for the one whose heart is willing to direct his life to the path of devotion to God—a life whose practical meaning according to Buber is the effort to make room for the presence of the divine (“Shekhinah”) within the stream of earthly normal life, the flow of physical, instinctive life, the flow of life as they are, within “This-World” as it is. (2) This article attempts to follow the sources in Buber’s writings to clearly explain Buber’s faith (which Buber saw as the core of the movement of Hasidism that preceded him). Who is the God that Buber clings to? Why did Buber try to replace the common appellation “God” with a new term of his own: “The Eternal Thou”? (3) It aims to show how the researchers who tried to present Buber as a social or political thinker and removed from his teaching the centrality of his faith entirely distorted his teaching and displaced from it the core of the foundation on which all of Buber’s teaching rests.

1. On the Difficulty in Explaining the Primary Words at the Center of Buber’s Thought

Martin Buber begins I and Thou with the following:

• The world is two-fold for man in accordance with his two-fold attitude.
• The attitude of man is two-fold in accordance with the two basic words he can speak.
• The basic words are not single words but word pairs.
• One basic word is the word pair I-You (=I-Thou).
• The other basic word is the word pair I-It, but this basic word is not changed when He or She takes the place of It.
• Thus, the I of man is also two-fold.
• For the I of the basic word I-You (=I-Thou) is different from that in the basic word I-It.

Only a few have attempted to plumb the depths of meaning of the basic words “I-Thou” and “I-It” and have dared to clearly formulate this meaning. Buber himself did not make this easy for the reader,1 and his interpreters generally feared to examine the religious nucleus of his teachings, preferring instead to engage in the external trappings of his life.

Jochanan Bloch is one of the few scholars to devote intensive efforts to explaining these concepts. He writes:

[…] in the final analysis one cannot make a clear distinction between Thou and It. The branching-off of Thou from It is not to be grasped in clear concepts. (Bloch 1984b, p. 60)2

The attempts by Samuel Hugo Bergman, Buber’s close friend and pupil, to contend with this issue are similarly unsatisfactory. Bergman writes in his entry on Buber in the Hebrew Encyclopedia:

Buber distinguishes between two “primary words”: the primary word of I-Thou, and that of I-It. A person’s “I” also has two countenances [i.e., how he relates to the other]. The “I” of the I-Thou primary word is not the same as that of the I-It primary word. The I-Thou relation requires effort and energy from both sides of the dialogue, and this energy wanes. The “objective” “It” does not demand of us the special efforts which are required by the “Thou”, with which we have a direct relation. The bounds of our capability to contain, of our preparedness vis-a-vis the other, are limited. The busy physician cannot mobilize the necessary mental powers for the realization of I-Thou, and for him the patient is transformed from “Thou” to nameless “case”, to “It”. This is also true for the social worker, and for all of us as regards our attitude to the other.

(Bergman 1968, cols. 682–83)3

Bergman’s statement forces us to conclude that the relation to “Thou” requires “effort and strength”, which in most instances is beyond us in everyday life. That is, even with generally good intentions, in real life we usually address the other as if he were “It”—we relate to the other as if he were a nameless object, who has no independent existence as a subject.

Clearly, then, the meaning of the primary (or basic) word “I-It” is much more understandable than that of “I-Thou”. Bergman gracefully skirts providing an explanation for the “I-Thou” minefield and focuses mainly on “I-It”.

Other attempts by Bergman to contend with this question, such as the frequently cited description from his Dialogical Philosophy from Kierkegaard to Buber, do not sufficiently clarify this concept (Bergman 1991, pp. 215–45). In order to exemplify the possibility of an I-Thou encounter, he writes:

The address itself […] when one person turns to another in conversation and calls him by his name—frees the Thou from the surroundings, and when the person with whom I am talking turns to me, this relationship is created.

(Bergman 1991, p. 227)

This explanation, however, is insufficient. A person’s calling another by name is usually no more than a pretense of being interested, a false show of friendship. In actuality, during the conversation, this person is interested solely in the benefit he can obtain from his interlocutor. For him, the latter is merely an object, and the interlocutor’s existence as a subject in his own right is no concern of his.4

Admittedly, most people would waste no time in denying this—every civilized person would have difficulty in admitting, even to himself, that most of his ties with the world are mechanical and alienated. On this point, however, we should adopt a cautious approach, which Paul Ricoeur called the “hermeneutics of suspicion” (see Ricoeur 1970, pp. 32 ff). Obviously, Buber, too, was cognizant of this, and in his essay, “Distance and Relation”, he distinguished between routine existence, which is evident in “those popular discussions which misuse the reality of speech”, and “genuine conversation” (Buber 1988a, pp. 58–59)

In any event, in Dialogical Philosophy, Bergman attempts to take another path in order to lucidly explain these basic words. He exemplifies the basic word “I-It” by means of the scientist, for whom things in the world are “side-by-side”. That is, the scientist’s attitude to the objects of his research is not one of “affinity or dialogue, but of detached manipulation that is apt to place things indifferently next to each other” (Bergman 1991, p. 226). He exemplifies “I-Thou”, in contrast, as follows:

When Jephthah calls his daughter “my daughter” (Judg. 11:35), or when David laments “I am distressed for you my brother Jonathan” (Sam. 1:26), on the other hand, there is in the address what Buber has called ‘exclusiveness’. The Thou is taken out of the surroundings and is no longer contiguous with it, as the paper is to the table on which it rests.

(Bergman 1991, pp. 226–27)

Here, too, we still lack sufficient clarity. Anyone who has even a passing familiarity with Freudian methodology and can adopt the “hermeneutics of suspicion” for our discussion will have difficulty in literally accepting Jephthah’s grief over his daughter or David’s for the loss of Jonathan.5 In Freudian terminology, we can say that Jephthah and David bore a libidinous charge that became melancholy energy the moment that its objects were gone.6 In the simpler wording of Buddhism, the personal mourning of each of these Biblical characters might attest to a strong past attachment, with the loss causing them much suffering, as depicted in the Bible.7

The basis for Bergman’s explanation of “I-Thou” is then unclear. Buber repeatedly stated that when two people say to each other “Thou”, then the possibility arises of the element that he calls the “third”, namely, divine grace, being present with them.8 Such an event obviously exceeds the framework of regular human communication. Bergman himself writes that such an occurrence creates an opening to the mysterious, to the “mystery of reality” (I will expand on this below). Accordingly, it cannot be explained by the usual psychological tools. Such an event can be called—and not metaphorically—an “inner miracle”.9 We, therefore, may ask what in the Jephthah and David narratives can be understood as an “inner miracle”, direct contact with the “mystery of reality”? Where, in his opinion, is the “Eternal Thou” present between the two?10

Bergman’s explanation is not the only of its kind. The literature on Buberian dialogue contains a wealth of examples that attest to a fundamental lack of comprehension of the basic word “I-Thou”.11 The above example was not cited in order to detract from Bergman’s major contribution to our understanding of Buber’s teachings, but rather to demonstrate the great difficulty lying in wait for anyone, aided by the conventional understanding, who wants to enter the “black hole” of “Thou”.12 A clarification of this basic element requires in-depth study that goes well beyond the usual ways in which we explain the word.

