Page 11 - Eclipse of God

x Introduction to the 2016 Edition

which turns human beings into objects among other objects.
Modern political and economic arrangements treat the indi-
vidual person as an object among others, to be manipulated
and regulated by the modern nation- state. Modern science,
philosophy, and even religion similarly deny the simultaneous
singularity and interconnectedness of individuals. Buber ar-
gues that we live in an age in which knowledge and the use of
knowledge to control our lives are our dominant values. This
means that our relations are relations of usefulness, of instru-
mentality, and not mutuality. For Buber, we have lost access
to God’s primary Thou because “I- It” relations eclipse our ac-
cess to “I- Thou” relations. It is important to be clear, however,
that Buber does not think we can or even should dispense
with many of the gifts of modernity, such as individual right
or modern science. He does not wish to suggest that mod-
ern medicine, for instance, errs in its attempt to use scientific
knowledge to eradicate disease. Rather, the problem is that the
exclusive focus on scientific knowledge and instrumentality
blocks, as the moon blocks the sun in a solar eclipse, the possi-
bility of our relationship to God.
Of course, one of the tasks of these essays is to clarify ex-
actly what Buber means by “God.” It is perhaps best to begin
with what Buber does not mean by God. Rebuffing the “God
of the philosophers,” Buber contends that God is not an idea
or a metaphysical principle. Instead, God is a presence whom
the human encounters in specific places and times. These en-
counters, like the human beings who experience them, are dif-
ferent from one another. They cannot be captured under any
unifying or abstract concept and in fact can only be described
in anthropomorphic terms: “Anthropomorphism always re-
flects our need to preserve the concrete quality evidenced in
the encounter. . . . This is true of those moments of our daily
life in which we become aware of the reality that is absolutely