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Title: I and Thou
Author: Martin Buber
Date: 1923
Language: en
Topics: philosophy, existentialism, relationships
Source: Retrieved on 2nd May 2021 from http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=77F833EB1EBCFEA0C3B33E4C97F19BD8
Notes: A Translation with a Prologue “I and You” and Notes by Walter Kaufmann.

Martin Buber

I and Thou

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

THE PRESENT VOLUME owes its existence to Rafael Buber. In June 1969 he

phoned me from Boston, explained that he was Martin Buber’s son, and

asked whether he could come to see me in Princeton. We had never met,

and he offered no explanation; but when he came a few days later, there

was an instant rapport, coupled with an intriguing lack of directness.

He told me of his desire for a new English translation of Ich und Du and

asked my counsel. I recalled how his father had told me that he

considered Ronald Gregor Smith, who had done I and Thou, by far his best

translator. Rafael insisted that those whose advice he valued were

agreed that the old version had to be replaced. I myself had attacked

the use of “thou” instead of “you” in print, but at this point did not

let on that I did not like the old translation. Instead I pointed out

how nearly untranslatable the book was. Rafael did not protest, but his

mind was made up, and he wanted my help. I mentioned names. They would

not do: the new version had to be done by someone who had been close to

his father; and he had come a long way and did not want to return home

to Israel without having accomplished this mission. Now I insisted that

the book really was untranslatable, and that all one could do was to add

notes, explaining plays on words—and I gave an example. Instant

agreement: that was fine—a translation with notes. He wanted me to do

it, however I chose to do it, and it was clear that I would have his

full cooperation.

This I got. That unforgettable day in my study, and later on in the

garden, was the fourth anniversary of Martin Buber’s death. I hesitated

for a few days, but the challenge proved irresistible. Thus I was led

back into another dialogue with Martin Buber, well over thirty years

after I had first seen and heard him in Lehnitz (between Berlin and

Oranienburg) where he had come with Ernst Simon at his side to teach

young people Bibel lesen—to read the Bible.

In the summer of 1969 I visited the Buber Archive in Jerusalem and had a

look at the handwritten manuscript of Ich und Du and at Buber’s

correspondence with Ronald Gregor Smith. I asked for copies of the

complete manuscript and of all pages on which Buber had commented on

points of translation. The material was promptly sent to me and turned

out to be of considerable interest. (See the Key, below.) Having noticed

some discrepancies between the first edition of the book and the later

editions, I asked Rafael Buber whether he had a record of the variants.

He did not, but made a list himself, by hand, for my use.

Both from him and from Mrs. Margot Cohn, who for decades was Buber’s

secretary and who now works fulltime in the Archive, I have encountered

not only kindness and cooperation at every point but the spirit of

friendship.

I have been equally fortunate with my undergraduate research assistant

at Princeton, Richard L. Smith ’70. He had read the original translation

of I and Thou three times before he began to assist me, and he loved the

book. There is no accounting for how many times he has read it now,

comparing the new version with the old one, raising questions, compiling

the glossary, and reading proofs. Working with him has been a delight.

Siegwart Lindenberg, assisting me in two courses in 1969–70, very kindly

went over the new translation during the semester break and compared it

with the German text. His queries and suggestions have been immensely

helpful, and it was wonderful to be able to discuss some of the most

difficult passages with a friend.

KEY

IN THE NOTES there are numerous references to “Buber, March 1937,”

followed by hitherto unpublished information. This material comes from

Buber’s letters to Ronald Gregor Smith, who made the first translation

of Ich und Du.

After reading the page proofs of that version, Buber requested well over

two hundred corrections. Many involved serious misunderstandings. As

soon as I had completed my version, I checked Buber’s criticisms to make

sure that mistakes pointed out in March 1937 had not been reintroduced

unwittingly. It was a strange experience to find my readings of many

difficult passages confirmed by Buber, years after his death.

Occasionally he offered glosses that went beyond the German text and

explained more fully what had been in his mind. These

self-interpretations, not previously available in any language, are

included in the notes and identified: “Buber, March 1937.”

“Before 1957” identifies variants between the first and second editions.

Many of these changes are too slight to affect the translation or to be

worth recording here. Thus Wörterpaars became Wortpaars; Eines was

changed to eines; and um dich herum, um dich her. All the more

substantial revisions are indicated in the notes.

I AND YOU, A PROLOGUE by Walter Kaufmann

I

Man’s world is manifold, and his attitudes are manifold. What is

manifold is often frightening because it is not neat and simple. Men

prefer to forget how many possibilities are open to them.

They like to be told that there are two worlds and two ways. This is

comforting because it is so tidy. Almost always one way turns out to be

common and the other one is celebrated as superior.

Those who tell of two ways and praise one are recognized as prophets or

great teachers. They save men from confusion and hard choices. They

offer a single choice that is easy to make because those who do not take

the path that is commended to them live a wretched life.

To walk far on this path may be difficult, but the choice is easy, and

to hear the celebration of this path is pleasant. Wisdom offers simple

schemes, but truth is not so simple.

Not all simplicity is wise. But a wealth of possibilities breeds dread.

Hence those who speak of many possibilities speak to the few and are of

help to even fewer. The wise offer only two ways, of which one is good,

and thus help many.

Mundus vult decipi: the world wants to be deceived. The truth is too

complex and frightening; the taste for the truth is an acquired taste

that few acquire.

Not all deceptions are palatable. Untruths are too easy to come by, too

quickly exploded, too cheap and ephemeral to give lasting comfort.

Mundus vult decipi; but there is a hierarchy of deceptions.

Near the bottom of the ladder is journalism: a steady stream of

irresponsible distortions that most people find refreshing although on

the morning after, or at least within a week, it will be stale and flat.

On a higher level we find fictions that men eagerly believe, regardless

of the evidence, because they gratify some wish.

Near the top of the ladder we encounter curious mixtures of untruth and

truth that exert a lasting fascination on the intellectual community.

What cannot, on the face of it, be wholly true, although it is plain

that there is some truth in it, evokes more discussion and dispute,

divergent exegeses and attempts at emendations than what has been stated

very carefully, without exaggeration or onesidedness. The Book of

Proverbs is boring compared to the Sermon on the Mount.

The good way must be clearly good but not wholly clear. If it is quite

clear, it is too easy to reject.

What is wanted is an oversimplification, a reduction of a multitude of

possibilities to only two. But if the recommended path were utterly

devoid of mystery, it would cease to fascinate men. Since it clearly

should be chosen, nothing would remain but to proceed on it. There would

be nothing left to discuss and interpret, to lecture and write about, to

admire and merely think about.

The world exacts a price for calling teachers wise: it keeps discussing

the paths they recommend, but few men follow them. The wise give men

endless opportunities to discuss what is good.

Men’s attitudes are manifold. Some live in a strange world bounded by a

path from which countless ways lead inside. If there were road signs,

all of them might bear the same inscription: I-I.

Those who dwell inside have no consuming interest. They are not devoted

to possessions, even if they prize some; not to people, even if they

like some; not to any project, even if they have some.

Things are something that they speak of; persons have the great

advantage that one cannot only talk of them but also to, or rather at

them; but the lord of every sentence is no man but I. Projects can be

entertained without complete devotion, spoken of, and put on like a suit

or dress before a mirror. When you speak to men of this type, they quite

often do not hear you, and they never hear you as another I.

You are not an object for men like this, not a thing to be used or

experienced, nor an object of interest or fascination. The point is not

at all that you are found interesting or fascinating instead of being

seen as a fellow I. The shock is rather that you are not found

interesting or fascinating at all: you are not recognized as an object

any more than as a subject. You are accepted, if at all, as one to be

spoken at and spoken of; but when you are spoken of, the lord of every

story will be I.

Men’s attitudes are manifold. Some men take a keen interest in certain

objects and in other men and actually think more about them than they

think of themselves. They do not so much say I or think I as they do I.

They “take” an interest, they do not give of themselves. They may

manipulate or merely study, and unlike men of the I-I type they may be

good scholars; but they lack devotion.

This I-It tendency is so familiar that little need be said about it,

except that it is a tendency that rarely consumes a man’s whole life.

Those who see a large part of humanity—their enemies, of course—as men

of this type, have succumbed to demonology.

This is merely one of the varieties of man’s experience and much more

widespread in all ages as a tendency and much rarer as a pure type in

our own time than the Manichaeans fancy.

There are men who hardly have an I at all. Nor are all of them of one

kind.

Some inhabit worlds in which objects loom large. They are not merely

interested in some thing or subject, but the object of their interest

dominates their lives. They are apt to be great scholars of

extraordinary erudition, with no time for themselves, with no time to

have a self.

They study without experiencing: they have no time for experience, which

would smack of subjectivity if not frivolity. They are objective and

immensely serious. They have no time for humor.

They study without any thought of use. What they study is an end in

itself for them. They are devoted to their subject, and the notion of

using it is a blasphemy and sacrilege that is not likely to occur to

them.

For all that, their “subject” is no subject in its own right, like a

person. It has no subjectivity. It does not speak to them. It is a

subject one has chosen to study—one of the subjects that one may

legitimately choose, and there may be others working on the same

subject, possibly on a slightly different aspect of it, and one respects

them insofar as they, too, have no selves and are objective.

Here we have a community of solid scholars—so solid that there is no

room at the center for any core. Theirs is the world of It-It.

There are other ways of having no I. There are men who never speak a

sentence of which I is lord, but nobody could call them objective. At

the center of their world is We.

The contents of this We can vary greatly. But this is an orientation in

which I does not exist, and You and It and He and She are only shadows.

One type of this sort could be called We-We. Theirs is a sheltered,

childish world in which no individuality has yet emerged.

Another perennial attitude is summed up in the words Us-Them. Here the

world is divided in two: the children of light and the children of

darkness, the sheep and the goats, the elect and the damned.

Every social problem can be analyzed without much study: all one has to

look for are the sheep and goats.

There is room for anger and contempt and boundless hope; for the sheep

are bound to triumph.

Should a goat have the presumption to address a sheep, the sheep often

do not hear it, and they never hear it as another I. For the goat is one

of Them, not one of Us.

Righteousness, intelligence, integrity, humanity, and victory are the

prerogatives of Us, while wickedness, stupidity, hypocrisy, brutality,

and ultimate defeat belong to Them.

Those who have managed to cut through the terrible complexities of life

and offer such a scheme as this have been hailed as prophets in all

ages.

In these five attitudes there is no You: I-I, I-It, It-It, We-We, and

Us-Them. There are many ways of living in a world without You.

There are also many worlds with the two poles I-You.

I-You sounds unfamiliar. What we are accustomed to is I-Thou. But man’s

attitudes are manifold, and Thou and You are not the same. Nor is Thou

very similar to the German Du.

German lovers say Du to one another, and so do friends. Du is

spontaneous and unpretentious, remote from formality, pomp, and dignity.

What lovers or friends say Thou to one another? Thou is scarcely ever

said spontaneously.

Thou immediately brings to mind God; Du does not. And the God of whom it

makes us think is not the God to whom one might cry out in gratitude,

despair, or agony, not the God to whom one complains or prays

spontaneously: it is the God of the pulpits, the God of the holy tone.

When men pray spontaneously or speak directly to God, without any

mediator, without any intervention of formulas, when they speak as their

heart tells them to speak instead of repeating what is printed, do they

say Thou? How many know the verb forms Thou commands?

The world of Thou has many mansions. Thou is a preachers’ word but also

dear to anticlerical romantic poets. Thou is found in Shakespeare and at

home in the English Bible, although recent versions of the Scriptures

have tended to dispense with it. Thou can mean many things, but it has

no place whatever in the language of direct, nonliterary, spontaneous

human relationships.

If one could liberate I-Thou from affectation, the price for that would

still involve reducing it to a mere formula, to jargon. But suppose a

man wrote a book about direct relationships and tried to get away from

the formulas of theologians and philosophers: a theologian would

translate it and turn Ich und Du into I and Thou.

II

Men love jargon. It is so palpable, tangible, visible, audible; it makes

so obvious what one has learned; it satisfies the craving for results.

It is impressive for the uninitiated. It makes one feel that one

belongs. Jargon divides men into Us and Them.

Two books appeared during the same year. One was called Ich und Du, the

other Das Ich und das Es. Rarely have two books of such importance had

such simple names.

Both books proposed three central concepts: the former also Es, the

latter also Über-ich. But neither book was trinitarian in any profound

sense. Both were dualistic. The wise emphasize two principles.

Freud’s Ich was the conscious part of the soul, his Es the unconscious

part, and his Über-ich a third part which he also called the Ich-Ideal

or the conscience. But it was part of his central concern at that time

to go “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” and introduce a second basic

drive.

Buber could also have called his book Das Ich und das Es. He could also

have spoken of an Über-ich, or perhaps an Über-du. But he was not

speaking of parts of the soul. He singled out two relationships: that in

which I recognize It as an object, especially of experience and use, and

that in which I respond with my whole being to You. And the last part of

his book dealt with the divine You.

Men love jargon. In English one book became I and Thou and the other The

Ego and the Id. Thus even people who had not read these books could

speak of ego, id, and superego, of the I-Thou and the I-It.

Actually, Freud had written his most epoch-making books before Das Ich

und das Es, without using these terms, and his system did not depend on

these words. That never deterred those who loved to speak and write

about the ego and the id.

Buber wrote many later works in which he did not harp on Ich and Du. He

was not a man of formulas but one who tried to meet each person, each

situation, and each subject in its own way. That never deterred those

who loved to speak and write about “the I-It” and “the I-Thou.”

There are many modes of I-You.

Kant told men always to treat humanity, in our person as well as that of

others, as an end also and never only as a means. This is one way of

setting off I-You from I-It. And when he is correctly quoted and the

“also” and the “only” are not omitted, as they all too often are, one

may well marvel at his moral wisdom.

Innumerable are the ways in which I treat You as a means. I ask your

help, I ask for information, I may buy from you or buy what you have

made, and you sometimes dispel my loneliness.

Nor do I count the ways in which You treat me as a means. You ask my

help, you ask me questions, you may buy what I have written, and at

times I ease your loneliness.

Even when you treat me only as a means I do not always mind. A genuine

encounter can be quite exhausting, even when it is exhilarating, and I

do not always want to give myself.

Even when you treat me only as a means because you want some

information, I may feel delighted that I have the answer and can help.

But man’s attitudes are manifold, and there are many ways of treating

others as ends also. There are many modes of I-You.

You may be polite when asking; you may show respect, affection,

admiration, or one of the countless attitudes that men call love.

Or you may not ask but seek without the benefit of words. Or you may

speak but not ask, possibly responding to my wordless question. We may

do something together. You may write to me. You may think of writing to

me. And there are other ways. There are many modes of I-You.

The total encounter in which You is spoken with one’s whole being is but

one mode of I-You. And it is misleading if we assimilate all the other

modes of I-You to I-It.

Philosophers tend to reduce the manifold to the twofold. Some of the

greatest taught that there were two worlds. Why has hardly anyone

proclaimed many worlds?

We have heard of the two ways of opinion and knowledge, the two realms

of appearance and reality, this world and the other, matter and mind,

phenomena and noumena, representation and will, nature and spirit, means

and end, It and You.

Side by side with technical philosophy similar games are played. Naïve

and sentimental poets have been contrasted in a lengthy and immensely

influential essay that has left its mark on subsequent discussions of

the classical and the romantic. Later on the Apollinian and the

Dionysian emerged as a variant. And the It and You.

The straight philosophers tend to celebrate one of the two worlds and

depreciate the other. The literary tradition is less Manichaean.

Friedrich Schiller tried to comprehend both kinds of poetry without

disparaging either naïve or sentimental tendencies, and Nietzsche

followed his example in his early contrast of the two Greek gods.

Ich und Du stands somewhere between the literary and philosophical

traditions. Buber’s “It” owes much to matter and appearance, to

phenomena and representation, nature and means. Buber’s “You” is the

heir of mind, reality, spirit, and will, and his I-You sometimes has an

air of Dionysian ecstasy. Even if I-It is not disparaged, noboby can

fail to notice that I-You is celebrated.

The year before Ich und Du appeared, Leo Baeck published a major essay

on Romantische Religion that was meant to be the first part of a larger

work on “Classical and Romantic Religion.” Eventually, it became the

capstone of his Judaism and Christianity.

The theme: “We encounter two forms above all, classical and romantic

religiousness, classical and romantic religion … Judaism and

Christianity.”

Baeck’s apologetics is inspiring, his polemic is inspired. But after a

hundred pages one is bound to ask oneself if his procedure is not

unsound.

Even where the two notions played off against each other in endless

variations are not black and white, one is led to wonder eventually if

the play impulse has not got out of hand, if repetition has not replaced

argument, and virtuosity demonstration.

Certainly, Buber’s delight in language gets between him and his readers.

There might as well be a screen between them on which one watches the

antics of his words instead of listening to him. The words do tricks,

the performance is brilliant, but much of it is very difficult to

follow.

Obscurity is fascinating. One tries to puzzle out details, is stumped,

and becomes increasingly concerned with meaning—unless one feels put off

and gives up altogether.

Those who persevere and take the author seriously are led to ask about

what he could possibly have meant, but rarely seem to wonder or discuss

whether what he says is true.

Instead of asking how things are in fact, and how one could possibly

find out, one wonders mostly whether one has got the author’s point; and

if one thinks one has, one may even feel superior to those who have not.

Speaking in Kierkegaard’s terms, one might say that Buber makes it all

too easy for his readers to avoid his ethical challenge by adopting an

aesthetic orientation. Precisely the same might be said of Kierkegaard

himself.

III

Success is no proof of virtue. In the case of a book, quick acclaim is

presumptive evidence of a lack of substance and originality.

Most books are stillborn. As the birthrate rises steeply, infant

mortality soars. Most books die unnoticed; fewer live for a year or two.

Those that make much noise when they see the light of day generally die

in childhood. Few books live as long as fifty years. For those that do,

the prognosis is good: they are likely to live much longer than their

authors.

In the case of a book, longevity is presumptive evidence of virtue,

although survival usually also owes a good deal to a book’s vices. A

lack of clarity is almost indispensable.

Books that survive their authors do not weather time like rocks. They

are reborn without having quite died and have several overlapping lives.

Some fall asleep in one country, come to life in another, and then wake

up again.

Ich und Du was fourteen years old when it began a new life in the

English-speaking world as I and Thou, in 1937. The next year the author

left Germany for Jerusalem, and the German book seemed to be headed for

death at fifteen.

In his new home Buber did not meet with the acclaim that he had won from

German Jewry in the years of persecution. No longer could he write in

German. He had to try his hand at Hebrew. And people joked that he did

not yet know Hebrew well enough to write as obscurely as he had written

in German.

I and Thou survived, mainly among Protestant theologians. That a book by

a man who felt so strongly about being a Jew should have been acclaimed

primarily by Protestants has struck many people as ironical. What is

much more remarkable is that a sharp attack on all talk about God and

all pretensions to knowledge about God—a sustained attempt to rescue the

religious dimension of life from the theologians—should have been

received so well by theologians. They generously acclaimed Buber as a

Jewish theologian, and went right on doing what they had done. Only now

their discourse was enriched with frequent references to the I-Thou and

the I-It.

After World War II the book gained a far wider hearing, especially in

Germany, where it was rediscovered, and in the United States. After the

holocaust a widespread need was felt to love and admire a representative

Jew. The competition was not keen. There was no dearth of great writers

and scientists who were Jews, but what was wanted was a representative

and teacher of the Jewish tradition—a contemporary heir, if that were

possible, of the Hebrew prophets.

In the twentieth century neither Eastern European Jewry nor American

Jewry had produced such figures, while the German Jews, whom both of

these far larger communities tended to regard with some resentment,

could point to several. Franz Rosenzweig, with whom Buber had undertaken

a new German translation of the Hebrew Bible, had died in 1929. But even

after World War II there were still Baeck and Buber.

Baeck, too, gained another hearing now. But when the war ended he was in

his seventies and, having spent the last part of the war in

Theresienstadt, somewhat frail. Moreover, his manner had always been

exceedingly refined, and he was a rabbi. He was an immensely impressive

person, and the rabbinical students who sat at his feet at Hebrew Union

College where he came to teach one semester a year will never forget him

any more than those who heard him lecture in Frankfurt a few months

before his death—tall, stooped, and undaunted; over eighty; speaking

without notes, as brilliantly as in his prime. Here was greatness, but

it belonged to a past period of history, almost to a vanished

civilization. He spoke of rebirth on that occasion and, back from

Theresienstadt, youthful in old age, symbolized it. But those who

learned from him did not feel that he was one of them.

Martin Buber’s personal appearances in Germany and the United States

were different. He was very small, not at all likely to be noticed from

far away; and his bearing did not create a sense of distance. Nor was he

a brilliant lecturer—at least not in this last phase. Unlike Baeck,

whose eyesight was so poor that he had trained himself to get along

without notes, Buber often read long papers that most of the audience

could not follow. But as soon as the lecture was over and the questions

started, he stood revealed as the exceptional man he was. If there was

any ostentation now, it was in his insistence on establishing genuine

dialogue. What was unforgettable was the attempt to triumph over

distance; to bridge differences in age, cultural background, and

language; to listen and communicate. And those who knew him tried to

keep him from lecturing in the first place and have discussion from the

start. But these discussions were not ordinary. On such occasions I and

You became incarnate.

Never was the popularity of Buber’s little masterpiece as great as it

became after his death. This posthumous triumph probably owed little to

his personality. It was part of a larger wave.

It took Kant and Hegel a few decades to arrive in the United States. It

took the German 1920’s forty years.

Kafka arrived sooner. But he was almost unknown in Germany when he died

in 1924; he did not belong to the German twenties as much as did Hesse

and Buber, Heidegger and Brecht.

Buber’s immense posthumous popularity is not confined to him. Those who

read I and Thou also read Hesse’s Steppenwolf and talk of Heidegger,

usually without having read him, just as students did in Germany in the

twenties. This goes with a sexual revolution and an interest in drugs, a

vast enthusiasm for Dostoevsky, Indian philosophy, and Buddhism. The

whole syndrome has come to life again along with interest in Bertolt

Brecht whose antisentimental and antiromantic protests have to be seen

against the background of a time that acclaimed Hesse and Buber. His

toughness has some of the swagger of adolescent rebellion. But their

neo-romanticism also had, and still has, a particular appeal for

adolescents. A book’s survival usually owes not a little to its vices.

Our first loves leave their mark upon us. In the crucial years of

adolescence I loved Hesse’s novels and experienced Buddhism and Indian

wisdom as a great temptation to detachment. Buber taught me that

mysticism need not lead outside the world. Or if mysticism does, by

definition, so much the worse for it.

It was from Buber’s other writings that I learned what could also be

found in I and Thou: the central commandment to make the secular sacred.

Ich und Du I did not read in my teens, and later the style of this

little book put me off as much as its dualism. Even more than

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, it is overwritten. We are far from the clear,

crisp air of a sunny autumn morning in the mountains and the bracing wit

of Nietzsche’s later prose. We seem even further from the simplicity of

Kafka’s style, schooled on the Book of Genesis.

Yet few books of our century equal the economy of Buber’s Tales of the

Hasidim. There he reached perfection. Among his own writings, The Way of

Man According to the Teachings of Hasidism is a work of comparable

beauty that distils Buber’s own teaching in less than twenty pages.[1]

It is also Buber’s best translated work, but he neither recalled nor was

able to find out who had translated it.

The style of Ich und Du is anything but sparse and unpretentious, lean

or economical. It represents a late flowering of romanticism and tends

to blur all contours in the twilight of suggestive but extremely unclear

language. Most of Buber’s German readers would be quite incapable of

saying what any number of passages probably mean.

The obscurity of the book does not seem objectionable to them: it seems

palpable proof of profundity. Sloth meets with awe in the refusal to

unravel mysteries.

And the Hasidic tradition meets with the conventions of German

philosophy in endowing teachers with an aura of authority. In this

ambience it is not for the student to challenge or to examine

critically. One tries to absorb what one can and hopes to understand

IV

It may be doubted whether the style of the book really communicates the

force of inspiration. In places the aesthetic surface of the book looks

like mere Schöngeisterei; the style seems mannered, the plays on words

at best clever, and those who hate affectation may even wonder whether

this virtuosity hides a lack of content. In fact, it hides a profoundly

antiromantic message.

The content may appear to be as romantic as the form. Of the many

possible relationships in which I encounter You as another I, Buber

singles out a state that is almost ecstatic. As long as we focus on this

choice, we are almost bound to see him as a romantic and to miss his

import.

Buber’s most significant ideas are not tied to his extraordinary

language. Nor do they depend on any jargon. On the contrary, they cry

out to be liberated from all jargon.

The sacred is here and now. The only God worth keeping is a God that

cannot be kept. The only God worth talking about is a God that cannot be

talked about. God is no object of discourse, knowledge, or even

experience. He cannot be spoken of, but he can be spoken to; he cannot

be seen, but he can be listened to. The only possible relationship with

God is to address him and to be addressed by him, here and now—or, as

Buber puts it, in the present. For him the Hebrew name of God, the

tetragrammaton (YHVH), means HE IS PRESENT. Er ist da might be

translated: He is there; but in this context it would be more nearly

right to say: He is here.

Where? After Auschwitz and Nagasaki, where? We look around and do not

see him. But he is not to be seen. Never. Those who have claimed to see

him did not see him.

Does he really address us? Even if we wanted to, desperately, could we

listen to him? Does he speak to us?

On the first page of the original edition of the book one was confronted

by only two lines:

So hab ich endlich von dir erharrt:

In allen Elementen Gottes Gegenwart.

“Thus I have finally obtained from you by waiting / God’s presence in

all elements.” No source was indicated, but this epigraph came from

Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan. It brings to mind Goethe’s contemporary,

William Blake:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an Hour.

But in Buber’s book the emphasis actually does not fall on all elements;

and that is surely one reason why he omitted the epigraph in 1957. Asked

why he had deleted it, he said: Because it could be misunderstood. And

in the later editions of some early works he also changed some phrases

that had a pantheistic ring. But in 1923, when Ich und Du appeared with

the epigraph from Goethe, Buber also published a collected edition of

some earlier “Lectures on Judaism” (Reden über das Judentum), adding a

Foreword that makes clear his desire even at that time to distinguish

his own position from any pantheism.

We must ask to whom the “you” (dir) in the epigraph had been meant to

refer. In Goethe’s Divan the lines occur in the short dialogue that

concludes “The Innkeeper’s Book” (Das Schenkenbuch), and the innkeeper

is addressing the poet. This dialogue, incidentally, was added only

after the original edition. But of whom could Buber have been thinking?

Ich und Du bore no dedication; but the sequel, Zwiesprache (1932:

Dialogue) was dedicated to Buber’s wife, Paula, with a four-line verse:

An P.

Der Abgrund und das Weltenlicht,

Zeitnot und Ewigkeitsbegier,

Vision, Ereignis und Gedicht:

Zwiesprache wars und ists mit dir.

“For P. The abyss and the light of the world, / Time’s need and the

craving for eternity, / Vision, event, and poetry: / Was and is dialogue

with you.”

Thus the epigraph in Ich und Du may be understood as a “concealed

dedication” to Paula Buber, who in 1921 had published a book in which

the elements, which had been pagan in her previous work, were full of

God.[2] The motto could scarcely be understood as it was meant. But

rightly understood, it serves notice that the book was grounded in an

actual relationship between a human I and a human You.

The centrality of human relationships in this book is so plain that

critics have actually noted with surprise and protested with complete

incomprehension that there should be any mention at all of a tree and of

a cat. The central stress falls on You—not Thou. God is present when I

confront You. But if I look away from You, I ignore him. As long as I

merely experience or use you, I deny God. But when I encounter You I

encounter him.

For those who no longer have any use for the word “God” this may be too

much; and for those who do, too little. But is it too little?

When you come to appear before me,

who requires of you

this trampling of my courts?

Bring no more vain offerings;

incense is an abomination to me.

New moon and sabbath and the calling of assemblies—

I cannot endure iniquity and solemn assembly.

Your new moon and your appointed feasts

my soul hates;

they have become a burden to me,

I am weary of bearing them.

When you spread forth your hands,

I hide my eyes from you;

even though you make many prayers,

I no longer listen;

your hands are full of blood.

Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;

remove the evil of your doings

from before my eyes;

cease to do evil,

learn to do good;

seek justice,

correct oppression;

defend the fatherless,

plead for the widow.

Is that too little?

Nor is it too much. In places it seems a bit much. Buber seems so

dramatic, so insistent on what seems obvious. But there are

self-refuting prophecies, and Hebrew prophecy was not meant to come

true.

The Hebrew prophets foretold disasters that would come to pass unless

those who heard them returned from their evil ways. Jeremiah did not

gloat when Jerusalem was destroyed; he was grieved by his failure.

Jonah, of course, felt aggrieved when his prophecy forestalled its own

fulfillment; but this only provides the occasion for the moral of the

story. He is told, and we are told, that this sort of failure is a

triumph.

If Buber places so much stress on what seems obvious to me, one has to

ask in fairness whether it would seem so obvious if he had not been so

insistent on it.

When a religion professor makes a great point of treating students as

persons, that seems almost comical. How else? But when every student who

comes to my office to speak to me, and everyone who asks a question of

me during or after a lecture comes to life for me as an I addressing me

and I try to speak not about him but to You—would it be that way but for

the influence of Martin Buber?

I am not sure and I will never know. The loves of childhood and of

adolescence cannot be subtracted from us; they have become part of us.

Not a discrete part that could be severed. It is as if they had entered

our blood stream.

