Page 12 - Eclipse of God

Introduction to the 2016 Edition xi

independent of us, whether it be as power or as glory, no less
than of the hours of great revelation of which only a halting
record has been handed down to us” (10).
Buber rejects not only “the god of the philosophers” gener-
ally but also more specifically the claims of his older contem-
porary, the great neo- Kantian Jewish philosopher Hermann
Cohen. Cohen, following the medieval Jewish philosopher
Moses Maimonides, insists that the Bible’s anthropomorphic
descriptions of God must be refused entirely. Like Maimon-
ides, Cohen contends that we can only know God by way of
our intellects. Updating Maimonides’ Aristotelianism with
Immanuel Kant’s claim that God is best understood as an
ideal of practical reason, Cohen contends that God can be un-
derstood only as an idea. In the essay “The Love of God and
the Idea of Deity,” Buber opposes Cohen’s twin assertions that
God is an idea and that one can only love ideas. Cohen main-
tains that when one loves another person, what one really loves
is the idea of that person. Buber denies that one loves ideas and
asserts that love can take place only within the concrete reality
of the meeting of two persons in a particular place and time.
As Buber explains: “the deepest basis of the Jewish idea of God
can be achieved only by plunging into that word by which God
revealed Himself to Moses, ‘I shall be there.’ It gives exact ex-
pression to the personal ‘existence’ of God (not to His abstract
‘being’)” (51).
It is worth noting that Buber’s contention bears directly on
the question of how to translate Exodus 3:14. While a num-
ber of Greek, Latin, German, and French translations of the
Bible (such as Luther’s and Calvin’s) render “I am that I am”
(eheye asher eheye) as a statement about God’s being and God’s
eternity, Buber, in his translation of the Bible into German
with Franz Rosenzweig, insists that this misunderstands the
Hebrew, which is not about God’s essence but about God’s