The Damned and the Saved

In an earlier post I noted down some thoughts on Buber's interpretation of the concept of the "sickness of the age" and the fate of cultures, in relation to Europe's present isolation from America, and the consequences this is likely to have for the future of our world. In his collections of essays, Buber pursued his reflections on the subject of human guilt through reflections on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Freud and Jung, and also included reflections on literary subjects, which for me are the most interesting and thought-provoking.

Buber concentrates on two writers - Dostoyevsky and Kafka - whom he saw as in some way representing a parallel. Comparing Stavrogin's confession in Dostoyevsky's The Possessed with the chapter entitled "In the Cathedral" from Kafka's novel The Trial, Buber writes:

In both a priest is the antagonist, in both it is a matter of a confession of guilt; however, in Dostoyevsky it is furnished undemanded while in Kafka it is demanded. For it is this demand that the chaplain wishes to convey by the information that the case is going badly, since the court holds the guilt to be proved.

Stavrogin, who has become absolutely corrupted by his abuse of power,visits a priest in the hope of having his confession published (it contains, among other things, the rape of a little girl), sees the act of confession as a magical way out of his guilt. Stavrogin practises confession and crime in order to attain the real existence he lacks. Joseph K., the central character of Kafka's novel, refuses to believe in the existence of guilt itself. Both men entertain false relationships in order to engage or disengage their own guiltiness.

It could be said that in Stavrogin and Joseph K., Buber the perceives the nihilism and emptiness that lie at the heart of the disasters that befell Europe in the 20th century. In an age in which reality itself seems to be in question, the catastrophic dangers posed by those who want to construct reality anew, to play God, is ever present: the dictators, and their followers, who dominated the continent of Europe and Russia were the heirs and successors to Stavrogin and Joseph K. The relative and guilt-fleeing cynicism of the political leaders mirrored the shattered and broken reality of the age, with results that were devastating in their savage destructiveness and cruelty.

But Buber also directs our attention to another experience of guilt that came to mark the twentieth century: the experience of the patient in psychoanalysis. Here Buber speaks of hope:

It is not for me to speak in general terms of the inner reality of him who refuses to believe in a transcendent being with whom he can communicate. I have only this to report: that I have met many men in the course of my life who have told me how, acting from the high conscience as men who had become guilty, they experienced themselves as seized by a higher power.

Buber writes that these men "grew into an existential state to which the name of rebirth is due."