Paul Mendes-Flohr. From Mysticism to Dialogue: Martin Buber’s Transformation of German Social Thought (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989)
“Interpersonal life, Simmel taught, has an ontological grounding.” (14) This follows a description of how Simmel may have influenced the development of Buber’s thought. But it must be noted that Simmel and young Buber’s thought is different from that of later Buber. “Simmel’s – and the young Buber’s – ontology of forms of relationship differ radically from Buber’s dialogical ontology. For Simmel, an infinite number of forms of relationship are, by definition, ontological; for the later Buber, only one form of relationship, the dialogic, is so graced. Simmel’s “formal sociology” would, in any case, seem to have had a seminal influence on Buber’s Ontologie des Zwischenmenschlichen (ontology of the between).” (14) Mendes-Flohr notes that the younger pre-dialogical Buber was only “superficially interested in the relations…between men” from 1899 to 1922 (15). “Indeed, prior to his affirmation of the realm of the interpersonal, Buber’s intellectual and spiritual focus was singularly a-social. In his pre-dialogical period, his central concern was the crisis of Kultur, the decline of spiritual and aesthetic sensibilities wrought by industrial, urban Zivilisation. Such a “romantic discontent” with modernity had been shared by many intellectuals since the rise of capitalist society.” (15) This note is used to introduced the influence of Nietzsche on a young Buber; Buber translated Thus Spoke Zarathustra into Polish at the age of seventeen. “As a young man, Buber expressly considered himself a disciple of Nietzsche; and even subsequently, a strong trace of Nietzsche’s influence can be discerned in all of Buber’s thought, particularly that of his pre-dialogical period.” (15) Later on in the book, Mendes-Flohr returns to reinforce this point. “Buber apparently held fast to his youthful affirmation of Nietzsche’s Heraclitean Weltbild: the world (qua reality) is in constant flux and should we desire to align ourselves with this process, our “primal” relation to this process must be continually renewed. Renewal – metaphysical, cultural, and social – is at bottom an act of spirit. Indeed, in that he continued to regard acts of the spirit, grounded in the realm of sensibility (Kultur in the broadest sense), as the fulcrum of social change, Buber remained true to his intellectual origins as a Kulturphilosoph.” (126) Mendes-Flohr explains that Buber’s generation approached conventional bourgeois life with great scepticism, seeking a regeneration of Kultur. “Thus, Buber’s early Zionism, which envisioned the redemption of the Jew to lie in a “renaissance” of the Jewish spirit and “primordial” sensibilities, is perhaps best understood as a species of Kulturpolitik.” (16) The discussion of a generational revolt of “spiritually vacuous revolt of bourgeois Zivilisation leads to Buber’s relationship with Wilhelm Dilthey.
“Buber’s generation instinctively protested this conclusion and affirmed the world-in-itself, the presumed reality beyond the phenomenal world refracted through sense data, as the “true reality,” declaring this reality as knowable precisely by virtue of the nonrational categories of intuition and feeling. This “idealistic reaction against science” was represented most prominently in the academy by Buber’s teacher Dilthey, who sought to effect a radical revision of nineteenth century epistemology, particularly with respect to Geistewissenschaften. Dilthey argued that Erlebnis, lived or inner experience (as opposed to Erfahrung, or cognitive experience grounded in sense data), is the primary faculty of knowing the nonlogical, dynamic events of the human spirit. Because it is an “an elementary and immediate reality,” Erlebnis is considered to enjoy an epistemological status (i.e., it possesses an appreciative quality) not obtainable by Erahrung, which medicates the data of sense perception through a priori structures of cognition.” (17) Mendes-Flohr is careful to point out that Dilthey did not “suggest that Erlebnis provided a noumenal, “higher” from of knowledge”; that would be the work of his more enthusiastic votaries. (17) This is done to demonstrate Buber’s brief flirtation with the more romantic elements of German Kultur in his youth, as is shown through his belief that the mystic “achieves unity with the primal experience…of the world spirit”. (18) “Clearly, Buber’s formulation of the mystic’s path to unity is a novel, free combination of Nietzsche’s voluntarism (i.e., unconditional living) and Dilthey’s “Erlebnis” epistemology.” (18)
The final part of the introduction shows the a-social character of Buber’s Kulturphilosophie at its most intense, in the context of the First World War. The enthusiasm Buber displayed for the war was derived from his belief in its metaphysical significance. But, as Mendes-Flohr notes, Gustav Landauer, socialist activist and Buber’s close friend, shook him from his position. The events of the First World War mark the turn in Buber’s thought from, what Mendes-Flohr calls, an a-social phase towards the dialogical Buber of his later life. “For Buber, the axis of Gemeinschaft (community) shifts from pathos to ethos,” writes Mendes-Flohr (19). The shift from the heroic fulfilment of a world narrative to the confrontation of a real world situation occurs in Buber’s thought primarily in response to the unparalleled brutality of the Great War. “At first, Buber had sought to integrate his new sensitivity to the realm of the interpersonal into the categories of his Kulturphilosophie. In time, what emerged was a radical modification of that philosophical system and a novel epistemology and social ontology (bearing, as it does, the imprint of Simmel’s influence) that characterize Buber’s dialogical thought. Mendes-Flohr concludes the introduction by proposing, “I and Thou is also – and perhaps principally – a grammar for the ethical regeneration of Gemeinschaft (community).” This interpretation is one that he brings back in the introduction to The Letters of Martin Buber.