2. On the Meaning of the Primary Words “I-Thou” and “I-It”

In my opinion, the basic words “I-Thou” and “I-It” cannot be understood without carefully scrutinizing examples from the flow of life itself, ones that can easily be ignored. Furthermore, they cannot be understood without considering the basic psychological fact of the existence of the ego.13 We should recall that we are naturally egotistical. All our relations with the ego of the other are conducted in accordance with the basic rule that “I come before the other”, which suffices for a person to erase—at least to a large extent—from his awareness the very existence of other subjects.14 Buber exemplifies this with the propagandist, who he says is tainted by:

the lust to make use [in verbal communication] […] in his relation to men remaining as in a relation to things; to things, moreover, with which he will never enter into relation, which he is indeed eager to rob of their distance15 and independence.

(Buber 1988a, p. 59)

If we think about this propagandist, we realize that he is not exceptional—this is how all of us talk regularly with people. Jacques Lacan formulated this in his sharp way, and said that, actually, four participate in every dialogue: two subjects and two “advocates” who present their set of manipulations to each other. Lacan was of the opinion that the main role of human speech is not to create communication with the other, but to confuse one’s interlocutor in order to obtain one’s goal.16

Jean Piaget showed in his studies that children seven years old and younger,17 even if they have mastered the use of words, do not address what they say to their interlocutors, they rather speak to themselves. Children are egocentric creatures and the other, for them, is just a sort of screen on which they can project their thoughts.18 Piaget naively thought that as the child grows, he learns to identify his interlocutor and to direct his speech to him.19 Within the limits of his discipline, Piaget was undoubtedly correct. If, however, we employ the “hermeneutics of suspicion”, we see that as the child grows up, he does not forge any substantial connection with the other (that is, sees him as a subject), but learns how to be manipulative. He learns to pretend that he views the other as a subject and acts on his behalf—all in order to obtain, in the end, what he wants from the other (in other words, he regards him as an object). The difference between the adult and the child is not substantive: the child, unlike the adult, is still too innocent to garb himself in the cloak of a caring and considerate person, and his innocent manipulations just cause us to smile; the manipulations of the adult, in contrast, arouse our ire.

The response by the German psychotherapist Lorenz Wachinger should be useful for our discussion. In a conference held at Ben-Gurion University, Wachinger told the learned participants that they were discussing the definition of these basic words from a philosophical perspective. If, however, they were to be examined from a psychological viewpoint, their meaning would be quite clear. These basic words, in his opinion, actually define two states in our mental life when we relate to the world around us. According to him:

The evocative rhetoric of I and Thou misleads the reader into a feeling of having understood, which does not stand up to close examination. My objection is that the center of Buber’s thought lies outside the objectifying, noetic20 domain of critical philosophy since Descartes. Our task in dealing with Buber’s work is to thematize the practical components in a philosophically appropriate manner: to pay attention not only to its concepts and logic, but also to the dynamics of intersubjective relations which accompany his logic, or are mixed in with it—the delicate or direct play of the struggle for power over and influence on the Other, the pressure toward a desired change and the resistance of the other to that pressure, in short, the game that is played whenever two or more people confront each other.21 Buber’s interest in problems of psychotherapy shows his sensitivity to the dynamic aspect of language, and only from this aspect can he be adequately understood.

(Wachinger 1984; see also Kosman 2007a, pp. 511–16)

3. The Basic Word I-It

As an example, I will examine a seemingly unimportant event from among the many that occur every day in each of our lives (the reader will forgive me if I exchange the language of objective reporting for a literary confessional tone).

Let us assume that the following sequence of events happened to me one day:

• I settled in with a pile of books in my living room in order to prepare the material for an article that I committed myself to write by a specific date for a prestigious journal.
• All of a sudden, my eyes started closing and I thought that I should take a short nap.
• I left the books, but on my way to my bed I remembered that my wife would soon return from work. I knew that she would be upset by such a pile of books in the living room.
• Now, a silent battle is being waged within me between two voices.22 On the one hand, since I was so tired, I did not marshal my flagging strength for this paltry task to return the pile of books to my already overflowing study, knowing full well that I would have to return them to the living room when I went back to working. On the other hand, I also knew that if I would not clean up the living room and fell asleep, this would result in tension between me and my wife. This tension would not be pleasant for me, and not only that, it would waste precious time.
• The rational consideration won out over my tiredness and laziness. I went back to the living room and returned the pile of books to my study.

I will use this chain of events, some version of which is familiar to each of us, to explain the dialogical idea. It should be stressed that this idea will always be intimately linked to the most normal events in our everyday lives. It is not really related to the abstract philosophical formulations that occupy their place of honor in the exalted realms of learned tomes. Buber himself wrote:

This essential two-foldness cannot be overcome by invoking a “world of ideas” as a third element that might transcend this opposition. For I speak only of the actual human being, of you and me, of our life and our world, not of any I-in-itself and not of any Being-in-itself.

(Buber 1970, pp. 64–65)23

An initial, and quite simple, analysis of this chain of events shows that, during the entire time, I saw my wife only as an absolute “It”; that is, an object that intruded from the outside into my territory. All the considerations that I took into account and that led me to act as I did, came from this egocentric center and its needs, and remained untouched by my wife’s inner world (that is, I did not see her as a subject). To add somewhat of an additional dimension to our inquiry, we will draw on a phenomenological analysis:

• The striving-for: For weeks, I was driven by the need for results, to finish the academic work that I had taken upon myself. On the one hand, I wanted to remove the tenseness of this situation and enjoy some peace (homeostasis); on the other hand, there was also the desire for the pleasure I would derive from completing this work. Additionally, in my heart of hearts, I anticipated the enhanced power of the “cultural capital”24 at my disposal. In my mind’s eye, I imagined that society would appreciate the greatness of my contribution and reward me for it in some way or another.
• Physical tiredness: The tiredness that suddenly came over me prevented me from seeking a solution that would reduce my suffering. My urge to get up and leave my work in the middle ensued from the thought that sleep would assuage the physical suffering that I felt at that moment. Moreover, I knew that while sleeping I would gain new energy, which I would put to good use when I resumed my work.

