Page 19 - Eclipse of God

xviii Introduction to the 2016 Edition

address in 1933 but also that Heidegger’s philosophy of being is
fundamentally amoral, if not immoral. As Buber puts it:
He [Heidegger] has allied his thought, the thought of
being, in which he takes part and to which he ascribes
the power to make ready for the rise of the holy, to that
hour which he has affirmed as history. He has bound his
thought to his hour as no other philosopher has done.
Can he, the existential thinker, despite all this, existen-
tially wrestle, in opposition to the hour, for a freedom
devoted to the eternal and gain it? Or must he succumb
to the fate of the hour, and with it also to a “holy” to
which no human holiness, no hallowed standing fast of
man in the face of historical delusion, responsibly an-
swers? (65)
Contra Heidegger, Buber’s God is not only the reality against
which the human may come to define himself but also the
moral absolute without which the human world cannot but
spin into chaos and nihilism.
While both necessary and admirable, Buber’s defense of the
ethical is also conceptually the weakest part of these essays. In
articulating what he means by ethics, Buber’s lifelong engage-
ment with Kant is evident. Like Kant, Buber defines the eth-
ical in terms of that which is intrinsically, and not instrumen-
tally, good: “We mean by the ethical in this strict sense the yes
and no which man gives to the conduct and actions possible to
him, the radical distinction between them which affirms or de-
nies them not according to their usefulness or harmfulness for
individuals and society, but according to their intrinsic value
and disvalue” (83). Also like Kant, Buber rejects “moral het-
eronomy or external moral laws” (86). Yet Buber parts ways
with Kant by rooting morality not in the autonomy of reason
but in the individual’s response to another (whether God or