The first chapter “Simmel’s Paradox” is inaugurated with a brief note on Buber’s relation to sociology, primarily through his teacher Georg Simmel, and the various publishing and editing projects he undertook. The primary point to be grasped is that the concept das Zwischenmenschliche (the ontology of the between) emerges in this early period. “He seems to have introduced this neologism to clarify a problem in Simmel’s epistemology of social life…” (25) Mendes-Flohr goes on to explicate Simmel’s approach to social relations on pp. 26 – 29.
“Interaction does not occur in a haphazard or irregular manner, rather it displays specific patterns. Borrowing the Kantian dichotomy of form and matter, Simmel contends that a priori principles of forms (Formen) structure the given expression of a particular interaction or sociation between individuals. Form is an analytical construct designed to isolate the purely social from the content (intent, purpose) of a social situation, “content being in itself not social”. Justification for this distinction is the observation that the same content may be found with an endless variety of forms; and vice versa, the same form may be realized with an infinite variety of contents. The identification and description of these forms, which proceed inductively and psychologically, Simmel avers, are the principal task of sociology as a science.” (27)
“Further, Simmel emphasizes, “these forms do not make for sociation; they are sociation.” This is to say that social life constitutes “a unique and autonomous form of existence.” (27)” There are traces of Buber’s I-Thou philosophy in what Simmel puts forth. But Buber puts these ideas to greater scrutiny. Simmel, however, realizes the uniquely contradiction this conception of sociation poses. “As a Kantian, Simmel was profoundly perplexed by this observation – and this perplexity recurs throughout his sociological writings. How could society, understood as fundamentally an interpersonal relationship or event, be said to possess objectivity if it is devoid of spatiality? To Kant, only the realm of space and time could possibly qualify as objective.” (28) But Buber, in I and Thou, reveals the I-Thou relationship is neither objective or subjective in substance (personal note). Simmel concludes that “sociation as consciousness of the other is a form of knowledge, akin to apperceptive self-consciousness is a form of knowledge, akin to apperceptive self-consciousness.” (28) “Society is a fact of cognition”, exclaims Simmel. (28) As Mendes-Flohr explains, Simmel, however, rejects the psychological-functional model of interaction as inadequate. “This model of social interaction would imply that the response of one individual to another is merely a modification, conscious or unconscious, of one’s psychic interests. To Simmel, this could hardly explain the objective forms to which individuals seem to adhere in their relations between one another.” (28) By applying a Kantian concept of synthesis, Simmel tried to respond to functionalist arguments. “In synthesis, primally disparate and incoherent elements are “connected” to form a unity of perception. This unification endows the constituents with a quality they do not possess in and of themselves. Kant of course confines this act of cognition to spatial objects.” (28-29) This is the paradox mentioned in the title of the chapter. Buber proposes das Zwischenmenschliche as a “descriptive designation of the ‘region’ of interaction” (29). Mendes-Flohr reiterates, for the sake of the reader, that this is the central preoccupation of the study; to uncover the relationship of the ontology of the between or interhuman to Simmel’s sociology. In other words, Mendes-Flohr embarks on a genetic account of the concept interhuman in Buber’s thought.
Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904), French sociologist, perhaps the first in Europe to propound the idea of a social psychology opposed to a Volkerpyschologie, taught that social facts arise through imitation, an “inter-mental” activity in which the action or value of one individual is duplicated by that of another. “The mechanism of imitation is affective. Individuals influence each other much in the manner that a wave motion is distributed: an innovative motion (act, value) is distributed (socialized) through a series of assimilative, monadic (human) relations. In a less mechanistic version, Tarde contends that a social process is initiated by an innovative act that is an adaptation to a given situation; other “intuitively” acknowledge the genius of this act and imitate it.” (33) Although this discussion between sociology and social psychology is interesting it leads to a divergence between Dilthey and Simmel, two primary influences on Buber. According to Mendes-Flohr, Buber cites Dilthey as a his “principal teacher in philosophical studies” (34). The quote from Dilthey regarding man as a “historical and social being” is reflective of his influence on Buber’s later work on philosophical anthropology in “What is Man?” (personal note). Dilthey’s objections to the discipline of sociology lies in its attempts to provide grand formulas…a science “which aims at comprehending everything with happens de facto in human society in a single study…” (35) “Dilthey,” according to Mendes-Flohr, “argues that political science (Staatswissenschaft) is the only discipline methodologically capable of treating such phenomena. Furthermore, the “state” assures the functioning of “lower” organizations and often has incorporated these into its own juridical organization.” (36). Mendes-Flohr notes that Buber’s affinity to Dilthey is largely “terminological”, but the conceptual substance of his idea of social science remains dependent on Simmel (36). He relates Dilthey to “political principles” or institutional conventions and Simmel’s forms to a priori principles, “whose dynamic transcends both history and individual action system” (36). The point of the chapter is clear enough. Mendes-Flohr attempts to demonstrate the Simmel has a philosophical influence on Buber, as much as Dilthey. “Buber’s social psychology is non-psychologistic; therefore, Dilthey’s psychologistic position is not a contributing factor in its formation.” (42) Mendes-Flohr clarifies this later on. “Contrary to Dilthey, Buber presents the descriptive and analytical aspects of social psychology as procedurally separate. Furthermore, he suggests that these aspects are each of a fundamentally different order: analytical social psychology is confined to the labour of one individual, descriptive social psychology is a cooperative effort of many; the former is pedestrian, the latter a new and fruitful departure.” (42) It goes on to be a deep analysis of Buber’s preface to Simmel’s work. The point is that the terminology for interhuman is posed in the preface and reflects a convergence of the influences Dilthey and Simmel had on a young Buber. “For Simmel the fleeting moment of interaction is an elemental sociation; for Buber the evanescent “meeting” of an I and Thou is an “elemental dialogue” – and as such, it discloses an oft-hidden “reality.” In the fleeting moment of meeting, one gains a glimpse of the life of “genuine community” (echte Gemeinschaft), or matrix of warm and trusting relations that had been eclipsed by the competitive, calculating relations of bourgeois urban life. The I-Thou meeting is an elemental Gemeinschaft, and hence, as we shall subsequently see, Buber held that Gemeinschaft is not, as many pessimistically presumed, irretrievably lost; and if indeed it is locked in the past, at least, Gemeinschaft-like relations are an elemental, and thus preduring, transhistorical reality.” (45)
Mendes-Flohr describes the transition of das Zwischenmenschliche from a “sociological designation denoting the zone of interaction” to “a term of ontological ethics describing the realm of “authentic” interhuman relations” (46). “Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft are no longer simply a matter of organic structures, of historical, diametrical oppositions, but of transhistorical forms of relation: in Between Man and Man (1947), Buber attributes the crisis of modern man, his “social and cosmic homelessness” to two factors…” (46) Having read BMM, I can tell you those two are the increasing decay of the old organic forms of direct life of man with man; and the second is that man can no longer master what he has brought about, i.e., technology. The presumption that a choice must be made between an individualistic anthropology and a collectivist sociology is erroneous. “The influence of Simmel’s “formal sociology” is palpable. His teaching that society is essentially structured by a priori forms of relations would thus seem to have furnished Buber with a seminal insight leading to a strategy for the renewal of Gemeinschaft.” (47) The pre-dialogical Buber, as Mendes-Flohr notes, “subsumed his interest in sociology to his overriding quest for heightened inner experience (Erlebnis) and mystical unity beyond the phenomenal and therefore social world” (47). This cannot be presented as a mere aberration, as Mendes-Flohr does, of Buber’s generation. This quest was mystical unity was of course steeped in neo-Romantic yearnings for lost roots. Although the connection to a Volkish ideology is made elsewhere – Bloch and Mosse – it cannot be made in the case of Buber. It was an intellectual movement against urban bourgeois values, but also intent on reviving Kultur.
“Buber’s pre-dialogical thought is dominated by an interest in mysticism, particularly, in the unitive Erlebnis. This interest was…a correlate of his concern with the putative decline of man’s spiritual and aesthetic sensibilities attendant to the rise of bourgeois Zivilisation.” (49) This chapter appears to clearly draw out the influence of Nietzsche on Buber’s pre-dialogical, but also his dialogical thought. But to examine Nietzsche’s influence on Buber, we must examine Schopenhauer’s framing of the problem of individuation.
“For Schopenhauer the empirical world is principally a fact of individuation: a plurality of discrete and autonomous units, all of which are eternally separate from one another. An irremovable barrier separates all empirical facts of existence, between man and man, between object and object, and, of course, between man and object. Such an individuated world is a function of the perceiving mind, however. The a priori structure of human cognition prescribes that the world be apprehended by the formal principles of time and space, principles that, because they seek to specify or measure relatedness, “succession of moments” and “position of parts,” necessarily imply a cognitive finiteness or individuation of that which is perceived…Time and space are the sole and defining principles of the phenomenal world, the world of individuation.” (51) We return once again to Nietzsche.