Importantly, in the first stages, the realization that I would cause my wife mental anguish never entered my mind. When I did think of this consideration, its motivations were purely egotistical. The inevitable—albeit unpleasant—conclusion is that, at that moment, my wife was a limiting factor—an element that entered my life from outside and endangered my “kingdom of the self”.25 This conception, obviously, is based in the hubris that developed in my childish imaginary world, a sort of image of the “I” as a monarch who is unbridled in his rule of all around him.26

This penetration into my “I” gives me no rest, whether I am totally aware of it, or whether it flickers somewhere in my subconsciousness, since it suffices to endanger the imagined status of the ruling “I”—that closed and impervious egocentric kingdom. It forces me to unwillingly consider my wife and her wishes and to take them, too, into account. I suddenly realize that my wife and her needs limit the endless expansion of my imagined “kingdom of the self”. It seems that this is the hidden, primal root of human violence. The egocentric center responds aggressively to any such invasion from the outside.27

At that moment, even if it is embarrassing to admit this, the ego, which is closed within itself, does not at all want the existence within its realm of the wife or any other person. The primitive energy of aggressiveness bubbles up from the depths of the ego; if it only could, at this moment it would choose to destroy all that threatens the territory that it rules.28 In Jean-Paul Sartre’s precise and brutal formulation:

The fact of the Other is incontestable and touches me to the heart. I realize him through uneasiness; through him I am perpetually in danger.

(Sartre 1966, p. 275)29

Theodore Dreyfus explains Sartre’s analysis of our attitude to the other:

The other is not only the one whom I see; to the same degree, he sees me. And just as, while seeing, I turn him into an object, so, too, while seeing, he turns me into an object. By his turning me into an object, by clipping my wings, by his freezing me, the other constitutes for me (and I for him) a constant threat.

(Dreyfus 1993, p. 152)30

In Buber’s thought, the word “It” equals the word “something”.31 At that time, my wife was for me “something”—an object that penetrates into me and endangers the territory of my “I” (and that, in other instances, causes me pleasure).32

It should be stressed that even if we attempt to explain the action of removing the books from the living room by means of rational philosophical–moral considerations (which, presumably, are more sublime), for example, as an action required by Kant’s categorical imperative, we will still remain in the closed territory of the “I” and in the context of its needs.33 As Buber puts this:

The life of a human being does not exist merely in the sphere of goal-directed verbs. It does not consist merely of activities that have something for their object.

I perceive something. I feel something. I imagine something. I want something. I sense something. I think something. The life of a human being does not consist merely of all this and its like.

All this and its like is the basis of the realm of It.

(Buber 1970, p. 54)

Schopenhaur, who formulated many of the insights that Buber would later draw into clearer focus, already highlighted this egocentrism, through his penetrating scrutiny of the unwitting psychological motives behind this action, in complete accordance with the “hermeneutics of suspicion”:

Now I confidently maintain that what opens the hand of the above-described […] loveless doer of good, who is indifferent to the sufferings of others, can never be anything […] but a slavish deisidaimonía [=Greek: superstition, irrational fear], no matter whether he calls his fetish “categorical imperative” or Fitzlipuzli [=a Mexican deity]. For what except fear could move a hard heart?

(Schopenhauer 1995, p. 66)34

4. The Basic Word I-Thou

Now, to imagine another chain of events, a different “script”. Let us assume that when I decide to stop working, I visualize my wife bearing a burden, in a completely different corner of the world. This burden is shared by both of us: work, shopping, and endless everyday concerns. At that moment, I might even be able to see in my mind’s eye her distress, and sense how she wages the daily struggle for survival, just the same as I do.

In that moment, I see her in my mind’s eye, coming up the stairs in the building, opening the door, and seeing before her the daunting pile of books that I left in the living room—a “red flag”. Like someone who returned after an exhausting day at work to find that a stranger has invaded his “kingdom” and disturbed the harmony that reigned in it.

Obviously, if I had seen these pictures of the suffering subject (namely, my wife) in my mind’s eye, it would not have been difficult for me to patiently delay by a few minutes the sleep I longed for and clear the living room of the pile of books.

And this is not all—I might even have continued to tidy up the house for her, and I might even have discovered that this action filled me with joy and “recharged all my batteries”. I would be flooded by totally unexpected positive thoughts and creativity. For example, I might have gone to the florist’s shop on the corner and bought some blushing roses to put in the vase on the white tablecloth in the living room, to greet her on her arrival home.35 This possibility, that usually is not realized in our lives, is what Buber suggested when he described the basic word “I-Thou”.

“I-Thou” is not necessarily a face-to-face encounter, or some sort of verbal communication, but the possibility of the occurrence of an “inner miracle”; that is, my egocentric center will be weakened for a moment, and room will be made in my inner world to sense the other, to see him as a subject, and to act toward him as if his inner considerations were mine. Even though this is not the total negation of the ego and the ecstatic experience of union, Buber maintains that the quality of such an encounter is spiritually superior to that of the ecstatic experience, since I can accept responsibility for another only by means of my functioning ego. Accepting responsibility is the mark of an I-Thou relationship.

Needless to say, in the situation described above, too, despite the pretty flowers, I must use the “hermeneutics of suspicion” to sincerely ask myself if I did not act out of unconscious utilitarianism, self-deceit in the guise of generosity and morality. It seems that the answer to this pointed question is that the very question attests to doubt, which is a sure sign that this is not the true realization of the basic word “I-Thou”. If this were truly realized, no question would arise.

To explain this, the certainty of the believer cannot be examined, explained, or proven with physiological or psychological tools. Certainty is a state of mind of inner assurance that results from contact with the absolute.36 For the person of faith, the clearest sign of this certainty is the disappearance of the dual status,37 which is the normal situation, and to be filled instead with power and vitality.38 Being filled with a sense of spiritual energy drives loving action, which derives its certainty from the absolute (I will expand on this below). From Buber’s viewpoint, this is the only realistic interpretation of revelation. Revelation is always accompanied by a feeling of being filled with power and vitality due to contact with the absolute, and keeping one’s distance from the doubts that accompany life in the kingdom of the It.

