In these essays, written between 1909 and 1954 and first published as a collection in 1957, the eminent philosopher relates the "I-Thou" dialogue to such varied fields as religion, social thought, philosophy, myth, drama, literature, and art. Buber thus responds to the crises and challenges of the 20th century and enables the reader to follow his lifelong struggles toward "authentic existence."
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In these essays, written between 1909 and 1954 and first published as a collection in 1957, the eminent philosopher relates the "I-Thou" dialogue to such varied fields as religion, social thought, philosophy, myth, drama, literature, and art. Buber thus responds to the crises and challenges of the 20th century and enables the reader to follow his lifelong struggles toward "authentic existence."
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In his recent book, "Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life" (2008), the American philosopher Hilary Putnam rejects the sometimes-expressed notion that Martin Buber was a philosophical "lightweight". Putnam finds Buber's thought difficult and complex. Indeed Putnam describes his own religious standpoint as "somewhere between John Dewey in "A Common Faith and Martin Buber." In his book, Putnam gives a short but sympathetic reading to Buber's most famous work, "I and Thou" (1923).
After reading Putnam, I was moved to revisit Buber. But I did not turn to "I and Thou" or to Buber's other well-known work "The Tales of the Hasidim." Instead, I turned to an old and battered collection of essays that I had bought used many years ago called "Pointing the Way" which now is out of print. Many of the essays in the collection are undoubtedly available elsewhere. I struggled with the book when I read it and I struggled with it again when I reread it after reading Putnam. I will discuss it briefly here.
Buber (1878 - 1965) collected the essays in "Pointing the Way" in 1957. The book includes a selection of essays dating from 1909- 1954 which, Buber indicated in his Foreward, "I can also stand behind today." The one exception is a fine essay on the "Teaching of the Tao" which Buber regarded as important, even though he subsequently rejected its monistic tone. The book consists of three large sections and comprises 29 essays which, in the breadth of their subject matter and in the long time period of their composition, constitute a good cross-section of Buber's thought. The essays predating 1938 were written in Germany. In 1938, Buber fled from the Nazis to what was then Palestine where he lived for the rest of his life.
The first section of the book as aptly titled "Towards Authentic Existence." There is an immediacy and an inwardness to these essays which develop Buber's concern with understanding what makes a human life meaningful. Some of the essays show Buber's interest in Eastern thought and in the teachings of Meister Eckhart. In these essays, Buber finds the value of life in shared human experience and intimacy with others. The collection opens with a 1947 essay "Books and Men" in which Buber compares the life of reading with the life of contact with one's fellows. He concludes "I knew nothing of books when I came forth from the womb of my mother, and I shall die without books, with another human hand in my own. I do, indeed, close my door at times and surrender myself to a book, but only because I can open the door again and see a human being looking at me."
The second section of "Pointing the Way" is called "Dimensions of Dialogue". It consists of seven short essays on a variety of subjects including the theatre, psychoanalysis, and education. But the most important essay in this collection is Buber's tribute to his colleague, the Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, with whom Buber collaborated in translating the Hebrew Bible into German. Buber discusses the attempt of Rosenzweig's thought to approach religious life through lived experience rather than through philosophical abstractions. Putnam as well adopts this approach in discussing Rosenzweig in his recent book mentioned above. This section also includes Buber's perceptive essays on Bergson and on Goethe.
The third and longest section of "Pointing the Way" is called "Politics, Community, and Peace." This section of the book probably constitutes Buber's most sustained collection of writings on political issues. The essays compare what today would be called scientific approaches to the social sciences with normative approaches which, for Buber, take into account the whole human person, the need for immediacy and directness in one's approach to others, and the importance of not seeing the whole of human experience as exhausted by history and politics. The best of these essays is titled "The Demand of the Spirit and Historical Reality" which Buber delivered in 1938 as his Inaugural Lecture at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. An open letter to Gandhi, in which Buber responds to Gandhi's criticisms of Zionism is also included here. The collection also includes a speech called "Hope for this Hour" which Buber delivered at Carnegie Hall in 1952 at the conclusion of a lecture tour in the United States. These essays stress the importance of trust and communication - what Buber termed "dialogue" in understanding between people during the Cold War years. They still make for difficult but valuable reading.
"Pointing the Way" will offer readers fortunate enough to acquire it an insight into the thought of an important and difficult Twentieth Century thinker.
