Beyond Theodicy: Jewish and Christian Continental Thinkers Respond to the Holocaust

3 DIALOGICAL FAITH Martin Buber’s I-Thou Response to Suffering and Its Meaning

39 3 Dialogical Faith Martin Buber’s I-Thou Response to Suffering and Its Meaning JEWISH THINKER MARTIN BUBER is well known as an existentialist philosopher , biblical interpreter, and historian of Hasidic Judaism. His impact on contemporary Jewish thought has been significant and enduring. Moreover, Buber’s I-Thou philosophy has widely influenced Protestant Christian thinkers, such as Rudolf Bultmann, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and Dorothee Soelle.1 His most famous book, I and Thou (1923), defines the dichotomous attitudes of I-Thou and I-It. According to Buber’s definition, faith centers on I-Thou encounter with God and other persons. I-Thou relation is not only essential to faith, according to Buber, but also to society as a whole. It provides a corrective to the increasingly one-sided emphasis on technology and science in the modern world. There are a number of striking similarities between the approaches of Buber and Marcel: both criticize instrumental and technological attitudes pervading society, both oppose theodicy, and both emphasize interpersonal relation as central to faith. As existentialist philosophers, they criticize idealist metaphysics and system building, while they promote philosophical concern with subjectivity and the self’s relations to other persons and the nonhuman world.2 Buber’s approach is distinctive in giving interpersonal relation a communal dimension and an ecological sensitivity not found in Marcel’s philosophy. Reflecting on the Hebrew Bible in his mature work, Buber engages the Jewish tradition and theological issues more extensively than Marcel deals with Christian texts and sources. This chapter cannot cover the full complexity of Buber’s thought nor his wide-ranging corpus. Rather, its focus is on how Buber’s dialogical philosophy militates against theodicy and offers a practical faith response to suffering and the Holocaust. Buber articulates the practical challenge posed by suffering as hinging on the questions: “How can faith survive suffering?” and “Where does religious 40 BEYOND THEODICY meaning in suffering lie?” Suffering raises the problem of the “eclipse of God”: the apparent absence of God that periodically recurs throughout Jewish history, most recently in connection with the Holocaust. Buber responds to evil and suffering by reflecting on narratives taken from biblical texts and Hasidic Jewish writings, where persons of faith face major challenges.3 Generalizing from these accounts, the religious postures that he recommends in the face of suffering are dialogue with God in prayer and I-Thou relations with others in community. T H E D I C H O T O M Y B E T W E E N I - I T A N D I - T H O U A T T I T U D E S The cornerstone of Buber’s philosophy is his distinction between I-It and I-Thou relation as two stances or attitudes with which human beings face the world. The I-It and I-Thou dichotomy, like the contrast between “problem” and “mystery” in Marcel’s work, has its precedent in Kant’s distinction between speculative and practical reason.4 While speculative reason looks scienti fically at objects in terms of their spatial, temporal, and causal properties, practical reason is the realm of freedom and faith in God. It reflects on what is the proper moral stance in relation to other beings. Practical reason postulates faith in the existence of God as a necessary condition of moral relation. Like Marcel’s posture of “having,” Buber’s I-It attitude takes a problemsolving approach toward other beings. I-It theoretical reason studies physical objects and empirical psychology; it is associated with scientific investigation and rationalist metaphysics. In I-It relation, my attitude toward living and nonliving things is detached, objective, analytic, and instrumental. The “other” is conceived as separate from me and as an object under my scrutiny (IT 7).5 This perspective is manifest both in theoretical reflection and in active postures. I may take the I-It stance passively, as an idle observer, or I may act as a researcher or technician manipulating things for scientific purposes . When I take an I-It stance of relation toward others, I analyze their properties, evaluate their usefulness, and can use them as tools at my disposal. Buber admits that it is necessary and useful to abstract properties or attributes from an object (EG 45). The scientific study of persons and objects can be productive for humanity, as the advances of technology demonstrate. Nevertheless, Buber warns that I-It attitudes...