In my earlier years the “religious” was for me the exception.
There were hours that were taken out of the course of things.
From somewhere or other the firm crust of everyday was
pierced. Then the reliable permanence of appearances broke
down; the attack which took place burst its law asunder.
“Religious experience” was the experience of an otherness
which did not fit into the context of life. It could begin with
something customary, with consideration of some familiar
object, but which then became unexpectedly mysterious and
uncanny, finally lighting a way into the lightning-pierced dark-
ness of the mystery itself. But also, without any intermediate
stage, time could be torn apart—first the firm world’s structure
then the still firmer self-assurance flew apart and you were
delivered to fulness. The “religious” lifted you out. Over there
now lay the accustomed existence with its affairs, but here

illumination and ecstasy and rapture held, without time or
sequence. Thus your own being encompassed a life here and a
life beyond, and there was no bond but the actual moment of the
transition.

The illegitimacy of such a division of the temporal life, which
is streaming to death and eternity and which only in fulfilling its
temporality can be fulfilled in face of these, was brought home
to me by an everyday event, an event of judgment, judging with
that sentence from closed lips and an unmoved glance such as
the ongoing course of things loves to pronounce.

What happened was no more than that one forenoon, after a
morning of “religious” enthusiasm, I had a visit from an
unknown young man, without being there in spirit. I certainly
did not fail to let the meeting be friendly, I did not treat him any
more remissly than all his contemporaries who were in the habit
of seeking me out about this time of day as an oracle that is ready
to listen to reason. I conversed attentively and openly with
him—only I omitted to guess the questions which he did not
put. Later, not long after, I learned from one of his friends—he
himself was no longer alive—the essential content of these ques-
tions; I learned that he had come to me not casually, but borne
by destiny, not for a chat but for a decision. He had come to me,
he had come in this hour. What do we expect when we are in
despair and yet go to a man? Surely a presence by means of
which we are told that nevertheless there is meaning.

Since then I have given up the “religious” which is nothing
but the exception, extraction, exaltation, ecstasy; or it has given
me up. I possess nothing but the everyday out of which I am
never taken. The mystery is no longer disclosed, it has escaped or
it has made its dwelling here where everything happens as it
happens. I know no fulness but each mortal hour’s fulness of
claim and responsibility. Though far from being equal to it, yet I
know that in the claim I am claimed and may respond in
responsibility, and know who speaks and demands a response.

I do not know much more. If that is religion then it is just
everything, simply all that is lived in its possibility of dialogue.
Here is space also for religion’s highest forms. As when you pray
you do not thereby remove yourself from this life of yours but in
your praying refer your thought to it, even though it may be in
order to yield it; so too in the unprecedented and surprising,
when you are called upon from above, required, chosen,
empowered, sent, you with this your mortal bit of life are
referred to, this moment is not extracted from it, it rests on what
has been and beckons to the remainder which has still to be
lived, you are not swallowed up in a fulness without obligation,
you are willed for the life of communion.
 

Above and below are bound to one another. The word of him
who wishes to speak with men without speaking with God is
not fulfilled; but the word of him who wishes to speak with God
without speaking with men goes astray.

There is a tale that a man inspired by God once went out from
the creaturely realms into the vast waste. There he wandered till
he came to the gates of the mystery. He knocked. From within
came the cry: “What do you want here?” He said, “I have pro-
claimed your praise in the ears of mortals, but they were deaf to
me. So I come to you that you yourself may hear me and reply.”
“Turn back,” came the cry from within. “Here is no ear for you.
I have sunk my hearing in the deafness of mortals.”

True address from God directs man into the place of lived
speech, where the voices of the creatures grope past one another,
and in their very missing of one another succeed in reaching the
eternal partner.
 

Here I expect two objections, one weighty and one powerful.

One argument against me takes this form. When it is a ques-
tion of essential views, of views concerning Weltanschauung, the
conversation must not be broken off in such a way. Each must
expose himself wholly, in a real way, in his humanly unavoid-
able partiality, and thereby experience himself in a real way as
limited by the other, so that the two suffer together the destiny
of our conditioned nature and meet one another in it.

To this I answer that the experience of being limited is
included in what I refer to; but so too is the experience of
overcoming it together. This cannot be completed on the level of
Weltanschauung, but on that of reality. Neither needs to give up his
point of view; only, in that unexpectedly they do something and
unexpectedly something happens to them which is called a
covenant, they enter a realm where the law of the point of view
no longer holds. They too suffer the destiny of our conditioned
nature, but they honour it most highly when, as is permitted to
us, they let themselves run free of it for an immortal moment.
They had already met one another when each in his soul so
turned to the other that from then on, making him present, he
spoke really to and towards him.

The other objection, which comes from a quite different, in
fact from the opposite, side is to the effect that this may be true
so far as the province of the point of view reaches, but it ceases
to be true for a confession of faith. Two believers in conflict
about their doctrines are concerned with the execution of the
divine will, not with a fleeting personal agreement. For the man
who is so related to his faith that he is able to die or to slay for it
there can be no realm where the law of the faith ceases to hold. It
is laid on him to help truth to victory, he does not let himself be
misled by sentiments. The man holding a different, that is a false,
belief must be converted, or at least instructed; direct contact
with him can be achieved only outside the advocacy of the faith,
it cannot proceed from it. The thesis of religious disputation
cannot be allowed to “go”.

This objection derives its power from its indifference to the
non-binding character of the relativized spirit—a character
which is accepted as a matter of course. I can answer it
adequately only by a confession.

I have not the possibility of judging Luther, who refused fel-
lowship with Zwingli in Marburg, or Calvin who furthered the
death of Servetus. For Luther and Calvin believe that the Word of
God has so descended among men that it can be clearly known
and must therefore be exclusively advocated. I do not believe
that; the Word of God crosses my vision like a falling star to
whose fire the meteorite will bear witness without making it
light up for me, and I myself can only bear witness to the light
but not produce the stone and say “This is it”. But this difference
of faith is by no means to be understood merely as a subjective
one. It is not based on the fact that we who live to-day are weak
in faith, and it will remain even if our faith is ever so much
strengthened. The situation of the world itself, in the most ser-
ious sense, more precisely the relation between God and man,
has changed. And this change is certainly not comprehended in
its essence by our thinking only of the darkening, so familiar to

us, of the supreme light, only of the night of our being, empty of
revelation. It is the night of an expectation—not of a vague hope,
but of an expectation. We expect a theophany of which we know
nothing but the place, and the place is called community. In the
public catacombs of this expectation there is no single God’s
Word which can be clearly known and advocated, but the words
delivered are clarified for us in our human situation of being
turned to one another. There is no obedience to the coming one
without loyalty to his creature. To have experienced this is our
way.

A time of genuine religious conversations is beginning—not
those so-called but fictitious conversations where none regarded
and addressed his partner in reality, but genuine dialogues,
speech from certainty to certainty, but also from one open-
hearted person to another open-hearted person. Only then will
genuine common life appear, not that of an identical content of
faith which is alleged to be found in all religions, but that of the
situation, of anguish and of expectation.
 

Responsibility which does not respond to a word is a metaphor
of morality. Factually, responsibility only exists when the court
is there to which I am responsible, and “self-responsibility” has
reality only when the “self” to which I am responsible becomes
transparent into the absolute. But he who practises real responsi-
bility in the life of dialogue does not need to name the speaker of
the word to which he is responding—he knows him in the
word’s substance which presses on and in, assuming the cadence
of an inwardness, and stirs him in his heart of hearts. A man can

ward off with all his strength the belief that “God” is there, and
he tastes him in the strict sacrament of dialogue.

Yet let it not be supposed that I make morality questionable in
order to glorify religion. Religion, certainly, has this advantage
over morality, that it is a phenomenon and not a postulate, and
further that it is able to include composure as well as determin-
ation. The reality of morality, the demand of the demander, has a
place in religion, but the reality of religion, the unconditioned
being of the demander, has no place in morality. Nevertheless,
when religion does itself justice and asserts itself, it is much
more dubious than morality, just because it is more actual and
inclusive. Religion as risk, which is ready to give itself up, is the
nourishing stream of the arteries; as system, possessing, assured
and assuring, religion which believes in religion is the veins’
blood, which ceases to circulate. And if there is nothing that can
so hide the face of our fellow-man as morality can, religion can
hide from us as nothing else can the face of God. Principle there,
dogma here, I appreciate the “objective” compactness of dogma,
but behind both there lies in wait the—profane or holy—war
against the situation’s power of dialogue, there lies in wait the
“once-for-all” which resists the unforeseeable moment. Dogma,
even when its claim of origin remains uncontested, has become
the most exalted form of invulnerability against revelation. Revel-
ation will tolerate no perfect tense, but man with the arts of his
craze for security props it up to perfectedness.
 

