Avant-propos - Studia Moralia

DIALOGICAL PERSONALISM REVISITED 213
that human speech is constitutive of human existence: humans
are given the “word.” It is only in the word, in language, that an
“I” meets a “Thou,” that relationship and self-identity can occur,
and this word is given in Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh: Jesus,
the Logos of St. John’s Gospel, mediates between God and
man and “stands” between I and Thou. It is through Jesus that
it is possible to address God in the human thou.
For Ebner, the key to the meaning of life, to the centrality of
relationship, and to God’s continuous action in His creation, is
found in the I-Thou question: why the I can never be found in itself,
and so must look in the thou, while the false I will try to
possess the thou as an object of power. This is the heart of Ebner’s
critique of idealist philosophies and thought: reality, truth,
and personal identity are not ideas, nor are they to be found in
ideas, therefore, Descartes’ cogito must be rejected, for the existence
of the I can’t be founded or proved by solitary thinking, but
only in relation with a thou.
While philosophy had focused so much on the abstract
problem of how the I might reach the world and the world might
reach the “I,” the question remained of how the “authentic” relation
is individualized – this is the concrete problem for man:
just how might the I reach the thou and the thou reach the “I.”
Ebner rejects any access to the true self through the world of
ideas. Likewise, man cannot know another person through an
idea, but only in the spirit; and further, man cannot know God
without knowing his fellow man:
The man whose I has found his thou in God, finds his thou also
in every man whom he encounters along the road of life. Jesus
ought to have said: “You have seen your brother, therefore you have
seen your God.” But the I of the one who cannot find his thou in
man has not yet found it in God either… The relationship of man
with man cannot and should not be based on anything other than
a spiritual base. The idea is never capable of being the link between
the I and the thou, between man and man. In the final analysis a
man’s relationship with the other must be based on his relationship
with God. 16
16 EBNER, Aus dem Tagebuch 1916/17, in Schriften 1:56.