Turning to the Other. Donovan D. Johnson
Buber struck up a friendship with Franz Rosenzweig, who was his equal as a German-Jewish thinker, although eight years his junior. Rosenzweig invited Buber to deliver a series of lectures at the Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus, the Independent Jewish Study Center, in Frankfurt, and Buber surprised himself by accepting the opportunity. Accordingly, Buber prepared and delivered eight lectures on “Religion as Presence” in the winter of 1922. The focus and coherence required for this effort gave him the necessary language that catapulted him into composing the final version of I and Thou that spring. As Buber stated in the postscript to I and Thou, “Then when I achieved the appropriate language with which to express the vision, I was free to write it down in its final form.”136 Buber later claimed he was in an exalted state of mind when he wrote the final draft of I and Thou: “At that time I wrote what I wrote in an overpowering inspiration. And what such inspiration delivers to one, one may no longer change, not even for the sake of exactness.”137
Ellenberger points out that because the person has undergone such an intense spiritual adventure, he “attributes a universal value to his own personal experience”: he takes what he has learned through his own lived experience as a great truth of universal value which must be proclaimed to mankind.138 Like others who have undergone a period of creative withdrawal, Buber claims that the principle of dialogue as ontological is universal by nature:
In all ages, it has clearly been intuited that the reciprocal essential relation between two beings signifies a primal opening of Being. . . . And it has repeatedly been intuited that when one steps into essential reciprocity, the human being becomes revealed as human. That is, in this way he arrives at the authentic participation in Being that lies in store for him and that therefore the saying of Thou by the I stands at the origin of all individual human becoming.139
Only when he was finishing the third and last part of I and Thou in the spring of 1922 was Buber able to break out of his constricted focus, his “ascesis of reading.” It was then he began to see “the almost uncanny similarity with which people of the time, in spite of diverse styles and traditions, had set off on comparable quests for the buried treasure of dialogical thinking.”140 His own “quest for the buried treasure” had been his period of withdrawal and ascesis which made possible his book, I and Thou.
I had known precursors such as Feuerbach and Kierkegaard in my student days . . . Now a growing number of people in the present generation surrounded me who to varying degrees were focused on the one thing that had ever more become my “life-theme.” I already had a sense of this in the distinction between a reifying stance and a making present in Daniel in 1913 which was the seed of the distinction between I-It and I-Thou in I and Thou. The latter was no longer grounded in the realm of subjectivity but in “the between.” This is the decisive transformation that came to fullness for a number of thinkers during the period around the First World War. The commonality of our thinking emerged out of the fundamental shift in the human situation of that era.141
With this account, Buber put his own transformation in the context of a larger, emerging cultural pattern, that brought about by the universal change of circumstances resulting from the First World War.
Ellenberger points out that, as a result of the person’s solitary struggle to understand, he has won a boon to share with humanity: he “is convinced that he has gained access to a new spiritual world, or that he has attained a new spiritual truth . . . a universal truth . . . that he will reveal to the world.”142 In the process he has been transformed through a deep-reaching metamorphosis: he has become the person who can and must do the work of disseminating the gift, the key concept he has uncovered. The discovery becomes the basis of his life’s work, for his task becomes to explain and elaborate the vision that has come to him.143 Like others who had undergone a period of creative withdrawal, Buber returned from it with a new book, I and Thou, and a new basis for his further work, the work of elaborating his hard-won vision. Some time after completing I and Thou, Buber stated “it became clear that much was needed to complete the picture but that that work had to find its own place and form. As a result, I wrote a number of shorter pieces” to clarify and develop the breakthrough vision expressed in I and Thou. “Later, further material, whether anthropological foundations or sociological consequences, came to me as well.”144
In Ellenberger’s history of the unconscious, Freud and Jung were two of those who, as the outcome of such a process, produced the breakthrough books that became the foundations of their mature theories and made possible their contributions to human advancement. As persons who have undergone a creative illness, an initiatory period without a guide or mentor, such persons become pathfinders who lay down means for others to pursue a similar path.145
For a time Buber considered making the following words the motto of I and Thou, showing that he saw the book as the distillation and manifesto of his newly emerging vision and as the foundation for his continuing work: “This book presents the beginning of a way that I intend to continue in and in which I intend to lead others.”146 Buber’s use of the word “Weg,” way or path, here emphasizes the existential, concrete, lived quality of his work as witness, as opposed to the abstractness of a merely conceptual-discursive philosophical construct.
Thus, Buber underwent a period of creative withdrawal, characterized by both the preoccupation and the breakthrough Ellenberger described, which was the process that led to I and Thou. For Buber, the death of his closest friend, Gustav Landauer, precipitated this period.
5. Spiritual Initiation: Transmission of the Transcendent
In a late summative statement Buber shows how he was ready to transmit his spiritual awakening to others at mid-life. He writes of his having “matured to a life” through the experiences of his watershed years.147 This was the completion of his initiation, his struggle to win “a relationship to being . . . only after long and diverse but always productive journeys through decisive personal experiences.”148 This process brought him “from a timeless and languageless sphere into the sphere of the moment,” the immediacy of dialogical existence, “where between one tick of the clock and the next everything depends on perceiving what is being said to one, now, in one of the innumerable languages of life, and on answering in a language appropriate to the situation.”149 This completion of his transformation brought forward the imperative to proclaim it: “I stood under the duty to insert the framework of the decisive experiences that I had at that time [1914–1919] into the human inheritance of thought.”150 Buber continues: “[M]y communication . . . had to relate the unique and particular to the ‘general,’ to what is discoverable by every man in his own existence. . . . I am convinced that it happened not otherwise with all the philosophers loved and honored by me . . . after they had completed the transformation [i.e., their spiritual initiation].”151 With these words Buber may have had Plato’s famous passage on initiation in mind:
There is no writing of mine about these matters, nor will there ever be. For this knowledge is not something that can be put into words like other studies. Acquaintance with it must come rather after a long-continued intercourse between teacher and student in joint pursuit of the subject, when, suddenly, like a blaze kindled by a leaping spark, it is born in the soul and at once nourishes itself.152
With Platonic initiation, as with Buber’s, the knowledge that is transmitted cannot be expressed in words. This knowing comes through long, focused effort and it manifests itself as “a leaping spark” which goes from master to initiate, a flame which becomes self-sustaining in the soul of the initiate. In this regard, Buber’s prescribed method of spiritual reading as the reader’s entering into dialogue with a master was autobiographical.153
The grounds of Buber’s initiation lay in the life of the Baal-Shem-Tov, the man whose life was a vehicle for transmitting the Hasidic teaching to his disciples so they could become his successors. Buber shows the moment of transmission in the story of Rabbi Susya and his disciples on a day between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur: “He raised his eyes and heart to heaven and freed himself from all corporeal bonds. Looking at him awakened in one of the disciples the impulse to the turning, and the tears rushed down his face; and as from a burning ember the neighboring coals begin to glow, so the flame of the turning came over one man