Martin Buber's Social and Religious Thought

Alienation and the Quest for Meaning

Laurence J. Silberstein

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1990
• ISBN:
  9780814739686
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

"Moore focuses on Buber's central message about what it means to be a human being, a person of faith, and what mankind can do to overcome the eclipse of God."
— Shofar

"Solid, well researched, and sympathetic…. might well spur a person to go back and read Buber."
— Commonwealth

1
Fin de Siècle Vienna: Cultural Context and Early Writings

Buber and the Crisis of Alienation

While the term alienation has held different meanings in the history of Western thought, it is generally used to describe a condition or experience in which a natural unity, wholeness, or relation in human life has been disrupted.¹

The “facts” to which the term alienation refers are, objectively, different kinds of dissociation, break or rupture between human beings and their objects, whether the latter be other persons, or the natural world, or their own creations in art, science and society.²

The concept of alienation serves as a fruitful and illuminating category around which to organize and integrate Martin Buber’s various writings and social activities. A careful reading of Buber reveals his ongoing concern for the meaningless, fragmented quality of life in the modern world. His books and lectures reflect his concern for the modern person’s estrangement from nature, from other persons, from God, and from his or her own essential being. In his writings, one feels a profound sense of the loneliness, isolation, and meaninglessness of modern life. Throughout his life, Buber endeavored to educate his audience to the alienating conditions of modern life and to point them to the path of liberation from these conditions.³ A vision of abysses permeates Buber’s thought and is a common theme in both his Jewish and his general writings.

Buber’s critique of the alienating conditions of modern life is best understood when read within the context of nineteenth-century existential philosophy and nineteenth- and twentieth-century social thought. Like his existentialist precursors, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Buber was deeply troubled by the dehumanizing effects of modern society. In I and Thou and subsequent writings, he sought to counter the reductionistic, functionalizing trends in modern life and restore the individual to his rightful place as a unique being.

Although these existentialists focused on the personal alienation of the individual, Buber, in the tradition of German sociology, was also troubled by the social forms of alienation resulting from the erosion of communal bonds and the fragmentation of social relations. Like the German social thinkers, he viewed the dominant social structures as conditioning the individual “to see his products, his activities and other men in economic, political, religious and other categories in terms which deny their human possibilities.”⁴ Deeply committed to the renewal of community and the facilitation of direct, confirming relations between people, Buber, like many of his contemporaries, believed that the forms and structures of modern Western society frustrated and impeded such relations.

In his writings on Judaism, Buber addressed the modern Jew’s alienation from the traditions and forms inherited from the past. His discussions of the Bible, Hasidism, Jewish history, and Zionism reflect a profound concern for the modern Jew’s estrangement from the spiritual power of authentic Judaism and reflect his search for an alternative, nonalienated form of Jewish life. In his youth, Buber became personally estranged from the values, norms, and ends that defined the common practices and institutions of traditional Jewish society. Although raised in a traditional Jewish environment, he, like many young Jews, found that institutionalized Judaism failed to instill in him a sense of the spiritual power of Jewish tradition or provide the framework for the communal life he so desperately sought.⁵ Unable to find meaning in the forms and symbols of the official Jewish community, he longed for a life that combined rootedness in an organic community and deep spirituality.

Fin de Siècle Vienna

Like many young intellectuals growing to adulthood in fin de siècle Vienna, Buber found that the rational, liberal worldview in which he had been socialized no longer served to order the sociocultural reality around him meaningfully. Reason, which the older generation viewed as the key to all social and political problems, was, to his generation, a harsh, divisive force that disrupted the unity and wholeness of human existence. In addition, for many young intellectuals and artists, the culture based upon the liberal, rational values of the nineteenth century lacked cohesion and direction. To them, it appeared that all sense of firmness was gone, replaced by a feeling of constant slippage and movement.⁶

Yearning for direct, emotional experiences, young artists and intellectuals rebelled against the values bequeathed by their parents’ generation:

