Life can only
be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.
‘I have occasionally
described my standpoint to my friends as the "narrow ridge,"’ writes
Buber. ‘I wanted by this to express that I did not rest on the broad upland of a system that
includes a series of sure statements about the absolute, but on a narrow rocky ridge between
the gulfs where there is no sureness of expressible knowledge but the certainty of meeting what
remains undisclosed.’ (Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. by Ronald Gregor Smith
[London: Kegan Paul, 1947] p.184).
The gravest danger
of these either-or’s is not the increasing division of men within and between
countries into hostile and intolerant groups, nor is it even the conflict and destruction which
results and seems likely to result from these divisions: It is the falsification of truth, the
falsification of life itself. It is the demand that every man fit his thought and his way of life into
one or the other of these hostile camps and the refusal to recognize the possibility of other
alternatives which cannot be reduced to one of the two conflicting positions. In the light of this
danger and its tremendous implications for our age, I should ‘venture to say that the vital need
of our age is to find a way of life and a way of thought which will preserve the truth of human
existence in all its concrete complexity and which will recognize that this truth is neither
‘subjective’ nor ‘objective’ -- neither reducible to individual temperament
on the one hand, nor
to any type of objective absolute or objective cultural relativism on the other.
"The world
is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable: through the embracing of one of its
beings. Each thing and being has a twofold nature: passive, absorbable, usable, dissectable,
comparable, combinable, rationalizable, and the other, the active, non-absorbable, unusable,
undissectible, incomparable, noncombinable, nonrationalizable. This is the confronting, the
shaping, the bestowing of things. He who truly experiences a thing so that it springs up to meet
him and embraces him of itself has in that thing known the world..."
"God is present
when I confront You. But if I look away from You, I ignore him. As long as I
merely experience or use you, I deny God. But when I encounter You I encounter him."
1. Schedule
