The Role of the Other in the Construction of Identity: Considerations Around Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas

Abstract

By comparing Buber and Levinas, this article aims to clarify the constitution of the self as a place of identity. Both authors recognise, at first, that the self is only defined in relation to others and, ultimately, in relation to the You. However, the definition of that relationship is opposite in both authors. Levinas’ interpretation echoes Luther and Kierkegaard, as it establishes an insurmountable difference between you and me. Buber, although he borrows many concepts from the Danish philosopher, fundamentally, the definition of the individual as a relationship, contradicts Kierkegaard by defining the relationship not as a simple ‘facing’, but as a third party between me and you. Finally, it is concluded that although the individual must be preserved in the I–You relationship, this cannot be understood as something in itself, as a third part, and, on the other hand, there must be a certain knowledge about the Thou for the relationship to be real.

1. Introduction

For millennia, thought (religious, moral, and scientific) was essentially about understanding the vital structure of reality, the movements of the Whole, of which human beings were a part: rta in Vedism, Dao in many parts of the East, the laws of Thoth in Egypt, etc. This knowledge allowed humans to know how to act. The goal was to adapt himself to this dynamic whole by keeping “justice”, and balance (Maat in Egypt), so that the world’s misalignment wouldn’t mess with the individual. When harmony reigned in the world, human beings could trust in an auspicious future.

With the emergence of transcendence, this worldview is redefined. Fundamentally, through the people of Israel, the Whole becomes You, the Absolute, and, consequently, the Other. Human beings are then gradually transformed into an “I”, which is defined in relation to that You who is one: Yahweh. What is important now is what kind of relationship the people–individual establishes with Him (berit), what that ‘Thou’ wants from the ‘I’; decision and action become fundamental to explaining human beings. The important thing is still to know how to act, but now responsibility appears on the scene and takes on enormous importance. Not even God himself can remove our responsibility, says Levinas1.

With this new starting point, the decision, the circularity of time, ‘unravels’ and becomes history. The self, or the people, can act in different ways, and Yahweh’s attitude will change accordingly. Time becomes history. The universe, as a stable framework for action—independent of individual acts—is transformed into a ‘situation,’ into what happens; guilt appears, and the world is tinged with suffering. That stable framework, to which human beings had to adapt as accurately as possible, through countless rituals, in order to reproduce and reinforce it in its becoming, turns into a struggle to maintain balance in the relationship with the Other, from the situations we have to live through, situations that are not always favourable. The Alliance nestles in a changing context; it is realised through suffering.

Therefore, human action is what maintains the new balance between the self and the Other and, consequently, within humanity. The great question is how to understand this relationship through which we understand individual action. In this article, I will analyse two very different responses from two important figures in contemporary philosophical and religious thought: Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas.

For both authors, suffering is the backdrop that forces us to rethink the question of the self. For both, action is also fundamental: the individual exists as a consequence of his actions, says Levinas (Levinas 1976, p. 246); the ultimate goal of Judaism is ‘the truth as an act,’ says Buber (Buber 1923, p. 148).

“The spiritual process of Judaism unfolds in the course of history as a struggle for an ever more perfect fulfilment of three interrelated ideas: the idea of unity, the idea of action, and the idea of the future”.

(Buber 1923, p. 45)

The idea of the self emerges in action, in action towards the You, in action as response and acceptance.

Another important point of agreement between both authors is that this action is a decision. “The world has been created because of the choice of the chooser”, Buber says, quoting Rabbi Nachman, because “the fundamental concept of Judaism is the concept of the absolute value of the act as a decision” (Buber 1923, p. 83).

For both philosophers, the “you” is defined in relation to the “I”; individuality would not really exist outside this binomial, considering that they are correlative concepts and realities. For both, the individual is formed in response to the “You”, as an action decision and, therefore, in a certain way, from himself; he is his own creation. But the similarities finish here, as we will see below; both explain the human being in opposite ways: in the case of Levinas, as a solitary and yet autonomous being, as an unconquerable being, and as a relationship, in the case of Buber. By understanding the relationship with the Transcendent in such different ways, the human being is defined in opposite ways.

As Lipari puts it, a ‘failed dialogue’ takes place between them (Lipari 2004, p. 131), an explicit misunderstanding on both sides. For both, the action has a marked ethical character, but for Levinas, the relationship between the I and the other is asymmetrical, and non-reciprocal, whereas for Buber, the relationship established as the absolute superiority of one element over the other, as Levinas argues, makes a true relationship impossible. A one-way relationship, which entails the suspension of the ‘I’ in favour of the ‘Thou’ as proposed by Levinas, implies an unreciprocated love, according to Buber (Lipari 2004, p. 135).

