Darwin, in The Descent of Man, states categorically that “only our natural prejudice, and that arrogance which made our forefathers declare that they were descended from demigods,” prevents us from acknowledging our biological descent from the lower animals. While this remains, for literal-minded monotheists in particular, a hard pill to swallow, the core of Darwin’s big idea has by now been thoroughly vindicated – and corrected; advanced – by the checks and balances of scientific process; while Creationist “theory,” empirically untestable, subject rather to faith, has managed only to recycle and repackage the “natural theology” (1802) of William Paley. Even so, it hardly seems necessary to reduce the whole religious (even monotheistic) impulse to our “natural prejudice” or “arrogance.” Nor, I think, did Darwin himself intend to do so. For one might wonder whether it yet remains possible for us to “storm heaven” like Don Quixote, to lift ourselves (by virtue of our best ideals and our works) into that station of nobility – by force of some biologically-based Quixotic will. Might it be true, in other words, in Louis Menand’s paraphrase of William James (The Metaphysical Club, 2001), that “when we choose a belief and act on it, we change the way things are”?

 

            Pondering this question, in this age of resurgent and potentially apocalyptic absolutisms, I find myself drawn to the Hasidic-based existentialism of Martin Buber, with its supremely positive and hopeful concept of dialogue; and at the same time, paradoxical as it may seem, to the Marxist-Maya, political-spiritual-mythic rhetorics of Subcommander Marcos, masked spokesperson and master-poet of the Zapatistan Army of National Liberation (EZLN), which is based at this turn of millenia (nearly a century after the original Zapatista revolution, which started in its namesake’s home state of Morelos) in the jungles of the southernmost Mexican state of Chiapas. And then, it occurs to me also that they are each bound by the most sympathetic cords, in equal measure and in remarkably similar ways, to the prevailing Darwinian view of science.

 

            And why not? If understood in the light of what biologist Edward O. Wilson might call their “consilience” (a coinage which, in his 1999 book by the same title, he attributes to William Whewell, who in 1840 defined consilience as “a ‘jumping together’ of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation”), why shouldn’t those “sympathetic cords” between Buber and Marcos be extended to encompass Darwin, from whom in John Herman Randall’s words (in a 1961 essay called “The Changing Impact of Darwin on Philosophy”) “all modern philosophies of experience are derived”? Why not, in this precise historical moment, in which God is apparently not as dead as He once seemed, approach this most elemental human concern – how such an exalted vision of humankind’s potentiality as our forefathers so arrogantly proclaimed might be recast, as it were, in the context of Darwin’s scientific and intellectual revolution – from the unlikeliest and most extravagant perspectives that present themselves to us?

 

            And while it might be something of a stretch to speak of Marcos’s neo-Zapatism as an existentialist movement, it is only so in the most formal sense of strict philosophical definition. In contrast, by Viktor Frankl’s pragmatic definition (stated in his 1946 book Man’s Search for Meaning), existentialism is simply the “striving to find a concrete meaning in personal existence.” Likewise, in a biologically-informed sense, both Buber and Marcos are suggestive of the very consilience that Wilson champions. “We have begun,” as he writes,

 

to probe the foundations of human nature, revealing what people intrinsically most need, and why. We are entering a new era of existentialism, not the old absurdist existentialism of Kierkegaard and Sartre, giving complete autonomy to the individual, but the concept that only unified learning, universally shared, makes accurate foresight and wise choice possible.

