«Mit unserm Widerspruch, mit unserer Lüge»: verità e menzogna in Martin Buber

In the thought of Martin Buber the dialectics between truth and lie is a pivotal theme. The first traces of this subject matter are scattered in his writings on the Jewish Renaissance and on Jewish mysticism from the early 20th century. These writings bear the witness of Buber’s confrontation with Nietzsche’s philosophy, one of the most important sources of the former’s early production. In its first part, the article deals with Buber’s own formulation of the nexus of truth and lie in the conceptual line which connects Nietzsche (especially as regards his philosophical essay On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense), Fritz Mauthner and Gustav Landauer with reference to the mystical phase of Buber’s early career. The article then moves on to analyse Buber’s treatment of the two concepts in the dialogical phase, as regards above all his rewriting of Hasidic tales after the dialogical turn and the famous essay Bilder von Gut und Böse (Images of Good and Evil, 1952) which investigates the origins of good and evil in the Bible. In this book Buber points out that the conflict between good and evil experienced by the first humans in the cosmogonic myths – a conflict which still exists in our souls today – parallels the battle between the opposing principles of truth and lie