If the skeptic were to question this teaching of Buber and declare that he does not know what he is saying, Buber’s response would be silence (see Katz 1984, p. 116; cf. Kosman 2002a). This silence means that he and the skeptic are standing at a crossroads, and from here their ways must part.

Here is a fine parable, an example of that “crossroads”, from another discussion. Michael Wischogrod attempted to explain one side of the “crossroads”,39 and said to the participants at the above conference held at Ben-Gurion University:

I am sure you all know the story of the engineer who wrote a very long and learned paper about how the bumble bee cannot possibly fly by the laws of aerodynamics; but the bumble bee does fly […] Therefore the trick is not to ground the bumble bee, but to adjust the laws of aerodynamics […] The “I-Thou” flies, and the job of the philosopher is not to show that the “I-Thou” doesn’t fly, but to show how we must readjust our ontology, our logic, our categories of thought, to deal with this, or at least cope with it.

(Wyschogrod 1984, p. 115)40

Steven Katz, who took the role of the skeptic here, was somewhat shocked when he responded to this, and stated decisively: “your [Wyschogrod’s] point of view, that the ‘I-Thou’ flies by itself, is false”.41

At this point, we should return to what was written by Schopenhaur.42 After he completely rejected the possibility raised by Kant that people will conduct themselves morally on the basis of rational considerations, he concluded that only love of people (Caritas) can bring a person to act in a truly moral manner, because then:

[…] another’s suffering in itself and as such directly becomes my motive […] not only restrains me from injuring another, but even impels me to help him. Now according as, on the one hand, that direct participation is keenly and deeply felt, and, on the other, the distress of someone else is great and urgent, I shall be induced by that purely moral motive to make a greater or smaller sacrifice for another’s needs or distress. Such sacrifice may consist in an expenditure of my bodily and mental powers on his behalf, in the loss of property, health, freedom, and even life itself.

(Schopenhauer 1995, p. 163)43

How are we to describe what happens in such an encounter? Schopenhauer relates:

But now how is it possible for a suffering which is not mine and does not touch me to become just as directly a motive as only my own normally does, and to move me to action? As I have said, only by the fact that although it is given to me merely as something external, merely by means of external intuitive perception or knowledge, I nevertheless feel it with him, feel it as my own, and yet not within me, but in another person; and thus there occurs what is expressed by Calderon:44

que entre el ver

Padecer y el padecer

Ninguna distancia habia.

(“No siempre el peor es cierto”, Jornale, II, p. 229)

(“that there is no difference between suffering and seeing suffering”)

(Schopenhauer 1995, p. 165)

Now we must ask: how does something so mysterious happen? We should realize that now we are moving from one field of discussion to another; that is, from philosophy to faith,45 from everyday speech to poetry.46 Our discussion will now touch the most sensitive nerves of the concept of “religiosity” (which, for Buber, is not the same as the declared belief of religion).47 Schopenhauer writes on this:

But this presupposes that to a certain extent I have identified myself with the other man, and in consequence the barrier between the ego and non-ego is for the moment abolished; only then do the other man’s affairs, his need, distress, and suffering, directly become my own. I no longer look at him as if he were something given to me by empirical intuitive perception, as something strange and foreign, as a matter of indifference, as something entirely different from me. On the contrary, I share the suffering in him, in spite of the fact that his skin does not enclose my nerves. Only in this way can his woe, his distress, become a motive for me; otherwise, it can be absolutely only my own. I repeat that this occurrence is mysterious, for it is something our faculty of reason can give no direct account of, and its grounds cannot be discovered on the path of experience.

(Schopenhauer 1995, p. 166)

Buber said of this that “the unity of the contraries is the mystery at the innermost core of the dialogue”(Buber 1948b, p. 17)48 and the mystery happens when there is the “act of inclusion” between the two.49^,50 We can also speak here of love,51 which, according to Buber, contains the best possibility for the existence of an I-Thou relation (Buber 1970, pp. 67–73, 92–95; see also Shapira 1994, pp. 54–55). He maintains that such love “does not invalidate the ‘I’; on the contrary, it binds the ‘I’ more closely to the ‘Thou’” (Buber 1970, p. 210; see also Buber 1970, pp. 67–68).

The possibility portrayed here, which is actually the innermost core of Buberian faith,52 is totally opposed to Sartre’s harsh depiction of the encounter with the other. In Buber’s view, my territory can be open to penetration by the other as a subject, to the extent that his being and mine, to a certain degree, become one—and the momentum of the energy of love fills my relation to him with grace.53

Nevertheless, Buber’s stance on this issue becomes even clearer when we follow his disagreement with Simone Weil,54 who, for Buber, represented the ecstatic–mystical Christian notions that demand man’s complete negation of his ego. Buber summarizes Weil’s understanding as follows:

Simone Weil’s idea was to serve mankind and so she again and again took to heavy manual labor on the land, but her soul was always put to flight by reality. And she began with her own reality: she contested the “I”; it was one’s duty, she thought, to slay the “I” in oneself. “We possess nothing in this world”, she wrote, “other than the power to say I. This is what we should yield up to God, and that is what we should destroy”.

(Buber 1967c, p. 210)

Buber then argues against this in the name of Judaism:

Such a basic orientation is, indeed, diametrically opposed to Judaism; for the real relationship taught by Judaism is a bridge that spans across two firm pillars, man’s “I” and the “I” of his eternal partner. It is thus the relation between man and God, thus also the relation between man and man. Judaism rejects the “I” that connotes selfishness and pride, but it welcomes and affirms the “I” of the real relationship, the “I” of the partnership between I and Thou, the “I” of love. For love does not invalidate the “I”; on the contrary, it binds the “I” more closely to the “Thou”. It does not say: “Thou are loved” but “I love Thee”.55

Thus, for Buber, in the state of mind in which there is a functioning “I”, but which is not “the ‘I’ that connotes selfishness and pride”, the manipulative entity that usually conducts an individual’s life is noticeably weakened. Akibah Ernst Simon, Buber’s student and close friend, defined this state of mind as one in which a person is “without the human desire to have the object for producing pleasure or to change it” (Simon 1985, p. 263). During such a true encounter with another, a miracle can happen, with man being filled with energy whose source is divine.56 In the manipulative entity’s regular state, in which it dominates us and channels the movements of our life, it would like to receive something in return for that commendable behavior. But in a moment of revelation, the “I-Thou” rises to the ascendant within us and we are filled with the energy of giving, while the manipulative entity loses some degree or other of its control of the “steering wheel” that directs our actions.

