Interesting quote, Catherine. I must say, to me it sounds both a fairly fascistic one in tonality and fairly conventional one in terms of philosophical logic. i wonder if it is because it is a quote out of context, a context which might make it more complex. But perhaps it is not an accident that Walter Benjamin came to break completely with Buber due to Buber's enthusiastic, and to Benjamin's precise ear highly dubious, support of the first world war. the rhetoric of war heroism is completely on the surface here, calling basically for acts of powerful glory against all weak cowardice. From the point of view of conceptual history Buber's argument is a very conventional philosophical one, with some kind of turn of the century existential flavour, repeating the basic Platonic gesture of he call for a unification of the soul against the dispersing danger of the emotions.

Thanks for your reply, which illuminated certain things for me. 

Of course you're right about the effect of this passage, especially out of context, but I am still sympathetic to what it does not quite manage to achieve. 

To exaggerate your point slightly, let's bring in Jacques-Alain Miller: 

"It is not enough to say that monotheism, the cult of the One and of its total power, comes from the discourse of the master. When one hears one of its spokespersons — a recent convert, or one who has returned not so long ago — one sees that monotheism condenses its force, the insistence of the master-signifier, and that it translates, expresses, perpetuates the fixation which attaches the speaking/beings to the signifier 'one.'"

While this reading is very compelling, I think one can also read otherwise. It's hard precisely to express how, perhaps in part because Miller speaks, naturally, with such authority. And I don't mean to push things to the other extreme -- Oneness in the sense, say, of Buddhism (here I speak very naively) where one constantly negates authority and attains a kind of emptiness (which is also radical, negating, ...). I'm not at home in such thought and can't speak to it. 

Nonetheless there is a kind of deep coherence, a very powerful sense of a "unified personality," in people who are, I think, most effective and most at peace with themselves. How does one talk about this? How does one find a rhetoric which is not fascistic in which one can achieve it? How does one speak of "achievement" without conjuring up heroic struggle? 

I'm asking from more of an emotional than an intellectual place, I think, which is why this is not yet precise.

In any case I think I should probably stop here --- even the insistent rhythms of these questions have something Wagnerian about them...  

Thanks for sharing this Buber quotation!  I am not terribly familiar with Jacques-Alain Miller or Walter Benjamin, but when I read the Buber excerpt the first thing that came to mind was Maslow's writings on self-actualization.  I haven't read Buber in quite a while, but I did read his book "Good and Evil"--earlier printed as "Images of Good and Evil" for a class called "Religious Sources of Morality".
 I also found some interesting Jungian-derived ideas of wholeness and healing the axis between the ego and self in "Ego and Archetype" by Edward Edinger. (http://www.amazon.com/Ego-Archetype-Edward-Edinger/dp/087773576X)


 There is an interesting summary of Maslow's findings here: http://psikoloji.fisek.com.tr/maslow/self.htm

Maslow's Basic Principles:

1. The normal personality is characterized by unity, integration, consistency, and coherence. Organization is the natural state, and disorganization is pathological.
2. The organism can be analyzed by differentiating its parts, but no part can be studied in isolation. The whole functions according to laws that cannot be found in the parts.
3. The organism has one sovereign drive, that of self-actualization. People strive continuously to realize their inherent potential by whatever avenues are open to them.
4. The influence of the external environment on normal development is minimal. The organism's potential, if allowed to unfold by an appropriate environment, will produce a healthy, integrated personality.
5. The comprehensive study of one person is more useful than the extensive investigation, in many people, of an isolated psychological function.
6. The salvation of the human being is not to be found in either behaviorism or in psychoanalysis, (which deals with only the darker, meaner half of the individual). We must deal with the questions of value, individuality, consciousness, purpose, ethics and the higher reaches of human nature.
7. Man is basically good not evil.
8. Psychopathology generally results from the denial, frustration or twisting of our essential nature.
9. Therapy of any sort, is a means of restoring a person to the path of self-actualization and development along the lines dictated by their inner nature.
10. When the four basic needs have been satisfied, the growth need or self-actualization need arises: A new discontent and restlessness will develop unless the individual is doing what he individually is fitted for. A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write--in short, what people can be they must be.