ABSTRACT
The later stage of Buber’s thought, expressed in his idea of distance and relation, leaves us with some doubt whether relationship within the human sphere is as primary as it was described in his earlier and more well-known work. To be sure, Buber uses expressions which reminding us of the context of his basic views such as, the expression “becoming a self for me” (Selbst-werdung-für-mich).* Yet in the later stage there is a kind of “second thought” as to the primacy of relationship as an independent, self-contained form of human existence. One of the indications of this revision of his position is that he begins to talk about a “primal setting at a distance” being “the presupposition of the other (entering into relation).” He continues:
That the first movement is the presupposition of the other is plain from the fact that one can enter into relation only with being which has been set at a distance, more precisely, has become an independent opposite. And it is only for man that an i ndependent opposite exists.†
These expressions point to a reflective attitude because to be removed from needs and wants is to maintain a kind of an overview of the basic situation. This overview in turn can be maintained only through reflection. When Buber talks about setting at a distance he is not talking in spatial terms but in terms of release, the latter being a kind of freedom inherent in the position of a spectator. A looker is at a distance and because of that he reflects on his position and its setting. The attitude of a person in the position of a spectator is again reflective. If this interpretation is correct, then in his later stage Buber became aware of the fact that the experimental view he maintained in his major works is not independent and self-contained but necessarily rooted in a reflective attitude. How that attitude gets realized in the encounter is a topic which Buber did not analyze, though he maintains the duality of distance and mutuality. Distance is a position acknowledged by the I-but it does not involve mutuality. The world is a horizon which I and Thou fill. But the world is not active in the mutuality of human beings. Buber is bound to distinguish in this context between awareness and that which is there in spite of the fact that the intentionality of the awareness does not refer to that what is surrounding, as it were, it. We face here one of the limitations of a conception based on the immediate encounter. As experience presupposes, without being able to state it within the boundaries of itself, something which is not encountered,
so the mutuality of relation presupposes a broader scope of reality than that present in it as such.