The new culture-makers in the city of Freud thus repeatedly defined themselves in terms of a kind of collective oedipal revolt. Yet the young were revolting not so much against their fathers as against the authority of the paternal culture that was their inheritance. What they assaulted on a broad front was the value system of classical liberalism in-ascendancy within which they had been reared.⁷

Hungry for instinctual expression and satisfaction, a generation of writers and artists, including Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo Von Hofmannsthal, and Stefan Zweig, rebelled against the rational ethos of liberal society. The cultural movement known as Jung Wien, the subject of Buber’s earliest published essay, yearned for wholeness and unity and eagerly sought to recover the primal forces of life suppressed by the analytic spirit of Western rationalism.⁸

Two responses to the disillusionment with nineteenth-century liberal life and rational thought were of particular significance for Buber. In the cultural realm, the suspicion of rational forms led to a growing skepticism regarding language. Writers and poets like Hugo Von Hofmannsthal and Karl Kraus questioned the capacity of language to embrace the wholeness of human experience adequately:⁹

Images and concepts only lead back to themselves. They do not open any way to the nature of things and to individual life. They are a roundelay, similar to a circle in which everything is in tune, everything is in a state of harmony of beauty, but they are “eyeless statues” which surround him, forms without any genuine relation to existence.¹⁰

This skeptical view of language, common among circles of young Viennese intellectuals at the turn of the century, exacerbated their sense of isolation. Without language to provide an accurate reflection of reality, the gap separating the individual from the world appeared greater than ever. At the same time, this skeptical view of language undermined trust in the efficacy of communication, thereby widening the distance between one person and another.

The language skepticism of the Viennese intellectuals was shared by non-Viennese writers, such as Rilke, Kafka, and Musil. While Rilke and Kafka “formulated the problem of existence in terms of the limits of language and the encapsulation of the self,” Musil shared a “pre-war concern with the incapability of language to explain men’s innermost being to others.”¹¹

This skeptical attitude toward language was philosophically formulated by Fritz Mauthner, who had a profound influence on Buber’s close friend and mentor, Gustav Landauer, and whose views are reflected in Buber’s thought.¹² To Mauthner, philosophy was a theory of knowledge based upon a critique of language (Sprachkritik):

Philosophy is theory of knowledge. Theory of knowledge is critique of language (Sprachkritik). Critique of language, however, is labor on behalf of the liberating thought that men can never succeed in getting beyond a metaphorical description of the world utilizing either everyday language or philosophical language.¹³

The reaction against the modern, technologically ordered society was also expressed in the yearning for premodern, organic forms of community. Increasingly despairing of the social order, people turned to the artist and the architect in search of desperately sought truths. The quest for the irrational was expressed in poetry, art, literature, and science, while the newly emerging field of psychoanalysis was laying the foundations for a radical upheaval in Western thought.

Alongside the cultural response, the fin de siècle’s felt need for values rooted in “an archaic, communitarian tradition”¹⁴ evoked a powerful political response among many young European Jews, Buber included. To the chagrin of Jewish and non-Jewish liberals, a Viennese journalist, Theodor Herzl, declared that the hope for the successful integration of Jews into European society was futile. Herzl, whose teachings were to have a profound impact on Buber, proclaimed the failure of liberalism’s program of emancipation and social integration of Jews and called for an independent Jewish homeland.¹⁵

Whatever little faith Buber and his contemporaries retained in the rational beliefs and liberal values inherited from the nineteenth century was destroyed by the trauma of World War I. Throughout Europe, men and women experienced the shattering of a dream. All hopes that individuals could rationally control either their impulses or their technological instruments seemed to disappear with the outbreak of the war:

August, 1914, shattered the foundations of that human world. It revealed that the apparent stability, security and material progress of society had rested, like everything human, upon the void. European man came face to face with himself as a stranger. When he ceased to be contained and sheltered within a stable social and political environment he saw that his rational and enlightened philosophy could no longer console him with the assurance that it satisfactorily answered the question What is Man?¹⁶

Alienation in Buber’s Personal Life

The events of Buber’s personal life, as described in his autobiographical recollections, contributed to his profound sense of alienation. Speaking shortly before his death of “moments that have exercised a decisive influence on the nature and direction of my thinking,” (Schilpp and Friedman, Philosophy of Martin Buber, 3, hereafter referred to as PMB), Buber recalled an event that occurred in his fourth year. The memory, which remained vivid throughout his life, was of his forced separation from his mother following the divorce of his parents.

