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."
Greetings:
1. I