We may distinguish three ways in which we are able to perceive
a man who is living before our eyes. (I am not thinking of an
object of scientific knowledge, of which I do not speak here.)
The object of our perception does not need to know of us, of our
being there. It does not matter at this point whether he stands in
a relation or has a standpoint towards the perceiver.

The observer is wholly intent on fixing the observed man in his
mind, on “noting” him. He probes him and writes him up.
That is, he is diligent to write up as many “traits” as possible. He
lies in wait for them, that none may escape him. The object
consists of traits, and it is known what lies behind each of them.
Knowledge of the human system of expression constantly
incorporates in the instant the newly appearing individual
variations, and remains applicable. A face is nothing but
physiognomy, movements nothing but gestures of expression.

The onlooker is not at all intent. He takes up the position which
lets him see the object freely, and undisturbed awaits what will
be presented to him. Only at the beginning may he be ruled by
purpose, everything beyond that is involuntary. He does not go
around taking notes indiscriminately, he lets himself go, he is
not in the least afraid of forgetting something (“Forgetting is
good,” he says). He gives his memory no tasks, he trusts its
organic work which preserves what is worth preserving. He does
not lead in the grass as green fodder, as the observer does; he
turns it and lets the sun shine on it. He pays no attention to traits
(“Traits lead astray,” he says). What stands out for him from the
object is what is not “character” and not “expression” (“The
interesting is not important,” he says). All great artists have been
onlookers.

But there is a perception of a decisively different kind.

The onlooker and the observer are similarly orientated, in that
they have a position, namely, the very desire to perceive the man
who is living before our eyes. Moreover, this man is for them an
object separated from themselves and their personal life, who
can in fact for this sole reason be “properly” perceived. Con-
sequently what they experience in this way, whether it is, as
with the observer, a sum of traits, or, as with the onlooker, an
existence, neither demands action from them nor inflicts destiny
on them. But rather the whole is given over to the aloof fields of
æsthesis.

It is a different matter when in a receptive hour of my per-
sonal life a man meets me about whom there is something,
which I cannot grasp in any objective way at all, that “says some-
thing” to me. That does not mean, says to me what manner of
man this is, what is going on in him, and the like. But it means,
says something to me, addresses something to me, speaks some-
thing that enters my own life. It can be something about this
man, for instance that he needs me. But it can also be something
about myself. The man himself in his relation to me has nothing
to do with what is said. He has no relation to me, he has indeed
not noticed me at all. It is not he who says it to me, as that
solitary man silently confessed his secret to his neighbour on the
seat; but it says it.

To understand “say” as a metaphor is not to understand. The
phrase “that doesn’t say a thing to me” is an outworn metaphor;
but the saying I am referring to is real speech. In the house of
speech are many mansions, and this is one of the inner.

The effect of having this said to me is completely different
from that of looking on and observing. I cannot depict or denote
or describe the man in whom, through whom, something has
been said to me. Were I to attempt it, that would be the end of
saying. This man is not my object; I have got to do with him.
Perhaps I have to accomplish something about him; but perhaps

I have only to learn something, and it is only a matter of my
“accepting”. It may be that I have to answer at once, to this very
man before me; it may be that the saying has a long and mani-
fold transmission before it, and that I am to answer some other
person at some other time and place, in who knows what kind of
speech, and that it is now only a matter of taking the answering
on myself. But in each instance a word demanding an answer has
happened to me.

We may term this way of perception becoming aware.

It by no means needs to be a man of whom I become aware. It
can be an animal, a plant, a stone. No kind of appearance or
event is fundamentally excluded from the series of the things
through which from time to time something is said to me. No-
thing can refuse to be the vessel for the Word. The limits of the
possibility of dialogue are the limits of awareness.
 

Human dialogue, therefore, although it has its distinctive life in
the sign, that is in sound and gesture (the letters of language
have their place in this only in special instances, as when,
between friends in a meeting, notes describing the atmosphere
skim back and forth across the table), can exist without the sign,
but admittedly not in an objectively comprehensible form. On
the other hand an element of communication, however inward,
seems to belong to its essence. But in its highest moments dia-
logue reaches out even beyond these boundaries. It is completed
outside contents, even the most personal, which are or can be
communicated. Moreover it is completed not in some “mys-
tical” event, but in one that is in the precise sense factual,
thoroughly dovetailed into the common human world and the
concrete time-sequence.

One might indeed be inclined to concede this as valid for the
special realm of the erotic. But I do not intend to bring even this
in here as an explanation. For Eros is in reality much more
strangely composed than in Plato’s genealogical myth, and the
erotic is in no way, as might be supposed, purely a compressing
and unfolding of dialogue. Rather do I know no other realm
where, as in this one (to be spoken of later), dialogue and mono-
logue are so mingled and opposed. Many celebrated ecstasies of
love are nothing but the lover’s delight in the possibilities of his
own person which are actualized in unexpected fulness.

I would rather think of something unpretentious yet
significant—of the glances which strangers exchange in a busy
street as they pass one another with unchanging pace. Some of

these glances, though not charged with destiny, nevertheless
reveal to one another two dialogical natures.

But I can really show what I have in mind only by events
which open into a genuine change from communication to
communion, that is, in an embodiment of the word of dialogue.

What I am here concerned with cannot be conveyed in ideas
to a reader. But we may represent it by examples—provided that,
where the matter is important, we do not eschew taking
examples from the inmost recesses of the personal life. For
where else should the like be found?

My friendship with one now dead arose in an incident that
may be described, if you will, as a broken-off conversation. The
date is Easter 1914. Some men from different European peoples
had met in an undefined presentiment of the catastrophe, in
order to make preparations for an attempt to establish a supra-
national authority. The conversations were marked by that
unreserve, whose substance and fruitfulness I have scarcely ever
experienced so strongly. It had such an effect on all who took
part that the fictitious fell away and every word was an actuality.
Then as we discussed the composition of the larger circle from
which public initiative should proceed (it was decided that it
should meet in August of the same year) one of us, a man of
passionate concentration and judicial power of love, raised the
consideration that too many Jews had been nominated, so that
several countries would be represented in unseemly proportion
by their Jews. Though similar reflections were not foreign to
my own mind, since I hold that Jewry can gain an effective and
more than merely stimulating share in the building of a stead-
fast world of peace only in its own community and not in
scattered members, they seemed to me, expressed in this way,
to be tainted in their justice. Obstinate Jew that I am, I pro-
tested against the protest. I no longer know how from that I
came to speak of Jesus and to say that we Jews knew him from
within, in the impulses and stirrings of his Jewish being, in a

way that remains inaccessible to the peoples submissive to him.
“In a way that remains inaccessible to you”—so I directly
addressed the former clergyman. He stood up, I too stood, we
looked into the heart of one another’s eyes. “It is gone,” he
said, and before everyone we gave one another the kiss of
brotherhood.

The discussion of the situation between Jews and Christians
had been transformed into a bond between the Christian and the
Jew. In this transformation dialogue was fulfilled. Opinions were
gone, in a bodily way the factual took place.
 

Through all sorts of changes the same dream, sometimes after an
interval of several years, recurs to me. I name it the dream of the
double cry. Its context is always much the same, a “primitive”
world meagerly equipped. I find myself in a vast cave, like the
Latomias of Syracuse, or in a mud building that reminds me
when I awake of the villages of the fellahin, or on the fringe of a
gigantic forest whose like I cannot remember having seen.

The dream begins in very different ways, but always with
something extraordinary happening to me, for instance, with a
small animal resembling a lion-cub (whose name I know in the
dream but not when I awake) tearing the flesh from my arm and
being forced only with an effort to loose its hold. The strange
thing is that this first part of the dream story, which in the
duration as well as the outer meaning of the incidents is easily
the most important, always unrolls at a furious pace as though it

did not matter. Then suddenly the pace abates: I stand there and
cry out. In the view of the events which my waking conscious-
ness has I should have to suppose that the cry I utter varies in
accordance with what preceded it, and is sometimes joyous,
sometimes fearful, sometimes even filled both with pain and
with triumph. But in my morning recollection it is neither so
expressive nor so various. Each time it is the same cry, inarticu-
late but in strict rhythm, rising and falling, swelling to a fulness
which my throat could not endure were I awake, long and slow,
quiet, quite slow and very long, a cry that is a song. When it ends
my heart stops beating. But then, somewhere, far away, another
cry moves towards me, another which is the same, the same cry
uttered or sung by another voice. Yet it is not the same cry,
certainly no “echo” of my cry but rather its true rejoinder, tone
for tone not repeating mine, not even in a weakened form, but
corresponding to mine, answering its tones—so much so, that
mine, which at first had to my own ear no sound of questioning
at all, now appear as questions, as a long series of questions,
which now all receive a response. The response is no more cap-
able of interpretation than the question. And yet the cries that
meet the one cry that is the same do not seem to be the same as
one another. Each time the voice is new. But now, as the reply
ends, in the first moment after its dying fall, a certitude, true
dream certitude comes to me that now it has happened. Nothing
more. Just this, and in this way—now it has happened. If I should try
to explain it, it means that that happening which gave rise to my
cry has only now, with the rejoinder, really and undoubtedly
happened.

