THE MORAL RELATIVISM AND MISPLACED COMPASSION OF THE SO OFTEN QUOTED MARTIN BUBER - "I AND THOU..."

Commentary by Tracy W.
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You have probably encountered at least one quotation from Martin Buber, since he is held in high regard by compassionate people all over the world.

Here is one: 

 

“When I confront a human being as my Thou and speak the basic word I-Thou to him, then he is no thing among things nor does he consist of things.

 

He is no longer He or She, a dot in the world grid of space and time, nor a condition to be experienced and described, a loose bundle of named qualities.

 

Neighborless and seamless, he is Thou and fills the firmament. Not as if there were nothing but he; but everything else lives in his light.” 

Source - http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/29357.Martin_Buber

It all sounds very nice, indeed.

 

But the truth is that Martin Buber was at best a moral relativist.

DID YOU KNOW THAT HE - A JEW - WANTED A PARDON FOR TOP NAZI ADOLF EICHMANN AT HIS TRIAL IN JERUSALEM?

 

Professor Paul Eidelberg  has exposed the philosophy behind German-born Martin Buber's well-loved quotes:   it is Georg Wilhelm Hegel's historicism or historical relativism. 

Historicism is a mode of thinking in which the basic significance of specific social context—e.g., time, place, local conditions—is central; whereas the notion of fundamental generalizable immutable laws in the realm of sociology or social behavior tends to be rejected. 

Source - http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Historicism.html

In other words, for relativists there is no moral right and wrong.  Barbaric behavior has to be understood in its social, geographical and cultural context and accepted.

 

Buber said:  “There is no scale of values for the function of peoples [and that] one cannot be ranked above another”

 

Martin Buber confronts real life evil - and he doesn't recognize it, blinded as he is by his own philosophy

 

That same relativism and let's-accept-and-embrace-everyone attitude led Martin Buber to agitate for saving the life and freedom of Adolf Eichmann during his trial in Jerusalem.  

Adolf Eichmann had been charged with the task of facilitating and managing the logistics of mass deportations of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in German-occupied Eastern Europe.
Source:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Eichmann.

Martin Buber "was disconsolate, running from meeting to meeting, with other professors from the university.... writing letters and hoping against hope that Adolf Eichmann might be granted clemency and given a life sentence of agricultural work on a kibbutz instead".

Source - Page 282 of The Jewish State by Yoram Hazoni.

The trial of Adolph Eichmann took place in Jerusalem in 1962, less than 16 years after the Holocaust, when six millions Jews and thousands of other minorities and political dissidents had been rounded up and exterminated. 

 

As a good relativist, Martin Buber had no compassion for those victims or for the grieving survivors.  His compassion was for the butcher.

 

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