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Martin Buber, The Politics of Dialogue

Jonathan Woocher (Sh'ma 8/152, APRIL 14, 1978)

When he died a little more than a decade ago Martin Buber left behind a legacy to modern life and thought matched by few other thinkers of this century. There is, nevertheless, one dimension of his life's work and teaching which has perhaps not received the sustained attention it deserves. This is the work of Martin Buber the political activist, journalist, and theorist, of the Buber who lived an enduring commitment to Zionism, to Jewish-Arab reconciliation and world peace, to communitarian socialism, and to the pioneering cooperative movement in Eretz Yisrael.

Martin Buber's mature political philosophy centers around two fundamental concepts: dialogue and community. Of all Buber's teachings surely the best known is his insistence that it is the I-You relation, the dialogical meeting, which provides the matrix for a genuinely human existence - for love, friendship, self-realization, meaning, and the encounter with God, the Eternal You. Buber's political thought constitutes an effort to extend this insight into the sphere of group life. Here his focus was on the nature of and requisites for the relation of true community among men, that goal to which he believed mankind had aspired throughout history. For Buber, genuine cornnlunity was both a social and a spiritual reality. On the social level it constituted a voluntary association of individuals building a common life around the pursuit of common goals. But the inner substance of community was defined, in Buber's view, by its dialogical character - its serving as a setting for the interpersonal immediacy and mutual confirmation of the I-You meeting, and its relationship to a "living center," a common task, work, and vision, from which the voice of the Eternal You addresses the group, calling it to a life of responsibility, justice, and brotherhood.

Community Needs Both Structure and Dialogue

For Buber, the goal of political action must be the creation of such community. It is important, however, to recognize that in establishing this goal, Buber did not give way to an abstract or romantic idealism. He readily acknowledged that no common life is possible for man in this world without the institutionalized structures and the means/end calculi which sustain economic, political, and cultural continuity. In short, in political life as in personal relationships, the it-world has its place. What Buber wished to insist upon, however, was the crucial distinction between a social entity which is nothing more than a bundling together of individuals, each playing his specified role, and one in which individuals again and again emerge from their roles to achieve real meeting with their fellows, to raise their instrumental relationships to the level of true dialogue. It is precisely to the latter, to a social life in which man's capacity for I-You relationships is nurtured and supported, that the voice of the Eternal You directs man. Its demand is for a transcendence of both individual and collective egoism in favor of a group life marked by internal and outward directed responsibility. For Buber, the political task and the religious task were, therefore, ultimately one: to permeate all aspects of social life with as much dialogical relationship as is possible in the given historical hour.

We start by Relearning the Skill of Relating

Buber recognized that the work of this dialogical politics would not be easily consummated in the modern world. Contemporary civilization, he believed, was undergoing a profound crisis whose basis and essential character were to be found precisely in modern man's inability to achieve direct and concrete relatedness to his fellow man. The political problematics of the twentieth century - violence, conflicts between nations, races, religions, and classes, authoritarian government, continuing oppression and exploitation - reflected, in his view, the crisis of a civilization which had lost most of the old organic forms of man's life with man, and which had replaced them with new institutional forms carrying little relational force. The failures of the two major ideological options of the modern world - Western "liberalism" and Marxist "communism" - to resolve the political crisis (and indeed their frequent exacerbation of it) were due, Buber believed, to the fact that neither really seeks to assist man in recovering his capacity for dialogical relationship.

In light of this analysis of the contemporary crisis, Buber concluded that the recreation of community in the public world must be done slowly and patiently, by bringing the institutions of modern social life of the economy and the state - under the influence of what he called the "You-saying, responding spirit." This cannot be achieved all at once; it cannot be done by imposing a preconceived shape on social life; it cannot be done by demanding a purity of realization impossible in lived existence. It must be done by pushing to the limit, by bearing witness to the possibility of dialogical relationship according to the right and measure of each day. Buber called this the way of the quantum satis. It was a way, he believed, which was appropriate everywhere - in factories, offices, neighborhoods, and government bureaus - in order to transform living and working alongside to living and working with.