After this manner the dream has recurred each time—till
once, the last time, now two years ago. At first it was as usual (it
was the dream with the animal), my cry died away, again my
heart stood still. But then there was quiet. There came no
answering call. I listened, I heard no sound. For I awaited the
response for the first time; hitherto it had always surprised me,

as though I had never heard it before. Awaited, it failed to come.
But now something happened with me. As though I had till now
had no other access from the world to sensation save that of the
ear and now discovered myself as a being simply equipped with
senses, both those clothed in the bodily organs and the naked
senses, so I exposed myself to the distance, open to all sensation
and perception. And then, not from a distance but from the air
round about me, noiselessly, came the answer. Really it did not
come; it was there. It had been there—so I may explain it—even
before my cry: there it was, and now, when I laid myself open to
it, it let itself be received by me. I received it as completely into
my perception as ever I received the rejoinder in one of the
earlier dreams. If I were to report with what I heard it I should
have to say “with every pore of my body.” As ever the rejoinder
came in one of the earlier dreams this corresponded to and
answered my cry. It exceeded the earlier rejoinder in an
unknown perfection which is hard to define, for it resides in the
fact that it was already there.

When I had reached an end of receiving it, I felt again that
certainty, pealing out more than ever, that now it has happened.
 

The idea of responsibility is to be brought back from the prov-
ince of specialized ethics, of an “ought” that swings free in the
air, into that of lived life. Genuine responsibility exists only
where there is real responding.

Responding to what?

To what happens to one, to what is to be seen and heard and

felt. Each concrete hour allotted to the person, with its content
drawn from the world and from destiny, is speech for the man
who is attentive. Attentive, for no more than that is needed in
order to make a beginning with the reading of the signs that
are given to you. For that very reason, as I have already indi-
cated, the whole apparatus of our civilization is necessary to
preserve men from this attentiveness and its consequences. For
the attentive man would no longer, as his custom is, “master”
the situation the very moment after it stepped up to him: it
would be laid upon him to go up to and into it. Moreover,
nothing that he believed he possessed as always available would
help him, no knowledge and no technique, no system and no
programme; for now he would have to do with what cannot be
classified, with concretion itself. This speech has no alphabet,
each of its sounds is a new creation and only to be grasped as
such.

It will, then, be expected of the attentive man that he faces
creation as it happens. It happens as speech, and not as speech
rushing out over his head but as speech directed precisely at
him. And if one were to ask another if he too heard and he said
he did, they would have agreed only about an experiencing and
not about something experienced.

But the sounds of which the speech consists—I repeat it in
order to remove the misunderstanding, which is perhaps still
possible, that I referred to something extraordinary and larger
than life—are the events of the personal everyday life. In them, as
they now are, “great” or “small”, we are addressed, and those
which count as great, yield no greater signs than the others.

Our attitude, however, is not yet decided through our becom-
ing aware of the signs. We can still wrap silence about us—a
reply characteristic of a significant type of the age—or we can
step aside into the accustomed way; although both times we
carry away a wound that is not to be forgotten in any productiv-
ity or any narcotism. Yet it can happen that we venture to

respond, stammering perhaps—the soul is but rarely able to
attain to surer articulation—but it is an honest stammering, as
when sense and throat are united about what is to be said, but
the throat is too horrified at it to utter purely the already com-
posed sense. The words of our response are spoken in the
speech, untranslatable like the address, of doing and letting—
whereby the doing may behave like a letting and the letting like a
doing. What we say in this way with the being is our entering
upon the situation, into the situation, which has at this moment
stepped up to us, whose appearance we did not and could not
know, for its like has not yet been.

Nor are we now finished with it, we have to give up that
expectation: a situation of which we have become aware is never
finished with, but we subdue it into the substance of lived life.
Only then, true to the moment, do we experience a life that is
something other than a sum of moments. We respond to the
moment, but at the same time we respond on its behalf, we
answer for it. A newly-created concrete reality has been laid in
our arms; we answer for it. A dog has looked at you, you answer
for its glance, a child has clutched your hand, you answer for its
touch, a host of men moves about you, you answer for their
need (2).
 

The life of dialogue is not limited to men’s traffic with one
another; it is, it has shown itself to be, a relation of men to one
another that is only represented in their traffic.

Accordingly, even if speech and communication may be dis-
pensed with, the life of dialogue seems, from what we may
perceive, to have inextricably joined to it as its minimum consti-
tution one thing, the mutuality of the inner action. Two men
bound together in dialogue must obviously be turned to one
another, they must therefore—no matter with what measure of
activity or indeed of consciousness of activity—have turned to
one another.

It is good to put this forward so crudely and formally. For
behind the formulating question about the limits of a category

under discussion is hidden a question which bursts all formulas
asunder.
 

Just as the most eager speaking at one another does not make a
conversation (this is most clearly shown in that curious sport,
aptly termed discussion, that is, “breaking apart”, which is
indulged in by men who are to some extent gifted with the
ability to think), so for a conversation no sound is necessary, not
even a gesture. Speech can renounce all the media of sense, and it
is still speech.

Of course I am not thinking of lovers’ tender silence, resting
in one another, the expression and discernment of which can be
satisfied by a glance, indeed by the mere sharing of a gaze which
is rich in inward relations. Nor am I thinking of the mystical

shared silence, such as is reported of the Franciscan Aegidius and
Louis of France (or, almost identically, of two rabbis of the
Hasidim) who, meeting once, did not utter a word, but “taking
their stand in the reflection of the divine Face” experienced one
another. For here too there is still the expression of a gesture, of
the physical attitude of the one to the other.

What I am thinking of I will make clear by an example.

Imagine two men sitting beside one another in any kind of
solitude of the world. They do not speak with one another, they
do not look at one another, not once have they turned to one
another. They are not in one another’s confidence, the one
knows nothing of the other’s career, early that morning they got
to know one another in the course of their travels. In this
moment neither is thinking of the other; we do not need to
know what their thoughts are. The one is sitting on the common
seat obviously after his usual manner, calm, hospitably disposed
to everything that may come. His being seems to say it is too
little to be ready, one must also be really there. The other, whose
attitude does not betray him, is a man who holds himself in
reserve, withholds himself. But if we know about him we know
that a childhood’s spell is laid on him, that his withholding of
himself is something other than an attitude, behind all attitude is
entrenched the impenetrable inability to communicate himself.
And now—let us imagine that this is one of the hours which
succeed in bursting asunder the seven iron bands about our
heart—imperceptibly the spell is lifted. But even now the man
does not speak a word, does not stir a finger. Yet he does some-
thing. The lifting of the spell has happened to him—no matter
from where—without his doing. But this is what he does now:
he releases in himself a reserve over which only he himself has
power. Unreservedly communication streams from him, and the
silence bears it to his neighbour. Indeed it was intended for him,
and he receives it unreservedly as he receives all genuine destiny
that meets him. He will be able to tell no one, not even himself,

what he has experienced. What does he now “know” of the
other? No more knowing is needed. For where unreserve has
ruled, even wordlessly, between men, the word of dialogue has
happened sacramentally.
 

Each of us is encased in an armour whose task is to ward off
signs. Signs happen to us without respite, living means being
addressed, we would need only to present ourselves and to per-
ceive. But the risk is too dangerous for us, the soundless thunder-
ings seem to threaten us with annihilation, and from generation
to generation we perfect the defence apparatus. All our know-
ledge assures us, “Be calm, everything happens as it must hap-
pen, but nothing is directed at you, you are not meant; it is just
‘the world’, you can experience it as you like, but whatever you
make of it in yourself proceeds from you alone, nothing is
required of you, you are not addressed, all is quiet.”

