"Between Man and Man" by Martin Buber

Dialogue (Zwiesprache, 1929)

"Between Man and Man" by Martin Buber

Dialogue (Zwiesprache, 1929)

"Between Man and Man" by Martin Buber

Dialogue (Zwiesprache, 1929)

Against the position outlined here of the Single One in responsi-
bility there is bound to rise up that powerful modern point of
view, according to which in the last resort only so-called object-
ives, more precisely collectives, are real, while significance is
attached to persons only as the workers or the tools of the coll-
ectives. Kierkegaard’s merely religious category, to be sure, may
be indifferent to this point of view: according to his category
only the person is essential and the objective either has only a
secondary existence or, as crowd, is the negative which is to be
avoided. If, however, the Single One as such has essentially to do
with the world, and even with the world in particular, with the
body politic, but not in order, consciously and with the
emphasis of faith, henceforth to let himself be used, but in
responsibility for that in which before God he participates, then
he is bound to be opposed and if possible refuted once for all by
that point of view. It can set about this by means of arguments
taken from a certain contemporary trend of thought which con-
forms to the time and is apparently its expedient. It is a trend of
which the representatives, first of all, with all their various differ-
ences, have in common one object of attack—it may be

described as liberalism or individualism or by any other slogan
you please. (In this they usually neglect—as, understandably,
often happens in cases of this kind—to analyze the attacked
“ism” conceptually, nor do they make a distinction between
what they mean and what they do not mean, that is, between
what is worth contesting and what should be spared. If such an
analysis should be applied to, say, “liberalism”, individual con-
cepts of varying tendency would arise, towards which it would
be possible to adopt a standpoint in quite different clarity and
unambiguousness. Thus, for example, there would be libertin-
ism, the poor mode of thought of the released slave who only
knows what is or what ought to be permitted to him, to “man”;
on the other hand there would be liberism, the mode of thought
of the free-born man for whom freedom is the presupposition
of binding, of the true personal entry into a binding relation, no
more and no less—a mode of thought worthy of being pre-
served in the treasure-house of the spirit and defended along
with it by everyone who knows about the spirit.) But it is more
significant that the representatives of this trend have also a com-
mon purpose or at least a common effect: they give the political
province an exaggerated autonomy, they contrast public life
with the rest of life, they remove it from the responsibility of the
Single One who takes part in it.

In order to indicate what might be replied to such arguments
from the standpoint of the transformed category of the Single
One, two examples of the trend of thought under consideration
may be discussed, one concerning the philosophy of the State
and the other the theology of the State.

But first I precede these with a third example, less important
but also rich in teaching, a historiosophical one.

Oswald Spengler wishes to establish the special sphere of the
political, as having a value independent of our therefore
inaccessible ethics, by classifying man with beasts of prey. If no
longer between tamed individuals yet certainly between the

groups, conditions (he says) are always, necessarily and nor-
mally, like those between packs of beasts. Here, in his existence
within the group, man has remained an unweakened beast of
prey, and the Single One has to guard against applying standards
which are foreign to the particular sphere.

This is a trivialization of a Nietzschian thesis. Nietzsche
believed that the important thing is that the power in history
should keep faith with its own nature; if that is repressed then
degeneration follows. Nietzsche does not move away from a
presupposition. The important thing is that the power in history
keeps faith with itself as with one of the partners in a dialogical
event in which even the most forceful activity can signify a
shirking of the answer, a refusal to give an answer.

Nietzsche’s thesis speaks the language of history, Spengler’s
the language of biology. Every attempt to interpret human
action in biological terms (however much one must remember
biological existence when explaining man) is a trivialization; it
is a poor simplification because it means the abandoning of the
proper anthropological content, of that which constitutes the
category of man.

Beasts of prey have no history. A panther can indeed have a
biography and a colony of termites perhaps even State annals,
but they do not have history in the great distinguishing sense
which permits us to speak of human history as “world-history”.
A life of prey yields no history. Man has acquired history by
entering fundamentally on something that would be bound to
appear to the beast of prey as senseless and grotesque—namely,
on responsibility, and thus on becoming a person with a relation
to the truth. Hence it has become impossible to comprehend
man from the standpoint of biology alone.

“History” is not the sequence of conquests of power and
actions of power but the context of the responsibilities of power
in time.

Thus the beast of prey thesis means a denial of human essence

and a falsification of human history. It is true, as Spengler says in
defence of his thesis, that “the great beasts of prey are noble
creations of the most perfect kind”, but this has no power to
prove anything. It is a matter of man’s becoming in his kind,
which is conditioned by his evolution and his history, just as
“noble a creation” as they in theirs: that means that he helps to
realize that “freedom of the children of God” towards which, as
Paul says, all creatures “crane their necks”.

More serious consideration must be given to the conceptual
definition of the political offered by a well-known Roman
Catholic exponent of Constitutional Law, Carl Schmitt. In his
view the political has its own criterion, which cannot be derived
from the criterion of another realm. It is the distinction between
friend and foe which in his view corresponds to “the relatively
autonomous criteria of other oppositions, good and evil in the
moral sphere, beautiful and ugly in the æsthetic, and so on”. The
eventuality of a real struggle, which includes the “possibility of
physical killing”, belongs to the concept of the foe, and from
this possibility the life of man acquires “its specifically political
tension”.

The “possibility of physical killing”—really it should be “the
intention of physical killing”. For Schmitt’s thesis carries a situ-
ation of private life, the classic duel situation, over into public
life.

This duel situation arises when two men experience a conflict
existing between them as absolute, and therefore as capable of
resolution only in the destruction of the one by the other. There
is no reconciliation, no mediation, no adequate expiation, the
hand that deals the blow must not be any but the opponent’s;
but this is the resolution. Every classic duel is a masked “judg-
ment of God”. In each there is an aftermath of the belief that
men can bring about a judgment of God. That is what Schmitt,
carrying it over to the relation of peoples to one another, calls
the specifically political.

But the thesis rests on an error of method. The essential prin-
ciple of a realm, the principle that constitutes it as such, cannot
be taken from the labile state of the formations in this realm, but
only from their lasting character. The friend-foe formula derives
from the sphere of exposedness of political formations, not from
the sphere of their coherence. The radical distinction which
Schmitt supposes appears in times in which the common life is
threatened, not in times in which it experiences its stability as
self-evident and assured. The distinction, therefore, is not
adequate to yield the principle of “the political”.

But the formula does not even include the whole lability of a
political formation. This lability is always twofold—an outer,
which is exposed by the neighbour (or attacker become neigh-
bour) pressing on the frontier, and an inner, which is indicated
by the rebel. Schmitt calls him the “inner foe”, but in this he
confuses two fundamentally different kinds of lability. The foe
has no interest in the preservation of the formation, but the rebel
has—he wants to “change” it: it is precisely it he wants to
change. Only the former is radical enough to establish the
import of the formula. The friend-foe formula comprehends,
therefore, only one side of lability and cannot be stretched to
include the other.

The oppositions “good and evil in the moral sphere, beautiful
and ugly in the æsthetic”, which Schmitt sets together with this
one, are in distinction from it intended normatively, that is, only
when the good, the beautiful, are understood in a content of
essential significance is there any sense in defining the evil, the
ugly. “Friend and foe,” however, describes not a normative con-
cept of being but only a concept of an attitude within a situation.

Moreover, it seems to me that behind the common pairs of
opposed concepts, good and evil, beautiful and ugly, there stand
others in which the negative concept is intimately bound to the
positive, being the emptiness to its fulness, the chaos to its cos-
mos. Behind good and evil as the criteria of the ethical stand

direction and absence of direction, behind beautiful and ugly as
the criteria of the æsthetic stand form and formlessness. For the
realm of the political there is no pair of concepts in the fore-
ground, obviously because it is more difficult, or impossible, to
give autonomy to the negative pole in it. I should call the pair in
the background order and absence of order, but the concept of
order must be freed of the depreciation which sometimes clings
to it. Right order is direction and form in the political realm. But
these two concepts must not be allowed to petrify. They have
their truth only from the conception of a homogeneous dynamic
of order which is the real principle of the political. The true his-
tory of a commonwealth must be understood as its striving to
reach the order suited to it. This striving, this wrestling for the
realization of true order—wrestling between ideas, plans, out-
lines of true order that are so different, but also a wrestling that
is simultaneously common to them all, not known, not to be
expressed—constitutes the political structure’s dynamic of
order. An order is gained and established again and again as a
result. It becomes firm and inclusive, it consolidates itself as well
against the resistance of whatever dynamic may be left. It stiffens
and dies off, completely renouncing the dynamic which set it
going; and yet it keeps its power for the struggle for true order
flaring up again. The foe threatens the whole dynamic of order
in the commonwealth, the rebel threatens only the order as it is
at the time. Every order considered from the standpoint of the
whole dynamic is called in doubt. That is the double life of the
State: again and again realization of the political structure, again
and again its being called in doubt. The “high points of concrete
politics” are not, as Schmitt thinks, “at the same time the
moments in which the foe is visualized in concrete clarity as
the foe”; they are the moments in which an order, in face of the
gravest responsibility of the individual confronting himself with
it, demonstrates the legitimacy of its static character, its character
(however necessarily relative) of fulfilment.

In Schmitt’s view all “genuine” political theories presuppose
that man is “evil”. (Incidentally, why do the theories that do this
do it? Since from Schmitt’s point of view political theory is only
a department of practical politics, the answer along his line
would have to be “because it seems to their authors to be politic-
ally expedient”.) This “evil”, indeed, Schmitt explains as being
“in no way unproblematic” and “dangerous”—and I too take
man to be both—but he finds support for the correctness of his
presupposition in the theological doctrine of the absolute sinful-
ness of man. He has found a weighty theological associate in
Friedrich Gogarten.

Gogarten explains in his Political Ethics that all ethical problems
receive their ethical relevance only from the political problem.
That is, the ethical is valid as the ethical only by its connexion
with man’s political being. In saying this he abandons Kierke-
gaard’s category of the Single One. Gogarten believes that he is
only fighting against individualism but at the same time he is
fighting against the position of personal life in the rigour of its
total responsibility. If ethical problems receive their relevance
from the political realm, they cannot also receive them from the
religious, not even if the political has a religious basis. But if they
do not receive them from the religious realm, then we have
reached again, within the life of the “religious” man—even if in
a politicized form—the disconnected ethic which Kierkegaard
helped us to overcome. Gogarten may speak in theological terms
as emphatically as he pleases, he narrows down the Single One’s
fundamental relation with God when he lets his action receive its
validity from some other source, even if it is from the destiny,
considered in itself, of the community to which the Single One
belongs. (And what else are “ethical problems” but man’s ques-
tions about his actions and their meaning?) True as it is that he,
the Single One, cannot win to a legitimate relation with God
without a legitimate relation to the body politic, it is neverthe-
less also true that the defining force has to be ascribed not to the

latter but to the former alone. That is, I must always let the
boundary between co-operation and non-co-operation within
my relation to my community be drawn by God. You say that
often you hear nothing? Well, we have to be attentive with the
unreserved effort of our being. If even then we hear nothing,
then, but only then, may we turn in the direction Gogarten
indicates. But if we are not attentive or if we hear but do not
obey, then our omission, and not our invoking of some kind of
relation of ethical problems to the political, will persist in
eternity.

In Gogarten’s view man is “radically and therefore irrevocably
evil, that is, in the grip of evil”. The relevance of the political
arises from the fact that “only in the political” does man have,
“in face of this recognition, the possibility of existence”. The
ethical quality of the State consists “in its warding off the evil to
which men have fallen prey by its sovereign power and by its
right over the life and property of its subjects”. (Incidentally,
this is a theological version of the old police-state idea.) For
“whence shall the State derive sovereign power if not from the
recognition of man’s fallen state”?

The concept to which Gogarten refers, of the radical evil of
man, his absolute sinfulness, is taken from the realm where man
confronts God and is significant there alone. What to my know-
ledge and understanding is taught by Christian theology, in
whose name Gogarten speaks, is that man, more precisely, fallen
man, considered as being unredeemed, is “before God” (coram
Deo) sinful and depraved. I do not see how his being unredeemed
can be broken off from its dialectic connexion with redemption
(ab his malis liberemur et servemur) and used separately. Nor do I see
how the concept of being evil can be translated from the realm
of being “before God” into that of being before earthly authori-
ties, and yet retain its radical nature. In the sight of God a state
of radical evil can be ascribed to man because God is God and
man is man, and the distance between them is absolute, and

because precisely in this distance and in virtue of it God’s
redeeming deed is done. In the sight of his fellow-men, of
human groups and orders, man, it seems to me, cannot be prop-
erly described as simply sinful, because the distance is lacking
which alone is able to establish the unconditional. Nothing is
changed if a human order is considered as established or
empowered by God. For that absolute distance to man, which
establishes the unconditional (but at the same time discloses the
place of redemption)—the distance from which alone man’s
radical evil could appear also in face of the body politic—can by
no means be bestowed in this way upon the human order. Hence
no legitimate use can be made in politics or political theory of
the concept of human sinfulness.

In my view, however, man generally is not “radically” this or
that.

