Buber's Paths in Utopia: The Picture of an Ideal  

        In Martin Buber's Paths in Utopia (Syracuse University Press 1996), the author discusses the idea of socialism, the movement's forerunners and its possibilities for modern society. In his Foreword of 1945, Buber states, "The intention underlying this book is to give genetic account of what Marx and the Marxists call 'Utopian Socialism,' with particular reference to its postulate of a renewal of society through a renewal of its cell-tissue. I am not concerned to survey the development of an idea, but to sketch the picture of an idea in process of development." In this regard, he traces the growth of a movement comparable to an organic development of what Oswald Spengler calls the only true interpretation of history, per se. In his Decline of the West (1917), Spengler presents a unique view of history when he says, "The world-as-history, conceived, viewed and given form from out of its opposite, the world-as-nature—here is a new aspect of human existence on this earth." In another passage Spengler says, "With all rigor I distinguish (as to form, not substance) the organic from the mechanical world-impression, the content of images from that of laws, the picture and symbol from the formula and the system, the instantly actual from the constantly possible, the intents and purposes of imagination ordering according to plan from the intents and purposes of experience . . ." (Spengler 5). In this respect, as with Buber, Spengler conceives a concept of organic history, not based upon details, but upon images and symbols, uniquely characteristic of psychoanalysis, music, and art. Interestingly, Victor Hugo makes a comparable observation when he compares the material and moral world as an organism of constant change and intermixture. Writing in Les Miserables, Hugo says, "Elements and principles are mingled, combined, espoused, multiplied one by another, to the point that the material world and the moral world are brought into the same light. Phenomena are perpetually folded back on themselves. In the vast cosmic changes, universal life comes and goes in the unknown quantities, rolling everything up in the invisible mystery of the emanations, using everything, losing no dream from any single sleep, sowing a microscopic animal here, crumbling a star there, oscillating and gyrating, making a force of light and an element of thought, disseminated and indivisible, dissolving all, save that geometric point, the self: reducing everything to the soul-atom; making everything blossom into God; entangling, from a dizzying mechanism. Linking the flight of an insect to the movement of the earth, subordinating—who knows, if only by the identity of the law—the evolution of the comet in the firmament to the circling of the protozoa in the drop of water. A machine made of mind. Enormous gearing, whose first motor is the gnat and whose last is the zodiac" (Hugo 886-887).

             Buber alludes to the illusory nature of this historic imagery in its Platonic sense as "a picture of what should be" and a vision of what "one wishes it to be" (Buber 7). He furthermore refers to these various endeavors as a quest, or "spiritual history of mankind" providing "pictures moreover of something not actually present but only represented" (7). Like Freud's concept of the wish-fulfillment, these images, he calls "Utopian wish-pictures" which archetypically "make us think of something that rises out of the depths of the Unconscious, and in the form of a dream, a reverie, a seizure, overpowers the defenseless soul, or may at a later stage, even be invoked, called forth, hatched out by the soul itself" (7). Like Jung's collective unconscious, this imagery emerges from the inner recesses of the mind and is transferred over generations. Buber differs from both Freud and Jung, however, in his determination that these pictures stem from a source other than the desire for self-gratification or those characteristically associated with those instinctual in nature. According to Buber, these idealistic visions originate in the spiritual realm. As the author suggest, "In the history of the human spirit the image-creating wish—although it, too, like all image-making is rooted deep down in us—has nothing instinctive about it and nothing of self-gratification. It is bound up with something supra-personal that communes with the soul but is not governed by it. What is at work here is the longing for the rightness which, in religious or philosophical vision, is experienced as revelation or idea, and which of its very nature cannot be realized in the individual, but only in human community" (7). C. S. Lewis maintains a similar notion when he suggests an underlying ethical predisposition apart from instinct or self-preservation. Writing in Mere Christianity (Macmillan 1975), Lewis says, "Supposing you hear a cry for help from a man in danger. You will probably feel two desires, one a desire to give help (due to herd instinct), the other a desire to keep out of danger (due to the instinct for self-preservation). But you will find inside you, in addition to these two impulses, a third thing which tells you that you ought to follow the impulse to help, and suppress the impulse to run away." In another passage, Lewis uses a piano metaphor to reinforce this idea: "Strictly speaking, there are no such things as good and bad impulses. Think once again of a piano. It has not got two kinds of notes on it, the right notes and the wrong ones. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another. The Moral Law is not any one instinct or any set of instincts: it is something which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right conduct) by directing the instincts" (Lewis 22-23). Buber suggests a similar sentiment that both positive and negative energy can be channeled into constructive outcomes: it is merely a matter a direction. Ironically, it is through man's tragic suffering that he most clearly envisions this dichotomy between the real and the ideal. Both history and literature bear witness to the unfortunate fact that man sees clearest when under oppression. Buber goes on to say, "All suffering under a social order that is senseless prepares the soul for vision, and what the soul receives in this vision strengthens and deepens its insight into the perversity of what is perverted. The longing for the realization of the seen fashions the picture" (7-8).

