Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T06:31:17.443Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Buber as Hermeneut: Relations to Dilthey and Gadamer*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

Steven D. Kepnes
Steven D. Kepnes
Affiliation:
University of Virginia
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In speaking about his objective in translating the tales of Nahman of Bratslav in July of 1906 Martin Buber said, “In general it is not my goal to gather new facts, but rather solely to give a new interpretation of their coherence, a new synthetic presentation of Jewish mystics and their creations.” Before his death, in responding to harsh criticism of his translations of the Hasidic tales, Buber referred to his work as an attempt “to convey to our own time the force of a former life of faith.” His task, as Gershom Scholem once pointed out in derision, was not primarily historical; it was not a process of fact gathering, but it was hermeneutical. He aimed to present a new interpretation of the Hasidic tales of the past which would render them relevant to the crisis of the contemporary reader.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 81 , Issue 2 , April 1988 , pp. 193 - 213
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1988

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Buber, Martin, Briefwechsel aus sieben Jahrzehnten (ed. Schaeder, G.; Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1972) 1.Google Scholar 244 (my translation).

2 Buber, Martin, “Interpreting Hasidism,” Commentary 36 (1963) 218.Google Scholar I have analyzed the hermeneutical presuppositions of Buber's and Scholem's interpretations of Hasidism in an attempt to resolve their famous dispute in my “A Hermeneutic Approach to the Buber-Scholem Controversy,” JJS 38 (1987) 81–98.Google Scholar This present paper represents a further development of my presentation of Buber's hermeneutical presuppositions.

3 Similarly, Buber's approach to the Hebrew Bible was hermeneutical. As one commentator has remarked, Buber was concerned with the “appropriation by the individual of the biblical event in the present moment” (James Muilenburg, “Buber as an Interpreter of the Bible,” in Friedman, M. and Schilpp, P., eds., The Philosophy of Martin Buber [La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1967] 382).Google Scholar Hans Kohn and Nahum Glatzer have both referred to Buber's work as “an interpretation of Judaism”; see Kohn, Hans, Martin Buber: Sein Werk und seine Zeit (Cologne: Joseph Melzer, 1961) 67Google Scholar, and Glatzer, Nahum, “Epilogue” to Buber, Martin, On the Bible (New York: Schocken, 1982) 233.Google Scholar

4 Kohn, Buber: Sein Werk, chaps. 1, 2; Schaeder, Grete, The Hebrew Humanism of Martin Buber (trans. Jacobs, N.; Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973)Google Scholar chaps. 1, 2; Mendes-Flohr, Paul, “Fin-de-Siècle Orientialism, the Ostjuden and Jewish Self-Affirmation,” in Frankel, J., ed., Studies in Contemporary Jewry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984) 1.Google Scholar 96–139; idem, Von der Mystik zum Dialog: Martin Bubers geistige Entwicklung bis hin zu “Ich und Du” (Frankfurt: Jüdischer Verlag, 1978) chaps. 1Google Scholar, 3; Friedman, Maurice, Martin Buber's Life and Work (New York: Dutton, 1981) 1.Google Scholar chaps. 2, 5.

5 Mendes-Flohr does mention that Buber's “concept of translation as an act of empathic retelling seems to be influenced by the doctrines of Wilhelm Dilthey” (“Orientalism,” 135 n. 93; cf. 111). See also his discussions of Dilthey's hermeneutical influence in “Martin Buber's Reception Among Jews,” Modern Judaism 6 (1986) 120Google Scholar, and in his Nachwort to the forthcoming republication of Buber's Die Geschichten des Rabbi Nachman (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider).

6 Buber, Martin, “Das Problem des Menschen,” Werke (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1962) 1.Google Scholar 317. Paul Mendes-Flohr reports that Buber's friends, Nathan Rotenstreich and Ernst Simons, both told him that they often heard Buber speak about his indebtedness to Dilthey (Von der Mystik, 49 n. 40).