 

 

* * *

 

 

            Martin Buber (1878–1965) is best known for his philosophical treatise I and Thou (1923) and his development, in order to bridge the existential gap between those two entities, of a particular concept of dialogue. Buber’s biographer, Maurice Friedman, in his introduction to a compilation of Buber’s essays called Between Man and Man (1965), distinguishes between this concept of “dialogue” and the “dialogical” principle introduced in I and Thou. In that book Buber’s main object is to contrast “man’s two primary attitudes – the two ways in which he approaches existence,” which he calls “I-Thou” and “I-It” relationships. The difference between the two is not in the relational object itself but in the attitude of that relation. “I-Thou,” Friedman writes, “is a relationship of openness, directness, mutuality, and presence,” which may take place as well between man and man or man and horse, or tree, or work of art – and, by means of these relationships, between man and God, “the ‘eternal Thou’ in whom the parallel lines of relation meet.” By contrast, I-It is a relationship of either ignorance or carelessness, a relationship (to use another of Buber’s phrases) of “mismeeting,” of incomprehension, even of exploitation and dominance.

 

            “It is this emphasis upon the ontological reality of the ‘between’ and upon the possibility of experiencing the other side of the relationship,” Friedman adds, “that distinguishes Buber from such existentialists as Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre, and even Tillich.” Kierkegaard, for instance, focuses on the I-Thou of the so-called “Single One” and God, neglecting altogether the relationship of man and man; while Sartre

 

limits human relationships a priori to my knowing the other as subject only when he knows me as object or, at best, to my recognizing his freedom only as a freedom that I wish to possess and dominate .... Buber, in contrast, sees love as precisely the recognition of the other’s freedom, the fullness of dialogue in which I turn to my beloved in his otherness, independence, and self-reality with all the power of intention of my own heart. It is this recognition that makes Buber the leading representative of those existentialists ... who see dialogue, communication, and the I-Thou relationship not as a dimension of the self but as the existential and ontological reality in which the self comes into being and through which it fulfills and authenticates itself.

 

            “But what is the reader to make of the fact that Buber extends the I-Thou relationship from the meeting with man, nature, and art to that with God?” Friedman continues. It is a matter simply of understanding the concept of dialogue as Buber uses it. “Dialogue is not merely the interchange of words,” for example –

 

genuine dialogue can take place in silence, whereas much conversation is really monologue. It is, rather, the response of one’s whole being to the otherness of the other, that otherness that is comprehended only when I open myself to him in the present and in the concrete situation and respond to his need even when he himself is not aware that he is addressing me. The God that speaks here is the God one meets only when one has put aside everything one thinks one knows about God and is plunged into the darkness, when the “moment Gods” fuse into the “Lord of the Voice.” This “Lord of the Voice” does not speak to us apart from creation but right through it.

 

            In a sense this is the point of view that makes of the ancient biblical text of Job, in translator Stephen Mitchell’s commentary (The Book of Job, 1989), “the central parable of the post-Holocaust age,” in which Job is revealed not as the legend’s servile character of infinite patience but as the poem’s “ferociously impatient” character who meets God without pious certainties. Job’s I-Thou experience with God, made concrete in the imagery that guides that Voice’s questions, reveals a natural world in which the “horse exults because of the battle” and in which “the vulture couldn’t exist in his grisly solicitude” without the corpses he feeds on; a world completely antithetical, in fact, to any literal reading of the Genesis creation story, a world of “elemental realities” which extend “beyond good and evil” and “outside the circle of human values.” In that case we might understand that book’s real tragedy to lie in the mismeeting between Job and his pious friends, rather than in any perceived injustice visited on his head by some Divine Other.

 

            The relationship to Darwinian thought is not difficult to see. The wonder of this existence is sufficient in itself to produce such evocations of humanistic ecstasy as Darwin’s concluding lines to On the Origin of Species: that “there is grandeur in this view of life ...; that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to fixed laws of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wondrous have been, and are being, evolved.”

 

            While I am not aware that Buber has explicitly mentioned Darwin as an influence on his work, it seems evident from a mention of him in one of the autobiographical fragments that compose Buber’s posthumous collection Meetings (1973) that the influence is at least subsumed in that work as an underlying assumption. Buber’s father was a reader of Darwin and a devoted agriculturalist. “He had mastered the technique of his age in his domain,” Buber writes.