The state of mind evident in the weakened power of the manipulative entity should be called “humility”.57 This, then, is the attenuation of the ego, that usually is vigorously engaged in the manipulations meant to take advantage of the other for one’s own purposes; that is, to act toward him as “It”.58 Making room for the other begins with our volitional intentionality, and concludes when the blessing of “Thou” rests upon us, and an opening unfolds before us to the mystery of which Schopenhauer spoke, and which Bergman calls “the mystery of reality”.59 Humility facilitates openness in our contacts with the world of subjects around us and the acceptance of responsibility.60 Jean Klein finely described this:

In intimate or problematic situations, each must speak in humility of how they feel. It is simply a statement of facts with no justification, no interpretation. We must not look for a conclusion. If we allow the situation complete freedom from evaluation and judgment and pressure to find a conclusion, many things appear which do not belong to our memory.

Humility arises when there is no reference to an ‘I”. This emptiness is the healing factor in any situation […] Be open to non-concluding. In this openness the situation offers its own solution. (Klein 1988, p. 23)61

It should be stressed in this context that the tool of speech changes its usual direction. In most cases, its purpose is to transmit messages from me to the other; while here, it is meant to provide an opening for my attentiveness to the other’s speech. Here, silence is more appropriate. Buber writes:

The more powerful the response, the more powerfully it ties down the You [=Thou] and as by a spell binds it into an object. Only silence toward the You [=Thou], the silence of all tongues, the taciturn waiting in the unformed, undifferentiated, prelinguistic word leaves the You [=Thou] free and stands together with it in reserve where the spirit does not manifest itself but is. All response binds the You [=Thou] into the It-world.

(Buber 1970, p. 89)

Following the study of the essence of human speech by Chaim Nahman Bialik (the Israeli national poet), we can assert that such speech, with the opening to the other that it enables, is transformed from the “husk of speech” to poetry, in which the words are not the main thing but, rather, as Bialik writes about this element in the language of the famous Kabbalistic work, Sefer Yetzirah, “there is belimah [holding action, restraint]; man’s lips are closed”.62 Thus, we may now say, that the words in a dialogue in which “Thou is present” are constantly being pulled out from their settings […] Meanwhile, between concealments [of the words]63 the void [Nothingness, Ayyin] looms”.64

Now, we can understand why the world of “I-Thou” has only a single criterion, that of “How”, namely, what is the quality of the inner intent with which a person comes to a meeting. In the world of “I-It”, on the other hand, there is only an external criterion that gauges the “What” or the “How many”. Buber writes:

This truth is not a What but a How. Not the matter of a deed determines its truth but the manner in which it is carried out: in human conditionality, or in divine unconditionality. Whether a deed will peter out in the outer courtyard, in the realm of things, or whether it will penetrate into the Holy of Holies is determined not by its content but by the power of decision which brought it about, and by the sanctity of intent that dwells in it. Every deed, even one numbered among the most profane, is holy when it is performed in holiness, in unconditionality.

(Buber 1977a, p. 87)65

This passage is consistent with Bialik’s conclusions regarding touching “concealments of the words”:

It has come to the point where the human language has become two languages, built upon one another’s destruction: one, an internal language, that of the individual and the soul, in which what is essential is ‘how?’ as in music—the domain of poetry; the other, the external language, that of abstraction and generalization, in which the essential is ‘what?’ as mathematics—the domain of logic.66

We now can state more clearly regarding the ego, the egocentrism inherent in humans—that blinds us to the existence of the other as a subject: we are not speaking here of narcissistic obtuseness regarding the existence of the other; on the contrary, this rather refers to the ego’s focused and precise identification of the existence of the other. But I am immediately overcome by the egotistical element within me, and I waste no time in swooping down upon the other, like a hunter on his prey. Before my very eyes, the other is transformed from a living person to an object, whose entire purpose (from my perspective) is to aid me in realizing my goal.67

5. Belief in God and Revelation in Buber’s Thought

The question of belief in God seems to me to be the most difficult of all in Buber’s thought. It obviously is intimately related to his distinction between the two basic words, “I-Thou” and “I-It”.

A study of Buber’s theological writings shows the need for a comparison between the revolution in theological thought brought about by Buber and the effect that Descartes had on Western philosophy. Buber, similar to Descartes, consistently refused to accept any theological statements regarding the reality, unless they could be examined, personally experienced, and seen whether they contain any substance or are mere extensions of the imagination. Buber maintained that he could make a definite theological statement only if based on personal experience. In this respect, Buber’s entire thought is an account of an explorer who set forth to an unknown land and who delivers a first-hand—and rational—report, one that is subject to exacting self-criticism.

It should be stressed that this is not like someone who undergoes a profoundly moving experience during which he sees mystical visions of which he reports to his audience. The divine revelation of which Buber speaks is experienced in quite regular moments of everyday life, as Buber repeatedly underscores.

Already in his initial probing for these primary words, Buber formulated the following sweeping statements:

Religions speak of God in the third person, mostly as a He. People seldom realize the extent to which this pronoun is already an anthropomorphism or, more correctly, to what extent this pronoun means a displacement of God into the world of things […] into the creation that has run away from God. In other words, in [the] history [of religions] God is a thing.

(From the seventh of the “Religion as Presence” lectures, in Horwitz 1988, p. 108)68

Rivka Horwitz explains:

The third-person God was invented [according to Buber] by human imagination, a figment of the imagination which is fed by the worldly at the expense of the experiences from this world. This is a creation in the image of man which is anthropomorphic. It can take shape in the image of God or the image of an idol or in the nonmaterial abstraction of metaphysics.

(Horwitz 1989, p. 179)69

Buber’s rejection of the common religious conception of a third-person God explains why he does not speak like a theologian trying to persuade people to believe in something far from us, but as a researcher of the consciousness, a phenomenologist, who argues for the patent presence of divine revelation in our inner lives.70 Why are we not aware of this? Because we have not been attentive,71 and perhaps because we could not name it when we encounter it, thinking that this was a marginal matter, one of no importance in the flow of everyday events.

