In Search of Martin Buber (II)

In In Search of Martin Buber (I) I discussed my recognition that in some strange way I have been seeming to move beyond religion, with its emphasis on hard-and-fast precepts and sets of mandatory practices, to spirituality, in which precept and practice give way to, shall we say, presence.

Martin Buber's I and Thou

The recognition came in large part by way of my exposure to the philosophy of Martin Buber in his early-twentieth-century book I and Thou and to the worldview of the late astronomer Carl Sagan. To Sagan, though he was an atheist, I attributed the accolade of having stood in I–Thou relation to the cosmos itself, to all that is and ever will be.

Since that last post I have continued to read I and Thou with an eye towards blogging about it on a regular basis — and found all my erstwhile ability to write coherently about such arcane subjects oddly absent in this particular case.

This morning I woke up with, for the first time, an awareness of why. I realized that most of my blogging has been in service to just one partly hidden purpose: to try to persuade myself of something. For example, the stuff I've been posting about Carl Sagan was to persuade myself that Sagan indeed had a deeply spiritual outlook, despite his irreligion, and thus that religion is at best a scaffolding for constructing the cathedral of a "real" truth which lies at its spiritual center.

With Buber, once you develop some sort of rapport with his thought, it's different. Once you "grok" I and Thou — once you achieve complete intuitive understanding of it — it stands as self-evident.

That word, grok, comes from Robert A. Heinlein's 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land. It is the Martian verb for "drink," and figuratively it means "to drink in all available aspects of reality," "to become one with the observed." Buber might say that only a Thou can truly be grokked; we can experience and use an It, we cannot grok it.


I and Thou can only be grokked. It can't really be explained or taught. Explaining and instructing in are actually forms of persuasion. If I explain to you, say, Einstein's theory of relativity, what I am basically intent upon doing is persuading you that your commonsense notions of time, space, and gravity aren't quite true. If I instruct you in Christian belief, I am seeking to persuade you that that Christian belief makes sense.

It isn't that way at all with Buber's thought, which goes right on past truth and sense — which after all are only from the world of It — to encounter. For Buber, the fulcrum of reality is in meeting, by way of whomever or whatever one's own Thou is — for Sagan, it was the entire cosmos — the eternal Thou. The latter is God.

I was about to say, just then, "The latter properly understood is the eternal Thou or God" But that would get the thought all wrong. Understanding, too, is just It. The correct formulation might be, "The latter properly met is Thou." To Buber, the relation between I and Thou, when the two properly meet, is primal. It comes before all else. That relation is not a matter of truth, sense, instruction, persuasion, or anything else from the world of It. It is, basically, a matter of dialogue.


In true dialogue, neither party tries to win the other over. Rather, there is a full sharing of the respective way or path which each party has trodden to arrive at their joint meeting place. To achieve full sharing, there must be mutual and unstinting acceptance of the other party in the exact moment of the I–Thou meeting, which is necessarily nothing other than the immediate present, the now. In the immediate present, an only in it, I and Thou abide together.

Each party to the I–Thou dialogue hallows the other: makes the other holy. Each party hails the other: makes the other hale, or whole in health. Or, what is hailed and hallowed, sanctified and made whole, is always the Thou which is affirmed in the mutual relation between the two parties who meet.

It can be said that the I and the Thou affect one another in this way — that is, they have such an effect on one another — but this is not the word "effect" as commonly used, as in "cause and effect." Cause and effect are from the world of It, not Thou. The I–Thou meeting does not set aside the It-world of cause and effect, the subject of Carl Sagan's beloved scientific understanding of the cosmos. Rather, it takes up into itself the whole of the It-world intact. There is no contradiction here. There is only the contradistinction between the two "attitudes" or "poles" we all have and move between. One attitude or pole gives us the I of I-It, and the other attitude or pole, if and when we manage to "take our stand" in Thou, gives us the entirely different I of I-Thou.

Buber says we can expect to take our stand in Thou only fleetingly and momentarily. The rest of the time, our I is closer to the I of I–It. My reading of that is that our individual I does not merge into an ethereal principle of universal awareness such as Brahman in Hinduism, or Buddha-consciousness in Buddhism. We come face-to-face with God as Thou; we do not "become God." We do not dissolve into something unnameable above and beyond the material world. For this reason, Buber does not care for what he calls "mysticism" or even what he calls "spirituality." Buber's thought could be called the distillation of Western monotheism.


So it would seem that, in view of the above, I actually do have a lot to say about Buber and I and Thou. But it remains hard for me to consider this a form of persuasion. You either grok it or you don't.