              The vision of what should be rather than what is, Buber calls, the "vision of rightness." He divides this perspective into two categories: the first of which derives from man's messianic eschatological view of perfect time, and the second stems from his utopian ideal which concerns perfect space. In essence, one pertains to the spiritual realm and the other to the physical or social. The eschatological originates from above as a matter of faith, from God or the divine; whereas, the latter functions as a matter of human will, as a social concern. Eschatology functions in the prophetic realm, and utopian, in the philosophical, although both possess "the character of realism" (8). In a different respect, eschatology perceives the ideal through the mind of tradition; whereas, modern technology provides a clearer avenue toward the utopian goal. According to Buber, "Those, on the contrary, which undertake to deliver a blueprint of the perfect social structure, turn into systems. But into these utopian social systems there enters all the force of dispossessed Messianism" (9). Ironically, both the spiritual and the secular approaches must be employed; to exclude the social removes man from the practical applications of technology, and to exclude the spiritual, leaves man in a state of neurosis, existential nausea or despair. Buber calls this alienated condition "mankind's childhood sickness," a symptom which Freud attempts to remedy through psychoanalysis, presupposing mental illness characteristic of repression and denial. Hugo stresses that man often equates God with progress, the absence of which leaves him faithless and alienated; however, progress merely implies a continuation or "enduring life of the people," that includes both its advances and declines. According to Hugo, "'Perhaps God is dead,' said Gerard de Nerval one day, to the writer of these lines, confusing progress with God, and mistaking the interruption of the movement for the death of the Being. He who despairs is wrong. Progress infallibly wakes up, and in short, we might say that it advances even in sleep, for it has grown. When we see it upright again, we find it taller. To be always peaceful belongs to progress no more than to the river; raise no obstruction, throw in no rocks; the obstacle makes water foam and humanity seethe. Hence, troubles; but after these troubles, we recognize, that there has been some ground gained. Until order, which is nothing more nor less than universal peace, is established, until harmony and unity reign, progress will have revolutions for way stations" (Hugo 1236). Along with Franz Rosenzweig, Buber laments that Marx himself was too much a prophet of Hegelian dialectic to realize that the final phase, or synthesis, would never occur. According to Buber, "The 'withering away' of the State," or "leap of humanity out of the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom, may be well-founded dialectically, but it is no longer so scientifically" (10-11). As Paul Tillich observes, this ultimate relinquishment of authority "can in no way be made intelligible in terms of existing reality "because there exists too wide a chasm "between reality and expectation" (11). Writing in Les Miserables, Victor Hugo expresses a similar sentiment when he says, "It is always at her own risk and peril that Utopia transforms herself into insurrection, and from a philosophic protest becomes an armed protest, from Minerva, Pallas. The Utopia that grows impatient and turns into riot knows what awaits her; almost always she is too soon. Then she resigns herself and stoically accepts, instead of triumph, catastrophe. She serves, without complaining, and even exonerating them, those who deny her, and it is her magnanimity to consent to desertion. She is indomitable against hindrance and gentle toward ingratitude" (Hugo 1236). A second faulty consideration exists in socialism's presupposition that all men are the same; people are not robots. Different problems require different solutions. In Buber's words, "Wholly different, indeed of a directly contrary nature, is the second element. Here the dominant purpose is to inaugurate, from an impartial and undogmatic understanding of contemporary man and his condition, a transformation of both, so as to overcome the contradictions which make up the essence of our social order" (11). A third consideration in this regard is the lack of freedom and diversity. This sameness encourages conformity, but certainly not creativity or individuality. Even in the event of a successful socialist revolution, the need for coercion to reestablish order, coupled with the lack of assurance that the government will indeed relinquish its authority, preclude the possibility of any pure form of socialism existing. In order for any practical form of socialism to address the issues of its time, it must constantly be changing to meet the needs of rapidly changing social and political circumstances. Change becomes its most singular feature. Spengler views history in a similar respect, as an element of Nature: "Each Culture has its own new possibilities of self-expression which arise, ripen, decay, and never return. There is not one sculpture, one painting, one mathematics, one physics, but many, each in its deepest essence, different from the others, each limited in duration and self-contained, just as each species of plant has its peculiar blossom or fruit, its special type of growth and decline." In this regard, socialism's ever-changing policies must adapt to the changing needs of particular groups. Buber contrasts Proudhon with Marx in the former's acceptance of this notion of change. Buber quotes Proudhon, "System, I have no system. I will have none and I expressly repudiate the suggestion. The system of humanity, whatever it be, will only be known when humanity is at an end . . . My business is to find out the way humanity is going and, if I can, prepare it" (24). Flexibility, courage, and mutual understanding must create a dialogue which supersedes self-interest and the will-to-power. Spengler goes on to say, "I see world-history as a picture of endless formations and transformations, of the marvelous waxing and waning of organic forms" (Spengler 17-18). Buber also uses the metaphor of a living organism to describe the nature of an unchanging capitalist society in decay: "Society is naturally composed not of disparate individuals, but of associative units and the associations between them. Under capitalist economy and the State peculiar to it, the constitution of society was being continually hollowed