It is not radicality that characterizes man as separated by a
primal abyss from all that is merely animal, but it is his potential-
ity. If we put him alone before the whole of nature then there
appears embodied in him the character of possibility inherent in
natural existence and which everywhere else hovers round dense
reality only like a haze. Man is the crystallized potentiality of
existence. But he is this potentiality in its factual limitation. The
wealth of possibility in existence from which the animals are
kept away by their exiguous reality is exhibited in man in a sign
that is incomprehensible from the standpoint of nature. Yet this
wealth of possibility does not hold free sway, so that life might
be able time and again to follow on wings the anticipation of
spirit, but it is confined within narrow limits. This limitation is
not essential, but only factual. That means that man’s action is
unforeseeable in its nature and extent, and that even if he were
peripheral to the cosmos in everything else, he remains the
centre of all surprise in the world. But he is fettered surprise,
only inwardly is it without bonds; and his fetters are strong.

Man is not good, man is not evil; he is, in a pre-eminent sense,

good and evil together. He who eats of him, as he who ate of that
fruit, has the knowledge of good and evil together. That is his
limitation, that is the cunning of the serpent: he was to become
as God, knowing good and evil; but what he “recognizes”, what
in being mixed up with it he has recognized as something mixed
up, is good and evil together: he has become good and evil
together; that is the nakedness in which he recognizes himself.
The limitation is only factual, it does not transform his essence
or destroy God’s work. To ascribe to the serpent the power of
destruction is to elevate it to rivalry with God and make it for the
time superior to him (as Ahriman was for a time to Ormuzd),
since it perverts God’s creation. But the serpent in the Bible is
not that. It is not an opposing god, it is only the creature which
desires to undo man by man’s own doing. It is the “cunning”
creature, the cunning of the secretly poisonous creature which
foments disorder; and out of the disorder comes history which,
groping and striving and failing, is concerned with God’s order.
The primal event pointed out by the images of the Bible does not
lie under the principle of contradiction: A and not-A are here
strangely concerned with one another.

Good and evil, then, cannot be a pair of opposites like right
and left or above and beneath. “Good” is the movement in the
direction of home, “evil” is the aimless whirl of human potenti-
alities without which nothing can be achieved and by which, if
they take no direction but remain trapped in themselves, every-
thing goes awry. If the two were indeed poles the man who did
not see them as such would be blind; but the man would be
blinder who did not perceive the lightning flash from pole to
pole, the “and”.

As a condition of the individual soul evil is the convulsive
shirking of direction, of the total orientation of the soul by
which it stands up to personal responsibility before God. The
shirking can take place from passion or from indolence. The
passionate man refuses by his passion, the indolent man by his

indolence. In both cases the man goes astray within himself. The
real historical dæmonias are the exploiting by historical powers
of this shirking.

But the State as such cannot indicate the one direction of the
hour towards God, which changes time and again by concretion.
Only the Single One, who stands in the depth of responsibility,
can do that. And indeed a statesman can also be this Single One.

Gogarten puts the State in place of the historical State, that is,
of the government of the particular time (αρχοντε^). This gov-
ernment cannot ward off the “evil” as an impersonal State but
can do it only on the basis of its own personal responsibility, and
is for the rest itself exposed to the dynamic between good and
evil. The State is the visible form of authority, and for Gogarten
authority is simply what is established, the diaconal; power is
full power. But if the establishment of power is taken seriously,
theologically and biblically seriously, the establishing turns out
to be a precise commission and the power a great duty of
responsibility. The Old Testament records, in the history of the
kings of Israel and the history of foreign rulers, the degeneration
of legitimacy into illegitimacy and of full power into antagon-
istic power. As no philosophical concept of the State, so likewise
no theological concept of the State leads beyond the reality of
the human person in the situation of faith. None leads beyond
his responsibility—be he servant or emperor—for the body
politic as man in the sight of God.
 

In the human crisis which we are experiencing to-day these two
have become questionable—the person and the truth.

We know from the act of responsibility how they are linked
together. For the responsible response to exist the reality of the
person is necessary, whom the word meets in the happening
claiming him; and the reality of the truth is necessary to which

the person goes out with united being and which he is therefore
able to receive only in the word, as the truth which concerns
himself, in his particular situation, and not in any general way.

The question by which the person and the truth have become
questionable to-day is the question to the Single One.

The person has become questionable through being
collectivized.

This collectivizing of the person is joined in history to a basic-
ally different undertaking in which I too participated and to
which I must therefore confess now. It is that struggle of recent
decades against the idealistic concepts of the sovereign, world-
embracing, world-sustaining, world-creating I. The struggle was
conducted (among other ways) by reference to the neglected
creaturely bonds of the concrete human person. It was shown
how fundamentally important it is to know in every moment of
thought this as well—that the one who thinks is bound, in dif-
ferent degrees of substantiality but never purely functionally, to
a spatial realm, to a historical hour, to the genus man, to a
people, to a family, to a society, to a vocational group, to a
companionship in convictions. This entanglement in a manifold
We, when known in an actual way, wards off the temptation of
the thought of sovereignty: man is placed in a narrow creaturely
position. But he is enabled to recognize that this is his genuine
width; for being bound means being bound up in relation.

But it came about that a tendency of a quite different origin
and nature assumed power over the new insights, which exag-
gerated and perverted the perception of bonds into a doctrine of
serfdom. Primacy is ascribed here to a collectivity. The collectiv-
ity receives the right to hold the person who is bound to it
bound in such a way that he ceases to have complete responsibil-
ity. The collectivity becomes what really exists, the person
becomes derivatory. In every realm which joins him to the
whole he is to be excused a personal response.

Thereby the immeasurable value which constitutes man is

imperilled. The collectivity cannot enter instead of the person
into the dialogue of the ages which the Godhead conducts with
mankind. Human perception ceases, the human response is
dumb, if the person is no longer there to hear and to speak. It is
not possible to reduce the matter to private life; only in the
uncurtailed measure of lived life, that is, only with the inclusion
of participation in the body politic, can the claim be heard and
the reply spoken.

The truth, on the other hand, has become questionable
through being politicized.

The sociological doctrine of the age has exercised a relativ-
izing effect, heavy with consequences, on the concept of truth,
in that it has, in the dependence of the thought processes on
social processes, proved the connexion of thought with exist-
ence. This relativization was justified in that it bound the “truth”
of a man to his conditioning reality. But its justification was
perverted into the opposite when its authors omitted to draw the
basic boundary line between what can and what cannot be
understood as conditioned in this way. That is, they did not
comprehend the person in his total reality, wooing the truth and
wrestling for it. If we begin with the Single One as a whole
being, who wishes to recognize with his total being, we find that
the force of his desire for the truth can at decisive points burst
the “ideological” bonds of his social being. The man who thinks
“existentially”, that is, who stakes his life in his thinking, brings
into his real relation to the truth not merely his conditioned
qualities but also the unconditioned nature, transcending them,
of his quest, of his grasp, of his indomitable will for the truth,
which also carries along with it the whole personal power of
standing his test. We shall certainly be able to make no distinc-
tion, in what he has, time and again, discovered as the truth,
between what can and what cannot be derived from the social
factor. But it is an ineluctable duty to accept what cannot be so
derived as a border concept and thus to point out, as the

unattainable horizon of the distinction made by the sociology of
knowledge, what takes place between the underivable in the
recognizing person and the underivable in the object of his
recognition. This duty has been neglected. Consequently, the
political theory of modern collectivisms was easily able to
assume power over the principle which lay ready, and to
proclaim what corresponded to the (real or supposed) life
interests of a group as its legitimate and unappealable truth.
Over against this the Single One could no longer appeal to a
truth which could be recognized and tested by him.

This marks the beginning of a disintegration of human faith
in the truth, which can never be possessed and yet may be
comprehended in an existentially real relation; it marks the
beginning of the paralysis of the human search for the truth.

“What I speak of,” says Kierkegaard, “is something simple
and straightforward—that the truth for the Single One only
exists in his producing it himself in action.” More precisely, man
finds the truth to be true only when he stands its test. Human
truth is here bound up with the responsibility of the person.

“True is what is Mine,” says Stirner. Human truth is here
bound up with the human person’s lack of responsibility. Col-
lectivisms translate this into the language of the group: “True is
what is Ours.”

But in order that man may not be lost there is need of persons
who are not collectivized, and of truth which is not politicized.

There is need of persons, not merely “representatives” in
some sense or other, chosen or appointed, who exonerate the
represented of responsibility, but also “represented” who on no
account let themselves be represented with regard to responsibil-
ity. There is need of the person as the ground which cannot be
relinquished, from which alone the entry of the finite into
conversation with the infinite became possible and is possible.

There is need of man’s faith in the truth as that which is
independent of him, which he cannot acquire for himself, but

with which he can enter into a real relation of his very life; the
faith of human persons in the truth as that which sustains them
all together, in itself inaccessible but disclosing itself, in the fact
of responsibility which awaits test, to him who really woos the
truth.

That man may not be lost there is need of the person’s
responsibility to truth in his historical situation. There is need of
the Single One who stands over against all being which is pres-
ent to him—and thus also over against the body politic—and
guarantees all being which is present to him—and thus also the
body politic.

True community and true commonwealth will be realized
only to the extent to which the Single Ones become real out of
whose responsible life the body politic is renewed.
 

Only by coming up against the category of the “Single One”,
and by making it a concept of the utmost clarity, did Søren
Kierkegaard become the one who presented Christianity as a
paradoxical problem for the single “Christian”. He was only able
to do this owing to the radical nature of his solitariness. His
“single one” cannot be understood without his solitariness,
which differed in kind from the solitariness of one of the earlier
Christian thinkers, such as Augustine or Pascal, whose name
one would like to link with his. It is not irrelevant that beside
Augustine stood a mother and beside Pascal a sister, who main-
tained the organic connexion with the world as only a woman as
the envoy of elemental life can; whereas the central event of

Kierkegaard’s life and the core of the crystallization of his
thought was the renunciation of Regina Olsen as representing
woman and the world. Nor may this solitariness be compared
with that of a monk or a hermit: for him the renunciation stands
essentially only at the beginning, and even if it must be ever
anew achieved and practised, it is not that which is the life
theme, the basic problem, and the stuff out of which all teaching
is woven. But for Kierkegaard this is just what renunciation is. It
is embodied in the category of the single one, “the category
through which, from the religious standpoint, time and history
and the race must pass” (Kierkegaard, 1847).

By means of an opposition we can first of all be precisely
aware what the single one, in a special and specially important
sense, is not. A few years before Kierkegaard outlined his Report to
History under the title The Point of View for my Work as an Author, in
whose Two Notes the category of the Single One found its
adequate formulation, Max Stirner published his book about
“The Unique One” (10). This too is a border concept like the
single one, but one from the other end. Stirner, a pathetic nom-
inalist and unmasker of ideas, wanted to dissolve the alleged
remains of German idealism (as which he regarded Ludwig
Feuerbach) by raising not the thinking subject nor man but the
concrete present individual as “the exclusive I” to be the bearer
of the world, that is, of “his” world.

Here this Unique One “consuming himself” in “self-
enjoyment” is the only one who has primary existence; only the
man who comes to such a possession and consciousness of him-
self has primary existence—on account of the “unity and
omnipotence of our I that is sufficient to itself, for it lets nothing
be but itself”. Thus the question of an essential relation between
him and the other is eliminated as well. He has no essential
relation except to himself (Stirner’s alleged “living participa-
tion” “in the person of the other” is without essence, since the
other has in his eyes no primary existence). That is, he has only

that remarkable relation with the self which does not lack certain
magical possibilities (since all other existence becomes the
haunting of ghosts that are half in bonds, half free), but is so
empty of any genuine power to enter into relation that it is better
to describe as a relation only that in which not only I but also
Thou can be said. This border product of a German Protagoras is
usually underrated: the loss of reality which responsibility and
truth have suffered in our time has here if not its spiritual origin
certainly its exact conceptual prediction. “The man who belongs
to himself alone . . . is by origin free, for he acknowledges noth-
ing but himself,” and “True is what is Mine” are formulas which
forecast a congealing of the soul unsuspected by Stirner in all his
rhetorical assurance. But also many a rigid collective We, which
rejects a superior authority, is easily understood as a translation
from the speech of the Unique One into that of the Group-I
which acknowledges nothing but itself—carried out against
Stirner’s intention, who hotly opposes any plural version.

Kierkegaard’s Single One has this in common with its coun-
terpoint, Stirner’s Unique One, that both are border categories;
it has no more in common than this, but also it has no less.

The category of the Single One, too, means not the subject or
“man”, but concrete singularity; yet not the individual who is
detecting his existence, but rather the person who is finding
himself. But the finding himself, however primally remote from
Stirner’s “utilize thyself”, is not akin either to that “know thy-
self” which apparently troubled Kierkegaard very much. For it
means a becoming, and moreover in a weight of seriousness that
only became possible, at least for the West, through Christianity.
It is therefore a becoming which (though Kierkegaard says
that his category was used by Socrates “for the dissolution of
heathendom”) is decisively different from that effected by the
Socratic “delivery”. “No-one is excluded from being a Single
One except him who excludes himself by wishing to be
‘crowd’.” Here not only is “Single One” opposed to “crowd”,

but also becoming is opposed to a particular mode of being
which evades becoming. That may still be in tune with Socratic
thought. But what does it mean, to become a Single One?
Kierkegaard’s account shows clearly that the nature of his cat-
egory is no longer Socratic. It runs, “to fulfil the first condition
of all religiosity” is “to be a single man”. It is for this reason that
the “Single One” is “the category through which, from the
religious standpoint, time and history and the race must pass”.

