Asaf Ziderman

In the Coda, we explore Buber’s potential contribution to the contemporary field of philosophy of action. Section “(1)” provides an overview of the field’s historical development and presents its current structure as a division between followers of Davidson’s causal perspective and Anscombe’s teleological, Aristotelian approach. Sections “(2)–(4)” unveil Buber’s implicit theory of action within the context of three key debates between Davidson and Anscombe: the relation between actions and their effects, the distinction between actions and events, and the notions of power and causality. In each case, we observe how Buber’s position aligns with an Anscombian critique of Davidson while also transcending Anscombe’s viewpoint. Section “(5)” concludes by highlighting the superiority of Buber’s philosophy of action in realizing the field’s driving force and justifying its raison d’être—the underscoring of the uniqueness of humans.

This chapter is the first of two dedicated to the unpacking of Buber’s concept of unity. It focuses on “I and Thou” and analyzes ‘unity’ as it surfaces there in three main discussions. The first is with reference to the concept of ‘concentration’; the second with reference to the concept of decision; and the third with reference to the concept of ‘whole being’. These are analyzed in sections “(1)–(3)”, respectively. Through these discussions, the picture of the notion of unification is painted: personal unity is not a static state but a dynamic one, an act of unification; acts of unification are those performed with one’s ‘whole being’, by the unified person; and one’s unified being consists in the concentration of one’s agentic power, as well as the alignment of the body, drives, sensations, and emotions with the unified agent; unification is a dimension of action, and as such an essential feature of it.

Reflecting on Martin Buber’s philosophical legacy, this chapter examines how Buber’s dialogical thought, originally framed as post-Kantian epistemology, became marginalized from mainstream philosophical discourse to the realm of German-Jewish history of ideas. Although this framing initially attracted philosophical interest, it eventually led to the perception of Buber’s work as nonviable and irrelevant, due to shifting philosophical paradigms and cultural dynamics. In response, the chapter introduces the main argument of the book: a proposal for reconceptualizing Buber’s work as a philosophy of action. This reconceptualization is argued to hold significant potential for contemporary philosophical exploration. The chapter concludes with an overview of the book’s structure.

This chapter, the second of two dedicated to Martin Buber’s concept of unity and its tight logical linkage with that of action, focuses on his 1952 essay “Images of Good and Evil” (IGE). In sections “(1)–(3)”, IGE’s notion of unification is laid out, and its linkage with the concept of action is demonstrated. Section “(1)” presents the linkage between Buber’s two concepts of ‘unification’ (Einheit) and ‘direction’ (Richtung), as well as between their negatives, fragmentation and arbitrariness. It reveals unification as a dimension of action, i.e., a process that occurs during—and by embarking upon—a course of action. In section “(2)”, the elements of the self that partake in the process of unification—power (Kraft), passion (Leidenschaft), and the “highest forces” (höchsten Kräfte)—are described; and the unification-direction and fragmentation-arbitrariness linkages are tightened. Section “(3)” provides further clarification through reconstructing Buber’s ontology of personhood and its hierarchical structure of the self, and inter alia resolving various issues left open in Chap. 5. Section “(4)” shows the strong linkage that explicitly surfaces between the concepts of unification and dialogue in Buber’s essays of the IGE period.

This chapter sets the stage for the rest of the book. It opens by demonstrating the centrality of the concept of action in Buber’s dialogical thought. Section “(1)” consists of an analysis of some of Buber’s major writings on dialogue: ‘I and Thou’, ‘Dialogue’, ‘A Question to the Single One’, and ‘Distance and Relation’. It shows that the conceptual distinctions at the heart of Buber’s dialogical essays are all articulated in terms of action. Although action-related concepts and ideas are prevalent in Buber’s writings, highlighting their central role and pervasive nature is critical, as most scholars, for various reasons discussed in section “(2)”, have either overlooked or ignored them. Section “(3)” presents the precise logical linkage between action and dialogue: action in its perfected form is necessarily dialogic. The chapter concludes with section “(4)”, a methodological note. Here, we address the main challenge we encounter in our investigation: Buber’s tendency not to define his terms. We outline the general structure of our investigation in the book which is crafted as a strategy to overcome this challenge. The section ends with the explanation of the rationale behind our selection of Buber’s texts.

This chapter explores Martin Buber’s concept of decision (Entscheidung). Section “(1)” presents decision as an essential feature of action, and as its first and most fundamental phase. Section “(2)” delves into Buber’s foundational distinction between pseudo decisions and true ones. Following this, sections “(3) and (4)” introduce two key resources necessary for making a true decision: revelation and human conscience, with section “(5)” detailing their interplay. In section “(6)”, Buber’s distinction between true and pseudo decisions is juxtaposed with Ullman-Margalit and Morgenbesser’s distinction between picking and choosing. The objective of unpacking Buber’s concept of decision is to facilitate and elucidate the linkage between Buber’s concepts of dialogue and action. The chapter concludes by teasing out the emergent link.

