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.