Page 14 - Eclipse of God

Introduction to the 2016 Edition xiii

While contemporary readers may debate Buber’s interpre-
tations of a variety of philosophers, including Baruch Spinoza,
Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, Cohen, and Martin Heidegger, his basic
contention that ideas and cognition are derivative of practi-
cal experience is one that is now widely accepted among most
post- Heideggerian philosophers as well as philosophers com-
6
ing out of the American pragmatist tradition. When Buber
applies this reasoning to God, it is important to be clear, how-
ever, that he is not making an ontological argument, or even
an argument at all, for the existence of God. Rather, he is in-
sisting that modern philosophers (such as Kant and Cohen)
have it backward when they assert that our experience of the
world derives from ideas within the human mind, and that it
is the philosopher’s task to clarify and articulate these ideas.
Buber maintains that the opposite is in fact the case: ideas
are derivative of experience. Experience, which Buber also calls
reality, conditions cognition. And again, it is our access to re-
ality, which Buber also understands as God, that is eclipsed by
an overemphasis on cognition. The question of faith in God
is then a question of experience, and not of rational proof. If
people do not have faith in God, it is because they have not
experienced God. And, once again, Buber’s concern in these
essays is that the modern world and modern thinking block
the possibility of our experience of God.
Buber’s arguments are directly relevant to contemporary
debates stemming from the “new atheism,” a term that has
7
been much discussed since the beginning of the early 2000s.
Among other things, this school of thought contrasts religion

6 For an example of this convergence, see Robert Brandom, “Heidegger’s Catego-
ries in Being and Time,” in Heidegger: A Critical Reader, ed. Dreyfus and Hall (Oxford,
UK; Cambridge, USA: Blackwell, 1992), 45– 64.
7 Sam Harris, The End of Faith (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004); Richard
Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Mariner Books, 2006); and Christopher
Hitchens, God Is Not Great (New York: Twelve Publishing, 2007).