Martin Buber’s Daniel: Conversations on Realization is a short philosophical work in dialogue form, published in Leipzig by Insel-Verlag. Across a series of conversations set in mountains, gardens, a theater, and by the sea, the speaker Daniel unfolds a spiritual teaching about direction, realization, polarity, and the birth of God in human life. The book opens with an epigraph from Scotus Erigena: “God is created in the creature in a wondrous and ineffable way.”
The Core Argument
Buber’s book makes its case not through treatise but through conversation, and the case runs roughly as follows. Human beings are torn between two ways of standing in the world. One is orientation: the useful, dividing, classifying knowledge that maps reality into names, purposes, and systems, and that in doing so isolates everything it touches. The other is realization: the act by which a person, gathering the whole force of a single inborn direction, enters into the substance of another being and there experiences unity. Orientation is not evil and cannot be dispensed with, but when it becomes master rather than servant, life thins into semblance. The person who realizes—who brings direction filled with force to bear on things, on other people, on the world—participates in the ongoing creation of reality, and in doing so realizes God, who wills to be realized in all things. This is the kingdom of God: not a settled order but a kingdom of holy insecurity, of eternal beginning, of danger and venture. The alternative is the sleepwalker’s security of childhood, which must eventually break; the abyss of duality then opens, and the awakened person must choose whether to descend into it and create unity from tension, or to flee into the safer arms of orientation. The book’s dialogues work out this choice across the domains of space and direction, of the creative life, of meaning and its loss, of polarity, and of the poet’s calling.
Inside the Book
Dialogue in the Mountains: On Direction
The first dialogue finds Daniel and a Woman walking in the mountains. Daniel refuses to sit, insisting that sitting establishes “the dominion of the plane” where it should never reach; he is ashamed of his body for failing to preserve its steepness. The Woman answers that rising makes revelation more precipitous, that knees are thrice blessed to tighten again, and that people are reborn each morning from the abyss of sleep. Daniel responds that because we cannot breathe the single directionless world-breath of Eternals, we fashion a small pleasure from the play of up and down.
He then describes his first experience of realization: a crossbeam loosened from the cross of space to which he was bound, his feet freed, and himself standing free in the vertical—the vertical was himself. Flame rose from his heels to his fingernails; no cathedral buttress ever stood so erect with life. He recalls standing lifted between heaven and earth, the scaffolding of directions collapsed, upright and alone with his direction. Then grace appeared, making the burdened one a bearer.
The Woman offers her own memory: leaning at an open window over a lake, feeling the lake’s small waves and her blood’s waves together, then looking away and back to find the world transformed. The heavy flood of night with its thousand despairs rose up and she felt lost—until, gazing at the night as at the lake, she made herself its blesser, tore from its infinity of directions the one that was hers, and cast it as a bridge from her core into the night’s core. The horror dissolved, and the great being gave her its gaze.
Daniel concludes that infinite directions and feelings seduce and shake us, while he sets his inborn direction between them. The waves of infinity interweave his path, but their totality is only the horizontal cutting his vertical. The Woman asks whether they were not speaking of space yet seem led into the spaceless. Daniel answers that even speaking of space they spoke of more than space: as manifold sleep is set before simple waking, so the manifold Other is set before the simple One. One reaches the mother only through the son; since we cannot live directionlessly, only one way into the Eternal remains—our direction. Not over, around, or between things: in each thing the door of the One opens if you bring the magic that unlocks it, the perfection of your direction.
The Woman objects that he forgets force. Daniel agrees that direction is perfect only when filled with force—force alone gives fullness, direction alone gives meaning, but directional force lets you penetrate the substance, unity itself. He illustrates with a cembra pine: comparing its properties and investigating its composition is useful in the auxiliary world of names and classifications but teaches nothing of the truth of this being. One must approach the tree itself with all one’s directed force, surrendering to it, until one feels its bark as one’s skin, the springing of a branch as striving in one’s muscles, one’s feet rooting, one’s crown arching—until transformed. Yet even in transformation one’s direction stays, and through it one reaches unity in the tree; the transformation dissolves like mist, and around one’s direction a being forms. The tree, once one among trees, becomes the tree of eternal life.