Since the concept of religiosity has since lost its definiteness,
what Kierkegaard means must be more precisely defined. He
cannot mean that to become a Single One is the presupposition
of a condition of the soul, called religiosity. It is not a matter of a
condition of the soul but a matter of existence in that strict sense
in which—precisely by fulfilling the personal life—it steps in its
essence over the boundary of the person. Then being, familiar
being, becomes unfamiliar and no longer signifies my being but
my participation in the Present Being. That this is what Kierke-
gaard means is expressed in the fundamental word that the
Single One “corresponds” to God. In Kierkegaard’s account,
then, the concept “of all religiosity” has to be more precisely
defined by “of all religious reality”. But since this also is all too
exposed to the epidemic sickening of the word in our time, by
which every word is at once covered with the leprosy of routine
and changed into a slogan, we must go further, as far as possible,
and, giving up vexatious “religion”, take a risk, but a necessary
risk, and explain the phrase as meaning “of all real human deal-
ings with God”. That Kierkegaard means this is shown by his
reference to a “speaking with God”. And indeed a man can have
dealings with God only as a Single One, as a man who has
become a Single One. This is so expressed in the Old Testament,
though there a people too meets the Godhead as a people, that it
time and again lets only a named person, Enoch, Noah, “have
dealings with Elohim”. Not before a man can say I in perfect
reality—that is, finding himself—can he in perfect reality say

Thou—that is, to God. And even if he does it in a community he
can only do it “alone”. “As the ‘Single One’ he [every man] is
alone, alone in the whole world, alone before God.” That is—
what Kierkegaard, strangely, does not think of—thoroughly
unsocratic: in the words “the divine gives me a sign” Socrates’s
“religiosity” is represented, significant for all ages; but the words
“I am alone before God” are unthinkable as coming from him.
Kierkegaard’s “alone” is no longer of Socrates; it is of
Abraham—Genesis 12.1 and 22.2, alike demand in the same
“Go before thee” the power to free oneself of all bonds, the
bonds to the world of fathers and to the world of sons; and it is
of Christ.

Clarity demands a further twofold distinction. First, with
respect to mysticism. It too lets the man be alone before God but
not as the Single One. The relation to God which it thinks of is
the absorption of the I, and the Single One ceases to exist if he
cannot—even in devoting himself—say I. As mysticism will not
permit God to assume the servant’s form of the speaking and
acting person, of a creator, of a revealer, and to tread the way of
the Passion through time as the partner of history, suffering
along with it all destiny, so it forbids man, as the Single One
persisting as such, from really praying and serving and loving
such as is possible only by an I to a Thou. Mysticism only tolerates
the Single One in order that he may radically melt away. But
Kierkegaard knows, at any rate in relation to God, what love is,
and thus he knows that there is no self-love that is not self-deceit
(since he who loves—and it is he who matters—loves only the
other and essentially not himself), but that without being and
remaining oneself there is no love.

The second necessary distinction is with respect to Stirner’s
“Unique One”. (For the sake of conceptual precision this expres-
sion is to be preferred to the more humanistic ones, such as
Stendhal’s égotiste.)

A preliminary distinction must be made with respect to

so-called individualism, which has also produced a “religious”
variety. The Single One, the person ready and able for the “stand-
ing alone before God”, is the counterpart of what still, in no
distant time, was called—in a term which is treason to the spirit
of Goethe—personality, and man’s becoming a Single One is the
counterpart of “personal development”. All individualism,
whether it is styled æsthetic or ethical or religious, has a cheap
and ready pleasure in man provided he is “developing”. In other
words, “ethical” and “religious” individualism are only inflex-
ions of the “æsthetic” (which is as little genuine æsthesis as those
are genuine ethos and genuine religio).

Morality and piety, where they have in this way become an
autonomous aim, must also be reckoned among the show-pieces
and shows of a spirit that no longer knows about Being but only
about its mirrorings.

Where individualism ceases to be wanton Stirner begins. He is
also, it is true, concerned with the “shaping of free personality”,
but in the sense of a severance of the “self” from the world: he is
concerned with the tearing apart of his existential bindings and
bonds, with breaking free from all ontic otherness of things and
of lives, which now may only serve as “nourishment” of his
selfhood. The contrapuntal position of Stirner’s Unique One to
Kierkegaard’s Single One becomes clearest when the questions
of responsibility and truth are raised.

For Stirner both are bound to be false questions. But it is
important to see that intending to destroy both basic ideas he has
destroyed only their routine forms and thus, contrary to his
whole intention, has prepared for their purification and renewal.
Historically-minded contemporaries have spoken disparagingly
of him as a modern sophist; since then the function of the soph-
ists, and consequently of their like, of dissolving and preparing,
has been recognized. Stirner may have understood Hegel just as
little as Protagoras did Heraclitus; but even as it is meaningless to
reproach Protagoras with laying waste the gardens of the great

cosmologist, so Stirner is untouched by being ridiculed as the
unsuspecting and profane interloper in the fields of post-kantian
philosophy. Stirner is not, any more than the sophists are, a
curious interlude in the history of human thought. Like them
he is an ^πεισ^διον in the original sense. In his monologue
the action secretly changes, what follows is a new thing—as
Protagoras leads towards his contemporary Socrates, Stirner
leads towards his contemporary Kierkegaard.

Responsibility presupposes one who addresses me primarily,
that is, from a realm independent of myself, and to whom I am
answerable. He addresses me about something that he has
entrusted to me and that I am bound to take care of loyally. He
addresses me from his trust and I respond in my loyalty or refuse
to respond in my disloyalty, or I had fallen into disloyalty and
wrestle free of it by the loyalty of the response. To be so answer-
able to a trusting person about an entrusted matter that loyalty
and disloyalty step into the light of day (but both are not of the
same right, for now loyalty, born again, is permitted to conquer
disloyalty)—this is the reality of responsibility. Where no pri-
mary address and claim can touch me, for everything is “My
property”, responsibility has become a phantom. At the same
time life’s character of mutuality is dissipated. He who ceases to
make a response ceases to hear the Word.

But this reality of responsibility is not what is questioned by
Stirner; it is unknown to him. He simply does not know what of
elemental reality happens between life and life, he does not
know the mysteries of address and answer, claim and disclaim,
word and response. He has not experienced this because it can
only be experienced when one is not closed to the otherness, the
ontic and primal otherness of the other (to the primal otherness
of the other, which of course, even when the other is God, must
not be confined to a “wholly otherness”). What Stirner with his
destructive power successfully attacks is the substitute for a real-
ity that is no longer believed: the fictitious responsibility in face

of reason, of an idea, a nature, an institution, of all manner of
illustrious ghosts, all that in its essence is not a person and hence
cannot really, like father and mother, prince and master, husband
and friend, like God, make you answerable. He wishes to show
the nothingness of the word which has decayed into a phrase; he
has never known the living word, he unveils what he knows.
Ignorant of the reality whose appearance is appearance, he
proves its nature to be appearance. Stirner dissolves the dis-
solution. “What you call responsibility is a lie!” he cries, and he
is right: it is a lie. But there is a truth. And the way to it lies freer
after the lie has been seen through.

Kierkegaard means true responsibility when, rushing in a
parabola past Stirner, he speaks thus of the crowd and the Single
One: “Being in a crowd either releases from repentance and
responsibility or weakens the responsibility of the Single One,
since the crowd leaves only a fragment of responsibility to him.”
These words, to which I intend to return, no longer have in view
any illusion of a responsibility without a receiver, but genuine
responsibility, recognized once more, in which the demander
demands of me the entrusted good and I must open my hands or
they petrify.

Stirner has unmasked as unreal the responsibility which is
only ethical by exposing the non-existence of the alleged
receivers as such. Kierkegaard has proclaimed anew the
responsibility which is in faith.

And as with responsibility so with truth itself: here the
parabolic meeting becomes still uncannier.

“Truth . . . exists only—in your head.” “The truth is a—
creature.” “For Me there is no truth, for nothing passes beyond
Me.” “So long as you believe in the truth you do not believe in
yourself..... You alone are the truth.” What Stirner undertakes
here is the dissolution of possessed truth, of “truth” as a general
good that can be taken into possession and possessed, that is at
once independent of and accessible to the person. He does not

undertake this like the sophists and other sceptics by means of
epistemology. He does not seem to have been acquainted with
the epistemological method; he is as audaciously naive in his
behaviour as though Hume and Kant had never lived. But neither
would the epistemology have achieved for him what he needed;
for it, and the solipsist theory as well, leads only to the knowing
subject and not to the concrete human person at which Stirner
aims with undeviating fanaticism. The means by which he
undertakes the dissolution of possessed truth is the demonstra-
tion that it is conditioned by the person. “True is what is Mine.”
There already lies hidden the fundamental principle of our day,
“what I take as true is defined by what I am”. To this two sen-
tences may be taken as alternatives or as a combination—to
Stirner’s horror, certainly, but in logical continuation as an
inseparable exposition—first the sentence “And what I am is
conditioned by my complexes”, and second the sentence “And
what I am is conditioned by the class I belong to”, with all its
variants. Stirner is the involuntary father of modern psycho-
logical and sociological relativizings which for their part (to
anticipate) are at once true and false.

But again Stirner is right, again he dissolves the dissolution.
Possessed truth is not even a creature, it is a ghost, a succubus with
which a man may succeed in effectively imagining he is living,
but with which he cannot live. You cannot devour the truth, it is
not served up anywhere in the world, you cannot even gape at it,
for it is not an object. And yet there does exist a participation in
the being of inaccessible truth—for the man who stands its test.
There exists a real relation of the whole human person to the
unpossessed, unpossessable truth, and it is completed only in
standing its test. This real relation, whatever it is called, is the
relation to the Present Being.

The re-discovery of truth, which has been disenthroned in the
human world by the semblance of truth, but which is in truth
eternally irremovable, which cannot be possessed but which can

be served, and for which service can be given by perceiving and
standing test, is accomplished by Kierkegaard in a paradoxical
series of sentences. It begins with the words, “He who com-
municates it [the truth] is only a Single One. And then its com-
munication is again only for the Single One; for this view of life,
‘the Single One’, is the very truth.” You must listen carefully.
Not that the Single One exists and not that he should exist is
described as the truth; but “this view of life” which consists in
the Single One’s existing, and which is hence also simply identi-
fied with him. To be the Single One is the communication of the
truth, that is, the human truth. “The crowd,” says Kierkegaard,
“produces positions of advantage in human life,” which “over-
look in time and the world the eternal truth—the Single One.”
“You alone are the truth” is what Stirner says. “The Single One is
the truth,” is what is said here. That is the uncanny parabolic
phenomenon of words to which I have referred. In “a time of
dissolution” (Kierkegaard) there is the blank point at which the
No and the Yes move up to and past one another with all their
power, but purely objectively and without consciousness. Now
Kierkegaard continues: “The truth cannot be communicated and
received except as it were before God’s eyes, by God’s help; so
that God is there, is the medium as he is the truth. For God is
the truth and its medium.” Thus “ ‘The Single One’ is the truth”
and “God is the truth”. That is true because the Single One
“corresponds” to God. Hence Kierkegaard can say that the cat-
egory of the “Single One” is and remains “the fixed point which
can resist pantheist confusion”. The Single One corresponds to
God. For “man is akin to the Godhead”. In Old Testament
language, the Single One realizes the “image” of God precisely
through having become a Single One. In the language in which
alone a generation, wrestling with the problem of truth, suc-
cumbing to it, turning from it, but also exploring it ever anew,
can understand the conquest, the Single One existentially stands
the test of the appearing truth by “the personal existence

expressing what is said” [I would say “what is unsaid”]. There is
this human side of truth—in human existence. God is the truth
because he is, the Single One is the truth because he reaches his
existence.

Stirner has dissolved the truth which is only noetic, and
against all his knowledge and desire cleared a space into which
Kierkegaard’s believed and tested truth has stepped, the truth
which can no longer be obtained and possessed by the noesis
alone, but which must be existentially realized in order to be
inwardly known and communicated.

But there is still a third and last contact and repulsion. For
Stirner every man is the Unique One if only he discards all
ideological ballast (to which for him the religious belongs) and
settles down as owner of his world-property. For Kierkegaard
“every, absolutely every man” “can and ought” to be “the Single
One”—only he must . . . what, indeed, must he? He must
become a Single One. For “the matter is thus: this category can-
not be taught by precept; it is something that you can do, it is an
art . . . and moreover an art whose practice could cost the artist,
in time, his life”. But when we investigate closely to see if there
is a nearer definition anywhere, even if not precisely one that can
be taught by precept, one will be found—no more than one, no
more than a single word, but it is found: it is “obey”. It is at any
rate what is under all circumstances prohibited to Stirner’s
Unique One by his author. It is easy to discover that behind all
Stirner’s prohibitions to his Unique One this stands as the real,
comprehensive and decisive prohibition. With this one verb
Kierkegaard finally thrusts off the spirit which, without either of
them knowing, had approached so near, too near, in the time of
dissolution.

And yet—the illumination of our time makes it visible—the
two, primally different, primally strange to one another, con-
cerning one another in nothing but with one another concern-
ing us, work together, not a hundred years ago but to-day, the

one announcing decay as decay, the other proving the eternal
structure to be inviolable. To renounce obedience to any usurp-
ing lord is Stirner’s demand; Kierkegaard has none of his own—
he repeats the ancient, misused, desecrated, outworn, inviolable
“obey the Lord”. If a man becomes the Single One “then the
obedience is all right” even in the time of dissolution, where
otherwise the obedience is not all right.