 

But I noticed what really concerned him when I stood with him in the midst of the splendid herd of horses and observed him as he greeted one animal after the other, not merely in a friendly fashion but positively individually, or when I drove with him through the ripening fields and looked at them as he had the wagon halt, descended and bent over the ears again and again, in order to finally break one and carefully taste the kernels. This wholly unsentimental and wholly unromantic man was concerned about genuine human contact with nature, an active and responsible contact.

 

He was equally solicitous to the people who surrounded him, Buber adds, and was “an elemental story-teller” who would relate “the simple occurrence without any embroidery, nothing further than the existence of human creatures and what took place between them.” And later, he recounts, at the age of eleven, the son himself experienced something of that same existential contact with “the Other, the immense otherness of the Other”: “When I stroked the mighty mane ... and felt the life beneath my hand, it was as though the element of vitality itself bordered on my skin, something that was not I, was certainly not akin to me ...; and yet it let me approach, confided itself to me, placed itself elementally in the relationship of Thou and Thou with me.” But when he once became conscious of his hand, of what pleasure the stroking gave him, “something had changed, it was no longer the same.”

 

            From his mother he gained a different insight. In a memory from his fourth year, some months after his parents’ divorce and his subsequently being brought to live for a time with his paternal grandparents, he was leaning against a railing with an older girl who was looking after him. “I cannot remember that I spoke of my mother to my older comrade,” he writes. “But I hear still how the big girl said to me: ‘No, she will never come back.’” Later, out of the pondering of that experience, he “made up the word ‘Vergegnung’ – ‘mismeeting’ or ‘misencounter’ – to designate the failure of a real meeting between men.” And twenty years later when he saw his mother again, he “could not gaze into her still astonishingly beautiful eyes without hearing from somewhere the word ‘Vergegnung’ as a word spoken to [him]”; he adds: “I suspect that all I have learned about the genuine meeting in the course of my life had its first origin in that hour on the balcony.”

 

Other insights follow, at precociously young ages. From his earliest European education, he was struck by the problem of the “multiplicity of human languages, their wonderful variety in which the white light of human speech at once fragmented and preserved itself”; he devised for himself, as he explains, “two-way conversations between a German and a Frenchman, later between a Hebrew and an ancient Roman, and came ever again ... to feel the tension between what was heard by the one and what was heard by the other, from his thinking in another language.” From his years at “Franz Josef’s Gymnasium,” where the “language of instruction and of social intercourse was Polish, but the atmosphere was that ... which prevailed or seemed to prevail among the peoples of the Austro-Hungarian empire: mutual tolerance without mutual understanding,” he gained (by daily forced attendance at Christian service) an abiding antipathy to all missionary activity – and “not merely against the Christian mission to the Jews, but against all missionarizing among men who have a faith with roots of its own.” Likewise, from a disturbing incident at school, and his being expected by the headmaster to inform on a pair of mis-doers (he did not comply but broke, instead, into a hysteria of sobbing), he became aware of “the problematic relationship between maxim and situation, and ... the nature of the true norm that commands not our obedience but ourselves.”

 

            Among his earliest philosophical influences, after Plato, were Kant and Nietzsche: the former, whose revelation of time and space as “nothing more than formal conditions of our sensory faculty,” he received as a great easing of mind and a gift of “philosophical freedom”; the latter worked on him also as a gift “but in the manner of an invasion which deprived [him] of [his] freedom,” a “negative seduction” that it took him some time to shake off. In favor of Nietzsche’s circular eternity of inevitability he ends up positing – bolstered by his Kantian freedom – an eternity “which sends forth time out of itself and sets us in that relationship to it that we call existence. To him who recognizes this,” Buber concludes, “the reality of the world no longer shows an absurd and uncanny face: because eternity is.”