For this author, this disagreement constitutes a failure of listening, the “problematics of listening for the other” (Lipari 2004, p. 131). In this article, I aim to demonstrate that the disagreement between both authors is not simply a problem of communication. It is a clash between two opposite anthropological perspectives, despite the fact that they supposedly share the same starting point: the Other as the completely Other. The self is constituted in relation to the You in both philosophers, but as a difference on the part of Levinas, for whom the impossibility of a relationship between equals is constitutive of the self and as reciprocity on the part of Buber, for whom the relationship is the possibility of the self. Perhaps both authors focus on different goals: the ontological inalienability of the individual in relation to the other, for Levinas, and the inalienability of the individual inside the relationship with the other, for Buber.

2. Emmanuel Levinas: Ethical Action and Solitude

Levinas’ thinking is structured around the Shoah (Parra 2023). How can we think about humanity after the Holocaust perpetrated by National Socialism? How can we talk about its humanity? For Levinas, revelation is certainly based on the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ (Parra 2023), but that is not enough. The Shoah really happened and destroyed the possibility of unthinking trust in the goodness of human nature. It revealed the superficiality with which man faces his own evil, ‘the banality of evil’, as Hannah Arendt called it (Arendt 2013)2. Is a human being really capable of annihilating another human being? Does this really happen, and does it have no consequences for human beings?

2.1. Separation: The Self as Identity

Like Kierkegaard in his tragic defence of the individual against the crushing laws of history, of the Hegelian Spirit, where “reason engulfs the subject” (Levinas 1971, p. 333), Levinas attempts to turn human beings into impregnable beings, and, to this end, like Kierkegaard, he makes them inaccessible. Isolation is the only thing that will defend the individual from cruel banality. To this end, Levinas defines the individual as ‘pure exteriority’ and inalienable (Levinas 1971, p. 24) as ‘absolutely Other’ (Levinas 1971, p. 28). In reality, the other is pure exteriority, “The Absolutely Other is the Another” (“L’Absolument Autre, c’est Autrui”, Levinas 1971, p. 28), and the self is interiority, although in relation to the other it is also exteriority3. Consequently, both poles are essentially asymmetrical and will never meet. There can be no union and, therefore, no totality.

Separation is the psyche, the inner life (Levinas 1971, p. 112). As for Kierkegaard, for Levinas, the important thing is to make synthesis impossible, but Levinas specifies that separation, essential to the self and the other, is not established thanks to the Self, to the Himself, as Kierkegaard asserts; it is not the Self that establishes it, but the Other. The Self cannot become history or system, because the Other makes it impossible (Levinas 1971, pp. 30, 78). Any other is, in reality, an Other. The Self, therefore, is not a relationship, but identity; identity is its content; the Self is identical to itself ‘even in its alterations’ (Levinas 1971, p. 25). In other words, we are not talking about a human being who does not change, but about a Self defined as identity in any circumstance; it is a Self, and it is so because it is separate; it is autonomous. Levinas defines the human being on countless occasions not only from separation, but as separation; difference essentially constitutes it, and, thanks to it, it exists as an independent and free being.

“Separation is the very essence of thought and interiority, that is to say, of a relationship within independence […] a being is a being only insofar as it is free, that is to say, outside the system that presupposes dependence. Any restriction put on freedom is a restriction placed on being”.

(Levinas 1971, p. 107)4

The identity of the self as separation begins in its relationship with the world. The world is the home of the self, a chez soi, a place (Levinas 1971, p. 26). Certainly, a place that protects and welcomes us should not be interpreted negatively, but it is already another, “transcendence” (Levinas 1971, p. 31). This starting point for understanding human beings may seem to be superficial to us; the world as a home and man as a being who inhabits it may seem like an obvious and harmless statement, but Levinas then clarifies that this difference is not purely formal, something that does not essentially affect the individual. On the contrary, the otherness of the world affects the individual in their being, even though it also guarantees their freedom (Levinas 1971, p. 28). It is an otherness that can still be overcome through possession, but it is already the basis for a deeper otherness, given that human beings are explained from the perspective of separation. Separation creates an unbridgeable chasm within me: separation from the origin.

“The separation of the Self is thus established as non-contingent, as non-provisional. The distance between myself and God—radical and necessary—arises within being itself. In this respect, philosophical transcendence differs from religious transcendence […]”.

