I can hear your sigh. Cameron’s silliness is slightly more entertaining than Buber’s intellectual somersaults. But let us stick with Buber; he’s worth it. I understand you, as we both belong to the same times, which are shallow, require no concentration and run on the modern fuel discovered shortly after petroleum and confusingly called “entertainment”. I freely admit that Buber is not an easy read and sometimes his assertions are opaque and simply far too grand, such as, “Nothing can doom man but the belief in doom, for this prevents the movement of return.” He is a mystic; I am a rationalist. He uses such terms as “soul” and “spirit”, without giving adequate explanation, and in Walter Kaufmann’s excellent translation (like his translation of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra) you feel that precision sometimes obscures meaning in order to avoid suggesting the wrong meaning. But like all good things, Buber’s work requires a little effort, and then you start to hear some interesting intuitions.
An I-thou relationship requires the I to seek out the thou’s nature and understand it, which is impossible. Hence the I-thou relationship is an ideal to which we should try to conform. We need to accept the nature of the thou and adapt to it. Attempting to change another nature is folly and rarely succeeds. If it does succeed, it is an act of tyranny. Many will object and ask, “What about teaching and parenthood?” Of course, there is a duty there, but it is not to change the thou; it is to help the thou to find its own way to change. When the thou is another I or an interlocutor, to use the normal terminology when speaking of human dialogue, the thou can be more or less disposed to seek out the I’s true nature. This is a game of two players, and the ideal requires that both are ideal. The ideal I or saintly I will never give up, but always accept the thou for what the thou is. The ideal I will always turn the other cheek. Most of us will give up long before that. As I get older, I am less accepting of the ambitious and the manipulative (still less the violent, whom I have always avoided). They cease to fascinate me, as experience has taught that they are wholly predictable. This is not commendable, but it is practical. Even if we have always fought against the commodification of time, we eventually have to accept that time holds sway, if we are to finish what we want to finish in life. We are never wholly free of ambition, however circumscribed.
The perfect I-thou relationship requires intelligence and understanding, for every dialogue produces degrees of misunderstanding and yet no one ought to say that I-thou relationships are the private domain of the intelligent, partly because the apparently intelligent are often only interested in displaying the virtuosity of their own thought processes. How many writers can deny this? Very few, if they’re honest. In anyone who ever put pen to paper with the intent of communicating their words to persons unknown and unknowable, there is an imperious “I”, who says, “I have something to say.” Writers do not necessarily claim great importance for their words. Generally, they will not change the world or even a little part of it; they will only engage with a few minds, many of whom will silently receive them with disapproval or, slightly better, outrage. Nevertheless, writing is not the same as a chat in the pub or on the train – sublime things that can be as satisfying as they are ephemeral – nor are they the same as the dialogues we have in our own heads. The written word is outside time and evolves out of sequence and through a series of corrections and changes of opinion.
When we speak of human relationships, we inhabit the world of ideas, and Buber does not explain how we relate to the world. When writing I and Thou was Buber relating to the reader or the work? The writer has complete control over the work, and therefore it must necessarily be an I-it relationship. Maybe the work, like any other work of art, has its own demands. Would that make it an I-I relationship? Buber does not mention such things. The relationship with the reader is not really a relationship at all, as the reader is an essential but anonymous being, whose nature remains entirely unknown to the writer. Some writers imagine their reader, who is often very like themselves. One leading Italian writer claimed that he expected his reader to have read the same books as he had. It is questionable that the creative act – in the artistic sense – is ever an I-thou relationship. Something that should humble us.
I and Thou is a work that tries to change the world, not through economics or politics as is so often the case with such ambitious works, but through the individual moment of our existence, in our perception of the world and how we relate to all of it with sensitivity. Buber is not specific on this point, but I feel certain that he believed that everyone could access this sensitivity and the pleasure it can bring. This suggests the importance of passivity, a virtue I have argued for, often to be misunderstood, because the West is now so wedded to its go-getting philosophy. We live in an entrepreneurial society that is obsessed with seduction – that is persuading others to do things they do not actually want to do – and this is quintessential coercive thinking or, to put it in Buber’s terminology, an I-it relationship with our human and material environment. We are expected to overheat the world and hammer it on the blacksmith’s anvil. Very few get to do the hammering. Most of us are the anvil. The commonest type of passivity is the cowardly one, which submits to the powerful simply because they are powerful. That is not the passivity I speak of. I mean the passivity that says to the powerful, “I do not hate you, but I will not be moved by you. I cannot change you or stop you from doing what you’re doing, but I will not assist you, even if there is a cost. I am sorry for you, because you have not understood what life is, and are alienated from your true nature. I hear your propaganda and I see your advertising and persuasive methods, but I will not be affected by them. I do not lift my hand against you, but I will do all I can to obstruct your plans. I know that my actions alone will have very little effect, but if enough of us sit down outside the palace of power, the assault on our planet and the poor will cease or slow down, at least for a while.”
