Avant-propos - Studia Moralia

DIALOGICAL PERSONALISM REVISITED 215
through the “religious factor,” through the spirit of Christianity.
Even with the turn of philosophy toward the subject, the I has
been examined only in relation to itself, in its “I-aloneness,”
which is not the real I, but only Pascal’s moi, 18 an infinitely small
man in the universe – grammatically speaking, not a first person
subject, “I” (je), but merely a smaller, third person object, “me”
(moi).
For Ebner, this I-aloneness is the result of an action of the I:
the I secluding itself from the Thou. The existence of the real I,
then, “does not lie in its being related to itself, but rather... in its
relation (Verhältnis) to the Thou.” 19 Outside the I-Thou relation,
there is no I at all.
The true I, then, can never be the abstract, “ideal” I of philosophy.
The real I “comes to expression in the fact that I am and
that I can say that of myself,” 20 that is, because man is given the
word. The I exists in relation to the Thou. The I depends on the
Thou and the Thou depends on the word. It is this I-Thou relation
which shows man his relation to God: in the ultimate
ground of our spiritual life, God is always the true Thou of the
true I in man. Conversely, at the same time, God makes of man
His Thou:
In the spirituality of his origin in God, man was not the “first”
but the “second person” – the first was and is God. And here this
“first” and “second” actually express the spiritual hierarchy, in contrast
to their grammatical usage. Man was the “person addressed”
by God, the Thou of the divine Word which created him. Yet since
18 In searching for the meaning of his own personal existence in a rational,
Cartesian I, what Pascal found was not man in dynamic relation as a
self-affirming subject, “I am,” but the contrary, insignificant man, an infinitely
small and limited moi over against the vastness of the universe. For
Pascal, the I’s aloneness is not due to its self-sufficiency and autonomy, but
rather, in its smallness it is the I of despair. The moi only moves beyond this
meaningless aloneness through the spiritual activity of the heart: “The heart
has its reasons, which reason does not know… It is the heart which experiences
God, not the reason.” See BLAISE PASCAL, Pensées, bilingual edition,
trans. H. F. Stewart (London: Routledge, and Kegan Paul, 1950), 627.
19 GREEN, 10; WR, Schriften 1:84.
20 GREEN, 13; WR, Schriften 1:86.