(Levinas 1971, p. 40)5

As Faessler points out, the absolute transcendence of God leads Levinas to understand him as a God ‘uncontaminated by being’ (Faessler 1980, p. 502), a God, therefore, who cannot be spoken of (a saying that does not say, ‘dire sans dit’), nor thought of. As Faessler states, “the Jewish God approaches without revealing himself” (Faessler 1980, p. 502); he must enter the world without participating in it, without ever truly entering into time, as “a past that was never present” (Faessler 1980, p. 503), an irretrievable (Faessler 1980, p. 505) and “immemorial” past which, in truth, does not enter into memory.

2.2. Religion and Ethics

Religion would be the relationship between the Self and the Other, the only way that does not constitute a totality (Levinas 1971, p. 30). Speaking of creation ex nihilo means precisely that there is an insurmountable separation between creator and creature (Levinas 1971, p. 58). The impossibility of union is defined as transcendence and makes the idea of Infinity possible. The term ‘religion’, therefore, speaks to us of a relationship without relationship (Levinas 1971, p. 78). Given that being is explained from separation, “religion, where the relationship between the Same and the Other subsists despite the impossibility of the Whole—the idea of the Infinite—is the ultimate structure” (Levinas 1971, p. 79)6.

The relationship with the other is therefore defined from the relationship with the Other, as transcendence, but with the peculiarity that by describing the Other as ‘absolutely Other,’ ultimately the individual, the self, can only be understood as separation. From this point on, the individual, in his autonomy, isolates himself: “We live outside of God; at home we are an ego, selfishness.” This means that we do not participate in being; we are ontologically atheists, although eventually, through faith, we may adhere to being (Levinas 1971, p. 52). “Only an atheist being can relate to the Other and already absolve itself from this relationship […] Atheism conditions a true relationship with a true God kaz’aútó” (Levinas 1971, p. 75)7.

The first consequence of the impossibility of Totality, of union, of the Self (Moi Même) and the other (Autrui) not being comparable, but rather metaphysically asymmetrical, is that knowledge is impossible. According to Levinas, this would mean possessing the other. But ‘to be human means: to live as if one were not a being among other beings’ (Levinas 2000, p. 84). For this reason, knowledge becomes impossible:

“Direct knowledge of God is impossible […] Knowledge of God as participation in his sacred being, supposedly direct knowledge, is impossible”.

(Levinas 1971, p. 76)8

Like Kierkegaard’s “knight of faith” the individual is constituted in solitude, through an act of will and by renouncing knowledge. But, unlike Kierkegaard, for Levinas, that is ethics. If for Kierkegaard, ethics was characterised by transparency, constituting the stage of the relationship (Laffont 1993, p. 875), for Levinas, only inner life allows us to exist as plurality (Levinas 1971, p. 52).

“Ethics is a spiritual perspective […] Separated from our relationship with other people, it is impossible to have any ‘knowledge’ of God […]. Ultimately, it is through moral relationships that any metaphysical assertion takes on a ‘spiritual’ meaning”.

(Levinas 1971, pp. 76–77)9

The ethical relationship is therefore presented as the relationship par excellence, the only real one, since it is only through it that human beings can establish a bond with other people or with God without losing themselves. For this reason, according to Levinas, the ethical relationship is an exceptional relationship for Judaism, since it not only does not compromise human sovereignty, but rather establishes it (Levinas 1976, p. 31).

The ethical relationship is all and consists of taking practically unlimited responsibility for the other. But this act of responsibility in Levinas’ philosophy is not clearly defined in terms of content. This almost total responsibility is so blurred that it seems more like a purely intellectual act with limited ethical significance in the strict sense. For Levinas, it is only through responsibility that a relationship with the other is possible, and it does not matter whether this responsibility is “accepted or rejected, whether or not one knows how to assume it, whether or not one can do something concrete for the other” (Levinas 2000, p. 81), “from the moment the other looks at me, I am responsible for them without even having to take responsibility in relation to them […] It is a responsibility that goes beyond what I do”10 (Levinas 2000, p. 80) and precedes any action. The act of taking responsibility is deprived of real content; it is a decision, but not about something concrete, and it is pure voluntarism.

This idea of responsibility is really very vague, lacking any concrete content. It is about resembling God, feeling his infinite responsibility (Levinas 2000, p. 201). What is clear is that there is no other type of ‘bridge’ between the self and the You, given that the path of knowledge is closed. The only possible relationship is the acceptance of something I choose, even if it is not obvious or perhaps understandable to me.

“The soul’s conversion to the externality, or to the absolutely other, or to the infinite, cannot be deduced from the self-identity of that soul, for it is beyond the soul’s capacity […] The idea of the Infinite reveals itself in the fullest sense of the term”.