out, so that the modern individualizing process finished up as a process of atomization. At the same time the old organic forms retained their outer stability, for the most part, but they became hollow in sense and in spirit—a tissue of decay. Not merely what we generally call the masses but the whole of society is in essence amorphous, unarticulated, poor in structure. Neither do those associations help which spring from the meeting of economic or spiritual interest—the strongest of which is the party; what there is of human intercourse in them is no longer a living thing, and the compensation for the lost community-forms we seek in them can be found in none" (14). Kropotkin also uses the growth metaphor to describe the pervasiveness of centralized power. According to Kropotkin, "The State is an historical growth that slowly and gradually, at certain epochs in the life and history of all peoples, displaces the free confederations of tribes, communities, tribal groups, villages and producers' guilds and gives minorities terrible support in enslaving the masses—and this historical growth and all that derives from it is the thing we are fighting against" (Buber 38). In The Political Capacity of the Working Class (1864), Proudhon descries the harms of a strong central government in terms that aptly apply to modern capitalism in the United States: "A compact democracy having the appearance of being founded on the dictatorship of the masses, but in which the masses have no more power than is necessary to ensure a general serfdom in accordance with the following precepts and principles borrowed from the old absolutism: invisibility of public power, all-consuming centralization, systematic destruction of all individual, corporative and regional thought (regarded as disruptive), inquisitorial police" (Proudhon in Buber 31). Ironically, it is Buber who cites Proudhon's passage for its similarity to the governmental structure existing in the mid-twentieth century, when in reality, the trend continues even into the twenty-first century. Proudhon's words echo the existential theme of loss and alienation common in modern society. In his Theory of Taxation (1861), Proudhon says, "People like simple ideas and are right to like them. Unfortunately the simplicity they seek is only to be found in elementary things; and the world, society and man are made up of insoluble problems, contrary principles and conflicting forces. Organism means complication, and multiplicity means contradiction, opposition, independence. The centralist system is all very well as regards size, simplicity, and construction; it lacks but one thing—the individual no longer belongs to himself in such a system, he cannot feel his worth, his life, and no account is taken of him at all" (Buber 33). It is Proudhon who foresees the danger that centralization poses for individual freedom. A strong case for his concerns can be made in terms of globular telecommunication today. In 1861, Proudhon expresses this danger in the following passage:"A fever of centralization is sweeping over the world; one would say that men were weary of the vestiges of freedom that yet remain to them and were only longing to be rid of them. . . Is it the need for authority that is everywhere making itself felt, a disgust with independence, or only an incapacity for self-government?" (Buber 34). Sadly, Proudhon realizes that the revolution which would liberate man can only be attained after prolonged suffering and oppression. In Proudhon's words, "I am under no illusions and do not expect to wake up one morning to see the resurrection of freedom in our country, as if by a stroke of magic . . . No, no; decay, and decay for a period whose end I cannot fix and which will last for not less than one or two generations –is our lot . . . I shall witness the evil only, I shall die in the midst of the darkness" (Buber 35). In response, Buber strongly discourages the idea of total revolution in the name of socialism. A gradual assimilation is better, he suggests, because a complete break with from the status quo would only necessitate governmental coercion as a means of reestablishing order, a coercion which by nature contradicts the peaceful objectives of socialism itself. Hugo concurs in this notion when he says, "The best, certainly, is the peaceable solution. On the whole, let us admit, when we see the paving block, we think of the bear, and his is a will about which society is not at ease. But the salvation of society depends on itself; to its own will, we appeal. No violent remedy is necessary. Study evil lovingly, verify it, then cure it. That is what we urge" (Hugo 1238). Hugo next describes the paradoxical nature of peaceably implementing a utopian system when he says, "Utopia, moreover, we must admit, departs from its radiant sphere in making war. The truth of tomorrow, she borrows her process, battle, from yesterday's lie. She, the future acts like the past. She, the pure idea, becomes an act of force. She compromises her heroism by a violence of opportunity and expediency, contrary to principles, and for which she is fatally punished. Utopia in revolt fights the old military code in her hand; she shoots spies, she executes traitors, she eliminates living beings, and casts them into the unknown dark. She uses death, a solemn thing. It seems as though Utopia had lost faith in the radiation of light, her irresistible and incorruptible strength. She strikes with the sword. But no sword is simple. Every blade had two edges; he who wounds with one wounds himself with the other" (Hugo 1237).

            Hugo criticizes those nations and leaders who have abandoned the ideals of socialism in favor of materialism and person gain. "Races petrified in dogma or demoralized by lucre," according to Hugo, "are unfit to lead civilization. Genuflection before the idol or the dollar atrophies the muscle which moves and the will which goes. Hieratic or mercantile absorption diminishes the radiance of a people, lowers its horizon by lowering its level, and deprives it of that intelligence of the universal aim, at the same time human and divine, which makes the missionary nations. Babylon has no idea. Carthage has no ideal. Athens and Rome have and preserve, even through all the dense night of centuries haloes of civilization" (Hugo 1241).            Despite its practical shortcomings, utopia as an idea fosters greatness in its followers. As Hugo observes, "This reservation made, and made in all severity, it is impossible for us not to admire, successful or not, the glorious combatants of the future, the