Nevertheless, if one has no use for the word “God” it may seem merely

obscurantist to make this point in this fashion. Why not say instead

that we ought to be mindful that the human beings we confront are

persons?

It still seems hard not to reply: what else could they be? isn’t this

obvious? In any case, Buber says more than this, without saying too

much.

He finds in my encounter with You what Blake finds in a grain of sand

and in a wild flower: infinity and eternity—here and now.

Far better than John Dewey who tried something similar in A Common

Faith, Buber succeeds in endowing the social sphere with a religious

dimension. Where other critics of religion tend to take away the sabbath

and leave us with a life of weekdays, Buber attacks the dichotomy that

condemns men to lives that are at least six-sevenths drab.

While man cannot live in a continual sabbath, he should not resign

himself to a flat two-dimensional life from which he escapes on rare

occasions. The place of the sacred is not a house of God, no church,

synagogue, or seminary, nor one day in seven, and the span of the sacred

is much shorter than twenty-four hours. The sabbath is every day,

several times a day.

Still why use religious terms? Indeed, it might be better not to use

them because they are always misunderstood. But what other terms are

there?

We need a new language, and new poets to create it, and new ears to

listen to it.

Meanwhile, if we shut our ears to the old prophets who still speak more

or less in the old tongues, using ancient words, occasionally in new

ways, we shall have very little music.

We are not so rich that we can do without tradition. Let him that has

new ears listen to it in a new way.

In Buber’s little book God actually does not appear much before the

Third Part. But a heretic need not consider that last part embarrassing

or de trop. On the contrary.

Those without ties to organized religion who feel that, although much of

institutional religion is repulsive, not all scriptures are bare

nonsense, have to ask themselves: what about God?

Those who prefer the God of Abraham, Jacob, and Job to the God of the

philosophers and theologians have to ask: what about God?

Those who read the Bible and the Sacred Books of the East not merely as

so much literature but as a record of experiences that are relevant to

their own lives must ask: what about God?

They do not ask: what is he really like? what are his attributes? is he

omniscient? can he do this or that? Nor: can his existence be proved?

They do not assume that they know him and only need one additional piece

of information. They do not even believe in him. What they ask about is

not some supernatural He. And the theologians are of little help, if

any.

If only one knew the meaning of one’s own question! If only one could

ask it properly or formulate it more precisely! Is it really a question?

Or is it a deep concern that finds no words that do it justice?

This book responds to this concern. God as the eternal You whom men

address and by whom they in turn feel—Buber would say, are—addressed

makes sense of much literature and life. The book does not save, or seek

to prop up, a tradition. Even less does it aim to save any institution.

It speaks to those who no longer believe but who wonder whether life

without religion is bound to lack some dimension.

V

The book is steeped in Judaism. This is often overlooked and perhaps as

often denied explicitly. Jesus is mentioned, as is the Gospel according

to John; but so are the Buddha and the Upanishads. The author is widely

read, conversant with many traditions—a modern intellectual with deep

roots in the German language. The volume abounds in coinages, but it is

difficult to be quite sure in any case whether a particular word is

really a coinage: so thorough was Buber’s knowledge of German

literature, all the way back to Luther and even Eckhart and beyond. He

was far from any orthodoxy, far even from being conservative in almost

any sense of that word. Of labels of that sort, even radical would fit

him better.

He was possessed by the desire to get back to the roots. His handling of

the language makes that plain at every turn. And when he resolved to

translate the Hebrew Bible with Franz Rosenzweig, he found a fertile

field for this great passion. For in Hebrew it could be argued that one

did not really understand a word until one had grasped its root and

considered its relations to other words with the same root.

The whole endeavor of translating the Hebrew Bible represented an

attempt to get back to the roots of Judaism—back beyond the roots of

Christianity. Buber sought a way back beyond the Shtetl and the Shulhan

Arukh, back beyond the Talmud and the Mishnah, even beyond Ezra and

Nehemiah. He went to the roots in the prophets and in Moses, and in some

ways his own Judaism was pre-Mosaic.

The Greeks were an eminently visual people. They gloried in the visual

arts; Homer’s epics abound in visual detail; and they created tragedy

and comedy, adding new dimensions to visual art.

The Hebrews were not so visual and actually entertained a prohibition

against the visual arts. Neither did they have tragedies or comedies.

The one book of the Bible that has sometimes been called a tragedy, Job,

was clearly not intended for, and actually precluded, any visual

representation.

The Greeks visualized their gods and represented them in marble and in

beautiful vase paintings. They also brought them on the stage.

The Hebrews did not visualize their God and expressly forbade attempts

to make of him an object—a visual object, a concrete object, any object.

Their God was not to be seen. He was to be heard and listened to. He was

not an It but an I—or a You.

Modern Christian attempts to get back to a pre-Hellenistic primal

Christianity are legion. They are also doomed.

There never was any pre-Hellenistic Christianity. The soil on which

Christianity was born had soaked up Hellenism for more than three

centuries. Paul wrote his epistles in Greek, and he was a Hellenistic

Jew—a Jew, to be sure, and deeply beholden to Judaism, but a Hellenistic

Jew and not by any stretch of the imagination a pre-Hellenistic Jew. And

the four Gospels were written in Greek somewhat later than were Paul’s

epistles.

Christianity was born of the denial that God could not possibly be seen.

Not all who considered Jesus a great teacher became Christians.

Christians were those for whom he was the Lord. Christians were those

who believed that God could become visible, an object of sight and

experience, of knowledge and belief.

Of course, Christianity did not deny its roots in Judaism. Jesus as the

Son of God who had ascended to the heavens to dwell there with God, as

God, did not simply become another Heracles, the son of Zeus who had

ascended to the heavens to dwell there with the gods, as a god. He did

not simply become another of the legion of Greek gods and demigods and

sons of Zeus. He had preached and was to be heard and listened to. His

moral teachings were recorded lovingly for the instruction of the

faithful.

But were they really to be listened to? Or did they, too, become

objects—of admiration and perhaps discussion? Was the individual to feel

addressed by them, commanded by them—was he to relate his life to them?

The new dispensation was hardly that. The New Testament keeps saying,

nowhere more emphatically than in the Gospel according to John, that

those who only live by Jesus’ moral teaching shall not enter the kingdom

of heaven; only those can be saved who are baptized, who believe, and

who take the sacraments—eating, as that Gospel puts it, “of this bread.”

Of course, Christian belief is not totally unlike Jewish belief. It is

not devoid of trust and confidence, and in Paul’s and Luther’s

experience of faith these Jewish elements were especially prominent.

Rarely have they been wholly lacking in Christianity. Still, this Jewish

faith was never considered sufficient. Christian faith was always

centered in articles of faith that had to be believed, and disputes

abounded about what precisely had to be believed by those who wanted to

be saved.

When the Reformation did away with visual images, it was only to insist

more firmly on the purity of doctrines that must be believed. And for

Luther the bread and wine were no mere symbols of Christ’s flesh and

blood—otherwise he might have made common cause with Ulrich Zwingli and

prevented the splintering of Protestantism—but the flesh and blood

itself: God as an object.

Buber does not say these things, and I have no wish to saddle him with

my ideas. His views are developed in his Two Types of Faith, mine in my

Critique of Religion and Philosophy and The Faith of a Heretic. Why

introduce these problems here? Because the notion of so many Christians

and some Jews that Buber was really closer to Christianity than he was

to Judaism should not go unchallenged. In fact, Ich und Du is one of the

great documents of Jewish faith.

One of the central concepts of the book is that of Umkehr. This is

Buber’s German rendering of the Hebrew t’shuvah and means return. The

noun is found in the Bible, but not in the distinctive sense which is

common in Jewish literature and liturgy. The verb is frequently used in

the Bible with the connotations that are relevant here: Deuteronomy 4:30

and 30:2, Isaiah 10:21 and 19:22, and Jeremiah 4:1 are among the many

examples. What is meant is the return to God.

The modern reader is apt to feel that this is a churchly notion,

presumably dear to preachers but without significance for those who do

not greatly care for organized religion. In fact, the idea is quite

unecclesiastical and it constitutes a threat to organized religion.

Christianity in particular is founded on its implicit denial.

The Jewish doctrine holds that a man can at any time return and be

accepted by God. That is all. The simplicity of this idea is deceptive.

Let us translate it into a language closer to Christianity, while noting

that Buber refrains from doing this: God can at any time forgive those

who repent.

What the Hebrew tradition stresses is not the mere state of mind, the

repentance, but the act of return. And on Yom Kippur, the Day of

Atonement, the Book of Jonah is read in synagogues the world over. When

Jonah had cried out, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown,”

the king called on his people “to return, every man, from his evil way

and from the violence on his hands. Who knows, God may return …” Nineveh

was the capital of the Assyrians who had conquered the kingdom of

Israel, laid waste Samaria, and led the ten tribes away into

destruction. Could God possibly forgive them without at least demanding

their conversion and some ritual observances? “When God saw what they

did, how they returned from their evil way, God repented of the evil

that he had said he would do to them and did it not.��

This conception of return has been and is at the very heart of Judaism,

and it is for the sake of this idea that Jonah is always read on the

highest holiday of the year. But the theology of Paul in the New

Testament is founded on the implicit denial of this doctrine, and so are

the Roman Catholic and the Greek Orthodox churches, Lutheranism and

Calvinism. Paul’s elaborate argument concerning the impossibility of

salvation under the Torah (“the Law”) and for the necessity of Christ’s

redemptive death presuppose that God cannot simply forgive anyone who

returns.

If the doctrine of the return is true, Paul’s theology collapses and

“Christ died in vain.” Nor does any need remain for baptism and the

sacrament of confession, or for the bread and the wine. Man stands in a

direct relationship to God and requires no mediator.

Buber’s whole book deals with such immediate relationships, and in this

as well as in his central emphasis on return he speaks out of the Jewish

religious tradition.

It was both a symptom and then also a cause of profound incomprehension

that in the first English translation Umkehr became reversal. Twenty

years later, in the second edition, this was changed to “turning.”

Meanwhile the choice of “Thou” did its share to make God remote and to

lessen, if not destroy, the sense of intimacy that pervades Buber’s

book.

Buber’s lifelong Zionism was prompted in large measure by his concern

for the creation of a new way of life and a new type of community. His

Zionism has been called cultural rather than political, but it was not

altogether unfitting that when he finally went to Jerusalem in 1938 it

was to accept an appointment to a new chair in Social Philosophy in the

Hebrew University’s Department of Sociology. (He was first offered the

chair of Pedagogy and declined it.)

The recurrent “Thou” in the first translation mesmerized people to the

point where it was widely assumed that Buber was a theologian. In fact,

the book deals centrally with man’s relationships to other men, and the

theme of alienation (Verfremdung) is prominent in the Second Part.

The aim of the book is not to disseminate knowledge about God but, at

least in large measure, to diagnose certain tendencies in modern

society—Buber speaks of “sick ages” more than forty years before it

became fashionable in the West to refer to our “sick” society—and to

indicate how the quality of life might be changed radically by the

development of a new sense of community.

The book will survive the death of theology, for it appeals to that

religiousness which finds no home in organized religion, and it speaks

to those whose primary concern is not at all with religion but rather

with social change.

But there is much more to the book than this.

Among the most important things that one can learn from Buber is how to

read. Was it from him that I learned it? I am not sure, and I will never

know. Does it matter? You could learn it from this book.

Modern man is a voracious reader who has never learned to read well.

Part of the trouble is that he is taught to read drivel that is hardly

worth reading well. (There was a time when Jewish children learned to

read by reading the Bible.)

One ends up by reading mainly newspapers and magazines—ephemeral,

anonymous trash that one scans on its way to the garbage can. One has no

wish to remember it for any length of time; it is written as if to make

sure that one won’t; and one reads it in a manner that makes doubly

sure. There is no person behind what one reads; not even a committee.

Somebody wrote it in the first place—if one can call that writing—and

then various other people took turns changing it. For the final result

no one is responsible; and it rarely merits a serious response. It cries

out to be forgotten soon, like the books on which one learned to read,

in school. They were usually anonymous, too; or they should have been.

In adolescence students are suddenly turned loose on books worth

reading, but generally don’t know how to read them. And if, untaught,

some instinct prompts them to read well, chances are that they are asked

completely tone-deaf questions as soon as they have finished their

assignment—either making them feel that they read badly after all or

spoiling something worthwhile for the rest of their lives.

We must learn to feel addressed by a book, by the human being behind it,

as if a person spoke directly to us. A good book or essay or poem is not

primarily an object to be put to use, or an object of experience: it is

the voice of You speaking to me, requiring a response.

How many people read Buber or Kierkegaard that way? Nietzsche or Hegel?

Tolstoy or Euripides? Or the Bible? Rather, how few do? But Buber

himself wants to be read that way.

VI

One can also learn from Buber how to translate. Nowhere is his teaching

more radical. Nowhere is he more deeply at odds with the common sense of

the English-speaking world.

Nor did anything he ever published seem as absurd to his readers in

Germany as did his translation of the Bible. What was familiar seemed to

have become incomprehensible.

In the beginning all this was due at least as much to Rosenzweig’s

uncompromising nature as to Buber, but Buber persisted even after

Rosenzweig’s death, and neither ridicule nor criticism ever moved him to

relent. When he left Germany in 1938, the vast undertaking that had

required so much effort looked like an almost total loss.

After the war, Buber was delighted when two German publishers asked him

to resume his enterprise. He did, and brought it to completion shortly

before his death. Gershom Scholem, a great scholar whose view of

Hasidism differs from Buber’s, toasted the accomplishment, adding: But

who will read it?

What had seemed outrageous in the twenties and thirties was merely ahead

of its time. A new generation that no longer expects all prose and

poetry to be so easily accessible finds no extraordinary difficulty with

the Buber Bible. It is widely read in Germany.

What can be learned from Buber as a translator before one explores

devices and techniques is the basic commitment to the writer one

translates. As a translator I have no right to use the text confronting

me as an object with which I may take liberties. It is not there for me

to play with or manipulate. I am not to use it as a point of departure,

or as anything else. It is the voice of a person that needs me. I am

there to help him speak.

If I would rather speak in my own voice, I am free to do that—on other

occasions. To foist my thoughts, my images, my style on those whom I

profess to translate is dishonest.

Mundus vult decipi. The world winks at dishonesty. The world does not

call it dishonesty.

In the case of poetry it says: what is most important is that the

translator should write a poem that is good in its own right. The

acceptance of this absurdity by so many intellectuals helps us to

understand the acceptance of so many absurd religious and political

beliefs by intellectuals in other times and climes. Once a few respected

men have fortified a brazen claim with their prestige, it becomes a

cliché that gets repeated endlessly as if it were self-evident. Any

protest is regarded as a heresy that shows how those who utter it do not

belong: arguments are not met on their merits; instead one rehearses a

few illustrious names and possibly deigns to contrast them with some

horrible examples.

Anyone able to write a poem that is good in its own right should clearly

do so, but he should not pass it off as a translation of another man’s

poem if the meaning or the tone of his poem are in fact quite different.

Least of all should he claim that the tone or meaning is the same when

it is not.

Tone is crucial and often colors meaning. If we don’t know what is said

seriously and what in jest, we do not know the meaning. We have to know

what is said lightly and what solemnly, where a remark is prompted by a

play on words, if something is ironical or a quotation, an allusion, a

pastiche, a parody, a diatribe, a daring coinage, a cliché, an epigram,

or possibly ambiguous.

A German translator who rendered William Faulkner into the equivalent of

the King’s English would serve his public ill. But if he tried hard to

be faithful to his author, then his publisher might say to him—if things

were as they are in the United States: “My dear fellow, that simply

isn’t German”; and an editor, utterly unable to write a single

publishable page over his—or more often her—own name, would be asked to

rewrite the translation to make it “idiomatic.”

Ah, we are told, every generation needs its own translation because a

book has to be done into the idiom of the day. If it is poetry, it had

better sound like Eliot. Alas, no more; we need a new translation. But

why should Goethe, Hölderlin, or Rilke sound like Eliot in the first

place? Should Eliot, conversely, have been made to sound like Rilke—and

then perhaps like Brecht—and now like someone whom a publisher or critic

fancies as a modern voice?

The point of reading a poet is surely in large measure to hear his

voice—his own, distinctive, novel voice. Poetry read in the original

stands a better chance of being read well than prose. But when we deal

with translations, the roles are reversed.

Again I do not want to saddle Buber with my own views. What he

translated was Scripture. Perhaps I am extending the lessons one could

learn from him—and from Rosenzweig, who also translated ninety-two hymns

and poems by Yehuda Halevi, with a brilliant postscript, and dedicated

the book to Martin Buber. The point is not to invoke Buber as an

authority but rather to spell out some of the implications of this book.

Buber ought to be translated as he translated. The voice should be his,

the thoughts and images and tone his. And if the reader should cry out,

exasperated, “But that simply isn’t English,” one has to reply: “True,

but the original text simply isn’t German.” It abounds in solecisms,

coinages, and other oddities; and Buber was a legend in his lifetime for

the way he wrote.

He makes very difficult reading. He evidently did not wish to be read

quickly, once only, for information. He tried to slow the reader down,

to force him to read many sentences and paragraphs again, even to read

the whole book more than once.

The style is not the best part of this book, but it is a part and even

an important part of it. Nobody has to chew passage upon passage more

slowly than a translator who takes his work seriously and keeps revising

his draft. Nobody has occasion to ask himself more often whether a play

on words really adds something worthwhile. But once he starts making an

effort to improve upon his text, keeping only the most brilliant plays

on words while leaving out and not calling attention to inferior ones,

possibly substituting his own most felicitous plays for the ones he

could not capture, where is he to stop on the road to falsehood?

When adjectives are piled up in profusion and some strike him as

decidedly unnecessary, should he substitute a single forceful word for a

two-line enumeration? Make long and obscure sentences short and clear?

Resolve all ambiguities in favor of the meaning he likes best? Gloss

over or leave out what seem weaknesses to him? Perhaps insert a few good

images that the author might have liked if only he had thought of them,

and that perhaps would have occurred to him if he had written his book

in English, and if he had shared more of the translator’s background—and

sensibility? Perhaps add a thought or two as well?

The book has many faults. Let him that can write a better one do so with

all haste. But to meddle with a text one translates and to father one’s

inventions on another man is a sin against the spirit.

What one should try to do is clear. What can be done is something else

again. This book is untranslatable.

It abounds in plays on words—don’t call them plays if that should strike

you as irreverent—that simply cannot be done into English. How can one

translate the untranslatable?

By adding notes. By occasionally supplying the German words. By offering

explanations.

But now the text seems much less smooth. One is stopped in one’s tracks

to read a note. One is led to go back to reread a paragraph. And having

read the book with so many interruptions, one really has to read it a

second time without interruptions.

To quote Rilke’s “Song of the Idiot”: How good!

Some of the key terms in this book are hard to render. Examples abound

in the notes. Here it must suffice to comment on a few points.

Buber loves the prefix Ur, which has no exact English equivalent. An

Urgrossvater is a great-grandfather; an Ururgrossvater, a

great-great-grandfather. Urwald is forest primeval; Ursprung, origin.

These are common words, but the prefix opens up endless possibilities

for coinages. In the following pages it has been rendered by “primal.”

Buber also loves the suffix baft (for adjectives)—and haftigkeit (for

nouns). This can have two altogether different connotations. It can mean

“having”: thus lebhaft means vivacious (literally: having life);

launenhaft, moody (having moods); and tugendhaft, virtuous (having

virtue). But it can also mean “somewhat like”: märchenhaft means

fabulous (somewhat like a fairytale). This suffix opens up endless

possibilities for coinages, and occasionally it is not altogether clear

which of the two meanings is intended. Usually, Buber definitely intends

the second: he adds the suffix to introduce a lack of precision or, to

put the matter more kindly, to stress the inadequacy of language.

One of his favorite words is Gegenwart, which can mean either the

present, as opposed to the past and the future, or presence, as it does

when he speaks of God’s presence in the epigraph to the first edition.

The German language does not distinguish between these two senses of the

word; nor does Buber. To add to this difficulty, “present” is ambiguous

in English: it can also mean “gift.” In the following pages “present” is

never used in that sense. Like “presence” it is used exclusively to

render Gegenwart.

Gegen means against but also figures as a prefix in a great many words;

and Buber uses a number of these. Gegenstand is the ordinary German word

for object (literally that which stands against). Gegenüber means

vis-à-vis (literally that which is over against), and this in turn can

become a prefix and figures in many different constructions. In this

book “confront” has been used in all such cases. Begegnung (noun) and

begegnen (verb) have been translated consistently as encounter. The list

could be continued, but there is no need here to anticipate the notes.

Buber’s persistent association of Wirklichkeit with wirken can be

carried over into English to some extent by using “actuality” for the

former (saving “reality” for the rare instances when he uses Realität)

and “act,” in a variety of ways, for the verb. And when he says that in

prayer we can, incredible as it may seem, wirken on God, although of

course we cannot erwirken anything from him, the translator can say that

we can act on God but not exact anything from him.

One of Buber’s most central terms is Wesen.

The word is not uncommon, and those who know a little about German

philosophic terms know that it means essence. They also know that Buber

has sometimes been called an existentialist, and that some other

philosophers have been called, more rarely, essentialists. But in this

book Wesen recurs constantly. Sometimes “essence” is clearly what is

meant; sometimes “nature” would be slightly more idiomatic; but quite

often neither of these terms makes any sense at all.

Wesen can also mean “a being” or, when the context indicates that it is

used in the plural, “beings.” To complicate matters further, we

sometimes encounter Wesenheiten, a much more unusual word that it would

be easy to do without; but Buber shows a preference for rare words and

coinages.

Any contrast of essence and existence is out of the picture.

Deliberately so. Every being I encounter is seen to be essential.

Nothing is essential but a being. Doing something with my whole being or

my whole essence is the same.

The realm of essences and what is essential is not outside this world in

some beyond. Essential is whatever is—here and now.

If romanticism is flight from the present, yearning for deliverance from

the cross of the here and now, an escape into the past, preferably

medieval, or the future, into drugs or other worlds, either night or

twilight—if romanticism can face anything except the facts—then nothing

could be less romantic than the central appeal of this book.

Hic Rhodos, hic salta!

“Here is Rhodes; jump here!” That is what Aesop’s braggart was told when

he boasted of his great jump in Rhodes.

Hegel cited this epigram in the preface to his Philosophy of Right by

way of contrasting his approach and Plato’s. He was not trying to

instruct the state how it ought to be: “To comprehend what is, is the

task of philosophy, for what is is reason. … Slightly changed, the

epigram would read [seeing that rhodon is the Greek word for rose]:

Here is the rose, dance here. …

To recognize reason as the rose in the cross of the present and thus to

delight in the present—this rational insight brings us that

reconciliation with actuality which philosophy grants those who have

once been confronted by the inner demand to comprehend…”

To link Buber with Hegel may seem strange. But in 1920 Franz Rosenzweig

had published a major work, in two volumes, on “Hegel and the State,”

dealing at length with this preface. The differences between Buber and

Hegel far outnumber their similarities. But they are at one in their

opposition to any otherworldliness, in their insistence on finding in

the present whatever beauty and redemption there may be, and in their

refusal to pin their hopes on any beyond.

Ich und Du speaks to men and women who have become wary of promises and

hopes: it takes its stand resolutely in the here and now. It is a sermon

on the words of Hillel:

“If I am only for myself, what am I?

And if not now, when?”

A PLAN MARTIN BUBER ABANDONED

IN AN ESSAY “On the History of the Dialogical Principle” Buber relates

that “the first, still awkward draft of Ich und Du dates from the fall

of 1919. Originally it was meant to be the first part of a five-volume

work, whose contents I had outlined briefly in 1916; but its

systematical character estranged me from it before long.”[3]

In the final manuscript of the book, in the Buber Archive in Jerusalem,

I found an outline apparently written in 1922, just after the book was

finished.[4] It is reproduced here in translation and in facsimile, with

the permission of Ernst Simon and the Archive. Although the rest of the

plan was abondoned, it is noteworthy that the three subheadings of “I

and You” fit the three parts of our book. I take it that “Word” refers

to the two basic words. And in place of “History” the second part could

also be entitled “Alienation.”

I. I and You

1. Word. 2. History. 3. God.

II. Primal Forms of Religious Life

1. Magic. 2. Sacrifice. 3. Mystery. 4. Prayer.

III. Knowledge of God and Law of God

1. Myth. 2. Dogma. 3. Law. 4. Teaching.

IV. Person and Community

1. The Founder. 2. The Priest. 3. The Prophet.

4. The Reformer. 5. The Solitary.

V. The Power and the Kingdom

Martin Buber’s I AND THOU

First Part

THE WORLD IS TWOFOLD for man in accordance with his twofold attitude.

The attitude of man is twofold 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.

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 twofold.

For the I of the basic word I-You is different from that in the basic

word I-It.[5]

Basic words do not state something that might exist outside them; by

being spoken they establish a mode of existence.[6]

Basic words are spoken with one’s being.[7]

When one says You, the I of the word pair I-You is said, too.

When one says It, the I of the word pair I-It is said, too.

The basic word I-You can only be spoken with one’s whole being.

The basic word I-It can never be spoken with one’s whole being.

There is no I as such but only the I of the basic word I-You and the I

of the basic word I-It.

When a man says I, he means one or the other. The I he means is present

when he says I. And when he says You or It, the I of one or the other

basic word is also present.

Being I and saying I are the same. Saying I and saying one of the two

basic words are the same.

Whoever speaks one of the basic words enters into the word and stands in

it.

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.

But the realm of You has another basis.

Whoever says You does not have something for his object. For wherever

there is something there is also another something; every It borders on

other Its; It is only by virtue of bordering on others. But where You

is, said there is no something. You has no borders.

Whoever says You does not have something; he has nothing. But he stands

in relation.

We are told that man experiences his world. What does this mean?

Man goes over the surfaces of things and experiences them.[8] He brings

back from them some knowledge of their condition—an experience. He

experiences what there is to things.

But it is not experiences alone that bring the world to man.

For what they bring to him is only a world that consists of It and It

and It, of He and He and She and She and It.

I experience something.

All this is not changed by adding “inner” experiences to the “external”

ones, in line with the non-eternal distinction that is born of mankind’s

craving to take the edge off the mystery of death. Inner things like

external things, things among things!

I experience something.

And all this is not changed by adding “mysterious” experiences to

“manifest” ones, self-confident in the wisdom that recognizes a secret

compartment in things, reserved for the initiated, and holds the key. O

mysteriousness without mystery, O piling up of information! It, it, it!

Those who experience do not participate in the world. For the experience

is “in them” and not between them and the world.

The world does not participate in experience. It allows itself to be

experienced, but it is not concerned, for it contributes nothing, and

nothing happens to it.

The world as experience belongs to the basic word I-It.

The basic word I-You establishes the world of relation.

Three are the spheres[9] in which the world of relation arises.

The first: life with nature. Here the relation vibrates in the dark and

remains below language. The creatures stir across from us, but they are

unable to come to us, and the You we say to them sticks to the threshold

of language.

The second: life with men. Here the relation is manifest and enters

language. We can give and receive the You.

The third: life with spiritual beings. Here the relation is wrapped in a

cloud but reveals itself,[10] it lacks but creates language. We hear no

You and yet feel addressed; we answer—creating, thinking, acting: with

our being we speak the basic word, unable to say You with our mouth.

But how can we incorporate into the world of the basic word what lies

outside language?

In every sphere, through everything that becomes present to us, we gaze

toward the train[11] of the eternal You; in each we perceive a breath of

it;[12] in every You we address the eternal You, in every sphere

according to its manner.

I contemplate a tree.

I can accept it as a picture: a rigid pillar in a flood of light, or

splashes of green[13] traversed by the gentleness of the blue silver

ground.

I can feel it as movement: the flowing veins around the sturdy, striving

core, the sucking of the roots, the breathing of the leaves, the

infinite commerce with earth and air—and the growing itself in its

darkness.

I can assign it to a species and observe it as an instance, with an eye

to its construction and its way of life.

I can overcome its uniqueness and form so rigorously that I recognize it

only as an expression of the law—those laws according to which a

constant opposition of forces is continually adjusted, or those laws

according to which the elements mix and separate.

I can dissolve it into a number, into a pure relation between numbers,

and eternalize it.

Throughout all of this the tree remains my object and has its place and

its time span, its kind and condition.

But it can also happen, if will and grace are joined, that as I

contemplate the tree I am drawn into a relation, and the tree ceases to

be an It. The power of exclusiveness has seized me.

This does not require me to forego any of the modes of contemplation.

There is nothing that I must not see in order to see, and there is no

knowledge that I must forget. Rather is everything, picture and

movement, species and instance, law and number included and inseparably

fused.

Whatever belongs to the tree is included: its form and its mechanics,

its colors and its chemistry, its conversation with the elements and its

conversation with the stars—all this in its entirety.

The tree is no impression, no play of my imagination, no aspect of a

mood; it confronts me bodily[14] and has to deal with me as I must deal

with it—only differently.

One should not try to dilute the meaning of the relation: relation is

reciprocity.

Does the tree then have consciousness, similar to our own? I have no

experience of that. But thinking that you have brought this off in your

own case, must you again divide the indivisible? What I encounter is

neither the soul of a tree nor a dryad, but the tree itself.

When I confront a human being as my You and speak the basic word I-You

to him, then he is no thing among things nor does he consist of things.

He is no longer He or She, limited by other Hes and Shes, a dot in the

world grid of space and time, nor a condition that can be experienced

and described, a loose bundle of named qualities. Neighborless and

seamless, he is You and fills the firmament. Not as if there were

nothing but he; but everything else lives in his light.