(Levinas 1971, p. 56)11

This assertion by Levinas suggests that not only is the Other unknowable—and, consequently, the other—but that the relationship itself, as separation, is unknowable. For him, as we have already said, man’s relationship with God is the pattern by which any kind of relationship is defined, and this relationship is a blind relationship, without sentimentality, without handholds, a relationship in which Kant’s “dare to think” is replaced by “dare to take on responsibility”, simply. This responsibility, which is not easily deducible in itself, does not clearly correspond to specific responsibilities. This relationship is proposed as an adult relationship, based on separation (the atheism we have already mentioned), without consolation or ‘half measures’, a relationship with an “absent God” (Levinas 2000, p. 205), “a relationship without a relationship” (Levinas 1971, p. 79), a heroic relationship like that of Kierkegaard’s “knight of faith”, at the limit of the impossible.

“God who hides his face is not, in our opinion, a theological abstraction nor a poet’s image. It is the hour when the righteous individual finds no external recourse, when no institution protects him, when even the consolation of the divine presence in childlike religious sentiment is denied, when the individual can triumph only in his conscience, that is to say, necessarily in suffering”.

(Levinas 1976, p. 203)12

This “justice without triumph”, Levinas would say, is Judaism. The spiritual is not something tangible; it is an absence. God becomes concrete and present in the law, and this justifies the seemingly blasphemous statement by Yossel ben Yossel that Levinas makes his own: “I love God, but I love the Torah more” (Levinas 1976, p. 204).

Ritual is superseded by ethics, but is an act of responsibility without content, real?

3. Martin Buber: The Substantialisation of the Relationship

As I mentioned in the introduction, Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas have important points in common. For both, suffering is the “humus” from which their understanding of man is formed, in which it sinks its roots. Buber states in the introduction to his 1923 work On Judaism (Reden über das Judentum):

“The theophany that prepares the liberated people for the conquest of the Earth appears as an outbreak of force, and earthly events, lightning and fire on the mountain are presented under the sign of a movement that goes from ‘above’ to ‘below’ in the transcendence of the word. But there is a theophany of exile, a theophany of ‘never being abandoned’, which resonates in dishonour and humiliation, and in this theophany revelation does not come from the clouds, but from the humblest objects, its whispering reaching us in the spilling of the days. The Shekhinah is close to us, alive among us, exiled with us, sharing our waiting while healing our suffering and sanctifying itself in the immanence of the word. This is the history of Israel, just as it is the history of the human person, but it could also be the history of the world, and of all that it has given us so far to read and write”.

(Buber 1923, p. XIII)

In this situation, in this story, human beings will have to live their spirituality and their religion; they will have to ‘realise’ God and find the You.

3.1. The Importance of Action, ‘Truth as an Act’ and as Action in the World

According to Buber, Judaism aims to create true community on earth. And it is precisely the desire to give God a place in that true community, in the way He has inspired it, that defines his need for God (Buber 1923, p. 148). We will try to explain how this aspiration can and should be realised for our author.

First, we must be aware of the importance of action, which, as in Levinas’ case, is fundamentally a decision: “The world was created for the choice of the chooser” (Buber 1923, pp. 105–6)13. For Buber, action is the essence of all religiosity; decision realises God’s freedom and unconditionality on earth. Conversely, inertia and indecision are the root of all evil.

The decision is important for Buber, not only on an individual level, as an intellectual starting point and basic concept of his thinking, as might be the case with Levinas. For Buber, human beings play a creative role in history, which is basically the history of salvation. In this history, each person must play their part, the part that has been entrusted to them, the part for which they came into the world, as our author says in the prologue to On Judaism from 1923 (Buber 1923, p. XVIII). But in this task, man is quite alone; in this history of salvation, there is no mediator, Buber asserts in explicit reference to Christianity and also positioning himself, on this point, against Hasidism, which has nevertheless been a basic element of his thinking. Nothing that has already been accomplished can alleviate man in his actions; everything depends on his own impulse, and all external support only works to weaken that force (Buber 1923, p. 108). For this reason, Buber asserts, Christianity ceases to be a source of inspiration for Jews when it affirms that faith in Christ is sufficient to attain eternal life14.

Action also takes on vital importance in our author’s thinking because the “realisation” of God, that is, giving him a place in the true community to which we have alluded, depends on man. Let us try to clarify this fundamental point for our purpose.