7 Schaeder, Hebrew Humanism, 41.

8 Dilthey's hermeneutic method is “romantic” because, like his predecessor, Schleiermacher, he stresses the importance of the creative mind of the individual author who produces the work and sees the work of interpretation, at least partially, as an attempt to get back to the intentionality of this author. See Schleiermacher, Friedrich, Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts (ed. Kimmerle, H.; Missoula: Scholars Press, 1977).Google Scholar For a contemporary version of romantic hermeneutics, see Hirsch, E. D., Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967).Google Scholar

9 Erlebnis, “lived experience,” is used to refer to the immediate, direct, prereflective experience of self, other, and human world. Erlebnis also is used to refer to what is significant and lasting in an experience. Erlebnis is experience which occurs within the socially constructed world and leads to the creation of value and meaning. It is contrasted with Erfahrung, which refers to objectivating and testing experience by the senses. On the basis of this difference, Dilthey developed his famous distinction between the human sciences, the Geisteswissenschaften. and the natural sciences, the Naturwissenschaften. Wilhelm Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1: Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (ed. Groethuysen, B.; Stuttgart: Teubner, 1959) xv–xixGoogle Scholar, and vol. 7: Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften (ed. Groethuysen, B., 1958) 79–88.Google Scholar

10 Expressions are signs and symbols which “gather together” and “fix” lived experiences. Dilthey, “Fragments of a Poetics,” Selected Works, vol. 5: Poetry and Experience (ed. Makkreel, R. and Rodi, F.; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985) 228.Google Scholar They include gestures, facial expressions, words, and more permanent forms of expression such as works of art, architecture, and written texts. It is the expression which provides the vessel for lived experience and organizes, structures, and preserves it so that it can be understood. “It is the medium in which the understanding of other persons and their life-expressions takes place”; Dilthey, “Das Verstehen anderer Personen und ihrer Leben,” Gesammelte Schriften, 7. 208. I use the translation from Kurt Mueller-Vollmer, ed. and trans., “The Hermeneutics of the Human Sciences,” in The Hermeneutics Reader (New York: Continuum, 1985) 155.Google Scholar

11 “The Development of Hermeneutics,” in W. Dilthey: Selected Writings (trans, and ed. Rickman, H. P.; London: Cambridge University Press, 1976) 247.Google Scholar

12 Ibid., 248.

13 Dilthey, “Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt,” Gesammelte Schriften, 7. 191, in Rickman, ed. and trans., Selected Writings, 208.

14 Ibid., 159. Because self-reflection is so important in the empathic method, autobiography, one's own attempt to bring to expression one's important life-experiences, is a primary preparatory tool for the task of hermeneutics. See Mueller-Vollmer, ed. and trans., Selected Writings, 214–15.

15 Understanding, proper, is based upon what Dilthey called “elementary understanding”—an assumed understanding of basic cultural codes, e.g., language, gestures, facial expressions. Mueller-Vollmer, ed. and trans., Hermeneutics Reader, 154.

16 Ibid., 159 (my italics).

17 Ibid.

18 Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften, 7. 215.

19 Dilthey asserts that the relation between creation and creator is not the only one which the interpreter is concerned with. He or she must also be concerned with “the relation of the expression to the expressed” (Hermeneutics Reader, 157), understood not as the author's Erlebnis but the “objective meaning” of the work outside of the author's mental state. Ricoeur, Paul has tried to argue (Interpretation Theory [Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976] 90–91)Google Scholar that the recognition of an objective referent in a work constitutes a major shift away from Dilthey's earlier subjectivist hermeneutic. Michael Ermarth summarizes the move as follows: “Particularly after his reading of Husserl, he extended his notion of meaning to include the relation between the sign and the thing signified and stipulated that what is signified cannot be resolved into experiential components and configurations. Verstehen is not just simply the “resubjectifying of objectivations in a ‘backward’ movement from the objective expression to the immanent subjective experiences of the expresser, but also a ‘forward movement’ from the sign to its intentional object” (Wilhelm Dilthey: The Critique of Historical Reason [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978] 274).Google Scholar