I still hear how the big girl said to me, “No, she will never come back.” I know that I remained silent, but also that I cherished no doubt of the truth of the spoken words. It remained fixed in me: from year to year it cleaved even more to my heart. (PMB, 3–4)

The loneliness, anxiety, and sense of estrangement that are reflected in this passage appear to have shaped Buber’s overall view of life. In his mind, the separation and estrangement he had personally experienced were characteristic of the lives of all people. Particularly in his later philosophy, this trauma of separation became a paradigm for the human condition:

But after more than ten years, I had begun to perceive it as something that concerned not only me, but all men. Later, I once made up the word “Vergegnung”—“mismeeting,” or “miscounter”—to designate the failure of a real meeting between men. … I suspect that all that I have learned about genuine meeting in the course of my life had its origins in that hour on the balcony. (PMB, 4)

As Erikson has argued, the failure of a child to establish a trusting attitude toward the world can play a decisive role in shaping his or her subsequent psychic development. This trusting attitude is largely dependent on the nurturing love of parents in the early years.¹⁷ Buber’s mother, absent from his life during his entire childhood, played no part in his upbringing following the breakup of the marriage. Moreover, Buber saw his father only occasionally before going to live with him at the age of fourteen.¹⁸ Although I am not suggesting that Buber’s philosophy was solely the result of this traumatic moment in his life, the divorce of his parents obviously shattered the framework from which the young Buber derived his basic sense of trust and security.

Even in the last years of his life, Buber still recalled the decisive transforming impact of his parents’ divorce. The childhood separation from his mother epitomized for him the fragility and precariousness of all human relations. Using Buber’s own terminology, it served as a formative, memory-shaping event, a basic mythic moment in his life.¹⁹ However, in describing the event as the source of his knowledge of genuine meeting, Buber appears to have repressed the negative traces of the experience. As his own words indicate, the event symbolized not meeting but “mismeeting,” “miscounter,” and “the failure of a real meeting between men.” The formative, memory-shaping moment of childhood separation served as a paradigm of the mismeetings between people, the abysses that separate them from one another.

Buber’s grandparents, acting as surrogate parents, did succeed in infusing his early life with stability and security, and his relationship to them was one of warmth, love, and mutual respect. Nevertheless, although the relationship to his grandparents appears to have mitigated the sense of absence brought about by the divorce of his parents, the longing for direct, need-free, loving, confirming relationships nonetheless permeates all of his writings and appears to be traceable in part to this tragedy in his life.

The stability of his grandparent’s home, in which love of Western culture was combined with a reverence for the study of Torah, provided a viable framework of meaning for the young boy. His grandmother’s humane urbanity and his grandfather’s deep commitment to Jewish learning made a lasting impression upon him and had a formative effect upon his own life choices.²⁰ However, as a young adolescent, Buber came to feel estranged from the forms and structures of the traditional Judaism in which he had been raised. His grandfather’s model notwithstanding, this alienation, which manifested itself shortly after the occasion of his becoming a bar mitzvah, culminated in a general alienation from Judaism and from religious faith in general.

So long as I lived with him, my roots were firm, although many questions and doubts also jogged about in me. Soon after I left his house, the whirl of the age took me in. Until my twentieth year, and in no small measure even beyond then, my spirit was in steady and multiple movement, in an alternation of tension and release, determined by manifold influences, taking ever new shape, both without center and without growing substance; it was really the “Olam HaTohu,” the “world of confusion,” the mythical dwelling place of the wandering souls. Here I lived, in virtual fullness of spirit, but without Judaism, without humanity, and without the presence of the divine. (HM...