Stirner leads out of all kinds of alleys into the open country
where each is the Unique One and the world is his property.
There they bustle in futile and non-committal life, and nothing
comes of it but bustle, till one after the other begins to notice
what this country is called. Kierkegaard leads to a “narrow pass”;
his task is “where possible to induce the many, to invite them, to
stir them to press through this narrow pass, ‘the Single One’,
through which, note well, none passes unless he becomes ‘the
Single One’, since in the concept itself the opposite is excluded”.
I think, however, that in actual history the way to this narrow
pass is through that open country that first is called individual
egoism and then collective egoism and, finally, by its true name,
despair.

But is there really a way through the narrow pass? Can one
really become the Single One?

“I myself do not assert of myself,” says Kierkegaard, “that I am
that one. For I have indeed fought for it, but have not yet grasped
it, and am in the continued fight continually reminded that it is
beyond human strength to be ‘the Single One’ in the highest
sense.”

“In the highest sense”—that is spoken with a Christian and a
christological reference, it manifests the paradox of the Christian
task. But it is also convincing to the non-christian. It has in it the
assertion that no man can say of himself that he has become the
Single One, since a higher sense of the category always remains
unfulfilled beyond him; but it also has in it the assertion that
every man can nevertheless become a Single One. Both are true.

“The eternal, the decisive, can be worked for only where one
man is; and to become this one man, which all men can, means
to let oneself be helped by God.” This is a way.

And yet it is not the way; for reasons of which I have not
spoken in this section and of which I now have to speak.
 

Kierkegaard’s “to become a Single One” is, as we have seen, not
meant Socratically. The goal of this becoming is not the “right”
life, but the entry into a relation. “To become” means here to
become for something, “for” in the strict sense which simply
transcends the circle of the person himself. It means to be made
ready for the one relation which can be entered into only by the
Single One, the one; the relation for whose sake man exists.

This relation is an exclusive one, the exclusive one, and this
means, according to Kierkegaard, that it is the excluding rela-
tion, excluding all others; more precisely, that it is the relation
which in virtue of its unique, essential life expels all other
relations into the realm of the unessential.

“Everyone should be chary about having to do with ‘the
others’, and should essentially speak only with God and with
himself,” he says in the exposition of the category. Everyone, so
it is to be understood, because everyone can be the one.

The joining of the “with God” with the “with himself” is a
serious incompatibility that nothing can mitigate. All the
enthusiasm of the philosophers for monologue, from Plato to
Nietzsche, does not touch the simple experience of faith that
speaking with God is something toto genere different from “speak-
ing with oneself”; whereas, remarkably, it is not something toto
genere different from speaking with another human being. For in
the latter case there is common the fact of being approached,
grasped, addressed, which cannot be anticipated in any depth of
the soul; but in the former case it is not common in spite of all

the soul’s adventures in doubling roles—games, intoxications,
dreams, visions, surprises, overwhelmings, over-powerings—in
spite of all tensions and divisions, and all the noble and strong
images for traffic with oneself. “Then one became two”—that
can never become ontically true, just as the reverse “one and one
at one” of mysticism can never be ontically true. Only when I
have to do with another essentially, that is, in such a way that he
is no longer a phenomenon of my I, but instead is my Thou, do I
experience the reality of speech with another—in the irrefrag-
able genuineness of mutuality. Abyssus abyssum clamat—what that
means the soul first experiences when it reaches its frontier and
finds itself faced by one that is simply not the soul itself and yet
is a self.

But on this point Kierkegaard seems to correct himself. In the
passage in his Journals where he asks the question, “And how does
one become a Single One?” the answer begins with the formula-
tion, obviously more valid in the problem under discussion, that
one should be, “regarding the highest concerns, related solely to
God”.

If, in this sentence, the word “highest” is understood as limit-
ing in its content, then the phrase is self-evident: the highest
concerns can be put only to the highest. But it cannot be meant
in this way; this is clear from the other sentence, “Everyone
should....” If both are held together, then Kierkegaard’s mean-
ing is evident that the Single One has to do essentially (is not
“chary”) only with God.

But thereby the category of the Single One, which has scarcely
been properly discovered, is already fatefully misunderstood.

Kierkegaard, the Christian concerned with “contempora-
neity” with Jesus, here contradicts his master.

To the question—which was not merely aimed at “tempting”
him, but was rather a current and significant controversial ques-
tion of the time—which was the all-inclusive and fundamental
commandment, the “great” commandment, Jesus replied by

connecting the two Old Testament commandments between
which above all the choice lay: “love God with all your might”
and “love your neighbour as one like yourself” (11). Both are to
be “loved”, God and the “neighbour” (i.e. not man in general,
but the man who meets me time and again in the context of
life), but in different ways. The neighbour is to be loved “as one
like myself” (not “as I love myself”; in the last reality one does
not love oneself, but one should rather learn to love oneself
through love of one’s neighbour), to whom, then, I should
show love as I wish it may be shown to me. But God is to be
loved with all my soul and all my might. By connecting the two
Jesus brings to light the Old Testament truth that God and man
are not rivals. Exclusive love to God (“with all your heart”) is,
because is God, inclusive love, ready to accept and include all love. It
is not himself that God creates, not himself he redeems, even
when he “reveals himself” it is not himself he reveals: his revela-
tion does not have himself as object. He limits himself in all his
limitlessness, he makes room for the creatures, and so, in love to
him, he makes room for love to the creatures.

“In order to come to love,” says Kierkegaard about his
renunciation of Regina Olsen, “I had to remove the object”. That
is sublimely to misunderstand God. Creation is not a hurdle on
the road to God, it is the road itself. We are created along with
one another and directed to a life with one another. Creatures are
placed in my way so that I, their fellow-creature, by means of
them and with them find the way to God. A God reached by
their exclusion would not be the God of all lives in whom all life
is fulfilled. A God in whom only the parallel lines of single
approaches intersect is more akin to the “God of the philo-
sophers” than to the “God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob”.
God wants us to come to him by means of the Reginas he has
created and not by renunciation of them. If we remove the
object, then—we have removed the object altogether. Without
an object, artificially producing the object from the abundance

of the human spirit and calling it God, this love has its being in
the void.

“The matter must be brought back to the monastery from
which Luther broke out.” So Kierkegaard defines the task of the
time. “Monastery” can here mean only the institutional safe-
guarding of man from an essential relation, inclusive of his
whole being, to any others but God. And certainly to one so
safeguarded the orientation towards the point called God is
made possible with a precision not to be attained otherwise. But
what “God” in this case means is in fact only the end-point of a
human line of orientation. But the real God lets no shorter line
reach him than each man’s longest, which is the line embracing
the world that is accessible to this man. For he, the real God, is
the creator, and all beings stand before him in relation to one
another in his creation, becoming useful in living with one
another for his creative purpose. To teach an acosmic relation to
God is not to know the creator. Acosmic worship of a God of
whom one knows, along with Kierkegaard, that it is of his grace
“that he wills to be a person in relation to you”, is Marcionism,
and not even consistent Marcionism; for this worship does not
separate the creator and the redeemer as it would have to do if it
were consistent.

But one must not overlook the fact that Kierkegaard is not at
all concerned to put Luther breaking out of the monastery in the
wrong. On one occasion he treats Luther’s marriage as some-
thing removed from all natural personal life, all directness
between man and wife, as a symbolic action, a deed representing
and expressing the turning-point of the spiritual history of the
west. “The most important thing,” he makes Luther say, “is that
it becomes notorious that I am married.” But behind Luther’s
marrying Katharina there emerges, unnamed but clear, Kierke-
gaard’s not marrying Regina. “Put the other way round, one
could say . . . in defiance of the whole nineteenth century I
cannot marry.” Here there is added as a new perspective the

qualitative difference between historical epochs. Certainly, on
Kierkegaard’s view it is true for both ages that the Single One
should not have to do essentially with any others but God, and
according to him, then, Luther speaks not essentially but only
symbolically with Katharina; though bound to the world he
remains essentially worldless and “alone before God”. But the
symbolic actions are opposed: by the one the word of a new
bond with the world—even if perhaps in the end a bond that is
not binding—is spoken to the one century; by the other the
word of a new and in any event binding renunciation is spoken
to the other century. What is the reason? Because the nineteenth
century has given itself up to the “crowd”, and “the crowd is
untruth”.

But now two things are possible. Either the bond with the
world preached with his life by Luther is in Kierkegaard’s view
not binding or “essential” or necessary for the leading of
Luther’s age to God. But that would make Luther one who lets
what is not binding be effective as something that is binding,
who has a different thing to say for men than he has for God, and
who treats the sacrament as though it were fulfilled outside
God; it would make Luther one in whose symbolic action no
authority could reside. Or else on the other hand the bond with
the world preached with his life by Luther is in Kierkegaard’s
view binding and essential and necessary for leading to God.
Then the difference between the two epochs, which is for the
rest indubitably a qualitative one, would have a say in what is
basically independent of history, more so than birth and death—
the relation of the Single One to God. For the essential quality of
this relation cannot be of one kind in the former century and of
another in the latter; it cannot in the one go right through the
world and in the other go over and beyond the world. Human
representations of the relation change, the truth of the relation
is unchangeable because it stands in eternal mutuality; it is
not man who defines his approach to it but the creator who

in the unambiguity of man’s creation has instituted the
approach.

It is certainly not possible to speak of God other than dialect-
ically, for he does not come under the principle of contradiction.
Yet there is a limit of dialectic where assertion ceases but where
there is knowledge. Who is there who confesses the God whom
Kierkegaard and I confess, who could suppose in decisive insight
that God wants Thou to be truly said only to him, and to all others
only an unessential and fundamentally invalid word—that God
demands of us to choose between him and his creation? The
objection is raised that the world as a fallen world is not to be
identified with the creation. But what fall of the world could be
so mighty that it could for him break it away from being his
creation? That would be to make the action of the world into
one more powerful than God’s action and into one compelling
him.

The essential is not that we should see things as standing out
from God nor as being absorbed in him, but that we should “see
things in God”, the things themselves. To apply this to our rela-
tions with creatures: only when all relations, uncurtailed, are
taken into the one relation, do we set the ring of our life’s world
round the sun of our being.

Certainly that is the most difficult thing, and man in order to
be able to do it must let himself be helped from time to time by
an inner-worldly “monastery”. Our relations to creatures inces-
santly threaten to get incapsulated. As the world itself is sus-
tained in its independence as the world through striving to be
closed to God, though as creation it is open to him, so every
great bond of man—though in it he has perceived his connexion
with the infinite—defends itself vigorously against continually
debouching into the infinite. Here the monastic forms of life in
the world, the loneliness in the midst of life into which we turn
as into hostelries, help us to prevent the connexion between the
conditioned bonds and the one unconditioned bond from

slackening. This too, if we do not wish to see our participation in
the Present Being dying off, is an imperative interchange, the
systole to the diastole of the soul; and the loneliness must know
the quality of strictness, of a monastery’s strictness, in order to
do its work. But it must never wish to tear us away from crea-
tures, never refuse to dismiss us to them. By that it would act
contrary to its own law and would close us, instead of enabling
us, as is its office, to keep open the gates of finitude.

Kierkegaard does not conceal from us for a moment that his
resistance to a bond with the world, his religious doctrine of
loneliness, is based on personal nature and personal destiny. He
confesses that he “ceased to have common speech” with men.
He notes that the finest moment in his life is in the bath-house,
before he dives into the water: “I have nothing more to do with
the world”. He exposes before our eyes some of the roots of his
“melancholy”. He knows precisely what has brought him to the
point of being chary about having to do with others and of
essentially speaking only with God and with himself. And yet, as
soon as he begins with the “direct” language, he expresses it as
an imperative: let everyone do so. Continually he points to his own
shadow—and wants to leap across it. He is a being excepted and
exposed, and certainly so are we all, for so is man as man. But
Kierkegaard has moved to the fringe of being excepted and
exposed, and maintains equilibrium only by means of the
unheard-of balance of his “author’s” reticently communicative
existence with the complicated safeguards of all the “pseudo-
nyms”; whereas we are not on the fringe, and that is no “not
yet” nor any sort of compromising, no shirking of melancholy;
it is organic continuance and grace of preservation and signifi-
cant for the future of the spirit. Kierkegaard behaves in our sight
like a schizophrenist, who tries to win over the beloved indi-
vidual into “his” world as if it were the true one. But it is not the
true one. We, ourselves wandering on the narrow ridge, must
not shrink from the sight of the jutting rock on which he stands

over the abyss; nor may we step on it. We have much to learn
from him, but not the final lesson.

Our rejection can be supported by Kierkegaard’s own teach-
ing. He describes “the ethical” as “the only means by which God
communicates with ‘man’ ” (1853). The context of the teaching
naturally keeps at a distance the danger of understanding this in
the sense of an absolutizing of the ethical. But it must be under-
stood so that not merely an autarkic ethic but also an autarkic
religion is inadmissible; so that as the ethical cannot be freed
from the religious neither can the religious from the ethical
without ceasing to do justice to the present truth. The ethical no
longer appears here, as in Kierkegaard’s earlier thought, as a
“stage” from which a “leap” leads to the religious, a leap by
which a level is reached that is quite different and has a different
meaning; but it dwells in the religious, in faith and service. This
ethical can no longer mean a morality belonging to a realm of
relativity and time and again overtaken and invalidated by the
religious; but it means an essential action and suffering in relation
to men, which are co-ordinated with the essential relation to God.
But only he who has to do with men essentially can essentially act
and suffer in relation to them. If the ethical is the only means by
which God communicates with man then I am forbidden to speak
essentially only with God and myself. And so indeed it is. I do not
say that Kierkegaard on his rock, alone with the mercy of the
Merciful, is forbidden. I say only that you and I are forbidden.

