  This critique of the single one in relation to a larger social world belongs to the world-picture established by Buber in the essay “What is Man?” (1938). At stake for Buber was a knowledge of the human person as a whole, i.e., a complete understanding of human subjectivity. The methodological key to the essay is a philosophical anthropology. Buber assumed that only by entering into the act of self-reflection can the philosophical anthropologist become aware of human wholeness based on a structural distinction between epochs of human habitation and epochs of human homelessness. In the former, philosophical anthropology is cosmological, i.e. fundamentally related to the world and to human environments. In the latter, human subjectivity is conceived of as self-standing and independent. The conceptual tension is between being at home in a universe of things in contrast to what is presented as the collapse of a rounded and unified world vis-à-vis self-divided forms of consciousness. In order to preserve the imbrication of singular selfhood and the bonding of human personhood, Buber rejected the false choice between individualism and collectivism. As Buber always understood it, human wholeness lies in the meeting of the one with the other in a living fourfold relation to things, individual persons, the mystery of Being, and self. Every living relation is essential and contributes to human wholeness because human wholeness (“man’s unique essence”) is known or posited only in living out a set of relations.