however qualified his language, of a direct or immediate relation with God. I do not intend to enlarge upon the questions raised by such a description: clearly it is the terminology which lends most justification to the description of Buber as a “mystic.” How to join this understanding of the chief element in man’s life as direct relation to God with an understanding of concrete human experience is a difficulty which Buber himself faces anew in the Postscript he has written for this edition. What in any case is clear is that Buber does speak out of what he himself regards as a relation with God which is basic to true humanity: a relation largely unrecognised today, yet one which is essential for the recovery of true humanity in all spheres. This relation he presents in I and Thou with a variety and subtlety and richness of experience which are at the same time able to convey the sense of that relation as a presence and a demand upon the reader.
If this is the main concern throughout the book—and indeed, as Buber himself says in the Postscript, through almost all his writings—then the now familiar categories of I–Thou and I–It which are unfolded here must be seen as taking a secondary place. They are pointers to the human situation, in its intricate interweaving of the personal and the impersonal, of the world to be “used” and the world to be “met.” But the very intricacy of that situation makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to use these distinctions as a kind of open sesame to the whole world of our experience. It is certainly necessary that I should warn the reader against a too facile assumption of these distinctions as involving clear-cut divisions between two worlds in which man may move. There is one world, which is twofold; but this twofoldness cannot be allocated to (let us say) on the one hand the scientist with a world of It and (let us say) on the other hand the poet with a world of Thou. Rather, this twofoldness runs through the whole world, through each person, each human activity. To recognise this is to recognise the need for reserve, for concreteness, for what Buber elsewhere calls “the hallowing of the everyday.” Any situation may become the vehicle of the “eternal Thou.” Human existence today, in its particular peril, cannot be rescued by any shibboleth, but only by the kind of sober re-appraisal which may be found in the pages of this book.
In particular, it is worth drawing the reader’s attention to Buber’s explanations given in the new Postscript. Especially in his reiteration of what he means by the personal, and by God as Person, he has enriched his position against a possible objection from the side of an ontological assertion about God’s being. While maintaining the category of the personal as strictly attributable to God, he has to some extent obviated the criticism that God and man might be considered as being equal partners in a conversation. It is, I suspect, against such a position, derived by others, not by Buber himself, from Buber’s dialogical personalism, that Paul Tillich is speaking, when he writes (in his Systematic Theology, I, 127) that “If it [revelation] is brought down to the level of a conversation between two beings, it is blasphemous and ridiculous.” For Buber himself God’s transcendence, his absolute otherness, is so thoroughly involved in his whole understanding of the relation between God and man, that it is difficult to select one point rather than another in his exposition of this. The otherness which runs through man’s whole relation to his world points to this transcendence, at the same time as the transcendence is drawn into the whole world. I do not mean that Buber himself would use such a term as transcendence, but that the reality to which this term points is fully present in the thought of I and Thou.
From my original introduction I now repeat the last two paragraphs. The inadequacy of a translation to do more than hint at the power of the original is specially noticeable with a poetical work of this kind. Footnotes might have helped to explain a word or two, or indicate nuances of the German which the English has lost; but, though the word might have been explained, the impact of the argument would have been dissipated rather than strengthened. The text stands therefore without any commentary. To the reader who finds the meaning obscure at a first reading we may only say that I and Thou is indeed a poem. Hence it must be read more than once, and its total effect allowed to work on the mind; the obscurities of one part (so far as they are real obscurities, and not the effect, as they must often be, of poor translation) will then be illumined by the brightness of another part. For the argument is not as it were horizontal, but spiral; it mounts, and gathers within itself the aphoristic and pregnant utterances of the earlier part.
I have to thank many friends and helpers for advice given at various points, in particular Frau Dr. Elisabeth Rotten, of Saanen, Switzerland, who repaired a little of the havoc I wrought at points with the original text, and most of all Dr. Buber himself, whose courteous and encouraging help lightened my task considerably.
Only one or two verbal changes have been made in the text of this edition: I now use “spiritual beings” for “geistige Wesenheiten” on pages 22 and 98, and now translate “Umkehr” by “turning” (which is more in line with biblical usage than the rather obscure “reversal”).
R.G.S.
Glasgow University,
November 1957
CONTENTS
Copyright
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Postscript
So, waiting, I have won from you the end: God’s presence in each element.
GOETHE
I and Thou
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