What does this “realisation” of God consist of? In his 1947 work The dialogical principle (Das dialoguische Prinzip), in the section “The Question of the Individual”, one of the sections that closes the work, Buber engages in a long dialogue with Kierkegaard to clarify his idea of man and relationship. He starts from the premise that Kierkegaard’s God and his own are one and the same: “Anyone who professes faith in the God to whom Kierkegaard and I profess faith” (Buber 2021, p. 218)15, which places us in a framework of understanding God as the absolutely Other (Aizpún 1992, p. 177 ff.), something that the author clearly affirms, although he wishes to nuance it (Buber 2021, p. 81).

Likewise, he argues, like the Dane, that the individual cannot under any circumstances disappear from the I–Thou equation. Buber states, quoting Kierkegaard: “the individual is the category through which, from a religious point of view, time, history and race must go” (Buber 2021, p. 223). However, Buber establishes his differences with Kierkegaard by distancing himself from the interpretation of the ‘ethical stage’. Is ethics, as an essential relationship with another, really incompatible with the ‘religious stage’? Buber interprets this Kierkegaardian position, set out in his theory of the three stages, as something strictly personal. He argues that this statement refers only to Kierkegaard himself, as an exception, and that Kierkegaard himself recognises that it has “a personal character and a personal destiny” (Buber 2021, p. 219). This interpretation is controversial, but we will not delve into that issue here, as it would distract us from our purpose. For Buber, the essence of Judaism lies precisely in the union of both ethics and religiosity, which are really two sides of the same coin. ‘The distinctive nature of Judaism, therefore, lies neither in the religious nor in the ethical, but in the unity of both elements. Unity, not connection; both are merely two sides of the same fundamental relationship’ (Buber 1923, pp. 148–49)16. Ethics does not play the absolute role for Buber that it does for Levinas, but it is indispensable in relation to the importance of action and in shaping the role that the world and the other play in his thinking. “The religiosity of the Danes would be blind to the fact that God places creatures in the world so that man may come to Him through a genuine relationship with them. Kierkegaard, on the other hand, sees the world solely as a fallen reality that distances man from God; therefore, a true bond with God is only possible by excluding the world” (Rodríguez 2013, p. 73)17.

Whatever Kierkegaard really thought, Buber makes it very clear that renouncing the other, the world in general, is not only not the way forward, but also renders us incapable of true relationship. Firstly, because the place of God’s realisation is the community (Buber 1923, p. 147), but also because,

“The ‘individual’ is not one who relates essentially to God and only inessentially to others, who deals unconditionally with God and conditionally with public life, but rather the individual is one in whom the relational reality with God, the exclusive one, includes and encompasses the relational possibility with all otherness, and to whom all public life, the repository of otherness, offers enough otherness to spend a lifetime with it”.

(Buber 2021, p. 235)18

Therefore, Buber not only rescues marriage, but also what Kierkegaard calls the ‘multitude’ and defines as falsehood, making, for example, spiritual life incompatible with politics. This was inconceivable to Buber, who was active in the early days of the Zionist movement19. Not only does the human being “belong […] to the community into which he was born or found himself” (Buber 2021, p. 237), but, and this is important for our analysis, unity is a basic principle in our author’s thinking; therefore, renunciation, exclusion from the world of the equation, not only does not help, but prevents the realisation of God and, consequently, of man. God is loved in his creatures and, since God is not an object among objects, cannot therefore be attained by renouncing objects (Buber 2021, p. 224)20. In Buber, everything is very concrete; God is not Kantian, and the demand for ‘realisation’ implies that

“For Judaism, God is not a Kantian idea, but an elemental and present substance. God is not a concept of pure reason, nor a postulate of practical reason, but the immediacy of existence […] the one who endures and lives before the divine face is not the one who turns away from the world”.

(Buber 1923, p. 146)

God likes to ‘lie’ in the world, says Buber, and it is there, in history, understood as a response and acceptance of my circumstances, that man must ‘realise’ God. By doing this, human beings create community and themselves. Taking responsibility, therefore, for the community to which they belong and for their historical moment, as if it were their own, they ‘realise God’. Everything that happens is really a hierophany (what happens is ‘His word’), and what it demands of each person is a response, one that I, in all responsibility, consider to be the correct one, because faith is not an instruction handbook; “the relationship of faith is not a rulebook” (Buber 2021, p. 248).

3.2. The Place of the Relationship: ‘The Encounter’

From the above, we can understand the dialogical essence of Buberian thought. In The dialogical principle, Buber begins by proposing the idea that the self does not exist in isolation; it is subjectivity because it is essentially a relationship, something that traditional cultures, as well as children, understood very clearly. The self was really only part of the “basic word” ‘I–Thou’. In this relational framework, the self appears as a person and becomes aware of its subjectivity (Buber 2021, p. 66).