Zionism's Goal - to Create a Model Community

The great testing-ground for this teaching in Martin Buber's own life was his participation in the Zionist endeavor to rebuild a Jewish community in Eretz Yisrael. Zion meant something more to Buber than simply another national entity. It meant a model community of justice, justice in its internal organization of social life and in its relations with its neighbors. Only if the Zionist movement preserved this vision, Buber believed, could it avoid becoming simply another framework for collective egoism. From this fundamental position flowed Buber's two central commitments as a Zionist: to the cooperative socialist movement in Eretz Yisrael and to Arab-Jewish reconciliation. In keeping with his emphasis on the concrete, Buber understood socialism less as an ideology than as a way of life working towards ever-expanding community. In Palestine this way of life embraced the rebuilding of the land itself, labor in a spirit of self-sacrifice, and an eagerness to cooperate with all who shared a love for the land and a commitment to its future. So too, Jewish-Arab reconciliation implied more than rhetoric at Zionist congresses; it demanded specific efforts to work with the Arabs in Palestine, to understand their needs and fears, and to fashion together a framework within which an autonomous Jewish community could become part of a greater Middle Eastern federation.

This definition of the Zionist task placed Buber at odds with many others in the movement. There can be little question that his positions on many of the crucial issues of Zionist politics were minority - and ethically and politically demanding - ones. Buber should not be dismissed, however, as a naive idealist or moral perfectionist. His commitment was always to the realization of the possible, and his "Zion" was no mere symbol of an unearthly achievement. His goal was a real Zion which would at the same time be a true one, an autonomous, secure, and prosperous Jewish settlement which would embody the ideals of justice and cooperation. The path of realization he described traversed a narrow ridge between unprincipled pragmatism and dogmatic moralism or ideologizing. What he urged on his fellow Zionists was a principled effort to combine practical work, a realistic appraisal of the political environment, and a resolute commitment to social justice.

Focusing on Reconciliation in Jewish-Arab Relations

The record of Buber's decades of activity in the Zionist movement reveals a perceptiveness with respect to the crucial issues determining the fate of the Zionist enterprise which belies any charge of lack of realism. His conviction that the growing hostility between Arabs and Jews had to be overcome, and could be only through the forging of concrete links of mutual , self-interest which would counter-balance the rhetorical excesses to which both national movements were prone, was firmly articulated long before most Zionists were willing to confront the problem realistically. Buber's speeches and articles on Jewish-Arab relations embody his dialogical perspective throughout. His program for reconciliation was rooted in four fundamental principles: 1) the need to try to understand the situation from the side of the other, even while maintaining one's own position; 2) the importance of focusing on the land itself, which both groups loved and wished to see prosper and which might, therefore, serve as a basis for common action; 3) the responsibility for drawing a demarcation line between the legitimate assertion of one's needs and rights, and the illegitimate effort to seize more than is required at the expense of the other's right and need; and 4) the ever-present possibility of constructing a foundation for better political relations through the development of personal relationships in day to day contacts. These were, Buber believed, guiding principles which respected both the actuality of the historical situation and the basic dynamics of inter-human relations.

For Buber, the Ends Cannot justify Immoral Means

In response to the criticism that he preached from a "moral Olympus," Buber articulated an additional principle central to his entire political philosophy: no way can lead to a goal but one which is like it. Any political movement which truly aspires to the creation of a more just and peaceful social order must recognize that means which are themselves unjust and not peaceful, no matter how seemingly unavoidable ,or efficacious, will not realize that end. This law of historical non-contradiction was not offered in a spirit of absolutism. As always, Buber acknowledged that life is lived in the sphere of the relative, and thus he recognized the necessity and legitimacy of compromise in political life. The root of the ethical problematic inherent in politics lay, for Buber, in the fact that it is impossible to avoid committing some measure of objective evil whenever one acts to secure one's needs and rights in the world. If moral perfectionism is not attainable in political life, however, moral responsibility is - by continually reassessing precisely how much damage to the needs and rights of others is really unavoidable, and by redrawing daily that line of demarcation which separates the tragically inevitable from the merely expedient. For any political movement, what is required is the recognition that so-called ethical questions are not tangential to political achievement, but rather part of the historical and human reality which establishes the conditions for genuine political success.

