Chaos, Abyss, and Whirl: Ambivalence as the Seedbed of Action

Buber held that a state of ambivalence is a necessary precursor, a seedbed to all actions. This chapter is devoted to the reconstruction of Buber’s notion of ambivalence. In section “(1)”, its main contours are reconstructed by a close reading of passages from ‘Images of Good and Evil’. Throughout his corpus, Buber refers to ambivalence through three metaphors: chaos (Chaos), abyss (Abgrund), and vortex (Wirbel). In section “(2)”, these metaphors are analyzed, elucidating how they serve to illuminate the nature of ambivalence as discussed in Buber’s texts, and the image they portray is shown to parallel his literal discussion of ambivalence laid out in section “(1)”. Buber’s conception of ambivalence evinces a tension between negative and positive depictions, which is resolved in section “(3)” via James Bugental’s distinction between (the negative) sequential and (the positive) simultaneous ambivalence, providing further insight into Buber’s conception of state of ambivalence.