Kierkegaard is deeply conscious of the dubiousness which
arises from the negativizing extension of the category of the
Single One. “The frightful thing”, he writes in his Journal, and
we read it, as he wrote it, with fear and trembling, “is that
precisely the highest form of piety, to let everything earthly go,
can be the highest egoism”. Here obviously a distinction is made
according to motives, and the idea of egoism used here is an idea
of motivation. If we put in its place an objective idea, an idea of a
state of affairs, the sentence is changed to a still more frightful

one: “Precisely what appears to us as the highest form of piety—
to let everything earthly go—is the highest egoism.”

Is it true that the Single One “corresponds” to God? Does he
realize the “image” of God solely by having become a Single One?
One thing is lacking for that to be—and it is the decisive thing.

“Certainly,” says Kierkegaard, “God is no egoist, but he is the
infinite Ego.” Yet thereby too little is said of the God whom we
confess—if one dares to say anything at all. He hovers over his
creation not as over a chaos, he embraces it. He is the infinite I
that makes every It into his Thou.

The Single One corresponds to God when he in his human
way embraces the bit of the world offered to him as God
embraces his creation in his divine way. He realizes the image
when, as much he can in a personal way, he says Thou with his
being to the beings living round about him.

No-one can so refute Kierkegaard as Kierkegaard himself. Rea-
soning with and judging himself, he corrects his own spirit from
its depths, often before it has uttered itself. In 1843 Kierkegaard
enters this unforgettable confession in his Journal: “Had I had
faith I would have stayed with Regina.” By this he means, “If I
had really believed that ‘with God all things are possible’, hence
also the resolution of this—my melancholy, my powerlessness,
my fear, my alienation, fraught with destiny, from woman and
from the world—then I would have stayed with Regina.” But
while meaning this he says something different, too, namely,
that the Single One, if he really believes, and that means if he is
really a Single One (which, as we saw, he has become for the one
relation of faith), can and may have to do essentially with
another. And behind this there lurks the extreme that he who can
and may also ought to do this. “The only means by which God
communicates with man is the ethical.” But the ethical in its
plain truth means to help God by loving his creation in his
creatures, by loving it towards him. For this, to be sure, one must
let oneself be helped by him.

“The Single One is the category through which, from the
religious standpoint, time and history and the race must pass.”
What is this “religious standpoint”? One beside others? The
standpoint towards God, gained by standing aside from all
others? God one object beside other objects, the chosen one
beside the rejected ones? God as Regina’s successful rival? Is that
still God? Is that not merely an object adapted to the religious
genius? (Note that I am not speaking of true holiness for which,
as it hallows everything, there is no “religious standpoint”.)
Religious genius? Can there be religious geniuses? Is that not a
contradictio in adiecto? Can the religious be a specification?
“Religious geniuses” are theological geniuses. Their God is the
God of the theologians. Admittedly, that is not the God of the
philosophers, but neither is it the God of Abraham and Isaac and
Jacob. The God of the theologians, too, is a logicized God, and so
is even the God of a theology which will speak only dialectically
and makes light of the principle of contradiction. So long as they
practise theology they do not get away from religion as a specifi-
cation. When Pascal in a volcanic hour made that stammering
distinction between God and God he was no genius but a man
experiencing the primal glow of faith; but at other times he was
a theological genius and dwelt in a specifying religion, out of
which the happening of that hour had lifted him.

Religion as a specification misses its mark. God is not an
object beside objects and hence cannot be reached by renunci-
ation of objects. God, indeed, is not the cosmos, but far less is he
Being minus cosmos. He is not to be found by subtraction and not
to be loved by reduction.
 

Kierkegaard’s thought circles round the fact that he essentially
renounced an essential relation to a definite person. He did not
resign this casually, or in the relativity of the many experiences

and decisions of life, or with the soul alone, but essentially. The
essential nature of his renunciation, its down-right positive
essentiality, is what he wants to express by saying, “In defiance
of the whole nineteenth century I cannot marry.” The renunci-
ation becomes essential through its representing in concrete
biography the renunciation of an essential relation to the world
as that which hinders being alone before God. Moreover, as I
have already said, this does not happen just once, as when a man
enters a monastery and has thereby cut himself off from the
world and lives outside it as one who has done this; but it is
peculiarly enduring: the renunciation becomes the zero of a
spiritual graph whose every point is determined in relation to
this zero. It is in this way that the graph receives its true existen-
tial character, by means of which it has provided the impulse to a
new philosophy and a new theology. And certainly there goes
along with this secularly significant concreteness of biography
the curiously manifold motivation—which is undoubtedly
legitimate, and is to be found piecemeal in the soundings of
inwardness—of the renunciation which Kierkegaard expresses
directly and indirectly, by suggestion and concealment. But
beyond that, on a closer consideration it is to be noted that there
arises, between the renunciation and an increasingly strong
point of view and attitude which is finally expressed with pene-
trating clarity in the Two Notes to the Report to History, a secret and
unexpressed connexion important for Kierkegaard and for us.

“The crowd is untruth.” “This consideration of life, the Single
One, is the truth.” “No-one is excluded from becoming a Single
One except him who excludes himself by wanting to be crowd.”
And again, “ ‘The Single One’ is the category of the spirit, of
spiritual awakening and revival, and is as sharply opposed to
politics as possible.” The Single One and the crowd, the “spirit”
and “politics”—this opposition is not to be separated from that
into which Kierkegaard enters with the world, expressing it
symbolically by means of his renunciation.

Kierkegaard does not marry “in defiance of the whole nine-
teenth century”. What he describes as the nineteenth century is
the “age of dissolution”, the age of which he says that a single
man “cannot help it or save it”, he can “only express that it is
going under”—going under, if it cannot reach God through the
“narrow pass”. And Kierkegaard does not marry, in a symbolic
action of negation, in defiance of this age, because it is the age of
the “crowd” and the age of “politics”. Luther married in sym-
bolic action, because he wanted to lead the believing man of his
age out of a rigid religious separation, which finally separated
him from grace itself, to a life with God in the world. Kierke-
gaard does not marry (this of course is not part of the manifold
subjective motivation but is the objective meaning of the sym-
bol) because he wants to lead the unbelieving man of his age,
who is entangled in the crowd, to becoming single, to the soli-
tary life of faith, to being alone before God. Certainly, “to marry
or not to marry” is the representative question when the monas-
tery is in view. If the Single One really must be, as Kierkegaard
thinks, a man who does not have to do essentially with others,
then marriage hinders him if he takes it seriously—and if he
does not take it seriously then, in spite of Kierkegaard’s remark
about Luther, it cannot be understood how he as an existing
person can be “the truth”. For man, with whom alone Kierke-
gaard is fundamentally concerned, there is the additional factor
that in his view woman stands “quite differently from man in
a dangerous rapport to finitude”. But there is still a special
additional matter which I shall now make clear.

If one makes a fairly comprehensive survey of the whole labyr-
inthine structure of Kierkegaard’s thought about renunci-
ation it will be recognized that he is speaking not solely of a
hard, hard-won renunciation, bought with the heart’s blood,
of life with a person; but in addition of the downright posi-
tively valued renunciation of the life (conditioned by life with
a person) with an impersonal being, which in the foreground

of the happening is called “people”, in its background “the
crowd”. This being, however, in its essence—of which
Kierkegaard knows or wants to know nothing—refutes these
descriptions as caricatures and acknowledges as its true
name only that of a res publica, in English “the body politic”.
When Kierkegaard says the category of the “Single One” is “as
sharply opposed as possible to politics” he obviously means an
activity that has essentially lost touch with its origin the polis. But
this activity, however degenerate, is one of the decisive manifest-
ations of the body politic. Every degeneration indicates its genus,
and in such a way that the degeneration is never related to the
genus simply as present to past, but as in a distorted face the
distortion is related to the form persisting beneath it. The body
politic, which is sometimes also called the “world”, that is, the
human world, seeks, knowingly or unknowingly, to realize in its
genuine formations men’s turning to one another in the context
of creation. The false formations distort but they cannot elimin-
ate the eternal origin. Kierkegaard in his horror of malformation
turns away. But the man who has not ceased to love the human
world in all its abasement sees even to-day genuine form. Sup-
posing that the crowd is untruth, it is only a state of affairs in the
body politic; how truth is here related to untruth must be part
and parcel of the true question to the Single One, and that warn-
ing against the crowd can be only its preface.

From this point that special matter can be made clear of which
I said that it is an additional reason for Kierkegaard’s considering
marriage to be an impediment. Marriage, essentially understood,
brings one into an essential relation to the “world”; more pre-
cisely, to the body politic, to its malformation and its genuine
form, to its sickness and its health. Marriage, as the decisive
union of one with another, confronts one with the body politic
and its destiny—man can no longer shirk that confrontation in
marriage, he can only prove himself in it or fail. The isolated
person, who is unmarried or whose marriage is only a fiction,

can maintain himself in isolation; the “community” of marriage
is part of the great community, joining with its own problems
the general problems, bound up with its hope of salvation to the
hope of the great life that in its most miserable state is called the
crowd. He who “has entered on marriage”, who has entered
into marriage, has been in earnest, in the intention of the sacra-
ment, with the fact that the other is; with the fact that I cannot
legitimately share in the Present Being without sharing in the
being of the other; with the fact that I cannot answer the lifelong
address of God to me without answering at the same time for the
other; with the fact that I cannot be answerable without being at
the same time answerable for the other as one who is entrusted
to me. But thereby a man has decisively entered into relation
with otherness; and the basic structure of otherness, in many
ways uncanny but never quite unholy or incapable of being hal-
lowed, in which I and the others who meet me in my life are
inwoven, is the body politic. It is to this, into this, that marriage
intends to lead us. Kierkegaard himself makes one of his pseudo-
nyms, the “married man” of the Stages, express this, though in
the style of a lower point of view which is meant to be overcome
by a higher. But it is a lower point of view only when trivialized,
there is no higher, because to be raised above the situation in
which we are set never yields in truth a higher point of view.
Marriage is the exemplary bond, it carries us as does none other
into the greater bondage, and only as those who are bound can
we reach the freedom of the children of God. Expressed with a
view to the man, the woman certainly stands “in a dangerous
rapport to finitude”, and finitude is certainly the danger, for
nothing threatens us so sharply as that we remain clinging to it.
But our hope of salvation is forged on this very danger, for our
human way to the infinite leads only through fulfilled finitude.

This person is other, essentially other than myself, and this
otherness of his is what I mean, because I mean him; I confirm
it; I wish his otherness to exist, because I wish his particular

being to exist. That is the basic principle of marriage and from
this basis it leads, if it is real marriage, to insight into the right
and the legitimacy of otherness and to that vital acknowledge-
ment of many-faced otherness—even in the contradiction and
conflict with it—from which dealings with the body politic
receive their religious ethos. That the men with whom I am
bound up in the body politic and with whom I have directly or
indirectly to do, are essentially other than myself, that this one or
that one does not have merely a different mind, or way of think-
ing or feeling, or a different conviction or attitude, but has also a
different perception of the world, a different recognition and
order of meaning, a different touch from the regions of exist-
ence, a different faith, a different soil: to affirm all this, to affirm
it in the way of a creature, in the midst of the hard situations of
conflict, without relaxing their real seriousness, is the way by
which we may officiate as helpers in this wide realm entrusted to
us as well, and from which alone we are from time to time
permitted to touch in our doubts, in humility and upright
investigation, on the other’s “truth” or “untruth”, “justice” or
“injustice”. But to this we are led by marriage, if it is real, with a
power for which there is scarcely a substitute, by its steady
experiencing of the life-substance of the other as other, and still
more by its crises and the overcoming of them which rises out
of the organic depths, whenever the monster of otherness,
which but now blew on us with its icy demons’ breath and now
is redeemed by our risen affirmation of the other, which knows
and destroys all negation, is transformed into the mighty angel
of union of which we dreamed in our mother’s womb.

Of course, there is a difference between the private sphere of
existence, to which marriage belongs, and the public sphere of
existence. Identification takes place in a qualitatively different way
in each. The private sphere is that with which a man, at any rate
in the healthy epochs of its existence, can in all concreteness
identify himself without regard to individual differentiation,

such as the bodily and spiritual one between members of a
family. This identification can take place by his saying in all
concreteness We, I, of this family or band of his. (A genuine band
stands in this respect on the side of the private sphere, in another
respect it is on the side of the public sphere.) And when he says
this he means not merely the whole, but also the single persons
recognized and affirmed by him in their particular being. Identi-
fication with the public sphere of existence, on the other hand, is
not really able to embrace the concrete persons in a concrete
way. Thus I say of my nation “we”, and this can be raised to the
power of an elementary “That is I”. But as soon as concretion,
direction to the persons of whom the nation consists, enters in,
there is a cleavage, and knowledge of the unbridgable multiple
otherness permeates the identification in a broad stream. If the
like happened to a province of private existence then it would
either itself become of questionable value or it would pass over
into public existence. For the relation to public existence every
such test can be a proof and strengthening.

