Viktor Frankl had a lot in common with Martin Buber. Both
were born to Jewish parents in Vienna, although Buber was 27 years Frankl’s
senior. Both had a bar mitzvah yet each went a different way with Judaism.
Buber’s human-grounded spirituality was oriented to the Jewish-Biblical-Hasidic
tradition and its texts while Frankl’s quest for meaning was more secular. Each
was at home with the language of the German-speaking academy and yet neither
was part of its mainstream. While Buber was a lifelong hiker, Frankl was a
lifelong mountain climber.
Yet their paths did not cross nor did their key ideas really
mesh. Buber had moved to Germany before Frankl was born. Later, Buber relocated
to Jerusalem in 1938 while Frankl stayed in Vienna to be with his parents until
he was incarcerated in concentration camps for three years (1942-1945). This
divergence gave them very different vantage points for their interpretations of
the world. There is no published correspondence between them and Buber never
referred to Frankl in his writings.
Frankl’s main reference to Buber is in his essay “A Critique
of Pure Encounter,” published in his collection of essays titled The Unheard Cry for Meaning in 1977
(pages 64-78). There he lists Martin Buber, along with Ferdinand Ebner and
Jacob Levy Moreno, as those who introduced “encounter” (Begegnung) into the discourse of existential social thought
(64-65).
Frankl’s brief account fundamentally misrepresents Buber’s
thought. Frankl begins with his definition of encounter as “a relationship
between an I and a Thou – a relationship which by its very nature can be
established only on the human and personal level” (65). It is noteworthy that
he uses the word “relationship,” a term Buber warns against for its implied
reification of the “event” nature of relating as encounter. Further, Frankl
grounds his concept of encounter in language, which is foreign to Buber’s
“encounter” for fundamental reasons: for Buber, encounter is grounded in
silence—note the role of silence in the two primary scenarios of encounter that
he presents in “Dialogue” (BMM 3-4,
5-6). The first hypothetical encounter involves no speech; in the second
encounter, between Buber and Florens Christian Rang, the crucial moment of the encounter
takes place in the silence that follows speech.
Furthermore, because Frankl sees encounter as verbal, he
sees Buber’s I-Thou encounter as two
dimensional, lacking an “intentional referent” or logos (Frankl’s term for the realm of meaning—he extended it as the
name for his therapeutic method: “logotherapy”) as his crucial third dimension
of language. It is significant that in this way he equates meaning (Sinn) with logos, making meaning inseparable from the Greek word for “word.”
Frankl’s resulting reduction of dialogue marks his fundamental departure from
Buber. He writes, “A dialogue without the logos, lacking the direction to an
intentional referent, is really a mutual monologue, merely mutual
self-expression.[ It lacks] ‘self-transcendence’” (66). Frankl does not see
that, fundamental to Buber, the I of I-It is a very different entity than the
I of I-Thou which by its very nature is at once both pre-verbal and self-transcendent.
How this difference between Frankl and Buber works out
becomes clear in Frankl’s discussion of self-transcendence. At the core of
Frank’s vision is the person’s “reaching out toward meaning.” This reaching out
is the essence of human nature as self-transcendence, a “relating and being
directed to something other than to oneself” (66). This reaching out is both
“for a meaning to fulfill” and “for another person to love.” In Frankl’s sense
of encounter, self-transcending love “makes us realize the humanness of the dialogical
partner, whereas loving him shows us more—his essential uniqueness. This
uniqueness is the constitutive characteristic of personhood” (66-67).
Every element of this analysis, which Frankl sees as totally
beyond his two-dimensional reduction of Buber’s I-Thou encounter, is actually integral to what Buber means by the I-Thou encounter. Buber’s I-Thou is all
about transcendent love:
Love
. . . is between I and Thou. Love ranges
in its effect through the whole world. In the eyes of him who takes his stand
in love, and gazes out of it, persons are freed from their mere entanglement in
bustling activity. Good people and evil, wise and foolish, beautiful and ugly, one
after the other, each becomes real to him as Thou; so set free, each stands out in his uniqueness and confronts
him as Thou. In a wonderful way, as from
moment to moment their exclusiveness arises, . . . he can be effective,
helping, healing, educating, raising up, saving. Love is this responsibility of
an I for a Thou. (§ 19b)
Finally, this Presence is inseparable from the pre-verbal, pre-conceptual meaning at the heart of life:
The meaning of existence is open and accessible in the actual lived concrete, not above the struggle with reality but in it. Meaning is to be experienced in living action and suffering itself, in the unreduced immediacy of the moment. Only he reaches the meaning who stands firm, without holding back or reservation, before the whole might of reality and answers it in a living way. He is ready to confirm with his life the meaning which he has attained. (Eclipse 35; see Turning to the Other 250-51)
It is too bad that Frankl did not tread as carefully traversing the landscape of Buber’s thought as he did negotiating the precipices of his beloved Austrian Alps!
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