Buber refrained from searching for a method in thinking about God that would be based on the premises made by human intellect,72 just as he abstained, in a certain stage, from seeking out the ecstatic experience.73 He wanted only to describe what he had actually experienced in his life.74 Since he refused to view God “in the third person”, because of the constant danger that the image of God is simply a product of human imagination,75 Buber rejected the theoretical possibilities of the type prevalent in the various religions. He was not occupied with the image of God in any form. His religious conception plainly, and totally, disclaims the usual human imagination, that portrays God in terms of directions in space; as if God, the “really super”, resides somewhere above us, at the top of an imaginary pyramid. Buber writes on this point (in a response to Nathan Rotenstreich):

But I have not been at all concerned about a metaphysical thesis. Rather, I have been concerned about establishing the simple fact that I do not mean by ‘God’ the highest idea but that which can be fit into no pyramid as its apex, and that, accordingly, the link between God and man does not go by way of the universals, but by way of concrete life.

(Buber 1967b, p. 694. The translation is mime)

This was so obvious to him that he refused to call himself a theologian, not even to identify, if even for a fleeting moment, with the theology of negation. He writes:

But I am absolutely not capable nor even disposed to teach this or that about God. Certainly, when I seek to explain the fact of man, I cannot leave out of consideration that he, man, lives over against God. But I cannot include God himself at any point in my explanation.

(Buber 1967b, p. 690)76

Buber’s precise formulation is noteworthy. He does not argue with any side in the theological speculations about God, and merely states that he has no interest in expressing an opinion of what lies totally beyond the bounds of his world. This entire theological debate has no meaning for him, since it does not pertain to real life.

Walter Kaufmann presents Buber’s religious conception simply yet trenchantly:

He [Buber] wanted a religion in which the individual could address God and be addressed by God,77 but a religion that left no room to talk about God.

(Kaufmann 1984a, p. 17)

All this is closely related to a response, in the name of Judaism, to Spinoza (see Buber 1948a, pp. 95–116). Buber maintains that Spinoza erred when he attempted to discuss an all-encompassing concept of “God”, and he did not understand he was not permitted to discuss God Himself, His “self”. “From being the place of meeting with God, the world becomes to him [Spinoza] God’s place” (Buber 1948a, p. 100). Buber uses the Kabbalistic–Hasidic model of the divine Sefirot (the ten stages of divine emanation) to explain the Jewish position. According to this model, nothing can be said about God Himself, since God’s “self” is beyond human comprehension, and this infinite and eternal existence cannot be discussed in human language. But from this point on, as for everything related to the emanation of the divine light through the Sefirot, we can speak of the divine that is revealed to man within the world, but only within the world, and through it—that is, through the objects that were created in this world.78

God, says Buber, is “infinite and nameless, “but also”—at the same time—”a father who teaches his children to call him”. God speaks to man solely through the world, through the things and people that surround him.79 If man will be attentive to God, he will hear Him speaking to him at every moment, by the agency of whatever he comes into contact with: other people, all the surrounding world, and his inner world.80

From this respect, we could say that Buber was the most cautious empirical researcher in recent generations who dared to fearlessly explore the theological thicket.81 If we were to ask which “tools” he took with him on his inner journeys, it seems that he brought with him the most precise research tool available to the phenomenologist of our inner worlds: distance. From a distance, the individual can objectively observe the impressions left in this inner world, his moods and thoughts, as if they were a research object (see Mendes-Flohr 1980, p. 89). Distance affords man the ability to carefully observe his experience and what occurs in his inner world, with the caution of a researcher. This, of course, entails a major difficulty, one which Buber himself wrote about in many of his writings: we cannot ignore the fact that ‘Thou’ becomes ‘It’ in the process of scientific observation. Nevertheless, as we saw above, for Buber, the ‘It’ is not a negative tool, as it is created in order to serve us—when we use it in a proper way. In this regard, Putnam even reinforces this point by arguing that:

Buber’s ‘I-You [=Thou]’ relation is one that can only be of short duration, but its significance is that after one has had an ‘I-You [=Thou]’ relation with the divine, the ‘It-World’ is transformed. There are, so to speak, [according to Buber] two sorts of ‘I-It’ relations: mere ‘I-It’ relations and transformed ‘I-It’ relations.

(Putnam 2008, p. 63)82

Profound thinkers have already argued that the discovery of the I-Thou primary word in Buber’s inner journeys is an event of equal importance to the Copernican revolution, since it completely changes human thought.83 What things, then, that Buber discovered in his life experience led him, like “Abraham the Hebrew”, to stand on one side of the divide, with the entire world on the other?84

Buber himself admitted that in his past he, too, had been completely blind to the possibility of God being revealed to man in the most banal everyday moments in his encounters with all that surrounds him. This was the case, as Buber explained, because he had previously sought God in “the-something-beyond”, in a quest that included “the exception, extraction, exaltation, ecstasy” (Buber 2002c, p. 54). But then, “I know no fullness but each mortal hour’s fullness of claim and responsibility” (Buber 2002c, p. 55). He attests, however, that he was not always successful: “Though far from being equal to it, yet I know that in the claim I am claimed and may respond in responsibility and know who speaks and demands a response” (Buber 2002c, p. 55). As to whether this discovery belongs to the realm of religion, he continues: “If that is religion, then it is just everything, simply all that is lived in its possibility of dialogue” (Buber 2002c, p. 55).

It should be stressed that the I-Thou relation fundamentally differs from the ecstatic experience. Ecstasy does not address the other, nor does it oblige me to accept any responsibility for his fate. And this is not all: it is directed to the ego, which always acts on its own behalf (even when it seeks to neutralize the ego). The “I-Thou” primary word, in contrast, by its very nature builds a bridge to the other. It demands of the ego to exceed itself and share the burden with the other.

It should also be emphasized that Buber concluded that there is an unfathomable chasm separating the ecstatic experience from that of I-Thou. Ecstasy is the result of a process. A person seeks such a type of experience, which he finds at the end of the search process. At times, to reach an ecstatic state, a person can be—and sometimes is—aided by drugs or other chemical substances. Experiencing I-Thou, on the other hand, is in no way a process—it is revealed to a person only when he himself ceases to hunt for it. Buber thought that the Thou is a fact from the very creation of all; that is, it is the ego that blinds us and by its very nature conceals the fact of our existence on the solid ground of the reality of the Thou. Accordingly, this solid ground—the reality of the Thou—will be palpable to us only if we do not seek the Thou, do not regard it as our possession, as an object that can serve us.85 Buber writes:

Feelings dwell in man, but man dwells in his love […] love does not cling to an I, as if the You [=Thou] were merely its “content” or object; it is between I and You [=Thou]. Whoever does not know this, know this with his being, does not know love.

