Martin Buber

Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent (Jewish… by Paul Mendes-Flohr

Book Review
Martin Buber by Paul Mendes-Flohr

A comprehensive biography of one of the most influential philosophers and intellectuals of the 20th century.

Born in Vienna, Austria in 1878 to an observant Jewish family his life was interrupted when at 3 years of age his mother abandoned the family running away with a Russian Army officer. He was sent to his paternal grandparents living in Lvov, Poland. His grandfather was a well-to-do officer of a large bank and a highly regarded scholar of Midrash and the Jewish Enlightenment. As he entered University Buber broke away from Jewish observance to study philosophy.

In his early 20s he developed an interest in Jewish culture as the true source of Jewish values and spiritual growth. His first extensive study and writing was about the Hasidic community and mythology, followed by an intense involvement lecturing Jewish students in the Jewish tradition, culture and Zionism as an avenue to reviving this spirit. He took a strong stance against the political nationalistic trend in Zionism and became a lifelong advocate to make Palestine a home for both Jews and Arabs.

Blessed with a curiosity, intellect and open mindedness Buber interacted with other renowned figures from a wide range of fields of study. He spent time interacting with the famous Sinologist Richard Wilhelm who helped introduce the I Ching to western readers and amongst his group were also Hermann Hesse and Carl Jung. He interacted with other religious philosophers such as Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, the German cleric Romano Guardino, Albert Schweitzer, the Jewish mystic Gershom Scholem, and Joseph Campbell, the mythologist..

His best friend and early influence was Gustav Landauer, a leading anarchist whose murder at the hands of anti-revolutionaries (post WW I) left Buber with a great sense of sadness and trauma and as he processed his feelings developed his monumental theories related to dialogue culminating in his masterpiece I and Thou. It was during those years and the advent of Nazi Germany that Buber’s voice became better known and influential. An interesting sidebar is that the famous American film director, Mike Nichols, was the grandson of Landauer; in the 1950s, when Buber, now in his 70s, lecturing in the US, sought Nichols out for a meeting when he visited Chicago.

In the field of literature, he had significant contact/influence with Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, Stefan Zweig, Walter Benjamin and Jorge Luis Borges. Mendes-Flohr relates how Kafka, struggling with understanding the themes in his work The Trial, took a train form Prague to Berlin to specifically consult with Buber. His inquiry regarded Buber’s comments on Psalm 82 in which the world is given over by God to judges who “judge unjustly and lift up the force of the wicked”. Buber later commented on Kafka’s work: “His unexpressed, ever present theme is the remoteness of the judge, the remoteness of the lord of the castle, the hiddenness, the eclipse”. Kafka’s theme of the meaningless government and a cold bureaucracy Buber states, “from the hopelessly strange Being who gave this world into their impure hands, no message of comfort or promise penetrates to us. He is, but he is not present”.

These very same themes were later amplified when following the Holocaust Buber wrote, “it is difficult for the individual, and all the more so for the people, to understand themselves as addressed by God; the experience of concrete answerability recedes more and more…in a seemingly God-forsaken space of history”. Buber had escaped Germany with his family intact in 1938 and lived out the rest of his life as a teacher and scholar, a self-described, philosophical anthropologist, in Jerusalem. While first avoiding travelling back to Germany in the early 1950s and along with lectures throughout Europe and the US he travelled to Germany to receive the prestigious Goethe Prize and in Netherland The Erasmus Prize. He was also nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature by the 1949 recipient Hermann Hesse and shortly before his death by Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary General of the United Nations who was moved after reading I and Thou. Unfortunately, Dag was killed in a plane accident before his nomination had been formally introduced.

Paul Mendes-Flohr nicely summarizes the concept of I and Thou:
“The human person, Buber believed, achieves the fullness of being by experiencing both modes of existence. Through the I-It mode, one enters the objective world, conditioned by the laws of nature. Modern epistemology and science account for the complex physical, historical, and sociological factors that structure objective reality; the knowledge and insights these disciplines provide help us navigate through the labyrinthine I-It world called ‘reality’. But to obtain the fullness of life, we must through I-Thou relationships relate to much of the world, chiefly our fellow human beings, not as It (an object) but as Thou, each an autonomous subject with a distinctive inner reality. It is our ‘sublime melancholy’ that we are always dwelling in both the realm of necessity (the I-It world) and that of freedom (the realm of I-Thou relations).”

Of affinity to Buber’s approach is his humility and gentleness. Regarding his role as teacher he states: “I only point to something…in reality that had not, or had too little been seen. I take him who listens to me by the hand and lead him to the window. I open the window and point to what is outside. I have no teaching but carry on a conversation”. As a psychotherapist myself I was particularly drawn to this quote for I have found that this approach is helpful in helping the other find their own answers. Indeed Buber himself had an interest in psychiatry, psychology and analysis as witnessed by his lectures to the William Allison White Institute of Psychoanalysis in 1957 and his dialogue, the same year, with Carl Rogers, the humanistic psychologist at the University of Michigan ( a dialogue whose transcript was published by SUNY in 1997).

Along this same line, humility and gentleness, Medes-Flohr relates how the
great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, “recalling a bon mot of Ralph waldo Emerson that ‘arguments convince nobody’, he remarked ‘when something is merely said or-better still-hinted at, there is a kind of hospitality in our imagination. We are ready to accept it. ‘I remember reading’, Borges continues, ‘the works of Martin Buber-I thought of them as being wonderful poems. Then, when I went to Buenos Aires, I read a book by a friend of mine, and found in its pages, much to my astonishment, that Martin Buber was a philosopher and that all his philosophy lay in the books because they came to me through poetry, through suggestion, through the music of poetry, and not as arguments’.”

Despite this Buber did not shy away from conflicts or disagreements. He articulated his beliefs and warnings when confronted with the aftermath of Nazism and with his fellow Zionists, aware of “the destructive potential of messianic political fantasies…alarmed by Ben Gurion’s view of Zionism as the fulfillment of the Hebrew prophet’s vison”. Though this was true he remained respected by all and at the time of death he was honored universally for his writings, teachings and lectures pointing to the need for people to seek dialogues of true understanding and mutual respect.

One could go on. This book is packed solid with numerous events in the miraculous life of Martin Buber. Unmentioned in the above review was the amazing love he and his wife, Paula, had for one another. Despite her not being Jewish, she supported fully his endeavors and in many ways was both his spiritual and intellectual equal. Eventually converting to Judaism, she died suddenly in 1958 following an extensive foreign lecture series and was hastily buried in the 12th century Jewish Cemetery on the Lido in Venice, Italy. Buber died 7 years later and is buried in Jerusalem.

This biography is a great work of scholarship and love and should be widely read as an inspiration to a very special human being.

Sounds terrific!