This first ‘basic word’ leads us to a second one formed by the duality of self-consciousness. Man becomes his own Self, becomes consciousness, through the you (Buber 2021, p. 34), and every you becomes You because it leads us to Him, to the eternal You, to that You that cannot become ‘it’21. These ‘basic words’ that manifest reality as it is (‘the truly real’, as philosophy has traditionally called it) manifest the unity of the real. The world of essences is one, because the spirit is one. Certainly, this is not the world in which we live for most of the time; indeed, some people never live in it, but rather in the world of experience, of knowledge, of technological advancement, of the measurable and the controllable (Buber 2021, pp. 41–42). This world, in which we live most of the time, is necessary, even though it really is an obstacle to the life of the spirit and to relationships, but it is the world that makes relationships possible (Buber 2021, pp. 42–43).

Buber is an author well-versed not only in Christianity but also in Eastern thought, and for this reason, he distinguishes his understanding of unity from that Eastern way of thinking, which was already beginning to spread throughout the West. For him, in that world of essences, even if it is one, the I and the you cannot disappear. Like Kierkegaard, Buber argues that without a subject, a relationship is not possible. The creation of unity is certainly fundamental to Buber’s thinking; according to him, it is not only a basic idea of Judaism, but also what makes Judaism a fundamental phenomenon for humanity. ‘The Jewish aspiration for unity is what makes Judaism a phenomenon of humanity and the Jewish question a question of humanity’ (Buber 1923, p. 23). For this reason, Buber has taken an interest in mysticism, which is the key to understanding the unity that makes the union of the world possible through oneness with God.

In his 1909 work Ekstatische Konfessionen (Buber 1996), Buber brings together different texts and testimonies not only from mystics, but also from the Upanishads, Eastern philosophers such as Lao-Tzu, etc. His own position on mysticism is far from clear in this work, although it is in The dialogical principle, as we shall see below. What is clear in his research on mysticism is that what interests him is union as ecstasy. How can we experience ourselves and experience God? The subject is not a unity that can be experienced, he will say, but coming out of turmoil (like Kierkegaard’s anguish) gives the soul the possibility of experiencing itself and the world as a unity, not as content, but as something ‘superior to all content’ (Buber 2019, p. 24). The soul experiences itself by immersing itself totally in itself. “This experience, the most internal of all, is what the Greeks called ektasis, that is, going out” (Buber 2019, p. 25).

It is not easy to define this idea clearly, but Buber makes it very clear that “all real life is encounter “ (Buber 2021, p. 17), that both on a human level (relationship between human beings) and on a divine level (relationship between man and God), the relationship is a reciprocal one, and if one of the parties is deprived of reality, understanding the relationship as pure dependence, the relationship itself is deprived of actuality. For this reason, duality cannot be eliminated; there cannot be a ‘beyond you and me’ understood as synthesis. Sure, the goal is unity, and however, both poles of the relationship must be preserved. If unity is not an experience, how can that unity be interpreted? Perhaps the idea of ecstasy leads Buber to assert that “the spirit is not in the I, but between the I and the Thou” (Buber 2021, p. 43)22.

So, Buber wonders how to interpret the testimonies of mystics and Eastern philosophies of unity. Regarding the former, according to the author, they are a ‘mistake’ due to the intensity of the experience.

“What the ecstatic calls union is the overwhelming dynamism of the relationship; not a unity originating at this moment in time of world, merging the I and the Thou, but the dynamism of the relationship itself, which can stand before its bearers, mutually and definitively confronted, and cover the sensation of the ecstatic”.

(Buber 2021, p. 89)

In relation to the Eastern view of the identification between the self and the whole, which Buber also refers to as the ‘theory of immersion,’ he admits that this non-duality may be real, although we will never know for sure, but it certainly contradicts our experience completely: “it has nothing in common with lived reality” (Buber 2021, p. 90), and that seems to be sufficient argument for our author. “In lived reality, there is no unity of being” (Buber 2021, p. 90), and it is this truth that the author seeks to preserve as something sacred.

In essential duality, what is truly real is the ecstatic encounter between you and You, love as a ‘cosmic action’ in which you and I need each other because even theophany is a matter for twos (Buber 1923, p. XII). I need God, and He needs me

“That you need God more than anything else, you know at all times in your heart; but do you also know that God needs you, in the fullness of His eternity? How could man exist if God did not need him, and how could you exist? You need God in order to be, and God needs you—precisely for what that is the meaning of your life”.

