Quest of the Spirit: From Suffering to Acceptance

66. Discerning Truth: Heidegger, Spengler, Buber, Russell, Ahura Mazda

                                                          Irony in Martin Buber's Good and Evil

        In Martin Buber's Good and Evil (Charles Scribner's Sons 1953), the author suggests several interesting concepts concerning the relationship between right and wrong, and good and evil, many of which reveal ironies that enhance his particular observations. In the initial chapter of Right and Wrong entitled "Against the Generation of the Lie," Buber points out that the lie came into existence only after man came to an awareness of the truth. According to Buber, "The lie is the specific evil which man has introduced into nature. All our deeds of violence and our misdeeds are only as it were a highly-bred development of what this and that creature of nature is able to achieve in its own way. But the lie is our very own invention, different in kind from every deceit that the animals can produce." Ironically, man, as God's highest form of creation, devises the very act which separates him from his creator. All lower forms continue to function in harmony with their maker. The second irony exist in the nature and origin of the lie itself, for the lie came into existence only after man came to an awareness of the truth. Paradoxically, without the truth, no lie could exist. As the author maintains, "It was possible only as directed against the conceived truth. In a lie the spirit practices treason against itself" (7). A third and certainly more damaging irony exist in the relationship in the emotional distance between the liar and its victim. In this case, there is an inverse correlation between the self-esteem of the victim and the confidence he reposes in the community. Buber then comments on the effect of the lie in modern society, saying that the "lie in this generation has reached the highest level of perfection as an ingenuously controlled means of supremacy" (8). Here lies the greater damage because of society's technological advancements and the need for natural resources, wielding the lie as a means of acquiring and maintaining power tends toward imperialistic ends. As Bertrand Russell suggests in Why Men Fight (1916), "Our institutions rest upon injustice and authority: it is only by closing our hearts against sympathy and our minds against truth that we can endure the oppressions and unfairnesses by which we profit" (Russell 19). The most deleterious effect of the lie, as Buber notes, is its contribution to the deterioration of communication itself. It destroys trust between the parties involved, and more precisely, contributes to "the disintegration of human speech as a result of this influence." This, in turn, destroys the possibility of effective dialogue, a topic which Buber further explores in terms of world peace during World War II. In this respect, the irony exists in what appears to be such a small delusion in reality corrupts the very intent of language itself. Instead of freeing the subject from the clutches of his deception, it confines him to an even worse set of consequences (9). These harmful effects in the political sphere equally permeate the spiritual realm as lies "introduce falsified material into his knowledge of the world and of life, and thus falsify the relations of his soul to being" (10). The lie becomes a tool for manipulation and oppression, as manifested in unethical advertising techniques and repressive methods of social control. Buber says that "all this is the work of the mighty in order to render tractable by their deceits those whom they have oppressed" (19 ). In this way, misinformation and propaganda create a false reality which also reflects a false relationship between men and between man and God. Another irony exists in the fact "this generation is not opposed to God as speaking lies but as being a lie" (12-13). Rather than denying the existence of the lie, they prefer to deny the existence of a creator whom they erroneously credit with the delusion. Their willful failure to recognize paradoxical nature of this misconception frees them from the responsibility of confronting the truth. It is much easier to deny the existence of God than to accept the consequences of their own lies. In his Introduction to Metaphysics, Martin Heidegger calls this condition the misinterpretation of the spirit, or in even bleaker terms, the darkening of the world. Writing just prior to World War II, Heidegger maintained that in America and Russia, the abandonment of talent and creativity in favor of mass uniformity in thought and behavior "grew into a boundless etcetera of indifference and sameness—so much so that the quantity took on a quality of its own. Since then the domination in those countries of a cross section of the indifferent mass has become something more than a dreary accident. It has become an active onslaught that destroys all rank and every world-creating impulse of the spirit, and calls it a lie. This is the onslaught of what we call the demonic (in the sense of destructive evil)" (Heidegger 46). Heidegger suggests that technological society has removed the spiritual aspect of intelligence by defining it materialistically to mean cleverness in the field of mass production. According to Heidegger, "The cleverness itself is subject to the possibility of organization, which is never true of the spirit. The attitude of the litterateur and esthete is merely a late consequence and variation of the spirit falsified into intelligence. Mere intelligence is a semblance of spirit, masking its absence" (Heidegger 47). Heidegger clarifies this "darkening of the world" as "the emasculation of the spirit, the disintegration, wasting away, repression, and misinterpretation of the spirit in one respect, that of misinterpretation." Buber agrees on this issue when he says, "Those who live by truth will rejoice in a blessed kingdom, but those who choose to live by the lie will inherit "a nothingness" which shall serve as their reality and the sole proof of their existence. Those whose hearts remain pure to God will retain their personalities even in the presence of their creator, but for those who choose the lie, their personalities will be absorbed into a state of nothingness, ad infinitum (12-13). In Psalms and Ecclesiastes, this realm of nothingness is called Sheol, a place where neither activity nor consciousness exists. Buber illustrates the distinction between heaven and Sheol in this manner: "The wicked have in the end a direct experience of their non-being; the pure in heart have in the end a direct experience of the Being of God." In fact, the difference is so singular that he refuses to use the word contrast when describing them (46). According to Buber, "The Psalmist now says with the strictest clarity what must now be said: it is not merely his flesh which vanishes in death, but also his heart, that innermost personal organ of the soul, which formerly 'rose up' in rebellion against the human fate and which he then 'purified' till he became pure in heart—this personal soul also vanishes" (47). In another passage, the author pronounces God's justice when he says, "Since the wicked man has negated his existence he ends in nothing, his way is his judgment" (59). The case is otherwise with the sinner who repeatedly repents and begins anew. For the believer, the case proves blessed. Buber says that "He who was the true part and true fate of this person, the 'rock' of this heart, God, is eternal. It is into His eternity that he who is pure in heart moves in death, and this eternity is something absolutely different any kind of time" (47).