20 The English word “genius “does not adequately capture the German romantic use of the term ingenium, which means something less exclusive than our “genius.” The meaning is closer to our word “inspiration” or “invention.” Gadamer explains it this way: “Wherever one must ‘come upon something’ that cannot be found through learning and methodical work alone, i.e. wherever there is inventio, where something is due to inspiration and not to methodical calculation, the important thing is ingenium, genius” (Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Truth and Method [New York: Crossroad. 1982] 50).Google Scholar

21 Thus understanding and interpretation are intricately related for Dilthey, as with many in the Verstehen tradition. See Gadamer, “Alles Verstehen ist Auslegen,” in Wahrheit und Methode (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck. 1972) 366.Google Scholar Dilthey speaks of the systematic development of understanding as “explication.” Explication, in its turn, properly works upon written texts: “As the life of the mind finds its complete, exhaustive and therefore objective comprehension in language, explication culminates in the interpretation of the written records of human existence” (Dilthey, Hermeneutics Reader, 161).

22 Buber, Martin. “My Way to Hasidism,” in idem, Hasidism and Modern Man (trans. Friedman, M.; New York: Harper&Row, 1966) 62.Google Scholar Hans Kohn states (Buber: Sein Werk, 30) that Buber was very much influenced by Gustav Landauer who, in turn it seems, was influenced by Dilthey in his modern German translation of Meister Eckhart's work. Kohn quotes from the publication prospectus for Landauer's Eckhart translation which includes observations that could very easily be said by Buber's publisher about his translation of Nahman and the Baal-Shem: “Landauer believes himself to have found the key to Eckhart's secrets from a certain kinship with his being. He joyfully went about his work with sincere belief in his intellectual and spiritual affinity and since he was successful in understanding Eckhart and in linguistically and conceptually forming the material anew, he was able to separate out from the extant writings of the Meister that which was uniquely Eckhart's.… Only he could presume to sift through this material who felt and revered Eckhart completely as full of life and effective. Therefore designations for this book as a selection or modernization would be totally false. … It is the return of a forgotten one who should not be evaluated historically but rather should be filled (erfüllt) anew with life” (293 n. 2; my translation). See Dilthey's use of the term Erfüllung in Gesammelte Schriften, 6. 315.

23 Martin Buber, “Hasidism and Modern Man,” in idem, Hasidism, 26.

24 Buber, Martin, The Tales of Rabbi Nachman (trans. Friedman, M.; New York: Horizon, 1956) i.Google Scholar

25 Ibid.

26 Buber, Martin, The Legend of the Baal-Shem (New York: Schocken, 1969) 10.Google Scholar

27 Buber, “My Way,” 62.

28 Buber, “Replies to My Critics,” 731.

29 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 277, 361.

30 An additional influence on Buber's revised hermeneutical approach stemmed from his involvement with Franz Rosenzweig and their joint project of translating the Hebrew Bible into German which was started in May 1925. Everett Fox points out, in his fine dissertation, that “in the translation each man was taxed to the utmost (especially Buber) in the effort to restrain poetic enthusiasm in favor of strict adherence to an existing text” (“Technical Aspects of the Translation of Genesis of Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig” [Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1975] 6). Rosenzweig could have been talking of Buber's tales of Rabbi Nahman when he spoke out in his epilogue to the translation of Ha-Levi's poems [1924] against a tendency of “creative translators” to “fill out the gaps” and “give us the masterpieces of the past and of foreign countries in ‘modern dress’” (translated in Glatzer, Nahum, Franz Rosenzweig [New York: Schocken, 1961]) 252.Google Scholar Rosenzweig apparently influenced Buber, for he came to speak out against translations of the Bible which fail to respect the “sense”and “sensuousness” of the Hebrew in which the Bible was written and which attempt to present a modern “unperceiving familiarity” with the text (Buber, “Über die Wortwahl in einer Verdeutschung der Schrift,” in idem and Rosenzweig, , Die Schrift und ihre Verdeutschung [Berlin: Schocken, 1936] 136Google Scholar, as translated by Fox, “Technical Aspects,” 21). Buber's notion of the Bible as foreign, “entirely unfamiliar,” yet capable of powerful speech provides a clear model for a text which can become a Thou. See Buber, “The Man of Today and the Jewish Bible,” in idem, On the Bible, 5.