(Buber 2021, p. 84)23

The two poles of the relationship are therefore inseparable from each other, but the relationship does not exist in either of them, but between them. Buber explains what this relationship, which he calls ‘encounter,’ consists of through different characteristics: this third party is not a feeling, it is not consciousness, nor is it experience (Buber 2021, p. 10 ff.). The relationship is both human action and the product of action, the creation–actualisation of a form (Buber 2021, p. 16). “To form is to discover”, “to actualise”. This third element constitutes a fragile and discontinuous appearance, uncontrollable and immeasurable, as we have already said, but which we know to be real because it acts on us, it affects us (Buber 2021, p. 16). This encounter, this ‘between-the-two’, is an action, but one that does not depend solely on the subject because it is a response. In this sense, the relationship is active and passive at the same time (Buber 2021, pp. 17, 78). Nothing should be left out; the real you includes everything else. Nor is any preparatory work necessary (exercises, meditations, etc.). All that is needed is a response of full acceptance of the present, of the story that, when I take it on as my own, becomes the word of God. If we accept everything, even the search disappears, “because there is nothing where it cannot be found”; it is finding without seeking (Buber 2021, p. 82). Correcting himself, Buber states at the beginning of his On Judaism that “God cannot arise”; the role of human beings is to ‘be open’, with a Kierkegaardian emphasis on ‘daring to stand before God’ as an I before a thou. The encounter, which is not the result of a search, is the hierophany of the most originary and the origin (Buber 2021, p. 82). It is something that we cannot properly call knowledge or experience, but which acts.

4. Conclusions

The self is a relative concept, and in this regard, I believe Buber is absolutely right in his explanation of ‘basic words’. The self requires a you, and consequently, the definition of the Self entails the definition of the other or Other in relation to whom it is determined and constituted. But we cannot forget that our ideas are not harmless. What we think defines how we live through how we act. Our ideas are also actions, and our ‘intellectual actions’ have consequences on our behaviour and, therefore, on our lives. That is why it is interesting to analyse two authors who, despite their similarities, differ greatly in their views of the human being, understood as a self in relation to a you. As we said in the introduction, by understanding the relationship with the Transcendent in opposite ways, human beings are defined in opposite ways by these two authors: as isolation in one case (Levinas) and as relationship in the other (Buber). These positions consequently define very different fields of action and possibilities for action.

The meaning of consciousness is much more complex than the simple Thomist concept of ‘knowing that you know’. It is related to our creative capacity, which is, first and foremost, a self-creative capacity (autopoiesis), the capacity to become who we decide to be, and this is not only related to outward action. Basically, our autopoietic capacity depends on the human capacity to set goals and models of action according to moral and spiritual criteria. This has to do with being able to define oneself and see oneself not in terms of who one is, but in terms of who one wants to be, which also requires defining the capacities and possibilities of one’s own human being (Aizpún 2020). Without this, man falls into a kind of dream, in which, like Eichmann, he does not want to be responsible for his actions and falls into a certain automatism with the risk of becoming inhuman and diabolical. That is why Arendt says of Eichmann that he lacked imagination, and, although he was not stupid, “it was only pure and simple thoughtlessness—which in no way can be confused with stupidity—that predisposed him to become the greatest criminal of his time” (Arendt 2013, p. 418). Responsibility, which our authors talk about so much, is meaningless if we do not have that previous capacity for self-definition that comes from imagination. That is where our responsibility really begins.

In this field of self-definition, the modern man has a fatal tendency towards self-limitation, which begins by curtailing our capacity for thought and, consequently, for action. I am not referring to self-limitation based on moral criteria, which was conspicuous by its absence during the Second World War. Modernity does not limit itself in this field as it should (there are things we are able to do but should not do)24. No, here I am referring to the self-limitation of thought: declaring something to be irrational and unscientific, in short, unthinkable, which sickeningly limits our capacity to act.

Descartes and Kant, like Levinas, finally declare God to be ‘unthinkable’. Defined as noumenon or ‘idea of reason’, God becomes a sort of disease of the soul or of thought: something we need to maintain our psychological or moral balance, but which only works as a limit. Certainly, man naturally tends towards his limits, due to his desire to improve himself, but ultimately, God, having become deus otiosus, always ends up disappearing from our thoughts and our lives, as Eliade explains, greatly limiting our vital field. That with which we do not interact in any way has no reason to exist for us and ends up disappearing, since it plays no role in our lives.