Even as a melody is not composed of tones, nor a verse of words, nor a

statue of lines—one must pull and tear to turn a unity into a

multiplicity—so it is with the human being to whom I say You. I can

abstract from him the color of his hair or the color of his speech or

the color of his graciousness; I have to do this again and again; but

immediately he is no longer You.

And even as prayer is not in time but time in prayer, the sacrifice not

in space but space in the sacrifice—and whoever reverses the relation

annuls the reality—I do not find the human being to whom I say You in

any Sometime and Somewhere. I can place him there and have to do this

again and again, but immediately he becomes a He or a She, an It, and no

longer remains my You.

As long as the firmament of the You is spread over me, the tempests of

causality cower at my heels, and the whirl of doom[15] congeals.

The human being to whom I say You I do not experience. But I stand in

relation to him, in the sacred basic word. Only when I step out of this

do I experience him again. Experience is remoteness from You.

The relation can obtain even if the human being to whom I say You does

not hear it in his experience. For You is more than It knows. You does

more, and more happens to it, than It knows. No deception reaches this

far: here is the cradle of actual life.

This is the eternal origin of art that a human being confronts a form

that wants to become a work through him. Not a figment of his soul but

something that appears to the soul and demands the soul’s creative

power. What is required is a deed that a man does with his whole being:

if he commits it and speaks with his being the basic word[16] to the

form that appears, then the creative power is released and the work

comes into being.

The deed involves a sacrifice and a risk. The sacrifice: infinite

possibility is surrendered on the altar of the form; all that but a

moment ago floated playfully through one’s perspective has to be

exterminated; none of it may penetrate into the work; the exclusiveness

of such a confrontation demands this. The risk: the basic word can only

be spoken with one’s whole being; whoever commits himself may not hold

back part of himself; and the work does not permit me, as a tree or man

might, to seek relaxation in the It-world; it is imperious: if I do not

serve it properly, it breaks, or it breaks me.

The form that confronts me I cannot experience nor describe; I can only

actualize it. And yet I see it, radiant in the splendor of the

confrontation, far more clearly than all clarity of the experienced

world. Not as a thing among the “internal” things, not as a figment of

the “imagination,” but as what is present. Tested for its objectivity,

the form is not “there” at all; but what can equal its presence? And it

is an actual relation: it acts on me as I act on it.[17]

Such work is creation, inventing is finding.[18] Forming is discovery.

As I actualize, I uncover. I lead the form across—into the world of It.

The created work is a thing among things and can be experienced and

described as an aggregate of qualities. But the receptive beholder[19]

may be bodily confronted now and again.

—What, then, does one experience of the You?

—Nothing at all. For one does not experience it.

—What, then, does one know of the You?

—Only everything. For one no longer knows particulars.

The You encounters me by grace—it cannot be found by seeking. But that I

speak the basic word to it is a deed of my whole being, is my essential

deed.

The You encounters me. But I enter into a direct relationship to it.

Thus the relationship is election and electing, passive and active at

once: An action of the whole being must approach passivity, for it does

away with all partial actions and thus with any sense of action, which

always depends on limited exertions.

The basic word I-You can be spoken only with one’s whole being. The

concentration and fusion into a whole being can never be accomplished by

me, can never be accomplished without me. I require a You to become;

becoming I, I say You.

All actual life is encounter.

The relation to the You is unmediated.[20] Nothing conceptual intervenes

between I and You, no prior knowledge and no imagination; and memory

itself is changed as it plunges from particularity into wholeness. No

purpose intervenes between I and You, no greed and no anticipation; and

longing itself is changed as it plunges from the dream into appearance.

Every means is an obstacle. Only where all means have disintegrated

encounters occur.

Before the immediacy of the relationship everything mediate becomes

negligible. It is also trifling whether my You is the It of other I’s

(“object of general experience”) or can only become that as a result of

my essential deed. For the real boundary, albeit one that floats and

fluctuates, runs not between experience and non-experience, nor between

the given and the not-given, nor between the world of being and the

world of value, but across all the regions between You and It: between

presence and object.[21]

The present—not that which is like a point and merely designates

whatever our thoughts may posit as the end of “elapsed” time, the

fiction of the fixed lapse, but the actual and fulfilled present—exists

only insofar as presentness, encounter, and relation exist. Only as the

You becomes present does presence come into being.

The I of the basic word I-It, the I that is not bodily confronted by a

You[22] but surrounded by a multitude of “contents,” has only a past and

no present. In other words: insofar as a human being makes do with the

things that he experiences and uses, he lives in the past, and his

moment has no presence. He has nothing but objects; but objects consist

in having been.

Presence is not what is evanescent and passes but what confronts us,

waiting and enduring.[23] And the object is not duration but standing

still, ceasing, breaking off, becoming rigid, standing out, the lack of

relation, the lack of presence.

What is essential is lived in the present, objects[24] in the past.

This essential twofoldness 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. But for an

actual human being the real boundary also runs across the world of

ideas.

To be sure, some men who in the world of things make do with

experiencing and using have constructed for themselves an idea annex or

superstructure in which they find refuge and reassurance in the face of

intimations of nothingness. At the threshold they take off the clothes

of the ugly weekday, shroud themselves in clean garments, and feel

restored as they contemplate primal being or what ought to be—something

in which their life has no share. It may also make them feel good to

proclaim it.

But the It-humanity that some imagine, postulate, and advertise has

nothing in common with the bodily humanity to which a human being can

truly say You. The noblest fiction is a fetish, the most sublime

fictitious sentiment is a vice. The ideas are just as little enthroned

above our heads as they reside inside them; they walk among us and step

up to us. Pitiful are those who leave the basic word unspoken, but

wretched are those who instead of that address the ideas with a concept

or a slogan as if that were their name!

That direct relationships involve some action on[25] what confronts us

becomes clear in one of three examples. The essential deed of art

determines the process whereby the form becomes a work. That which

confronts me is fulfilled through the encounter through which it enters

into the world of things in order to remain incessantly effective,

incessantly It—but also infinitely able to become again a You,

enchanting and inspiring. It becomes “incarnate”: out of the flood of

spaceless and timeless presence it rises to the shore of continued

existence.[26]

Less clear is the element of action in the relation to a human You. The

essential act that here establishes directness is usually understood as

a feeling, and thus misunderstood. Feelings accompany the metaphysical

and metapsychical fact of love, but they do not constitute it; and the

feelings that accompany it can be very different. Jesus’ feeling for the

possessed man is different from his feeling for the beloved disciple;

but the love is one. Feelings one “has”; love occurs. Feelings dwell in

man, but man dwells in his love. This is no metaphor but actuality: love

does not cling to an I, as if the You were merely its “content” or

object; it is between I and You. Whoever does not know this, know this

with his being, does not know love, even if he should ascribe to it the

feelings that he lives through,[27] experiences, enjoys, and expresses.

Love is a cosmic force.[28] For those who stand in it and behold in it,

men emerge from their entanglement in busy-ness;[29] and the good and

the evil, the clever and the foolish, the beautiful and the ugly, one

after another become actual and a You for them; that is, liberated,

emerging into a unique confrontation.[30] Exclusiveness comes into being

miraculously again and again—and now one can act, help, heal, educate,

raise, redeem. Love is responsibility of an I for a You: in this

consists what cannot consist in any feeling—the equality of all lovers,

from the smallest to the greatest and from the blissfully secure whose

life is circumscribed by the life of one beloved human being to him that

is nailed his life long to the cross of the world, capable of what is

immense and bold enough to risk it: to love man.[31]

Let the meaning of action in the third example, that of the creature and

its contemplation, remain mysterious. Believe in the simple magic of

life, in service in the universe, and it will dawn on you what this

waiting, peering, “stretching of the neck”[32] of the creature means.

Every word must falsify; but look, these beings live around you, and no

matter which one you approach you always reach Being.[33]

Relation is reciprocity. My You acts on me as I act on it. Our students

teach us, our works form us. The “wicked” become a revelation when they

are touched by the sacred basic word. How are we educated by children,

by animals! Inscrutably involved, we live in the currents of universal

reciprocity.

—You speak of love as if it were the only relationship between men; but

are you even justified in choosing it as an example, seeing that there

is also hatred?

—As long as love is “blind”—that is, as long as it does not see a whole

being—it does not yet truly stand under the basic word of relation.

Hatred remains blind by its very nature; one can hate only part of a

being. Whoever sees a whole being and must reject it, is no longer in

the dominion of hatred but in the human limitation of the capacity to

say You. It does happen to men that a human being confronts them and

they are unable to address him with the basic word that always involves

an affirmation of the being one addresses, and then they have to reject

either the other person or themselves: when entering-into-relationship

comes to this barrier, it recognizes its own relativity which disappears

only when this barrier is removed.

Yet whoever hates directly is closer to a relation than those who are

without love and hate.

This, however, is the sublime melancholy of our lot that every You must

become an It in our world. However exclusively present it may have been

in the direct relationship—as soon as the relationship has run its

course or is permeated by means,[34] the You becomes an object among

objects, possibly the noblest one and yet one of them, assigned its

measure and boundary. The actualization of the work involves a loss of

actuality. Genuine contemplation never lasts long; the natural being

that only now revealed itself to me in the mystery of reciprocity has

again become describable, analyzable, classifiable—the point at which

manifold systems of laws intersect. And even love cannot persist in

direct relation; it endures, but only in the alternation of actuality

and latency. The human being who but now was unique and devoid of

qualities, not at hand[35] but only present, not experienceable, only

touchable,[36] has again become a He or She, an aggregate of qualities,

a quantum with a shape.[37] Now I can again abstract from him the color

of his hair, of his speech, of his graciousness; but as long as I can do

that he is my You no longer and not yet again.

Every You in the world is doomed by its nature to become a thing or at

least to enter into thinghood again and again. In the language of

objects: every thing in the world can—either before or after it becomes

a thing—appear to some I as its You. But the language of objects catches

only one corner of actual life.

The It is the chrysalis, the You the butterfly.[38] Only it is not

always as if these states took turns so neatly; often it is an

intricately entangled series of events that is tortuously dual.

In the beginning is the relation.

Consider the language of “primitive” peoples, meaning those who have

remained poor in objects and whose life develops in a small sphere of

acts that have a strong presence.[39] The nuclei of this language, their

sentence-words—primal pre-grammatical forms that eventually split into

the multiplicity of different kinds of words—generally designate the

wholeness of a relation. We say, “far away”; the Zulu has a

sentence-word instead that means: “where one cries, ‘mother, I am lost.’

” And the Fuegian surpasses our analytical wisdom with a sentence-word

of seven syllables that literally means: “they look at each other, each

waiting for the other to offer to do that which both desire but neither

wishes to do.” In this wholeness persons are still embedded like reliefs

without achieving the fully rounded independence of nouns or pronouns.

What counts is not these products of analysis and reflection[40] but the

genuine original unity, the lived relationship.

We greet those we encounter by wishing them well or by assuring them of

our devotion or by commending them to God. But how indirect are these

worn-out formulas (“Hail!”[41] no longer suggests anything of the

original bestowal of power) compared with the eternally young, physical,

relational greeting of the Kaffir, “I see you!” or its American variant,

the laughable but sublime “Smell me!”

We may suppose that relations[42] and concepts, as well as the notions

of persons and things, have gradually crystallized out of notions of

relational processes and states. The elementary, spirit-awakening

impressions and stimulations of the “natural man” are derived from

relational processes—the living sense of a confrontation—and from

relational states—living with one who confronts him. About the moon

which he sees every night he does not think much until it approaches him

bodily, in his sleep or even while he is awake, and casts a spell over

him with its gestures or, touching him, does something wicked or sweet

to him. What he retains is not the visual notion of the migratory disk

of light nor that of a demonic being that somehow belongs to it, but at

first only an image of the moon’s action that surges through his body as

a motor stimulus; and the personal image of an active moon crystallizes

only very gradually. Only then is the memory of that which was

unconsciously absorbed every night kindled into the notion of an agent

behind this action. Only then does it become possible for the You that

originally could not be an object of experience, being simply endured,

to be reified and become a He or She.

The originally relational character of the appearance of all beings

persists and remains effective for a long time. This may help us to

understand a spiritual element of primitive life that has been discussed

a great deal in recent literature without having been adequately

interpreted: that mysterious power whose concept has been found with all

sorts of variations in the faith and science (both are still one at this

point) of many primitive peoples—that mana or orenda from which we can

trace a path all the way to the original significance of Brahman and

even to the dynamis and charis of the magical papyruses and the

Apostolic letters.[43] It has been designated as a supra-sensible or

supernatural force, in terms of our categories which do not do justice

to those of primitive man. The boundaries of his world are drawn by his

bodily experiences to which the visits of the dead belong quite

“naturally.” Any assumption that the non-sensible exists must strike him

as nonsense. The appearances to which he attributes a “mystical potency”

are all the elementary relational processes—that is, all the processes

about which he thinks at all because they stimulate his body and leave

an impression of such stimulation in him. The moon and the dead who

haunt him at night with pain or lust have this potency; but so do the

sun that burns him, the beast that howls at him, the chief whose glance

compels him, and the shaman whose song fills him with strength for the

hunt. Mana is that which is active and effective,[44] that which has

made the moon person up there in the sky a blood-curdling You, that of

which a memory trace remained when the impression of a stimulus turned

into the impression of an object, although mana itself always appears

only in an agent. It is that with which we ourselves, if we possess

it—say, in a miracle stone—can bring about similar effects. The

primitive “world” is magical not because any human power of magic might

be at its center, but rather because any such human power is only a

variant of the general power that is the source of all effective

action.[45] The causality of his world is not a continuum; it is a force

that flashes, strikes, and is effective ever again like lightning, a

volcanic motion without continuity. Mana is a primitive abstraction,

probably more primitive than numbers, for example, but no more

supernatural. Memory, educating itself, constructs a series of the major

relational events and the elementary upheavals. What is most important

for the drive for preservation and most noteworthy for the drive for

knowledge, namely, that which is active and effective,[46] stands out

most clearly and gains independence, while the less important, that

which is not shared, the changeful You of the experiences, recedes,

remains isolated in man’s memory, gradually becomes an object and even

more gradually gets arranged in groups and species. But the third

element, gruesomely detached and at times spookier than the dead and the

moon, becomes more and more inexorably clear until finally the other

partner that always remains the same emerges: “I.”

The original drive for “self”-preservation is no more accompanied by any

I-consciousness than any other drive. What wants to propagate itself is

not the I but the body that does not yet know of any I.[47] Not the I

but the body wants to make things, tools, toys, wants to be

“inventive.”[48] And even in the primitive function of cognition one

cannot find any cognosco ergo sum[49] of even the most naive kind, nor

any conception, however childlike, of an experiencing subject. Only when

the primal encounters,[50] the vital primal words I-acting-You[51] and

You-acting-I, have been split and the participle has been reified and

hypostatized, does the I emerge with the force of an element.

In the history of the primitive mind[52] the fundamental difference

between the two basic words appears in this: even in the original

relational event, the primitive man speaks the basic word I-You in a

natural, as it were still unformed manner, not yet having recognized

himself as an I; but the basic word I-It is made possible only by this

recognition, by the detachment of the I.

The former word splits into I and You, but it did not originate as their

aggregate, it antedates any I. The latter originated as an aggregate of

I and It, it postdates the I.

Owing to its exclusiveness, the primitive relational event includes the

I. For by its nature this event contains only two partners, man and what

confronts him, both in their full actuality, and the world becomes a

dual system; and thus man begins to have some sense of that cosmic

pathos[53] of the I without as yet realizing this.

In the natural fact, on the other hand, that will give way to the basic

word I-It and I-related experience, the I is not yet included. This fact

is the discreteness of the human body as the carrier of its sensations,

from its environment. In this particularity the body learns to know and

discriminate itself, but this discrimination remains on the plane where

things are next to each other, and therefore it cannot assume the

character of implicit I-likeness.[54]

But once the I of the relation has emerged and has become existent in

its detachment, it somehow etherializes and functionalizes itself[55]

and enters into the natural fact of the discreteness of the body from

its environment, awakening I-likeness in it. Only now can the conscious

I-act, the first form of the basic word I-It, of experience by an I,

come into being. The I that has emerged proclaims itself as the carrier

of sensations and the environment as their object. Of course, this

happens in a “primitive” and not in an “epistemological” manner; yet

once the sentence “I see the tree” has been pronounced in such a way

that it no longer relates a relation between a human I and a tree You

but the perception of the tree object by the human consciousness, it has

erected the crucial barrier between subject and object; the basic word

I-It, the word of separation, has been spoken.

—Then our melancholy lot took shape in primal history?

—Indeed, it developed—insofar as man’s conscious life developed in

primal history. But in conscious life cosmic being recurs as human

becoming. Spirit appears in time as a product, even a byproduct, of

nature, and yet it is spirit that envelops nature timelessly.

The opposition of the two basic words has many names in the ages and

worlds; but in its nameless truth it inheres in the creation.

—Then you believe after all in some paradise in the primal age of

humanity?

—Even if it was a hell—and the age to which we can go back in historical

thought was certainly full of wrath and dread and torment and

cruelty—unreal it was not.

Primal man’s experiences of encounter were scarcely a matter of tame

delight; but even violence against a being one really confronts[56] is

better than ghostly solicitude for faceless digits! From the former a

path leads to God, from the latter only to nothingness.[57]

Even if we could fully understand the life of the primitive, it would be

no more than a metaphor for that of the truly primal man. Hence the

primitive affords us only brief glimpses into the temporal sequence of

the two basic words. More complete information we receive from the

child.

Here it becomes unmistakably clear how the spiritual reality of the

basic words emerges from a natural[58] reality: that of the basic word

I-You from a natural association,[59] that of the basic word I-It from a

natural discreteness.

The prenatal life of the child is a pure natural association, a flowing

toward each other, a bodily reciprocity; and the life horizon of the

developing being appears uniquely inscribed, and yet also not inscribed,

in that of the being that carries it; for the womb in which it dwells is

not solely that of the human mother. This association is so cosmic that

it seems like the imperfect deciphering of a primeval inscription when

we are told in the language of Jewish myth that in his mother’s womb man

knows the universe and forgets it at birth. And as the secret image of a

wish, this association remains to us. But this longing ought not to be

taken for a craving to go back, as those suppose who consider the

spirit, which they confound with their own intellect, a parasite of

nature. For the spirit is nature’s blossom, albeit exposed to many

diseases. What this longing aims for is the cosmic association of the

being that has burst into spirit with its true You.

Every developing human child rests, like all developing beings, in the

womb of the great mother—the undifferentiated, not yet formed primal

world. From this it detaches itself to enter a personal life, and it is

only in dark hours when we slip out of this again (as happens even to

the healthy, night after night) that we are close to her again. But this

detachment is not sudden and catastrophic like that from the bodily

mother. The human child is granted some time to exchange the natural

association with the world that is slipping away for a spiritual

association—a relationship. From the glowing darkness of the chaos he

has stepped into the cool and light creation without immediately

possessing it: he has to get it up, as it were, and make it a reality

for himself; he gains his world by seeing, listening, feeling,

forming.[60] It is in encounter that the creation reveals its

formhood;[61] it does not pour itself into senses that are waiting but

deigns to meet those that are reaching out. What is to surround the

finished human being as an object, has to be acquired and wooed

strenuously by him while he is still developing.[62] No thing is a

component of experience or reveals itself except through the reciprocal

force of confrontation. Like primitives, the child lives between sleep

and sleep (and a large part of waking is still sleep), in the lightning

and counter-lightning of encounter.

The innateness of the longing for relation is apparent even in the

earliest and dimmest stage. Before any particulars can be perceived,

dull glances push into the unclear space toward the indefinite; and at

times when there is obviously no desire for nourishment, soft

projections of the hands reach, aimlessly to all appearances, into the

empty air toward the indefinite.[63] Let anyone call this animalic: that

does not help our comprehension. For precisely these glances will

eventually, after many trials, come to rest upon a red wallpaper

arabesque and not leave it until the soul of red has opened up to them.

Precisely this motion will gain its sensuous form and definiteness in

contact with a shaggy toy bear and eventually apprehend lovingly and

unforgettably a complete body: in both cases not experience of an object

but coming to grips with a living, active being that confronts us, if

only in our “imagination.” (But this “imagination” is by no means a form

of “panpsychism”; it is the drive to turn everything into a You, the

drive to pan-relation—and where it does not find a living, active being

that confronts it but only an image or symbol of that, it supplies the

living activity from its own fullness.) Little inarticulate sounds still

ring out senselessly and persistently into the nothing; but one day they

will have turned imperceptibly into a conversation—with what? Perhaps

with a bubbling tea kettle, but into a conversation. Many a motion that

is called a reflex is a sturdy trowel for the person building up his

world. It is not as if a child first saw an object and then entered into

some relationship with that. Rather, the longing for relation is

primary, the cupped hand into which the being that confronts us nestles;

and the relation to that, which is a wordless anticipation of saying

You, comes second. But the genesis of the thing is a late product that

develops out of the split of the primal encounters,[64] out of the

separation of the associated partners—as does the genesis of the I. In

the beginning is the relation—as the category of being, as readiness, as

a form that reaches out to be filled, as a model of the soul; the a

priori of relation; the innate You.

In the relationships through which we live, the innate You is realized

in the You we encounter: that this, comprehended as a being we

confront[65] and accepted as exclusive, can finally be addressed with

the basic word, has its ground in the a priori of relation.

In the drive for contact (originally, a drive for tactile contact, then

also for optical contact with another being) the innate You comes to the

fore quite soon, and it becomes ever clearer that the drive aims at

reciprocity, at “tenderness.” But it also determines the inventive

drive[66] which emerges later (the drive to produce things synthetically

or, where that is not possible, analytically—through taking or tearing

apart), and thus the product is “personified” and a “conversation”

begins. The development of the child’s soul is connected indissolubly

with his craving for the You, with the fulfillments[67] and

disappointments of this craving, with the play of his experiments and

his tragic seriousness when he feels at a total loss. Any real

understanding of these phenomena is compromised by all attempts to

reduce them to narrower spheres and can be promoted only when in

contemplating and discussing them we recall their cosmic-metacosmic

origin. We must remember the reach beyond that undifferentiated, not yet

formed[68] primal world from which the corporeal[69] individual that was

born into the world has emerged completely, but not yet the bodily,[70]

the actualized being that has to evolve from it gradually through

entering into relationships.

Man becomes an I through a You. What confronts us comes and vanishes,

relational events take shape and scatter, and through these changes

crystallizes, more and more each time, the consciousness of the constant

partner, the I-consciousness. To be sure, for a long time it appears

only woven into the relation to a You, discernible as that which reaches

for but is not a You; but it comes closer and closer to the bursting

point until one day the bonds are broken and the I confronts its

detached self for a moment like a You—and then it takes possession of

itself and henceforth enters into relations in full consciousness.

Only now can the other basic word be put together. For although the You

of the relation always paled again, it never became the It of an I—an

object of detached perception and experience, which is what it will

become henceforth—but as it were an It for itself, something previously

unnoticed that was waiting for the new relational event. Of course, the

maturing body[71] as the carrier of its sensations and the executor of

its drives stood out from its environment, but only in the

next-to-each-other where one finds one’s way, not yet in the absolute

separation of I and object. Now, however, the detached I is

transformed—reduced from substantial fullness to the functional

one-dimensionality[72] of a subject that experiences and uses

objects—and thus approaches all the “It for itself,” overpowers it and

joins with it to form the other basic word. The man who has acquired an

I[73] and says I-It assumes a position before things but does not

confront them in the current of reciprocity. He bends down to examine

particulars under the objectifying magnifying glass of close scrutiny,

or he uses the objectifying telescope of distant vision to arrange them

as mere scenery. In his contemplation he isolates them without any

feeling for the exclusive or joins them without any world feeling. The

former could be attained only through relation, and the latter only by

starting from that. Only now he experiences things as aggregates of

qualities. Oualities, to be sure, had remained in his memory after every

encounter,[74] as belonging to the remembered You; but only now things

seem to him to be constructed of their qualities. Only by drawing on his

memory of the relation—dreamlike, visual, or conceptual, depending on

the kind of man he is—he supplements the core that revealed itself

powerfully in the You, embracing all qualities: the substance. Only now

does he place things in a spatio-temporal-causal context; only now does

each receive its place, its course, its measurability, its

conditionality. The You also appears in space, but only in an exclusive

confrontation in which everything else can only be background from which

it emerges, not its boundary and measure. The You appears in time, but

in that of a process that is fulfilled in itself—a process lived through

not as a piece that is a part of a constant and organized sequence but

in a “duration”[75] whose purely intensive dimension can be determined

only by starting from the You. It appears simultaneously as acting on

and as acted upon,[76] but not as if it had been fitted into a causal

chain; rather as, in its reciprocity with the I, the beginning and end

of the event. This is part of the basic truth of the human world: only

It can be put in order. Only as things cease to be our You and become

our It do they become subject to coordination. The You knows no system

of coordinates.

But having got this far, we must also make another pronouncement without

which this piece of the basic truth would remain an unfit fragment: an

ordered world is not the world order. There are moments of the secret

ground in which world order is beheld as present. Then the tone is heard

all of a sudden whose uninterpretable score the ordered world is. These

moments are immortal; none are more evanescent. They leave no content

that could be preserved, but their force enters into the creation and

into man’s knowledge, and the radiation of its force penetrates the

ordered world and thaws it again and again. Thus the history of the

individual, thus the history of the race.

The world is twofold for man in accordance with his twofold attitude.

He perceives the being that surrounds him, plain things and beings as

things; he perceives what happens around him, plain processes and

actions as processes, things that consist of qualities and processes

that consist of moments, things recorded in terms of spatial coordinates

and processes recorded in terms of temporal coordinates, things and

processes that are bounded by other things and processes and capable of

being measured against and compared with those others—an ordered world,

a detached world. This world is somewhat reliable; it has density and

duration; its articulation can be surveyed; one can get it out again and

again; one recounts it with one’s eyes closed and then checks with one’s

eyes open. There it stands—right next to your skin if you think of it

that way, or nestled in your soul if you prefer that: it is your object

and remains that, according to your pleasure—and remains primally alien

both outside and inside you. You perceive it and take it for your

“truth”;[77] it permits itself to be taken by you, but it does not give

itself to you. It is only about it that you can come to an understanding

with others; although it takes a somewhat different form for everybody,

it is prepared to be a common object for you; but you cannot encounter

others in it. Without it you cannot remain alive; its reliability

preserves you; but if you were to die into it, then you would be buried

in nothingness.

Or man encounters being and becoming as what confronts him—always only

one being and every thing only as a being. What is there reveals itself

to him in the occurrence, and what occurs there happens to him as being.

Nothing else is present but this one, but this one cosmically.[78]

Measure and comparison have fled. It is up to you how much of the

immeasurable becomes reality for you. The encounters do not order

themselves to become a world, but each is for you a sign of the world

order. They have no association with each other, but every one

guarantees your association with the world. The world that appears to

you in this way is unreliable, for it appears always new to you, and you

cannot take it by its word. It lacks density, for everything in it

permeates everything else. It lacks duration, for it comes even when not

called and vanishes even when you cling to it. It cannot be surveyed: if

you try to make it surveyable, you lose it. It comes—comes to fetch

you—and if it does not reach you or encounter you it vanishes, but it

comes again, transformed. It does not stand outside you, it touches your

ground; and if you say “soul of my soul” you have not said too much. But

beware of trying to transpose it into your soul—that way you destroy it.

It is your present; you have a present only insofar as you have it;[79]

and you can make it into an object for you and experience and use it—you

must do that again and again—and then you have no present any more.

Between you and it there is a reciprocity of giving: you say You to it

and give yourself to it; it says You to you and gives itself to you. You

cannot come to an understanding about it with others; you are lonely

with it; but it teaches you to encounter others and to stand your ground

in such encounters; and through the grace of its advents and the

melancholy of its departures it leads you to that You in which the lines

of relation, though parallel, intersect. It does not help you to

survive; it only helps you to have intimations of eternity.

The It-world hangs together in space and time.

The You-world does not hang together in space and time.

The individual You must become an It when the event of relation has run

its course.

The individual It can become a You by entering into the event of

relation.

These are the two basic privileges of the It-world. They induce man to

consider the It-world as the world in which one has to live and also can

live comfortably—and that even offers us all sorts of stimulations and

excitements, activities and knowledge. In this firm and wholesome

chronicle the You-moments appear as queer lyric-dramatic episodes. Their

spell may be seductive, but they pull us dangerously to extremes,

loosening the well-tried structure, leaving behind more doubt than

satisfaction, shaking up our security—altogether uncanny, altogether

indispensable.[80]Since one must after all return into “the world,” why

not stay in it in the first place? Why not call to order that which

confronts us and send it home into objectivity? And when one cannot get

around saying You, perhaps to one’s father, wife, companion—why not say

You and mean It? After all, producing the sound “You” with one’s vocal

cords does not by any means entail speaking the uncanny basic word. Even

whispering an amorous You with one’s soul is hardly dangerous as long as

in all seriousness one means nothing but experiencing and using.

One cannot live in the pure present: it would consume us if care were

not taken that it is overcome quickly and thoroughly. But in pure past

one can live; in fact, only there can a life be arranged. One only has

to fill every moment with experiencing and using, and it ceases to burn.

And in all the seriousness of truth, listen:[81] without It a human

being cannot live. But whoever lives only with that is not human.[82]

Second Part

HOWEVER THE HISTORY of the individual and that of the human race may

diverge in other respects, they agree in this at least: both signify a

progressive increase of the It-world.

