Human distrust and decline of genuine dialogue
Human relationships, for Hobbes, can only exist legitimately within the normal conditions created by sovereign action. The necessity of the state is based on an assumption that distrust is rampant and insoluble. With no assurance that others will not betray him, man cannot freely enter into contract with his fellows. The laws and structures of the modern state are constructed, through the common consent of its constituents, to alleviate this innate distrust between men. The relation between ruler and subject operates on the assumption that the subject trusts the sovereign, because the sovereign secures the normal conditions under which the individual subject can be free and secure from potential external and internal threats.
The individual, under such conditions, engages in the task of seeing-through and unmasking others. Living under the scope of political illusions – composed of grandiose threats, individuals attempt to expose the questionable allegiance of those who express dissent. Buber notes that these challenging spirits, who respond to the actual conditions of life, attempt to help a civilization towards change. But often, they are categorized as internal threats. This ‘sport’, as Buber calls it, is the site where the individual can indulge in a confirmation of itself vis à vis an object of his unmasking. This self-confirmation of the individual withers away the “immediacy of togetherness” between people, leading them to retract into a crude individualism. Buber would contend that this presumption of distrust draws one back only into oneself, neglecting I-You relation integral to human relationships.
“Life is not lived by my playing the enigmatic game on a board by myself, but by my being placed in the presence of a being with whom I have agreed on no rules for the game and with whom no rules can be agreed.” (BMM 197)
For Buber, unbridled suspicion and skepticism “strengthen what gives rise to suspicion, and even create new reasons for it”. The distrust between people is exacerbated when they fail to acknowledge the demand of the hour, of the moment in which they live, in short, when they live solely for individual contentment. Those who disengage seek life in an illusory peace. “War has not produced this crisis,” Buber writes, “It is, rather, the crisis of man which has brought forth the total war and the unreal peace which followed.” This crisis of man is the proliferation of distrust, an inability to genuinely engage or relate with others. Distrust, hence, is the ground that breeds the disengaged individual.
At the end of “Society and the State”, Buber contends that thoughtful engagement is the primary means to resist the effects of propaganda. He posits social education as a means for thoughtful engagement between persons to destabilize the dominance of the political principle. Buber places social education as an “exact reverse” of propaganda, which seeks to ‘suggest’ a ready-made will to members of society. “Social education,” he writes, “seeks to arouse and develop in the minds of its pupils the spontaneity of fellowships…with the development of personal existence and personal thought.” The danger of propaganda, as Buber notes, is that it proliferates a belief that the will of the sovereign is derived from the “innermost being” of citizens. Propaganda help individuals to internalize “ready-made truths” as if they are immutable, and hence helps cultivate the passive, consenting citizen integral to the domination of the political principle. Propaganda facilitates an impersonal connection to ‘truths’ and social education, as Buber sees it, allows for personal engagement – to allow human beings share in the presentness of a shared existent condition.
In his essay “Instead of Polemics”, Buber calls on his fellows to become engaged with the problems that face their contemporary hour, “We must take upon ourselves repeatedly and continuously the hardest task: responding to both demands at the same time, the demand of the moment and the demand of truth”. Actual life cannot be detached from the genuine relations. The ‘social principle’, as stated above, is animated by ‘social spontaneity’ – which brings forth the creative potential of human relations. In Hobbes, the sovereign, as legitimate representative of the will of the multitude, becomes the single decision-maker or the Great Definer.
In the Introduction to Leviathan, Hobbes refers to the state as an “Artificiall Man”, and in which “Sovereignty is an Artificiall Soul, as giving life and person to the whole body”. Men authorize the sovereign to act on their behalf, because when each and every man acts without restraint – as he does in the state of nature – he pursues personal interest to the detriment of others. The multitude cannot define a common interest, since in its natural state it is nothing but a chaotic mass of particular interests ceaselessly in conflict. The sovereign, who is instituted as representative of the state, acts on behalf of citizens. Indeed, the sovereign brings the state to life, because without the sovereign, as Quentin Skinner points out, the state ‘is but a word’. Buber, however, contends that the ‘political’ cannot be equated to the actual life between man and man. The dominant political principle subordinates society to the State; namely the assumption that in the absence of the state, there can be no society – since men harbour an innate distrust for each other.