(Buber 1970, p. 66)86

Moreover, a matter mentioned above bears repeating: experiencing I-Thou, unlike any common experience, is singular in its being some sort of mix of will and grace: will on our part (“Only when two say to one another with all that they are, ‘It is Thou’, is the indwelling of the Present Being between them”),87 and grace on the part of the divine presence that dwells in the space between two who are engaged in true dialogue. Buber says on this: “The You [=Thou] encounters me by grace—it cannot be found by seeking” (Buber 1970, p. 62).

He explains, when speaking of Hasidic thought, how these elements are so intertwined that they cannot be isolated within the processes that occur in the reality:

[…] it is senseless to ask how far my action reaches, and where God’s grace begins; there is no common border-line; what concerns me alone, before I bring something about, is my action, and what concerns me alone, when the action is successfully done, is God’s grace. The one is no less real than the other, and neither is a part-cause.

(Buber 1948a, p. 110)88

6. “Hebrew Humanist” versus the “Arbitrary Man”

A description of Buber’s attitude to faith will aid in explaining his complex position: on the one hand, he was a humanist and professed ideals similar to those championed by secular humanists; while, on the other, he was an advocate of passionate faith, who spoke for adhering to God with all one’s heart.89 He writes at the beginning of the third section of I and Thou:

Extended, the lines of relationships intersect in the eternal You [=Thou].

Every single You [=Thou] is a glimpse of that. Through every single You [=Thou] the basic word addresses the eternal You [=Thou]. The relationship of the You [=Thou] of all beings accounts for the fullness of our relationships to them—and for the lack of fulfillment. The innate You [=Thou] is actualized each time without ever being perfected. It attains perfection solely in the immediate relationship to the You [=Thou] that in accordance with its nature cannot become an It.

(Buber 1970, p. 123)

Buber says here that by means of our sincere and loving contact with someone with whom we have an I-Thou relationship, we also encounter the Eternal Thou, namely, God. This is, as he explained, an “extending” that results in meeting God Himself.90 Buber forges a strong bond between love of man, which is one of the foundations of humanism, and belief in God: “Our faith is based on our humanity, and our humanity is based on our faith” (Buber 1966, p. 19). Buber assumes that:

Creation is not a hurdle on the road to God, it is the road itself. We are created along with one another and directed to a life with one another. Creatures are placed in my way so that I, their fellow-creature, by means of them and with them find the way to God.

(Buber 2002d, p. 60)

And in another formulation:

Above and below are bound to one another. The word of him who wishes to speak with men without speaking with God is not fulfilled; but the word of him who wishes to speak with God without speaking with men goes astray.

(Buber 2002a, p. 18)91

It seems, however, that this is still not sufficiently clear. What distinguishes the atheist humanist from the believing humanist who adheres to God? Loudly declaring that God exists or adopting a worldview that asserts this is not enough. What is the substantive difference between the nature of the simple human encounter between an empathic person and another—and that between the I and the Thou, which, by means of this “extending”, joins with the encounter with the Eternal Thou?

These questions cannot be answered without understanding the profoundly religious considerations underlying Buber’s arguments. Buber wrote about what he learned from Hasidism, and it seems that this element is the basis for his entire teaching:

I do not know of any other proper way to convey what I believe, what Hasidism taught me to believe: that the divine being is concealed in things and objects, and that I have no way to sense this being, but only incidental to sincere contact with them, incidental to contact of I and Thou. In this contact, however, I have the way to act upon it, I have the way to perform a ‘redemptive’ action upon it.

(Buber 1945, p. 6)

This passage presents the first concept by which the I-Thou relation differs from any other empathic stance. We can say that for Buber, following Hasidic teachings, something deep and primal in our being is hidden from us (others would say: is flawed, and needs mending), and man is to uncover and redeem this. In other words, if we let things flow in the world as they are, sooner or later we will find ourselves alienated, and inner and external conflicts will fill our entire world. If we are not prepared to face this fundamental flaw in our mental reality, we will be doomed to stand at a distance from the divine source. The human state of consciousness is such that if we allow things to flow as they are, and if we do not understand that something in the manner in which we are thrown into the world and act in it is basically faulty, the ego will take control of our lives like a monster and will blacken our world. The “kingdom of the ego” is imperfect, since it is only illusion. It is ruled by only a single egocentric center, for whom all was created to serve it, and it, therefore, distorts our perception of the reality.92

What, then, is the opposite of the humanism that follows the path of faith of which Buber speaks? Not the “secularist”, who might live his life in closeness to Thou and the fervor of faith, even though he does not belong to any community of believers, but rather the “capricious man”, namely, the one who is thrown into his arbitrary life with no direction, the one who “does not believe and encounter” (Buber 1970, p. 109). This is a person who is “a slave to his emotions and desires, and a slave to the historical forces that act upon the society to which he belongs” (Barzilai 2000, p. 207). Buber found a close connection between seeing the other as an object and denying the existence of God, or perhaps in the opposite direction: between denying the existence of God and viewing the other as an object.93 Buber explains this point in an essay in which he responds to Sartre’s philosophy:

But the Other for Sartre is he who “looks at” me, who makes me into an object, as I make him. The idea of God, moreover, he also understands as that of an inescapable witness, and if that is so, “What need have we of God? The Other is enough, no matter what other”.

(Buber 2016c, pp. 55–56)

Buber argues against this notion:

But what if God is not the quintessence of the Other, but rather its absoluteness?94 And what if it is not primarily the reciprocal relation of subject and object which exists between me and the other, but rather the reciprocal relation of I and Thou?

(Buber 2016c, p. 56)

Now, we come to the second element that makes Buber’s humanism profoundly religious: the concept of sacrifice. In Buber’s view, “in all realms of human existence, including language, [the position of the person of faith] is viable only by means of sacrifice”.95 This element is of the greatest import for understanding the argument that was highlighted above, regarding the importance of humility and making room for the other when we meet—just as the “sacrifice” of which Buber speaks is nothing other than the sacrifice of one’s ego.96 This element, however, is completely lacking in atheistic humanism. Dana Freibach-Heifetz, who described atheistic humanism, attempted to defend what she calls “secular grace”. She compares Buber’s teaching with her notion regarding secular empathy, that is detached from belief in God:

[…] there are other differences between secular [i.e., empty of any foundation of faith, in Freibach-Heifetz’s definition] grace and I-Thou relationship. The most important of them concerns individuality: secular grace is not understood as a foundation of the self,97 indeed the opposite, grace (at least from the perspective of the inviter) is an existential choice of the self that is already established, as an expression of individualistic self-realization, completely unlike Buber’s self-individualist position. The difference is also expressed in the understanding of self-love: according to Buber, self-love is a delusion, and it’s possible for a person to love himself only by means of mutual love with the other.98 In secular grace, self-love does not depend on love of the other, but vice-versa. This also means that the I-Thou—unlike grace—involves responsibility.