Regarding the history of the race this is often doubted. People point

out that successive cultures begin with a primitive stage that is

colored differently but always has essentially the same structure,

involving a small world of objects; and thus it is the life of each

individual culture and not that of the race that is held to correspond

to the life of the individual.[83] But if we disregard those cultures

that seem to be isolated, we find that those that are under the

historical influence of others take over their It-world at a certain

stage that is not so early but precedes the great age—sometimes by

immediately accepting it from a culture that is still contemporary, as

did the Greeks from the Egyptians; at other times indirectly from a past

culture, as Occidental Christendom accepted the Greek It-world. They

enlarge their It-world not only through their own experience but also by

accepting alien influences, and it is only then that the It-world which

has grown in this way experiences its crucial expansion which involves

discovery. (Let us ignore for the moment the overwhelming share in this

development of the vision and deeds of the You-world.) Generally, the

It-world of every culture is therefore more comprehensive than that of

its predecessors, and in spite of some stoppages and apparent

regressions the progressive increase of the It-world is clearly

discernible in history. It is not essential in this connection whether

the “world” of a culture should be characterized more as finite or

whether we should attribute to it so-called infinity or, more correctly

speaking, non-finitude: a “finite” world may very well contain more

components, things, and processes than an “infinite” one. It should also

be noted that we must compare not only the extent of their knowledge of

nature but also that of their social differentiation and their technical

achievements because both expand the world of objects.

The basic relation of man to the It-world includes experience, which

constitutes this world ever again, and use, which leads it toward its

multifarious purpose—the preservation, alleviation, and equipment of

human life. With the extent of the It-world the capacity for

experiencing and using it must also increase. To be sure, the individual

can replace direct experience more and more with indirect experience,

the “acquisition of information”; and he can abbreviate use more and

more until it becomes specialized “utilization”: a continual improvement

of capacity from generation to generation is nevertheless indispensable.

This is what is usually meant when people speak of a progressive

development of the life of the spirit. This certainly involves the real

linguistic sin against the spirit; for this “life of the spirit” is

usually the obstacle that keeps man from living in the spirit, and at

best it is only the matter that has to be mastered and formed before it

can be incorporated. The obstacle: for the improvement of the capacity

for experience and use generally involves a decrease in man’s power to

relate—that power which alone can enable man to live in the spirit.

Spirit in its human manifestation is man’s response to his You. Man

speaks in many tongues—tongues of language, of art, of action—but the

spirit is one; it is response to the You that appears from the mystery

and addresses us from the mystery. Spirit is word. And even as verbal

speech may first become word in the brain of man and then become sound

in his throat, although both are merely refractions of the true event

because in truth language does not reside in man but man stands in

language and speaks out of it—so it is with all words, all spirit.

Spirit is not in the I but between I and You. It is not like the blood

that circulates in you but like the air in which you breathe. Man lives

in the spirit when he is able to respond to his You. He is able to do

that when he enters into this relation with his whole being. It is

solely by virtue of his power to relate that man is able to live in the

spirit.

But it is here that the fate[84] of the relational event rears up most

powerfully. The more powerful the response, the more powerfully it ties

down the You and as by a spell binds it into an object. Only silence

toward the You, the silence of all tongues, the taciturn waiting in the

unformed, undifferentiated, prelinguistic word leaves the You free and

stands together with it in reserve where the spirit does not manifest

itself but is. All response binds the You into the It-world. That is the

melancholy of man, and that is his greatness. For thus knowledge, thus

works, thus image and example come into being among the living.

But whatever has thus been changed into It and frozen into a thing among

things is still endowed with the meaning and the destiny[85] to change

back ever again. Ever again—that was the intention in that hour of the

spirit when it bestowed itself upon man and begot the response in

him—the object shall catch fire and become present, returning to the

element from which it issued, to be beheld and lived by men as present.

The fulfillment of this meaning and this destiny is frustrated by the

man who has become reconciled to the It-world as something that is to be

experienced and used and who holds down what is tied into it instead of

freeing it, who observes it instead of heeding it,[86] and instead of

receiving it utilizes it.

Knowledge: as he beholds what confronts him, its being is disclosed to

the knower. What he beheld as present he will have to comprehend as an

object, compare with objects, assign a place in an order of objects, and

describe and analyze objectively; only as an It can it be absorbed into

the store of knowledge. But in the act of beholding it was no thing

among things, no event among events; it was present exclusively. It is

not in the law that is afterward derived from the appearance but in the

appearance itself that the being communicates itself. That we think the

universal is merely an unreeling of the skeinlike event that was beheld

in the particular, in a confrontation. And now it is locked into the

It-form of conceptual knowledge. Whoever unlocks it and beholds it again

as present, fulfills the meaning of that act of knowledge as something

that is actual and active between men. But knowledge can also be pursued

by stating: “so that is how matters stand; that is the name of the

thing; that is how it is constituted; that is where it belongs.” What

has become an It is then taken as an It, experienced and used as an It,

employed along with other things for the project of finding one’s way in

the world, and eventually for the project of “conquering” the world.

Art, too: as he beholds what confronts him, the form discloses itself to

the artist. He conjures it into an image. The image does not stand in a

world of gods but in this great world of men. Of course, it is “there”

even when no human eye afflicts it; but it sleeps. The Chinese poet

relates that men did not want to hear the song that he was playing on

his flute of jade; then he played it to the gods, and they inclined

their ears; and ever since men, too, have listened to the song—and thus

he went from the gods to those with whom the image cannot dispense. As

in a dream it looks for the encounter with man in order that he may undo

the spell and embrace the form for a timeless moment. And there he comes

and experiences what there is to be experienced: that is how it is made,

or this is what it expresses, or its qualities are such and such, and on

top of all that perhaps also how it might rate.

Not that scientific and aesthetic understanding is not necessary—but it

should do its work faithfully and immerse itself and disappear in that

truth of the relation which surpasses understanding and embraces what is

understandable.

And thirdly: that which towers above the spirit of knowledge and the

spirit of art because here evanescent, corporeal man need not banish

himself into the enduring matter but outlasts it and rises, himself an

image, on the starry sky of the spirit, as the music of his living

speech roars around him—pure action, the act that is not arbitrary. Here

the You appeared to man out of a deeper mystery, addressed him out of

the dark, and he responded with his life. Here the word has become life,

and this life, whether it fulfilled the law or broke the law—both are

required on occasion lest the spirit die on earth—is teaching. Thus it

stands before posterity in order to teach it, not what is and not what

ought to be, but how one lives in the spirit, in the countenance[87] of

the You. And that means: it stands ready to become a You for them at any

time, opening up the You-world; no, it does not stand ready, it always

comes toward them and touches them. But they, having become uneager and

inept for such living intercourse that opens up a world, are well

informed; they have imprisoned the person in history, and his speech in

a library; they have codified the fulfillment or the breach, it does not

matter which; nor are they stingy with reverence and even adoration,

adequately mixed with some psychology, as is only proper for modern man.

O lonely countenance, starlike in the dark; O living finger upon an

insensitive forehead; O steps whose echo is fading away!

The improvement of the ability to experience and use generally involves

a decrease in man’s power to relate.

The man who samples the spirit as if it were spirits[88]—what is he to

do with the beings that live around him?

Standing under the basic word of separation which keeps apart I and It,

he has divided his life with his fellow men into two neatly defined

districts: institutions and feelings. It-district and I-district.

Institutions are what is “out there” where for all kinds of purposes one

spends time, where one works, negotiates, influences, undertakes,

competes, organizes, administers, officiates, preaches; the halfway

orderly and on the whole coherent structure where, with the manifold

participation of human heads and human limbs, the round of affairs runs

its course.

Feelings are what is “in here” where one lives and recovers from the

institutions. Here the spectrum of the emotions swings before the

interested eye; here one enjoys one’s inclination and one’s hatred,

pleasure and, if it is not too bad, pain. Here one is at home and

relaxes in one’s rocking chair.

Institutions comprise a complicated forum; feelings, a boudoir that at

least provides a good deal of diversity.

This separation, to be sure, is continually endangered, as our sportive

feelings break into the most objective institutions; but with a little

good will it can always be restored.

A dependable separation is most difficult in the areas of our so-called

personal life. In marriage, for example, it is not always so simple to

attain; but time works wonders. In the areas of so-called public life it

is eminently successful: consider, for example, how in the age of

political parties, but also of groups and “movements” that claim to be

above parties, heaven-storming congresses alternate flawlessly with the

day-to-day operations that crawl along on the ground, whether mechanized

and evenly or organically and slovenly.

But the severed It of institutions is a golem,[89] and the severed I of

feelings is a fluttering soul-bird.[90] Neither knows the human being;

one only the instance and the other one only the “object.” Neither knows

person or community. Neither knows the present: these, however modern,

know only the rigid past, that which is finished, while those, however

persistent, know only the fleeting moment, that which is not yet.

Neither has access to actual life. Institutions yield no public life;

feelings, no personal life.

That institutions yield no public life is felt by more and more human

beings, to their sorrow: this is the source of the distress and search

of our age. That feelings yield no personal life has been recognized by

few so far; for they seem to be the home of what is most personal. And

once one has learnt, like modern man, to become greatly preoccupied with

one’s own feelings, even despair over their unreality will not easily

open one’s eyes; after all, such despair is also a feeling and quite

interesting.

Those who suffer because institutions yield no public life have thought

of a remedy: feelings are to loosen up or thaw or explode the

institutions, as if they could be renewed by feelings, by introducing

the “freedom of feelings.” When the automatized state yokes together

totally uncongenial citizens without creating or promoting any

fellowship, it is supposed to be replaced by a loving community. And

this loving community is supposed to come into being when people come

together, prompted by free, exuberant feeling, and want to live

together. But that is not how things are. True community does not come

into being because people have feelings for each other (though that is

required, too), but rather on two accounts: all of them have to stand in

a living, reciprocal relationship to a single living center, and they

have to stand in a living, reciprocal relationship to one another. The

second event has its source in the first but is not immediately given

with it. A living reciprocal relationship includes feelings but is not

derived from them. A community is built upon a living, reciprocal

relationship, but the builder is the living, active center.

Even institutions of so-called personal life cannot be reformed by a

free feeling (although this is also required). Marriage can never be

renewed except by that which is always the source of all true marriage:

that two human beings reveal the You to one another. It is of this that

the You that is I for neither of them builds a marriage. This is the

metaphysical and metapsychical fact of love which is merely accompanied

by feelings of love. Whoever wishes to renew a marriage on another basis

is not essentially different from those who want to abolish it: both

declare that they no longer know the fact. Indeed, take the much

discussed eroticism of our age and subtract everything that is really

egocentric[91]—in other words, every relationship in which one is not at

all present to the other,[92] but each uses the other only for

self-enjoyment—what would remain?

True public and true personal life are two forms of association. For

them to originate and endure, feelings are required as a changing

content, and institutions are required as a constant form; but even the

combination of both still does not create human life which is created

only by a third element: the central presence of the You, or rather, to

speak more truthfully, the central You that is received in the present.

The basic word I-It does not come from evil—any more than matter comes

from evil.[93] It comes from evil—like matter that presumes to be that

which has being.[94] When man lets it have its way, the relentlessly

growing It-world grows over him like weeds, his own I loses its

actuality, until the incubus over him and the phantom inside him

exchange the whispered confession of their need for redemption.

—But isn’t the communal life of modern man bound to be submerged in the

It-world? Consider the two chambers of this life, the economy and the

state: are they even thinkable in their present dimensions and

ramifications, except on the basis of a superior renunciation of all

“immediacy”—and even an inexorably resolute repudiation of any “alien”

authority that does not itself have its source in this area? And if the

I that experiences and uses holds sway here—in the economy, the I that

uses goods and services; in politics, the I that uses opinions and

aspirations—is it not precisely to this absolute dominion that we owe

the extensive and firm structure of the great “objective” fabrics in

these two spheres? Doesn’t the form-giving greatness of leading

statesmen and businessmen depend on their way of seeing the human beings

with whom they have to deal not as carriers of an inexperienceable You

but rather as centers of services and aspirations that have to be

calculated and employed according to their specific capacities? Wouldn’t

their world come crashing down upon them if they refused to add up He +

He + He to get an It, and tried instead to determine the sum of You and

You and You, which can never be anything else than You? What would this

come to if not an exchange of form-giving mastery for a puttering

dilettantism, and of lucid, powerful reason for murky enthusiasm? And

when we turn our eyes from the leaders to the led and consider the

fashion of modern work and possession, don’t we find that modern

developments have expunged almost every trace of a life in which human

beings confront each other and have meaningful relationships? It would

be absurd to try to reverse this development; and if one could bring off

this absurdity, the tremendous precision instrument of this civilization

would be destroyed at the same time, although this alone makes life

possible for the tremendously increased numbers of humanity.

—Speaker, you speak too late. But a moment ago you might have believed

your own speech; now this is no longer possible. For an instant ago you

saw no less than I that the state is no longer led: the stokers still

pile up coal, but the leaders merely seem to rule the racing engines.

And in this instant while you speak, you can hear as well as I how the

machinery of the economy is beginning to hum in an unwonted manner; the

overseers give you a superior smile, but death lurks in their hearts.

They tell you that they have adjusted the apparatus to modern

conditions; but you notice that henceforth they can only adjust

themselves to the apparatus, as long as that permits it. Their spokesmen

instruct you that the economy is taking over the heritage of the state;

you know that there is nothing to be inherited but the despotism of the

proliferating It under which the I, more and more impotent, is still

dreaming that it is in command.

Man’s communal life cannot dispense any more than he himself with the

It-world—over which the presence of the You floats like the spirit over

the face of the waters. Man’s will to profit and will to power are

natural and legitimate as long as they are tied to the will to human

relations and carried by it. There is no evil drive until the drive

detaches itself from our being; the drive that is wedded to and

determined by our being[95] is the plasma of communal life, while the

detached drive spells its disintegration. The economy as the house of

the will to profit and the state as the house of the will to power[96]

participate in life as long as they participate in the spirit. If they

abjure the spirit, they abjure life. To be sure, life takes its time

about settling the score, and for quite a while one may still think that

one sees a form move where for a long time a mere mechanism has been

whirring. Introducing some sort of immediacy at this point is surely

futile. Loosening the framework of the economy or the state cannot make

up for the fact that neither stands any longer under the supremacy of

the You-saying spirit, and stirring up the periphery cannot replace the

living relationship to the center. The structures of communal human life

derive their life from the fullness of the relational force that

permeates their members, and they derive their embodied form from the

saturation of this force by the spirit. The statesman or businessman who

serves the spirit is no dilettante. He knows well that he cannot simply

confront the people with whom he has to deal as so many carriers of the

You, without undoing his own work. Nevertheless he ventures to do this,

not simply but up to the limit suggested to him by the spirit; and the

spirit does suggest a limit to him, and the venture that would have

exploded a severed structure succeeds where the presence of the You

floats above. He does not become a babbling enthusiast; he serves the

truth which, though supra-rational, does not disown reason but holds it

in her lap. What he does in communal life is no different from what is

done in personal life by a man who knows that he cannot actualize the

You in some pure fashion but who nevertheless bears witness of it daily

to the It, defining the limit every day anew, according to the right and

measure of that day—discovering the limit anew. Neither work nor

possessions can be redeemed on their own but only by starting from the

spirit. It is only from the presence of the spirit that significance and

joy can flow into all work, and reverence and the strength to sacrifice

into all possessions, not to the brim but quantum satis—and that all

that is worked and possessed, though it remains attached to the

It-world, can nevertheless be transfigured to the point where it

confronts us and represents the You. There is no back-behind-it; there

is, even at the moment of the most profound need—indeed, only then—a

previously unsuspected beyond-it.

Whether it is the state that regulates the economy or the economy that

directs the state is unimportant as long as both are unchanged. Whether

the institutions of the state become freer and those of the economy

juster, that is important, but not for the question concerning actual

life that is being posed here; for they cannot become free and just on

their own. What is decisive is whether the spirit—the You-saying,

responding spirit—remains alive and actual; whether what remains of it

in communal human life continues to be subjected to the state and the

economy or whether it becomes independently active; whether what abides

of it in individual human life incorporates itself again in communal

life. But that certainly cannot be accomplished by dividing communal

life into independent realms that also include “the life of the spirit.”

That would merely mean that the regions immersed in the It-world would

be abandoned forever to this despotism, while the spirit would lose all

actuality. For the spirit in itself can never act independently upon

life; that it can do only in the world—with its force which penetrates

and transforms the It-world. The spirit is truly “at home with

itself”[97] when it can confront the world that is opened up to it, give

itself to the world, and redeem it and, through the world, also itself.

But the spirituality that represents the spirit nowadays is so

scattered, weakened, degenerate, and full of contradictions that it

could not possibly do this until it had first returned to the essence of

the spirit: being able to say You.

In the It-world causality holds unlimited sway. Every event that is

either perceivable by the senses and “physical” or discovered or found

in introspection and “psychological” is considered to be of necessity

caused and a cause. Those events which may be regarded as purposive form

no exception insofar as they also belong in the continuum of the

It-world: this continuum tolerates a teleology, but only as a reversal

that is worked into one part of causality without diminishing its

complete continuity.

The unlimited sway of causality in the It-world, which is of fundamental

importance for the scientific ordering of nature, is not felt to be

oppressive by the man who is not confined to the It-world but free to

step out of it again and again into the world of relation. Here I and

You confront each other freely in a reciprocity that is not involved in

or tainted by any causality; here man finds guaranteed the freedom of

his being and of being.[98] Only those who know relation and who know of

the presence of the You have the capacity for decision. Whoever makes a

decision is free because he has stepped before the countenance.

The fiery matter of all my capacity to will surging intractably,[99]

everything possible for me revolving primevally,[100] intertwined and

seemingly inseparable, the alluring glances of potentialities flaring up

from every corner, the universe as a temptation, and I, born in an

instant, both hands into the fire, deep into it, where the one that

intends me is hidden, my deed, seized: now! And immediately the menace

of the abyss is subdued; no longer a coreless multiplicity at play in

the iridescent equality of its claims; but only two are left alongside

each other, the other and the one, delusion and task.[101] But now the

actualization commences within me. Having decided cannot mean that the

one is done while the other remains lying there,[102] an extinguished

mass, filling my soul, layer upon layer, with its dross. Only he that

funnels all the force of the other into the doing of the one, absorbing

into the actualization of what was chosen the undiminished passion of

what was not chosen, only he that “serves God with the evil impulse,”

decides—and decides what happens. Once one has understood this, one also

knows that precisely this deserves to be called righteous: that which is

set right, toward which a man directs himself and for which he

decides;[103] and if there were a devil he would not be the one who

decided against God but he that in all eternity did not decide.

The man to whom freedom is guaranteed does not feel oppressed by

causality. He knows that his mortal life is by its very nature an

oscillation between You and It, and he senses the meaning of this. It

suffices him that again and again he may set foot on the threshold of

the sanctuary in which he could never tarry. Indeed, having to leave it

again and again is for him an intimate part of the meaning and destiny

of this life. There, on the threshold, the response, the spirit is

kindled in him again and again; here, in the unholy and indigent land

the spark has to prove itself. What is here called necessity cannot

frighten it; for there he recognized true necessity: fate.

Fate and freedom are promised to each other. Fate is encountered only by

him that actualizes freedom. That I discovered the deed that intends me,

that, this movement of my freedom, reveals ‘the mystery to me. But this,

too, that I cannot accomplish it the way I intended it, this resistance

also reveals the mystery to me. He that forgets all being caused as he

decides from the depths, he that puts aside possessions and cloak and

steps bare before the countenance—this free human being encounters fate

as the counter-image of his freedom. It is not his limit but his

completion; freedom and fate embrace each other to form meaning; and

given meaning, fate—with its eyes, hitherto severe, suddenly full of

light—looks like grace itself.

No, the man who returns into the It-world, carrying the spark, does not

feel oppressed by causal necessity. And in healthy ages, confidence

flows to all the people from the men of the spirit; to all of them, even

the most obtuse, the encounter, the presence has happened somehow, if

only in the dimension of nature, impulse, and twilight; all of them have

somewhere felt the You; and now the spirit interprets this guarantee to

them.

But in sick ages it happens that the It-world, no longer irrigated and

fertilized by the living currents of the You-world, severed and

stagnant, becomes a gigantic swamp phantom and overpowers man. As he

accommodates himself to a world of objects that no longer achieve any

presence for him, he succumbs to it. Then common causality grows into an

oppressive and crushing doom.[104]

Every great culture that embraces more than one people rests upon some

original encounter, an event at the source when a response was made to a

You, an essential act of the spirit. Reinforced by the energy of

subsequent generations that points in the same direction, this creates a

distinctive conception of the cosmos in the spirit; only thus does a

human cosmos[105] become possible again and again; only now can man

again and again build houses of worship and human houses in a

distinctive conception of space and from a confident soul—and fill

vibrant time with new hymns and songs and give the human community

itself a form. But only as long as he possesses this essential act in

his own life, acting and suffering, only as long as he himself enters

into the relation is he free and thus creative. When a culture is no

longer centered in a living and continually renewed relational process,

it freezes into the It-world which is broken only intermittently by the

eruptive, glowing deeds of solitary spirits. From that point on, common

causality, which hitherto was never able to disturb the spiritual

conception of the cosmos, grows into an oppressive and crushing doom.

Wise, masterful fate which, as long as it was attuned to the abundance

of meaning in the cosmos, held sway over all causality, has become

transformed into demonic absurdity[106] and has collapsed into

causality. The same karma that appeared to earlier generations[107] as a

beneficial dispensation—for our deeds[108] in this life raise us into

higher spheres in the next—now is seen as tyranny; for the deeds of a

former life of which we are unconscious have imprisoned us in a dungeon

from which we cannot escape in this life. Where the meaningful law of a

heaven used to arch, with the spindle of necessity hanging from its

bright vault, the meaningless, tyrannical power of the planets now holds

sway. It used to be merely a matter of entering Dike, the heavenly

“path” that aimed to be ours, too, and one could live with a free heart

in the total measure of destiny. Now we feel, whatever we do, the

compulsion of heimarmene,[109] a stranger to spirit who bends every neck

with the entire burden of the dead mass of the world. The craving for

redemption grows by leaps and bounds and remains unsatisfied in the end,

in spite of all kinds of experiments, until it is finally assuaged by

one who teaches men how to escape from the wheel of rebirth, or by one

who saves the souls enslaved by the powers into the freedom of the

children of God. Such accomplishments issue from a new encounter that

becomes substantial, a new response of one human being to his You, an

event that comes to determine fate. The repercussions of such a central

essential act may include the supersession of one culture by another

that is devoted to this ray, but it is also possible for a culture to be

thus renewed.

The sickness of our age is unlike that of any other and yet belongs with

the sicknesses of all. The history of cultures is not a stadium of eons

in which one runner after another must cover the same circle of death,

cheerfully and unconsciously. A nameless path leads through their

ascensions and declines. It is not a path of progress and development.

It is a descent through the spirals of the spiritual underworld but

could also be called an ascent to the innermost, subtlest, most

intricate turn that knows no Beyond and even less any Backward but only

the unheard of return[110]—the breakthrough. Shall we have to follow

this path all the way to the end, to the test of the final darkness? But

where there is danger what saves grows, too.[111]

The biologistic and the historiosophical orientations of this age, which

made so much of their differences, have combined to produce a faith in

doom that is more obdurate and anxious than any such faith has ever

been. It is no longer the power of karma nor the power of the stars that

rules man’s lot ineluctably; many different forces claim this dominion,

but upon closer examination it appears that most of our contemporaries

believe in a medley of forces, as the late Romans believed in a medley

of gods. The nature of these claims facilitates such a faith. Whether it

is the “law of life”—a universal struggle in which everybody must either

join the fight or renounce life—or the “psychological law” according to

which innate drives[112] constitute the entire human soul; or the

“social law” of an inevitable social process that is merely accompanied

by will and consciousness; or the “cultural law” of an unalterably

uniform genesis and decline of historical forms; or whatever variations

there may be: the point is always that man is yoked into an inescapable

process that he cannot resist, though he may be deluded enough to try.

From the compulsion of the stars the ancient mysteries offered

liberation; from the compulsion of karma, the Brahmanic sacrifice,

accompanied by insight. Both were preparations for salvation. But the

medley idol does not tolerate any faith in liberation. It is considered

foolish to imagine any freedom; one is supposed to have nothing but the

choice between resolute and hopelessly rebellious slavery. Although all

these laws are frequently associated with long discussions of

teleological development and organic evolution, all of them are based on

the obsession with some running down,[113] which involves unlimited

causality. The dogma of a gradual running down represents man’s

abdication in the face of the proliferating It-world. Here the name of

fate is misused: fate is no bell that has been jammed down over man;

nobody encounters it, except those who started out from freedom. But the

dogma of some running down leaves no room for freedom or for its most

real revelation whose tranquil strength changes the countenance of the

earth: returning. The dogma does not know the human being who overcomes

the universal struggle by returning; who tears the web of drives, by

returning; who rises above the spell of his class by returning; who by

returning stirs up, rejuvenates, and changes the secure historical

forms. The dogma of running down offers you only one choice as you face

its game: to observe the rules or drop out. But he that returns knocks

over the men on the board. The dogma will at most permit you to carry

out conditionality with your life and to “remain free” in your soul. But

he that returns considers this freedom the most ignominious slavery.

Nothing can doom man but the belief in doom, for this prevents the

movement of return.

The belief in doom is a delusion from the start. The scheme of running

down is appropriate only for ordering that which is

nothing-but-having-become, the severed world-event, objecthood[114] as

history. The presence of the You, that which is born of association, is

not accessible to this approach, which does not know the actuality of

spirit; and this scheme is not valid for spirit. Divination based on

objecthood is valid only for those who do not know presentness.[115]

Whoever is overpowered by the It-world must consider the dogma of an

ineluctable running down as a truth that creates a clearing in the

jungle. In truth, this dogma only leads him deeper into the slavery of

the It-world. But the world of the You is not locked up. Whoever

proceeds toward it, concentrating his whole being, with his power to

relate resurrected, beholds his freedom. And to gain freedom from the

belief in unfreedom is to gain freedom.

One gains power over an incubus by addressing it by its real name.

Similarly, the It-world that but now seemed to dwarf man’s small

strength with its uncanny power has to yield to anyone who recognizes

its true nature: the particularization and alienation[116] of that out

of whose abundance, welling up close by, every earthly You emerges to

confront us—that which appeared to us at times as great and terrible as

the mother goddess, but nevertheless always motherly.

—But how can we muster the strength to address the incubus by his right

name as long as a ghost lurks inside us—the I that has been robbed of

its actuality? How can the buried power to relate be resurrected in a

being in which a vigorous ghost appears hourly to stamp down the debris

under which this power lies? How is a being to collect itself as long as

the mania of his detached I-hood[117] chases it ceaselessly around an

empty circle? How is anyone to behold his freedom if caprice[118] is his

dwellingplace?

—Even as freedom and fate belong together, caprice belongs with doom.

But freedom and fate are promised to each other and embrace each other

to constitute meaning; caprice and doom, the spook of the soul and the

nightmare of the world, get along with each other, living next door and

avoiding each other, without connection and friction, at home in

meaninglessness—until in one instant eye meets eye, madly, and the

confession erupts from both that they are unredeemed. How much

intellectual eloquence and artistry is used today to prevent or at least

conceal this occurrence!

Free is the man that wills without caprice. He believes in the actual,

which is to say: he believes in the real[119] association of the real

duality, I and You. He believes in destiny[120] and also that it needs

him. It does not lead him, it waits for him. He must proceed toward it

without knowing where it waits for him. He must go forth with his whole

being: that he knows. It will not turn out the way his resolve intended

it; but what wants to come will come only if he resolves to do that

which he can will. He must sacrifice his little will, which is unfree

and ruled by things and drives, to his great will that moves away from

being determined to find destiny.[121] Now he no longer interferes, nor

does he merely allow things to happen. He listens to that which grows,

to the way of Being in the world,[122] not in order to be carried along

by it but rather in order to actualize it in the manner in which it,

needing him, wants to be actualized by him—with human spirit and human

deed, with human life and human death. He believes, I said; but this

implies: he encounters.

The capricious man does not believe and encounter. He does not know

association; he only knows the feverish world out there and his feverish

desire to use it. We only have to give use an ancient, classical name,

and it walks among the gods. When he says You, he means: You, my ability

to use! And what he calls his destiny is merely an embellishment of and

a sanction for his ability to use. In truth he has no destiny but is

merely determined by things and drives, feels autocratic, and is

capricious. He has no great will and tries to pass off caprice in its

place. For sacrifice he lacks all capacity, however much he may talk of

it, and you may recognize it by noting that he never becomes concrete.

He constantly interferes, in order “to let it happen.” How, he says to

you, could one fail to assist destiny? How could one not employ all

feasible means required for such an end? That is also how he sees those

who are free; he cannot see them differently. But the free man does not

have an end here and then fetch the means from there; he has only one

thing: always only his resolve to proceed toward his destiny. Having

made this resolve, he will renew it at every fork in the road; and he

would sooner believe that he was not really alive than he would believe

that the resolve of the great will was insufficient and required the

support of means. He believes; he encounters. But the unbelieving marrow

of the capricious man cannot perceive anything but unbelief and caprice,

positing ends and devising means. His world is devoid of sacrifice and

grace, encounter and present, but shot through with ends and means: it

could not be different and its name is doom. For all his autocratic

bearing, he is inextricably entangled in unreality; and he becomes aware

of this whenever he recollects his own condition. Therefore he takes

pains to use the best part of his mind to prevent or at least obscure

such recollection.[123]

But if this recollection of one’s falling off,[124] of the deactualized

and the actual I, were permitted to reach down to the roots that man

calls despair and from which self-destruction and rebirth grow, this

would be the beginning of the return.