31 Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim, vol. 1: Early Masters (trans. Marx, Olga; New York: Schocken, 1947) xi.Google Scholar

32 Ibid., viii.

33 Ibid., x.

34 Buber, “Hasidism,” 24.

35 Buber, Martin, I and Thou (trans. Smith, R. G.; New York: Scribner's, 1958) 6.Google Scholar All references to I and Thou will be taken from this translation unless otherwise noted.

36 Wood, Robert, Martin Buber's Ontology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1969) 43Google Scholar; see also n. 38 for a helpful discussion of other attempts to translate the term geistige Wesenheiten.

37 The expression “prime analogate” is Wood's (Ontology, 50). Buber's first mention of geistige Wesenheiten in I and Thou refers to “forming, thinking, acting” (6). His next reference is to “language, art, and action” (39), which is followed by paragraphs on knowledge, art, and action (40–42). The discussions of art seem primary because it is out of them that Buber develops most fully his notion of a form of spirit that has become concrete. On the other hand he does refer to language as “spirit's primal act” (95) and then again to true spiritual action as “higher than the spirit of knowledge and the spirit of art” (42). For a good example of a spiritual form of action, see Buber's remarks on Schweitzer, Albert in “A Realist of the Spirit,” in Buber, , A Believing Humanism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967) 55ff.Google Scholar

38 Buber, I and Thou, 9.

39 See Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften, 6. 313–20.

40 Buber, I and Thou, 9–10.

41 Ibid., 39.

42 Buber's references to Geist in I and Thou range from transcendent notions of spirit as “in its own realm” (51), the “heavenly,” and the “deeply mysterious” (42), to the religious designation, the “Word” (39), to more immanent notions of spirit as encompassing nature (24), to human and cultural notions: “language, art, and action” (39). Wood (Ontology, 74) has tried to establish some order in Buber's use of the term by suggesting that the purest form of spirit is transcendent and labeled “the Word” and its manifestations are founded in the forms of spirit: art, knowledge, action.

43 Buber, , “Der Mensch und sein Gebild,” in Werke (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1962) 424–42Google Scholar; ET: “Man and His Image-Work,” in Friedman, M., ed., The Knowledge of Man (New York: Harper & Row, 1965) 151.Google Scholar Cf. “Spirits and Men,” in A Believing Humanism, 52–54, for an interesting discussion of the work of Buber's wife Paula as an example of an artistic form of spirit.

44 Buber, I and Thou, 10.

45 Buber, “Image-work,” 161.

46 Buber, I and Thou, 10.

47 Ibid., 10, 40.

48 Buber, “Ich und Du,” Werke, 1. 84.

49 Louis Hammer, “The Relevance of Buber to Aesthetics,” in Friedman and Schilpp, eds., Philosophy of Martin Buber, 627.

50 Buber, I and Thou, 129.

51 Buber, Martin, “Dialogue,” in Between Man and Man (trans. Smith, R. G.; New York: Macmillan, 1965) 9.Google ScholarPubMed

52 Hammer, “Relevance,” 614.

53 Buber, “Gebild,” 424.

54 Buber, , I and Thou (trans. Kaufmann, W.; New York: Scribner's, 1970) 62.Google Scholar

55 Maurice Friedman, “Introductory Essay,” Knowledge of Man, 53.

56 Buber, “Dialogue,” 25.

57 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 91ff.