Perhaps suffering can also play this limiting role in Levinas’ thinking. Can the enormous weight of the Shoah lead us not only to understand human beings in a different way, but also to restrict their capacity for action? We have seen, in dialogue with Kierkegaard, the attempt to defend the individual from annihilation by defining him as unassailable in contrast to and as a reflection of an unattainable God. Of course, a definition does not have to be true, but, understood as the absolutely Other, God prevents us from approaching Him. Our definition does not limit God in his reality, obviously, but it limits us in our actions. Levinas’ God ends up being non-existent: the relationship with the transcendent is a social relationship, affirms Levinas (Levinas 1971, p. 76), so it is man who must save man (Parra 2023). Levinas even concedes to his interviewer in Ethics and Infinity that, although the Bible is the ‘Book of Books’ (Levinas 2000, p. 25), ultimately any ethical man, at any time and in any place, would be capable of “giving written or oral testimonies, which could eventually constitute a bible” (Levinas 2000, p. 97). Finally, man is alone.

How does this anthropological model inform our actions? Our ideas either elevate us or limit us. The human being capable of deifying themselves by creating themselves—as advocated by an important strand of Christian tradition stretching from Pico Della Mirandola (Della Mirandola 1972) to Novalis (Novalis 2006, p. 52)—is opposed to the man who understands himself as a being unable to know and understand himself, a being who, although not stupid, is totally lacking in imagination, as Hannah Arendt describes Eichmann (Arendt 2013, p. 418), and is therefore incapable of setting goals for himself and goals that go beyond himself. He would be someone who cannot conceive of himself outside of a structure.

In Buber’s case, the problem is very different. He also defends, albeit with nuances, a Thou understood as absolutely Other that we cannot know25, but nevertheless, he does not define the self as separation, but as a relationship. True reality, and particularly the reality of the human being, is understood as an I–Thou/Thou relationship. But that reality is a third party; it is not something that is either in the self or in the Thou. The model for this third party, which is the ‘Encounter’, the Relationship, is the explanation of God in the Gospel of John, which Buber defines as ‘the gospel of pure relationship’ (Buber 2021, p. 87). He even says, paraphrasing the evangelist: “In the beginning was the relationship” (Buber 2021, p. 24). In this Gospel, he asserts, there is more truth than in the statement ‘I am you and you are that’ in traditional Buddhism, although Buber identifies it as a ‘mystical verse’. The indissolubility of the Father in the Son and vice versa, the relationship of knowledge and love between the two as spirit, is the model of relationship to which, according to him, we should aspire.

This thesis amounts to attributing to human beings, or to relationships, the capacity to create life. That third party would apparently be another being, since it acts in some way26. This raises several problems for us. On the one hand, we would have to admit that the ‘Encounter’ is a procreation, which does not seem real. On the other hand, it is difficult to understand how that relationship changes me, how it acts on me, if it is another. And, according to Buber, it changes me, since the relationship is the possibility of human becoming, “it is at the origin of all individual human becoming” (Buber 2021, p. 297).

I have already defended elsewhere the importance of triadic logic for thinking about life (Aizpún 2024), but there is a huge gap between thinking about life and creating it, between understanding the process of life and reproducing it. In my opinion, Buber rightly asserts that there is no love if one of the poles of the I–Thou relationship disappears, and that the disappearance of either pole of the relationship completely contradicts our experience. I also agree with Buber that human beings aspire to unity, even though that unity cannot mean the disappearance of the subject who loves and enjoys God, without eliminating both love and enjoyment. I do not believe, however, that we can define that union as a third party, but rather as something that happens within man27. Buber asserts that this ‘Encounter’ is something that affects us, but it is not a feeling, nor an experience, nor is it consciousness (it is there, even if we do not know it). Ecstasy is not knowledge (Buber 2019, p. 29). But if it is not experience, feeling, or consciousness, it is, in my opinion, reducing the relationship to nothing. What is it then? A pure force, something that acts? It does not seem logical and, following his argument, contradicts all experience.

Perhaps the problem lies in defining the relationship as ‘cosmic’, something that necessarily precedes the encounter itself. I confess that I do not fully understand this concept, but it is not really easy to compare man’s encounter with God’s relationship with any other element in the universe, such as a planet, for example28.

Finally, I believe that excluding knowledge from the I–You equation is always a mistake. Just because we cannot know God in the same way we know the world does not mean we cannot know Him. Knowledge does not always follow the same logic (that of modern rationalism), but that does not mean it is not knowledge. Similarly, I believe that any relationship is an experience, because in human life, everything is an experience, even dreams, which are not always conscious, are an experience.

I also agree with Buber that true relationships are, in a way, creative, but precisely because they are conscious, and, unlike animals, human consciousness involves creation; and that creation is autopoiesis, a change in myself, even if it influences what is outside.

In conclusion, we see that in order to define the identity of the Self, it is not enough to place it in front of you. How we understand that you will determine what kind of relationship is established between both, and from this, the understanding of the Self.