In On Love, Stendhal perceives love as something decidedly I-it: it is the conquest of another through a complex game that can include deception. It is seduction in the restricted sense of the word. “Love and war,” we say, which is a grotesque association. A clearer encomium of the seductive arts is to be found in Machiavelli’s La mandragola, in which the lover and the seducer are two distinct people, stressing the differences between the roles. The former is an inept young man rendered even more foolish by his uncontrollable passion, and the latter is a middle-aged man with experience of life who sets out to resolve the young man’s problem for reasons that are not entirely clear, but most probably a desire to measure the efficacy of his own cunning. The seduction is planned like a political campaign, and the skills are those of the sophist and spin-doctor.2 The Arab Israeli who told his Israeli lover that he was a Jew did not deserve to go to prison for “rape”, because the Israeli court would certainly not do the same to Jewish Israelis who lie about their jobs, their financial assets, their athleticism or any other factor they think might increase their chances of getting a woman into bed. These things happen all the time and are reprehensible. They reveal an awareness that the woman in question would not want sex with the seducer if they knew his true nature or status. That such women are probably shallow is of no importance. The Israeli woman was incapable of an I-thou relationship because she only sees race and not the individual, even when she fails to detect it; this is a fine example of racism, but the rules of dialogic relations demand that the “I” acknowledge the “thou’s” true nature for what it is and does not loathe it, at least within the act of dialogue. Deception in sexual relationships is common and certainly cannot be defined as criminal rape, but it is an act of disrespect – even when the motivation of the disrespected person is not worthy of respect outside the relationship, precisely because all human relationships should be characterised by that consideration we generally define as humanity and here we call the I-thou relationship.
This leads us to the strength and the weakness of Buber’s argument, although it is perhaps unfair to subject hi
s work to this kind of analysis. It is as much a poetic and moral work as it is a philosophical one. He purposefully rejected his first draft plan, because “its systematic character estranged me from it.” In relations between human beings, the greatest damage is not done by violence and theft, but by mendacity and deception, simply because of the scale of the latter. Lives and families are devastated, but no law can do much to alter this fundamental law of the human condition. This is an area where philosophy, religion, morality, social pressure and various other forces can play a part, but their effectiveness will always be restricted. There is a cost associated with mendacity and deception, and for most of us this cost is sufficient to deter us. That we feel we have to be distrustful of others is a cost that remains. Given this centrality of honesty to genuine dialogue between human beings, is it sensible to confuse I-thou relationships between humans with those between human “I”s and inanimate or even abstract things, which can never be properly dialogic? The answer, I think, is yes: Buber’s work is one of literary defamiliarisation, in which the author wishes us to rethink all our relationships. This book, published in 1922, was ahead of its time: in our current reality, we cannot restrict our considerations of reality to humanity while treating what is beyond it as a resource to be acted on as we wish without reference to its needs. Our own selfish needs demand that we treat this shrinking planet with care and respect, and I say this as someone perhaps too wedded to a humanistic mindset. Buber was perfectly aware that the human world is different and complex, requiring different rules and different moralities. He also believed that the I-it relationship was inevitable and could not be banned from our lives, even our interactions with other humans. He was also very insistent that any religious experience of any worth had to be within the physicality of human society and not isolated from it. Like many great works, you read the last page in a state of greater wisdom and greater confusion. Its inconsistencies are perhaps the cause of its charm and its efficacy.
We cannot mention Buber or I and Thou, without mentioning Walter Kaufmann who translated the book from German and wrote a “prologue” that is not only an introduction to a complex work, but also a gloss and a work of literature in its own right. When I was first acquainted with this work, over a quarter of a century ago, I was more impressed by Kaufmann’s prologue than the main text. Kaufmann is more accessible than Buber, and he has many intelligent things to say. While praising and defending I and Thou, Kaufmann reveals what it hasn’t done, and lists the other dialogic relationships: “In these five attitudes there is no You: I-I, I-It, It-It, We-We and Us-Them. There are many ways of living in a world without You.”3 It-It? Kaufmann explains,
There are men who hardly have an I at all. Nor are all of them of one kind.
Some inhabit worlds in which objects loom large. They are not merely interested in some thing or subject, but the object of their interest dominates their lives. They are apt to be great scholars of extraordinary erudition, with no time for themselves, with no time to have a self.
They study without experiencing: they have no time for experience, which would smack of subjectivity if not frivolity. They are objective and immensely serious. They have no time for humour…
Here we have a community of solid scholars – so solid there is no room at the centre for any core. Theirs is the world of It-It.
Kaufmann takes Buber’s ideas and develops them much further in a more rationalist key.