Buber held that a state of ambivalence is a necessary precursor, a seedbed to all actions. This chapter is devoted to the reconstruction of Buber’s notion of ambivalence. In section “(1)”, its main contours are reconstructed by a close reading of passages from ‘Images of Good and Evil’. Throughout his corpus, Buber refers to ambivalence through three metaphors: chaos (Chaos), abyss (Abgrund), and vortex (Wirbel). In section “(2)”, these metaphors are analyzed, elucidating how they serve to illuminate the nature of ambivalence as discussed in Buber’s texts, and the image they portray is shown to parallel his literal discussion of ambivalence laid out in section “(1)”. Buber’s conception of ambivalence evinces a tension between negative and positive depictions, which is resolved in section “(3)” via James Bugental’s distinction between (the negative) sequential and (the positive) simultaneous ambivalence, providing further insight into Buber’s conception of state of ambivalence.

In various essays examined in previous chapters, the linkage between dialogue and unification is explicitly asserted. However, it is not justified by an argument. In this chapter, we reconstruct such an argument by dividing the assertion into two claims. The first, treated in sections “(1) and (2)”, is that a dialogic act is necessarily carried out by a unified self. In section “(1)”, we demonstrate it through a thought experiment of a dialogic meeting at a Café; and in section “(2)”, through the analysis of Buber’s concept of exclusivity (Ausschließlichkeit). The second claim, treated in sections “(3) and (4)”, is that an action by a unified self is necessarily a dialogic one. In section “(3)”, we do so by introducing Buber’s notion of reflection (Rückbiegung), which—he holds—necessarily accompanies all non-dialogic acts, thus dividing the ‘I’ into a doer and an observer. In section “(4)”, we explain why only through a dialogic act, does one escape the predicament of the doer-observer divide.

The Act of Love promotes a philosophical revival of Buber’s dialogical thought by repositioning it as a philosophy of action, departing from a long-established consensus that narrowly viewed it as a post-Kantian epistemology. Based on careful analysis of his writings, the book’s main thrust is to reconstruct Buber’s argument that dialogue is the perfected form of action, and a perfect action is necessarily dialogical. This reconstruction renders Buber's dialogical thought pertinent to contemporary analytic philosophy by situating it within central discussions in the field of philosophy of action.

Herman Levin Goldschmidt delineates and critiques four types of “dialogism,” four ways of derailing dialogical discourse and praxis. In the following, I examine two of them: “Pan-dialogism” is the glossing over the effect of power differentials such as gender, class, and race as relevant factors in the constitution of dialogue. “Pluralogic” is the evading of true dialogue, which is intense and exclusive, by conducting simultaneously multiple superficial conversations. Pluralogic enables to escape the internal turmoil and conscience’s call for critiquing that are part and parcel of true dialogue. To examine the two dialogisms, I use Martin Buber’s thought, which Goldschmidt sees himself as continuing, as a case in point as well as a resource to further unpack Goldschmidt’s thought. In the course of the paper, I criticize what I call “Human Resource Office Morality,” the celebration of mere diversity at the expense of true contradiction.

This paper corrects a pervasive mistake in readings of Buber’s iconic trope, “I-Thou” (Ich-Du; hereafter, I-You). The mistake lies in considering it synonymous to the principal concept of his dialogical thought, “relation” (Beziehung). A detailed reading of relevant passages in Buber’s I and Thou (hereafter, IAT) reveals their difference: While both “relation” and “I-You” refer to the same reality—to the dialogic moment—they do so with a different focus and scope: “Relation” refers to the dialogic moment in its bilateral entirety. However, “primary word I-You” (hereafter, PWIY)—the phrase in which the I-You trope in fact appears in IAT—focuses on the active share of only one of the two interlocutors in the dialogic moment. While PWIY does refer to the dialogical moment (which is indeed bilateral), it denotes only a partial aspect of the dialogical moment. It focuses exclusively on my active turning toward you and defocuses your concurrent turning toward me (which, no doubt, is present as well). This mistake, I show, is due to interpreters’ enthusiastic endorsement of Buber’s later phrase, the “I-You relation,” which is indeed synonymous with “relation.” It is then easy to read back the “I-You relation” into the earlier, more focused concept of PWIY. Furthermore, this enthusiasm has blinded readers from realizing that, following IAT, Buber in fact abandoned the I-You trope and used it only reluctantly, mainly when addressing his interpreters who used it themselves, or when discussing IAT where it indeed appeared.