Each of us is encased in an armour which we soon, out of
familiarity, no longer notice. There are only moments which
penetrate it and stir the soul to sensibility. And when such a
moment has imposed itself on us and we then take notice and
ask ourselves, “Has anything particular taken place? Was it not of

the kind I meet every day?” then we may reply to ourselves,
“Nothing particular, indeed, it is like this every day, only we are
not there every day.”

The signs of address are not something extraordinary, some-
thing that steps out of the order of things, they are just what goes
on time and again, just what goes on in any case, nothing is
added by the address. The waves of the æther roar on always, but
for most of the time we have turned off our receivers.

What occurs to me addresses me. In what occurs to me the
world-happening addresses me. Only by sterilizing it, removing
the seed of address from it, can I take what occurs to me as a part
of the world-happening which does not refer to me. The inter-
locking sterilized system into which all this only needs to be
dovetailed is man’s titanic work. Mankind has pressed speech
too into the service of this work.

From out of this tower of the ages the objection will be
levelled against me, if some of its doorkeepers should pay any
attention to such trains of thought, that it is nothing but a variety
of primitive superstition to hold that cosmic and telluric happen-
ings have for the life of the human person a direct meaning that
can be grasped. For instead of understanding an event physically,
biologically, sociologically (for which I, inclined as I always have
been to admire genuine acts of research, think a great deal, when
those who carry them out only know what they are doing and
do not lose sight of the limits of the realm in which they are
moving), these keepers say, an attempt is being made to get
behind the event’s alleged significance, and for this there is no
place in a reasonable world continuum of space and time.

Thus, then, unexpectedly I seem to have fallen into the com-
pany of the augurs, of whom, as is well-known, there are
remarkable modern varieties.

But whether they haruspicate or cast a horoscope their signs
have this peculiarity that they are in a dictionary, even if not
necessarily a written one. It does not matter how esoteric the

information that is handed down: he who searches out the signs
is well up in what life’s juncture this or that sign means. Nor does
it matter that special difficulties of separation and combination
are created by the meeting of several signs of different kinds. For
you can “look it up in the dictionary”. The common signature of
all this business is that it is for all time: things remain the same,
they are discovered once for all, rules, laws, and analogical con-
clusions may be employed throughout. What is commonly
termed superstition that is, perverse faith, appears to me rather
as perverse knowledge (1). From “superstition” about the num-
ber 13 an unbroken ladder leads into the dizziest heights of
gnosis. This is not even the aping of a real faith.

Real faith—if I may so term presenting ourselves and
perceiving—begins when the dictionary is put down, when you
are done with it. What occurs to me says something to me, but
what it says to me cannot be revealed by any esoteric informa-
tion; for it has never been said before nor is it composed of
sounds that have ever been said. It can neither be interpreted nor
translated, I can have it neither explained nor displayed; it is not
a what at all, it is said into my very life; it is no experience that can
be remembered independently of the situation, it remains the
address of that moment and cannot be isolated, it remains the
question of a questioner and will have its answer.

(It remains the question. For that is the other great contrast
between all the business of interpreting signs and the speech of
signs which I mean here: this speech never gives information or
appeasement.)

Faith stands in the stream of “happening but once” which is
spanned by knowledge. All the emergency structures of analogy
and typology are indispensable for the work of the human spirit,
but to step on them when the question of the questioner steps
up to you, to me, would be running away. Lived life is tested and
fulfilled in the stream alone.

With all deference to the world continuum of space and time I

know as a living truth only concrete world reality which is con-
stantly, in every moment, reached out to me. I can separate it
into its component parts, I can compare them and distribute
them into groups of similar phenomena, I can derive them from
earlier and reduce them to simpler phenomena; and when I have
done all this I have not touched my concrete world reality.
Inseparable, incomparable, irreducible, now, happening once
only, it gazes upon me with a horrifying look. So in Stravinsky’s
ballet the director of the wandering marionette show wants to
point out to the people at the annual fair that a pierrot who
terrified them is nothing but a wisp of straw in clothes: he tears
it asunder—and collapses, gibbering, for on the roof of the
booth the living Petrouchka sits and laughs at him.

The true name of concrete reality is the creation which is
entrusted to me and to every man. In it the signs of address are
given to us.
 

In the signs of life which happen to us we are addressed. Who
speaks?

It would not avail us to give for reply the word “God”, if we
do not give it out of that decisive hour of personal existence
when we had to forget everything we imagined we knew of God,
when we dared to keep nothing handed down or learned or self-
contrived, no shred of knowledge, and were plunged into the
night.

When we rise out of it into the new life and there begin to
receive the signs, what can we know of that which—of him who
gives them to us? Only what we experience from time to time
from the signs themselves. If we name the speaker of this speech
God, then it is always the God of a moment, a moment God.

I will now use a gauche comparison, since I know no right one.

When we really understand a poem, all we know of the poet is
what we learn of him in the poem—no biographical wisdom is
of value for the pure understanding of what is to be understood:
the I which approaches us is the subject of this single poem. But
when we read other poems by the poet in the same true way

their subjects combine in all their multiplicity, completing and
confirming one another, to form the one polyphony of the
person’s existence.

In such a way, out of the givers of the signs, the speakers of
the words in lived life, out of the moment Gods there arises for
us with a single identity the Lord of the voice, the One.
 

In the view customary to-day, which is defined by politics, the
only important thing in groups, in the present as in history,
is what they aim at and what they accomplish. Significance is
ascribed to what goes on within them only in so far as it in-
fluences the group’s action with regard to its aim. Thus it is

conceded to a band conspiring to conquer the state power that
the comradeship which fills it is of value, just because it
strengthens the band’s reliable assault power. Precise obedience
will do as well, if enthusiastic drill makes up for the associates
remaining strangers to one another; there are indeed good
grounds for preferring the rigid system. If the group is striving
even to reach a higher form of society then it can seem danger-
ous if in the life of the group itself something of this higher
form begins to be realized in embryo. For from such a premature
seriousness a suppression of the “effective” impetus is feared.
The opinion apparently is that the man who whiles away his
time as a guest on an oasis may be accounted lost for the project
of irrigating the Sahara.

By this simplified mode of valuation the real and individual
worth of a group remains as uncomprehended as when we
judge a person by his effect alone and not by his qualities. The
perversion of thought grows when chatter is added about sacri-
fice of being, about renunciation of self-realization, where poss-
ible with a reference to the favourite metaphor of the dung.
Happiness, possession, power, authority, life can be renounced,
but sacrifice of being is a sublime absurdity. And no moment, if
it has to vouch for its relation to reality, can call upon any kind of
later, future moments for whose sake, in order to make them fat,
it has remained so lean.

The feeling of community does not reign where the desired
change of institutions is wrested in common, but without
community, from a resisting world. It reigns where the fight that
is fought takes place from the position of a community strug-
gling for its own reality as a community. But the future too is
decided here at the same time; all political “achievements” are at
best auxiliary troops to the effect which changes the very core,
and which is wrought on the unsurveyable ways of secret history
by the moment of realization. No way leads to any other goal but
to that which is like it.

But who in all these massed, mingled, marching collectivities
still perceives what that is for which he supposes he is striving—
what community is? They have all surrendered to its
counterpart. Collectivity is not a binding but a bundling
together: individuals packed together, armed and equipped in
common, with only as much life from man to man as will
inflame the marching step. But community, growing com-
munity (which is all we have known so far) is the being no
longer side by side but with one another of a multitude of per-
sons. And this multitude, though it also moves towards one goal,
yet experiences everywhere a turning to, a dynamic facing of,
the other, a flowing from I to Thou. Community is where com-
munity happens. Collectivity is based on an organized atrophy of
personal existence, community on its increase and confirmation
in life lived towards one other. The modern zeal for collectivity is
a flight from community’s testing and consecration of the per-
son, a flight from the vital dialogic, demanding the staking of
the self, which is in the heart of the world.

