Martin Buber

Martin Buber (February 8, 1878 – June 13, 1965) was a Jewish philosopher, theologian, story-teller, and teacher.

Quotes

Let us, cautious in diction
And mighty in contradiction,
Love powerfully.

To win a truly great life for the people of Israel, a great peace is necessary … a true peace with the neighboring peoples, which alone can render possible a common development of this portion of the earth as the vanguard of the awakening Near East.

All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.

The real struggle is not between East and West, or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda.

Every morning
I shall concern myself anew about the boundary
Between the love-deed-Yes and the power-deed-No
And pressing forward honor reality.

We cannot avoid
Using power,
Cannot escape the compulsion
To afflict the world,
So let us, cautious in diction
And mighty in contradiction,
Love powerfully.
- "Power and Love" (1926)

Life, in that it is life, necessarily entails justice.
- "Politics and Morality" in Be'ayot (April 1945), as published in A Land of Two Peoples : Martin Buber on Jews and Arabs (1983) edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr, p. 169

To win a truly great life for the people of Israel, a great peace is necessary, not a fictitious peace, the dwarfish peace that is no more than a feeble intermission, but a true peace with the neighboring peoples, which alone can render possible a common development of this portion of the earth as the vanguard of the awakening Near East.
- "Our Reply" (September 1945), as published in A Land of Two Peoples : Martin Buber on Jews and Arabs (1983) edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr, p. 178
- Variant translation: Only a true peace with neighboring peoples can render possible a common development of this portion of the earth as a vanguard of the awakening of the Near East.

All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.
- The Legend of the Baal-Shem (1955),1995 edition, p. 36

The prophet is appointed to oppose the king, and even more: history.
- BBC radio broadcast (1962), as quoted in The Great Thoughts (1984) by George Seldes

I do not accept any absolute formulas for living. No preconceived code can see ahead to everything that can happen in a man's life. As we live, we grow and our beliefs change. They must change. So I think we should live with this constant discovery. We should be open to this adventure in heightened awareness of living. We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience.
- As quoted in Martin Buber : An Intimate Portrait (1971), p. 56

The real struggle is not between East and West, or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda.
- As quoted in Encounter with Martin Buber (1972) by Aubrey Hodes, p. 135

When we rise out of [the night] into the new life and there begin to receive the signs, what can we know of that which — of him who gives them to us? Only what we experience from time to time from the signs themselves. If we name the speaker of this speech God, then it is always the God of a moment, a moment God.
- Between Man and Man (1965), p. 15

I and Thou (1923)

Ich und Du (1923)

What is Man? (1938)

The philosophical anthropologist … can know the wholeness of the person and through it the wholeness of man only when he does not leave his subjectivity out and does not remain an untouched observer.

As translated by Ronald Gregor Smith in Between Man and Man (1947; 1965), page numbers from a 2001 edition

Man must be free of it all, of his bad conscience and of the bad salvation from this conscience in order to become in truth the way. Now, he no longer promises others the fulfillment of his duties, but promises himself the fulfillment of man.

When we see a great man desiring power instead of his real goal we soon recognize that he is sick, or more precisely that his attitude to his work is sick.

In philosophical anthropology, … where the subject is man in his wholeness, the investigator cannot content himself, as in anthropology as an individual science, with considering man as another part of nature and with ignoring the fact that he, the investigator, is himself a man and experiences this humanity in his inner experience in a way that he simply cannot experience any part of nature.
- p. 147

The philosophical anthropologist … can know the wholeness of the person and through it the wholeness of man only when he does not leave his subjectivity out and does not remain an untouched observer.
- p. 148

You do not attain to knowledge by remaining on the shore and watching the foaming waves, you must make the venture and cast yourself in, you must swim, alert and with all your force, even if a moment comes when you think you are losing consciousness; in this way, and in no other, do you reach anthropological insight.
- p. 148

So long as you “have” yourself, have yourself as an object, your experience of man is only as of a thing among things.
- p. 148

