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Everything is under control: Buber’s critique of Heidegger’s magic

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Abstract

As part of a religiously-oriented analysis, Martin Buber associates Martin Heidegger’s later philosophy with magic. The present article is dedicated to explicating and evaluating this association. It does so, first, by fleshing out how Buber comes to depict Heidegger as an advocate of magic. Then, by examining other appearances of the category of magic in the wider context of Buber’s dialogical oeuvre, it demonstrates that what he has in mind when he invokes this category is a specific manner of human appeal to the divine marked by manipulation, utility and control. Finally, it evaluates the affiliation of Heidegger with magic: first, by comparing the metaphysical presuppositions undergirding the logic of magic—specifically the conceptions of, and interrelations between, ‘language’ and ‘being’—with Heidegger’s views, and second, by judging whether the claim that Heidegger promotes manipulative, utilitarian, and power-laden attitudes can be justified in light of his analysis of ‘technology’. The article ultimately argues that Buber misattributes magic to Heidegger, and that this misattribution better reflects the theoretical framework through which Buber justifies his dialogical position than an apt assessment of Heidegger’s thought.

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Notes

  1. Buber (1965). Originally published as Buber (1952). On Buber’s analysis of Heidegger in this lecture series, see Herskowitz (2017). My interpretation differs from Novak’s (1985) and Gordon’s (2001).

  2. Buber (1947). Originally published as Buber (1938).

  3. Heidegger (2002a, b).

  4. Heidegger (2002a, p. 50).

  5. Understandably, this is one of Buber’s favorite lines from Hölderlin. He similarly mentions it, while explicitly polemicizing against Heidegger’s interpretation, in Buber (2003a, p. 83–85). This statement also concludes the original German version of Buber’s essay “Dem Gemeinschaftlichen folgen” (1956), though it is omitted from the English version, published as “What is Common to All” (1988b). An early version of Paul Celan’s famous poem “Todtnauberg” began with this Hölderlinian line as well. See Gellhaus (2002).

  6. Another such moment is found in Buber’s reproach of Jung’s psychology of religion, where he quotes Heidegger’s critique of Nietzsche to express his own view. “To Nietzsche’s saying, ‘All the gods are dead, now we desire that the superman live!’”, Buber explains, “Heidegger, in a note otherwise foreign to him, adds this warning: ‘Man can never set himself in the place of God because the essence of man does not reach to God’s sphere of being…the superman does not and never will step into the place of God”. Concluding this long quote from Heidegger, Buber judges: “these words compel one to listen with attention. One must judge whether that which is said or intimated in them does not hold true to—day and here” (1965, p. 91–92).

  7. In a correspondence with Franz Rosenzweig from around this time, Buber insisted on the antithetical relation between ‘magic’ and ‘prayer’, even despite Rosenzweig’s suggestion to perceive the two as standing in some form of continuum. See Glatzer and Mendes-Flohr (1991, p. 272–276).

  8. Buber (1963, p. 194–195). In English: Buber (1948, p. 21–22). I have occasionally altered the translation. See also Smith (1965).

  9. On Buber and Gnosis, see Mendes-Flohr (1991), Brague (2002), Feller (2013), Erlewine (2016).

  10. Scholem (1971), Schatz-Uffenheimer (1967). The Scholem-Buber debate has prompted a staggering amount of secondary literature.

  11. It should be noted that Buber insists that Moses anticipated that the distressed Israelites would have expected him to learn the deity’s name in order to be able to control it; Moses himself did not hold such obscene views. A similar insistence on disassociating a venerable religious figure—Jesus—from the vestige of magic can be found in Buber (1951, p. 19–20).

  12. As we shall see, judging the link between Heidegger and magic as an ‘exaggeration’, as Wahl does, is an understatement.

  13. Interestingly, Buber attended this lecture and referred to it critically in his essay “The Word that is Spoken” (1988a). Cf. Kraft (1966, p. 80). Buber’s essay was written as a paper for a conference Buber organized together with Heidegger on the theme of ‘language’. On the Buber-Heidegger meetings around this conference, see Mendes-Flohr (2014). Cf. also Bieman (2003), Pöggeler (1986, p. 149–151).

  14. On Heidegger’s gods, see, among many, Young, Heidegger’s Later Philosophy (2002, p. 94–99), Wrathall and Lambeth (2011), Polt (2006). On Heidegger’s ties to religion and theology more generally, see, among many, Crowe (2006), Crowe (2008), McGrath and Wierciński (eds.) (2010), Vedder (2007), Hemming (2002), Kovacs (1990), Fischer and von Hermann (eds.) (2007), Coyne (2015), Wolfe (2014).

  15. See for example, Zagano (1989).

  16. On the failure of language, see Wolfson (2018, pp. 109–130).

  17. On this passage, see Bernasconi (2013). Buber writes (1965, p. 73): “I have never in our time encountered on a high philosophical plane such a far-reaching misunderstanding of the prophets of Israel”.

  18. Heidegger’s objection to the (modern) category of ‘religion’ as inappropriately capturing the relation between humans and gods, in particular as this relation was manifested in ancient Greece, can be found, for example, in Heidegger (2011, p. 18) and (2000b, p. 241, 260).

  19. As he said in his televised interview with Richard Wisser in 1969: “The fundamental thought of my thinking is precisely that being, or the manifestation of being, needs human being and that, vice versa, human beings are human beings only if they are standing in the manifestation of being”. In Neske and Kettering, (eds.) (1990, p. 82).

  20. Cf. Joronen (2012).

  21. While in Introduction to Metaphysics (1935) Heidegger does speak of the necessity of human ‘violence’ with respect to being, he quickly moves away from this way of thinking. Already in Contributions (1936–38), Besinnung (1938–39), the Nietzsche lectures, and basically all subsequent writings, Heidegger associates power and violence with metaphysics. In Elucidations, being is said to be ‘powerful’, but not in the sense of control: “The essence of power”, he writes, “is determined from the all-presence of nature, which Hölderlin calls ‘powerful, divinely beautiful’. Nature is powerful because she is god-like in beauty” (76). Cf. Dallmayr (2001), Polt (2006, p. 153–154).

  22. See B. W. Davis (2007).

  23. Since the publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks and the disturbing comments on Jews found in them, there has been an explosion of publications on the topic. See, for example, Nancy (2017), Di Cesare (2015), Wolfson (2018), Farin and Malpas (eds.) (2016), Trawny (2014), Heinz and Kellerer (eds.) (2016), Homolka and Heidegger (2016).

  24. See for example, (2001, p. 207), Heidegger (2012, p. 88), (2015, p. 358).

  25. For a comparison between pragmatism and Heidegger, see Rosenthal (1991). For pragmatistic readings of Sein und Zeit, see Brandom (1983), Okrent (1988), see also Rorty (2005).

  26. Heidegger (1969, p. 66). Cf. Thomson (2005).

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    Daniel Herskowitz

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Herskowitz, D. Everything is under control: Buber’s critique of Heidegger’s magic. Int J Philos Relig 86, 111–130 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-019-09706-1

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