The Woman asks about the context that is not the artful net of world-knowledge but the deep element itself, the mother-womb into which we must dive to avoid perishing by contradiction—is not all ecstasy a merging in the Other? Daniel cites Dionysos as Zagreus, whom the Titans lured by a game, tore to pieces, and devoured; this fate befalls whoever surrenders to ecstasy with an undirected soul. He counterposes Orpheus, who descends with the lyre into Hades’ land not to regain a beloved but to die and rise in Dionysos who is Hades, performing renewal, wherein the rhythm of breath and sleep is transfigured into sacrament. The archetypal thing about Orpheus is that he goes into ecstatic death with the lyre—not lured but resolved, and with the lyre. Music is the pure word of the directed soul; only the directed soul rules here, setting its inborn direction and melody into the abyss, while the powers of the deep layer themselves around it like wild beings around the playing Orpheus.
On Realization and Orientation
A dialogue between Daniel and Alrich (also addressed as Ulrich) turns to realization versus orientation. Daniel argues that realizing experience creates the essential form of existence; things and the “I” alike find reality only in this created bond. All experience is a dream of connectedness; orientation divides and isolates, while realization fulfills and proclaims connection. Nothing single is real in itself—only a precondition. Creative hours are binding hours; the hero, sage, poet, and prophet are bound ones, and their mystery is communion. Reality is not for them but with them.
Asked whether the creative person is therefore different and chosen, Daniel answers: only insofar as what is laid in all appears gathered and effectively worked in him. Every person has the power to be bound and enter reality; some unknown silent ones equal the creative in realizing force but do not reveal it widely—through lack of art of expression, reverence for grace, or being turned away and consecrated. Even the true hermit cannot exist without realizing power. These may be written as the Nameless on the tablet of the creative.
Alrich asks whether such people are few in our time. Daniel says the realizing are few, and the time replaces them with the “achieving”—those who work without being, give what they do not have, conquer where they did not fight, the spoiled children of semblance. God once created the world in six days; now God’s ape makes it in one day, and it is more interesting. Daniel blames the Basileus who installed these satraps, the same power crushing the force of realization in today’s masses. No earthly need can touch realization; only the overmacht of orientation besieges it. This city is fallen to semblance; its millions are shortened in the right to reality. They have purposes, environment, intellectuality, but live outside the real; each is called “Be!” from eternity and answers “I know my way around.” Orientation is their lord—spherical monistic, cone-pointed theological, or the roller of empiricism.
Alrich asks whether only our time is so. Daniel says no age could do without orientation, but great hearths of realization always stood in the midst. A time came that succumbed to the assault of its material, when purposes were displaced by means. Spirit is realization: unity of soul, exclusiveness of experience, connectedness. Alrich objects that Daniel speaks as if meaning all people of the city; Daniel refuses to count the righteous, saying his heart swells for the city, the masses, the millions. Alrich asks whether realizing would first make the time’s distress, contradiction, injustice, and nonsense truly lived; Daniel agrees: there is no other beginning than reality. All must be conquered anew for reality in unheard-of struggles. What now has ghostly existence in the delusion of unholy haste must become real, lived life—life of immediacy and human bond.
The Garden: On the Loss of Meaning
In a garden dialogue, Reinold tells Daniel he cannot stand before his garden; he knows no rest, only unrest, wandering, and anxiety. Daniel says that as long as one is in the rest of becoming, the “Thou” within may suffice; when the flood comes, one must find the “Thou” in the world.
Reinold recalls a Celtic song—”Not long will you wander in the land with living heart”—and says that was his childhood: the land with living heart, where life had an inexpressible, inexpressibly real meaning, center and unity. Nothing senseless happened to him; things nestled into his senses like a peach into a hollow hand. He was secure at ten, twelve, sixteen, more secure than when drinking his mother’s milk. He learned life’s bright dualities, enmity and love, without losing meaning.
This spring, returning from the south, he stopped one evening in Spezia. He took a boat and rowed out. It was new moon; southern stars roared down. When he turned toward the coast, he was startled: everything he possessed had vanished. A host of will-o’-the-wisps stared from mute infinity; moist lips opened and closed in cruel smiling; the presence of the nocturnal being grew in his neck like betrayal. Where his soul’s bed had been was nothing. He cried “I am here, I am here,” and rowed toward the coast. A shrill strip of light tore a piece of coast loose; it stood shamelessly out of the dark, bellowing the madness of its distinctness. He recognized it not; then the night swallowed it again, and for a moment he understood: the approaching storm and the cruiser playing searchlight. But when the cold lightning cut again, his knowledge availed nothing. Ghostly stretches of earth replaced one another in senseless service—not parts of a coast but ghostly screams. He “knew” they belonged together, but felt no connection, only screams and between them the abyss. The abyss was between piece and piece of the world, between thing and thing, between image and essence, between world and him. Rowing toward the known coast, he longed for meaning as the dying Christian for Christ’s body; then meaning burst, a bloody rift ran through it. He saw the last: in him, innermost in himself, was the abyss. He was eternally divided—not spirit and body, but into the thousand-shaped, protean duality of the bright One and the dark Other, with the eternal abyss between. His last security broke; he landed as if on the coast of a dis-tuned, unbound life. Since then the abyss is before him at all times.
