Page 20 - Eclipse of God

Introduction to the 2016 Edition xix

another person). Similarly, Buber trumpets the moral voice of
the Hebrew prophets, yet he also opposes any notion of divine
authority that prescribes particular behaviors to people. As he
puts it in I and Thou, God’s revelations mean that “Man re-
ceives and what he receives is not a content, but a presence, a
presence as a strength . . . the eternal voice sounds and nothing
more.” 12
Philosophically, it is difficult to discern where moral author-
ity comes from for Buber. He would say of course that morality
comes in the dialogical relation, in the response of me to you
and you to me. But it is not clear why the dialogical relation
is an ethical relation. For instance, Buber quotes Heidegger:
“The gods can only enter the Word if they themselves address
us and place their demand upon us. The Word that names the
gods is always an answer to this demand” (64). There is no
moral underpinning to Heidegger’s description of this dialog-
ical relation. Yet Buber insists there must be. There is a parallel
tension in Buber’s claims about religion, and the Bible particu-
larly. Buber notes that Heidegger rejects biblical religion be-
cause it provides “certainty of salvation.” Buber counters: “The
prophets of Israel have never announced a God upon whom
their hearers’ striving for security reckoned. They have always
aimed to shatter all security and to proclaim in the opened
abyss of the final insecurity the unwished- for God” (61). How
and why does the “opened abyss of this final insecurity” result
in an absolute moral command?
This issue is particularly acute in Buber’s essay on Søren
Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, titled “On the Suspension
of the Ethical.” Against Kierkegaard’s famous contention that
faith may require, as in the case of God’s command to Abra-
ham to sacrifice his son Isaac, “a suspension of the ethical,”

12 I and Thou, 158– 60.