There are, however, two basic attitudes in which identification
with public existence wards off the concretion, the direction to
actual persons, and either transitorily or enduringly asserts itself.
Very different from one another though they are, they often
exercise almost the same effect. The one derives from the act of
enthusiasm of “historic” hours: the crowd is actualized, enters
into the action and is transfigured in it, and the person, over-
powered by delirious ecstasy, is submerged in the movement of
public existence. Here there is no contesting and impeding
knowledge about the otherness of other persons: the transfigur-
ation of the crowd eclipses all otherness, and the fiery impulse to
identification can beget a real “family” feeling for the unknown
man who walks in a demonstration or in the enthusiastic
confusion of the streets runs into one’s arms.

The other basic attitude is passive and constant. It is the accus-
tomed joining in public opinion and in public “taking of a

position”. Here the crowd remains latent, it does not appear as a
crowd, but only becomes effective. And, as is known, this hap-
pens in such a way that I am either completely excused from
forming an opinion and a decision, or as it were convicted, in a
murky recess of inwardness, of the invalidity of my opinions and
decisions, and in their stead fitted out with ones that are
approved as valid. By this means I am not in the least made aware
of others since the same thing happens to them and their other-
ness has been varnished over.

Of these two basic attitudes the first is of such a kind that it
snatches us out and away from confrontation with the great
form of otherness in public existence, from the most difficult of
the inner-worldly tasks, and raises us enthusiastically into the
historical paradise of crowds. The second undermines the
ground on which confrontation is to be carried out; it rubs out
the pathetic signs of otherness and then convinces us by the
evidence of our own eyes that uniformity is the real thing.

It is from this point that Kierkegaard’s confusion of public
existence, or the body politic, with the crowd, is to be under-
stood. He knows the body politic, indeed, also in the form of the
State, which is for him, however, only a fact in the world of
relativity which is foreign to transcendence; it is respectable, but
without significance for the individual’s religious relation.
And then he knows a crowd which is not respectable, but
which has the deepest negative significance, indeed concerning
transcendence, but as compact devilty.

This confusion which is in increasing measure heavy with
consequences for the thought of our time must be opposed with
the force of distinction.

A man in the crowd is a stick stuck in a bundle moving
through the water, abandoned to the current or being pushed by
a pole from the bank in this or that direction. Even if it seems to
the stick at times that it is moving by its own motion it has in fact
none of its own; and the bundle, too, in which it drifts has only

an illusion of self-propulsion. I do not know if Kierkegaard is
right when he says that the crowd is untruth—I should rather
describe it as non-truth since (in distinction from some of its
masters) it is not on the same plane as the truth, it is not in the
least opposed to it. But it is certainly “un-freedom”. In what un-
freedom consists cannot be adequately learned under the pres-
sure of fate, whether it is the compulsion of need or of men; for
there still remains the rebellion of the inmost heart, the tacit
appeal to the secrecy of eternity. It can be adequately learned
only when you are tied up in the bundle of the crowd, sharing
its opinions and desires, and only dully perceiving that you are
in this condition.

The man who is living with the body politic is quite different.
He is not bundled, but bound. He is bound up in relation to it,
betrothed to it, married to it, therefore suffering his destiny
along with it; rather, simply suffering it, always willing and
ready to suffer it, but not abandoning himself blindly to any of
its movements, rather confronting each movement watchfully
and carefully that it does not miss truth and loyalty. He sees
powers press on and sees God’s hands in their supreme power
held up on high, that the mortal immortals there below may be
able to decide for themselves. He knows that in all his weakness
he is put into the service of decision. If it is the crowd, remote
from, opposed to, decision which swarms round him, he does
not put up with it. At the place where he stands, whether lifted
up or unnoticed, he does what he can, with the powers he
possesses, whether compressed predominance or the word
which fades, to make the crowd no longer a crowd. Otherness
enshrouds him, the otherness to which he is betrothed. But he
takes it up into his life only in the form of the other, time and
again the other, the other who meets him, who is sought, lifted
out of the crowd, the “companion”. Even if he has to speak to
the crowd he seeks the person, for a people can find and find
again its truth only through persons, through persons standing

their test. That is the Single One who “changes the crowd into
Single Ones”—how could it be one who remains far from the
crowd? It cannot be one who is reserved, only one who is given;
given, not given over. It is a paradoxical work to which he sets
his soul, to make the crowd no longer a crowd. It is to bring out
from the crowd and set on the way of creation which leads to the
Kingdom. And if he does not achieve much he has time, he has
God’s own time. For the man who loves God and his companion
in one—though he remains in all the frailty of humanity—
receives God for his companion.

“The Single One” is not the man who has to do with God
essentially, and only unessentially with others, who is
unconditionally concerned with God and conditionally with the
body politic. The Single One is the man for whom the reality of
relation with God as an exclusive relation includes and
encompasses the possibility of relation with all otherness, and
for whom the whole body politic, the reservoir of otherness,
offers just enough otherness for him to pass his life with it.
 

The category of the Single One has changed. It cannot be that the
relation of the human person to God is established by the sub-
traction of the world. The Single One must therefore take his
world, what of the world is extended and entrusted to him in his
life, without any reduction into his life’s devotion; he must let
his world partake unabated of its essentiality. It cannot be that
the Single One finds God’s hands when he stretches his hands
out and away beyond creation. He must put his arms round the
vexatious world, whose true name is creation; only then do his
fingers reach the realm of lightning and of grace. It cannot be
that the spirit of reduction reigns in the relation of faith as well.
The Single One who lives in his relation of faith must wish to
have it fulfilled in the uncurtailed measure of the life he lives. He

must face the hour which approaches him, the biographical and
historical hour, just as it is, in its whole world content and
apparently senseless contradiction, without weakening the
impact of otherness in it. He must hear the message, stark and
untransfigured, which is delivered to him out of this hour, pre-
sented by this situation as it arrives. Nor must he translate for
himself its wild and crude profaneness into the chastely
religious: he must recognize that the question put to him, with
which the speech of the situation is fraught—whether it sounds
with angels’ or with devils’ tongues—remains God’s question to
him, of course without the devils thereby being turned into
angels. It is a question wondrously tuned in the wild crude
sound. And he, the Single One, must answer, by what he does
and does not do, he must accept and answer for the hour, the
hour of the world, of all the world, as that which is given to him,
entrusted to him. Reduction is forbidden; you are not at liberty
to select what suits you, the whole cruel hour is at stake, the
whole claims you, and you must answer—Him.

You must hear the claim, however unharmoniously it strikes
your ear—and let no-one interfere; give the answer from the
depths, where a breath of what has been breathed in still
hovers—and let no-one prompt you.

This arch-command, for whose sake the Bible makes its God
speak from the very time of creation, defines anew, when it is
heard, the relation of the Single One to his community.

The human person belongs, whether he wants to acknow-
ledge it and take it seriously or not, to the community in which
he is born or which he has happened to get into. But he who has
realized what destiny means, even if it looks like doom, and
what being placed there means, even if it looks like being mis-
placed, knows too that he must acknowledge it and take it seri-
ously. But then, precisely then, he notes that true membership
of a community includes the experience, which changes in
many ways, and which can never be definitively formulated, of

the boundary of this membership. If the Single One, true to the
historico-biographical hour, perceives the word, if he grasps the
situation of his people, his own situation, as a sign and demand
upon him, if he does not spare himself and his community
before God, then he experiences the boundary. He experiences it
in such agony as if the boundary-post had pierced his soul. The
Single One, the man living in responsibility, can carry out his
political actions as well—and of course omissions are also
actions—only from that ground of his being to which the claim
of the fearful and kind God, the Lord of history and our Lord,
wishes to penetrate.

It is obvious that for the man living in community the ground
of personal and essential decision is continually threatened by
the fact of so-called collective decisions. I remind you of Kierke-
gaard’s warning: “That men are in a crowd either excuses a man
of repentance and responsibility or at all events weakens the
Single One’s responsibility, because the crowd lets the man have
only a fragment of responsibility.” But I must put it differently.
In practice, in the moment of action, it is only the semblance of a
fragment, but afterwards, when in your waking dream after
midnight you are dragged before the throne and attacked by the
spurned calling to be a Single One, it is complete responsibility.

It must, of course, be added that the community to which a
man belongs does not usually express in a unified and
unambiguous way what it considers to be right and what not
right in a given situation. It consists of more or less visible
groups, which yield to a man interpretations of destiny and of
his task which are utterly different yet all alike claim absolute
authenticity. Each knows what benefits the community, each
claims your unreserved complicity for the good of the
community.

Political decision is generally understood to-day to mean join-
ing such a group. If this is done then everything is finally in
order, the time of deciding is over. From then on one has only to

share in the group’s movements. One no longer stands at the
cross-roads, one no longer has to choose the right action out of
the possible ones; everything is decided. What you once
thought—that you had to answer ever anew, situation by situ-
ation, for the choice you made—is now got rid of. The group
has relieved you of your political responsibility. You feel yourself
answered for in the group; you are permitted to feel it.

The attitude which has just been described means for the man
of faith (I wish to speak only of him here), when he encounters
it, his fall from faith—without his being inclined to confess it to
himself or to admit it. It means his fall in very fact from faith,
however loudly and emphatically he continues to confess it not
merely with his lips but even with his very soul as it shouts
down inmost reality. The relation of faith to the one Present
Being is perverted into semblance and self-deceit if it is not an
all-embracing relation. “Religion” may agree to be one depart-
ment of life beside others which like it are independent and
autonomous—it has thereby already perverted the relation of
faith. To remove any realm basically from this relation, from its
defining power, is to try to remove it from God’s defining power
which rules over the relation of faith. To prescribe to the relation
of faith that “so far and no further you may define what I have to
do; here your power ends and that of the group to which I
belong begins” is to address God in precisely the same way. He
who does not let his relation of faith be fulfilled in the
uncurtailed measure of the life he lives, however much he is
capable of at different times, is trying to curtail the fulfillment of
God’s rule of the world.

Certainly the relation of faith is no book of rules which can be
looked up to discover what is to be done now, in this very hour. I
experience what God desires of me for this hour—so far as I do
experience it—not earlier than in the hour. But even then it is not
given me to experience it except by answering before God for
this hour as my hour, by carrying out the responsibility for it

towards him as much as I can. What has now approached me,
the unforeseen, the unforeseeable, is word from him, a word
found in no dictionary, a word that has now become word—and
it demands my answer to him. I give the word of my answer by
accomplishing among the actions possible that which seems to
my devoted insight to be the right one. With my choice and
decision and action—committing or omitting, acting or
persevering—I answer the word, however inadequately, yet
properly; I answer for my hour. My group cannot relieve me of
this responsibility, I must not let it relieve me of it; if I do I
pervert my relation of faith, I cut out of God’s realm of power
the sphere of my group. But it is not as though the latter did not
concern me in my decision—it concerns me tremendously. In
my decision I do not look away from the world, I look at it and
into it, and before all I may see in the world, to which I have to
do justice with my decision, my group to whose welfare I cling; I
may before all have to do justice to it, yet not as a thing in itself,
but before the Face of God; and no programme, no tactical reso-
lution, no command can tell me how I, as I decide, have to do
justice to my group before the Face of God. It may be that I may
serve it as the programme and resolution and command have
laid down. It may be that I have to serve it otherwise. It could
even be—if such an unheard-of thing were to rise within me in
my act of decision—that I might be set in cruel opposition to its
success, because I became aware that God’s love ordains other-
wise. Only one thing matters, that as the situation is presented to
me I expose myself to it as to the word’s manifestation to me, to
the very ground where hearing passes into being, and that I
perceive what is to be perceived and answer it. He who prompts
me with an answer in such a way as to hinder my perceiving is
the hinderer, let him be for the rest who he will (12).

I do not in the least mean that a man must fetch the answer
alone and unadvised out of his breast. Nothing of the sort is
meant; how should the direction of those at the head of my

group not enter essentially into the substance out of which the
decision is smelted? But the direction must not be substituted for
the decision; no substitute is accepted. He who has a master may
yield “himself”, his bodily person, to him, but not his
responsibility. He must find his way to that responsibility
armed with all the “ought” that has been forged in the group,
but exposed to destiny so that in the demanding moment all
armour falls away from him. He may even hold firm with all his
force to the “interest” of the group—till in the last confronta-
tion with reality a finger, hardly to be perceived, yet never to be
neglected, touches it. It is not the “finger of God”, to be sure;
we are not permitted to expect that, and therefore there is not
the slightest assurance that our decision is right in any but a
personal way. God tenders me the situation to which I have to
answer; but I have not to expect that he should tender me
anything of my answer. Certainly in my answering I am given
into the power of his grace, but I cannot measure heaven’s
share in it, and even the most blissful sense of grace can
deceive. The finger I speak of is just that of the “conscience”,
but not of the routine conscience, which is to be used, is being
used and worn out, the play-on-the-surface conscience, with
whose discrediting they thought to have abolished the actuality
of man’s positive answer. I point to the unknown conscience in
the ground of being, which needs to be discovered ever anew,
the conscience of the “spark” (13), for the genuine spark is
effective also in the single composure of each genuine decision.
The certainty produced by this conscience is of course only a
personal certainty; it is uncertain certainty; but what is here
called person is the very person who is addressed and who
answers.

I say, therefore, that the Single One, that is, the man living in
responsibility, can make even his political decisions properly
only from that ground of his being at which he is aware of the
event as divine speech to him; and if he lets the awareness of this

ground be strangled by his group he is refusing to give God an
actual reply.

