writings of the nineteen forties and fifties
But how, according to Buber, could there be a transition from a human condition now almost incapable of entering into a relation with God as the eternal Thou and with the other finite Thou’s, to a human condition in which this relation will again take place in all aspects of life and in all its intensity? In some of his writings published in the 1940s and 1950s he indicates two paths that might allow man to become aware of religion as the realm of true, authentic human existence. InDas Problem des Menschen¹⁴ he meditates on philosophy –a philosophy, however, that is not separated from the philosopher’s subjectiv-ity, that unifies the individual and the universal, and that bears in mind man’s concrete, everyday existence, and the multiplicity of his rational and non-ration-al experiences. In this book Buber identifies the foundations of this kind of phi-losophy in Plato, Kant and Husserl. Pondering these philosophers’ anthropolog-ical insights regarding the overarching question“What is Man?”, we are made aware of man’s simultaneous social essence and infinity, in spite of his living
Martin Buber,Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation between Religion and Philosophy(New York: Harper & Row, 1952).
Martin Buber,Das Problem des Menschen(Heidelberg: Verlag Lambert Schneider, 1947).
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in the world bounded by time and space: religion and a religious life, as under-stood by Buber, could be renewed if we attune ourselves to the insights of these philosophers who, in the history of philosophical thought, point out the anteri-ority and superianteri-ority of ethical life–which allows human beings to arrive at the Absolute–with respect to theoretical knowledge and science. InZwei Glaubens-weisen¹⁵Buber appeals to the conception of faith informing both in the Old and the New Testament as a way to understand what religion truly is: faith is chiefly emuna(trust) for the Jewish people, that is to say it includes the elements of God’s promises and commandments, the people’s love of God, and the relation-ship between God and the people founded on a covenant; faith is above allpistis (knowledge) for the Christian community which affirms the truth manifest in Jesus Christ’s Incarnation, Passion and Resurrection; however, both the Jewish people as the foundation or root, and the Christian community as the outgrowth or tree, share an attitude which allows them to attain a genuine religious life.
Therefore, an attentive reading of their history, as narrated in Scripture, promises to point to a way out of the solitude and egotism in which human beings find themselves in contemporary society beholden, as it is, to secular philosophy and culture.
It is possible that Buber’s interpretation of Husserl’s philosophy inDas Prob-lem des Menschenwas significantly influenced by Hans Jonas’s interpretation of Husserlian phenomenology in his commemorative article on Husserl’s death.¹⁶ Shortly after Buber settled in Jerusalem in March 1938, Jonas delivered a com-memorative address at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in which he charac-terized Husserl’s phenomenological method as underlining the role of theEgoin the constitution of being and as an agent of Reason’s self-responsibility. Reason is, for Husserl, not an abstract faculty of producing ideas, but originates in the human heart, belongs to every individual, and embraces in itself the various ways of giving form to objects. Husserl, for Jonas, marks the consummation of a philosophical tradition which begins with Parmenides and Plato and continues with Descartes, Kant, Hegel; he is the most radical and rigorous thinker in this tradition because of his obedience to the ethical imperative of uninterrupted self-justification. Hence the originality and novelty of his teachings.
It is possible that Buber’s interpretation of Jewish and Christian faith draws significantly on the conception of the dialectical relationship between Judaism and Christianity– “the fire and the rays” –that Rosenzweig expounded inDer
Martin Buber,Zwei Glaubensweisen(Zürich: Manesse, 1950).
Hans Jonas,“Edmund Husserl and the Ontological Problem,”Moznaim, 1938, VII, pp. 581–
89 (Hebrew).
110 Irene Kajon
Stern der Erlösung(1921).¹⁷We know from Jonas himself that Buber was in close contact with him from 1938 onwards;¹⁸and Buber himself, in his biblical exege-sis inZwei Glaubensweisen, which takes up the main themes he had developed together with Rosenzweig in their joint reflection on the translation of the He-brew Bible into German,¹⁹demonstrates an intimate knowledge of Rosenzweig’s concept of the similarity-difference between Christianity and Judaism, presented in hismagnum opus.²⁰
Nevertheless, beyond Buber’s relation with other Jewish philosophers, what is particularly important is to emphasize that regardless whether he appeals to philos-ophy or to biblical faith as paths which can give new life to religion, he never sep-arates affective life from thought: true philosophers and true believers are engaged in reality with their total being.Religioitself involves receiving in love, feeling active-ly, and thinking. But, all in all, for Buber access to religion does not depend so much on the reading of books, however important and meaningful these can be.
Life is much more instructive than books.²¹ In order to reclaim religion as the ground of true existence, we must make an effort to work, to speak, to be in touch with other human beings in the name of the divine Thou, even if contempo-rary social conditions, given the primacy of the I-It relations, renders this effort dif-ficult. Only the event of the“between”(Zwischen) can preserve our humanity. In-deed, for Buberhomo religiosuscoincides withhomo tout court.
Cf. Franz Rosenzweig,Der Stern der Erlösung(1921), part 3. Rosenzweig writes in a letter of January 4, 1922 to his wife Edith that he knows that Buber read theStern, but was not as inter-ested in the second part, dealing with the relationship between man and God, as one might ex-pect.Der Mensch und sein Werk. Gesammelte Schriften(Haag/Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976– 84), vol. 1.2. From Rosenzweig’s letter to Eugen Rosenstock, letter dated August 28, 1924, ibid., we learn that Buber was interested in the third part.
Cf. Hans Jonas,Erinnerungen(Frankfurt a. M.: Insel, 2003), 441–42.
Cf. Martin Buber–Franz Rosenzweig,Die Schrift und ihre Verdeutschung(Berlin, 1936). Buber refers to this book when inZwei Glaubensweisenhe deals with the key words (Motiv-Worte) in the Bible, its ethical teachings, its representation of idolatry, and its concept of“spirit”(ruach).
Like Rosenzweig inDer Stern der Erlösung, part 3, Buber regards the center of Christianity to be the faith in Jesus Christ, which he deems essential to Christian evangelical mission, which implicitly posits that space and time are unredeemed, if not conquered by eternity. Buber attributes this con-ception of Christianity to Paul and promoting a species of Gnosticism. He further argues that the relation between the Jewish concept of divine love and the Greek concept of Logos in John’s Gospel prepares the way to the negation of God’s transcendence, the source of the neo-Gnosticism that af-flicts the modern world. Cf. particularly,Zwei Glaubensweisen, preface, chapters 4, 13–16.
Cf. Martin Buber,Autobiographische Fragmente, Anhang: III. Bücher und Menschen, inMartin Buber, ed. Paul A. Schilpp and Maurice Friedman (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1963), 32–33.
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