Wishing You Were Somehow Readable

A Philistine's View of Martin Buber's I and Thou

I had several interesting roommates in graduate school at the University of Chicago. My first roommate majored in Public Policy even though all he wanted to do was make a lot of money. He couldn’t afford the business school.

Another roommate had a hairless cat named “Trotsky.”

A third was so devoted to the life of the mind she married her sweetheart at the Newberry Library—and now writes a consistently entertaining Substack.

And one of them was a sweet, smart guy, doubtlessly more intelligent than I, who once told me he wanted a trophy wife and who explicated for me Martin Buber’s famous work, I and Thou.

He was excited about the book. Buber, he said, laid out a profound difference between relating to others as a “thou” and as an “it,” the former recognizing their fellow humanity, the latter denying it.

My response was something like, “He needed a whole book to say that?”

To which my roommate’s response was something like, “You’re a philistine.”

Sometime later we were watching the Tonight Show together, and Sarah Brightman was performing “Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again,” a song from The Phantom of the Opera. I have a special love for that musical, ranking it just below Jesus Christ Superstar, which for me is saying a lot.

I was deeply moved by Brightman’s performance. I couldn’t imagine anyone could not be.

“That was amazing,” I said.

“The song is derivative,” he said, asserting that Weber had cribbed the melody from some opera whose name I can’t recall.

I called my roommate a jerk.

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I’ve always felt bad for calling him that—and for not giving Buber a chance. So, recently, I started listening to I and Thou.

Buber, an Austrian-Israeli philosopher raised as an orthodox Jew, wrote the book in 1923, but according to translator Walter Kaufmann, the work didn’t hit its stride until it was translated into English in 1937. Then, in the postwar years, it gained a wide following among, of all things, Protestant theologians. “After the holocaust,” Kaufmann writes, “a widespread need was felt to love and admire a representative Jew. . . . a representative and teacher of the Jewish tradition—a contemporary heir, if that were possible, of the Hebrew prophets.”

Kaufmann says the “competition was not keen.” I guess it was too early in the careers of Rabbi Soloveitchik or Rabbi Schneerson, but I also suspect the public wanted a Hebrew prophet who wasn’t actually that Jewish. Buber’s existentialism has roots in Judaism, but it’s not the kind of Jewish book that The Rav or the Rebbe would ever have written. It is not a book steeped in Torah Law.¹

The Audible version includes a six-chapter introduction by Kaufmann. One of the Audible reviews complains about that long intro, but I’m grateful for it. Otherwise, I would have felt like I had thrown away an Audible credit for nothing—because it’s highly unlikely I will finish this book.

I’m fast concluding that my younger self was right about Buber, at least right for me, i.e., that he spends a lot of time saying not much of interest, and what is of interest is, as my son would say, “not all that deep.”

What makes me say so? Sentences like these:

The original drive for “self”-preservation is no more accompanied by any I-consciousness than any other drive. What wants to propagate itself is not the I but the body that does not yet know of any I. Not the I but the body wants to make things, tools, toys, wants to be “inventive.” And even in the primitive function of cognition one cannot find any cognosco ergo sum of even the most naive kind, nor any conception, however childlike, of an experiencing subject. Only when the primal encounters, the vital primal words I-acting-You and You-acting-I, have been split and the participle has been reified and hypostatized, does the I emerge with the force of an element.

Jeez, and I thought Rabbi Soloveitchik was a bit much. This guy makes the Rav look like Dr. Seuss.

I can’t say Kaufmann didn’t warn me. “Certainly,” he says, “Buber’s delight in language gets between him and his readers. There might as well be a screen between them on which one watches the antics of these words instead of listening to him.”

Kaufman’s intro is ambivalent about these antics and points out the traps involved in such writing.

Obscurity is fascinating. One tries to puzzle out details, is stumped, and becomes increasingly concerned with meaning—unless one feels put off and gives up altogether.

Those who persevere and take the author seriously are led to ask about what he could possibly have meant, but rarely seem to wonder or discuss whether what he says is true.

Instead of asking how things are in fact, and how one could possibly find out, one wonders mostly whether one has got the author’s point; and if one thinks one has, one may even feel superior to those who have not.

Kauffman thus suggests not only that an obscure author risks losing a reader but that the readers who are engaged fall victim to a kind of intellectual fallacy—if not an outright con. They invest so much intellectual energy into deciphering the author that, rather than interrogating the truth of the author’s claims, they congratulate themselves on “getting him” and feel superior to those who do not.

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I saw this dynamic throughout graduate school. It accounted for much of the enthusiasm for impenetrable yet facile thinkers such as Derrida, Lacan, Kristeva, and Judith Butler. Professors and students, breathless with self-congratulation at understanding the obfuscating language of these “geniuses,” never stopped to ask whether what said geniuses were saying was really “true”—or if true, in any way new or remarkable. On the contrary, questioning such giants was considered “not smart.”

When Jacques Derrida came to speak at U of C, I made sure to go hear him because, in my field, he was a giant, the George Washington of Deconstruction. I sat through 45 minutes or so of the lecture, the gist of which was entirely unremarkable—the idea that when we give a gift, there is always some selfish motive attached to our presumed generosity. It was all stuff like “the gift of giving gifts is a gift that’s not really given by the gifter” and so on—only not that coherent.

I have little patience for such antics, which is why I will never read, for example, Finnengan’s Wake or go back to Gravity’s Rainbow, which I dropped after a few pages.

I know this marks me as a second-rate smarty-pants. Some two decades ago, for example, I attended a James Joyce conference in Dublin. There was a clear distinction there between those who studied Ulysses and those who studied Finnegan’s Wake. Both are difficult novels.

An entire industry exists for books explaining how to read Ulysses, an industry that commenced almost the moment the book came out. To get through the novel, you not only have to pick up on the underlying Homeric metaphor, but you also have to have a strong understanding of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Irish politics and the geography of Dublin. It also helps to be familiar with Joyce’s personal life and willing to put up with a novel whose narration style varies dramatically from chapter to chapter.

But if Ulysses scores an 11/10 on the difficulty scale, Finnegan’s Wake is not even on the chart.

Here’s the first sentence of that “novel”

riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. Sir Tristram, violer d’amores, fr’over the short sea, had passencore rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor had topsawyer’s rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County’s gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time: nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe totauftauf thuartpeatrick: not yet, though venissoon after, had a kidscad buttended a bland old isaac: not yet, though all’s fair in vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe.

Joyce considered FW his masterpiece, far superior to Ulysses, and FW scholars at the conference shared that belief. They were the real Joycians.

Whatever. I used to belong to a Finnegan’s Wake reading group at the University of Chicago. It comprised PhD candidates from the English Department, the Department of Comparative Lit, Religion, and Physics. The six of us would spend literally two hours reading two pages, after which we could never say for sure what we had just read. Call me anti-intellectual; call me a philistine, but that sort of art is not for me. Life is too short.

I know I shouldn’t say that as a professor. I know it makes some folks wonder how I managed to get my PhD. But it may be useful to some readers to know that we, i.e., professors, don’t all think the same way.

Call me a populist PhD. Or just a philistine. Regardless, on any given day, I’ll take

Wishing you were somehow here again
Knowing we must say goodbye
Try to forgive, teach me to live
Give me the strength to try

over primal encounters with I-acting-You and You-acting-I reified, hypostastized split particles.

And that’s about all that I have to say to thou.

1. So far as I can tell. . . . .