Janz, B. - Review of Friedman, Martin Buber and the Eternal

8/14/2019 Janz, B. - Review of Friedman, Martin Buber and the Eternal

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Eidos VII, 1June/Juin 1988

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS

MARTIN BUBER AND THE ETERNALMaurice FriedmanNew York: Human Sciences Press, 1986. Pp. 191.

Maurice Friedman has done more than anyone else to make MartinBuber accessible to the English-speaking world. His ambitiousthree volume Martin Buber's Life and Work1 alone would haveguaranteed him that status; the many translations and commentarieshe has produced on Buber's work move the question beyond anydoubt.

While Friedman is clearly the most able and prolific commentator in English on Buber, he is also the most conservative. Hiswork on Buber is that of a true disciple. It is always clear thatBuber is the master, that he has shown us the way to truly authentic existence. Friedman is the defender of the faith against allcritics; of any interpreter of Buber, he is the one that is leastwilling to find fault with Buber, and always seems most affrontedby any challenge to Buber's insights in philosophical anthropology.This should not, however, be taken as a serious criticism of Friedman. It is all too rare in philosophical circles to find someone thatis willing to make a stand with a system of thought, and who isable to defend that system so competently. Nevertheless, one


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94 COMPTES RENDUSshould be aware that Buber will always be given the benefit of thedoubt.

This latest work outlines various themes in Buber's philoso-phy which develop out of religious concerns. As Friedman pointsout, i t would be misleading to speak of Buber's philosophy ofreligion, for strictly speaking he has none. Rather, he has a philo-sophical anthropology which touches on all areas of human exist-ence. For example, Buber's first expression of his mature philo-sophy, I and Thou, is not a book on religion, even though it is shotthrough with religious implications. In the same way, it is not abook on education, or politics, or sociology, or psychology, eventhough it bears implications for each of these areas.

The book is divided into nine chapters, plus an appendixwhich addresses Stanley Hopper's essay "Eclipse of God andExistential Mistrust." Most of the chapters have appeared elsewhere,as essays in journals or volumes on Buber. Friedman is quick totell us, though, that this is not simply a' collection of unrelatedpapers. "It comes together in a gestalt" he says, "an integral state-ment of my understanding of Buber's philosophy of religion and itsimplications for ethics, the history of religion, interreligious dia-logue, and religious education." (MBE1})

Friedman's purpose is to ask religious questions of Buber.The first two chapters are an attempt to outline Buber's dialogicalthought in religious terms by describing dialogue itself, and also byexamining some specifically Biblical themes such as creation, red-emption, and the Messianic hope in (in his words) "existential"terms. He goes from there to address a number of importantquestions in the philosophy of religion: the relationship betweenrevelation and reason, the relationship between religion and ethics,the nature of existential guilt and trust, the nature of the history ofreligion, interreligious dialogue (Oriental, in particular), and reli-gious education.

In some ways the first short chapter is the most important ofthe book. Its purpose is to turn this book into the unified state-ment Friedman hopes for, and this is accomplished by making the


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95OOK REVIEWSdistinction between reflection on universals as the absolute andreflection on the relation between particulars as the absolute. Thisreflection can be in philosophy, psychology, or, as in this case,religion. The essence of Friedman's book is to investigate the waysin which concrete, lived relation provides the rubric for understanding religious questions.

Part of the task of making this distinction explicit involvesclarifying the I-Thou relation. Although this relation has greatintuitive appeal, it is not an easy concept to outline clearly. Thecritics of Buber that Friedman addresses (Hepburn, 45ff; Hopper,165f) have problems with the precise nature of this relation. ForHepburn, the question is over the nature of knowledge that isgained by the I-Thou relation. For Hopper, the I-Thou is a metaphor in which the Thou refers to something apart from the relation.To both of these Friedman insists that the Thou is not somethingpreviously existent, with which I (as also previously existent) havea relationship. The I-Thou relation is the meeting of (in this case)man with the Eternal Thou, which we think of as God.The I-Thou is Buber's primary ontological category. I t seemsstrange, then, that critics of Buber invariably attack him on thispoint. One would expect that this most important of terms wouldbe fairly unambiguous. Yet, this does not seem to be the case.Friedman's account of Buber's philosophy of religion could just aseasily be taken as an attempt to delineate the relation between Iand the Eternal Thou as it occurs in the arenas of ethics, history,biblical interpretation, and interreligious dialogue -- hence, thebook's title. Nevertheless, i t is not clear that, despite his protestations and explanations, this category is all that self-evident.