What I am speaking of has nothing to do with “individual-
ism”. I do not consider the individual to be either the starting-
point or the goal of the human world. But I consider the human
person to be the irremovable central place of the struggle
between the world’s movement away from God and its move-
ment towards God. This struggle takes place to-day to an uncan-
nily large extent in the realm of public life, of course not
between group and group but within each group. Yet the
decisive battles of this realm as well are fought in the depth, in
the ground or the groundlessness, of the person.

Our age is intent on escaping from the demanding “ever
anew” of such an obligation of responsibility by a flight into a
protective “once-for-all”. The last generation’s intoxication with
freedom has been followed by the present generation’s craze for
bondage; the untruth of intoxication has been followed by the
untruth of hysteria. He alone is true to the one Present Being
who knows he is bound to his place—and just there free for his
proper responsibility. Only those who are bound and free in this
way can still produce what can truly be called community. Yet
even today the believing man, if he clings to a thing that is
presented in a group, can do right to join it. But belonging to it,
he must remain submissive with his whole life, therefore with
his group life as well, to the One who is his Lord. His responsible
decision will thus at times be opposed to, say, a tactical decision
of his group. At times he will be moved to carry the fight for the
truth, the human, uncertain and certain truth which is brought
forward by his deep conscience, into the group itself, and
thereby establish or strengthen an inner front in it. This can be
more important for the future of our world than all fronts that
are drawn today between groups and between associations of
groups; for this front, if it is everywhere upright and strong, may
run as a secret unity across all groups.

What the right is can be experienced by none of the groups of
today except through men who belong to them staking their
own souls to experience it and then revealing it, however bitter it
may be, to their companions—charitably if it may be, cruelly if it
must be. Into this fiery furnace the group plunges time and
again, or it dies an inward death.

And if one still asks if one may be certain of finding what is
right on this steep path, once again the answer is No; there is no
certainty. There is only a chance; but there is no other. The risk
does not ensure the truth for us; but it, and it alone, leads us to
where the breath of truth is to be felt.
 

Education worthy of the name is essentially education of
character. For the genuine educator does not merely consider
individual functions of his pupil, as one intending to teach him
only to know or be capable of certain definite things; but his
concern is always the person as a whole, both in the actuality in
which he lives before you now and in his possibilities, what he
can become. But in this way, as a whole in reality and potential-
ity, a man can be conceived either as personality, that is, as a
unique spiritual-physical form with all the forces dormant in it,
or as character, that is, as the link between what this individual is
and the sequence of his actions and attitudes. Between these two
modes of conceiving the pupil in his wholeness there is a fun-
damental difference. Personality is something which in its
growth remains essentially outside the influence of the educator;
but to assist in the moulding of character is his greatest task.

Personality is a completion, only character is a task. One may
cultivate and enhance personality, but in education one can and
one must aim at character.

However—as I would like to point out straightaway—it is
advisable not to over-estimate what the educator can even at best
do to develop character. In this more than in any other branch of
the science of teaching it is important to realize, at the very
beginning of the discussion, the fundamental limits to conscious
influence, even before asking what character is and how it is to
be brought about.

If I have to teach algebra I can expect to succeed in giving my
pupils an idea of quadratic equations with two unknown quan-
tities. Even the slowest-witted child will understand it so well
that he will amuse himself by solving equations at night when
he cannot fall asleep. And even one with the most sluggish
memory will not forget, in his old age, how to play with x and y.
But if I am concerned with the education of character, every-
thing becomes problematic. I try to explain to my pupils that
envy is despicable, and at once I feel the secret resistance of those
who are poorer than their comrades. I try to explain that it is
wicked to bully the weak, and at once I see a suppressed smile on
the lips of the strong. I try to explain that lying destroys life, and
something frightful happens: the worst habitual liar of the class
produces a brilliant essay on the destructive power of lying. I
have made the fatal mistake of giving instruction in ethics, and what
I said is accepted as current coin of knowledge; nothing of it is
transformed into character-building substance.

But the difficulty lies still deeper. In all teaching of a subject I
can announce my intention of teaching as openly as I please, and
this does not interfere with the results. After all, pupils do want,
for the most part, to learn something, even if not overmuch, so
that a tacit agreement becomes possible. But as soon as my pupils
notice that I want to educate their characters I am resisted pre-
cisely by those who show most signs of genuine independent

character: they will not let themselves be educated, or rather,
they do not like the idea that somebody wants to educate them.
And those, too, who are seriously labouring over the question of
good and evil, rebel when one dictates to them, as though it
were some long established truth, what is good and what is bad;
and they rebel just because they have experienced over and over
again how hard it is to find the right way. Does it follow that one
should keep silent about one’s intention of educating character,
and act by ruse and subterfuge? No; I have just said that the
difficulty lies deeper. It is not enough to see that education of
character is not introduced into a lesson in class; neither may
one conceal it in cleverly arranged intervals. Education cannot
tolerate such politic action. Even if the pupil does not notice the
hidden motive it will have its negative effect on the actions of the
teacher himself by depriving him of the directness which is his
strength. Only in his whole being, in all his spontaneity can the
educator truly affect the whole being of his pupil. For educating
characters you do not need a moral genius, but you do need
a man who is wholly alive and able to communicate himself
directly to his fellow beings. His aliveness streams out to them
and affects them most strongly and purely when he has no
thought of affecting them.

The Greek word character means impression. The special link
between man’s being and his appearance, the special connexion
between the unity of what he is and the sequence of his actions
and attitudes is impressed on his still plastic substance. Who
does the impressing? Everything does: nature and the social con-
text, the house and the street, language and custom, the world of
history and the world of daily news in the form of rumour, of
broadcast and newspaper, music and technical science, play and
dream—everything together. Many of these factors exert their
influence by stimulating agreement, imitation, desire, effort;
others by arousing questions, doubts, dislike, resistance. Char-
acter is formed by the interpenetration of all those multifarious,

opposing influences. And yet, among this infinity of form-
giving forces the educator is only one element among innumer-
able others, but distinct from them all by his will to take part in
the stamping of character and by his consciousness that he repre-
sents in the eyes of the growing person a certain selection of what
is, the selection of what is “right”, of what should be. It is in this
will and this consciousness that his vocation as an educator finds
its fundamental expression. From this the genuine educator
gains two things: first, humility, the feeling of being only one
element amidst the fullness of life, only one single existence in
the midst of all the tremendous inrush of reality on the pupil;
but secondly, self-awareness, the feeling of being therein the
only existence that wants to affect the whole person, and thus the
feeling of responsibility for the selection of reality which he
represents to the pupil. And a third thing emerges from all this,
the recognition that in this realm of the education of character,
of wholeness, there is only one access to the pupil: his confidence.
For the adolescent who is frightened and disappointed by an
unreliable world, confidence means the liberating insight that
there is human truth, the truth of human existence. When the
pupil’s confidence has been won, his resistance against being
educated gives way to a singular happening: he accepts the edu-
cator as a person. He feels he may trust this man, that this man is
not making a business out of him, but is taking part in his life,
accepting him before desiring to influence him. And so he learns
to ask.

The teacher who is for the first time approached by a boy with
somewhat defiant bearing, but with trembling hands, visibly
opened-up and fired by a daring hope, who asks him what is the
right thing in a certain situation—for instance, whether in learn-
ing that a friend has betrayed a secret entrusted to him one
should call him to account or be content with entrusting no
more secrets to him—the teacher to whom this happens realizes
that this is the moment to make the first conscious step towards

education of character; he has to answer, to answer under a
responsibility, to give an answer which will probably lead
beyond the alternatives of the question by showing a third pos-
sibility which is the right one. To dictate what is good and evil in
general is not his business. His business is to answer a concrete
question, to answer what is right and wrong in a given situation.
This, as I have said, can only happen in an atmosphere of con-
fidence. Confidence, of course, is not won by the strenuous
endeavour to win it, but by direct and ingenuous participation in
the life of the people one is dealing with—in this case in the life
of one’s pupils—and by assuming the responsibility which
arises from such participation. It is not the educational intention
but it is the meeting which is educationally fruitful. A soul suf-
fering from the contradictions of the world of human society,
and of its own physical existence, approaches me with a
question. By trying to answer it to the best of my knowledge
and conscience I help it to become a character that actively
overcomes the contradictions.

If this is the teacher’s standpoint towards his pupil, taking part
in his life and conscious of responsibility, then everything that
passes between them can, without any deliberate or politic
intention, open a way to the education of character: lessons and
games, a conversation about quarrels in the class, or about the
problems of a world-war. Only, the teacher must not forget the
limits of education; even when he enjoys confidence he cannot
always expect agreement. Confidence implies a break-through
from reserve, the bursting of the bonds which imprison an
unquiet heart. But it does not imply unconditional agreement.
The teacher must never forget that conflicts too, if only they are
decided in a healthy atmosphere, have an educational value. A
conflict with a pupil is the supreme test for the educator. He
must use his own insight wholeheartedly; he must not blunt the
piercing impact of his knowledge, but he must at the same time
have in readiness the healing ointment for the heart pierced by

it. Not for a moment may he conduct a dialectical manœuvre
instead of the real battle for truth. But if he is the victor he has to
help the vanquished to endure defeat; and if he cannot conquer
the self-willed soul that faces him (for victories over souls are
not so easily won), then he has to find the word of love which
alone can help to overcome so difficult a situation.
 

So far I have referred to those personal difficulties in the educa-
tion of character which arise from the relation between educator
and pupil, while for the moment treating character itself, the
object of education, as a simple concept of fixed content. But it is
by no means that. In order to penetrate to the real difficulties in
the education of character we have to examine critically the
concept of character itself.

Kerschensteiner in his well-known essay on The Concept and
Education of Character distinguished between “character in the most
general sense”, by which he means “a man’s attitude to his
human surroundings, which is constant and is expressed in his
actions”, and real “ethical character”, which he defines as “a
special attitude, and one which in action gives the preference
before all others to absolute values”. If we begin by accepting
this distinction unreservedly—and undeniably there is some
truth in it—we are faced with such heavy odds in all education
of character in our time that the very possibility of it seems
doubtful.

The “absolute values” which Kerschensteiner refers to cannot,
of course, be meant to have only subjective validity for the per-
son concerned. Don Juan finds absolute and subjective value in
seducing the greatest possible number of women, and the dic-
tator sees it in the greatest possible accumulation of power.
“Absolute validity” can only relate to universal values and
norms, the existence of which the person concerned recognizes

and acknowledges. But to deny the presence of universal values
and norms of absolute validity—that is the conspicuous ten-
dency of our age. This tendency is not, as is sometimes sup-
posed, directed merely against the sanctioning of the norms by
religion, but against their universal character and absolute valid-
ity, against their claim to be of a higher order than man and to
govern the whole of mankind. In our age values and norms are
not permitted to be anything but expressions of the life of a
group which translates its own needs into the language of
objective claims, until at last the group itself, for example a
nation, is raised to an absolute value—and moreover to the only
value. Then this splitting up into groups so pervades the whole
of life that it is no longer possible to re-establish a sphere of
values common to mankind, and a commandment to mankind is
no longer observed. As this tendency grows the basis for the
development of what Kerschensteiner means by moral character
steadily diminishes. How, under these circumstances, can the
task of educating character be completed?

At the time of the Arab terror in Palestine, when there were
single Jewish acts of reprisal, there must have been many discus-
sions between teacher and pupils on the question: Can there be
any suspension of the Ten Commandments, i.e. can murder
become a good deed if committed in the interest of one’s own
group? One such discussion was once repeated to me. The
teacher asked: “When the commandment tells you ‘Thou shalt
not bear false witness against thy neighbour’, are we to interpret
it with the condition, ‘provided that it does not profit you’?”
Thereupon one of the pupils said, “But it is not a question of my
profit, but of the profit of my people.” The teacher: “And how
would you like it, then, if we put our condition this way: ‘Pro-
vided that it does not profit your family’?” The pupil: “But
family—that is still something more or less like myself; but the
people—that is something quite different; there all question of I
disappears.” The teacher: “Then if you are thinking, ‘we want

victory’, don’t you feel at the same time, ‘I want victory’?” The
pupil: “But the people, that is something infinitely more than
just the people of to-day. It includes all past and future genera-
tions.” At this point the teacher felt the moment had come to
leave the narrow compass of the present and to invoke historical
destiny. He said: “Yes; all past generations. But what was it that
made those past generations of the Exile live? What made them
outlive and overcome all their trials? Wasn’t it that the cry ‘Thou
shalt not’ never faded from their hearts and ears?” The pupil
grew very pale. He was silent for a while, but it was the silence of
one whose words threatened to stifle him. Then he burst out:
“And what have we achieved that way? This!” And he banged his
fist on the newspaper before him, which contained the report on
the British White Paper. And again he burst out with “Live?
Outlive? Do you call that life? We want to live!”

I have already said that the test of the educator lies in conflict
with his pupil. He has to face this conflict and, whatever turn it
may take, he has to find the way through it into life, into a life, I
must add, where confidence continues unshaken—more, is even
mysteriously strengthened. But the example I have just given
shows the extreme difficulty of this task, which seems at times to
have reached an impassable frontier. This is no longer merely a
conflict between two generations, but between a world which
for several millennia has believed in a truth superior to man, and
an age which does not believe in it any longer—will not or
cannot believe in it any longer.