 

             Later, in his capacity as an arbitrator appointed by the Sixth Zionist Congress in 1902, he had an uncomfortable encounter with Herzl, who had just unleashed a vituperative attack on another member of the Congress. Buber was assigned with another comrade to address the grievance with him. This duty was duly fulfilled, but in presenting himself there, and in making himself fully present in the moment (Herzl pacing back and forth, eyes flashing; his mother a sympathetic presence behind him), Buber felt no longer able “to remain inwardly the representative of one side.” It seems that he experienced something of the relationship from the side of the Other, and though repulsed by that Other’s being (though still his leader) so “sick with zeal,” to the point of not distinguishing between his cause and himself, Buber sensed that for “perhaps the first time [he had] set foot on the soil of tragedy where there is no longer such a thing as being in the right.” This leads him to a lengthy meditation on the uncertainty of the knowing behind our public actions; and he concludes that, while “the man who acts in history” must put aside such questions or be overwhelmed and defeated by doubt, “the moments in which [such doubts] touch him are the truly religious moments of his life.”

 

            This richly humanistic sense of the religious emerges organically from his Hasidic background, from the traditions of the rabbis or “zaddikim” (zaddik: “righteous, proven”), whose relationship with the unproven people that they led constituted “the living double kernel of humanity: genuine community and genuine leadership” (the italics are Buber’s). Watching “the rebbe striding through the rows of the waiting,” Buber writes, “I felt, ‘leader,’ and when I saw the Hasidim dance with the Torah, I felt ‘community.’ At that time there rose in me a presentiment of the fact that common reverence and common joy of soul are the foundations of genuine human community.”

 

            Influenced at once by that insight about community and by a basic consciousness of his un-knowing, Buber describes himself as one who is “truly no zaddik, no one assured in God, rather a man endangered before God, a man wrestling ever anew for God’s light, ever anew engulfed in God’s abysses.” He claims that he is no philosopher, prophet, or theologian, but a man who has seen something and goes to a window and points at what he has seen.” Anyone who “hopes for a teaching from [him] that is anything other than a pointing of this sort,” he adds, “will always be disappointed.

 

            His sense of religion, likewise, steers clear of the over-assuredness of “the ‘religious’ which is nothing but the exception, extraction, exaltation, ecstasy,” in favor of the contingency of “each mortal hour’s fullness of claim and responsibility.” In that case, he adds, religion “is just everything, simply all that is lived in its possibility of dialogue.” Consequently, there is “no great thought whose origin was not to be gathered from the self-involving contact with existing being over-against one,” just as there is “no self-enclosed unity of the spirit.” In fact, he writes: “It is none other than the spirit itself, cut off, that commits the sin against the holy spirit.”

 

            The individual, cut off from community, is in that same sense incomplete, in Buber’s view. In his essay “The Question of the Single One,” he challenges Kierkegaard’s “religious doctrine of loneliness,” his deliberate and misanthropic separation from the world, as deriving from his “confusion of public existence, or the body politic, with the crowd.” Buber contends, rather, that the man who encounters that body politic in a right relationship is not compromised by that association but is joined with

 

the other who meets him, who is sought, lifted out of the crowd, the ‘companion’.             Even if he has to speak to the crowd he seeks the person, for a people can find and find again its truth only through persons .... That is the Single One who “changes the crowd into Single Ones’ – how could it be one who remains far from the crowd? It cannot be one who is reserved, only one who is given; given, not given over. It is a paradoxical work to which he sets his soul, to make the crowd no longer a crowd. It is to bring out from the crowd and set on the way of creation which leads to the Kingdom. And if he does not achieve much, he has God’s own time. For the man who loves God and his companion in one – though he remains in all the frailty of humanity – receives God for his companion.

