Page 13 - Eclipse of God

xii Introduction to the 2016 Edition

presence. Buber and Rosenzweig translate Exodus 3:14 as Ich
werde dasein, als der ich dasein werde (“I will be there, how-
5
soever I will be there”). God’s presentation of God’s self to
Moses is not for the sake of clarifying philosophically what
kind of being God is or is not. Instead, God presents God’s self
to Moses to let him know that God is literally there with him,
and the children of Israel.
Buber is often described as more of a poet than a philoso-
pher, but this characterization does not do justice to his phil-
osophical acumen. One of the themes that unites these essays
is Buber’s submission that a number of seminal philosophers
inadvertently bump up against the limitations of philosophy
and in this way cannot but begin to affirm not just the idea
of God but also God’s reality. As Buber puts it with regard
to Cohen, “For when man learns to love God, he senses an
actuality which rises above the idea. Even if he makes the phi-
losopher’s great effort to sustain the object of his love as an
object of his philosophical thought, the love itself bears wit-
ness to the existence of the Beloved” (52). Buber similarly sug-
gests that Kant could not but touch on the reality, and not
just the idea, of God. Referring to some of Kant’s unpublished
late writings, Buber argues that while Kant earlier had sought
an idea of God that was a postulate of practical reason that
could be “the source of all moral obligation,” he realized late
in his life “that a God who is nothing but a condition within
us cannot meet this requirement, that only an absolute can
give the quality of absoluteness to an obligation.” This real-
ization, Buber claims, was “the spur of Kant’s restlessness”
(13).

5 For a discussion of Buber and Rosenzweig’s choices regarding Exodus 3:14,
see Franz Rosenzweig, “The Eternal: Mendelssohn and the Name of God,” trans. in
Scripture and Translation, ed. Lawrence Rosenwald and Everett Fox (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1994).