The spontaneity of social engagement helps to produce a genuine transformation of society; allowing human fellows to respond to a varying contemporary condition rather than react to a priori doctrinal truths. As intimated in Chapter 3, any universal dictums regarding human action have force only if agents submit to them unconditionally and thoughtlessly. An individual who submits unconditionally is also one who inscribes and imposes universal dictums onto human reality. If the ‘social principle’ were to stand in relation with the ‘political’, Buber argues that thoughtful and engaged human activity creates the world anew. Rather than indulge in the “empty abstractions” peddled in the name of the political, he implores human beings to engage with actual life.
Norm and Exception: The Limits of Community?
The ostensible need for the sovereign to provide meaning and security for human society exacerbates the domination of the ‘political principle’. The domination of the ‘political principle’ entails the accumulation of ‘political surplus’ by the sovereign. The justification of this ‘political surplus’ is derived from “the external and internal instability, from the latent crisis between the nations and within every nation, which may at any moment become an active crisis requiring more immediate and far-reaching measures”. Buber contends that these potentially catastrophic crises invariably lead to the dominance of the political principle, because such crises threaten the existence of both the state and its citizens. In this section, we will further explore this point by explicating a response to Carl Schmitt’s conception of the political.
Carl Schmitt begins his book Political Theology with a devastatingly concise definition of sovereignty: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception”. Schmitt goes on to elaborate that the definition of sovereignty “must therefore be associated with a borderline case and not with routine”. For him, the essence of the state’s sovereignty is not a monopoly over violence or coercion, but a monopoly to decide. What does this “monopoly to decide” entail? The sovereign decision decides on the existence of the state, and by proxy, the existence of individual citizens. Hence, the sovereign decision is also an existential decision – one regarding life and death. Schmitt’s definition invariably places the sovereign state in a dominant place above society; namely that the sovereign decision defines the limit-conditions of society. While the latter can only exist under legal norms, the former is freed from all normative ties. “The rule,” Schmitt writes, “proves nothing; the exception proves everything: It confirms not only the rule but also its existence, which derives only from the exception.”
On a substantive level, a threat to the state is also a threat to the political. Without the sovereign decision, i.e. one regarding friend and enemy, the state cannot exist; hence the political does not exist. Schmitt, possessing an extraordinarily sharp intellect, clearly states the grounds for the modern state. The ever-present possibility of threat provides the state its raison d’être. He clearly draws the limit-conditions of the politics, namely the borders under the aegis of sovereign authority. The ‘political surplus’ possessed by the modern state is justified in light of these ever-present threats.
Schmitt’s account of sovereignty poses a problem similar to one inherent in Hobbes: what are conditions for society? The limit-conditions of society for Schmitt are defined by the sovereign’s extra-ordinary preparedness to transgress those limits. Hence, as he articulates in Political Theology, a conception of legality that derives its authority solely from existing legal norms, much like Schmitt’s contemporary Hans Kelsen does, according to Schmitt, disregards the transgressive act of the decision. “The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology”, writes Schmitt. The transgression of norms, done through a sovereign decision about the exception, is by definition an irrational act, an act that destroys both the normative limits and the norms. The legal norms cannot legislate for the decision to transgress its own limits, because that would be a move incongruent with the rational principles upon which norms are founded. The sovereign decision, hence, must be one “transcendent” of the existing legal order, made with authority not bound to the norms, i.e. comparable to a miracle from above. Hence, order does not come organically from associational ties. Schmitt’s criticism of associational theory attests to this – according to him, these theories have no conception of sovereignty, and by proxy, presupposes the existence of normal conditions for associative interaction without confronting the limit-conditions that ground them in a concrete situation.
