The True Front | 29In one sense, “Through Separation to Community” would have appealed
to the young Buber’s geistesaristokratisch sensibilities, as it addresses itself to
an imagined vanguard or spiritual elite. However, this vanguard is different;
belonging to it “is not a matter of knowledge or ability, but of perspective and
orientation.”^60 Only those who overcome traditional ties to authority, custom,
class, faith, and profession belong to the vanguard. Landauer portrays himself as
a failed preacher who had descended to the masses hoping to pull them up but
had not been equal to the task. It was time for a new strategy: “We must cease
descending to the masses. Instead we must precede them.”^61 This meant first sepa-
rating from the world of the masses, and then forming a new world, a community
unto itself. This community would be a free association of men and women who
were deeply in touch with the ultimate community, the relationship of the hu-
man being to the universe itself.
Landauer argued that modern modes of reasoning, which privileged ab-
stract concepts and placed the individual subject at the center, were a political
problem and not merely a philosophical error. Combining Kant and Nietzsche,
Landauer reasoned that because one could prove neither that individual subjec-
tivity formed the basis of all truth and reality, nor that it did not, he was autho-
rized to simply assert the truth he desired: “My inner feeling that I am an isolated
unit can be wrong—and I declare it so, because I do not want to be isolated. . . .
I reject the certainty of my I so that I can bear life.... The I kills itself so that
the World-I can live.” Drawing on his readings of the Christian mystic Meister
Eckhart, Landauer asserted that we can understand the universe through inten-
sive study of the individual organism, our own selves.^62 Thus “the way to create
a community that encompasses the entire world leads not outward, but inward.
We must realize that we do not just perceive the world, but that we are the world.”
The purpose of this introspection, however, was not the idealism of Berkeley, in
which the world is a reflection of our individual mind, but the recognition that
we ourselves are “part-souls of the world-soul.” The mystical form of this state-
ment is paired to a more philosophical version: “‘The individual’ is a rigid and ab-
solute expression for something that is very mobile and relative.”^63 In both time,
in which individuals carry within themselves the genetic and social presence of
their ancestors, and in space, in which they can be marked out discretely only on
the particular and arbitrary level visible to the human eye, Landauer found that
the concept of the individual needed redescription. In its current form, the con-
cept only validated the arbitrary faux communities into which people are born
and in which they are held captive by authority; eliminating this concept would
give rise to both “true” individuality, “deep, ancient, and everlasting,” and to true
fellowship, in place of sham communities like the state.^64
We can only speculate as to the immediate impact of Landauer’s lec-
ture on Buber.^65 A year later, however, he quoted it in his own talk to the Neue