The Brahmana of the hundred paths relates that the gods and the demons

were once engaged in a contest. Then the demons said: “To whom shall we

offer our sacrifices?” They placed all offerings in their own mouths.

But the gods placed the offerings in one another’s mouth. Then

Prajapati, the primal spirit, bestowed himself upon the gods.

—One can understand how the It-world, left to itself, untouched and

unthawed by the emergence of any You, should become alienated and turn

into an incubus; but how does it happen that, as you say, the I of man

is deactualized? Whether it lives in relation or outside it, the I

remains assured of itself in its self-consciousness, which is a strong

thread of gold on which the changing states are strung. Whether I say,

“I see you” or “I see the tree,” seeing may not be equally actual in

both cases, but the I is equally actual in both.

—Let us examine, let us examine ourselves to see whether this is so. The

linguistic form proves nothing. After all, many a spoken You really

means an It to which one merely says You from habit, thoughtlessly. And

many a spoken It really means a You whose presence one may remember with

one’s whole being, although one is far away. Similarly, there are

innumerable occasions when I is only an indispensable pronoun, only a

necessary abbreviation for “This one there who is speaking.” But

self-consciousness? If one sentence truly intends the You of a relation

and the other one the It of an experience, and if the I in both

sentences is thus intended in truth, do both sentences issue from the

same self-consciousness?

The I of the basic word I-You is different from that of the basic word

I-It.

The I of the basic word I-It appears as an ego[125] and becomes

conscious of itself as a subject (of experience and use).

The I of the basic word I-You appears as a person and becomes conscious

of itself as subjectivity (without any dependent genetive).[126]

Egos appear by setting themselves apart from other egos.

Persons appear by entering into relation to other persons.

One is the spiritual form of natural differentiation, the other that of

natural association.

The purpose of setting oneself apart is to experience and use, and the

purpose of that is “living”—which means dying one human life long.

The purpose of relation is the relation itself—touching the You. For as

soon as we touch a You, we are touched by a breath of eternal life.[127]

Whoever stands in relation, participates in an actuality; that is, in a

being that is neither merely a part of him nor merely outside him. All

actuality is an activity in which I participate without being able to

appropriate it. Where there is no participation, there is no actuality.

Where there is self-appropriation, there is no actuality. The more

directly the You is touched, the more perfect is the participation.

The I is actual through its participation in actuality. The more perfect

the participation is, the more actual the I becomes.

But the I that steps out of the event of the relation into detachment

and the self-consciousness accompanying that, does not lose its

actuality. Participation remains in it as a living potentiality. To use

words that originally refer to the highest relation but may also be

applied to all others: the seed remains in him. This is the realm of

subjectivity in which the I apprehends simultaneously its association

and its detachment. Genuine subjectivity can be understood only

dynamically, as the vibration of the I in its lonely truth. This is also

the place where the desire for ever higher and more unconditional

relation and for perfect participation in being arises and keeps rising.

In subjectivity the spiritual substance of the person matures.

The person becomes conscious of himself as participating in being, as

being-with, and thus as a being. The ego becomes conscious of himself as

being this way and not that. The person says, “I am”; the ego says,

“That is how I am.” “Know thyself” means to the person: know yourself as

being. To the ego it means: know your being-that-way. By setting himself

apart from others, the ego moves away from being.

This does not mean that the person “gives up” his being-that-way, his

being different; only, this is not the decisive perspective but merely

the necessary and meaningful form of being. The ego, on the other hand,

wallows in his being-that-way—or rather for the most part in the fiction

of his being-that-way—a fiction that he has devised for himself. For at

bottom self-knowledge usually means to him the fabrication of an

effective apparition of the self that has the power to deceive him ever

more thoroughly; and through the contemplation and veneration of this

apparition one seeks the semblance of knowledge of one’s own

being-that-way, while actual knowledge of it would lead one to

self-destruction—or rebirth.

The person beholds his self; the ego occupies himself with his My: my

manner, my race, my works, my genius.

The ego does not participate in any actuality nor does he gain any. He

sets himself apart from everything else and tries to possess as much as

possible by means of experience and use. That is his dynamics: setting

himself apart and taking possession—and the object is always It, that

which is not actual. He knows himself as a subject, but this subject can

appropriate as much as it wants to, it will never gain any substance: it

remains like a point, functional, that which experiences, that which

uses, nothing more. All of its extensive and multifarious

being-that-way, all of its eager “individuality” cannot help it to gain

any substance.

There are not two kinds of human beings, but there are two poles of

humanity.

No human being is pure person, and none is pure ego; none is entirely

actual, none entirely lacking in actuality. Each lives in a twofold I.

But some men are so person-oriented that one may call them persons,

while others are so ego-oriented that one may call them egos. Between

these and those true history takes place.

The more a human being, the more humanity is dominated by the ego, the

more does the I fall prey to inactuality. In such ages the person in the

human being and in humanity comes to lead a subterranean, hidden, as it

were invalid existence—until it is summoned.

How much of a person a man is depends on how strong the I of the basic

word I-You is in the human duality of his I.

The way he says I—what he means when he says I—decides where a man

belongs and where he goes. The word “I” is the true shibboleth of

humanity.

Listen to it!

How dissonant the I of the ego[128] sounds! When it issues from tragic

lips, tense with some self-contradiction that they try to hold back, it

can move us to great pity. When it issues from chaotic lips that

savagely, heedlessly, unconsciously represent contradiction, it can make

us shudder. When the lips are vain and smooth, it sounds embarrassing or

disgusting.

Those who pronounce the severed I, wallowing in the capital letter,

uncover the shame of the world spirit that has been debased to mere

spirituality.

But how beautiful and legitimate the vivid and emphatic I of Socrates

sounds! It is the I of infinite conversation, and the air of

conversation is present on all its ways, even before his judges, even in

the final hour in prison. This I lived in that relation to man which is

embodied in conversation. It believed in the actuality of men and went

out toward them. Thus it stood together with them in actuality and is

never severed from it. Even solitude cannot spell forsakenness, and when

the human world falls silent for him, he hears his daimonion say You.

How beautiful and legitimate the full I of Goethe sounds! It is the I of

pure intercourse with nature. Nature yields to it and speaks ceaselessly

with it; she reveals her mysteries to it and yet does not betray her

mystery. It believes in her and says to the rose: “So it is You”—and at

once shares the same actuality with the rose. Hence, when it returns to

itself, the spirit of actuality stays with it; the vision of the sun

clings to the blessed eye that recalls its own likeness to the sun, and

the friendship of the elements accompanies man into the calm of dying

and rebirth.[129]

Thus the “adequate, true, and pure” I-saying of the representatives of

association, the Socratic and the Goethean persons, resounds through the

ages.

And to anticipate and choose an image from the realm of unconditional

relation: how powerful, even overpowering, is Jesus’ I-saying, and how

legitimate to the point of being a matter of course! For it is the I of

the unconditional relation in which man calls his You “Father” in such a

way that he himself becomes nothing but a son. Whenever he says I, he

can only mean the I of the holy basic word that has become unconditional

for him. If detachment ever touches him, it is surpassed by association,

and it is from this that he speaks to others. In vain you seek to reduce

this I to something that derives its power from itself, nor can you

limit this You to anything that dwells in us. Both would once again

deactualize the actual, the present relation. I and You remain; everyone

can speak the You and then becomes I; everyone can say Father and then

becomes son; actuality abides.

—But what if a man’s mission requires him to know only his association

with his cause and no real relation to any You, no present encounter

with any You, so that everything around him becomes It and subservient

to his cause? How about the I-saying of Napoleon? Wasn’t that

legitimate? Is this phenomenon of experiencing and using no person?

—Indeed, this master of the[130] age evidently did not know the

dimension of the You. The matter has been put well: all being was for

him valore.[131] Gently, he compared the followers who denied him after

his fall with Peter; but there was nobody whom he could have denied, for

there was nobody whom he recognized as a being. He was the demonic You

for the millions and did not respond; to “You” he responded by saying:

It; he responded fictitiously on the personal level—responding only in

his own sphere, that of his cause, and only with his deeds. This is the

elementary historical barrier at which the basic word of association

loses its reality, the character of reciprocity: the demonic You for

whom nobody can become a You. This third type, in addition to the person

and the ego, to the free and the arbitrary man—not between them—occurs

in fateful eminence in fateful times: ardently, everything flames toward

him while he himself stands in a cold fire; a thousand relations reach

out toward him but none issues from him. He participates in no

actuality, but others participate immeasurably in him as in an

actuality.

To be sure, he views the beings around him as so many machines capable

of different achievements that have to be calculated and used for the

cause. But that is also how he views himself (only he can never cease

experimenting to determine his own capacities, and yet never experiences

their limits). He treats himself, too, as an It.

Thus his I-saying is not vitally emphatic, not full. Much less does it

feign these qualities (like the I-saying of the modern ego).[132] He

does not even speak of himself, he merely speaks “on his own behalf.”

The I spoken and written by him is the required subject of the sentences

that convey his statements and orders—no more and no less. It lacks

subjectivity; neither does it have a self-consciousness that is

preoccupied with being-that-way; and least of all does it have any

delusions about its own appearance. “I am the clock that exists and does

not know itself”: thus he himself formulated his fatefulness, the

actuality of this phenomenon and the inactuality of this I, after he had

been separated from his cause;[133] for it was only then that he could,

and had to, think and speak of himself and recollect his I which

appeared only then. What appears is not mere subject; neither does it

reach subjectivity: the magic spell broken, but unredeemed, it finds

expression in the terrible word, as legitimate as it is illegitimate:

“The universe contemplates Us!” In the end it sinks back into mystery.

Who, after such a step and such a fall,[134] would dare to claim that

this man understood his tremendous, monstrous[135] mission—or that he

misunderstood it? What is certain is that the age for which the demonic

man who lives without a present has become master and model will

misunderstand him. It fails to see that what holds sway here is destiny

and accomplishment, not the lust for and delight in power.[136] It goes

into ecstasies over the commanding brow and has no inkling of the signs

inscribed upon this forehead like digits upon the face of a clock. One

tries studiously to imitate the way he looked at others, without any

understanding of his need and necessitation, and one mistakes the

objective severity of this I for fermenting self-awareness. The word “I”

remains the shibboleth of humanity. Napoleon spoke it without the power

to relate, but he did speak it as the I of an accomplishment.[137] Those

who exert themselves to copy this, merely betray the hopelessness of

their own self-contradiction.

—What is that: self-contradiction?

—When man does not test the a priori of relation in the world, working

out and actualizing the innate You in what he encounters, it turns

inside. Then it unfolds through the unnatural, impossible object, the

I—which is to say that it unfolds where there is no room for it to

unfold. Thus the confrontation within the self comes into being, and

this cannot be relation, presence, the current of reciprocity, but only

self-contradiction. Some men may try to interpret this as a relation,

perhaps one that is religious, in order to extricate themselves from the

horror of their Doppelgänger:they are bound to keep rediscovering the

deception of any such interpretation. Here is the edge of life. What is

unfulfilled has here escaped into the mad delusion of some fulfillment;

now it gropes around in the labyrinth and gets lost ever more

profoundly.

At times when man is overcome by the horror of the alienation between I

and world, it occurs to him that something might be done. Imagine that

at some dreadful midnight you lie there, tormented by a waking

dream:[138] the bulwarks have crumbled and the abysses scream, and you

realize in the midst of this agony that life is still there and I must

merely get through to it—but how? how? Thus feels man in the hours when

he collects himself:[139] overcome by horror, pondering, without

direction. And yet he may know the right direction, deep down in the

unloved knowledge of the depths—the direction of return that leads

through sacrifice. But he rejects this knowledge; what is “mystical”

cannot endure the artificial midnight sun.[140] He summons thought in

which he places, quite rightly, much confidence: thought is supposed to

fix everything. After all, it is the lofty art of thought that it can

paint a reliable and practically credible picture of the world. Thus man

says to his thought: “Look at the dreadful shape that lies over there

with those cruel eyes—is she not the one with whom I played long ago? Do

you remember how she used to laugh at me with these eyes and how good

they were then? And now look at my wretched I—I’ll admit it to you: it

is empty, and whatever I put into myself, experience as well as use,

does not penetrate to this cavern. Won’t you fix things between her and

me so that she relents and I get well again?” And thought, ever obliging

and skillful, paints with its accustomed speed a series—nay, two series

of pictures on the right and the left wall. Here is (or rather: happens,

for the world pictures of thought are reliable motion pictures) the

universe. From the whirl of the stars emerges the small earth, from the

teeming on earth emerges small man, and now history carries him forth

through the ages, to persevere in rebuilding the anthills of the

cultures that crumble under its steps. Beneath this series of pictures

is written: “One and all.” On the other wall happens the soul. A female

figure spins the orbits of all stars and the life of all creatures and

the whole of world history; all is spun with a single thread and is no

longer called stars and creatures and world but feelings and

representations or even living experiences and states of the soul. And

beneath this series of pictures is written: “One and all.”

Henceforth, when man is for once overcome by the horror of alienation

and the world fills him with anxiety, he looks up (right or left, as the

case may be) and sees a picture. Then he sees that the I is contained in

the world, and that there really is no I, and thus the world cannot harm

the I, and he calms down; or he sees that the world is contained in the

I, and that there really is no world, and thus the world cannot harm the

I, and he calms down. And when man is overcome again by the horror of

alienation and the I fills him with anxiety, he looks up and sees a

picture; and whichever he sees, it does not matter, either the empty I

is stuffed full of world or it is submerged in the flood of the world,

and he calms down.

But the moment will come, and it is near, when man, overcome by horror,

looks up and in a flash sees both pictures at once. And he is seized by

a deeper horror.

Third Part

EXTENDED, the lines of relationships intersect in the eternal You.

Every single You is a glimpse of that. Through every single You the

basic word addresses the eternal You. The mediatorship of the You of all

beings accounts for the fullness of our relationships to them—and for

the lack of fulfillment. The innate You is actualized each time without

ever being perfected. It attains perfection solely in the immediate

relationship to the You that in accordance with its nature cannot become

an It.

Men have addressed their eternal You by many names. When they sang of

what they had thus named, they still meant You: the first myths were

hymns of praise. Then the names entered into the It-language; men felt

impelled more and more to think of and to talk about their eternal You

as an It. But all names of God remain hallowed—because they have been

used not only to speak of God but also to speak to him.

Some would deny any legitimate use of the word God because it has been

misused so much. Certainly it is the most burdened of all human words.

Precisely for that reason it is the most imperishable and

unavoidable.[141] And how much weight has all erroneous talk about God’s

nature and works (although there never has been nor can be any such talk

that is not erroneous) compared with the one truth that all men who have

addressed God really meant him? For whoever pronounces the word God and

really means You, addresses, no matter what his delusion, the true You

of his life that cannot be restricted by any other and to whom he stands

in a relationship that includes all others.

But whoever abhors the name and fancies[142] that he is godless—when he

addresses with his whole devoted being the You of his life that cannot

be restricted by any other, he addresses God.

When we walk our way and encounter a man who comes toward us, walking

his way, we know our way only and not his; for his comes to life for us

only in the encounter.

Of the perfect relational process we know in the manner of having lived

through it our going forth, our way. The other part merely happens to

us, we do not know it. It happens to us in the encounter. But we try to

lift more than we can if we speak of it as something beyond the

encounter.

Our concern, our care must be not for the other side but for our own,

not for grace but for will. Grace concerns us insofar as we proceed

toward it and await its presence; it is not our object.[143]

The You confronts me. But I enter into a direct relationship to it. Thus

the relationship is at once being chosen and choosing, passive and

active. For an action of the whole being does away with all partial

actions and thus also with all sensations of action (which depend

entirely on the limited nature of actions)—and hence it comes to

resemble passivity.

This is the activity of the human being who has become whole: it has

been called not-doing, for nothing particular, nothing partial is at

work in man and thus nothing of him intrudes into the world. It is the

whole human being, closed in its wholeness, at rest in its wholeness,

that is active here, as the human being has become an active whole. When

one has achieved steadfastness in this state, one is able to venture

forth toward the supreme encounter.

To this end one does not have to strip away the world of the senses as a

world of appearance. There is no world of appearance, there is only the

world—which, to be sure, appears twofold to us in accordance with our

twofold attitude. Only the spell of separation needs to be broken. Nor

is there any need to “go beyond sense experience”; any experience, no

matter how spiritual, could only yield us an It. Nor need we turn to a

world of ideas and values—that cannot become present for us. All this is

not needed. Can one say what is needed? Not by way of a prescription.

All the prescriptions that have been excogitated and invented in the

ages of the human spirit, all the preparations, exercises, and

meditations[144] that have been suggested have nothing to do with the

primally simple fact of encounter. All the advantages for knowledge or

power that one may owe to one or another exercise do not approach that

of which we are speaking here. All this has its place in the It-world

and does not take us one step—does not take the decisive step—out of it.

Going forth is unteachable in the sense of prescriptions. It can only be

indicated—by drawing a circle that excludes everything else. Then the

one thing needful becomes visible: the total acceptance of the present.

To be sure, this acceptance involves a heavier risk and a more

fundamental return, the further man has lost his way in separation. What

has to be given up is not the I, as most mystics suppose: the I is

indispensable for any relationship, including the highest, which always

presupposes an I and You. What has to be given up is not the I but that

false drive for self-affirmation[145] which impels man to flee from the

unreliable, unsolid, unlasting, unpredictable, dangerous world of

relation into the having of things.

Every actual relationship to another being[146] in the world is

exclusive. Its You is freed and steps forth to confront us in its

uniqueness. It fills the firmament—not as if there were nothing else,

but everything else lives in its light. As long as the presence of the

relationship endures, this world-wideness cannot be infringed. But as

soon as a You becomes an It, the world-wideness of the relationship

appears as an injustice against the world, and its exclusiveness as an

exclusion of the universe.

In the relation to God, unconditional exclusiveness and unconditional

inclusiveness are one. For those who enter into the absolute

relationship, nothing particular retains any importance—neither things

nor beings, neither earth nor heaven—but everything is included in the

relationship. For entering into the pure relationship does not involve

ignoring everything but seeing everything in the You, not renouncing the

world but placing it upon its proper ground. Looking away from the world

is no help toward God; staring at the world is no help either; but

whoever beholds the world in him stands in his presence. “World here,

God there”—that is It-talk; and “God in the world”—that, too, is

It-talk; but leaving out nothing, leaving nothing behind, to comprehend

all—all the world—in comprehending the You, giving the world its due and

truth, to have nothing besides God but to grasp everything in him, that

is the perfect relationship.

One does not find God if one remains in the world; one does not find God

if one leaves the world. Whoever goes forth to his You with his whole

being and carries to it all the being of the world, finds him whom one

cannot seek.

Of course, God is “the wholly other”; but he is also the wholly same:

the wholly present. Of course, he is the mysterium tremendum that

appears and overwhelms; but he is also the mystery of the obvious that

is closer to me than my own I.[147]

When you fathom the life of things and of conditionality, you reach the

indissoluble; when you dispute the life of things and of conditionality,

you wind up before the nothing; when you consecrate life you encounter

the living God.

The You-sense of the man who in his relationships to all individual Yous

experiences the disappointment of the change into It, aspires beyond all

of them and yet not all the way toward his eternal You. Not the way one

seeks something: in truth, there is no God-seeking because there is

nothing where one could not find him. How foolish and hopeless must one

be to leave one’s way of life to seek God: even if one gained all the

wisdom of solitude and all the power of concentration, one would miss

him. It is rather as if a man went his way and merely wished that it

might be the way; his aspiration finds expression in the strength of his

wish. Every encounter is a way station that grants him a view of

fulfillment; in each he thus fails to share, and yet also does share, in

the one because he is ready. Ready, not seeking, he goes his way; this

gives him the serenity toward all things and the touch that helps them.

But once he has found, his heart does not turn away from them although

he now encounters everything in the one. He blesses all the cells that

have sheltered him as well as all those where he will still put up. For

this finding is not an end of the way but only its eternal center.

It is a finding without seeking; a discovery of what is most original

and the origin. The You-sense that cannot be satiated until it finds the

infinite You sensed its presence from the beginning; this presence

merely had to become wholly actual for it out of the actuality of the

consecrated life of the world.

It is not as if God could be inferred from anything—say, from nature as

its cause, or from history as its helmsman, or perhaps from the subject

as the self that thinks itself through it. It is not as if something

else were “given” and this were then deduced from it. This is what

confronts us immediately and first and always, and legitimately it can

only be addressed, not asserted.

The essential element in our relationship to God has been sought in a

feeling that has been called a feeling of dependence[148] or, more

recently, in an attempt to be more precise, creature-feeling.[149] While

the insistence on this element and its definition are right, the

onesided emphasis on this factor leads to a misunderstanding of the

character of the perfect relationship.

What has been said earlier of love is even more clearly true at this

point: feelings merely accompany the fact[150] of the relationship which

after all is established not in the soul but between an I and a You.

However essential one considers a feeling, it still remains subject to

the dynamics of the soul where one feeling is surpassed, excelled, and

replaced by another; feelings, unlike relationships, can be compared on

a scale. Above all, every feeling has its place in a polar tension; it

derives its color and meaning not from itself alone but also from its

polar opposite; every feeling is conditioned by its opposite. Actually,

the absolute relationship includes all relative relationships and is,

unlike them, no longer a part but the whole in which all of them are

consummated and become one. But in psychology the absolute relationship

is relativized by being derived from a particular and limited feeling

that is emphasized.

If one starts out from the soul, the perfect relationship can only be

seen as bipolar, as coincidentia oppositorum, as the fusion of opposite

feelings. Of course, as one looks back one pole frequently disappears,

suppressed by the basic religious orientation of the person, and it is

only in the purest and most open-minded and profound introspection that

it can be recalled.

Yes, in the pure relationship you felt altogether dependent, as you

could never possibly feel in any other—and yet also altogether free as

never and nowhere else; created—and creative. You no longer felt the

one, limited by the other; you felt both without bounds, both at once.

That you need God more than anything, you know at all times in your

heart. But don’t you know also that God needs you—in the fullness of his

eternity, you? How would man exist if God did not need him, and how

would you exist? You need God in order to be, and God needs you—for that

which is the meaning of your life. Teachings and poems try to say more,

and say too much: how murky and presumptuous is the chatter of “the

emerging God”—but the emergence of the living God we know unswervingly

in our hearts.[151] The world is not divine play, it is divine fate.

That there are world, man, the human person, you and I, has divine

meaning.

Creation—happens to us, burns into us, changes us, we tremble and swoon,

we submit. Creation—we participate in it, we encounter the creator,[152]

offer ourselves to him, helpers and companions.

Two great servants move through the ages: prayer and sacrifice. In

prayer man pours himself out, dependent without reservation, knowing

that, incomprehensibly, he acts on God, albeit without exacting anything

from God;[153] for when he no longer covets anything for himself, he

beholds his effective activity burning in the supreme flame. And those

who sacrifice? I cannot despise the honest servants of the remote past

who thought that God desired the smell of their burnt sacrifices: they

knew in a foolish and vigorous way that one can and should give to God;

and that is also known to him who offers his little will to God and

encounters him in a great will. “Let your will be done”—is all he says,

but truth goes on to say for him: “through me whom you need.” What

distinguishes sacrifice and prayer from all magic? Magic wants to be

effective without entering into any relationship and performs its arts

in the void, while sacrifice and prayer step “before the countenance,”

into the perfection of the sacred basic word that signifies reciprocity.

They say You and listen.

Wishing to understand the pure relationship as dependence means wishing

to deactualize one partner of the relationship and thus the relationship

itself.

The same thing happens if one starts from the opposite side and finds

the essential element of the religious act in immersion[154] or a

descent into the self—whether the self is to be stripped of all

subjectivity and I-hood or whether the self is to be understood as the

One that thinks and is. The former view supposes that God will enter the

being that has been freed of I-hood or that at that point one merges

into God; the other view supposes that one stands immediately in oneself

as the divine One. Thus the first holds that in a supreme moment all

You-saying ends because there is no longer any duality; the second, that

there is no truth in You-saying at all because in truth there is no

duality. The first believes in the unification,[155] the second in the

identity of the human and the divine. Both insist on what is beyond I

and You: for the first this comes to be, perhaps in ecstasy, while for

the second it is there all along and reveals itself, perhaps as the

thinking subject beholds its self. Both annul relationship—the first, as

it were, dynamically, as the I is swallowed by the You, which now ceases

to be a You and becomes the only being; the second, as it were,

statically, as the I is freed, becomes a self, and recognizes itself as

the only being. The doctrine of dependence considers the I-supporter of

the world-arch of pure relation as so weak and insignificant that his

ability to support the arch ceases to be credible, while the one

doctrine of immersion does away altogether with the arch in its

perfection and the other one treats it as a chimera that has to be

overcome.

The doctrines of immersion invoke the great epigrams of

identification—one of them above all the Johannine “I and the Father are

one,”[156] and the other one the doctrine of Sandilya: “The

All-embracing is my self in the inner heart.”[157]

The paths of these two epigrams are diametrically opposed. The former

(after a long subterranean course) has its source in the myth-sized life

of a person and then unfolds in a doctrine. The second emerges in a

doctrine and culminates (provisionally) in the myth-sized life of a

person. On these paths the character of each epigram is changed. The

Christ of the Johannine tradition, the Word that has become flesh but

once, takes us to Eckhart’s Christ whom God begets eternally in the

human soul. The formula of the coronation of the self in the

Upanishads—“That is the actual, it is the self, and that you are”[158]

takes us far more quickly to the Buddhistic formula of deposition: “A

self and what pertains to the self are not to be found in truth and

actuality.”

Beginning and end of both paths have to be considered separately.

That there is no justification for invoking the “are one”[159] is

obvious for anyone who reads the Gospel according to John without

skipping and with an open mind. It is really nothing less than the

Gospel of the pure relationship. There are truer things here than the

familiar mystic verse: “I am you, and you are I.” The father and the

son, being consubstantial—we may say: God and man, being consubstantial,

are actually and forever Two, the two partners of the primal

relationship that, from God to man, is called mission and commandment;

from man to God, seeing and hearing; between both, knowledge and love.

And in this relationship the son, although the father dwells and works

in him, bows before him that is “greater” and prays to him. All modern

attempts to reinterpret this primal actuality of dialogue and to make of

it a relationship of the I to the self or something of that sort, as if

it were a process confined to man’s self-sufficient inwardness, are vain

and belong to the abysmal history of deactualization.

—But mysticism? It relates how unity within duality feels. Have we any

right to doubt the faithfulness of this testimony?

—I know not only of one but of two kinds of events in which one is no

longer aware of any duality. Mysticism sometimes confounds them, as I,

too, did at one time.

First, the soul may become one. This event occurs not between man and

God but in man. All forces are concentrated into the core, everything

that would distract them is pulled in, and the being stands alone in

itself and jubilates, as Paracelsus put it, in its exaltation. This is a

man’s decisive moment. Without this he is not fit for the work of the

spirit. With this—it is decided deep down whether this means preparation

or sufficient satisfaction. Concentrated into a unity, a human being can

proceed to his encounter—wholly successful only now—with mystery and

perfection. But he can also savor the bliss of his unity and, without

incurring the supreme duty, return into distraction. Everything along

our way is decision—intentional, dimly sensed, or altogether secret—but

this one, deep down, is the primally secret decision, pregnant with the

most powerful destiny.

The other event is that unfathomable kind of relational act itself in

which one has the feeling that Two have become One: “one and one made

one, bare shineth in bare.”[160] I and You drown; humanity that but now

confronted the deity is absorbed into it; glorification, deification,

universal unity have appeared. But when one returns into the

wretchedness of daily turmoil, transfigured and exhausted, and with a

knowing heart reflects on both, is one not bound to feel that Being is

split, with one part abandoned to hopelessness? What help is it to my

soul that it can be transported again from this world into that

unity,[161] when this world itself has, of necessity, no share whatever

in that unity—what does all “enjoyment of God” profit a life rent in

two? If that extravagantly rich heavenly Moment has nothing to do with

my poor earthly moment—what is it to me as long as I still have to live

on earth—must in all seriousness still live on earth? That is the way to

understand those masters who renounced the raptures of the ecstasy of

“unification.”[162]

Which was no unification. Those human beings may serve as a metaphor who

in the passion of erotic fulfillment are so carried away by the miracle

of the embrace that all knowledge of I and You drowns in the feeling of

a unity that neither exists nor can exist. What the ecstatic calls

unification is the rapturous dynamics of the relationship; not a unity

that has come into being at this moment in world time, fusing I and You,

but the dynamics of the relationship itself which can stand before the

two carriers of this relationship, although they confront each other

immovably, and cover the eyes of the enraptured.[163] What we find here

is a marginal[164] exorbitance of the act of relation: the relationship

itself in its vital unity is felt so vehemently that its members pale in

the process: its life predominates so much that the I and the You

between whom it is established are forgotten. This is one of the

phenomena that we find on the margins where actuality becomes blurred.

But what is greater for us than all enigmatic webs at the margins of

being is the central actuality of an everyday hour on earth, with a

streak of sunshine on a maple twig and an intimation of the eternal You.

Against this stands the claim of the other doctrine of immersion that at

heart the universe and the self are identical and hence no You-saying

can ever grant any ultimate actuality.