So the question can be posed to Buber: does dialogical thought operate solely within normal conditions? At the heart of this question is ultimately a question regarding the antimony between dialogical thought and the violence of the modern world. The problem of violence is not conjured away in Buber’s thought. Living in the It-world, the potential for violence is part of the unforeseen. The work of dialogue involves a courageous turn to another, knowing full well the stakes involved in doing so. In his essay “The Validity and Limitation of the Political Principle”, Buber formulates a response to Schmitt – although never explicitly mentioning his name. He reiterates that the state draws it cumulative monopoly over political power “on drawing profit from a…latent exceptional condition”. This exceptional condition, however, cultivates the collective fear and anxiety of a group of individuals, exacerbating the mutual distrust between people. Unable to turn to each other in a spirit of openness and mutuality, fragmented individuals look to the Leviathan, the mortal God, or the sovereign-miracle for redemption. Such a turn towards the political illusion facilitate the domination of the political principle.
“Many states decree the division of mankind into friends who deserve to live and enemies who deserve to die, and the political principle sees to it that what is decreed penetrates the hearts and reins of men.”
In I and Thou, Buber contends, “Nothing can doom man but the belief in doom…” Those who subscribe to the essentiality of enmity only deepen the crisis of trust between people. This breakdown of interhuman trust alienates people from “presentness”; allowing the crisis of man, a failure to trust and speak genuinely, to reach critical extremes. Once one sees no other way, when the illusory becomes reality; there is no option other than capitulation, allowing one to be dominated ostensibly for one’s own good. As noted in Chapter 3, I-Thou relationship provides the space for personal transformation, as well as addressing and transforming the It-world. For Buber, the creative engagement that unfolds in the realm of the dialogue challenges stagnant It-world conceptions. It is through genuine dialogue that the limits of It-world causality are confronted and transformed.
Schmitt, in theorizing about limits, presupposes the dominance of the political principle by equating the political to the pre-eminence of the state. As a leading jurist in Weimar Germany, a staunch critic of liberalism, and eventually a prominent intellectual figure of Nazi Germany, Schmitt transgresses Hobbes by contending that society on a whole must be politicized by the sovereign decision on the exception. In doing this, Schmitt pares the antinomical relationship between society and the state present in Weber’s thought down to a single concern: sovereignty. In facing the world in its factuality, people think about the paradoxical nature of human existence and see the world with a degree of complexity. Buber’s ‘narrow ridge’ – an approach that rejects homogenous unity or a radical relativism – shares affinities with Weber’s antinomical thought. While Buber calls on all those share in an existent human condition to consider the paradoxes that arise in actual life, Schmitt’s account reserves this ability to grasp complexity to the sovereign, who alone is able to decide on the exception – and by proxy, possesses the ability to decide on matters of life and death. Through this move, he perverts Weber’s account of ethics in pursuit of a homogenized collective. While Weber sees the relationship between responsibility and conviction as an antinomy, Schmitt believes that a leader of pure conviction can bring into being a pure Volk. Whereas Weber carved a sphere for social relationships separate of politics, albeit subordinate to the dominant political principle, Schmitt advocates total politicization of society in anticipation of internal and external threats. According to David Dyzenhaus, Schmitt sees politics as “a matter of elite determination with the aim of eliminating all internal enemies”, and believes that the glory of politics is cultivated in “the utter homogeneity of the nation state ready to do battle with other nation states”.
In his “The Question of a Single One”, Buber provides a response to Schmitt. He critiques Schmitt’s indiscriminate definition of ‘enemy’, noting that the so-called ‘inner foe’ or ‘rebel’ works towards transforming and changing the society that he is a part of, to be differentiated from the ‘external foe’, who has no interest in preserving, much less advancing, the society. Buber contends that order cannot be imposed upon a society, once and for all. For him, order is cultivated throughout the history of a commonwealth by the living persons of dialogue who constitute it.