(Freibach-Heifetz 2017, pp. 94–95)

This teaches that grace that does not come from faith cannot intrinsically include the central element of dialogue: sacrifice. Accordingly, central concepts taken from the religious world cannot apply to the relation between the two: self-abnegation, humility, and self-sacrifice. For this reason, I dare to state that we should be suspicious of the “secular grace” proposed by Freibach-Heifetz, which, by its very nature, can exist only superficially, as the seeming appearance of momentary empathy, but which will lack the depth dimension provided by the vertical line,99 which facilitates the acceptance of the power that is expressed, in the final analysis, in the acceptance of responsibility for the world of the other.

It should also be noted that the religious experience, that seeks to draw the individual to the other side, to withdraw from this world and to adhere to God—Buber deemed this experience, too, concentrating on oneself, and one of the seductions of the ego. Buber said, against Kierkegaard:

Precisely what appears to us as the highest form of piety—to let everything earthly go—is the highest egoism.

(Buber 2002d, p. 66)

7. Applying the Dialogical Idea in the Everyday Life of the Modern Individual: The Disagreement between Buber and the Opponent

To exemplify what Buber meant when he spoke of the believing humanist and how he contends with the difficulties of everyday life, we should bring an example provided by Buber. The following passage is from a conversation between Buber and the “opponent” who raises harsh arguments regarding the possibility of applying Buber’s philosophy in the reality. Buber cites the words of the opponent:

“In all this actuality of our present life, the conditioned nature of life as a whole is not taken into account. All that you speak of takes place in the never-never-land, not in the social context of the world in which we spend our days, and by which if by anything our reality is defined. Your ‘two men’ [=in the imagined ‘dialogue’] sit on a solitary seat, obviously during a holiday journey. In a big city office, you would not be able to let them sit, they would not reach the ‘sacramental’ there […] That may be quite interesting for people who are not taken up with any duty. But is the business employee to ‘communicate himself without reserve’ to his colleagues? Is the worker at the conveyor belt to ‘feel himself addressed in what he experiences’? Is the leader of a gigantic technical undertaking to ‘practice the responsibility of dialogue’? You demand that we enter into the situation which approaches us, and you neglect the enduring situation in which everyone of us, so far as we share in the life of community, is elementally placed”.

(Buber 2002a, pp. 39–40)

Buber responds to these claims by first declaring that he does not demand anything of anyone. This answer teaches something fundamental about the essence of dialogue: a person who is aware of his inner state must clearly know when he slips into preaching, in which the demon of the ego dominates the address to the other:

I beg you to notice that I do not demand. I have no call to that and no authority for it. I try only to say that there is something, and to indicate how it is made: I simply record. And how could the life of dialogue be demanded? There is no ordering of dialogue. It is not that you are to answer but that you are able.

(Buber 2002a, p. 40)

Second, Buber proclaims, with all the ardor typical of his faith, that his message is totally relevant for every individual, in every situation in which he finds himself in the tumult of life, provided that he has faith in the possibility of redemptive dialogue:

Yes, precisely him I mean, him in the factory, in the shop, in the office, in the mine, on the tractor, at the printing-press: man […] Dialogue is not an affair of spiritual luxury and spiritual luxuriousness, it is a matter of creation, of the creature, and he is that, the man of whom I speak.

(Buber 2002a, p. 41)

Buber explains to the opponent that he is inclined to bring ideal, “pure” examples in what he writes “in order to make myself intelligible about what has become so unfamiliar, in fact so sunk in oblivion. For this reason, I appear to draw my tales from the province which you term the ‘intellectual’” (Buber 1977b, p. 41). All this, however, is for explanatory purposes only. Buber knew full well that the situations we encounter in daily life are very murky, complicated, conflicted, and replete with hostility and bad features—and under such condition, the ego dictates to us how to respond to those around us:

But I am not concerned with the pure. I am concerned with the turbid, the repressed, the pedestrian, with toil and dull contraryness.

(Buber 2002a, p. 41)

Third, Buber wanted to explain that he did not intend to present us with the challenge of fundamental change, but rather something much more modest: what he called a “break-through”. In our wording, we might say “a spark of understanding” or “a spark of sight”, the intent being to the possibility of expressing the basic word I-Thou in everyday life:

With the break-through and not with a perfection […] not with the great catastrophic break-through which happens once for all (it is fitting to be silent for a while about that, even in one’s own heart), but with the breaking through from the status of the dully-tempered disagreeableness, obstinacy, and contraryness in which the man, whom I pluck at random out of the tumult, is living and out of which he can and at times does break through.

Whither? Into nothing exalted, heroic or holy […] only into this tiny strictness and grace of every day […] glance to glance, look to look, word to word […] And now, in all the clanking of routine that I called my reality,100 there appears to me, homely and glorious, the effective reality, creaturely and given to me in trust and responsibility.

(Buber 2002a, pp. 41–42; cf. Frankl 1963, pp. 212–13)

Buber explains to the opponent that the latter charges Buber with having an “all or nothing” attitude and, therefore, attempts to “then prove the impossibility of my alleged demand”.101

All this enables us to understand the following example, which Buber puts forward to clarify his arguments against the opponent by observing the gray lives of factory workers or office employees:

No factory and no office is so abandoned by creation that a creative glance could not fly up from one working-place to another, from desk to desk, a sober and brotherly glance which guarantees the reality of creation which is happening—quantum satis [the amount which is enough]. And nothing is so valuable a service of dialogue between God and man as such an unsentimental102 and unreserved exchange of glances between two men in an alien place.

(Buber 2002a, p. 42)

***

If there is a single life lesson, a sort of abstract of all of Buber’s teaching that we can adopt today, it is this: the ladder that ascends to the heights is never in heaven, but is always firmly planted in the earth, in the commotion of life: in the office, the marketplace, the kitchen, the kindergarten, and the bedroom. Those are the places where God demands that man sanctify himself, and the world around, by constant openness to the sincere encounter, I-Thou, with the other.