My Friendship with Martin Buber

5. Sartre, Heidegger, Jung, and Scholem

60 5 Sartre, Heidegger, Jung, and Scholem In Images of Good and Evil, Buber used both biblical and Zoroastrian myths, which embody directly without passing through any conceptual form what has taken place in the countless human encounters with evil. Buber coupled the primordial mythical intuition of Zoroastrianism with directly experienced reality in such a way as to extend and deepen his philosophical anthropology. Just as importantly, Buber designated two stages of evil, which he had never done before: a first in which evil grows directly out of “decisionlessness,” the failure to find the direction to God by responding with one’s whole being to the concrete situation; and a second in which evil takes the form of a decision made but not with the whole being. In the first stage, unable to bear the difficult path of bringing itself toward unity, the soul clutches at any object past which the vortex happens to carry it and casts its passion upon it, grasping, devouring, compelling, seducing, exploiting, humiliating, torturing , and destroying. This vision of man bowled over as much by possibility as by infinitude is very similar to Kierkegaard’s concept of the origin of sin and the fall in The Concept of Dread. It also stands in a direct line with that threat of infinity that brought the fourteen-year-old Buber close to suicide: the temptation of the creative man to lose himself in infinity, about which SARTRE, HEIDEGGER, JUNG, AND SCHOLEM • 61 Buber wrote when he was twenty-five in “The Day of Looking Back.” In this essay, written at fifty, Buber recalled how Paula had set a limit to his own delusion and madness and helped him make a real decision as a young man with what he called in I and Thou the “fiery stuff” of one’s possibilities that circles around the person who must give direction to the “evil urge” of self-annihilation. In the second stage of evil, the repeated experiences of indecision merge into a fixation that produces a crisis of confirmation. In this stage, that Yes with which others speak to a person, and with which he can speak to himself to free him from the anxiety of loneliness, which is a foretaste of death, is no longer spoken. In a pinch, one can do without the confirmation of others, but not without the confirmation of oneself. Those who become pathologically fragile in their relationship to themselves extinguish the image of what they are intended to be in favor of an absolute selfaffirmation that says, “What I say is true because I say it and what I do is good because I do it.” It was undoubtedly Buber’s experience with the Nazis and with the war in Palestine that led him to deepen his view of evil to include this second stage. The great significance of this second stage of evil for Buber’s thought is its concrete base in human existence that makes understandable such extreme phenomena as Hitler and the Nazis without resorting to the dogma of original sin or agreeing with Sartre’s assertion that the events of the early twentieth century made it necessary to recognize evil as absolute and unredeemable. Less than ten years later, during the trial of Adolf Eichmann, looking at the pictures and reading the description of Eichmann during his trial, I thought of what Buber had asserted in Good and Evil about the product of this crystallized inner division: “They are recognizable, those who dominate their own self-knowledge, by the spastic pressure of the lips, the spastic tension of the muscles of the hand and the spastic tread of the foot.”1 62 • MY FRIENDSHIP WITH MARTIN BUBER In his lecture on Sartre and Heidegger, which he delivered in New York, Buber quoted Sartre as saying that there is no universe other than that of human subjectivity and that man must recognize himself as the being through whom the universe exists. This sounded like the thesis of a resurrected idealism, Buber argued. If God is silent toward man and man toward God, “then something has taken place not in human subjectivity, Sartre to the contrary, but in Being itself. It would be worthier not to explain it to oneself with sensational and incompetent sayings, such as that of the death of God, but to endure it as it is and at the same time to move existentially...