The men of the “collective” look down superciliously on the
“sentimentality” of the generation before them, of the age of the
“youth movement”. Then the concern, wide-ranging and
deeply-pondered, was with the problem of all life’s relations,
“community” was aimed at and made a problem at the same
time. They went round in circles and never left the mark. But
now there is commanding and marching, for now there is the
“cause”. The false paths of subjectivity have been left behind and
the road of objectivism, going straight for its goal, has been
reached. But as there existed a pseudosubjectivity with the for-
mer, since the elementary force of being a subject was lacking,
so with the latter there exists a pseudo-objectivism, since one is
here fitted not into a world but into a worldless faction. As in the
former all songs in praise of freedom were sung into the
void, because only freeing from bonds was known, but not free-
ing to responsibility, so in the latter even the noblest hymns on

authority are a misunderstanding. For in fact they strengthen
only the semblance of authority which has been won by
speeches and cries; behind this authority is hidden an absence of
consistency draped in the mighty folds of the attitude. But genu-
ine authority, celebrated in those hymns, the authority of the
genuine charismatic in his steady response to the lord of Charis,
has remained unknown to the political sphere of the present.
Superficially the two generations are different in kind to the
extent of contradiction, in truth they are stuck in the same
chaotic condition. The man of the youth movement, pondering
his problems, was concerned (whatever the particular matter at
different times) with his very own share in it, he “experienced”
his I without pledging a self—in order not to have to pledge a
self in response and responsibility. The man of the collective
undertaking, striding to action, succeeded beforehand in getting
rid of himself and thus radically escaping the question of pledg-
ing a self. Progress is nevertheless to be recorded. With the for-
mer monologue presented itself as dialogue. With the latter it is
considerably simpler, for the life of monologue is by their desire
driven out from most men, or they are broken of the habit; and
the others, who give the orders, have at least no need to feign
any dialogic.

Dialogue and monologue are silenced. Bundled together, men
march without Thou and without I, those of the left who want to
abolish memory, and those of the right who want to regulate it:
hostile and separated hosts, they march into the common abyss.

The Greeks distinguished between a powerful, world-begetting
Eros and one which was light and whose sphere was the soul;
and also between a heavenly and a profane Eros. Neither seems to
me to indicate an absolute distinction. For the primal god Desire
from whom the world is derived, is the very one who in the form
of a “tender elfin spirit” (Jacob Grimm) enters into the sphere of
souls and in an arbitrary daimonic way carries out here, as medi-
ator of the pollination of being, his cosmogonic work: he is the
great pollen-bearing butterfly of psychogenesis. And the Pan-
demos (assuming it is a genuine Eros and not a Priapos impu-
dently pretending to be the higher one) needs only to stir his
wings to let the primal fire be revealed in the body’s games.

Of course, the matter in question is whether Eros has not
forfeited the power of flight and is now condemned to live
among tough mortals and govern their mortality’s paltry ges-
tures of love. For the souls of lovers do to one another what they
do; but lame-winged beneath the rule of the lame-winged one
(for his power and powerlessness are always shown in theirs)
they cower where they are, each in his den, instead of soaring
out each to the beloved partner and there, in the beyond which
has come near, “knowing” (6).

Those who are loyal to the strong-winged Eros of dialogue

know the beloved being. They experience his particular life in
simple presence—not as a thing seen and touched, but from the
innervations to his movements, from the “inner” to his “outer”.
But by this I mean nothing but the bipolar experience, and—
more than a swinging over and away in the instant—a
contemporaneity at rest. That inclination of the head over
there—you feel how the soul enjoins it on the neck, you feel it
not on your neck but on that one over there, on the beloved one,
and yet you yourself are not as it were snatched away, you are
here, in the feeling self-being, and you receive the inclination of
the head, its injunction, as the answer to the word of your own
silence. In contemporaneity at rest you make and you experience
dialogue. The two who are loyal to the Eros of dialogue, who
love one another, receive the common event from the other’s
side as well, that is, they receive it from the two sides, and thus
for the first time understand in a bodily way what an event is.

The kingdom of the lame-winged Eros is a world of mirrors
and mirrorings. But where the winged one holds sway there is no
mirroring. For there I, the lover, turn to this other human being,
the beloved, in his otherness, his independence, his self-reality,
and turn to him with all the power of intention of my own heart.
I certainly turn to him as to one who is there turning to me, but
in that very reality, not comprehensible by me but rather com-
prehending me, in which I am there turning to him. I do not
assimilate into my own soul that which lives and faces me, I vow
it faithfully to myself and myself to it, I vow, I have faith (7).

The Eros of dialogue has the simplicity of fulness; the Eros of
monologue is manifold. Many years I have wandered through
the land of men, and have not yet reached an end of studying the
varieties of the “erotic man” (as the vassal of the broken-winged
one at times describes himself). There a lover stamps around and
is in love only with his passion. There one is wearing his differ-
entiated feelings like medal-ribbons. There one is enjoying the
adventures of his own fascinating effect. There one is gazing

enraptured at the spectacle of his own supposed surrender. There
one is collecting excitement. There one is displaying his
“power”. There one is preening himself with borrowed vitality.
There one is delighting to exist simultaneously as himself and as
an idol very unlike himself. There one is warming himself at the
blaze of what has fallen to his lot. There one is experimenting.
And so on and on—all the manifold monologists with their
mirrors, in the apartment of the most intimate dialogue!

I have spoken of the small fry, but I have had more in mind
the leviathans. There are some who stipulate to the object they
propose to devour that both the doing as a holy right and the
suffering as a sacred duty are what is to be called heroic love. I
know of “leaders” who with their grip not only cast into confu-
sion the plasma of the growing human being but also disinte-
grate it radically, so that it can no longer be moulded. They relish
this power of their influence, and at the same time deceive them-
selves and their herd into imagining they are moulders of youth-
ful souls, and call on Eros, who is inaccessible to the profanum
vulgus, as the tutelary god of this work.

They are all beating the air. Only he who himself turns to the
other human being and opens himself to him receives the world
in him. Only the being whose otherness, accepted by my being,
lives and faces me in the whole compression of existence, brings
the radiance of eternity to me. Only when two say to one
another with all that they are, “It is Thou”, is the indwelling of the
Present Being between them (8).
 

To all unprejudiced reflection it is clear that all art is from its
origin essentially of the nature of dialogue. All music calls to an
ear not the musician’s own, all sculpture to an eye not the
sculptor’s, architecture in addition calls to the step as it walks in
the building. They all say, to him who receives them, something
(not a “feeling” but a perceived mystery) that can be said only in
this one language. But there seems to cling to thought something
of the life of monologue to which communication takes a sec-
ond, secondary place. Thought seems to arise in monologue. Is it
so? Is there here—where, as the philosophers say, pure subject
separates itself from the concrete person in order to establish and
stabilize a world for itself—a citadel which rises towering over
the life of dialogue, inaccessible to it, in which man-with-
himself, the single one, suffers and triumphs in glorious solitude?

Plato has repeatedly called thinking a voiceless colloquy of the
soul with itself. Everyone who has really thought knows that
within this remarkable process there is a stage at which an
“inner” court is questioned and replies. But that is not the aris-
ing of the thought but the first trying and testing of what has
arisen. The arising of the thought does not take place in colloquy
with oneself. The character of monologue does not belong to the
insight into a basic relation with which cognitive thought
begins; nor to the grasping, limiting and compressing of the
insight; nor to its moulding into the independent conceptual
form; nor to the reception of this form, with the bestowal of
relations, the dovetailing and soldering, into an order of con-
ceptual forms; nor, finally, to the expression and clarification in
language (which till now had only a technical and reserved
symbolic function). Rather are elements of dialogue to be dis-
covered here. It is not himself that the thinker addresses in the
stages of the thought’s growth, in their answerings, but as it
were the basic relation in face of which he has to answer for his

insight, or the order in face of which he has to answer for the
newly arrived conceptual form. And it is a misunderstanding of
the dynamic of the event of thought to suppose that these apos-
trophizings of a being existing in nature or in ideas are “really”
colloquies with the self.

But also the first trying and testing of the thought, when it is
provisionally completed, before the “inner” court, in the pla-
tonic sense the stage of monologue, has besides the familiar
form of its appearance another form in which dialogue plays a
great part, well-known to Plato if to anyone. There he who is
approached for judgment is not the empirical self but the genius,
the spirit I am intended to become, the image-self, before which
the new thought is borne for approval, that is, for taking up into
its own consummating thinking.

And now from another dimension which even this lease of
power does not satisfy there appears the longing for a trying and
testing in the sphere of pure dialogue. Here the function of
receiving is no longer given over to the Thou-I but to a genuine
Thou which either remains one that is thought and yet is felt as
supremely living and “other”, or else is embodied in an intimate
person. “Man”, says Wilhelm von Humboldt in his significant
treatise on The Dual Number (1827),

“longs even for the sake of his mere thinking for a Thou corres-
ponding to the I. The conception appears to him to reach its
definiteness and certainty only when it reflects from another
power of thought. It is produced by being torn away from the
moving mass of representation and shaped in face of the sub-
ject into the object. But the objectivity appears in a still more
complete form if this separation does not go on in the subject
alone, if he really sees the thought outside himself; and this is
possible only in another being, representing and thinking like
himself. And between one power of thought and another there
is no other mediator but speech.”