An example may clarify more precisely the relation between the psychologist and the anthropologist. If both of them investigate, say, the phenomenon of anger, the psychologist will try to grasp what the angry man feels, what his motives and the impulses of his will are, but the anthropologist will also try to grasp what he is doing. In respect of this phenomenon self-observation, being by nature disposed to weaken the spontaneity and unruliness of anger, will be especially difficult for both of them. The psychologist will try to meet this difficulty by a specific division of consciousness, which enables him to remain outside with the observing part of his being and yet let his passion run its course as undisturbed as possible. Of course this passion can then not avoid becoming similar to that of the actor, that is, though it can still be heightened in comparison with an unobserved passion its course will be different: there will be a release which is willed and which takes the place of the elemental outbreak, there will be a vehemence which will be more emphasized, more deliberate, more dramatic. The anthropologist can have nothing to do with a division of consciousness, since he has to do with the unbroken wholeness of events, and especially with the unbroken natural connection between feelings and actions; and this connection is most powerfully influenced in self-observation, since the pure spontaneity of the action is bound to suffer essentially. It remains for the anthropologist only to resign any attempt to stay outside his observing self, and thus when he is overcome by anger not to disturb it in its course by becoming a spectator of it, but to let it rage to its conclusion without trying to gain a perspective. He will be able to register in the act of recollection what he felt and did then; for him memory takes the place of psychological self-experience. … In the moment of life he has nothing else in his mind but just to live what is to be lived, he is there with his whole being, undivided, and for that very reason there grows in his thought and recollection the knowledge of human wholeness.
- pp. 148-149

In the ice of solitude man becomes most inexorably a question to himself, and just because the question pitilessly summons and draws into play his most secret life he becomes an experience to himself.
- p. 150

Man must be free of it all, of his bad conscience and of the bad salvation from this conscience in order to become in truth the way. Now, he no longer promises others the fulfillment of his duties, but promises himself the fulfillment of man.
- p. 178

The concept of guilt is found most powerfully developed even in the most primitive communal forms which we know: … the man is guilty who violates one of the original laws which dominate the society and which are mostly derived from a divine founder; the boy who is accepted into the tribal community and learns its laws, which bind him thenceforth, learns to promise; this promise is often given under the sign of death, which is symbolically carried out on the boy, with a symbolical rebirth.
- p. 178

When we see a great man desiring power instead of his real goal we soon recognize that he is sick, or more precisely that his attitude to his work is sick. He overreaches himself, the work denies itself to him, the incarnation of the spirit no longer takes place, and to avoid the threat of senselessness he snatches after empty power. This sickness casts the genius on to the same level as those hysterical figures who, being by nature without power, slave for power, in order that they may enjoy the illusion that they are inwardly powerful, and who in this striving for power cannot let a pause intervene, since a pause would bring with it the possibility of self-reflection and self-reflection would bring collapse.
- p. 180

For The Sake of Heaven (1945)

as translated by Ludwig Lewisohn (1981)

Avoid melancholy with all your might. It hurts the service of God more than sin. Satan takes less pleasure in sin than in a man's melancholy over having sinned again and so feeling that he is a slave to sin. Thus the Evil One has caught the poor soul in the net of despair.
- Rabbi Jaacob Yitzchak, p. 7

God ... desires His creature to be able to oppose Him. He has given that creature freedom. ... When man turns away from evil with that whole measure of power with which he is able to rebel against God, then he has truly turned to God.
- p. 44

As the oil is in the olive, so is the teshuvah, repentance, hidden within sin.
- p. 44

It is the highest service to submit the evil impulse to God through the power of love.
- p. 45

God ... demands everything, in order to give everything anew to him who loves Him, after that loving has truly given up all.
- p. 45

In the presence of God himself man stands always like a solitary tree in the wilderness.
- p. 95

When we desire to lead men to God, we must not simply overthrow their idols. In each of these images we must seek to discover what divine quality he who carved it sought.
- p. 117

Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation Between Religion and Philosophy (1952)

Gottesfinsternis – Betrachtungen zur Beziehung zwischen Religion und Philosophie

To be old is a glorious thing when one has not unlearned what it means to begin, this old man had perhaps first learned it thoroughly in old age.
- p. 6

The realer religion is, so much the more it means its own overcoming. It wills to cease to be the special domain "Religion" and wills to become life. It is concerned in the end not with specific religious acts, but with redemption from all that is specific.
- p. 34

Between Man and Man (1965)

Greatness by nature includes a power, but not a will to power.