On Security and Danger
The speaker addresses Reinold, contrasting two modes of life. The “primitive” person has essential deed in magic and essential knowledge in myth, celebrating their union in the mystery, overcoming separateness and uniting with God. Likewise one who has direction and meaning enacts an eternally new mystery in realizing God in all things: God wills to be realized, all reality is God’s reality, and there is no reality except through the human who realizes self and all being. This is the kingdom of God: of danger and venture, eternal beginning and becoming, opened spirit and deep realization, the kingdom of holy insecurity.
Reinold’s first-life “security” was not that of the self-preserving and knowing but of the sleepwalker; children are sleepwalkers, passing abysses unharmed because they do not see them. Their direction and fulfillment are dreamlike; they realize experience without venture, unaware of inner duality. When God would appear to them, He must disguise Himself as a traveling musician and make a foolish face.
Then comes the hour of awakening, possibly late; some people’s realizing power is so great that dreamlike simplicity outlasts childhood. One suddenly sees the abyss of contradiction and opposition: the abyss of the thousand-named immanent duality of all things. It calls from the depths, and something answers from an abyss within him, also thousand-named: the abyss of inner duality. He is frightened, and in fright the choice appears: to which to give power, orientation or realization. Neither can exist without the other; the question is mastery. Orientation promises security; realization promises nothing, demanding descent into the abyss. The chooser may surrender to the friendlier mistress, casting only melancholy glances at the other in rare hours of self-reflection.
Reinold has decided whom not to follow, hence whom to follow. He always knew what to do; the direction remains. But now its first, dreamlike force ends and its second, waking force begins. It stands hesitant, as if listening to a distant call; his speaking today is its first new step, and it knows its way again. Meaning appeared darkened because it wants renewal. In the dreaming heart a venturing one had resolved; now it wants to rise from larval life to winged life. In the light of meaning the world’s duality was encompassed; now he must newly encompass it in resurrecting light. Meaning is reborn and nothing can destroy it.
The peace of his becoming was dreamlike, now disturbed by urge and wandering; he must regain it as one awakened. It had light feet and a flowerlike gaze, knowing nothing of danger; now he will go out with it and seek dangers. From each excursion it returns with stronger longings and firmer eyes; its foot will not forget dance nor its gaze caress. Danger is henceforth his path. A song says “God and the dreams,” the song of blessed security; but his saying shall be “God and the danger.” Danger is the gate of deep reality, and reality is life’s highest prize and God’s eternal birth.
If all poets asked whether they devised the most beautiful life, the answer: the most beautiful devised life is Don Quijote’s, who created danger where he did not find it. But more beautiful is the lived life of one who finds danger everywhere it is to be found—and it is everywhere. All creation stands at the edge of being; all creation is venture. Whoever does not venture his soul can only mock the Creator.
Reinold is told to live upright and attentive, opened and surrendered, in the peace of his becoming, and to love danger. He has no security in the world, but has direction and meaning, and God, who wills to be realized, the God of the venturing, is always near. His next danger: descend into the abyss, realize it, recognize its essence—the thousand-named, nameless polarity of all being, between piece and piece of the world, thing and thing, image and essence, world and you, innermost in yourself, everywhere, with its oscillating Yes and flowing oppositeness. Recognize the signs of primal being in it, and recognize that here his task is to create unity from his and all duality, to posit unity in the world—not unity of mixture as the secure fabler tells, but consummating unity from tension and stream, suited to the polar earth, so that God’s realized countenance shine from tension and stream. Recognize also that this is the infinite task; no once-for-all applies, but he must eternally descend anew into the change-capable abyss, eternally venture the soul anew, eternally pledged anew to holy insecurity.