This reference, simplified to an aphorism, recurs with Ludwig
Feuerbach in 1843: “True dialectic is not a monologue of the
solitary thinker with himself, it is a dialogue between I and
Thou.”

But this saying points beyond that “reflecting” to the fact that
even in the original stage of the proper act of thought the inner
action might take place in relation to a genuine and not merely
an “inward” (Novalis) Thou. And where modern philosophy is
most earnest in the desire to ask its questions on the basis of
human existence, situation and present, in some modifications
an important further step is taken. Here it is certainly no longer
just that the Thou is ready to receive and disposed to philoso-
phize along with the I. Rather, and preeminently, we have the
Thou in opposition because we truly have the other who thinks
other things in another way. So, too, it is not a matter of a
game of draughts in the tower of a castle in the air, but of the
binding business of life on the hard earth, in which one is
inexorably aware of the otherness of the other but does not at all
contest it without realizing it; one takes up its nature into
one’s own thinking, thinks in relation to it, addresses it in
thought.

This man of modern philosophy, however, who in this way no
longer thinks in the untouchable province of pure ideation, but
thinks in reality—does he think in reality? Not solely in a reality
framed by thought? Is the other, whom he accepts and receives
in this way, not solely the other framed by thought, and there-
fore unreal? Does the thinker of whom we are speaking hold his
own with the bodily fact of otherness?

If we are serious about thinking between I and Thou then it is
not enough to cast our thoughts towards the other subject of
thought framed by thought. We should also, with the thinking,
precisely with the thinking, live towards the other man, who is
not framed by thought but bodily present before us; we should
live towards his concrete life. We should live not towards

another thinker of whom we wish to know nothing beyond his
thinking but, even if the other is a thinker, towards his bodily life
over and above his thinking—rather, towards his person, to
which, to be sure, the activity of thinking also belongs.

When will the action of thinking endure, include, and refer to
the presence of the living man facing us? When will the dialectic
of thought become dialogic, an unsentimental, unrelaxed dia-
logue in the strict terms of thought with the man present at the
moment?
 

I term basic movement an essential action of man (it may be
understood as an “inner” action, but it is not there unless it is
there to the very tension of the eyes’ muscles and the very action
of the foot as it walks), round which an essential attitude is built
up. I do not think of this happening in time, as though the single
action preceded the lasting attitude; the latter rather has its truth
in the accomplishing, over and over again, of the basic move-
ment, without forethought but also without habit. Otherwise
the attitude would have only æsthetic or perhaps also political
significance, as a beautiful and as an effective lie. The familiar
maxim, “An attitude must first be adopted, the rest follows of
itself” ceases to be true in the circle of essential action and
essential attitude—that is, where we are concerned with the
wholeness of the person.

The basic movement of the life of dialogue is the turning
towards the other. That, indeed, seems to happen every hour and
quite trivially. If you look at someone and address him you turn
to him, of course with the body, but also in the requisite meas-
ure with the soul, in that you direct your attention to him. But
what of all this is an essential action, done with the essential
being? In this way, that out of the incomprehensibility of what
lies to hand this one person steps forth and becomes a presence.

Now to our perception the world ceases to be an insignificant
multiplicity of points to one of which we pay momentary atten-
tion. Rather it is a limitless tumult round a narrow breakwater,
brightly outlined and able to bear heavy loads—limitless, but
limited by the breakwater, so that, though not engirdled, it has
become finite in itself, been given form, released from its own
indifference. And yet none of the contacts of each hour is
unworthy to take up from our essential being as much as it may.
For no man is without strength for expression, and our turning
towards him brings about a reply, however imperceptible, how-
ever quickly smothered, in a looking and sounding forth of the
soul that are perhaps dissipating in mere inwardness and yet do
exist. The notion of modern man that this turning to the other is
sentimental and does not correspond to the compression of life
today is a grotesque error, just as his affirmation that turning to
the other is impractical in the bustle of this life today is only the
masked confession of his weakness of initiative when confronted
with the state of the time. He lets it dictate to him what is
possible or permissible, instead of stipulating, as an unruffled
partner, what is to be stipulated to the state of every time, namely,
what space and what form it is bound to concede to creaturely
existence.

The basic movement of the life of monologue is not turning
away as opposed to turning towards; it is “reflexion” (4).

When I was eleven years of age, spending the summer on my
grandparents’ estate, I used, as often as I could do it unobserved,
to steal into the stable and gently stroke the neck of my darling, a
broad dapple-grey horse. It was not a casual delight but a great,
certainly friendly, but also deeply stirring happening. If I am to
explain it now, beginning from the still very fresh memory of
my hand, I must say that what I experienced in touch with the
animal was the Other, the immense otherness of the Other,
which, however, did not remain strange like the otherness of the
ox and the ram, but rather let me draw near and touch it. When I

stroked the mighty mane, sometimes marvellously smooth-
combed, at other times just as astonishingly wild, and felt the life
beneath my hand, it was as though the element of vitality itself
bordered on my skin, something that was not I, was certainly not
akin to me, palpably the other, not just another, really the Other
itself; and yet it let me approach, confided itself to me, placed
itself elementally in the relation of Thou and Thou with me. The
horse, even when I had not begun by pouring oats for him into
the manger, very gently raised his massive head, ears flicking,
then snorted quietly, as a conspirator gives a signal meant to be
recognizable only by his fellow-conspirator; and I was approved.
But once—I do not know what came over the child, at any rate it
was childlike enough—it struck me about the stroking, what fun
it gave me, and suddenly I became conscious of my hand. The
game went on as before, but something had changed, it was no
longer the same thing. And the next day, after giving him a rich
feed, when I stroked my friend’s head he did not raise his head.
A few years later, when I thought back to the incident, I no
longer supposed that the animal had noticed my defection. But
at the time I considered myself judged.

Reflexion is something different from egoism and even from
“egotism”. It is not that a man is concerned with himself, con-
siders himself, fingers himself, enjoys, idolizes and bemoans
himself; all that can be added, but it is not integral to reflexion.
(Similarly, to the turning towards the other, completing it, there
can be added the realizing of the other in his particular exist-
ence, even the encompassing of him, so that the situations
common to him and oneself are experienced also from his, the
other’s, end.) I term it reflexion when a man withdraws from
accepting with his essential being another person in his par-
ticularity—a particularity which is by no means to be circum-
scribed by the circle of his own self, and though it substantially
touches and moves his soul is in no way immanent in it—and
lets the other exist only as his own experience, only as a “part of

myself”. For then dialogue becomes a fiction, the mysterious
intercourse between two human worlds only a game, and in the
rejection of the real life confronting him the essence of all reality
begins to disintegrate.

The realms of the life of dialogue and the life of monologue do
not coincide with the realms of dialogue and monologue even
when forms without sound and even without gesture are
included. There are not merely great spheres of the life of
dialogue which in appearance are not dialogue, there is also
dialogue which is not the dialogue of life, that is, it has the
appearance but not the essence of dialogue. At times, indeed, it
seems as though there were only this kind of dialogue.

I know three kinds. There is genuine dialogue—no matter
whether spoken or silent—where each of the participants really
has in mind the other or others in their present and particular
being and turns to them with the intention of establishing a
living mutual relation between himself and them. There is
technical dialogue, which is prompted solely by the need of
objective understanding. And there is monologue disguised as
dialogue, in which two or more men, meeting in space, speak
each with himself in strangely tortuous and circuitous ways and
yet imagine they have escaped the torment of being thrown back
on their own resources. The first kind, as I have said, has become
rare; where it arises, in no matter how “unspiritual” a form,
witness is borne on behalf of the continuance of the organic
substance of the human spirit. The second belongs to the
inalienable sterling quality of “modern existence”. But real dia-
logue is here continually hidden in all kinds of odd corners and,
occasionally in an unseemly way, breaks surface surprisingly and
inopportunely—certainly still oftener it is arrogantly tolerated
than downright scandalizing—as in the tone of a railway guard’s
voice, in the glance of an old newspaper vendor, in the smile of
the chimney-sweeper. And the third.

A debate in which the thoughts are not expressed in the way in

which they existed in the mind but in the speaking are so
pointed that they may strike home in the sharpest way, and
moreover without the men that are spoken to being regarded in
any way present as persons; a conversation characterized by the
need neither to communicate something, nor to learn some-
thing, nor to influence someone, nor to come into connexion
with someone, but solely by the desire to have one’s own self-
reliance confirmed by marking the impression that is made, or if
it has become unsteady to have it strengthened; a friendly chat in
which each regards himself as absolute and legitimate and the
other as relativized and questionable; a lovers’ talk in which both
partners alike enjoy their own glorious soul and their precious
experience—what an underworld of faceless spectres of
dialogue!

