Recalling Stein’s observation that one’s “readiness to receive the transcendent Other creatively may well increase amidst the painful experiences of rupture and loss,”114 we can see how Buber’s withdrawal following Landauer’s death in 1919 occasioned the transformation that resulted in I and Thou.
Further, the use of Ellenberger’s illness metaphor to characterize this culminating phase of Buber’s inner development coheres with the nature of grief. Studies of loss and grief show that a person’s grief is like an illness or “deep wound.”115 As we have seen, Buber’s description of the initial impact of Landauer’s death shows this wounding was for him a bodily reality that involved a deep inner wounding as well.116 As with any wounding, there is a natural, sometimes lengthy healing process. Yet the person is forever changed by the wound: the scarring that remains permanently marks the survivor.
Buber’s largely autobiographical essay, “Afterword: The History of the Dialogical Principle,” links his own inner process with the broader historical context as he construes it.117 The story he lays out in this short account includes a number of elements that connect his sense of his own process with Ellenberger’s phenomenon of “creative illness.” In what follows we will trace Buber’s account in conjunction with Ellenberger’s analysis.
According to Ellenberger, a period of creative withdrawal begins when an individual turns inward for an extended period of time to address and resolve a major issue that he has devoted himself to fathoming.118 At that point, the person’s inner search “can take the shape of depression, even neurosis.”119 In Buber’s case, it was not depression or neurosis but grief which served to throw off his psychic equilibrium.
Buber states he withdrew for a period of time. He specifies he had a two-year period from late 1919 to late 1921 in which he did not work on anything but Hasidic material. This focus was part of a process of his “spiritual ascesis,” as he called it, a narrowing down which he imposed on himself as part of his turn inward.120 In his account Buber uses the Greek word askēse (the root of the word “asceticism”), originally meaning “training” or discipline, to explicitly denote this period as one of withdrawal and disciplined narrow focus for “spiritual purposes.”
Ellenberger points out that an extended time of intense preoccupation with an idea or issue can lead up to and even precipitate a period of creative withdrawal.121 In Buber’s “History,” he specifies the focus for this intense inner work, that which had become his lifelong issue: “the question of the possibility and reality of a dialogical relationship between the human being and God . . . of a free partnership in a conversation between heaven and earth whose speech in address and answer is the happening itself, the happening from above and the happening from below.”122 This vision first seized him in his youth, but by about 1904, the time of his original spiritual awakening, it became the supporting ground and driver of his thinking. In short, “This question became my innermost passion.”123 Buber continues his story, laying out the steps that led to I and Thou. He states he mentioned “the myth of I and Thou” as early as the introduction to his second book on Hasidism, The Legends of the Baal-Shem, in 1907. From this early envisioning of I and Thou, his thinking led him “ever more seriously toward the common, that which is accessible to all.”124 That is, he was searching for the universal language that would present the truth of his encounter with the Presence so all could understand it. As he put it, “Since I have received no message which might be passed on . . . but only had the experiences and attained the insights, my communication had to be a philosophical one. It had to relate the unique and particular to the ‘general,’ to what is discoverable by every man in his own existence.”125 With these words, Buber denotes the existential dimension as the locus of his discourse.
Buber began to clarify his thinking through his work at interpreting Hasidism in the fall of 1919: when he was writing his book The Great Maggid and His Followers, he developed his key concept of “encounter.”126 After finishing this pivotal work on Hasidism, he wrote a rough first draft of I and Thou. He initially envisioned it as the first of five volumes laying out a systematic anthropology of religion—yet over time he shifted away from this larger project.127
In the postscript to I and Thou he makes clear how the vision he was grappling with when drafting I and Thou in late 1919 was the fruit of a long incubation and that this vision came with an impelling need to proclaim it: “When I sketched the first draft of this book, an inner necessity was driving me. A vision that pursued me from my youth onward, although at first repeatedly growing dim, had then attained a constant clarity. This vision was so blatantly of a transpersonal nature that I knew at once that I had to bear witness to it.”128 These words echo the original sense of mission that came to Buber at the time of his spiritual awakening: “And I became inwardly aware of the call to proclaim it to the world.”129 The time had come for him to realize that mission. Significantly, he uses the word “vision” and presents the vision as pursuing him over the decades.
According to grief theory, in the process of responding to loss, grieving individuals oscillate between a loss-oriented focus where acute, active grieving is prominent, and a restoration-oriented focus where they take up the ongoing responsibilities of their everyday lives.130 In Ellenberger’s analysis, this pattern is a major characteristic of creative withdrawal as well. The person may adjust his life circumstances to allow the time for this withdrawal, which can last for up to three years or more. During this period the person may maintain his normal professional activity and family life while at the same time suffering from inner feelings of utter isolation, even abandonment—such as Buber did following the loss of Landauer.131 At this time in his life, Buber did almost all of his work as a scholar and editor in the solitude of his study in his home in Heppenheim. Thus, his circumstances fostered the isolation which Ellenberger describes; yet at the same time, he continued to be engaged in the household with his wife Paula and their two children.
Winokuer and Harris characterize the impact of loss in a way that fits the phases of the process of creative illness, which Ellenberger outlines thusly:
The trauma, shock, and anguish of a major loss assault an individual’s fundamental assumptions about the world. Meaning-making can result through reinterpretation of the negative events as opportunities to learn . . . about one’s self or life in general, as a means of helping others, or contributing to society in some way that is related to the experience that occurred.132
In relation to the survivor’s world view, the loss is an “assault on an individual’s fundamental assumptions.” This challenge to one’s basic assumptions necessitates the extremely difficult task of reworking one’s inner models of reality. It precipitates a new departure in the person’s search for meaning. According to Ellenberger, because the person struggles “in utter spiritual isolation and has the feeling that nobody can help him,” he must plunge into the unknown and figure out how to fathom the depths of the issue that grips him. Yet, throughout this process, he relentlessly pursues the thread of his dominant concern.133 In this way, Landauer’s death, coming when it did, shook Buber until it provoked him to deepen and reorient his thinking. Buber worked through the abyss that opened under him with his loss until he was able to reinterpret and reconstruct the blow into his emerging sense of dialogical reality. Thus, he struggled with his loss until he could make the loss into his opportunity to learn, and he thereby developed a deeper sense of the nature of dialogue. The drafting of I and Thou became the screen upon which he worked this out. In this way, the book became for him a means of helping others and contributing to society while giving him a new standing as a survivor of Landauer’s death.
According to Ellenberger, when a grieving person breaks through to a new level of understanding, he may experience this as his “liberation from a long period of suffering”; however, it is also an illumination. He becomes possessed by a new idea which he regards as a revelation.134 The breakthrough to a new level of insight becomes the turning point in the process and opens up a rapid return