Eclipse of God; Book Review

 Book Review : ECLIPSE OF GOD

Author : Martin Buber

By; Hamid Fahmy Zarkasyi

Martin Buber must use his words to point us beyond these very words. The Machine of Buber clinks and rattles and chugs, all to move a single pointer finger. It doesn't point at itself, for this would be to claim to speak the unspeakable; it would be to "philosophize" in the way for which Buber criticizes philosophers, masters of image and metaphor. The Machine of Buber speaks by way of this pointer finger that directs us towards another form of communication, namely, that which exceeds the Machine, that which humbles the philosopher. Buber studies these contrasting forms of communication: that which is found in our everyday speaking and writing and that which surpasses this ambiguity. Buber would like for the exception to become the norm, or at least the grounds for all other communication; he would like for us to first feel and then speak as opposed to speaking and only feeling through the veil of these words. The latter he calls "the eclipse of God."

Buber distinguishes between these two forms of communication. On the one hand he discusses the communication of the "religious experience," which is the sort of communication that surpasses metaphor and ambiguity and can best be described as a feeling. On the other hand, he discusses the common communication of images and metaphor. It is this distinction that underlies most of Buber's thought, and thus will be the prime object of this essay.

Buber wants for us to be able to feel with our souls and communicate with the Absolute Thou by way of this feeling, this "feeling-communication." He insists that this is in fact the only way that we can communicate with God. God is not another image, another metaphor-and we can never truly communicate with God, we can never truly know God, except by escaping our everyday "speaking-communication."

Buber doesn't want to merely create new metaphors; he doesn't want to redefine God. If this were the case, the pointer finger would point right back at the Machine. Instead, Buber wants for our "thinking" of God to exceed these metaphors. Buber founds his discussion of communication on three main assumptions:
1) That there really is a soul that can communicate,
2) That feeling, and not just words, can be communicated, and
3) That there really is an Absolute Thou with whom we can share this feeling-communication.

We could go on at length debating these primary assumptions, without which there could be no distinction between I-It (speaking then feeling; "using") and I-Thou (pure feeling with the Absolute Thou; feeling then speaking with other Thous; "sharing") relationships-but to do this would be to dismantle the Machine without first letting it run. We could go on at length about "cognitive scientists" who tell us that "we're all zombies", about "deconstructionists" who tell us that "nothing exists outside of the text," and about "existentialists" who tell us that "God is dead." We could do this-but we want to watch the Machine run-we are not willing to send it to the junkyard without first at least trying to turn the key in the ignition. We want to watch it create, we want to watch its pointer finger waver; we get no satisfaction from watching a machine at rest. If it should malfunction there will be mechanics on hand to attempt to make the necessary adjustments; if these adjustments fail at least we should have gained the satisfaction of watching the gears turn.

Buber builds himself with a certain purpose in The Eclipse of God. He says: "Real listening has become rare in our time." Man is speaking too much and feeling too little; in our speaking we have turned what we speak of so readily into mere objects and thus engage in what Buber calls I-It relationships. If Buber were to try to redefine God with his writing, surely he would be falling into the same trap as those whom he criticizes. He says in order to dispel this nasty inclination of "philosophy": "We cannot cleanse the word God...but defiled and mutilated as it is, we can raise it from the ground and set it over an hour of great care." He knows that neither he, nor anybody else, can create a "pure language" in which the word God means the Deity amongst all people univocally; he knows that saying the word God never points directly to the Deity. If feeling-communication flows out of man, it is speaking that blocks these flows, Buber thinks, and thus we must "listen" and engage in this feeling-communication, the communication of the soul, of the "true self"-we must become open in such a way in order to communicate with God. What is important is that Buber never tries to speak this feeling-communication to us, instead telling us that we must experience this openness of speechless communication for ourselves.

If God is the Sun, then we have blocked the Sun with our words. This doesn't mean that the Sun has died, but only that its flow of warmth no longer reaches us, or if it does still reach us, we are unwilling to recognize it. God continues to call on us and it is our task to hear this call, we "take part with full freedom and spontaneity in the dialogue." Buber finds that we are not answering the call with a call of our own. He finds us engaging in I-It relationships with God and others, which isn't a relationship at all if one considers it necessary that there be some sort of sharing between the two parties. It is a parasitic relationship; we aren't in a relationship with the Deity, only with His image, a metaphor that we have found useful; we are "using" God, but not God Himself, only His image as an abstraction, an abstraction that doesn't necessarily bear any resemblance to the Deity.

Buber finds philosophy especially guilty of engaging in this false "speaking" relationship with God. "In a great act of philosophizing, even the finger-tips think-but they no longer feel." Philosophy only knows of its words, it can only speak; it can only, or is currently only, engaging in I-It relationships. Philosophy is in the business of playing with images. The Deity is replaced by the "image of images," thus putting off the feeling-communication that is needed in order to share with the Eternal Thou. Philosophy looks at God through these metaphors but fails to recognize, Buber thinks, that these metaphors are either opaque (hence the "eclipse") or in fact tell us nothing about the Deity as he is known through religious experience (feeling-communication). Because "all great philosophy...shows us that cognitive truth means making the Absolute into an object from which all other objects must be derived," it must then order these objects to suit its own purposes.