“This striving, this wrestling for the realization of true order – wrestling between ideas, plans, outlines of true order – wrestling between ideas, plans, outlines of true order that are so different, but also a wrestling that is simultaneously common to all, not known, not be expressed – constitutes the political structure’s dynamic of order.”
Hence, according to Buber, Schmitt’s equation of politics to a “homogeneous dynamic of order” is deeply erroneous, purging the transformative concrete relationships between man and man, and leaves the fate of a society to sovereignty’s ability to bring about a “judgment of God”. Not surprisingly, Buber notes in the Foreword to Between Man and Man that “The Question of the Single One” attacks the life-basis of totalitarianism. In “People and Leader”, Buber directly addresses the horrors of Nazi Germany. Writing in response to Hitler’s contention that “leader and idea are one”, Buber exposes the hideous cost demanded by the dream of united homogeneity, fully cognizant of the fate of his people.
“The leader alone knows the goal, but there is no goal. The leader embodies the idea, but there is no idea. The ‘superior race’ decides, and those who include themselves in it decide who belongs to it – provided that they are in power…’There is always’, according to Hitler, ‘only the fight of the racially inferior lower stratum against the ruling higher race.’”
Dyzenhaus insists that any worthwhile scholarship on Schmitt’s political theory should seriously address the latter’s anti-Semitic views. He contends that Schmitt’s conception of the political, intimately related to the apparent need for internal homogeneity, contributed to the radical exclusion of Jews from Germany society. This need for homogeneity, for a unified Volk, legitimates the sovereign decider – who guards against internal and external threats through his ability to decide on the exception. The sovereign decider, hence, unites the Volk in preparation for triumph the conflict-duel, wherein triumph confirms that the “judgment of God” was destined to be theirs, willed into being by sovereign authority.
In “People and Leader”, Buber laments the rise Hitler and Mussolini to power – the rise of the man who thinks he has become God. Once the role of leader believes that he is “becoming God”, his position is contingent upon the production of docile and uneducated followers, rather than critical and “enlightened” subjects. “Successful leading without teaching,” he writes, “comes near to destroying all that makes human life seem worth living.” If the role of citizens is merely to follow – legitimating the authority of the sovereign through capitulation, they are simply instrumental to the power of the “successful leader” or master demagogue. Rather than facilitating the space for education or enlightenment, as Kant believes his “enlightened sovereign” does, a leader, merely successful in the obtaining and sustaining power for power’s sake, provides only propaganda, in order to retrench and strengthen his sovereign grip on political surplus. The “successful” leader creates an environment advantageous to his exercise of sovereignty. And in the case of the sovereign decision on the exception, these conditions are emergencies and threats – exaggerated by propaganda or utterly fabricated – coming from internal and external sources.
The architecture of totalitarianism constructs a radically insecure condition, where the sovereign, and the sovereign alone, can ostensibly assure order and security. Simply put, such an environment leaves individuals to live in radical distrust of all others within society. Under such conditions, people approach each other with suspicion, with the intention of seeing-through the intentions and exposing potential threats to the established order. As Buber notes in “Education and World-View” (1935), education allows people to approach the world in its actuality – to allow them to distinguish between appearance and reality. But as noted earlier, once individuals are left simply as individuals, alienated from his fellows and unable to engage the world in its presentness, the grip of political illusion grows ever stronger.
Let us revisit two points made in sections 2.3.3 and 2.3.4 above. First, Buber believes that the simple immediacy of togetherness is the most effective form of action. And second, he posits this form of action – which unfolds through direct and immediate relationships – destabilizes the political illusions reinforced by state propaganda, precisely because immediacy makes present the world in its actuality. As we recall from his stirring article “A Tragic Conflict?”, people must come to understand and deal with the real conflicts that arise between groups, rather than be frightened into inaction – trusting political mechanisms more willingly than interhuman immediacy – and allow exaggerated illusory conflicts to consume life.