However, when I read I and Thou for this essay, I found that the book came out from Kaufmann’s shadow. It says something that I had already come to believe: humanity is lost in an inexplicable world that becomes bearable and then even wonderful when we engage with its unknowability and avoid its “thinghood”. I struggle at times with Buber’s mysticism. But it seemed less of a struggle this time, and the subject matter could not be more essential. And it could not be more relevant now that consumer society has pursued much further our alienation from natural human relations. We need to think about them, and this is the good reason why Buber is the subject of my first essay. We face some difficult questions. >Can we remember the dialogue when it was an end in itself? Can we communicate with our neighbour when we can communicate with the whole world? What does it mean to travel, when travel has been deprived of its power to surprise? Have we ceased to play with language since we became adding machines that assess everything in monetary terms? We thought we had entered an age of reason, but we have stumbled into the mysticism of the market, the greatest abstraction of them all. Compared with the mysticism of the market, Buber’s eccentric religious mysticism feels like common sense.
It would be wrong to write this essay on Buber and human relationships without mentioning a magnificent novel which, I think, took or should have taken everyone by surprise. I had already read quite a bit by Stefan Zweig when I read it: a novel, his well-crafted novellas and a couple of non-fiction works, one on Erasmus and the other on Servetus, the former of which is still a serviceable biography. Yet Beware of Pity is, in my opinion, one of the great European novels. I argued over this book with an intellectual I greatly admire and whose opinions I reject only after careful consideration. He was a little dismissive of Zweig, which is not uncommon for reasons that to me are not clear. Zweig’s novel is beautifully constructed, the characterisation is perfect, the dialogues are intriguing and the tragedy that unfolds with exquisite slowness is revealing of some important truths on human relationships.
Zweig undermines Buber, because he demonstrates very well that human relationships take place within society. Whether I-thou or I-it, relationships do not take place in isolation. Perhaps this is true of musings on the nature of a cat (which is not really a relationship anyway). Yet human relationships are acted upon by a thousand other forces: kinship interests, friendships, personal ambitions, rivals, language and social conventions (this last group covers endless subgroups). No human relationship is an island cut loose from society, even when those two persons are away in a remote part of a country whose language they cannot speak – because we always carry our relationships with us in our heads – and some people also carry their hatreds. In a way those we care about are more present when they are absent because they leave behind them an eloquent gap. That presence in absence may fade, if for some reason we never see them again, but others will take their place. There is no vacuum in human relationships.
This defect is not, however, fatal for Buber’s book. His plea to assert the I not as source of manipulation and power but as a passive and independent interlocutor leads to an I that is strong enough to rebuff the pressures and conventions that caused the tragedy in the life of Zweig’s protagonist. Beyond the possibilities of Buber’s ideal and almost unachievable I, it is, as Walter Kaufmann points out in his prologue, sometimes necessary to simplify an argument in order to put it across more clearly and more forcefully. Buber’s work should be read more widely, preferably with Kaufmann’s comments, but these should be read after the main text. I and Thou should be approached without prejudice or preconception. The reader should not be put off by the occasional obscure passage. This is true of all good books, but it is particularly true of this one, which is so utterly itself.
And what does it say? Many things – too many to mention here – but essentially the author is urging you to treat every encounter – I think this is the right word – every encounter, however banal or fleeting, as a wonderful, God-given opportunity to do something new and discover something new. I use that adjective, God-given, in its literal sense, because Buber believes in God and that God is present in the human world in all its smallest mechanisms: it is there and only there that you can discover Him.
On Tolstoy’s Resurrection
Tolstoy’s Resurrection starts and ends with an explicitly Christian message, and to some small extent this mars the opening chapters with a narrative voice that is precisely that of one who shares Tolstoy’s specific religious views – in other words the narrative voice appears to be indistinguishable from
the author’s voice (not simply exposing wrongs but also providing a moral gloss). This is not damaging at the end, partly because it is great writing but in any case because this is more appropriate for endings, which thus become undeclared epilogues – authors’ glosses on their own works to assist anyone who hasn’t, quite yet, got the point. And Tolstoy, like Upton Sinclair in The Jungle, was writing this novel for very particular non-literary reasons, which were both political and religious but more political than religious.
Tolstoy’s Resurrection is a great novel. It may be that, today, it is not as great as, say, Anna Karenina, but at the time of writing it was the greater. Not only was it great literature, it was also something more important: a plea for clemency and a better world addressed to his own times. To some extent the important and original things in this novel had long been part of intelligent political discourse, although they are still largely to be implemented. Anyone interested in prison reform should read this book not in search of new ideas but to sober themselves with the depressing thought that over a hundred years later so little has been done to make his hopes a reality.
Tolstoy’s Resurrection is also a great social document. In it we have privileged access to the “lower classes” of late nineteenth-century Russia. And Tolstoy manages to write without condescension, although sometimes he comes close, which is an achievement for someone living in a society dripping with class prejudice. Dickens does well, but Tolstoy does much better. He is scathing and even at times cruel in his depiction of his own class, but he never loses his humanity, his understanding for stunted lives trapped in their own affluence. The characterisation is occasionally judgemental but is always acute and profound. Some of the harshest judgements are reserved for the protagonist and autobiographical figure of Nekhlyudov, whose religious conversion is always in danger of tipping over into a new form of self-love.
Things Written Randomly in Doubt Page 6