 

To Buber this crowd that is no longer a crowd is simply a community – which he defines in stark contrast to the collectivist models of totalitarian or fascist states, which merely co-opt the crowd of unawakened individuals to their imposed and “unappealable” versions of truth – “of persons who are not collectivized, and of truth which is not politicized”; he adds that such persons should have “faith in the truth as that which is independent of him, which he cannot acquire for himself, but with which he can enter into a real relation of his very life”: “True community and true commonwealth,” he adds, “will be realized only to the extent to which the Single Ones become real out of whose responsible life the body politic is renewed.”

 

            Of equal importance, and intimately related to this over-arching sense of civic responsibility, are Buber’s thoughts on education. In speaking of them, it may be useful to refer to John Dewey’s “technical definition of education” (in his book Democracy and Education, 1916): “that reconstruction of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of subsequent experience”; education is, in other words, a “direct transformation of the quality of experience.” Less technically, in respect to education as a social function – in Buber’s terms, a function of community – Dewey writes that it

 

is thus a fostering, a nurturing, a cultivating process. All of these words mean that it implies attention to the conditions of growth. ... Etymologically, the word education means just a process of leading or bringing up. ... Since what is required is a transformation of the quality of experience till it partakes in the interests, purposes, and ideas current in the social group, the problem is evidently not one of mere physical forming. ... Beliefs and aspirations cannot be physically extracted and inserted. ... our problem is to discover the method by which the young assimilate the point of view of the old, or the older bring the young into like-mindedness with themselves.

 

 

That method by which the young acquire or are brought to “like-mindedness” with the old is what Buber, in his essay “Education,” refers to as the “reality” that defines the child (as a Darwinian entity, a product of evolution) and that must also come to define education; and Dewey’s oft-repeated emphasis on education as a “transformation of the quality of experience” is likewise what Buber refers to when he writes, in his essay “The Education of Character,” that the teacher must strive to “awaken in young people the courage [in an age in which the eternal verities are all thrown into question] to shoulder life again. He can bring before his pupils the image of a great character who denies no answer to life and the world, but accepts responsibility for everything essential that he meets. ... Genuine education of character is genuine education for community.”

 

            Buber and Dewey are both supremely concerned with education for participation in the give-and-take of democratic society, in the community in which dialogue and all of the truly humane and liberal arts are nurtured. It is only within this (ultimately) Darwinian concept of humankind as social creatures that an existential sense of purpose and meaning, in the absence of teleological certainties, can be established. Frankl, Holocaust survivor and inventor (in contradiction to Freud) of “logotherapy,” a “meaning-centered psychotherapy” by means of which the afflicted person is brought toward existential awareness and invited to interpret his own life according to the purpose he can invest it with, is speaking to that need that Buber recognizes in the modern student’s fractured “relation to his own self,” in his thirst to “be a person again, to rescue one’s real personal self from the fiery jaws of collectivism which devours all selfhood.” The frustration of that common human desire, in Frankl’s terms, is the essence of the modern “existential” crisis.

 

            It is in fact hard to argue that for us it has not become essential to our survival as a species to engage with each other in the relationship of dialogue and of existential probing of meaning and purpose that Buber in particular suggests. As to how that might occcur practically, at least at the level of teacher and student, Buber explains that while the pedagogical relation of I and Thou is “based on a concrete but one-sided experience” of that relation, it remains “one of pure dialogue,” nourished by the teacher’s open acceptance of his students and their potentiality. “Only in his whole being,” Buber writes,

 

in all his spontaneity, can the educator truly affect the whole being of his pupil. For educating characters you do not need a moral genius, but you do need a man who is wholly alive and able to communicate himself directly to his fellow beings. His aliveness streams out to them and affects them most strongly and purely when he has no thought of affecting them.

 

Through that genuine and essential engagement, then, “the adolescent who is frightened and disappointed by an unreliable world” might come to accept “the liberating insight that there is a human truth, the truth of human existence.” His confidence thus won, the adolescent “accepts the educator as a person. He feels he may trust this man, that this man is not making a business out of him, but is taking part in his life, accepting him before desiring to influence him. And so he learns to ask.”