  The German words Form (form) and Gestalt (here translated as “shape”) are not identical, although, in English, it is easy to confuse one with the other. Buber uses Gestalt as a term of central, constitutive, and animating power, contrasting it with the Platonic term Form, which he associates with a lack of genuine vitality. Commenting upon a work by Michelangelo, Buber speaks of Gestalt as hidden in the raw material, waiting to emerge as the artist wrestles with the dead block. The artistic struggle instantiates and represents the more fundamental opposition between formative (gestaltende) and shapeless (gestaltlose) principles. The tension between these, for Buber, lay at the source of all spiritual renewal, raging within every human individual as the creative, spiritual act that subjugates unformed, physical stuff (1963b: 239). It is the free play of Gestalt that quickens the dead rigidity of form.