Communal Units Build into a Utopian Socialism

The cardinal principles of attentiveness to the concrete and daily redrawing of the line of demarcation provided the foundation for Buber's communitarian socialism as well as his quest for Arab-Jewish reconciliation. For Buber, the only genuinely topical socialism was that which Marxists had branded as "utopian" - a socialism which seeks to restructure society from the bottom up by creating cells of functioning organic community, gradually building from these a community of communities, and finally, when a federation of communal units has been achieved, assuming economic and political leadership in the largely reconstituted society. Buber's support of the cooperative movement in Israel was grounded in his belief that this movement embodied just such a promise and commitment. In his eyes, the specific form of the cooperative-communal venture was less important than the direction in which it pointed: towards an augmentation of what Buber called the "social principle," the principle of social organization based upon natural or purposive association growing out of common need or common interest. The struggle between this social principle and its "political" counterpart - the principle of authoritative power directing group life from a centralized institutional locus - constituted, for Buber, the great struggle underlying the modem political crisis. Buber never contended that the social principle could entirely replace the political in human life; nor did he assert that political power is intrinsically evil. He did argue that the state, the structure most decisively embodying the political principle in the modern world, had acquired a surplus of power which was gradually stifling all spontaneous forms of social and communal organization. The crucial task, then, in every society and through every appropriate means, is to extend the scope of the social principle - to challenge the excesses of state power and to create the alternative communal institutions which can assume the responsibility for social coordination within a framework of justice and shared control.

Peace Can Come Only When We Trust our Fellow Man

Buber recognized the direct link between the maintenance of excessive centralized governmental power and the atmosphere of international conflict, disorder, and suspicion in the modern world. For this reason, he considered the development of real dialogue between nations, a reduction in the potential for mutual destruction, and cooperation in the management of the world's resources to be indispensable requisites for the liberation of social and communal energies within nations. In his pursuit of world peace, as in his efforts to promote peace between Arab and Jew, Buber emphasized the need for two-sided vision, the separation of genuine needs from fictitious political claims, the fostering of personal contacts, and a willingness to compromise on the basis of concrete mutual interests. Above all, he urged, progress toward peace demanded a rebirth of trust. There can be no dialogue, and thus no community and no genuine reconciliation, if there is no trust between men, no willingness to be open, to speak honestly and to listen sincerely. In the modern world, Buber asserted, a universal mistrust reigns: men take pride in their ability to dissemble and to "unmask" the other through their mastery of psychology and sociology.

In truth, this mistrust between man and man only expresses what Buber believed to be an even more profound mistrust pervasive in the modem world - a mistrust of existence and of its meaningfulness. Here again, it becomes clear that the ultimate horizon of Buber's political vision was always spiritual. We live, he suggested, in an age of God's eclipse, an age in which man feels cut off from the divine and its revealing and healing countenance. But the path to social and cosmic homelessness which modern man has traversed, with dire political consequences, can be retrod: the renewal of trust between man and man the acceptance of the risk of trusting - may be a way back to a more embracing faith as well. "If our mouths succeed in saying 'thou,' " Buber wrote, "then after long silence and stammering, we shall have addressed our eternal 'Thou' anew. Reconciliation leads to reconciliation."

Aware of Our Limits, We Must Still Make Decisions

Daring to trust means making a personal decision for dialogue. Buber would not accept those modern views of history which reduce it either to chance or to fatality. History, he insisted, has meaning - not, however, a meaning which can be objectively formulated, but one which can be discovered and lived in the moment of decision. The meaning of history comes in the form of a claim and a challenge, and though there is no standpoint beyond history from which to judge its validity with assurance, the claim can be heard - by the individual and the community - in the broken and contradictory reality of daily historical experience. Decision - made in the awesomeness of personal responsibility - is man's response to this claim. In deciding and acting the individual enters a problematic and paradoxical realm, because he can never know in advance the limits either of his power or of his responsibility in that historical situation. Yet, he must trust that in acting he will come to recognize these limits, and when he does act, he may encounter as well a response of grace from history which confirms him in the direction he has chosen.

For Buber, the spheres of politics and religion remained distinct, yet they were joined in the life of the man of the spirit. Thus, though he accepted no legitimate messianic politics, that did not imply, in Buber's eyes, "that the political sphere (could) be excluded from the hallowing of all things." It is not in man's power, he believed, to prepare the kingdom of God, but man may prepare for it, and in this recognition of both limits and possibilities lies the heart of Buber's political way. Renewed relationship and community are both the path to and the essence of the kingdom, and though they cannot be consummated in every moment, trust in their reality and readiness for them are the indispensable prerequisites for their realization at some moment.

Thus, in the final analysis, the politics of dialogue is both more and less than a political "program." It is an ongoing task and an act of faith. What Buber called for was neither a new ideology nor new techniques, but a renewal of dedication and trust. More than a half-century ago he wrote of the political challenge - the challenge to permeate social life with dialogue and community - in words that remain no less valid today: "The task becomes more and more difficult, and more and more essential, the fulfillment more and more impeded and more and more rich in decision. All the regulated chaos of the age waits for the breakthrough, and wherever a man perceives and responds, he is working to that end."