58 Ibid., 94.

59 Ibid., 95.

60 Ibid., 278.

61 Ibid., 321.

62 Others such as F. Rosenzweig, E. Rosenstock-Huessy, and F. Ebner employed the term, but its most sustained development is found in Buber's work and its world-wide recognition is also due to Buber. For a historical discussion of the term see Buber, “The History of the Dialogical Principle,” in Between Man and Man, and Theunissen, Michael, The Other (trans. Macann, C.; Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984) 256–71.Google Scholar

63 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 321.

54 Ibid., 323.

65 Cf. Buber, I and Thou, 4 and “Dialogue,” 8, where Buber speaks of the objective way of perceiving, which he calls “observing.”

66 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 262.

67 Ibid., 322.

68 Ibid., 262–63.

69 Martin Buber, “Distance and Relation,” in Knowledge of Man, 60.

70 Ibid., 69.

71 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 324.

72 Ibid., 325.

73 Ibid., 326.

74 Ibid., 331.

75 Buber, “Über das Erzieherische,” in Werke, 1. 801 ff.

76 Buber, “Education,” in Between Man and Man, 97.

77 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 273.

78 Ibid., 341. Buber gives moving examples of transforming dialogues in his essay “Dialogue,” 3–6.

79 Ibid., 274.

80 Ibid., 278.

81 Ibid., 297.

82 Ibid., 263–64.

83 Buber, “Hasidism and Modem Man,” 38.

84 Martin Buber, “Replies to My Critics,” in Friedman and Schilpp, eds., Philosophy of Martin Buber, 737.

85 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 275. This is not to say that every new interpretation is a correct interpretation. Interpretation, as Gadamer suggests in the final sentence of Truth and Method, must “be achieved by a discipline of questioning and research” (447). David Tracy has interpreted this to mean that each person's individual interpretation of a text must be subjected to the questioning and research of other serious readers. A dialogue must also be engendered between interpreters. “The larger dialogue with the entire community of capable readers is a major need for any claim to relative adequacy in interpretation” (Tracy, The Analogical Imagination [New York: Crossroad. 1981] 121).Google Scholar Richard Bernstein summarizes Gadamer's position on a true interpretation in this way. It is “what can be argumentatively validated by the community of interpreters who open themselves to what [the text of] a tradition says to us” (Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics and Praxis [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983] 154).Google Scholar Buber's interpretation of Hasidism must still then be validated by the argument and consensus of modern interpreters of Hasidic texts.

86 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 350.

87 Buber. I and Thou (trans. Kaufmann) 57. For an in-depth discussion of Buber's notion of language, see my dissertation, “Martin Buber's Stories and Contemporary Narrative Theory” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago. 1983) chap. 1.Google Scholar

88 As well as articulating the initial dialogic relationship between the reader and text, Buber may be helpful to those who are trying to articulate the process of dialogue which should rightly occur between serious readers after their initial private dialogue with the text. See Tracy, Analogical Imagination, and Scott, Nathan, Jr., “The House of Intellect in an Age of Carnival: Some Hermeneutical Reflections,” JAAR 60 (1987) 3–19.Google Scholar One important “dialogical” literary critic, Mikhail Bakhtin, has spoken of his debt to Buber: see Frank, Joseph, “The Voices of Mikhail Bakhtin,” New York Review of Books (23 October 1986) 56 n. 2.Google Scholar

89 Buber, “Replies to my Critics,” 731.

90 See Gadamer, Truth and Method, 324–25. For a more elaborate discussion of Scholem's relationship to the historical-critical school of Jewish scholarship, the “Wissenschaft des Judentums,” and Buber's departure from it see my “Hermeneutic Approach.” Here, in addition to defending Buber, I try to show how attention to certain historical-critical issues that Scholem raises could have helped Buber's interpretation of Hasidism. On the other hand, Scholem's project of bringing obscure elements of the Jewish past to light would have been advanced by Buber's techniques as well. I try to put Scholem and Buber “in dialogue” by employing the hermeneutical theory of Paul Ricoeur wherein historical-critical (explanatory) and Verstehen methodologies are employed dialectically.

91 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 299.