The life of dialogue is not one in which you have much to do
with men, but one in which you really have to do with those
with whom you have to do. It is not the solitary man who lives
the life of monologue, but he who is incapable of making real in
the context of being the community in which, in the context of
his destiny, he moves. It is, in fact, solitude which is able to
show the innermost nature of the contrast. He who is living the
life of dialogue receives in the ordinary course of the hours
something that is said and feels himself approached for an
answer. But also in the vast blankness of, say, a companionless
mountain wandering that which confronts him, rich in change,
does not leave him. He who is living the life of monologue is
never aware of the other as something that is absolutely not
himself and at the same time something with which he never-
theless communicates. Solitude for him can mean mounting
richness of visions and thoughts but never the deep intercourse,
captured in a new depth, with the incomprehensibly real.
Nature for him is either an état d’âme, hence a “living through” in
himself, or it is a passive object of knowledge, either idealistic-
ally brought within the soul or realistically alienated. It does not

become for him a word apprehended with senses of beholding
and feeling.

Being, lived in dialogue, receives even in extreme dereliction a
harsh and strengthening sense of reciprocity; being, lived in
monologue, will not, even in the tenderest intimacy, grope out
over the outlines of the self.

This must not be confused with the contrast between “ego-
ism” and “altruism” conceived by some moralists. I know
people who are absorbed in “social activity” and have never
spoken from being to being with a fellow-man. I know others
who have no personal relation except to their enemies, but stand
in such a relation to them that it is the enemies’ fault if the
relation does not flourish into one of dialogue.

Nor is dialogic to be identified with love. I know no one in
any time who has succeeded in loving every man he met. Even
Jesus obviously loved of “sinners” only the loose, lovable sin-
ners, sinners against the Law; not those who were settled and
loyal to their inheritance and sinned against him and his mes-
sage. Yet to the latter as to the former he stood in a direct rela-
tion. Dialogic is not to be identified with love. But love without
dialogic, without real outgoing to the other, reaching to the
other, and companying with the other, the love remaining with
itself—this is called Lucifer.

Certainly in order to be able to go out to the other you must
have the starting place, you must have been, you must be, with
yourself. Dialogue between mere individuals is only a sketch,
only in dialogue between persons is the sketch filled in. But by
what could a man from being an individual so really become a
person as by the strict and sweet experiences of dialogue which
teach him the boundless contents of the boundary?

What is said here is the real contrary of the cry, heard at times
in twilight ages, for universal unreserve. He who can be
unreserved with each passer-by has no substance to lose; but he
who cannot stand in a direct relation to each one who meets him

has a fulness which is futile. Luther is wrong to change the
Hebrew “companion” (out of which the Seventy had already
made one who is near, a neighbour) into “nearest” (3). If every-
thing concrete is equally near, equally nearest, life with the
world ceases to have articulation and structure, it ceases to have
human meaning. But nothing needs to mediate between me and
one of my companions in the companionship of creation,
whenever we come near one another, because we are bound up
in relation to the same centre.
 

Sometimes I hear it said that every I and Thou is only superficial,
deep down word and response cease to exist, there is only the
one primal being unconfronted by another. We should plunge
into the silent unity, but for the rest leave its relativity to the life
to be lived, instead of imposing on it this absolutized I and
absolutized Thou with their dialogue.

Now from my own unforgettable experience I know well that
there is a state in which the bonds of the personal nature of life
seem to have fallen away from us and we experience an
undivided unity. But I do not know—what the soul willingly
imagines and indeed is bound to imagine (mine too once did
it)—that in this I had attained to a union with the primal being
or the godhead. That is an exaggeration no longer permitted to
the responsible understanding. Responsibly—that is, as a man
holding his ground before reality—I can elicit from those
experiences only that in them I reached an undifferentiable unity
of myself without form or content. I may call this an original
pre-biographical unity and suppose that it is hidden unchanged
beneath all biographical change, all development and complica-
tion of the soul. Nevertheless, in the honest and sober account of
the responsible understanding this unity is nothing but the unity
of this soul of mine, whose “ground” I have reached, so much
so, beneath all formations and contents, that my spirit has no
choice but to understand it as the groundless (5). But the basic
unity of my own soul is certainly beyond the reach of all the
multiplicity it has hitherto received from life, though not in the
least beyond individuation, or the multiplicity of all the souls in

the world of which it is one—existing but once, single, unique,
irreducible, this creaturely one: one of the human souls and not
the “soul of the All”; a defined and particular being and not
“Being”; the creaturely basic unity of a creature, bound to God
as in the instant before release the creature is to the creator spiritus,
not bound to God as the creature to the creator spiritus in the
moment of release.

The unity of his own self is not distinguishable in the man’s
feeling from unity in general. For he who in the act or event of
absorption is sunk beneath the realm of all multiplicity that
holds sway in the soul cannot experience the cessation of multi-
plicity except as unity itself. That is, he experiences the cessation
of his own multiplicity as the cessation of mutuality, as revealed
or fulfilled absence of otherness. The being which has become
one can no longer understand itself on this side of individuation
nor indeed on this side of I and Thou. For to the border experience
of the soul “one” must apparently mean the same as “the One”.

But in the actuality of lived life the man in such a moment is
not above but beneath the creaturely situation, which is mightier
and truer than all ecstasies. He is not above but beneath dialogue.
He is not nearer the God who is hidden above I and Thou, and he
is farther from the God who is turned to men and who gives
himself as the I to a Thou and the Thou to an I, than that other who
in prayer and service and life does not step out of the position of
confrontation and awaits no wordless unity, except that which
perhaps bodily death discloses.

Nevertheless, even he who lives the life of dialogue knows a
lived unity: the unity of life, as that which once truly won is no
more torn by any changes, not ripped asunder into the everyday
creaturely life and the “deified” exalted hours; the unity of
unbroken, raptureless perseverance in concreteness, in which
the word is heard and a stammering answer dared.
 

I hope for two kinds of readers for these thoughts: for the amicus
who knows about the reality to which I am pointing with a
finger I should like to be able to stretch out like Grünewald’s
Baptist; and for the hostis or adversarius who denies this reality and
therefore contends with me, because I point to it (in his view
misleadingly) as to a reality. Thus he takes what is said here just
as seriously as I myself do, after long waiting writing what is to
be written—just as seriously, only with the negative sign. The
mere inimicus, as which I regard everyone who wishes to relegate
me to the realm of ideology and there let my thoughts count, I
would gladly dispense with.

I need say nothing at this point to the amicus. The hour of
common mortality and the common way strikes in his and in
my ears as though we stood even in the same place with one
another and knew one another.

But it is not enough to tell the adversarius here what I am point-
ing at—the hiddenness of his personal life, his secret, and that,
stepping over a carefully avoided threshold, he will discover
what he denies. It is not enough. I dare not turn aside his gravest
objection. I must accept it, as and where it is raised, and must
answer.

So now the adversarius sits, facing me in his actual form as he
appears in accordance with the spirit of the time, and speaks,
more above and beyond me than towards and to me, in accents
and attitude customary in the universal duel, free of personal
relation.

“In all this the actuality of our present life, the conditioned
nature of life as a whole, is not taken into account. All that you
speak of takes place in the never-never-land, not in the social
context of the world in which we spend our days, and by which

if by anything our reality is defined. Your ‘two men’ sit on a
solitary seat, obviously during a holiday journey. In a big city
office you would not be able to let them sit, they would not
reach the ‘sacramental’ there. Your ‘interrupted conversation’
takes place between intellectuals who have leisure a couple of
months before the huge mass event to spin fantasies of its pre-
vention through a spiritual influence. That may be quite interest-
ing for people who are not taken up with any duty. But is the
business employee to ‘communicate himself without reserve’ to
his colleagues? Is the worker at the conveyor belt to ‘feel himself
addressed in what he experiences’? Is the leader of a gigantic
technical undertaking to ‘practise the responsibility of dia-
logue’? You demand that we enter into the situation which
approaches us, and you neglect the enduring situation in which
everyone of us, so far as we share in the life of community, is
elementally placed. In spite of all references to concreteness, all
that is pre-war individualism in a revised edition.”

And I, out of a deep consciousness of how almost impossible
it is to think in common, if only in opposition, where there is no
common experience, reply.