Conversation after the Theater: On Polarity
In “On Polarity: Conversation after the Theater,” Seebad asks whether the play moved Daniel so; walking beside him in stillness, it seems they come not the same way: Seebad from the theater, Daniel from Eleusis. Daniel says he comes from the theater, Leonhard, and what moved him was the theater itself, seen today for the first time. Leonhard says he jests. Daniel compares it to being familiar with a person for years, then one evening seeing him for the first time and wondering, recognizing in the familiar face an unfathomable, message-rich secret—a ground measure and ground relation of life.
Leonhard asks whether he thus saw the theater. Daniel recounts entering when it had just grown dark; often entering at that moment had increased his enjoyment because he need not see anyone before the play began, passing from loose street light to strict light, from the street’s wild dice game to this rule-knowing board game. This time it was different: in darkness the event seized him. Eleusis, Leonhard said—yes.
The Poet and the Dialogue by the Sea
After realizing he no longer watched the stage, Daniel sees the tall man watching the wedding procession, “licht und gelöst,” son of venture and polarity, and beautiful. The curtain falls a third time; Daniel leans back, calm and grateful. His directionless gratitude carries him through the theater, finds no one to receive it fully, and flies into hiddenness. At the dream’s edge, where heaven and earth touch, it finds the lonely wanderer it unknowingly sought. Daniel had not thought of him, yet the actors spoke his word and followed his command; rightly Plato called them messengers of the poet.
Daniel asks whether what was staged was truly the poet’s work or transferred into another genre, law, order. Yet this seems fulfillment of deep intentions: every art contains tendencies whose maturity finds no room and must seek or awaken another art. All poetry tends toward drama. Every lyric work is dialogue with a partner speaking in superhuman language; what he says is the poet’s secret. Every epic work is dialogue in which the Moiren speak; interpreting their replies is the poet’s task. Drama is pure dialogue; all feeling and event become dialogue. It stands at art’s border and points to fulfillment and suspension in that other realm where dialogue is spoken.
The poet made the actor speak. The poet’s power is the word; the actor’s is gesture; speech is only a late kind of gesture. Among “jungfräulichen Völkern,” those representing divine marriage or resurrection do not speak but only dance; the natives at the Schwanenfluß in Australien expressed their souls’ deepest truth by calling the sacrament of the Abendmahl a dance, to the missionaries’ astonishment. At Eleusis only the Hierophant spoke, until the poet came and loosed the players’ mouths forever.
Daniel sees the poet as lord of the word, moving theater yet never truly entering it. When the light goes out and he knows the curtain will rise, he rises and quietly leaves. Leonhard asks whether he did not see the last act. Daniel answers he saw the last act of his drama. He could not stay because he had gone in thought to the dream’s edge, to the poet; he would be both turned toward and withdrawn from the stage, hearing behind every actor’s word the unemphatic, untouched, secret word of poetry, whose closed simplicity the splendid theater can only drown out and faithfully interpret; behind that word he would hear the infinite word of the eternal poet—not this or that poet, nor all, but the poet—whom he could and would seek only in the lonely spirit, not behind forms.
Daniel goes into the garden, where the moonbow sends gentle brightness. This pure light, neither loose nor strict, like a bird’s gaze, gladdens him. Here he can remember the poet. Of Henoch, who walked with the Elohim, it is told he became an angel all eye and wing. So is the poet: all in him perceives things, all flies past them. He is wholly in the one he experiences and yet already and still in all the others. He knows the ardor of remaining like the painter and of hovering like the musician. His senses are the world’s strongest anchors, his soul its fleetest keel. He drinks eternally, like the poet in the Purgatorio, from both springs: Lethe and Mnemosyne, which Dante calls Eunoe.
This duality appears anew in the poem’s becoming. All human action mixes creating and destroying; every doer must reject the many for the one chosen, but this applies most perfectly to the poet because he decides unceasingly. Poeting is choosing in the infinite; this choosing is no rummaging, seeking, sifting, but a fire with annihilating and melting power. Every word of the poet is unique; yet around each lies a ring of incomprehensible matter imaging the sphere of infinite passing: the trace of melting fire-power.
