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.