Avant-propos - Studia Moralia

DIALOGICAL PERSONALISM REVISITED 211
in the third person, is emblematic of Buber’s thought in I and
Thou, an insight he owes directly to Ferdinand Ebner. Although
Buber himself maintained that he encountered Ebner’s work,
“too late to affect my own thought,” 13 his dependence on Ebner
for this key insight has now been well documented. 14 Because
Buber’s name is practically synonymous with I-Thou thought,
what would merely be an historic footnote is significant here because
it demonstrates the decisive influence of the lesser known
Ferdinand Ebner as foundational and decisive to any understanding
of dialogical philosophy.
Ferdinand Ebner: Dialogical Personalism
While the carnage of World War I caused Ferdinand Ebner
13 RIVKA HORWITZ, “Ferdinand Ebner as a Source of Martin Buber’s Dialogic
Thought in I and Thou,” in Martin Buber: A Centenary Volume, eds.
Haim Gordon and Jochanan Bloch (New York: KTAV, 1984), 122.
14 See HORWITZ, “Ferdinand Ebner,” 123: the concept of God as “the eternal
Thou” or “the absolute Thou” appears in Buber for the first time in early
1922, in a series of lectures entitled, Religion as Presence, delivered just as
Buber was reading Ebner. In these lectures Ebner’s influence is very clear,
but became less obvious later for, “a few months later, when composing the
lectures into a book, Buber took out the concepts closest to Ebner’s, so that
they are less evident in I and Thou.” In HORWITZ’S judgment, “Buber received
the concept of divinity as developed in I and Thou from Ebner. On every page
of the book, Ebner recognizes God as the ‘true Thou’ who cannot be God in
the third person; but this is one of the decisive innovations of I and Thou,
that God can never be grasped in the third person, but only in presence. The
similarity exists not only in the substance of the concept, but also in the
whole structure and development of the idea… ‘Thou’ as the basic and fixed
name of God is found in Buber’s writings only after his encounter with the
writings of Ebner.” See also RIVKA HORWITZ, Buber’s Way to I and Thou: An
Historical Analysis and the First Publication of Martin Buber’s Lectures Religion
As Presence, (Heidelberg: 1978). See also JOHN OESTERREICHER, The Unfinished
Dialogue: Martin Buber and the Christian Way, (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel
Press, 1987), 31.: “Rivka Horwitz has pointed to Ferdinand Ebner as the
source of Buber’s own dialogic thought, particularly the postulate that God
must be addressed not as the remote ‘He,’ but as the ever present ‘Thou.’ In
my opinion, Ebner and Rosenzweig even outrank Buber.”