Buber considers Schmitt’s transposition of the classic duel situation onto political conflict to be indicative of, what he calls, “political surplus conflict”. If an ‘enemy’, including ‘inner foes’, needs to be annihilated for the sake of assured peace and security, spaces for meeting and human contact in society would become radically politicized. These politicized spaces, indicative of the growing grip of the political principle over society, are not places conducive to social education and meeting. On the contrary, they are simulated public spaces; designed to reinforce political illusions, galvanize individuals in support of the state’s Cause, and strengthen the grip sovereign authority has over society. The mass political rallies of Nazi Germany are examples of these simulated public spaces. “The totalitarian mass marks not only the end of personal life, it is also the end of the life of a people,” writes Buber. The point Buber conveys is that these simulated public spaces destroy any possibility for social spontaneity between persons, by stimulating and manipulating an individuated emotional attachment to Nation and People. Social spontaneity, as we recall, is rather integral to the transformative encounters between people. Hence, left alienated from fellow human beings, isolated from human contact and meeting, individuals are forced to find a false confirmation in the collective, i.e. homogenous unity, concocted by political propaganda to unify and galvanize a group in opposition to a common enemies.
In “Community and Environment”, Buber makes the following contention.
“The secret longing of man for a life in reciprocal mutual confirmation must be developed through education, but the external conditions it needs in order to finds its fulfillment must also be created. The architects must be set the task of also building for human contact, building surroundings that invite meeting and centers that shape meeting.”
For Buber, simulated public spaces are not simply the result of political machinations, but are a consequence of the tacit and explicit compliance of citizens to sovereign authority. If we recall section 2.4 above, Buber contends that any normative valuation of “what should be” should not be detached from a critical and fundamental relationship to the existing condition of humanity. Through this contention, Buber makes two points. First, the “architecture” of spaces conducive to human meeting cannot be left to political forces external to immediate human relationship; and second, the building of spaces for human meeting are built upon the critical relationship to a shared existent condition. As demonstrated above, the spaces for social education cannot be left simply to sovereign authority, which manipulate such spaces in an effort to reinforce its own grip on power. Buber notes that those bound to the body politic and aware of the personal responsibility for human address should strive to make the “crowd no longer a crowd”. “Even if he has to speak to the crowd he seeks the person, for a people can find its truth only through persons, through persons standing their test,” writes Buber. This courageous turn toward other persons is fundamental to the creation of public spaces. If the simulated public space is the crowd or totalitarian mass, the genuine space for human meeting comes to being through the courageous personal address – working to revive personhood in the midst of the crowd. And, as noted in Chapter 3, although this address at times may end in mis-meeting and the failure of dialogue, the price of silent capitulation is far more calamitous.
At the beginning of his 1953 address entitled “Genuine Dialogue and the Possibilities of Peace”, he engages with implications of the Holocaust. In the course of his reflections of the German people, he expresses reverence and love for those who stood up and spoke out against the horrendous crimes.
“There appears before me…some who have become as familiar to me by sight, action, and voice as if they were friends, those who refused to carry out the orders and suffered death or put themselves to death, and those who learned what was taking place and opposed it and were put to death, or those who learned what was taking place and because they could do nothing to stop it killed themselves. I see these men very near before me in that especial intimacy which binds us at times to the dead and to them alone.”
In the course of the address, Buber reiterates that a human voice addressing his others in a spirit of mutual trust moves the life of humanity towards transformation. A great and lasting peace, in his estimation, cannot be achieved in ignorance of human relationship.
Peace is not achieved through the imposition of sovereign authority over a group or many groups of people. The sovereign, accepted by Hobbes and Schmitt as the central guarantor of internal peace and stability, provides only an illusory peace. The purgation of an internal ‘political surplus conflict’, accomplished through the consolidation of political power, including emergency powers, claims to impose peace upon the innate and limitless enmity between men. But this assumption that man is innately evil is in of itself an illusory conflict – one that pits man against his own humanity. In the Third Reich, the sovereign power, in the person of the Führer, creates a homogenous and unified populace through the force of its executive will, secures peace for the polity by purging and annihilating internal foes, and it seeks to defeat external enemies, i.e. external ‘evils’, in cultivating global peace for the Aryan race. Dreams of ‘great peace’ have been based on a similar fascination with sovereign power, hinging on a dominant political principle.