He whom Plato calls messenger of the overpolar God is no less messenger of polar earth. As in his action the dual stream matures, condenses, spiritualizes in all living things, so in his being all tensions are fired and winged; every opposition elsewhere merely latent, blunted, or open to mediation rises in him to polarity. He knows the poles of over-power and powerlessness, freedom and dependence, union and abandonment, guilt and purity, form and formlessness; he recognizes them in the world because he knows them in himself. Of Indra, the god-poet who found dawn, sun, and fire in his song, it is said he encompasses all as the wheel’s rim holds the spokes. Of the poet it can be said his heart is the hub where the spokes of polarities converge; but here is not suspension but connection, not indifference but fruitfulness. The poet bears the spirit’s opposites, and they are fruitful in him. He has a twofold great love: love of the world, in which everything he experiences in himself as extreme and contradiction blossoms toward him in the intimate truth of colors and tones as in wondrous reconciliation; and love of the word, born from the deep tension of early human dreams, formed by the deep tension of seeking human generations, able to redeem and unite all tension. World and word come together in the poet’s love; their love rises in the poet’s love; in their love all opposites become fruitful. Fullness and emptiness beget in the poet, pain and joy beget in the poet, form and formlessness beget in the poet, heaven and earth beget in the poet.
Key Ideas
Direction and realization. Daniel’s central teaching is that each person carries an inborn direction, and that this direction becomes the narrow door into the Eternal. Direction alone gives meaning; force alone gives fullness; only direction filled with force penetrates to unity. The image of the cembra pine makes this concrete: one does not know a tree by classifying it but by surrendering to it with all one’s directed force until one feels its bark as one’s own skin.
Orientation versus realization. Orientation is the useful, dividing knowledge that maps and manages the world; realization is the binding act that creates reality in communion. Orientation is necessary but must not become master. When it does, a civilization fills with the “achieving”—people who work without being and give what they do not have—and life thins into semblance.
The kingdom of holy insecurity. God wills to be realized; all reality is God’s reality; there is no reality except through the human who realizes self and all being. This kingdom is not a settled order but one of danger and venture, eternal beginning and becoming. The sleepwalker’s security of childhood must break; the awakened person chooses to descend into the abyss of duality and create unity from tension.
Polarity and fruitfulness. The poet, and by extension the realizing person, holds the poles of existence—over-power and powerlessness, freedom and dependence, union and abandonment, guilt and purity, form and formlessness—not in indifference but in fruitful connection. The heart is the hub where the spokes of polarities converge.
The abyss of duality. Reinold’s experience at Spezia dramatizes the loss of meaning: the world breaks into ghostly fragments with an abyss between piece and piece, thing and thing, image and essence, world and self—and the deepest abyss is within. This crisis is not the end but the threshold of a new, waking realization.
Themes
The book is best read as a spiritual-philosophical meditation in the tradition of the German Lebensphilosophie and religious existentialism of its era, though its roots reach back through mysticism to Plato, Dionysos, and Orpheus. Its governing theme is the birth of God in the human soul through the act of realization—a teaching that anticipates Buber’s later I-Thou philosophy. The dialogues form a kind of spiritual autobiography in fragments: Daniel’s first experience of the vertical, the Woman’s bridge cast into the night, Reinold’s collapse at Spezia, and the poet’s twofold love all trace stages of a single path from dreamlike security through the abyss of duality toward a waking, venturing unity. The book’s Romantic inheritance is visible in its nature mysticism—the lake, the mountains, the cembra pine, the moonbow—but it is a mysticism disciplined by direction and force, not by dissolution. Against the ecstatic merging of undirected surrender, figured in Zagreus torn apart by the Titans, Buber sets Orpheus descending with the lyre: the directed soul enters the abyss not to be swallowed but to perform renewal. The critique of modernity runs through the middle dialogues: a time that replaces the realizing with the achieving, that lives by orientation and semblance, that answers “I know my way around” to the eternal call “Be!” Yet the book refuses despair. There is no other beginning than reality, and reality must be conquered anew in unheard-of struggles.
Why It Matters
Daniel is the early Buber—the Buber before I and Thou—and it shows the concerns that would occupy him for the rest of his life taking shape in dialogue form. Its insistence that God is realized in and through human beings, that reality is created in the bond between self and world, and that the kingdom of God is a kingdom of holy insecurity rather than settled order, marks a distinctive position in early twentieth-century religious thought. The book’s prose moves between philosophical argument and lyrical vision, and its central images—the vertical, the cembra pine, the bridge cast into the night, Orpheus with his lyre, the hub of polarities—give abstract ideas a concrete, memorable body. For readers who know Buber only through I and Thou, Daniel offers the earlier, more dramatic unfolding of the same fundamental intuition: that meaning is not found but realized, and that the door of the One opens in each thing for the person who brings the perfection of their direction.