This claim is answered by the doctrine itself. One of the Upanishads

relates how Indra, the prince of the gods, comes to Prajapati, the

creator spirit, to learn how one can find and recognize the self. He

remains a student for a century and is twice sent away with inadequate

information, before he finally attains the right information: “When one

rests in a deep sleep, without dreams, that is the self, the immortal,

the assured, the All-being.” Indra goes hence but is soon troubled by a

scruple. He returns and asks: “In that state, O sublime one, we do not

know of our self, ‘That am I’; neither, ‘Those are the beings.’ We are

gone to annihilation. I see no profit here.” “That, my lord, is indeed

how it is,” replies Prajapati.[165]

Insofar as this doctrine contains an assertion about true being, we

cannot find out in this life whether the doctrine is true; but however

that may be, there is one thing with which this doctrine has nothing in

common: lived actuality; and it therefore has to demote this to the

level of a merely illusory world. And insofar as this doctrine contains

directions for immersion in true being, it does not lead into lived

actuality but into “annihilation,” in which there is no consciousness,

from which no memory survives—and the man who has emerged from it may

profess the experience by using the limit-word of non-duality, but

without any right to proclaim this as unity.

We, however, are resolved to tend with holy care the holy treasure of

our actuality that has been given to us for this life and perhaps for no

other life that might be closer to the truth.

In lived actuality there is no unity of being. Actuality is to be found

only in effective activity; strength and depth of the former only in

that of the latter. “Inner” actuality, too, is only where there is

reciprocal activity. The strongest and deepest actuality is to be found

where everything enters into activity—the whole human being, without

reserve, and the all-embracing god; the unified I and the boundless You.

The unified I: for (as I have said earlier) the unification of the soul

occurs in lived actuality—the concentration of all forces into the core,

the decisive moment of man. But unlike that immersion, this does not

entail ignoring the actual person. Immersion wants to preserve only what

is “pure,” essential, and enduring, while stripping away everything

else; the concentration of which I speak does not consider our instincts

as too impure, the sensuous as too peripheral, or our emotions[166] as

too fleeting—everything must be included and integrated. What is wanted

is not the abstracted self but the whole, undiminished man. This

concentration aims at and is actuality.

The doctrine of immersion demands and promises penetration into the

thinking One, “that by which this world is thought,” the pure subject.

But in lived actuality no one thinks without something being thought;

rather is that which thinks as dependent on that which is thought as

vice versa. A subject that annuls the object to rise above it annuls its

own actuality. A thinking subject by itself exists—in thought, as the

product and object of thought, as a limit-concept that lacks all

imaginable content; also in the anticipatory determination of death for

which one may also substitute its metaphor, that deep sleep which is

virtually no less impenetrable; and finally in the assertions of a

doctrine concerning a state of immersion that resembles such deep sleep

and is essentially without consciousness and without memory. These are

the supreme excesses of It-language. One has to respect its sublime

power to ignore while at the same time recognizing it as something that

can at most be an object of living experience but that cannot be lived.

Buddha, the “Perfected” and perfecter, asserts not. He refuses to claim

that unity exists or does not exist; that he who has passed through all

the trials of immersion will persist in unity after death or that he

will not persist in it. This refusal, this “noble silence,” has been

explained in two ways. Theoretically: because perfection is said to

elude the categories of thought and assertion. Practically: because the

unveiling of such truths would not aid salvation.[167] In truth both

explanations belong together: whoever treats being as the object of an

assertion, pulls it down into division,[168] into the antitheses of the

It-world—in which there is no salvation. “When, O monk, the view

prevails that soul and body are identical, there is no salvation; when,

O monk, the view prevails that the soul is one and the body another,

then also there is no salvation.” In the envisaged mystery, even as in

lived actuality, neither “thus it is” nor “thus it is not” prevails,

neither being nor not-being, but rather thus-and-otherwise, being and

not-being, the indissoluble. To confront the undivided[169] mystery

undivided, that is the primal condition of salvation.[170] That the

Buddha belongs to those who recognized this, is certain. Like all true

teachers, he wishes to teach not a view but the way. He contests only

one assertion, that of the “fools” who say that there is no acting, no

deed, no strength: we can go the way. He risks only one assertion, the

decisive one: “There is, O monks, what is Unborn, Unbecome, Uncreated,

Unformed”; if that were not, there would be no goal; this is, the way

has a goal.

So far we may follow the Buddha, faithful to the truth of our encounter;

going further would involve a betrayal of the actuality of our own life.

For according to the truth and actuality that we do not fetch from our

own depths but that has been inspired in us and apportioned to us, we

know: if this is merely one of the goals, then it cannot be ours; and if

it is the goal, then it has been misnamed. And: if it is one of the

goals, then the path may lead all the way to it; if it is the goal, then

the path merely leads closer to it.

The goal was for the Buddha “the annulment of suffering,” which is to

say, of becoming and passing away—the salvation from the wheel of

rebirth. “Henceforth there is no recurrence” was to be the formula for

those who had liberated themselves from the desire for existence and

thus from the compulsion to become again ceaselessly. We do not know

whether there is a recurrence; the line of this dimension of time in

which we live we do not extend beyond this life; and we do not try to

uncover what will reveal itself to us in its own time and law. But if we

did know that there was recurrence, then we should not seek to escape

from it: we should desire not crude existence but the chance to speak in

every existence, in its appropriate manner and language, the eternal I

of the destructible and the eternal You of the indestructible.[171]

Whether the Buddha leads men to the goal of redemption from having to

recur, we do not know. Certainly he leads to an intermediate goal that

concerns us, too: the unification of the soul. But he leads there not

only, as is necessary, away from the “jungle of opinions,” but also away

from the “deception of forms”—which for us is no deception but (in spite

of all the paradoxes of intuition that make for subjectivity but for us

simply belong to it) the reliable world. His path, too, is a way of

ignoring something, and when he bids us become aware of the processes in

our body, what he means is al most the opposite of our sense-assured

insight into the body. Nor does he lead the unified being further to

that supreme You-saying that is open to it. His inmost decision seems to

aim at the annulment of the ability to say You.

The Buddha knows saying You to man—that is clear from his greatly

superior, but also greatly direct, intercourse with his disciples—but he

does not teach it: to this love, which means “boundless inclusion in the

heart of all that has become,” the simple confrontation of being by

being remains alien. In the depths of his silence he certainly knows,

too, the You-saying to the primal ground, transcending all the “gods”

whom he treats like disciples; it was from a relational process that

became substance that his deed came, clearly as an answer to the You;

but of this he remains silent.

His following among the nations, however, “the great vehicle,”[172]

denied him gloriously. They addressed the eternal You Of man—using the

name of the Buddha. And they expect as the coming Buddha, the last one

of his eon, him that shall fulfill love.

All doctrines of immersion are based on the gigantic delusion of a human

spirit bent back into itself—the delusion that spirit occurs in man. In

truth it occurs from man—between man and what he is not.[173] As the

spirit bent back into itself renounces this sense, this sense of

relation, he must draw into man that which is not man, he must

psychologize[174] world and God. This is the psychical delusion[175] of

the spirit.

“I proclaim, friend,” says the Buddha, “that in this fathom-sized,

feeling-afflicted ascetic’s body dwell the world and the origin of the

world and the annulment of the world and the path that leads to the

annulment of the world.”

That is true, but ultimately it is no longer true.

Certainly, the world dwells in me as a notion,[176] just as I dwell in

it as a thing. But that does not mean that it is in me, just as I am not

in it. The world and I include each other reciprocally.[177] This

contradiction for thought, which inheres in the It-relation, is annulled

by the You-relation which detaches me from the world in order to relate

me to it.

The self-sense, that which cannot be included in the world, I carry in

myself. The being-sense, that which cannot be included in any notion,

the world carries in itself. But this is not a thinkable “will”[178] but

the whole worldliness of the world, just as the former is not a “knowing

subject” but the whole I-likeness[179] of the I. No further “reduction”

is valid here: whoever does not honor the ultimate unities thwarts the

sense that is only comprehensible but not conceptual.[180]

The origin of the world and the annulment of the world are not in me;

neither are they outside me; they simply are not—they always occur, and

their occurrence is also connected with me, with my life, my decision,

my work, my service, and also depends on me, on my life, my decision, my

work, and my service. But what it depends on is not whether I “affirm”

or “negate” the world in my soul, but how I let the attitude of my soul

toward the world come to life, life that affects the world, actual

life—and in actual life paths coming from very different attitudes of

the soul can cross.[181] But whoever merely has a living “experience” of

his attitude and retains it in his soul may be as thoughtful as can be,

he is worldless—and all the games, arts, intoxications, enthusiasms, and

mysteries that happen within him do not touch the world’s skin. As long

as one attains redemption only in his self, he cannot do any good or

harm to the world; he does not concern it. Only he that believes in the

world achieves contact with it; and if he commits himself he also cannot

remain godless. Let us love the actual world that never wishes to be

annulled, but love it in all its terror, but dare to embrace it with our

spirit’s arms—and our hands encounter the hands that hold it.

I know nothing of a “world” and of “worldly life” that separate us from

God. What is designated that way is life with an alienated It-world, the

life of experience and use. Whoever goes forth in truth to the world,

goes forth to God. Concentration and going forth, both in truth, the

one-and-the-other which is the One, are what is needful.

God embraces but is not the universe;[182] just so, God embraces but is

not my self. On account of this which cannot be spoken about, I can say

in my language, as all can say in theirs: You. For the sake of this

there are I and You, there is dialogue, there is language, and spirit

whose primal deed language is, and there is, in eternity, the word.

Man’s “religious” situation, existence in the presence, is marked by its

essential and indissoluble antinomies. That these antinomies are

indissoluble constitutes their very essence. Whoever affirms the thesis

and repudiates the antithesis violates the sense of the situation.

Whoever tries to think a synthesis destroys the sense of the situation.

Whoever strives to relativize the antinomies annuls the sense of the

situation. Whoever would settle the conflict between antinomies by some

means short of his own life transgresses against the sense of the

situation. It is the sense of the situation that it is to be lived in

all its antinomies—only lived—and lived ever again, ever anew,

unpredictably, without any possibility of anticipation or prescription.

A comparison of the religious and the philosophical antinomy will make

this clearer. Kant can relativize the philosophical conflict of freedom

and necessity by relegating the latter to the world of appearance and

the former to that of being, so that the two positions no longer really

oppose one another but rather get along with one another as well as do

the two worlds in which each is valid. But when I mean freedom and

necessity not in worlds that are thought of but in the actuality in

which I stand before God; when I know, “I have been surrendered” and

know at the same time, “It depends on me,” then I may not try to escape

from the paradox I have to live by relegating the irreconcilable

propositions to two separate realms; neither may I seek the aid of some

theological artifice to attain some conceptual reconciliation: I must

take it upon myself to live both in one, and lived both are one.

The eyes of an animal have the capacity of a great language.

Independent, without any need of the assistance of sounds and gestures,

most eloquent when they rest entirely in their glance, they express the

mystery in its natural captivity, that is, in the anxiety of

becoming.[183] This state of the mystery is known only to the animal,

which alone can open it up to us—for this state can only be opened up

and not revealed. The language in which this is accomplished is what it

says: anxiety—the stirring of the creature between the realms of

plantlike security and spiritual risk. This language is the stammering

of nature under the initial grasp of spirit, before language yields to

spirit’s cosmic risk which we call man. But no speech will ever repeat

what the stammer is able to communicate.

I sometimes look into the eyes of a house cat. The domesticated animal

has not by any means received the gift of the truly “eloquent” glance

from us, as a human conceit suggests sometimes; what it has from us is

only the ability—purchased with the loss of its elementary

naturalness—to turn this glance upon us brutes.[184] In this process

some mixture of surprise and question has come into it, into its dawn

and even its rise—and this was surely wholly absent from the original

glance, for all its anxiety. Undeniably, this cat began its glance by

asking me with a glance that was ignited by the breath of my glance:

“Can it be that you mean me? Do you actually want that I should not

merely do tricks for you? Do I concern you? Am I there for you? Am I

there? What is that coming from you? What is that around me? What is it

about me? What is that?!” (“I” is here a paraphrase of a word of I-less

self-reference that we lack. “That” represents the flood of man’s glance

in the entire actuality of its power to relate.) There the glance of the

animal, the language of anxiety, had risen hugely—and set almost at

once. My glance, to be sure, endured longer; but it no longer retained

the flood of man’s glance.

That rotation of the world’s axis which introduced the relational

process had been succeeded almost immediately by the next, which

concludes it. Just now the It-world had surrounded the animal and me,

then the You-world radiated from the ground for the length of one

glance, and now its light has died back into the It-world.

It is for the sake of the language of this barely perceptible rising and

setting of the spirit sun that I relate this minute occurrence that

happened to me more than once. No other event has made me so deeply

aware of the evanescent actuality in all relationships to other beings,

the sublime melancholy of our lot, the fated lapse into It of every

single You. For usually a day, albeit brief, separated the morning and

evening of the event; but here morning and evening merged cruelly, the

bright You appeared and vanished: had the burden of the It-world really

been taken from the animal and me for the length of one glance? At least

I could still remember it, while the animal had sunk again from its

stammering glance into speechless anxiety, almost devoid of memory.

How powerful is the continuum of the It-world, and how tender the

manifestations of the You!

There is so much that can never break through the crust of thinghood! O

fragment of mica,[185] it was while contemplating you that I first

understood that I is not something “in me”—yet I was associated with you

only in myself; it was only in me, not between you and me that it

happened that time. But when something does emerge from among things,

something living, and becomes a being for me, and comes to me, near and

eloquent, how unavoidably briefly it is for me nothing but You! It is

not the relationship that necessarily wanes, but the actuality of its

directness. Love itself cannot abide in a direct relation; it endures,

but in the alternation of actuality and latency. Every You in the world

is compelled by its nature to become a thing for us or at least to enter

again and again into thing-hood.

Only in one relationship, the all-embracing one, is even latency

actuality. Only one You never ceases, in accordance with its nature to

be You for us. To be sure, whoever knows God also knows God’s remoteness

and the agony of drought upon a frightened heart, but not the loss of

presence. Only we are not always there.

The lover of the Vita Nuova is right in usually saying Ella and only

occasionally Voi. The visionary of the Paradiso speaks inauthentically,

from poetic constraint, when he says Colui, and he knows it.[186]

Whether one speaks of God as He or It, this is never more than allegory.

But when we say You to him, the unbroken truth of the world has been

made word by mortal sense.

Every actual relationship in the world is exclusive; the other breaks

into it to avenge its exclusion. Solely in the relation to God are

unconditional exclusiveness and unconditional inclusiveness one in which

the universe is comprehended.

Every actual relationship in the world rests upon individuation: that is

its delight, for only thus is mutual recognition of those who are

different granted—and that is its boundary, for thus is perfect

recognition and being recognized denied. But in the perfect relationship

my You embraces my self without being it; my limited recognition is

merged into a boundless being-recognized.

Every actual relationship in the world alternates between actuality and

latency; every individual You must disappear into the chrysalis of the

It in order to grow wings again. In the pure relationship, however,

latency is merely actuality drawing a deep breath during which the You

remains present. The eternal You is You by its very nature;[187] only

our nature forces us to draw it into the It-world and It-speech.

The It-world coheres in space and time.

The You-world does not cohere in either.

It coheres in the center in which the extended lines of relationships

intersect: in the eternal You.

In the great privilege of the pure relationship the privileges of the

It-world are annulled. By virtue of it the You-world is continuous: the

isolated moments of relationships join for a world life of

association.[188] By virtue of it the You-world has the power to give

form: the spirit can permeate the It-world and change it. By virtue of

it we are not abandoned to the alienation of the world and the

deactualization of the I, nor are we overpowered by phantoms.[189]

Return signifies the re-cognition of the center, turning back to it

again. In this essential deed man’s buried power to relate is

resurrected, the wave of all relational spheres surges up in a living

flood and renews our world.

Perhaps not only ours. Dimly we apprehend this double movement—that

turning away from the primal ground by virtue of which the universe

preserves itself in its becoming, and that turning toward the primal

ground by virtue of which the universe redeems itself in being—as the

metacosmic primal form of duality that inheres in the world as a whole

in its relation to that which is not world, and whose human form is the

duality of attitudes, of basic words, and of the two aspects of the

world.[190] Both movements are unfolded fatefully in time and enclosed,

as by grace, in the timeless creation that, incomprehensibly, is at once

release and preservation, at once bond and liberation. Our knowledge of

duality is reduced to silence by the paradox of the primal mystery.

Three are the spheres in which the world of relation is built.[191]

The first: life with nature, where the relation sticks to the threshold

of language.

The second: life with men, where it enters language.

The third: life with spiritual beings, where it lacks but creates

language.

In every sphere, in every relational act, through everything that

becomes present to us, we gaze toward the train of the eternal You; in

each we perceive a breath of it; in every You we address the eternal

You, in every sphere according to its manner. All spheres are included

in it, while it is included in none.

Through all of them shines the one presence.

But we can take each out of the presence.

Out of life with nature we can take the “physical” world, that of

consistency; out of life with men, the “psychical” world, that of

affectability; out of life with spiritual beings, the “noetic” world,

that of validity. Now they have been deprived of their transparency and

thus of sense; each has become usable and murky, and remains murky even

if we endow it with shining names: cosmos, eros, logos. For in truth

there is a cosmos for man only when the universe becomes a home for him

with a holy hearth where he sacrifices; and there is eros for him only

when beings become for him images of the eternal, and community with

them becomes revelation; and there is logos for him only when he

addresses the mystery with works and service of the spirit.

The demanding silence of forms, the loving speech of human beings, the

eloquent muteness of creatures—all of these are gateways into the

presence of the word.

But when the perfect encounter is to occur, the gates are unified into

the one gate of actual life, and you no longer know through which one

you have entered.

Of these three spheres one is distinguished: life with men. Here

language is perfected as a sequence and becomes speech and reply. Only

here does the word, formed in language, encounter its reply. Only here

does the basic word go back and forth in the same shape; that of the

address and that of the reply are alive in the same tongue; I and You do

not only stand in a relationship but also in firm honesty.[192] The

moments of relation are joined here, and only here, through the element

of language in which they are immersed. Here that which confronts us has

developed the full actuality of the You. Here alone beholding and being

beheld, recognizing and being recognized, loving and being loved exist

as an actuality that cannot be lost.

This is the main portal into whose inclusive opening the two side

portals lead.

“When a man is intimate[193] with his wife, the longing of the eternal

hills wafts about them.”

The relation to a human being is the proper metaphor for the relation to

God—as genuine address is here accorded a genuine answer. But in God’s

answer all, the All,[194] reveals itself as language.

—But isn’t solitude, too, a portal? Does it not happen sometimes in the

stillest lonesomeness that we unexpectedly behold? Cannot intercourse

with oneself change mysteriously into intercourse with mystery? Indeed,

is not only he that is no longer attached to any being worthy of

confronting being? “Come, lonesome one to the lonesome,” Simeon, the New

Theologian,[195] addresses his God.

—There are two kinds of lonesomeness, depending on what it turns away

from. If lonesomeness means detaching oneself from experiencing and

using things, then this is always required to achieve any act of

relation, not only the supreme one. But if lonesomeness means the

absence of relation: if other beings have forsaken us after we had

spoken the true You to them, we will be accepted by God; but not if we

ourselves have forsaken other beings. Only he that is full of

covetousness to use them is attached to some of them; he that lives in

the strength of the presence can only be associated with them. The

latter, however—he alone is ready for God. For he alone counters God’s

actuality with a human actuality.

And again there are two kinds of lonesomeness, depending on what it

turns to. If lonesomeness is the place of purification which even the

associate needs before he enters the holy of holies, but which he also

needs in the midst of his trials, between his unavoidable failures and

his ascent to prove himself[196]—that is how we are constituted. But if

it is the castle of separation where man conducts a dialogue with

himself, not in order to test himself and master himself for what awaits

him but in his enjoyment of the configuration of his own soul—that is

the spirit’s lapse into mere spirituality. And this becomes truly

abysmal when self-deception reaches the point where one thinks that one

has God within and speaks to him. But as surely as God embraces us and

dwells in us, we never have him within. And we speak to him only when

all speech has ceased within.

A modern philosopher supposes that every man believes of necessity

either in God or in “idols”—which is to say, some finite good, such as

his nation, his art, power, knowledge, the acquisition of money, the

“ever repeated triumph with women”—some good that has become an absolute

value for him, taking its place between him and God; and if only one

proves to a man the conditionality of this good, thus “smashing” the

idol, then the diverted religious act would all by itself return to its

proper object.[197]

This view presupposes that man’s relation to the finite goods that he

“idolizes” is essentially the same as his relationship to God, as if

only the object were different: only in that case could the mere

substitution of the proper object for the wrong one save the man who has

gone wrong. But a man’s relation to the “particular something” that

arrogates the supreme throne of his life’s values, pushing eternity

aside, is always directed toward the experience and use of an It, a

thing, an object of enjoyment. For only this kind of relation can bar

the view to God, by interposing the impenetrable It-world; the

relationship that says You always opens it up again. Whoever is

dominated by the idol whom he wants to acquire, have, and hold,

possessed by his desire to possess, can find a way to God only by

returning, which involves a change not only of the goal but also of the

kind of movement. One can heal the possessed only by awakening and

educating him to association, not by directing his possession toward

God. If a man remains in the state of possession, what does it mean that

he no longer invokes the name of a demon or of a being that is for him

distorted demonically, but that of God? It means that he blasphemes. It

is blasphemy when a man whose idol has fallen down behind the altar

desires to offer to God the unholy sacrifice that is piled up on the

desecrated altar.

When a man loves a woman so that her life is present in his own, the You

of her eyes allows him to gaze into a ray of the eternal You. But if a

man lusts after the “ever repeated triumph”—you want to dangle before

his lust a phantom of the eternal? If one serves a people in a fire

kindled by immeasurable fate—if one is willing to devote oneself to it,

one means God. But if the nation is for him an idol to which he desires

to subjugate everything because in its image he extols his own—do you

fancy[198] that you only have to spoil the nation for him and he will

then see the truth? And what is it supposed to mean that a man treats

money, which is un-being[199] incarnate, “as if it were God”? What does

the voluptuous delight of rapacity and hoarding have in common with the

joy over the presence of that which is present? Can mammon’s slave say

You to money? And what could God be to him if he does not know how to

say You? He cannot serve two masters[200]—not even one after the other;

he must first learn to serve differently.

Whoever has been converted by substitution, now “has” a phantom that he

calls God. God, however, the eternal presence, cannot be had. Woe unto

the possessed who fancy that they possess God!

People speak of the “religious man” as one who can dispense with all

relationships to the world and to beings because the social stage that

is allegedly determined from outside is supposed to have been

transcended here by a force that works entirely from within. But two

basically different notions are confused when people use the concept of

the social: the community built of relation and the amassing of human

units that have no relation to one another—the palpable manifestation of

modern man’s lack of relation. The bright edifice of community, however,

for which one can be liberated even from the dungeon of

“sociability,”[201] is the work of the same force that is alive in the

relation between man and God. But this is not one relation among others;

it is the universal relation[202] into which all rivers pour without

drying up for that reason. Sea and rivers—who would make bold to

separate here and define limits? There is only the one flood from I to

You, ever more infinite, the one boundless flood of actual life. One

cannot divide one’s life between an actual relationship to God and an

inactual I-It relationship to the world—praying to God in truth and

utilizing the world. Whoever knows the world as something to be utilized

knows God the same way. His prayers are a way of unburdening himself—and

fall into the ears of the void. He—and not the “atheist” who from the

night and longing of his garret window[203] addresses the nameless—is

godless.

It is said further that the “religious” man steps before God as one who

is single, solitary, and detached insofar as he has also transcended the

stage of the “ethical” man who still dwells in duty and obligation to

the world. The latter is said to be still burdened with responsibility

for the actions of agents because he is wholly determined by the tension

between is and ought, and into the unbridgeable gap between both he

throws, full of grotesquely hopeless sacrificial courage, piece upon

piece of his heart. The “religious” man is supposed to have transcended

this tension between world and God; the commandment for him is to leave

behind the restlessness of responsibility and of making demands on

himself; for him there is no longer any room for a will of one’s own, he

accepts his place in the Plan;[204] any ought is dissolved in

unconditional being, and the world, while still persisting, has lost its

validity; one still has to do one’s share in it but, as it were, without

obligation, in the perspective of the nullity of all activity. Thus men

fancy[205] that God has created his world to be an illusion and his man

to reel. Of course, whoever steps before the countenance has soared way

beyond duty and obligation—but not because he has moved away from the

world; rather because he has come truly close to it. Duties and

obligations one has only toward the stranger: toward one’s intimates one

is kind and loving. When a man steps before the countenance, the world

becomes wholly present to him for the first time in the fullness of the

presence, illuminated by eternity, and he can say You in one word to the

being of all beings.[206] There is no longer any tension between world

and God but only the one actuality. He is not rid of responsibility: for

the pains of the finite version that explores effects he has exchanged

the momentum of the infinite kind, the power of loving responsibility

for the whole unexplorable course of the world, the deep inclusion in

the world before the countenance of God. Ethical judgments, to be sure,

he has left behind forever: “evil” men are for him merely those

commended to him for a deeper responsibility, those more in need of

love; but decisions he must continue to make in the depths of

spontaneity unto death—calmly deciding ever again in favor of right

action. Thus action is not null: it is intended, it is commanded, it is

needed, it belongs to the creation; but this action no longer imposes

itself upon the world, it grows upon it as if it were non-action.

What is it that is eternal: the primal phenomenon, present in the here

and now, of what we call revelation? It is man’s emerging from the

moment of the supreme encounter, being no longer the same as he was when

entering into it. The moment of encounter is not a “living

experience”[207]that stirs in the receptive soul and blissfully rounds

itself out: something happens to man. At times it is like feeling a

breath and at times like a wrestling match; no matter: something

happens. The man who steps out of the essential act of pure relation has

something More in his being, something new has grown there of which he

did not know before and for whose origin he lacks any suitable words.

Whereever the scientific world orientation in its legitimate desire for

a causal chain without gaps may place the origin of what is new here:

for us, being concerned with the actual contemplation of the actual, no

subconscious and no other psychic apparatus will do. Actually, we

receive what we did not have before, in such a manner that we know: it

has been given to us. In the language of the Bible: “Those who wait for

God will receive strength in exchange.”[208] In the language of

Nietzsche who is still faithful to actuality in his report: “One

accepts, one does not ask who gives.”[209]

Man receives, and what he receives is not a “content” but a presence, a

presence as strength. This presence and strength includes three elements

that are not separate but may nevertheless be contemplated as three.

First, the whole abundance of actual reciprocity, of being admitted, of

being associated while one is altogether unable to indicate what that is

like with which one is associated, nor does association make life any

easier for us—it makes life heavier[210] but heavy with meaning. And

this is second: the inexpressible confirmation of meaning. It is

guaranteed. Nothing, nothing can henceforth be meaningless. The question

about the meaning of life has vanished. But if it were still there, it

would not require an answer. You do not know how to point to or define

the meaning, you lack any formula or image for it, and yet it is more

certain for you than the sensations of your senses. What could it intend

with us, what does it desire from us, being revealed and surreptitious?

It does not wish to be interpreted by us—for that we lack the

ability—only to be done by us. This comes third: it is not the meaning

of “another life” but that of this our life, not that of a “beyond” but

of this our world, and it wants to be demonstrated by us in this life

and this world. The meaning can be received but not experienced; it

cannot be experienced, but it can be done; and this is what it intends

with us. The guarantee does not wish to remain shut up within me, it

wants to be born into the world by me. But even as the meaning itself

cannot be transferred or expressed as a universally valid and generally

acceptable piece of knowledge, putting it to the proof in action[211]

cannot be handed on as a valid ought; it is not prescribed, not

inscribed on a table that could be put up over everybody’s head. The

meaning we receive can be put to the proof in action only by each person

in the uniqueness of his being and in the uniqueness of his life. No

prescription can lead us to the encounter, and none leads from it. Only

the acceptance of the presence is required to come to it or, in a new

sense, to go from it. As we have nothing but a You on our lips when we

enter the encounter, it is with this on our lips that we are released

from it into the world.

That before which we live, that in which we live, that out of which and

into which we live, the mystery—has remained what it was. It has become

present for us, and through its presence it has made itself known to us

as salvation; we have “known” it, but we have no knowledge of it that

might diminish or extenuate its mysteriousness. We have come close to

God, but no closer to an unriddling, unveiling of being. We have felt

salvation but no “solution.”[212] We cannot go to others with what we

have received, saying: This is what needs to be known, this is what

needs to be done. We can only go and put to the proof in action. And

even this is not what we “ought to” do: rather we can—we cannot do

otherwise.

This is the eternal revelation which is present in the here and now. I

neither know of nor believe in any revelation that is not the same in

its primal phenomenon. I do not believe in God’s naming himself or in

God’s defining himself before man. The word of revelation is: I am there

as whoever I am there.[213] That which reveals is that which reveals.

That which has being is there,[214] nothing more. The eternal source of

strength flows, the eternal touch is waiting, the eternal voice sounds,

nothing more.

By its very nature the eternal You cannot become an It; because by its

very nature it cannot be placed within measure and limit, not even

within the measure of the immeasurable and the limit of the unlimited;

because by its very nature it cannot be grasped as a sum of qualities,

not even as an infinite sum of qualities that have been raised to

transcendence; because it is not to be found either in or outside the

world; because it cannot be experienced; because it cannot be thought;

because we transgress against it, against that which has being, if we

say: “I believe that he is”—even “he” is still a metaphor, while “you”

is not.

