I & Thou

The visiting philosopher walked into a New York barbershop, sat down in a chair, and, while the scissors clicked away, he closed his eyes, deep in thought. Before he realized what was happening, most of his thick, long beard was gone. The philosopher was Martin Buber, the world's leading Jewish thinker. Today Buber's beard has grown back to its full splendor, and he once more looks like what he is: a modern Jewish patriarch.

Vienna-born Martin Buber, 77, lives in Jerusalem, where he taught philosophy at the Hebrew University from 1938 until his retirement five years ago. Long a prominent Zionist thinker, he is now at odds with the Israeli government, and the splinter group of which he is a leader (Ihud, meaning Union) is almost the only voice in Israel advocating cooperation with the Arabs. But Buber's main achievement lies in his tense, paradoxical, spiritual philosophy that has perhaps been as influential among Christian theologians, e.g., Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, as among Jews. A new book,

Martin Buber, the Life of Dialogue, by Philosophy Professor Maurice S. Friedman of Sarah Lawrence College (University of Chicago; $6) is the first comprehensive study of Buber's thought.

Meaning v. Thought. Buber's work is influenced by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky. It is also inspired by an 18th century Jewish movement called Hasidism. The modern Hasidism (from the Hebrew hasid, meaning pious) sprang up in the Polish ghettos and followed the zaddikim, or holy men, who rebelled against excessive emphasis on law and scholarship, which seemed to confine Judaism. They were cheerful mystics who insisted on sharing their personal inspirations with the whole community. Buber, a leading collector of Hasidic lore, is in a sense himself a zaddik. He too rebels against the overrigid emphasis on the law. But he has also moved away from the "enlightenment" of 18th and 19th century Jewish thinkers (which led to Reform Judaism). He distrusts all philosophical systems. His is less a way of thinking about God than of personally relating to Him.

Buber points always to the duality of things--good v. evil, love v. justice, order v. freedom. But he offers no happy middle way between them. Man must not try to choose either--or, nor may he pretend that no real contradiction exists; he can only accept the tension of both opposites. "According to the logical conception of truth," he says, "only one of two contraries can be true, but in the reality of life as one lives it they are inseparable. I have occasionally described my standpoint to my friends as the 'narrow ridge.' I wanted by this to express that I did not rest on the broad upland of a system that includes a series of sure statements about the absolute, but on a narrow, rocky ridge between the gulfs, where there is [only] the certainty of meeting what remains undisclosed."

Buber formulates his position in terms of two philosophical catch phrases: I-It and I-Thou.

I-It stands for the relationship of a human being to an object. The object may be another human being, as when an employer treats his workers merely as machines. Even in what appears to be love there may by an I-It relationship, as when lovers find in each other only a projection of themselves. Similarly, I-It appears in religion, as when man uses God merely for his peace of mind, or abstracts Him in complicated logical systems, or regards Him as so large and overpowering that He is out of reach. Buber refuses to see God as the "wholly Other" of Swiss Theologian Karl Barth or the "Mysterium Tremendum" of German Theologian Rudolph Otto. "Of course God is the 'wholly Other,' " Buber writes, "but He is also the wholly Same, the wholly Present. Of course He is the Mysterium Tremendum that appears and overthrows, but He is also the mystery of the self-evident, nearer to me than my I."

I-Thou stands for the kind of meeting --love or even hate--in which two beings face and accept each other as truly human. This produces what Buber calls a dialogue--a fusion of action and response, of choosing and being chosen--that engages man's highest qualities. But I-It relationships are necessary for the everyday world. For I-Thou meetings are "strange, lyric and dramatic episodes, seductive and magical, but tearing us away to dangerous extremes, loosening the well-tried context . . . shattering security." Therefore, says Buber, modern man tries to escape from I-Thou in many ways, notably through collectivism, which Buber calls "the last barrier raised by man against a meeting with himself."

Ultimately, Buber applies the I -Thou idea to man's meeting with God, whom he calls the "Eternal Thou." This confrontation, says Philosopher Friedman, is "perhaps best understood from the nature of the demand which one person makes on another if the two of them really meet . . . If you are to meet me, you must become as much of a person as I am . . . In order to remain open to God [man] must change in his whole being."

Job v. God. Perhaps Buber's greatest merit is that, almost alone among modern Jewish thinkers, he has returned to the intensely personal dialogue with God that is characteristic of the Old Testament and existed among the sages and rabbis before the Middle Ages. In their writings God often sounds like a member of the family to be submitted to but nonetheless argued with: "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him," said Job, "but I will maintain mine own ways before him."

The man of faith, says Buber, must' walk the narrow ridge, "avoiding the abyss of self-affirmation on the one hand and self-denial on the other." Author Friedman cites a Hasidic saying: "Everyone must have two pockets, so that he can reach into the one or the other, according to his needs. In his right pockei are to be the words: 'For my sake the world was created,' and in his left: 'I am dust and ashes.' "

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