The Problem of Unity in the Thought of Martin Buber

The Problem of Unity in the Thought of Martin Buber ELLIOT WOLFSON MAURICEFRIEDMANHAS SUGGESTEDTHAT Martin Buber's thought "can best be understood as a gradual movement from an early period of mysticism through a middle period of existentialism to a final period of developing dialogical philosophy."' The common denominator of these stages seems to me to be Buber's unyielding concern with the problem of unity in multiplicity. In Daniel: Dialogues on Realization (1913) Buber wrote: "All wisdom of the ages has the duality of the world as it subject; its point of departure is to know it, its goal is to overcome it. However it names the two forces that it makes known-spirit and matter, form and material, being and becoming, reason and will, positive and negative element, or with any of the other pairs of names--it has in mind the overcoming of their tension, the unification of their duality.''2 It is clear that from early on Buber was preoccupied with the possibility of overcoming this state of conditionality. "Unity," he wrote in 1914, "is not a property of the world but its task. To form unity out of the world is our neverending work."3 This interest abided throughout Buber's literary career, from the nascent mystical teaching of unity (Einheitslehre) to the more developed philosophy of realization (Verwirklichung), to, finally, the mature philosophy of dialogue (Zwiesprache). The manner through which the unity was to be established, however , varied with each stage of his thought. In his mystical stage Buber mainmined that unity was found in the subjective experience of ecstasy whereby the individual transcends the conditional world of space and time. In his existential MauriceFriedman, Martin Buber: The Life ofDialogue (Chicago:The Universityof Chicago Press, 1955),27- " Daniel: Dialogueson Realization, trans. M. Friedman (NewYork: Holt,Rinehart, and Winston , 1964), 136. s "With a Monist,"in Pointing the Way, trans, and ed. M. Friedman (NewYork: Schocken Books, 1957),3o. [423] 424 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 27:3 JULY ~989 stage Buber held that unity was not found but rather created by the individual confronting the world with all his uniqueness. In his dialogical stage Buber claimed that unity is realized--continuously and never absolutely--in the "Between ," i.e., in the meeting of two beings who nevertheless remain distinct. It is to the unfolding of this development that we now set out. 1. Reflecting on his mystical period in 1938, Buber wrote: Since 19oo I had first been under the influence of German mysticism from Meister Eckhart to Angelus Silesius, according to which the primal ground of being, the nameless , impersonal godhead, comes to "birth" in the human soul [in der Menschen-seele zur "Geburt" kommt]; then I had been under the influence of the later Kabbala and of Hasidism, according to which man has the power to unite the God who is over the world with his shekhinah dwelling in the world. In this way there arose in me the thought of a realization of God through man [einer Verwirklichung Gottes durch den Menschen]; man appeared to me as the being through whose existence the Absolute, resting in its truth, can gain the character of reality.4 This passage is significant for it contains what is perhaps the most important theme of Buber's pre-dialogical thought: man is the being through whom God is realized. Buber, as we shall see, entirely abandoned this idea in his mature thinking. That he nevertheless wholeheartedly affirmed it in his youth is clear from a passage such as this: "God does not want to be believed in, to be debated and defended by us, but simply to be realized through us."s Yet one must wonder: what did Buber really intend by these words? In his mystical phase he would have answered: God is realized through the experience of ecstasy (das Erlebnis der Ekstase). No sooner have we answered our first question, however, than a second confronts us: why is such an experience considered by Buber God-realizing? To answer this we must heed the precise meaning of the term under consideration. Ecstasy, as Buber himself reminds us in the introduction to his anthology of...