Bonus post: the Unicorn and the Donkey

Martin Buber and human connection in an age of identity politics

This is an essay I published this time last year, but as it was before I'd started L'esprit de l'escalier, most subscribers will not have seen it. And it does have a vaguely Christmassy message, so here it is by way of holiday reading. Enjoy the rest of Christmas (we’re only on Day 3!) and have a very happy New Year.

2023 marked the hundredth anniversary of the original publication in German of philosopher Martin Buber’s hugely influential and very peculiar book, Ich und Du. Born in Vienna in 1878, the author was part of the Jewish intellectual cohort that was devastated by the Holocaust. He became both a prominent Zionist and a leading advocate of Arab-Israeli coexistence, until his death in Jerusalem in 1965. One of the peculiarities of his seminal book, however, is that while it addresses a particular historical moment, it is in no sense a political book. It has a pre-political, even pre-philosophical quality, and that’s what makes it just as relevant a century on.

In his introduction to the new centennial edition, Buber scholar Paul Mendes-Flohr helpfully makes a connection between Buber’s concerns in 1923 and the current moment: ‘an age in which human worth is ever-increasingly measured by economic utility, vocational skills, and professional and social status’. Then and now, such tendencies reduce individuals to useful objects rather than ‘fellow human beings in the singularity of their existential uniqueness’. It is the non-instrumental encounter between such unique beings that Buber explores in the book, and that he felt was increasingly difficult in modern society.

Crucially, the instrumentalisation of others also transforms the way we understand ourselves. Our own sense of self-worth must come from objective attributes of one kind or another. Mendes-Flohr summarises the alternatives as ‘egotistic individualism and collective egoism (what we would today call the politics of identity)’. It is worth adding, then, that the social status by which human worth is measured today includes status in the terms of identity politics, in which it is perceived oppression rather than privilege that gives someone value. Clearly, when we understand both ourselves and others in such terms, it is difficult if not impossible to connect on a more basic, human level.

Mendes-Flohr credits Buber with inventing the modern concept of dialogue, not as a narrative technique but as the intersubjective encounter involved in ‘interfaith dialogue, intercultural dialogue and even political dialogue (as opposed to mere negotiations)’. Given Buber’s commitment to peace between Israelis and Arabs, it might be tempting to think his ideas are relevant to the current conflict in Gaza (or Ukraine or anywhere else ravaged by war). I think this would be a misunderstanding. The value of Buber’s ideas cannot be so easily cashed out in practical terms.

Whatever is meant by subsequent appeals for dialogue, Buber was not simply calling for more discussion, better listening or greater empathy, and especially not as a solution to the problems of the world. His primary concern in Ich und Du was more radically subjective.

I and Thou

The book was first published in English in 1937 as I and Thou. It’s an inexact translation, as ‘Du’ in German is actually the informal, familiar form of ‘you’. But, paradoxically, the archaic, poetic, even churchy feel of ‘thou’ does capture the sense Buber intended of a special kind of human connection, and he approved the translation (by the Scottish theologian Ronald Gregor Smith).

Central to the book is the idea that human beings have two different ways of relating to one another and to the world: I-Thou and I-It. The first is an encounter with someone, or even something, considered purely in their own terms. The second involves an appraisal, a weighing of value or utility – even if that goes in both directions. One points to a kind of sacredness, the other is profane.

In the sense posited by inter-group dialogue, at least, faiths, cultures and political interest groups are assemblages of individuals with common interests, rather than unique singularities or persons. In that sense, there can be no I-Thou encounter between groups or those who meet as their representatives – unless, of course, those representatives shed their group identities and allegiances and encounter one another strictly in the moment, but that would surely defeat the purpose. Political representatives, at least, have to inhabit the world of I-It.

To be clear, even acknowledging that dialogue is not mere negotiation – which implies bargaining over terms of reference that are already shared – it surely implies a deepening understanding of the other’s values, beliefs and indeed interests. That is, not just an acknowledgement of their subjectivity, but an engagement with their objectivity. I-It.

Buber himself was under no illusion that I-Thou encounters could replace the world of I-It and of objects (including human objects) altogether. We need to attend to that world. It is the world that sustains us, and Buber did not disdain the achievements of modern science and technology, any more than the value of politics and the arts. He did insist it was not enough: ‘And in all seriousness of truth, hear this: without It man cannot live. But he who lives with It alone is not a man.’ 

The point of the I-Thou relation, then, is not so much to recognise the humanity of the other, as to remember our own humanity. To inhabit it fully, with others rather than for or against others. As Mendes-Flohr puts it: ‘The dialogical relation is borne neither by purposeful cognitive nor even ethical intent. [There is no appraisal of any kind.] What then, Buber asks, does one learn of the other when one relates to the person in the sacred stance of an ‘I-Thou’ relation? “Nothing at all.”’

Or, as Buber also insists, ‘It does not help to sustain you in life, it only helps you to glimpse eternity’. Not for nothing has I and Thou been described as a ‘philosophical poem’ rather than a traditional work of philosophy based on rational argument. It certainly is ‘poetic’. Sometimes infuriatingly so. For this reader, at least, whole pages go by on each reading that elicit nothing but confusion and a mounting suspicion that there is nothing there. It is telling, though, that they are not necessarily the same pages each time. In any case, there always comes a point when something clear and profound crashes through the sometimes baffling verbiage.

Glimpsing eternity

Some of the core ideas are more easily graspable, even obvious, on reflection. Above all, the idea that human beings are nothing without relationships. In some sense, being itself is grounded in relationships.