Buber rejects Sartre's claim that "He spoke to us but now he is silent" and that it is rather the existentialist's assertion that any "truth" is created within the bounds of human subjectivity that has created the notion of a silent God. Buber finds this system eliminating the possibility of reciprocity without first considering it; it forces us to create the eclipse. To share means to share with the Other, and first and foremost, the Eternal Thou. Existentialism, as well as psychologist Carl Jung, promotes a coming-together with something interior, whereas Buber promotes a coming-together with something exterior-and only in this way can we hear the call of the transcendent God.

As God calls on us, it is our choice to return this call and thus engage in a reciprocal, "sharing," relationship. We must "speak" with our souls, but our souls do not speak at all, at least not any way in which we speak our words. When we say "feeling-communication" and when Buber says that we must "listen," this feeling and this listening isn't necessarily referring to any function of the five senses that are common to us. As Buber thinks that we are communicating with a transcendent God, in this communication these "feelings" transcend the everydayness of our bodily feelings; we listen, but not to any sounds; we are invaded by these sensations everywhere and nowhere. It is "color-free, beyond-color" - beyond all metaphor and certainly beyond all common bodily sensations.

Revelation for Buber means sharing flows of feeling-communication with the Divine. If we dare to call this one who shares flows so wonderfully a "Superman" we can then throw this term back at Nietzsche, whom Buber often criticizes. Whereas Nietzsche's Superman rejects flows of communication, positing others as means to his own domination, Buber's Superman is a "Super-sharer": he is a master of communication, both with the Divine and with his fellow man. Buber perceives Nietzsche's attempt to conquer nihilism as only leading to more nihilism in the coming-together of the self, resulting in a beast that somehow lives without any communication with the Other. When we consider Nietzsche's "child" who is supposedly "innocent and forgetting," Buber's "true self," his "Superman," begins to look strikingly more "innocent and forgetting" than Nietzsche's own child, if by "innocent and forgetting" we mean one who is open to all flows of communication, even those coming from God. Nietzsche tries to convince us that his Superman has somehow creating a language that is all his own, that he created from scratch. Nietzsche presents a bold vision of a man who has heard every language, decided that none of them are worthy of his own superiority, and thus creates a language that bears no resemblance to any of the languages that he deemed unworthy of describing himself by. Nietzsche is bold, but has boldly created the myth of a man who creates everything-his entire vocabulary by which he describes the world-out of nothing. When thought from this perspective, Buber's "true self" emerges as the more plausible alternative, constantly sharing, "playing," with the Other, constantly expanding his own language by way of this sharing, both in terms of his feeling-communication and his speaking-communication.

Nietzsche's Superman doesn't like games for games require the Other. He likes to be alone, he likes feeling different from everybody else-in short, he likes his own superiority. But as a consequence, he is only able to expand and realize the full scope of his Will-to-Power by way of sheer domination-because he is unwilling or unable to expand by way of his language, his sharing, like Buber's "true self." Nietzsche assumes that domination is equivalent to expansion, but when the vast majority of people are reduced to slaves, the Superman finds that he has no way to expand-he could take over more slaves or he could take over a heard of cattle, Nietzsche sees little difference-and we see this solitary Superman as failing to realize the full scope of his Will-to-Power.3 In this formulation, the Superman becomes the one who is dependent on his slaves, not vice versa, as Nietzsche would like to fantasize, and it is Buber's "true self" who comes forth as the one more capable of expansion. Buber, although likely unintentionally, beats Nietzsche at his own game.

Buber says that it is in the "concrete situation" that we encounter God; this is when, in the spontaneity of the moment, all speaking-communication is forgotten and feeling-communication, pure and unhindered, comes to the forefront-this is when there are not even clouds, let alone a menacing moon, to block the warmth of the Sun. "Concrete," however, initially implies to us that it is solid and immovable. Buber does mean "concrete," but concrete as free from the abstraction of speaking-communication, that is, free from shifting metaphors; free from the abstraction that Buber calls "philosophizing." It is also in the concrete situation, by way of this shedding of abstraction, that one encounters the "true self"-the true self, like the true God, cannot be spoken of or written of; rather, it can only be known, it can only be experienced, by way of feeling-communication.

Even as one stands in the concrete situation, God remains mysterious-he hides as he reveals. If we were to say otherwise we would no doubt become "philosophers"-to claim that God is no longer mysterious, even in the concrete situation, is to condemn God to a word; it is to force oneself out of the concrete situation and back into mere verbal abstractions. Man must refuse "the impulse to control the power yonder"; man must enter through the dark gate and live in the mystery; he must live without words. It is "dreadful and incomprehensible," assuming here that comforting and understandable is that which we can "objectify" by way of our words. Buber calls this the "fear of God."