And yet we reduce the eternal You ever again to an It, to something,

turning God into a thing, in accordance with our nature. Not

capriciously. The history of God as a thing, the way of the God-thing

through religion and its marginal forms,[215] through its illuminations

and eclipses, the times when it heightened and when it destroyed life,

the way from the living God and back to him again, the metamorphoses of

the present, of embedment in forms,[216] of objectification, of

conceptualization, dissolution, and renewal are one way, are the way.

The asserted knowledge and the posited action of the religions—whence do

they come? The presence and strength of revelation (for all of them

necessarily invoke some sort of revelation, whether verbal, natural, or

psychic—there are, strictly speaking,[217] only revealed religions), the

presence and strength that man received through revelation—how do they

become a “content”?

The explanation has two levels. The exoteric, psychic level is known

when man is considered by himself, apart from history. The esoteric,

factual one, the primal phenomenon of religion, when we afterward place

him in history again. Both belong together.

Man desires to have God; he desires to have God continually in space and

time. He is loath to be satisfied with the inexpressible confirmation of

the meaning; he wants to see it spread out as something that one can

take out and handle again and again—a continuum unbroken in space and

time that insures life for him at every point and moment.

Life’s rhythm of pure relation, the alternation of actuality and a

latency in which only our strength to relate and hence also the

presence, but not the primal presence, wanes, does not suffice man’s

thirst for continuity. He thirsts for something spread out in time, for

duration. Thus God becomes an object of faith. Originally, faith fills

the temporal gaps between the acts of relation; gradually, it becomes a

substitute for these acts. The ever new movement of being through

concentration and going forth is supplanted by coming to rest in an It

in which one has faith. The trust-in-spite-of-all of the fighter who

knows the remoteness and nearness of God is transformed ever more

completely into the profiteer’s assurance that nothing can happen to him

because he has the faith that there is One who would not permit anything

to happen to him.

The life-structure of the pure relation, the “lonesomeness” of the I

before the You, the law that man, however he may include the world in

his encounter, can still go forth only as a person to encounter God—all

this also does not satisfy man’s thirst for continuity. He thirsts for

something spread out in space, for the representation in which the

community of the faithful is united with its God. Thus God becomes a

cult object. The cult, too, originally supplements the acts of relation,

by fitting the living prayer, the immediate You-saying into a spatial

context of great plastic power and connecting it with the life of the

senses. And the cult, too, gradually becomes a substitute, as the

personal prayer is no longer supported but rather pushed aside by

communal prayer; and as the essential deed simply does not permit any

rules, it is supplanted by devotions that follow rules.

In truth, however, the pure relation can be built up into

spatio-temporal continuity only by becoming embodied in the whole stuff

of life. It cannot be preserved[218] but only put to the proof in

action;[219] it can only be done, poured into life. Man can do justice

to the relation to God that has been given to him only by actualizing

God in the world in accordance with his ability and the measure of each

day, daily. This is the only genuine guarantee of continuity. The

genuine guarantee of duration is that the pure relation can be fulfilled

as the beings become You, as they are elevated to the You, so that the

holy basic word sounds through all of them. Thus the time of human life

is formed into an abundance of actuality; and although human life cannot

and ought not to overcome the It-relation, it then becomes so permeated

by relation that this gains a radiant and penetrating constancy in it.

The moments of supreme encounter are no mere flashes of lightning in the

dark but like a rising moon in a clear starry night. And thus the

genuine guarantee of spatial constancy consists in this that men’s

relations to their true You, being radii that lead from all I-points to

the center, create a circle. Not the periphery, not the community comes

first, but the radii, the common relation to the center. That alone

assures the genuine existence of a community.

The anchoring of time in a relation-oriented life of salvation and the

anchoring of space in a community unified by a common center: only when

both of these come to be and only as long as both continue to be, a

human cosmos comes to be and continues to be around the invisible altar,

grasped in the spirit out of the world stuff of the eon.[220]

The encounter with God does not come to man in order that he may

henceforth attend to God[221] but in order that he may prove its meaning

in action in the world. All revelation is a calling and a mission. But

again and again man shuns actualization and bends back toward the

revealer: he would rather attend to God than to the world. Now that he

has bent back, however, he is no longer confronted by a You; he can do

nothing but place a divine It in the realm of things, believe that he

knows about God as an It, and talk about him. Even as the egomaniac does

not live anything directly, whether it be a perception or an affection,

but reflects on his perceiving or affectionate I and thus misses the

truth of the process, thus the theomaniac (who, incidentally, can get

along very well with the egomaniac in the very same soul) will not let

the gift take full effect but reflects instead on that which gives, and

misses both.

When you are sent forth, God remains presence for you; whoever walks in

his mission always has God before him: the more faithful the

fulfillment, the stronger and more constant the nearness. Of course, he

cannot attend to[222] God but he can converse with him. Bending back, on

the other hand, turns God into an object. It appears to be a turning

toward the primal ground, but belongs in truth to the world movement of

turning away, even as the apparent turning away of those who fulfill

their mission belongs in truth to the world movement of turning toward.

For the two basic metacosmic movements of the world—its expansion into

its own being and returning to association [with God][223]—attain their

supreme human form, the true spirit form of their struggle and

conciliation, their mixture and separation,[224] in the history of man’s

relation to God. It is in the return that the word is born on earth; in

spreading out it enters the chrysalis of religion; in a new return it is

reborn[225] with new wings.

Not caprice is at work here, although the movement toward the It may at

times go so far that it holds down the movement of going forth again to

the You and threatens to suffocate it.

The powerful revelations invoked by the religions are essentially the

same as the quiet one[226] that occurs everywhere and at all times. The

powerful revelations that stand at the beginnings of great communities,

at the turning-points of human time, are nothing else than the eternal

revelation. But revelation does not pour into the world through its

recipient as if he were a funnel: it confers itself upon him, it seizes

his whole element in all of its suchness and fuses with it. Even the man

who is “mouth”[227] is precisely that and not a mouthpiece—not an

instrument but an organ, an autonomous, sounding organ; and to sound

means to modify sound.[228]

But there is a qualitative difference between historical ages. There are

times of ripening when the true element of the human spirit, held down

and buried, grows ready underground with such pressure and such tension

that it merely waits to be touched by one who will touch it—and then

erupts. The revelation that then appears seizes the whole ready element

in all its suchness, recasts it and produces a form, a new form of God

in the world.

Ever new regions of the world and the spirit are thus lifted up into

form, called to divine form, in the course of history, in the

transformations of the human element. Ever new spheres become the place

of a theophany. It is not man’s own power that is at work here, neither

is it merely God passing through; it is a mixture of the divine and the

human. Whoever is sent forth in a revelation takes with him in his eyes

an image of God; however supra-sensible it may be, he takes it along in

the eyes of his spirit, in the altogether not metaphorical but entirely

real visual power[229] of his spirit. The spirit also answers by

beholding, a form-giving beholding.[230] Although we on earth never

behold God without world but only the world in God, by beholding we

eternally form God’s form.

Form is a mixture of You and It, too. In faith and cult it can freeze

into an object; but from the gist of the relation that survives in it,

it turns ever again into presence. God is near his forms as long as man

does not remove them from him. In true prayer, cult and faith are

unified and purified into living relation. That true prayer lives in

religions testifies to their true life; as long as it lives in them,

they live. Degeneration of religions means the degeneration of prayer in

them: the relational power in them is buried more and more by

objecthood; they find it ever more difficult to say You with their whole

undivided being; and eventually man must leave their false security for

the risk of the infinite in order to recover this ability, going from

the community over which one sees only the vaulting dome of the temple

and no longer the firmament into the ultimate solitude.[231] This

impulse is most profoundly misunderstood when it is ascribed to

“subjectivism”: life before the countenance is life in the one

actuality, the only true “objectivum”; and the man that goes forth

desires to find refuge in that which has true being, before the merely

apparent, illusory objectivum that he flees has disturbed his truth.

Subjectivism is psychologization[232] while objectivism is reification

of God; one a false fixation, the other a false liberation; both

departures from the way of actuality, both attempts to find a substitute

for it.

God is close to his forms when man does not remove them from him. But

when the spreading movement of religion holds down the movement of

return and removes the form from God, then the countenance of the form

is extinguished, its lips are dead, its hands hang down, God does not

know it any more, and the house of the world built around its altar, the

human[233] cosmos, crumbles.

The decomposition of the word has occurred.

The word is present in revelation,[234] at work in the life of the form,

and becomes valid in the dominion of the dead form.

Thus the path and counter-path of the eternal and eternally present word

in history.

The ages in which the living word appears are those in which the

association of I and world is renewed. The ages in which the active and

effective word reigns are those in which the understanding between I and

world is preserved; the ages in which the word becomes valid are those

in which the deactualization, the alienation of I and world, the

emergence of doom takes place—until the great shudder appears, the

holding of breath in the dark, and the preparatory silence.

But the path is not a circle. It is the way. Doom becomes more

oppressive in every new eon, and the return more explosive. And the

theophany comes ever closer, it comes ever closer to the sphere between

beings—comes closer to the realm that hides in our midst, in the

between. History is a mysterious approach to closeness. Every spiral of

its path leads us into deeper corruption and at the same time into more

fundamental return. But the God-side of the event whose world-side is

called return is called redemption.

In the original manuscript this point was elaborated further in the

sentence immediately following upon this paragraph; but Buber struck it

out: “Thus the fisherman gets his catch. But the find is for the diver.”

Moreover, immerse, like versenken, can be transitive or reflexive, and

in both languages the meaning intended is the reflexive one: I immerse

myself. When I am immersed or in a state of immersion, this is a result

of my effort. And the ultimate outcome may be that I am drowned and my I

is annulled; or as a Buddhist scripture has it, “he is gone to

annihilation.”

A German reader may well feel reminded of the final Chorus in Goethe’s

Faust: “What is destructible / Is but a metaphor …” Buber himself must

also have known Nietzsche’s poem “To Goethe” which begins: “The

indestructible / is but your metaphor…” Gleichnis, the word used in

these lines by Goethe and Nietzsche, recurs frequently in these pages

and has always been translated as “metaphor.”

AFTERWORD

In the first edition (1923) the page facing the last page of the text

read:

Conception of the work whose beginning is represented by this book:

spring 1916; first complete draft of this book: fall 1919; final

version: spring 1922.

IN OCTOBER 1957 Buber wrote the following Afterword for the second

edition and omitted the three lines translated above.

1

When I drafted the first sketch of this book (more than forty years

ago), I felt impelled by an inner necessity. A vision that had afflicted

me repeatedly since my youth but had always been dimmed again, had now

achieved a constant clarity that was so evidently supra-personal that I

soon knew that I ought to bear witness of it. Some time after I had

earned the appropriate diction that permitted me to write the book in

its definitive form,[235] it appeared that a good deal remained to be

added—but in its own place, independently. Thus several shorter works

came into being:[236] I found occasions to clarify the crucial vision by

means of examples, to elaborate it by refuting objections, and to

criticize views to which I owed something important but which had missed

the central significance of the close association of the relation to God

with the relation to one’s fellow-men, which is my most essential

concern. Later other discussions were added: of the anthropological

foundations[237] and of the sociological implications.[238] Nevertheless

it has become plain that by no means everything has been clarified

sufficiently. Again and again readers have asked me what I might have

meant here or there. For a long time I answered each individually, but

gradually I saw that I could not do justice to these demands, and

moreover I surely must not restrict the dialogical relationship to those

readers who decide to speak up: perhaps some of those who remain silent

deserve special consideration. Hence I resolved to answer publicly—first

of all a few essential questions that are interrelated.

2

The first question might be formulated like this, with reasonable

precision: The book speaks of our I-You relation not only to other men

but also to beings and things that confront us in nature; what, then,

constitutes the essential difference between the former and the latter?

Or, still more precisely: if the I-You relation entails a reciprocity

that embraces both the I and the You, how can the relationship to

something in nature be understood in this fashion? Still more exactly:

if we are to suppose that the beings and things in nature that we

encounter as our You also grant us some sort of reciprocity, what is the

character of this reciprocity, and what gives us the right to apply to

it this basic concept?

Obviously, no sweeping answer can be given to this question. Instead of

considering nature as a single whole, as we usually do, we must consider

its different realms separately. Man once “tamed” animals, and he is

still capable of bringing off this strange feat. He draws animals into

his own sphere and moves them to accept him, a stranger, in an

elementary manner and to accede to his ways. He obtains from them an

often astonishing active response to his approach, to his address—and on

the whole this response is the stronger and more direct, the more his

relation amounts to a genuine You-saying. Not infrequently animals, like

children, see through feigned tenderness. But outside the tamed circle,

too, we occasionally encounter a similar contact between men and

animals: some men have deep down in their being a potential partnership

with animals—most often persons who are by no means “animalic” by nature

but rather spiritual.

Animals are not twofold, like man: the twofoldness of the basic words

I-You and I-It is alien to them although they can both turn toward

another being and contemplate objects. We may say that in them

twofoldness is latent. In the perspective of our You-saying to animals,

we may call this sphere the threshold of mutuality.

It is altogether different with those realms of nature which lack the

spontaneity that we share with animals. It is part of our concept of the

plant that it cannot react to our actions upon it, that it cannot

“reply.” Yet this does not mean that we meet with no reciprocity at all

in this sphere. We find here not the deed of posture of an individual

being but a reciprocity of being itself—a reciprocity that has nothing

except being.[239] The living wholeness and unity of a tree that denies

itself to the eye, no matter how keen, of anyone who merely

investigates, while it is manifest to those who say You, is present when

they are present: they grant the tree the opportunity to manifest it,

and now the tree that has being manifests it. Our habits of thought make

it difficult for us to see that in such cases something is awakened by

our attitude and flashes toward us from that which has being. What

matters in this sphere is that we should do justice with an open mind to

the actuality that opens up before us. This huge sphere that reaches

from the stones to the stars I should like to designate as the

pre-threshold, meaning the step that comes before the threshold.

3

Now we come to the questions posed by that sphere which might be called,

sticking to the same sort of image, the “over-threshold”

(superliminare),[240] meaning the lintel that is above the door: the

sphere of the spirit.

Here, too, we must separate two realms, but the distinction cuts deeper

than that within nature. On the one side is the spirit that has already

entered the world and now can be perceived in it by means of our senses;

on the other, the spirit that has not yet entered the world but is ready

to do so and now becomes present to us. This distinction is founded on

the fact that I can show you, more or less, my reader, the spiritual

forms that have already entered the world, but not the others. The

spiritual forms that are “at hand”[241] in our common world, no less

than a thing or a natural being, I can point out to you as something

actually or potentially accessible to you. But what has not yet entered

the world I cannot point out to you. If I am asked here, too, in the

case of this borderland, where one is supposed to find mutuality, I can

only point indirectly to certain scarcely describable events in human

life where spirit was encountered; and if this indirect procedure proves

inadequate, nothing remains to me in the end but an appeal to the

testimony of your own mysteries, my reader, which may be buried under

debris but are presumably still accessible to you.

Let us now return to the first realm, to that which is “at hand.” Here

it is possible to adduce examples.

Let those who ask about this realm call to mind one of the traditional

sayings of a master who died thousands of years ago. Let them try, as

best they can, to receive this saying with their ears—as if the speaker

had said it in their presence, addressing them. To this end they must

turn with their whole being toward the speaker, who is not at hand, of

the saying that is at hand. In other words, they must adopt toward the

master who is dead and yet living that attitude which I call You-saying.

If they succeed (and will and effort are not sufficient, but now and

then it can be undertaken), they will hear a voice, perhaps none too

clearly at first, that is identical with the voice that speaks to them

through other genuine sayings of the same master. Now they will not be

able any longer to do what they did as long as they treated the saying

as an object: they will not be able to separate out content and rhythm;

they receive nothing but the indivisible wholeness of something

spoken.[242]

But here we are still dealing with a person and the manifestation of a

person in his words. What I have in mind, however, is not limited to the

continued presence of some personal existence in words. Hence I must

supplement this account by pointing to an example in which there is no

longer anything personal. As always, I choose an example that is

associated with strong memories at least for some people. Take the Doric

column, wherever it appears to a man who is able and ready to turn

toward it. It confronted me for the first time out of a church wall in

Syracuse into which it had been incorporated: secret primal measure

presenting itself in such a simple form that nothing individual could be

seen or enjoyed in it. What had to be achieved was what I was able to

achieve: to confront and endure this spiritual form there that had

passed through the mind and hand of man and become incarnate. Does the

concept of mutuality disappear here? It merely merges into the darkness

behind it—or it changes into a concrete state of affairs, coldly

rejecting concepthood,[243] but bright and reliable.

From here we may also look across into that other realm where that which

is “not at hand” belongs, the contact with “spiritual beings,” the

genesis of word and form.

Spirit become word, spirit become form—whoever has been touched by the

spirit and did not close himself off knows to some extent of the

fundamental fact:[244] neither germinates and grows in the human world

without having been sown; both issue from encounters with the other.

Encounters not with Platonic Ideas (of which I have no direct knowledge

whatever and which I am incapable of understanding as having any being)

but with the spirit that blows around us and inspires us. Again I am

reminded of the strange confession of Nietzsche who circumscribed the

process of inspiration by saying that one accepts without asking who

gives. That may be so—one does not ask, but one gives thanks.

Those who know the spirit’s breath commit a transgression if they wish

to gain power over the spirit or to determine its nature. But they are

also unfaithful if they ascribe this gift to themselves.

4

Let us consider once more what has here been said about encounters with

what is natural and with what is spiritual.

The question may be asked at this point whether we have any right to

speak of a “reply” or “address” that comes from outside the sphere to

which in our consideration of the orders of being we ascribe spontaneity

and consciousness as if they were like a reply or address in the human

world in which we live. Is what has here been said valid except as a

“personalizing” metaphor? Are we not threatened by the dangers of a

problematic “mysticism” that blurs the borderlines that are drawn, and

necessarily have to be drawn, by all rational knowledge?

The clear and firm structure of the I-You relationship, familiar to

anyone with a candid heart and the courage to stake it, is not mystical.

To understand it we must sometimes step out of our habits of thought,

but not out of the primal norms that determine man’s thoughts about what

is actual. Both in the realm of nature and in the realm of spirit—the

spirit that lives on in sayings and works and the spirit that strives to

become sayings and works—what acts on us may be understood as the action

of what has being.

5

The next question no longer concerns the threshold, pre-threshold, and

over-threshold of mutuality, but mutuality itself as the gate of entry

into our existence.

People ask: What about the I-You relationship between men? Is this

always entirely reciprocal? Could it be, is it permitted to be? Is it

not, like everything human, subject to the limitations of our

inadequacy, and is it not limited further by the inner laws that govern

our life with one another?

The first of these two obstacles is surely familiar enough. Everything,

from your own experience of looking day after day into the eyes of your

“neighbor” who needs you after all but responds with the cold surprise

of a stranger, to the melancholy of the holy men who repeatedly offered

the great gift in vain—everything tells you that complete mutuality does

not inhere in men’s life with one another. It is a form of grace for

which one must always be prepared but on which one can never count.

Yet there are also many I-You relationships that by their very nature

may never unfold into complete mutuality if they are to remain faithful

to their nature.

Elsewhere[245] I have characterized the relationship of a genuine

educator to his pupil as being of this type. The teacher who wants to

help the pupil to realize his best potentialities must intend him as

this particular person, both in his potentiality and in his actuality.

More precisely, he must know him not as a mere sum of qualities,

aspirations, and inhibitions; he must apprehend him, and affirm him, as

a whole. But this he can only do if he encounters him as a partner in a

bipolar situation. And to give his influence unity and meaning, he must

live through this situation in all its aspects not only from his own

point of view but also from that of his partner. He must practice the

kind of realization that I call embracing.[246] It is essential that he

should awaken the I-You relationship in the pupil, too, who should

intend and affirm his educator as this particular person; and yet the

educational relationship could not endure if the pupil also practiced

the art of embracing by living through the shared situation from the

educator’s point of view. Whether the I-You relationship comes to an end

or assumes the altogether different character of a friendship, it

becomes clear that the specifically educational relationship is

incompatible with complete mutuality.

Another, no less instructive example of the normative limits of

mutuality may be found in the relationship between a genuine

psychotherapist and his patient. If he is satisfied to “analyze” his

patient—that is, to bring to light unconscious factors from his

microcosm and to apply to a conscious project the energies that have

been transformed by this emergence—he may successfully accomplish some

repairs. At best, he may help a diffuse soul that is poor in structure

to achieve at least some concentration and order. But he cannot absolve

his true task, which is the regeneration of a stunted personal center.

That can be brought off only by a man who grasps with the profound eye

of a physician the buried, latent unity of the suffering soul, which can

be done only if he enters as a partner into a person-to-person

relationship, but never through the observation and investigation of an

object. In order to promote coherently the liberation and actualization

of this unity in a new situation in which the other person comes to

terms with the world, the therapist, like the educator, must stand not

only at his own pole of the bipolar relationship but also at the other

pole, experiencing the effects of his own actions. Again the specific

“healing” relationship would end as soon as the patient decided to

practice the art of embracing and actually succeeded in experiencing

events also from the doctor’s point of view. Healing, like educating,

requires that one lives in confrontation and is yet removed.

The most striking example of the normative limits of mutuality could

probably be found in the work of those charged with the spiritual

well-being of their congregation: here any attempt at embracing from the

other side would violate the consecrated authenticity of the mission.

Every I-You relationship in a situation defined by the attempt of one

partner to act on the other one so as to accomplish some goal depends on

a mutuality that is condemned never to become complete.

6

In this context only one more question can be discussed, but this has to

be taken up because it is incomparably the most important of all.

How—people ask—can the eternal You be at the same time exclusive and

inclusive? How is it possible for man’s You-relationship to God, which

requires our unconditional turning toward God, without any distraction,

nevertheless to embrace all the other I-You relationships of this man

and to bring them, as it were, to God?

Note that the question is not about God but only about our relationship

to him. And yet in order to be able to answer, I have to speak of him.

For our relationship to him is as supra-contradictory as it is because

he is as supra-contradictory as he is.

Of course, we shall speak only of what God is in his relationship.to a

human being. And even that can be said only in a paradox; or more

precisely, by using a concept paradoxically; or still more precisely, by

means of a paradoxical combination of a nominal concept with an

adjective that contradicts the familiar content of the concept. The

insistence on this contradiction must give way to the insight that thus,

and only thus, the indispensable designation of this object by this

concept can be justified. The content of the concept undergoes a

revolutionary transformation and expansion, but that is true of every

concept that, impelled by the actuality of faith, we take from the realm

of immanence and apply to transcendence.

The designation of God as a person is indispensable for all who, like

myself, do not mean a principle when they say “God,” although mystics

like Eckhart occasionally equate “Being” with him, and who, like myself,

do not mean an idea when they say “God,” although philosophers like

Plato could at times take him for one—all who, like myself, mean by

“God” him that, whatever else he may be in addition, enters into a

direct relationship to us human beings through creative, revelatory, and

redemptive acts, and thus makes it possible for us to enter into a

direct relationship to him. This ground and meaning of our existence

establishes each time a mutuality of the kind that can obtain only

between persons. The concept of personhood is, of course, utterly

incapable of describing the nature of God; but it is permitted and

necessary to say that God is also a person. If for once I were to

translate what I mean into the language of a philosopher, Spinoza, I

should have to say that of God’s infinitely many attributes we human

beings know not two, as Spinoza thought, but three: in addition to

spiritlikeness—the source of what we call spirit—and naturelikeness,

exemplified by what we know as nature, also thirdly the attribute of

personlikeness.[247] From this last attribute I should then derive my

own and all men’s being persons, even as I should derive from the first

two my own and all men’s being spirit and being nature. And only this

third attribute, personlikeness, could then be said to be known directly

in its quality as an attribute.

But now the contradiction appears, appealing to the familiar content of

the concept of a person. A person, it says, is by definition an

independent individual and yet also relativized by the plurality of

other independent individuals; and this, of course, could not be said of

God. This contradiction is met by the paradoxical designation of God as

the absolute person, that is one that cannot be relativized. It is as

the absolute person that God enters into the direct relationship to us.

The contradiction must give way to this higher insight.

Now we may say that God carries his absoluteness into his relationship

with man. Hence the man who turns toward him need not turn his back on

any other I-You relationship: quite legitimately he brings them all to

God and allows them to become transfigured “in the countenance of God.”

One should beware altogether of understanding the conversation with

God—the conversation of which I had to speak in this book and in almost

all of my later books—as something that occurs merely apart from or

above the everyday. God’s address to man penetrates the events in all

our lives and all the events in the world around us, everything

biographical and everything historical, and turns it into

instruction,[248] into demands for you and me. Event upon event,

situation upon situation is enabled and empowered by this personal

language to call upon the human person to endure and decide. Often we

think that there is nothing to be heard as if we had not long ago

plugged wax into our own ears.

The existence of mutuality between God and man cannot be proved any more

than the existence of God. Anyone who dares nevertheless to speak of it

bears witness and invokes the witness of those whom he addresses—present

or future witness.

Jerusalem, October 1957

Martin Buber

[1] It is reprinted, uncut, in my Religion from Tolstoy to Camus.

[2] I owe the phrase in quotes, this interpretation, and most of the

information about the epigraph to Grete Schaeder, who will argue her

case in her introduction to the first volume of Buber’s correspondence.

I don’t know whether she has noticed that the two lines in the Divan

that follow upon Buber’s epigraph support her reading: Wie du mir das so

lieblich gibst! / Am lieblichsten aber dass du liebst: “How you give

this to me in such a lovely way! But what is loveliest is that you

love.”

[3] “Zur Geschichte des dialogischen Prinzips” (1954), in Werke, vol. I

(1962), p. 298. The whole essay is only thirteen pages long.

[4] The date was established by Rivka Horwitz in Buber’s Way to I and

Thou, Heidelberg, Lambert Schneider, 1978, pp. 156 and 209.

The significance of the fact that Buber was unable to complete the work

is discussed in Walter Kaufmann, Discovering the Mind, volume II:

Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Buber, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1980, section

46ff.

[5] In the first edition the next section began: “Basic words do not

signify things but relations.” This sentence was omitted by Buber in

1957 and in all subsequent editions.

[6] stiften sie einen Bestand. The locution is most unusual, and Bestand

in any applicable sense is very rare. Buber intends a contrast with

“that might exist” (was … bestünde).

[7] Wesen: see page 46.

[8] Der Mensch befährt die Fläche der Dinge und erfährt sie. Both

erfährt in this sentence and erfahre in the preceding paragraph are

forms of erfahren, the ordinary German equivalent of the verb, to

experience. The noun is Erfahrung. These words are so common that it has

hardly ever occurred to anyone that they are closely related to fahren,

an equally familiar word that means to drive or go. Befahren means to

drive over the surface of something. The effect of the German sentence

is to make the reader suddenly aware of the possibility that erfahren

might literally mean finding out by going or driving, or possibly by

traveling. But by further linking erfahren with befahren Buber manages

to suggest that experience stays on the surface.

[9] This locution echoes the Passover Haggadah which contains a famous

song in which each stanza begins: One is …, Two are …, Three are …, etc.

[10] sich offenbarend. A few lines earlier, offenbar was translated as

manifest. The adjective, unlike the verb, generally has no religious

overtones.

[11] Saum means hem or edge, but this is surely an allusion to Isaiah

6:1.

[12] Wehen: literally, blowing (of a breeze or wind), wafting.

[13] das spritzende Gegrün: the noun is a coinage.

[14] Er leibt mir gegenüber … Leib means body; leibt is most unusual and

means literally: it bodies—across from me or vis-à-vis me. Locutions

that involve gegenüber abound in this book. A few lines below, in the

first sentence of the next section, we find Stehe ich … gegenüber; in

the following section, gegenübertritt and des Gegenüber and—a variant—

entgegentritt. Cf. p. 45.

[15] Verhängnis means, and has been consistently translated as, doom;

Schicksal, as fate.

[16] Es kommt auf eine Wesenstat des Menschen an: vollzieht er sie,

spricht er mit seinem Wesen das Grundwort … Henceforth, Wesenstat and

Wesensakt are translated “essential deed” and “essential act”; but the

meaning that is intended is spelled out here.

“Form”: Gestalt. One might consider leaving this word untranslated

because Gestalt has become familiar in English; but the associations of

Gestalt psychology might be more distracting than helpful, and

Gestaltung (below: “forming”) needs to be translated in any case.

[17] actual: wirklieb; acts: wirkt; act: wirke. Earlier in the same

paragraph, actualize: verwirklichen. In English “real” and “realize”

would sometimes be smoother than “actual” and “actualize”; but it is

noteworthy that the German word wirklich is so closely associated, not

only by Buber but also by Nietzsche and Goethe before him, with wirken,

Werk (work), Wirkung (effect), and wirksam (effective). Cf. p. 45f.

[18] Schaffen ist Schöpfen, Erfinden ist Finden. Schaffen can mean to

work or to create; schöpfen means to create. Erfinden is the ordinary

German word for invent, and finden means to find.

[19] dem… Schauenden. Schauen is a way of looking that in this book is

not associated with experiencing, with objects, with It. It has

generally been translated “behold.”

[20] unmittelbar is the ordinary German word for immediate. Mittel is

the ordinary word for means (the noun, both in the contrast of means and

ends and also in the sense of being without means). This noun is

encountered in the last two sentences of this paragraph. In the first

sentence of the following paragraph Buber contrasts Unmittelbarkeit and

alles Mittelbare. In the present context it seemed feasible and

important to reproduce this counterpoint of concepts in English, but

elsewhere unmittelbarhas often been translated as direct. While this

word is positive and unmittelbar is negative, “direct” suggests more

forcibly the absence of any intermediary than does “immediate” with its

primarily temporal connotations.

