In Search of Martin Buber (III)

Martin Buber's I and Thou

I continue to explore the philosophy of Martin Buber and his early-twentieth-century book I and Thou, along with how that outlook compares with the worldview of the late astronomer Carl Sagan. My previous installment in this series was In Search of Martin Buber (II).

To Sagan — though he was a non-believer in the God of his Judaic heritage — I attribute the accolade of having stood in I–Thou relation to the cosmos itself, to all that is and ever will be. Buber, who was a practicing Hasidic Jew, wrote (see p. 79 of the Ronald Gregor Smith translation, not the Walter Kaufman translation pictured here): "When you hallow this life you meet the living God." No one hallowed this life more than Carl Sagan.

I think Sagan was in contact with what Buber calls "the eternal Thou"; though irreligious, Sagan partook of what Buber terms "man's sense of Thou" via his scientific wonder and awe. Hence his cherishing of this vast cosmos we call the universe surely turned into, in Buber's words, "a discovering of the primal, of origin."

Buber writes of such a discoverer: "His sense of Thou, which cannot be satiated until he finds the endless Thou, had the Thou present to it from the beginning; the presence had only to become wholly real to him in the reality of the hallowed life of the world" (p. 80).

Carl Sagan's The Demon- Haunted World

Sagan wrote, in The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark:

"Spirit" comes from the Latin word "to breathe." What we breathe is air, which is certainly matter, however thin. Despite usage to the contrary, there is no necessary implication in the word "spiritual" that we are talking of anything other than matter (including the matter of which the brain was made), or anything outside the realm of science. ... Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or of acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both. (pp. 29-30).

Buber, for his part, held that "the world of sense does not need to be laid aside as though it were illusory. There is no illusory world, there is only the world — which appears to us as twofold in accordance with our twofold attitude" (p. 77). Or, again, "God cannot be inferred in anything — in nature, say, as its author, or in history as its master, or in the subject [i.e., the human person] as the [basis of the] self ... . Something else is not 'given' and God then elicited from it; but God is the Being that is directly, most nearly, and lastingly, over against us [i.e., it is God who most immediately faces us], that may properly only be addressed, not expressed" (pp. 80-81). It is this non-inferred, non-elicited, immediate God whom I think Sagan encountered.


So I think Buber and Sagan are saying the same things in different words. I think of it this way: the eternal Thou, God, whom we can address only in dialogue, can be engaged in many, albeit disparate, ways: religion, spirituality, science. If the stand we take (i.e., if our relational "attitude") is a proper one, the dialogue is real. Otherwise, we simply face nothingness.

It is as if there were an extra axis to reality. There are manifestly three axes of visible space, each orthogonal — at right angles — to the others. Science sees those. But there is also an axis of relationship, above and beyond length, breadth, and height. It is orthogonal to the other three ... which of course cannot be so unless you imagine an extra, unseen, spirit dimension, in a four-dimensional reality.

The "things" from which Buber says God cannot in any way be inferred or elicited exist entirely in the three non-spiritual dimensions. Science studies them and figures out how those things are produced by ordinary causes and effects. Meanwhile, our morality and ethics concern how we act in this, the material world of It — to use Buber's terms — rather than the relational world of Thou.

Reality's "extra" axis of relationship and dialogue — whenever we acknowledge our spiritual birthright and step forth along it toward the Thou — makes no difference to the material, causal world. Rather, it simply turns It into Thou for us. That ineffable act of stepping forth: it at one and the same time makes no difference materially and makes all the difference spiritually.


If morality and ethics relate only to the material domain of reality, does "being spiritual" excuse us from moral exigencies? Not at all. The domain of I-Thou relationality is distinct from morality, that's all. Distinct, but not separate.

This is what the Book of Job teaches us. Job was as upstanding as they come, as attested to by his copious offspring and material wealth. Yet God apparently wanted to "test" Job in order to see whether Job understood the distinction between mere uprightness and being in right relation with the eternal Thou. God visited no end of humiliation and woe upon the formerly wealthy patriarch, whose three friends tried to help him figure out what he had done wrong. Their explanations sounded pretty good to most people's ears, but they didn't satisfy Job. Instead of taking to heart these rationalizations from the sort of thinking done in the It-world, Job stepped forth into near-blaspemy, calling God himself into question. In Buber's terms, Job sought I–Thou dialogue with God.

And God at long last responded, appearing to Job out of a whirlwind and answering Job's charges face to face. The message here is that I–Thou dialogue with the Lord God is possible; indeed, it is indispensible ... and it trumps all considerations of righteousness, fecundity, and moral standing in the It world.

This is why Buber says "in the beginning" is relation (p. 18). Relation precedes all else: moral, ethical, material. Relation is primary.