But if we now ask, “How in this situation can there be any
education of character?”, something negative is immediately
obvious: it is senseless to want to prove by any kind of argument
that nevertheless the denied absoluteness of norms exists. That
would be to assume that the denial is the result of reflection, and
is open to argument, that is, to material for renewed reflection.
But the denial is due to the disposition of a dominant human
type of our age. We are justified in regarding this disposition as a

sickness of the human race. But we must not deceive ourselves
by believing that the disease can be cured by formulæ which
assert that nothing is really as the sick person imagines. It is an
idle undertaking to call out, to a mankind that has grown blind
to eternity: “Look! the eternal values!” To-day host upon host of
men have everywhere sunk into the slavery of collectives, and
each collective is the supreme authority for its own slaves; there
is no longer, superior to the collectives, any universal sover-
eignty in idea, faith, or spirit. Against the values, decrees and
decisions of the collective no appeal is possible. This is true, not
only for the totalitarian countries, but also for the parties and
party-like groups in the so-called democracies. Men who have so
lost themselves to the collective Moloch cannot be rescued from
it by any reference, however eloquent, to the absolute whose
kingdom the Moloch has usurped. One has to begin by pointing
to that sphere where man himself, in the hours of utter solitude,
occasionally becomes aware of the disease through sudden pain:
by pointing to the relation of the individual to his own self. In
order to enter into a personal relation with the absolute, it is first
necessary to be a person again, to rescue one’s real personal self
from the fiery jaws of collectivism which devours all selfhood.
The desire to do this is latent in the pain the individual suffers
through his distorted relation to his own self. Again and again he
dulls the pain with a subtle poison and thus suppresses the desire
as well. To keep the pain awake, to waken the desire—that is the
first task of everyone who regrets the obscuring of eternity. It is
also the first task of the genuine educator in our time.

The man for whom absolute values in a universal sense do not
exist cannot be made to adopt “an attitude which in action gives
the preference over all others to absolute values”. But what one
can inculcate in him is the desire to attain once more to a real
attitude, and that is, the desire to become a person following the
only way that leads to this goal to-day.

But with this the concept of character formulated by

Kerschensteiner and deriving, as we know, from Kant is recog-
nized to be useless for the specifically modern task of the educa-
tion of character. Another concept has to be found if this task is
to be more precisely defined.

We cannot conceal from ourselves that we stand to-day on the
ruins of the edifice whose towers were raised by Kant. It is not
given to us living to-day to sketch the plan for a new building.
But we can perhaps begin by laying the first foundations without
a plan, with only a dawning image before our mind’s eye.
 

According to Kerschensteiner’s final definition character is
“fundamentally nothing but voluntary obedience to the maxims
which have been moulded in the individual by experience,
teaching, and self-reflection, whether they have been adopted
and then completely assimilated or have originated in the con-
sciousness through self-legislation”. This voluntary obedience
“is, however, only a form of self-control”. At first, love or fear of
other people must have produced in man “the habit of self-
conquest”. Then, gradually, “this outer obedience must be
transformed into inner obedience”.

The concept of habit was then enlarged, especially by John
Dewey in his book, Human Nature and Conduct. According to him
character is “the interpenetration of habits”. Without “the con-
tinued operation of all habits in every act” there would be no
unified character, but only “a juxtaposition of disconnected
reactions to separated situations”.

With this concept of character as an organization of self-
control by means of the accumulation of maxims, or as a system
of interpenetrating habits, it is very easy to understand how
powerless modern educational science is when faced by the
sickness of man. But even apart from the special problems of the
age, this concept can be no adequate basis for the construction of

a genuine education of character. Not that the educator could
dispense with employing useful maxims or furthering good
habits. But in moments that come perhaps only seldom, a feeling
of blessed achievement links him to the explorer, the inventor,
the artist, a feeling of sharing in the revelation of what is hidden.
In such moments he finds himself in a sphere very different
from that of maxims and habits. Only on this, the highest plane
of his activity, can he fix his real goal, the real concept of
character which is his concern, even though he might not often
reach it.

For the first time a young teacher enters a class independently,
no longer sent by the training college to prove his efficiency. The
class before him is like a mirror of mankind, so multiform, so
full of contradictions, so inaccessible. He feels “These boys—I
have not sought them out; I have been put here and have to
accept them as they are—but not as they now are in this
moment, no, as they really are, as they can become. But how can I
find out what is in them and what can I do to make it take
shape?” And the boys do not make things easy for him. They are
noisy, they cause trouble, they stare at him with impudent curi-
osity. He is at once tempted to check this or that trouble-maker,
to issue orders, to make compulsory the rules of decent
behaviour, to say No, to say No to everything rising against him
from beneath: he is at once tempted to start from beneath. And if
one starts from beneath one perhaps never arrives above, but
everything comes down. But then his eyes meet a face which
strikes him. It is not a beautiful face nor particularly intelligent;
but it is a real face, or rather, the chaos preceding the cosmos of a
real face. On it he reads a question which is something different
from the general curiosity: “Who are you? Do you know some-
thing that concerns me? Do you bring me something? What do
you bring?”

In some such way he reads the question. And he, the young
teacher, addresses this face. He says nothing very ponderous or

important, he puts an ordinary introductory question: “What
did you talk about last in geography? The Dead Sea? Well, what
about the Dead Sea?” But there was obviously something not
quite usual in the question, for the answer he gets is not the
ordinary schoolboy answer; the boy begins to tell a story. Some
months earlier he had stayed for a few hours on the shores of the
Dead Sea and it is of this he tells. He adds: “And everything
looked to me as if it had been created a day before the rest of
creation.” Quite unmistakably he had only in this moment made
up his mind to talk about it. In the meantime his face has
changed. It is no longer quite as chaotic as before. And the class
has fallen silent. They all listen. The class, too, is no longer a
chaos. Something has happened. The young teacher has started
from above.

The educator’s task can certainly not consist in educating
great characters. He cannot select his pupils, but year by year the
world, such as it is, is sent in the form of a school class to meet
him on his life’s way as his destiny; and in this destiny lies the
very meaning of his life’s work. He has to introduce discipline
and order, he has to establish a law, and he can only strive and
hope for the result that discipline and order will become more
and more inward and autonomous, and that at last the law will
be written in the heart of his pupils. But his real goal which,
once he has well recognized it and well remembers it, will
influence all his work, is the great character.

The great character can be conceived neither as a system of
maxims nor as a system of habits. It is peculiar to him to act from
the whole of his substance. That is, it is peculiar to him to react
in accordance with the uniqueness of every situation which chal-
lenges him as an active person. Of course there are all sorts of
similarities in different situations; one can construct types of
situations, one can always find to what section the particular
situation belongs, and draw what is appropriate from the hoard
of established maxims and habits, apply the appropriate maxim,

bring into operation the appropriate habit. But what is untypical
in the particular situation remains unnoticed and unanswered.
To me that seems the same as if, having ascertained the sex of a
new-born child, one were immediately to establish its type as
well, and put all the children of one type into a common cradle
on which not the individual name but the name of the type was
inscribed. In spite of all similarities every living situation has,
like a newborn child, a new face, that has never been before and
will never come again. It demands of you a reaction which can-
not be prepared beforehand. It demands nothing of what is past.
It demands presence, responsibility; it demands you. I call a great
character one who by his actions and attitudes satisfies the claim
of situations out of deep readiness to respond with his whole
life, and in such a way that the sum of his actions and attitudes
expresses at the same time the unity of his being in its willing-
ness to accept responsibility. As his being is unity, the unity of
accepted responsibility, his active life, too, coheres into unity.
And one might perhaps say that for him there rises a unity out
of the situations he has responded to in responsibility, the
indefinable unity of a moral destiny.

All this does not mean that the great character is beyond the
acceptance of norms. No responsible person remains a stranger
to norms. But the command inherent in a genuine norm never
becomes a maxim and the fulfilment of it never a habit. Any
command that a great character takes to himself in the course of
his development does not act in him as part of his consciousness
or as material for building up his exercises, but remains latent in
a basic layer of his substance until it reveals itself to him in a
concrete way. What it has to tell him is revealed whenever a
situation arises which demands of him a solution of which till
then he had perhaps no idea. Even the most universal norm will
at times be recognized only in a very special situation. I know of
a man whose heart was struck by the lightning flash of “Thou
shalt not steal” in the very moment when he was moved by a

very different desire from that of stealing, and whose heart was
so struck by it that he not only abandoned doing what he
wanted to do, but with the whole force of his passion did the
very opposite. Good and evil are not each other’s opposites like
right and left. The evil approaches us as a whirlwind, the good as
a direction. There is a direction, a “yes”, a command, hidden
even in a prohibition, which is revealed to us in moments like
these. In moments like these the command addresses us really in
the second person, and the Thou in it is no one else but one’s
own self. Maxims command only the third person, the each and
the none.

One can say that it is the unconditioned nature of the address
which distinguishes the command from the maxim. In an age
which has become deaf to unconditioned address we cannot
overcome the dilemma of the education of character from that
angle. But insight into the structure of great character can help
us to overcome it.

Of course, it may be asked whether the educator should really
start “from above”, whether, in fixing his goal, the hope of
finding a great character, who is bound to be the exception,
should be his starting-point; for in his methods of educating
character he will always have to take into consideration the
others, the many. To this I reply that the educator would not have
the right to do so if a method inapplicable to these others were
to result. In fact, however, his very insight into the structure of a
great character helps him to find the way by which alone (as I
have indicated) he can begin to influence also the victims of the
collective Moloch, pointing out to them the sphere in which
they themselves suffer—namely, their relation to their own
selves. From this sphere he must elicit the values which he can
make credible and desirable to his pupils. That is what insight
into the structure of a great character helps him to do.

A section of the young is beginning to feel today that, because
of their absorption by the collective, something important and

irreplaceable is lost to them—personal responsibility for life and
the world. These young people, it is true, do not yet realize that
their blind devotion to the collective, e.g. to a party, was not a
genuine act of their personal life; they do not realize that it
sprang, rather, from the fear of being left, in this age of confu-
sion, to rely on themselves, on a self which no longer receives its
direction from eternal values. Thus they do not yet realize that
their devotion was fed on the unconscious desire to have
responsibility removed from them by an authority in which they
believe or want to believe. They do not yet realize that this devo-
tion was an escape. I repeat, the young people I am speaking of
do not yet realize this. But they are beginning to notice that he
who no longer, with his whole being, decides what he does or
does not, and assumes responsibility for it, becomes sterile in
soul. And a sterile soul soon ceases to be a soul.

This is where the educator can begin and should begin. He
can help the feeling that something is lacking to grow into the
clarity of consciousness and into the force of desire. He can
awaken in young people the courage to shoulder life again. He
can bring before his pupils the image of a great character who
denies no answer to life and the world, but accepts responsibility
for everything essential that he meets. He can show his pupils
this image without the fear that those among them who most of
all need discipline and order will drift into a craving for aimless
freedom: on the contrary, he can teach them in this way to
recognize that discipline and order too are starting-points on the
way towards self-responsibility. He can show that even the great
character is not born perfect, that the unity of his being has first
to mature before expressing itself in the sequence of his actions
and attitudes. But unity itself, unity of the person, unity of the
lived life, has to be emphasized again and again. The confusing
contradictions cannot be remedied by the collectives, not one of
which knows the taste of genuine unity and which if left to
themselves would end up, like the scorpions imprisoned in a

box, in the witty fable, by devouring one another. This mass of
contradictions can be met and conquered only by the rebirth of
personal unity, unity of being, unity of life, unity of action—
unity of being, life and action together. This does not mean a
static unity of the uniform, but the great dynamic unity of the
multiform in which multiformity is formed into unity of char-
acter. Today the great characters are still “enemies of the people”,
they who love their society, yet wish not only to preserve it but
to raise it to a higher level. To-morrow they will be the architects
of a new unity of mankind. It is the longing for personal unity,
from which must be born a unity of mankind, which the educa-
tor should lay hold of and strengthen in his pupils. Faith in this
unity and the will to achieve it is not a “return” to individual-
ism, but a step beyond all the dividedness of individualism and
collectivism. A great and full relation between man and man can
only exist between unified and responsible persons. That is why
it is much more rarely found in the totalitarian collective than in
any historically earlier form of society; much more rarely also
in the authoritarian party than in any earlier form of free ass-
ociation. Genuine education of character is genuine education
for community.

In a generation which has had this kind of upbringing the
desire will also be kindled to behold again the eternal values, to
hear again the language of the eternal norm. He who knows
inner unity, the innermost life of which is mystery, learns to
honour the mystery in all its forms. In an understandable reac-
tion against the former domination of a false, fictitious mystery,
the present generations are obsessed with the desire to rob life of
all its mystery. The fictitious mystery will disappear, the genuine
one will rise again. A generation which honours the mystery in
all its forms will no longer be deserted by eternity. Its light
seems darkened only because the eye suffers from a cataract; the
receiver has been turned off, but the resounding ether has not
ceased to vibrate. To-day, indeed, in the hour of upheaval, the

eternal is sifted from the pseudo-eternal. That which flashed into
the primal radiance and blurred the primal sound will be extin-
guished and silenced, for it has failed before the horror of the
new confusion and the questioning soul has unmasked its futil-
ity. Nothing remains but what rises above the abyss of to-day’s
monstrous problems, as above every abyss of every time: the
wing-beat of the spirit and the creative word. But he who can see
and hear out of unity will also behold and discern again what
can be beheld and discerned eternally. The educator who helps
to bring man back to his own unity will help to put him again
face to face with God.
 

"Between Man and Man" by Martin Buber

What is Man? (Was ist der Mensch? 1938)

Section One: The Progress of the Question

"Between Man and Man" by Martin Buber

What is Man? (Was ist der Mensch? 1938)

Section Two: Modern Attempts