Before all, dear opponent, if we are to converse with one
another and not at and past one another, I beg you to notice that
I do not demand. I have no call to that and no authority for it. I
try only to say that there is something, and to indicate how it is
made: I simply record. And how could the life of dialogue be
demanded? There is no ordering of dialogue. It is not that you are
to answer but that you are able.

You are really able. The life of dialogue is no privilege of
intellectual activity like dialectic. It does not begin in the
upper story of humanity. It begins no higher than where
humanity begins. There are no gifted and ungifted here, only
those who give themselves and those who withhold them-
selves. And he who gives himself to-morrow is not noted to-
day, even he himself does not know that he has it in himself,

that we have it in ourselves, he will just find it, “and finding
be amazed”.

You put before me the man taken up with duty and business.
Yes, precisely him I mean, him in the factory, in the shop, in the
office, in the mine, on the tractor, at the printing-press: man. I
do not seek for men. I do not seek men out for myself, I accept
those who are there, I have them, I have him, in mind, the yoked,
the wheel-treading, the conditioned. Dialogue is not an affair of
spiritual luxury and spiritual luxuriousness, it is a matter of
creation, of the creature, and he is that, the man of whom I
speak, he is a creature, trivial and irreplaceable.

In my thoughts about the life of dialogue I have had to choose
the examples as “purely” and as much in the form of paradigm
as memory presented them to me in order to make myself intel-
ligible about what has become so unfamiliar, in fact so sunk in
oblivion. For this reason I appear to draw my tales from the
province which you term the “intellectual”, in reality only from
the province where things succeed, are rounded off, in fact are
exemplary. But I am not concerned with the pure; I am con-
cerned with the turbid, the repressed, the pedestrian, with toil
and dull contraryness—and with the break-through. With the
break-through and not with a perfection, and moreover with the
break-through not out of despair with its murderous and renew-
ing powers; no, not with the great catastrophic break-through
which happens once for all (it is fitting to be silent for a while
about that, even in one’s own heart), but with the breaking
through from the status of the dully-tempered disagreeableness,
obstinacy, and contraryness in which the man, whom I pluck at
random out of the tumult, is living and out of which he can and
at times does break through.

Whither? Into nothing exalted, heroic or holy, into no Either
and no Or, only into this tiny strictness and grace of every day,
where I have to do with just the very same “reality” with whose
duty and business I am taken up in such a way, glance to glance,

look to look, word to word, that I experience it as reached to me
and myself to it, it as spoken to me and myself to it. And now, in
all the clanking of routine that I called my reality, there appears
to me, homely and glorious, the effective reality, creaturely and
given to me in trust and responsibility. We do not find meaning
lying in things nor do we put it into things, but between us and
things it can happen.

It is not sufficient, dear opponent, first of all to ascribe to me
the pathos of “all or nothing” and then to prove the impossibil-
ity of my alleged demand. I know neither what all nor what
nothing is, the one appears to me to be as inhuman and con-
trived as the other. What I am meaning is the simple quantum satis
of that which this man in this hour of his life is able to fulfil and
to receive—if he gives himself. That is, if he does not let himself
be deceived by the compact plausibility that there are places
excluded from creation, that he works in such a place and is able
to return to creation when his shift is over; or that creation is
outstripped, that it once was but is irrevocably over, now there is
business and now it is a case of stripping off all romanticism,
gritting the teeth and getting through with what is recognized as
necessary. I say—if he does not let himself be deceived.

No factory and no office is so abandoned by creation that a
creative glance could not fly up from one working-place to
another, from desk to desk, a sober and brotherly glance which
guarantees the reality of creation which is happening—quantum
satis. And nothing is so valuable a service of dialogue between
God and man as such an unsentimental and unreserved
exchange of glances between two men in an alien place.

But is it irrevocably an alien place? Must henceforth, through
all the world’s ages, the life of the being which is yoked to
business be divided in two, into alien “work” and home
“recovery”? More, since evenings and Sundays cannot be freed
of the workday character but are unavoidably stamped with it,
must such a life be divided out between the business of work

and the business of recovery without a remainder of directness,
of unregulated surplus—of freedom? (And the freedom I mean
is established by no new order of society.)

Or does there already stir, beneath all dissatisfactions that can
be satisfied, an unknown and primal and deep dissatisfaction for
which there is as yet no recipe of satisfaction anywhere, but
which will grow to such mightiness that it dictates to the tech-
nical leaders, the promoters, the inventors, and says, “Go on
with your rationalizing, but humanize the rationalizing ratio in
yourselves. Let it introduce the living man into its purposes and
its calculations, him who longs to stand in a mutual relation
with the world.” Dear opponent, does the longing already stir in
the depths—an impulse to great construction or a tiny spark of
the last revolution—to fill business with the life of dialogue?
That is, in the formulation of the quantum satis, the longing for an
order of work in which business is so continually soaked in vital
dialogic as the tasks to be fulfilled by it allow? And of the extent
to which they can allow it there is scarcely an inkling to-day, in
an hour when the question which I put is at the mercy of the
fanatics, blind to reality, who conform to the time, and of
the heralds, blind to possibility, of the impervious tragedy of the
world.

Be clear what it means when a worker can experience even his
relation to the machine as one of dialogue, when, for instance, a
compositor tells that he has understood the machine’s humming
as “a merry and grateful smile at me for helping it to set aside
the difficulties and obstructions which disturbed and bruised
and pained it, so that now it could run free”. Must even you not
think then of the story of Androclus and the Lion?

But when a man draws a lifeless thing into his passionate
longing for dialogue, lending it independence and as it were a
soul, then there may dawn in him the presentiment of a world-
wide dialogue, a dialogue with the world-happening that steps
up to him even in his environment, which consists partly of

things. Or do you seriously think that the giving and taking of
signs halts on the threshold of that business where an honest and
open spirit is found?

You ask with a laugh, can the leader of a great technical under-
taking practise the responsibility of dialogue? He can. For he
practises it when he makes present to himself in its concreteness,
so far as he can, quantum satis, the business which he leads. He
practises it when he experiences it, instead of as a structure of
mechanical centres of force and their organic servants (among
which latter there is for him no differentiation but the functional
one), as an association of persons with faces and names and
biographies, bound together by a work that is represented by,
but does not consist of, the achievements of a complicated
mechanism. He practises it when he is inwardly aware, with a
latent and disciplined fantasy, of the multitude of these persons,
whom naturally he cannot separately know and remember as
such; so that now, when one of them for some reason or other
steps really as an individual into the circle of his vision and the
realm of his decision, he is aware of him without strain not as a
number with a human mask but as a person. He practises it
when he comprehends and handles these persons as persons—
for the greatest part necessarily indirectly, by means of a system
of mediation which varies according to the extent, nature and
structure of the undertaking, but also directly, in the parts which
concern him by way of organization. Naturally at first both
camps, that of capital and that of the proletariat, will decry his
masterly attitude of fantasy as fantastic nonsense and his practical
attitude to persons as dilettantist. But just as naturally only until
his increased figures of production accredit him in their
eyes. (By this of course is not to be implied that those increases
necessarily come to pass: between truth and success there is no
pre-stabilized harmony.) Then, to be sure, something worse
will follow. He will be pragmatically imitated, that is, people will
try to use his “procedure” without his way of thinking and

imagining. But this demoniac element inherent in spiritual his-
tory (think only of all the magicizing of religion) will, I think,
shipwreck here on the power of discrimination in men’s souls.
And meanwhile it is to be hoped that a new generation will
arise, learning from what is alive, and will take all this in real
seriousness as he does.

Unmistakably men are more and more determined by “cir-
cumstances”. Not only the absolute mass but also the relative
might of social objectives is growing. As one determined par-
tially by them the individual stands in each moment before con-
crete reality which wishes to reach out to him and receive an
answer from him; laden with the situation he meets new situ-
ations. And yet in all the multiplicity and complexity he has
remained Adam. Even now a real decision is made in him,
whether he faces the speech of God articulated to him in things
and events—or escapes. And a creative glance towards his
fellow-creature can at times suffice for response.

Man is in a growing measure sociologically determined. But
this growing is the maturing of a task not in the “ought” but in
the “may” and in “need”, in longing and in grace. It is a matter
of renouncing the pantechnical mania or habit with its easy
“mastery” of every situation; of taking everything up into the
might of dialogue of the genuine life, from the trivial mysteries
of everyday to the majesty of destructive destiny.

The task becomes more and more difficult, and more and
more essential, the fulfilment more and more impeded and
more and more rich in decision. All the regulated chaos of the
age waits for the break-through, and wherever a man perceives
and responds, he is working to that end.