If Buber is engaging in the study of communication, mainly by contrasting our "objectifying" speech with our "speaking" with God, the problem of translation and the relationship between the two forms of communication must be further examined. Buber often, although not always, implies that establishing an I-Thou relationship with the Absolute Thou is the possibility for all other I-Thou relationships. But if Buber is claiming that we cannot establish I-Thou relationships with other Human beings without having first established an I-Thou relationship with the Absolute Thou, we find ourselves unable to follow him in this claim. We do not think that one must establish a relationship with God in the concrete situation in order to love his fellow Humans and not regard them as mere objects, "Its." To begin, pure feeling-communication can only take place in the concrete situation with God. It follows from this that one cannot, no matter how open one is to the call of God, communicate entirely in this way with other Human beings, no matter how open they are to the call of God. One must always speak, in one way or another, to other Humans; there must always be some degree of abstraction. This is what distinguishes between the Absolute Thou and all other Thous: with the Absolute Thou it is pure feeling-communication, whereas with other Thous, feeling-communication is not pure, but rather interwoven with speaking-communication. When speaking-communication dominates, one falls into an I-It relationship, yet because we can never communicate with Humans as "purely" as we can with God, it is very possible that one can establish I-Thou relationships with Human beings without having ever stood in the concrete situation.

It can be argued that the reciprocity of the concrete situation leads to certain symmetry in the relationship between man and God, committing "violence against heights" - making God too much of a person. If we are to entertain this objection, the question arises: what is going on the concrete situation? This question tantalizes us because we know that we cannot claim to speak the unspeakable, but at this point we have all of the tools needed to clarify the "situation" of the concrete situation as much as we can. We can rely on a few basic premises that Buber presents. We know that in the concrete situation, a special sort of communication is going on that in this essay has been termed "feeling-communication." We also know from Buber's description of speaking-communication and how it relates to feeling-communication that the latter isn't an abstraction: "There is nothing to interpret...God who speaks proposes no riddles."4 We know that something is being communicated-only we cannot say what without forcing ourselves into foolishly trying to speak the unspeakable.

Buber knows that no translation is ever exact, which is why we must love God as the mystery of God, the God that makes us tremble. But as it was said above, we can only purely feel-communication with the Absolute Thou. Buber can hereby be reproached, in conjunction with the claim that he has turned God into a person, for presenting us with an odd situation: either remain silent or be thrust out of feeling-communication. However, Buber says: "God does not despise all these similarly and necessarily untrue images, but rather suffers that one look at Him through them." Buber permits for us to speak, so long as we first "feel." In addition, this stance is more forgiving towards those who do not ever stand in the concrete situation-so long as one first feels and then speaks, one is capable of establishing I-Thou relationships with other Humans. It is not my role, even after I have been in the concrete situation, to attempt to translate it into words; "it is not to be proved; it is only to be experienced; man has experienced it." If Buber didn't think it to be impossible to translate pure-feeling communication into speaking-communication, then he would be turning God into a person. He doesn't make this error; God remains all God and man remains all man, even in the reciprocity of the concrete situation.

The Machine has run its course, sputtering at times, but fortunately several clever mechanics were willing to plug into the Machine of Buber. The Machine is only a pointer, and by our judgments it has generally been consistent in the direction that it has been pointing us; had it begun to randomly spin and whirl in different directions surely we would have been forced to disconnect it. It did waver, and expectedly it did tremble, but we can now proceed to where it where points us, which is to a "place" that eludes our speech.

1. Although Buber doesn't use either the term "feeling-communication" or "speaking-communication," these two terms plug directly into, and fit rather nicely with, the Machine of Buber. The intent is that these terms can act as dyes, allowing for us to better see the inner workings of the Machine.

2. This can be interpreted as the idea of "sensing" a divine presence that doesn't directly involve the five senses. However, it should be noted this element, in the context of this interpretation of Buber's work, is not necessarily referring to a specific type of religious experience, but rather to religious experience "in general," as contrasting with the problems of I-It relationships.

3. It could have also been leveled against Nietzsche that his entire Will-to-Power is just another myth that he created to fill the role of the Truth that was left unoccupied upon the death of God. However, as with the Machine of Buber, it was more practical, as well as more enjoyable because we get no satisfaction from watching a machine at rest, to let the machine run-and through this to show that Nietzsche's Superman, the one who supposedly explodes with this Will-to-Power and is a master of expansion, in reality would have a terribly difficult time expanding at all.

4. A question arises regarding Buber's treatment of the Abraham-Isaac story. Buber criticizes modern man for not having an open ear to God; he thinks that God is calling on us but that we have made ourselves deaf. The problem arises with Abraham because if one has to be open to hear the call of God in the concrete situation, Abraham was already completely open to the first call of God and was not "more open" when God told him that he had proved himself. Furthermore, if establishing an I-Thou relationship with God is followed by I-Thou relationships with Human beings, the Abraham-Isaac story is a poor example of this-Abraham was open to God, in the concrete situation, and yet Isaac became the means to an end, namely, the pleasing of God. We could say that the Abraham-Isaac situation is truly unique, an extreme, but in doing this we would have to divorce it from Buber's system.