When we rise out of [the night] into the new life and there begin to receive the signs, what can we know of that which — of him who gives them to us? Only what we experience from time to time from the signs themselves. If we name the speaker of this speech God, then it is always the God of a moment, a moment God.
- p. 15

Dialogue and monologue are silenced. Bundled together, men march without Thou and without I, those of the left who want to abolish memory, and those of the right who want to regulate it: hostile and separated hosts, they march into the common abyss.
- p. 33

Greatness by nature includes a power, but not a will to power.
- p. 150

The great man, whether we comprehend him in the most intense activity of his work or in the restful equipoise of his forces, is powerful, involuntarily and composedly powerful, but he is not avid for power. What he is avid for is the realization of what he has in mind, the incarnation of the spirit.
- p. 151

So long as a man’s power, that is, his capacity to realize what he has in mind, is bound to the goal, to the work, to the calling, it is, considered in itself, neither good nor evil, it is only a suitable or unsuitable instrument. But as soon as this bond with the goal is broken off or loosened, and the man ceases to think of power as the capacity to do something, but thinks of it as a possession, that is, thinks of power in itself, then his power, being cut off and self-satisfied, is evil; it is power withdrawn from responsibility, power which betrays the spirit, power in itself.
- p. 152

You do not attain to knowledge by remaining on the shore and watching the foaming waves, you must make the venture and cast yourself in, you must swim, alert and with all your force, even if a moment comes when you think you are losing consciousness; in this way, and in no other, do you reach anthropological insight.
- p. 148

The concept of guilt is found most powerfully developed even in the most primitive communal forms which we know: … the man is guilty who violates one of the original laws which dominate the society and which are mostly derived from a divine founder; the boy who is accepted into the tribal community and learns its laws, which bind him thenceforth, learns to promise; this promise is often given under the sign of death, which is symbolically carried out on the boy, with a symbolical rebirth.
- p. 178

Quotes about Buber

(“How do you feel about America? There are some who claim it has become a land of greed.”) MA: It doesn't have to be. It has been rapidly turning into that. One sees what happened with the Indians first, and the black Americans second, and every other visible group. But I don't believe that's all there is, or else Paul and I would never live here. I can sell my books I can live like James Baldwin in the south of France, or in West Africa. But I believe there's something else. There is a spirit. And it's almost like Martin Buber, a good-evil conflict.
- 1975 interview in Conversations with Maya Angelou (1989)

Martin Buber, the famous Jewish philosopher who was inspired by a strong “religious anarchism”, defined Judaism as a synthesis of three basic concepts: the idea of unity, the idea of action and the idea of a future.
- Furio Bagnini "On Jewish Anarchism" (2009)

Buber and Tillich each took similar paths toward their common destination of religious socialism. Both had been influenced early in their careers by the 19th century German philosopher Nietzsche's rejection of bourgeois culture in his classic book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and were further influenced by Karl Marx's doctrine of human self-estrangement and objectification in capitalist society while rejecting his anti-religious bias. Moreover, Buber and Tillich, along with all religious socialists, rejected the Marxist “revolutionary dictatorship” of the proletariat. This would represent the extreme of heteronomy for Tillich and the political manifestation of the I-it relationship expressed by Buber that is based on human instrumentalism.… Tillich initially promoted an "idealistic anarchism" in the sense that he envisioned a theonomous culture arising from "communities themselves and their spiritual substance" instead of being promoted by the state. They would eventually part ways to some extent, with Buber continuing to promote a "federalistic communal socialism" yet not rejecting the political component of social life, while Tillich promoted the possibility of a central government that is not absolute in a theonomous society.
- Marc A. Krell, in Modern Judaism and Historical Consciousness : Identities, Encounters. Perspectives (2007), edited by Andreas Gotzmann and Christian Wiese; Ch. 8 : Fashioning a Neutral Zone: Jewish and Protestant Socialists challenge Religionswissenschaft in Weimar Germany, § 3 : Fashioning a Neutral Zone of Religious Socialism, p. 218

studying the early civil rights movement in college, I'd been intrigued by the influence of Jewish philosophers like Martin Buber on Dr. King's sermons and writings.
- Barack Obama A Promised Land (2020)

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