Buber writes, “The great peace is something essentially different from the absence of war.” The great peace is not Pax Romana or its contemporary variant, Pax Americana. The proliferation of imperium does not lead to peace; it only prepares the way for future conflicts that drive humankind closer to the brink of annihilation. It is only through the cultivation of trust between peoples that humanity can take on the difficult task of engaging the world in its presentness – which presents paradox and contradictions that demand genuine human thought – rather than indulging in visions of an illusory peace.
Conclusion
Buber begins the Afterword to Between Man and Man with the following quote:
“In all ages it has undoubtedly been glimpsed that the reciprocal essential relationship between two beings signifies a primal opportunity of being, and one, in fact, that enters into the phenomenon that man exists. And it has also ever again been glimpsed that just through the fact that he enters into essential reciprocity, man becomes revealed as man; indeed, that only with this and through this does he attain to that valid participation in being that is reserved for him; thus, that the saying of Thou by the I stands in the origin of all…human becoming.”
Buber indicates that the dominance of the political principle effaces the possibility for human becoming, deprives persons of those creative and transformative encounters integral to actual life. Buber’s thought, however, does not attempt to dissolve the antimony between state and social. His thought, well aware of the necessity of the It-world, does not seek to do away with the political principle. He wishes only to free social spontaneity from the dominant grip of politicization. Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty, however, does away the possibilities of social engagement and community. Schmitt envisions a wholesale politicization of society. In this politicized society, individuals are accepted as “friend” if they legitimate sovereign authority, adhere sovereign decisions, and reinforce the homogenous composition of the polity. Others who question the decisions of the sovereign or are, by virtue of their ethnicity or beliefs, repugnant to the sensibilities of the homogenous unity are considered ‘inner foes’ to be excised. Life, through engaged and participatory activity, is foreign to Schmitt’s definition of absolute sovereignty, since order is supreme above all.
In a brief article entitled “Abstract and Concrete”, Buber responds to criticisms that his address to Carnegie Hall entitled, “Hope for this Hour” dealt with an “abstract philosophical” question rather than a “concrete political” one. He rebuts by contending that his work appeals directly to the genuine concrete – the actual life of actual persons, which has become “smeared over and crusted with the varnish of political fictiousness”. Of course, this response is reflective of Buber’s approach to modern political thought. In returning to a point explored in Chapter 1, abstractions are the result of indiscriminate politicization, often used to unite and galvanize a group of citizens, whose tacit consent to a collective cause also legitimates the political surplus wielded by sovereign authority. And within the text of “Abstract and Concrete”, Buber once again calls for a thoughtful response to crisis – in his context, the Cold War – rather than merely reinforcing political mechanisms. He believes that transformation of the situation starts with those who will “begin to speak with one another – not as pawns on a chessboard but as themselves, partakers of human reality”.
As this chapter showed, it is the thinkers who reinforce the dominance of the political over society – Schmitt, and to a lesser extent, Hobbes – who are dealing in abstractions. In spite of Schmitt’s rhetorical fixation on real and concrete situations, namely the conditions which the sovereign exception addresses, his thought relies on the almost otherworldly ability of the sovereign formulate the decision on exceptions – in response to grotesquely exaggerated political conflicts. Buber defiantly envisions the decision as a work of dialogue unfolding between persons. The act of decision is made on the most elemental existential level, a response to a human voice, responding to the address of a fellow, and responding to existent conditions. Decision, hence, is not simply a singular “miraculous” ordinance of a sovereign. Schmitt’s conception of “the political” sharpens the sovereign decision into a decision regarding life and death. The decision, motivated by the urgent necessity for it, is left to the sovereign. If individuals continually delegate a personal responsibility for response, the crisis of man is pushed to the verge of total annihilation.