[21] Gegenwart und Gegenstand: this contrast is developed and echoed in

the following sections. The words are discussed on p. 45: Gegenwart

means both presence and the present as opposed to past and future; and

in the next sentence it has been translated “the present.”

[22] See note 1 on page 58.

[23] Gegenwart ist … das Gegenwartende und Gegenwäbrende. The first word

is the usual term for the present or presence, the other two capitalized

words are coinages and represent plays on the first word.

[24] Wesenheiten werden in der Gegenwart gelebt, Gegenständliebkeiten in

der Vergangenheit. This is an extraordinary sentence. Both Wesenheit and

Gegenständlichkeit are rare words with no very precise meaning: the

effect of the suffixes (heit and keit) is to add a note of abstractness

and generality, comparable to “essencehood” and “objecthood.” Using

these two words in the plural is most unusual, and saying that the

former is lived in the present and the latter in the past is a tour de

force. In German, as in English, only life can “be lived.” Had Buber

said erlebt (experienced in a living or vital manner), the sentence

would be much less puzzling; but in this book he treats experience

(Erfahrung) as a corollary of object and It, and generally he does not

exempt Erlebnis which, though more vital and intense, suggests an

aesthetic orientation. The last half of the sentence is much less

difficult than the first. We have been prepared for it by the two

preceding paragraphs; e.g., “objects consist in having been.” Whatever

is not present to me and—to use my own expression—addressing me as a

person, whatever is remembered, discussed, or analyzed, has lapsed into

the past and is an object.

“Beings are lived in the present” does not make much sense of the first

six words, although Wesen in this book means being or nature more often

than it means essence. Beings simply are not lived; they live, they may

address us and change our lives, but to say that they are lived is not

merely a solecism but contrary to what Buber says in this book. “What is

essential is lived in the present” is linguistically not so outrageous,

is much more meaningful, and suggests an idea that is in keeping with

the central motifs of the book.

[25] ein Wirken am: an odd locution.

[26] das Ufer des Bestands: see page 53, note 2.

[27] erlebt.

[28] Liebe ist ein welthaftes Wirken.

[29] Getriebe.

[30] herausgetreten, einzig und gegenüber wesend.

[31] die Menschen zu lieben.

[32] Since 1957: “stretching the head forward.” Surely, we are to think

of a cat: see pp. 144 ff.

[33] die Wesen leben um dich herum … du kommst immer zum Wesen. In

another context many translators would, no doubt, render die Wesen by

“the creatures” and zum Wesen by “the essence.” That way something

important would be lost, but these meanings are present.

[34] Mittel. The word translated as “direct” and “directly” in the

immediately preceding lines is unmittelbar. Even if that were rendered

as “immediate(ly)”—at the cost of giving the impression that Buber

speaks of those who hate right away, instantly—“means” would then have

to be circumscribed by “that which mediates.” Cf. p. 62, note 7.

[35] vorbanden.

[36] Before 1957: fulfillable.

[37] ein figurhaftes Quantum.

[38] Before 1957: eternal chrysalis, … eternal butterfly.

[39] gegenwartsstarker Akte.

[40] Zerlegung und Überlegung.

[41] Heil! Toward the end of the year in which Ich und Du was published.

Hitler made his abortive putsch in Munich; ten years later Heil! and

Heil Hitler!attained official status in Germany as der deutsche Gruss,

the German greeting.

[42] Before 1957: designations (Bezeichnungen instead of Beziehungen).

[43] In the original the passage from the beginning of the paragraph to

this point forms a single sentence.

[44] Mana ist eben das Wirkende …

[45] der alle wesentliche Wirkung entstammt.

[46] eben das “Wirkende” …

[47] Cf. the chapter “On the Despisers of the Body” in Part One of

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, which the young Buber translated into Polish: “

‘I,’ you say … But greater is … your body and its great reason: that

does not say ‘I,’ but does ‘I.’”

[48] Urheber

[49] I know, therefore I am.

[50] Urerlebnisse.

[51] Ich-wirkend-Du is as odd as the translation above.

[52] in der Geistesgeschichte des Primitiven.

[53] Pathetik.

[54] Ichhaftigkeit.

[55] sich seltsam verdünnend und funktionalisierend.

[56] Gewalt am real erlebten Wesen.

[57] ins Nichts.

[58] naturhaften.

[59] naturhaften Verbundenheit. “Association” is used in this book only

to render Verbundenheit.

[60] es muss sich seine Welt erschauen, erhorchen, ertasten, erbilden.

Cf. p. 55, note 4 on erfahren.

[61] Gestaltigkeit is a coinage.

[62] Was den fertigen Menscben … umspielen wird, muss vom entstehenden

in angestrengter Handlung erworben, umworben werden.

[63] und … allem Anschein nach zwecklos suchen, greifen die weichen

Handentwürfe in die leere Luft … The word order and the choice of words

are most unusual.

[64] Urerlebnisse.

[65] Die erlebten Beziehungen sind Realisierungen des eingeborenen Du am

begegnenden; dass dieses als Gegenüber gefasst…

[66] Urhebertrieb. Cf. p. 73, note 8 and the preceding text.

[67] Until 1957: Satisfactions.

[68] vorgestaltigen. This is a coinage. See p. 77, note 3.

[69] körperliche.

[70] leibliche: In ordinary German körperlich and leiblich are synonyms.

[71] der zum Leib reifende Körper: see the two preceding notes.

[72] Punkthaftigkeit: a coinage meaning pointlikeness.

[73] Der ichhaft gewordene Mensch.

[74] Beziehungserlebnis: literally, living experience of relation.

[75] Buber in March 1937: What is meant is Bergson’s durée.

[76] als Wirkung und als Wirkung empfangend.

[77] Du nimmst sie wahr, nimmst sie dir zur “Wahrheit” … This is a gloss

on the literal meaning of the German verb wahrnehmen which is the

ordinary word for perceive.

[78] aber dies eine welthaft.

[79] In 1957 Buber changed the German word order. Cf. p. 63, note 8.

[80] Until 1957: dispensable. At first glance it might seem as if Buber

had changed his mind. But “dispensable” was obviously meant ironically,

like the rest of the passage, and actually was much more consistent with

the immediately following sentence. Eventually Buber evidently felt

dissatisfied with his sustained irony and decided to bring the reader up

short with a sudden show of his real hand. But “indispensable” does not

only break the mood; it is flatly contradicted by the following

sentences. The first translator of the book took no note of this

change—or a great many others—in his “Second Edition.” In this case, I

think Buber’s change is for the worse.

[81] Buber does not say “listen” but du. Here “you” would be rather

unidiomatic and unnatural, but in German lovers and close friends

sometimes use du in this way as an expression of intimacy.

[82] Cf. Hillel’s words: “If I am not for myself, who will be? And if I

am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?” (Avoth I: 14).

[83] An allusion to Oswald Spengler whose Decline of the West had just

appeared and was widely debated.

[84] Schicksal.

[85] Bestimmung.

[86] statt ihm zuzublicken: in German one can zuhören (listen;

literally: hear to) but hardly zublicken. The point here is not to

observe a direct object but to respond to a You.

[87] Angesicht: the word recurs often in this book. It sounds much more

elevated than Gesicht (face).

[88] der den Geist sich zum Genussmittel präparierte.

[89] Buber’s gloss, March 1937: “an animated clod without a soul.”

[90] Ibid.: An allusion to the “mythical notion of the soul as a bird.”

[91] was Ichbezogenheit ist.

[92] worin eins dem andern gar nicht gegenwärtig, von ihm gar nicht

vergegenwärtigt wird.

[93] The phrase harks back to Matthew 5:37.

[94] das Seiende zu sein.

[95] being, both times: Wesen; “our” is not in the original.

[96] das Gehäuse des Machtwillens. Buber speaks of Nutzwillen and

Machtwillen and does not employ the phrase used more often by Nietzsche:

Wille zur Macht.

[97] “bei sich”: this locution and its application to the spirit are

Hegelian. Cf. an sich (in itself) above, where it is contrasted with an

der Welt (in the world).

[98] die Freiheit seines und des Wesens.

[99] unbändig. Until 1957: ungeheuer (tremendously).

[100] vorwelthaft kreisend.

[101] Auftrag.

[102] gelagert (lying there) was inserted in 1957.

[103] … das Gerechte zu nennen ist, das Gerichtete, wozu einer sich

richtet und entscheidet.

[104] Verhängnis. “Doom” is used here only to render this word.

[105] Kosmos des Menschen. Before 1957: Kosmos, gefasste Welt,

heimische, haushafte Welt. Weltbehausung des Menschen: cosmos, conceived

world, homelike, houselike world, the world as man’s dwellingplace …

[106] zur sinnwidrigen Dämonie.

[107] Buber’s gloss, March 1937: in pre-Buddhistic India as opposed to

Buddhistic India.

[108] Since 1957: our successes. This change weakens the contrast.

[109] A Greek word for fate, used by Plato, Phaedo 115a and Gorgias

512e.

[110] See pp. 35ff.

[111] A Quotation from Hölderlin’s poem “Patmos,” which begins: Nah ist

/ Und schwer zu fassen der Gott./ Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst / Das

Rettende auch. “Near is and hard to grasp the god. But where there is

danger what saves grows, too.”

[112] eingebornen Gebrauchstrieben.

[113] Ablauf: laufen means running, and the prefix ab, like the Latin

de, means down. Ablauf can mean running off, drainage, as well as lapse

(of time) or expiration. When Schiller’s Tell says, Fort musst du, deine

Ubr ist abgelaufen—words often quoted—he means: You have to go, your

clock’s run down—or, a little less literally: You have to die, your time

is up. That Ablauf often suggests expiration, termination, and running

down is undeniable; whether Buber meant to emphasize these associations

and whether he was thinking of entropy and the gradual running down of

the mechanistic universe is less clear. “Process”—the term used in the

first translation of the book—is misleading because such so-called

process philosophies as Bergson’s and Whitehead’s are not mechanistic

but stress freedom and creativity. (A few lines above, where we have “an

inevitable social process,” Buber uses the German Prozess.) Buber

clearly associates Ablauf with “unlimited causality,” with the

“proliferating It-world,” with the denial of freedom, and with doom.

[114] Gegenständlichkeit.

[115] Gegenwärtigkeit.

[116] Versonderung und Verfremdung.

[117] Ichheit.

[118] Willkür.

[119] reale.

[120] die Bestimmung.

[121] vom Bestimmtsein weg und auf die Bestimmung zu.

[122] Er lauscht dem aus sich Werdenden, dem Weg des Wesens in der Welt.

In German, the fourfold alliteration recalls Richard Wagner.

[123] Besinnung can also mean consciousness or reflection; sich besinnen

can mean to recollect or remember; and zur Besinnung kommen, to recover

one’s senses. Overtones of this last meaning are present here. This

passage and the next paragraph invite comparison with Kierkegaard’s

Sickness Unto Death and—like much of Ich und Du—with Heidegger’s Being

and Time.

[124] das Abgefallensein: literally, the state of having fallen off or

away; abfallen can also suggest defection and apostasy. Cf. “O Hamlet,

what a falling-off was there” (Hamlet, Act I, scene 5, line 47).

[125] Eigenwesen, literally own-being or self-being, is a highly unusual

word. In the first English version of the book it has been rendered as

“individuality” although Buber had expressly protested on seeing page

proofs that this bothered him a great deal (“stört mich doch sehr”):

“But I cannot think of anything better. In French there is the word

égotiste (cf. Stendhal) which comes close to what I mean; but the

English egotist unfortunately means Egoist, and that is something else.

Would it perhaps be possible to say: the egotical being??” Except for

the last three words, the comment was written in German, and in a

covering letter, dated March 8, 1937, Buber devoted another whole

paragraph to this problem.

He insisted that he had nothing against individualities and added:

“Eigenwesen, on the other hand, refers to a man’s relation to himself. I

do hope that you will find it possible after all to translate it

differently, perhaps by moving in the direction suggested in the

enclosure.”

“Ego” works perfectly in all the many passages in which Buber speaks of

Eigenwesen, including the paragraph after the next one in which

“egotist,” for example, would not do at all. The only serious objection

that comes to mind is that those who read Freud or subsequent

psychoanalytic literature in English may have irrelevant and distracting

associations with the word “ego.” But this objection loses all force

when we recall that the term Freud himself used was Ich (cf. Das Ich und

das Es)—the very same word that Buber uses constantly in lcb und Du in

an altogether difference sense. Buber’s Ich is closer to ordinary usage

than Freud’s; and “ego” in the following pages is closer to ordinary

English usage than is the Freudian “ego.”

[126] I.e., without any “of” clause like that in the preceding

parenthesis; also without any object.

[127] Until 1957: of the You, that is, of eternal life.

[128] des Eigenmenschen.

[129] Buber alludes to three Goethe poems: “Blessed eye” echoes Faust,

line 11300, the song of Lynceus. Then, one of Goethe’s late Xenien

(1823: Book III): “Were not the eye so like the sun, / It never could

behold the sun: / If the god’s own power did not lie in us, / How could

that which is godlike delight us?” And the final stanza of “Blessed

Yearning” in Goethe’s Divan: “And until you have possessed / dying and

rebirth, / you are but a sullen guest / on the gloomy earth.”

[130] Buber in March 1937 protested against “his age,” insisted on “the

age,” and added that it was our age, too.

[131] Value. But the Italian word can also mean worth, courage, fitness.

[132] Eigenmenschen.

[133] aus seiner Sache.

[134] Untergang.

[135] ungeheure, ungeheuerliche.

[136] Schickung und Vollzug, nicht Machtbrunst und Machtgenuss.

[137] als das Ich eines Vollzugs.

[138] Buber in March 1937: “one really dreams; i.e., one is under the

spell of a dream although one is awake.”

[139] in den Stunden der Besinnung.

[140] der elektrischen Sonne. Buber’s gloss, March 1937, in German

except for the last six words: “regarding the ‘electric sun’: it is

midnight; the man told about here had lit the strong electric light on

the ceiling, this small sun, as a defense against the torment of the

waking dream; but it is at the same time a symbol for the ‘thought’ he

invokes. Hence perhaps: cannot resist the sunlike electric lamp.”

[141] das unvergänglichste und unumgänglichste.

[142] wähnt. Until 1957: glaubt (believes).

[143] The immediately following paragraph was omitted in 1957: “What we

know of the way by virtue of our having lived, by virtue of our life, is

not a waiting, not a being open.”

[144] Versenkung. Buber in March 1937: “Instead of ‘absorption’ better

‘meditation’ at this point (what is meant is the Buddhistic dhyaya).”

What he meant was dhyana. I had “meditations” before reading this and

have naturally let it stand. But a little later on, when Versenkung is

used repeatedly in a broader sense, I have rendered it consistently by

“immersion,” which is not only better than “absorption” but just right.

In the first passage in which the term is introduced in this sense, it

is equated with “a descent into the self.”

[145] Selbstbehauptungstriebs: the term is somewhat unusual, although

Selbsterhaltungstrieb (the drive or instinct of self-preservation) is

quite common. It is doubly remarkable that Heidegger entitled his

inaugural lecture as Rector of the University of Freiburg, in which he

embraced Nazism, Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität (1933).

[146] zu einem Wesen oder einer Wesenheit: in English the single word

“being” must serve for both terms.

[147] Rudolf Otto had argued in Das Heilige (1917; translated as The

Idea of the Holy, 1923) that God is “the wholly other” and experienced

as a mysterium tremendum.

[148] By F. E. D. Schleiermacher.

[149] By Rudolf Otto.

[150] Until 1957: the metaphysical and metapsychical fact.

[151] vom “werdenden Gott”—aber ein Werden des seienden Gottes ist, …

[152] dem Schaffenden: this is not the theological term for the Creator.

[153] auf Gott wirken, wenn auch nicht eben von Gott erwirken.

“Effective activity” later in the same sentence: Wirken.

[154] Versenkung. See note 4 on pp. 125f.

[155] Vereinigung.

[156] John 10:30.

[157] Khandogya Upanishad, III. 14. 4: “He from whom all works, all

desires, all sweet odours and tastes proceed, who embraces all this, who

never speaks and who is never surprised, he, my self within the heart,

is that Brahma(n). … thus said Sandilya, yea, thus he said” (transl. Max

Müller).

[158] Khandogya Upanishad VI. 8.7: “It is the True. It is the Self, and

thou, O Svetaketu, art it” (transl. Max Müller). This refrain is

repeated in VI. 9.4, 10.3, 11.3, 12.3, 13.3, 14.3, 15.2, and 16.3.

[159] Before 1957 the two words were printed in Greek: hen esmen.

[160] “ein und ein vereinet da liubtet bloz in bloz” (Master Eckhart).

[161] Einheit.

[162] “Einungs”-Ekstase.

[163] Buber in March 1937, in English: “and cover each of them to the

feeling of the enraptured other one” (sic).

[164] Ibid., Buber protested against “fringe” and suggested that here

and in a few other passages Rand might be translated “brink.”

[165] Khandogya Upanishad, VIII. 11. 1–3.

[166] das Gemüthafte: Buber in March 1937: “emotions.”

[167] Throughout this passage Heilsleben (literally, life of salvation)

has been rendered simply as salvation.

[168] Schiedlichkeit is a coinage and more eccentric than division.

[169] Unschiedlich(en) is again more eccentric than undivided.

[170] Here, for the first time in this passage, Buber uses Heil(s).

[171] das ewige Ich des Vergänglichen und das ewige Du des

Unvergänglichen. Vergänglich is what passes away, and the adjective

could also be rendered by “transitory” or “perishable.” Here the

adjective is made into a noun that could be masculine and personal or

neuter and impersonal. The whole construction is remote from ordinary

language. The writer seems less concerned with precise denotation than

with rich connotations and associations.

[172] The literal meaning of Mahayana, the Buddhism of Nepal, Tibet,

China, Korea, and Japan.

[173] These locutions are as extraordinary in German as they are in

English.

[174] verseelen: a coinage.

[175] Seelenwahn: another coinage.

[176] … die Welt in mir als Vorstellung: an allusion to Schopenhauer’s

main work, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, translated as The World

as Will and Representation (or Idea). For a detailed discussion of

Vorstellung, including reasons for translating it as notion, see

Kaufmann’s Hegel, section 34.

[177] sind wechselseitig einbezogen: Buber in March 1937 said he meant

that “The world and I are mutually included one in the other.”

[178] As Schopenhauer taught.

[179] Ichhaftigkeit.

[180] den nur begreifbaren, nicht begrifflicben Sinn.

[181] können die Wege von sehr versehiednen Seelenhaltungen aus einander

kreuzen. In the original edition of 1923 auseinander was printed as one

word, which would make the interpretation in the text above impossible;

but this was a printer’s error: Buber’s manuscript leaves no doubt about

that and moreover had originally begegnen instead of kreuzen, which

shows that aus goes with von and not with einander.

[182] das All corresponds to the Brahma of the Upanishads, and the self

to Atman.

[183] Bangigkeit des Werdens.

[184] uns Untieren could mean “us non-animals”; but Untier almost

invariably means monster, beast, brute.

[185] O Glimmerstück: It is doubtful that most German readers get

Buber’s meaning, but in March 1937 he wrote his first translator that he

meant “das Mineral, das englisch mica beisst; also: fragment of mica.”

Cf. Buber’s earlier book, Daniel (1913), 148 f.: “I walked on the road

one dim morning, saw a piece of mica lying there, picked it up, and

looked at it for a long time. The day was no longer dim: so much light

was caught by the stone. And suddenly, as I looked away, I realized that

while looking at it I had known nothing of “object” and “subject”; as I

looked, the piece of mica and “I” had been one; as I looked, I had

tasted unity. I looked at it again, but unity did not return. Then

something flamed up inside me as if I were about to create. I closed my

eyes, I concentrated my strength, I entered into an association with my

object, I raised the piece of mica into the realm of that which has

being. And then, Lucas, only then did I feel: I; only then was I. He

that had looked had not yet been I; only this, this being in association

[dieses Verbundene] bore the name like a crown. Now I felt about this

former unity as a marble image might feel about the block from which it

has been carved: it was the undifferentiated, while I was the

unification. As yet I did not understand myself …

“True unity cannot be found, it can only be done.”

And a few pages later: “Can the low tide say I? Or the high tide? But

attribute a spirit to the sea and include in it the unity of low tide

and high tide: that could say I.

“The piece of mica couldn’t; the man looking at it couldn’t; and the

undifferentiated state of the initial look was mere material. But once

their tension had taken form, that which had become associated could.

“What we ordinarily call I is a point of departure and makeshift—a

grammatical fact. But the I of the tension is a work and actuality [Werk

und Wirklichkeit]” (151 f.).

The book ends less than two pages after that—and many of its themes are

taken up again and developed further in Ich und Du. Daniel consists of

five short dialogues, each devoted to one key term, and four of the five

terms recur in the later work: Richtung (direction), Wirklichkeit

(actuality), Sinn (sense), and Einheit (unity). Polarität (polarity) has

been given such a new twist that the word does not reappear in Ich und

Du —except for the Afterword, in which we encounter bipolarity.

[186] The three Italian words may be rendered as she, you, and that one.

Buber writes Vita Nova. The lover and visionary is, of course, Dante.

[187] The meaning is not so clear in the original, but Buber explained

in March 1937 that this was what he meant.

[188] verbinden sieb zu einem Weltleben der Verbundenheit.

[189] das Gespenstische.

[190] In the original, this is one of the most baffling sentences in the

book and has to be construed painstakingly to be understood.

[191] This passage is very similar to the ninth section of the First

Part; see pp. 56ff.

[192] “Redlichkeit” means honesty but has the same root as reden (speak)

and Rede (speech).

[193] “Intimate” (innig) was added in 1957.

[194] alles, das All: elsewhere, das All has been translated as “the

universe.”

[195] A mystic of the Eastern Church who lived around A.D. 1000.

[196] Buber in March 1937: “Nicht renunciation; Versagen ist hier

failing. Nicht confirmation; Bewährung: proving true.”

[197] Max Scheler, Vom Ewigen im Menscben (Berlin 1921; Engl. tr., On

the Eternal in Man, London 1960) contains a section entitled “The

religious act is performed of necessity by every human being.” Here we

find not only the position criticized by Buber but also the phrases he

quotes. The book was written during the brief period when Scheler was a

convert to Roman Catholicism. Soon he abandoned Catholicism and theism,

but in his Philosophische Weltanschauung (1929; he died in 1928) the

point about “idolatry” and smashing idols is repeated in the opening

pages. In the English-speaking world the position attacked by Buber was

made familiar by Tillich who kept restating it in his late works, after

World War II—without giving credit to Scheler and without meeting

Buber’s criticism. Although Tillich’s remarks about idolatry attracted a

good deal of attention, I have not found any comparisons with the

relevant passages in Scheler or Buber. And although I and Thou is a

classic, not one of the scholars I asked knew whom Buber had had in

mind; only Professor Hugo Bergman, Buber’s contemporary and friend,

recalled that the “modern philosopher” was Max Scheler.

For Buber’s interest in Scheler, see especially Werke, Vol. I, pp.

380ff. (Between Man and Man, pp. 181ff.), where idolatry is not

discussed. Tillich’s books contain occasional references to Scheler, but

not to his discussions of idolatry and the ground of being.

[198] wähnt. Until 1957: meint (suppose).

[199] Unwesen can also mean monster, disorder.

[200] “No one can serve two masters … You cannot serve God and mammon”

(Matthew 6:24; cf. Luke 16:13).

[201] “Sozialität.”

[202] Allbeziehung.

[203] Kammerfensters. Buber explained in March 1937 that he was thinking

of a Dachkammer and proposed the English words, “of his garret-window,”

adding (in German): “it is a poor student who lives in a garret; at

night he opens the window and looks out into the infinite dark.”

[204] das in die Fügung Gefügt-sein.

[205] Until 1957: meinen (suppose).

[206] zur Wesenheit aller Wesen.

[207] “Erlebnis.”

[208] Isaish 40:31. “They who wait for the Lord shall renew their

strength” (RSV).

[209] Ecce Homo, in section 3 of the discussion of Zarathustra.

[210] schwer means hard or difficult as well as heavy, and here the

former would be much more idiomatic and preferable if it were not for

the recurrence of the word in the same sentence.

[211] seine Bewährung.

[212] Erlösung … “Lösung.”

[213] Ich bin da als der ich da bin. Before 1957: Ich bin der ich bin.

Both sentences represent attempts to translate the Hebrew Ehyeh asher

ehyey in Exodus 3:14. For an interpretation and discussion of Buber’s

later translation see Kaufmann, Critique of Religion and Philosophy,

section 89.

[214] Das Seiende ist da. Before 1957: Das Seiende ist. Again, the

stress on being there, on being present, was added later.

[215] Buber in March 1937 suggested: “and through the products” and

“fringe?” But “its marginal forms” is closer to ihre Randgebilde.

[216] Eingestaltung: a coinage.

[217] The preceding two words were added in 1957.

[218] bewahrt.

[219] bewährt.

[220] The word twice rendered by “anchoring” is die Bindung, which means

“the binding” but could also mean, in appropriate contexts, cohesion or

obligation. Here the meaning required by the context is a tying down,

but not by way of fettering someone and robbing him of his freedom.

“Anchoring” would seem to capture Buber’s meaning.

The two adjectives in the first part of the sentence are coinages:

bezie-hungsgemässen and mittegeeinten; literally: relation-according and

center-unified.

Where we now have “a human cosmos,” earlier editions, until 1957, had:

“a limitlike, formlike human cosmos, a homelike, houselike world, a

world shelter for man.”

The main problem with this kind of writing is that those who take it

seriously are led to devote their attention to what might be meant, and

the question is rarely asked whether what is meant is true, or what

grounds there might be for either believing or disputing it.

[221] sich mit Gott befasse.

[222] befassen kann er sich freilich mit Gott nicht: the mild irony of

this remark is reinforced by the overtones of befassen. Literally,

befassen means to touch all over. While sich mit etwas befassen (the

idiom used both here and earlier) means to attend to something or occupy

oneself with something, the reflexive sich (oneself) may also suggest,

at least subliminally, touching oneself all over with God.

[223] Buber in March 1937: “besser nur [better only]: reversal to

connexion (nämlich der Welt mit Gott).” These two English nouns were

used throughout the first translation. “Reversal” has many misleading

connotations and lacks the absolutely crucial Biblical overtones of

“return” (see pp. 35ff) and “connexion” is almost equally unfortunate.

Verbundenheit is hard to translate, but we have seen that one of the

paradigms is the relation of the embryo to the mother (see p. 76):

hardly a connection—because our primary associations with “connect” are

inorganic and artificial. Buber did not know English well enough at the

time to realize any of this. Nor could the translation of key terms that

recur frequently throughout the book be changed in page proof. Buber’s

parenthetical gloss has led me to add two words in brackets in the text

above.

[224] An allusion to fragment 17 of the pre-Socratic philosopher,

Empedocles.

[225] Literally: it gives birth to itself.

[226] der stillen: cf. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Part Two, “On Great

Events”: “the greatest events—those are not our loudest but our stillest

hours.”

[227] A reference to Biblical Hebrew: see Exodus 4:16.

[228] lauten beisst umlauten.

[229] realen Augenkraft. Until 1957: wirklichen Augenkraft.

[230] bildendes Schauen.

[231] letzte Einsamkeit.

[232] Verseelung.

[233] Before 1957: geistgefasste instead of menschliche.

[234] Das Wort ist in der Offenbarung wesend is utterly unidiomatic

German, no less than the immediately preceding sentence.

[235] eine nichts als seiende.

[236] The Latin word is found in the Vulgate, e.g., Exodus 12:22.

[237] “vorhanden”: because Buber keeps placing this word in quotes, it

seems reasonable to preserve the image in translation; but in ordinary

German the reference to the hand is not felt strongly, and es ist

vorhanden does not greatly differ from “it exists.” Heidegger makes much

of the same term in Sein und Zeit.

[238] einer Gesprochenheit: as often, Buber coins an abstract noun—of a

spokenness.

[239] die Begriffichkeit.

[240] das grundlegend Faktische sounds much more like a German

philosopher than does the English translation. A “fundamental fact” has

an air of concreteness, while Buber’s phrase successfully avoids any

imaginable content. Similarly, in irgendeinem Grade (in some degree or

other) sounds vaguer than “to some extent”; and weiss … um is much more

solemn than “knows … of” and suggests some profound mystery.

[241] Umfassung.

[242] Geisthaftigkeit … Naturhaftigkeit… Personhaftigkeit. These three

coinages are highly abstract and elusive. The suffix haftigkeit has been

discussed on p. 44f.

[243] Weisung is Buber’s translation of Torah. He entitled his version

of the Pentateuch: Die Fünf Bücher der Weisung. But ein Wegweiser is a

signpost that, literally, points the way. Weisung could also be rendered

as “direction.”

[244] It appeared in 1923.

[245] Zwiesprache (1930). Die Frage an den Einzelnen (1936). Über das

Erzieherische (1926). Das Problem des Menschen (Hebrew, 1943). All

included in Martin Buber, Werke, vol. I: Schriften zur Philosophie

(1962) [and in Between Man and Man (1937)].

[246] Urdistanz und Beziehung (1950). Also in Werke, vol. I.

[247] Elemente des Zwischenmenschlichen (1954). Also in Werke, vol. I.

[248] Über das Erzieherische: see note 2 above.