Theodor Adorno's position on the I-Thou relation is that ithas an "aura" about it that makes it convincing, but that ultimatelyi t is a deceptive concepe It is clear that, for Buber, to be fullyhuman is to have the sort of authenticity that the I-Thou relationdescribes. However, this authenticity is jargon for Adorno. Theobjective content, which includes history, is subsumed in subject


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96 COMPTES RENDUSivity. Put another way, jargon is unable to explain the connectionbetween language and its objective content (JAxiii).

Behind this jargon [of authenticityJ is a determining doctrine of the 1-Thou relationship as the locale of truth:'a doctrine that defames theobjectivity of truth as thingly, and secretly warms up irrationalism. Assuch a relationship, communication turns into that transpsychologicalelement which it can only be by virtue of the objectivity of what iscommunicated; in the end stupidity becomes the founder of metaphysics.(JA16)

The question, Adorno says, is whether we can conceive ofmetaphysical content as being bound to the I-Thou relation. If it isbound to the I-Thou relation, metaphysical content must grow outof the immanent. Adorno's point is that the threshold between thenatural and the supernatural disappears. Because of this, there isan infatuation with the living, and consequently a disregard fordeath. Transcendence is generated out of the fact that spontaneousrelationships between persons cannot be reduced to objective poles.The result of this, Adorno says, is that this sort of existentialismoverelevates the dynamism of mortality into the sphere of immortality (JA17).

Trent Schroyer, who introduced Adorno's Jargon of Authen-ticity, summarizes Adorno's position on the I-Thou relation asthe shift to subjectivity as an in-it-selfness... rohe words are referred tothe immediacy of life, to attitudinal and qualitative aspects of self-experience. One needs only to be a believer; the objective content of belief hasbeen eclipsed in the subjectivization of objective content. To be be aChristian seems to be a personal question - independent from the historical divinity of Christ. Without necessarily intending to do so, thisextreme subjectivity transforms existentialistic language into a mystifiCation of the objective constraints that block the autonomy and spontaneityof the historical subject. (JAxiv)

Whether or not one accepts Adorno's critical theory in general, his response to Buber seems to be well taken. Buber clearlywants to affirm the objectivity of the world, but in the end thedistinction between philosophical reflection and the object of reflec


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97OOK REVIEWStion is blurred, and objective consciousness becomes self experience.The I-Thou relation is what is real, and the poles of the relationonly become real through the relation. However, the relation issubjectivized. I believe that this is what lies at the root of thecriticisms of Buber by Hepburn and Hopper. They are strugglingto find a clear understanding of the nature of the I-Thou relation.Their attempts are found wanting by Friedman, but the philosophical account that he offers is not satisfying either. I-Thou is "meeting", "dialogue", the "between" - but what do these mean? Whileone might admit that there is an intuitive feel for the force of theI-Thou relation, i t seems remarkably difficult to describe it in unambiguous terms.Friedman's main explanatory tool in this book, to illuminatethe force of I-Thou, is to outline it in various concrete arenas. Thisis consistent with the stated intention of the relation, that i t shouldbe between particulars. On the whole, his exposition of the variousplaces in which the I-Eternal Thou relation appears is quite good, i fone takes that relation in the intuitive sense. I was disappointed tosee so little on mysticism (although the index claims that all ofchapter 7 is on the topic). Friedman has a long essay on Buber'srelation to mysticism3 that was reprinted in the first volume ofMartin Buber's Life and Work and which is very good. I realize thatit is probably too much to ask that i t be reprinted again so quickly,but it is much more interesting than his treatment in chapter 7.The only really annoying thing about this book was completely out of the author's control. There were an inordinately largenumber of typographical errors, which the proofreaders shouldhave caught.

Bruce Janz, University of Waterloo


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98 COMPTES RENDUS

NOTES

1. Maurice Friedman, Martin Huber's Ufe and Work: The Early Years 1878-1923 (NewYork: E. P. Dutton, 1982); The Middle Years 1923-1945 (New York: E. P. Dutton,1983); The Later Years 1945-1965 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1984).2. Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity (Evanston, Ill.: NorthwesternUniversity Press, 1973), p. 16-17. Referred to in the text as "JA".3. Friedman, "Martin Buber's Encounter With Mysticism" Human Inquiries: Review ofExistential Psychology and Psychiatry X (1970), 43-81.

Janz, B. - Review of Friedman, Martin Buber and the Eternal

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