Życie duchowe” a „życie w duchu” – dialogiczna dystynkcja Martina Bubera

For Martin Buber, the protagonist of the modern philosophy of dialogue, spiritual life is not an ontic distinction of human existence, but an opportunity that man has and should use because of his dialogical genesis, which determines the particular horizon of his being. Existing cannot be reduced merely to the existence of a given object among others, since it may and ought to be expressed via presence – being a person to other people, being ‘I’ to ‘You’. The fundamental difference between ‘spiritual life’ and ‘living in the spirit’ lies in the fact that the former, as opposed to the latter, does not always happen to be dialogical, that it does not always have an ethical dimension, and often fulfils itself in an aesthetic dimension only. On the other hand, living in the spirit indicates a transcendental status and the provenance of the spirit, which cannot be perceived as the result of cultural progress – it is regarded as the sublimation or projection of what is immanently human.