The life of dialogue

pp. 223-253

in: George Pattison, Anxious angels, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1999

Abstract

Shestov, Berdyaev, Unamuno and Marcel collectively give the lie to the view that religious existentialism was exclusively a Lutheran-Protestant phenomenon. When we also take into account the cases of Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig we have to make the further acknowledgement that it was not exclusively Christian either, since their Jewish inheritance was central to virtually everything either of them wrote.¹ Focusing in the first instance on Buber, we have to add that, despite a resolute acceptance of the world in its fearful contingency and a powerful sense of the need for "holy insecurity", there is a confidence and an optimism in his thought that many regard as far removed from the mind-set of the typical existentialist. Moreover, Buber was a thoroughly social thinker, for whom not only the relation to the Other but life in community was an ineluctable dimension of the human condition.² Like Unamuno, Shestov and Berdyaev, Buber was also somewhat older than many of the twentieth-century anxious angels, having been born (in Vienna) in 1878, and he came to intellectual maturity well before the First World War, even though I and Thou, the book for which he is best, and sometimes solely, remembered was not published until 1923.