In what Buber calls ‘the spiritual history of primitive man’ – which is repeated in the formation of each individual self – we only become aware of ourselves as individuals in relation to one another. We don’t start with an understanding of ourselves as individuals who can then act on the world. How could we? Just as we need a mirror before we can see our own image, we need a ‘psychological mirror’ – someone to whom we are ‘you’ – before we can think of ourselves as distinct personalities.

So there is ‘you and me’ before there is ‘I’ alone, and only then can there be ‘I’ in relation to another object, an ‘It’. Moreover, we are not confronted with particular, clearly defined objects before we enter into relation with them; the urge to relate comes first. A child reaches before she grips.

This is reflected in the ‘mystical’ way we continue to experience the world even when we think we are regarding it in purely material terms. The ability to look at a sprawling chunk of vegetation and see a whole, unified and distinct tree – and not a spirit or dryad, but simply a tree – is not given to us by brute, meaningless, material reality. It is a function of a human-shaped world, in which things too are rich with meaning. What is there in brute nature, after all, that tells us to prefer a healthy tree to a dying one? Let alone an interesting pebble to a boring one?

Do you remember being a child and encountering the world in a childish way? Those fleeting moments of idle awareness and wonder? Of singing into rather than thinking about the world? Did you ever look into an animal’s eyes and confront the mystery of being? ‘An animal’s eyes have the power to speak a great language,’ Buber tells us, ‘This language is the stammering of nature at the first touch of spirit, before it yields to spirit’s cosmic adventure that we call man. But no speech will ever repeat what that stammering knows and can proclaim.’

On reading this, I am immediately transported to childhood, lying on my back with the reluctant family cat clamped between my thighs as I gaze into her eyes, marvelling: ‘You exist! You are real!’ And, much to my surprise, Buber belatedly provides the cat’s response: ‘Is it possible that you think of me? Do you really not just want me to have fun? Do I concern you? Do I exist in your sight? Do I really exist? What is it that comes from you? What is it that surrounds me? What is it that comes to me? What is it?’

History versus fate

What is it indeed? And why does any of this nonsense matter? One answer is that it’s in the I-Thou that we find human freedom. For all the acknowledged benefits of the world of I-It, its rigid focus on the objective and profane makes for an impoverished philosophy. The world of objects, after all, is a deterministic one. Its philosophy deals in causes rather than reasons.

As Buber said of his own time, ‘The quasi-biological and quasi-historical thought of today, however different the aims of each, have worked together to establish a more tenacious and oppressive belief in fate than has ever before existed.’ He would have had in mind ideas like Social Darwinism and deterministic forms of Marxism. In our own time, evolutionary psychology is the most obvious intellectual current that plays a similar role. But a less obvious form of determinism pervades the air we breathe.

What we might call secular materialism consists of assumptions more than propositions, but it is no less dogmatic for that. Not only is there no God, but there is no soul either, not really. Just psychology, or something. Of course, we cannot really function without an implicit belief that we have free will, but the more sophisticated our thinking, the more we seek to explain it away. To see through it, and ourselves, to the ‘real world’ of objects and relations between them. In the case of identity politics, that means we are prisoners of history rather than its makers. Our lives are shaped by forces beyond our control.

Modern determinism traps us in what Buber called ‘the dogma of process’. He believed it compared badly even with old ideas of karma or the stars, since these contained enough mystery at least to allow for some kind of freedom through redemption. By contrast, ‘This dogma does not know the man who through reversal surmounts the universal struggle, tears to pieces the web of habitual instincts, raises the class ban [curse], and stirs, rejuvenates, and transforms the stable structures of history.’ If we free ourselves from the dogma that there is no freedom, we are free indeed.

In his preface to the second English edition of I and Thou in 1957, Buber’s translator rejected the idea that he was a ‘mystic’ on the grounds that his writing made a direct claim on the reader. (This meant the then-fashionable ‘existentialist’ was closer to the mark.) While a mystic seeks to flee the profane world into a detached and elevated plane, Buber saw a life of ‘I-Thou’ relations as unfolding in the course of everyday life. In his own words: ‘He who truly goes out to meet the world goes out also to God.’ And what is the world? The world is other people.

The Unicorn and the Donkey (at last)

There is a wonderful moment in The Last Battle, the last of CS Lewis’ Narnia books, when two very different characters have to spend a night together. Jewel is a unicorn; his magical qualities are only hinted at, but we do know he is a fierce warrior and a trusted confidant of King Tirian. Puzzle is a donkey, a talking one, but also a simple and naïve one who has lately been badly led astray by a malevolent ape. ‘Jewel was very kind to Puzzle,’ Lewis tells us, ‘and spoke to him about grass and sugar and taking care of one’s hooves, and other things they could both understand’.

Jewel does not seek to teach or learn anything from Puzzle – ‘Nothing at all’ – simply to share a moment. Each has had and will have a part to play in the story of which they are part. As readers, we know a lot about Puzzle, most of it not flattering, and much less about the beguiling Jewel. For now, though, what matters is that they are two fellow beings who just might ‘stir, rejuvenate, and transform the stable structures of history’, and who can recognise one another as such.

Identity politics is false. Our world is not divided between unicorns and donkeys. In fact, we are all unicorns (or at the very least talking donkeys). What is a human being, after all, but a ‘supernatural animal’? But when we deal with one another it is often as mere donkeys. We experience the ‘existential uniqueness’ of others only in terms of their worldly (and often annoying) personalities. And too often we interpret those personalities through the prism of their identities. Thus, we are far removed from Buber’s I-Thou encounter, unless we make a particular effort.

Such an encounter cannot in itself solve the problems of the world. It does not necessarily achieve anything in practical terms. But it reminds us of an invaluable truth. Another person is always a Jewel in the form of a Puzzle. If we can just see that, the possibilities are endless.