Below are two passages from Buber that can read as rebukes to the designerly faith. The first evokes UX, the second, service design. 1. Man becomes an I through a You. What confronts us comes and vanishes, relational events take shape and scatter, and through these changes crystallizes, more and more each time, the consciousness … Continue reading Buber versus design…?
Last week I attended a class held by the Temple on Martin Buber. The class will cover Ten Rungs and The Way of Humanity, two of the many books Buber wrote in what I’ll call his “Hasidic mode”. Buber’s interest in Hasidism will seem strange to people habituated to seeing Hasidim from the default Christian … Continue reading (Re)welcoming Buber
Martin Buber, in his Introduction to Pointing the Way makes an extremely important distinction between two forms of religiosity: In this selection of my essays from the years 1909 to 1954, I have, with one exception, included only those that, in the main, I can also stand behind today. The one exception is ‘The Teaching … Continue reading Buber on misapotheosis
I love Jaspers, but I have to classify him with Rorty as another pre-material turn thinker who manages to say amazing things despite an uncannily precise neglect of the role nonhuman actors play in generating truth, and in Jaspers’s case, scientific truths. His distinction between scientific modes of truth and original truths of being, and … Continue reading Jaspers, Latour — and Buber, too
“…Real relationship to God cannot be achieved on earth if real relationships to the world and to mankind are lacking. Both love of the Creator and love of that which He has created are finally one and the same.”
From Buber’s Between Man and Man: Sometimes I hear it said that every I and Thou is only superficial, deep down word and response cease to exist, there is only the one primal being unconfronted by another. We should plunge into the silent unity, but for the rest leave its relativity to the life to … Continue reading Buber, on height and depth
I dislike WordPress more and more. This post was originally written in 2010. I was digging through old posts on Buber, looking for comments I might have made regarding experience and use of things (in the mode of I-It), when I happened upon this old post. I say a misspelling and corrected it. When I … Continue reading Buber’s heir
As far as I am concerned the world divides into that which speaks and that which does not.
From “Dialogue”, the first essay in the collection Between Man and Man: Be clear what it means when a worker can experience even his relation to the machine as one of dialogue, when, for instance, a compositor tells that he has understood the machine’s humming as “a merry and grateful smile at me for helping … Continue reading Buber on why work really does matter
From “The Question to the Single One”, the second essay in the collection Between Man and Man: Kierkegaard does not marry “in defiance of the whole nineteenth century”. What he describes as the nineteenth century is the “age of dissolution”, the age of which he says that a single man “cannot help it or save … Continue reading Buber on marriage and responsibility
My situation requires some Judaic fortification. Until things change I’m dropping Hegel and taking up Buber. A crucial passage from Buber’s “Dialogue” (in Between Man and Man): Above and below are bound to one another. The word of him who wishes to speak with men without speaking with God is not fulfilled; but the word … Continue reading Rebuberizing
I scanned Buber’s essay “Elements of the Interhuman” and put it in my wiki. It is hard to convey the feeling of satisfaction I’m enjoying right now at the fact that this essay exists. It is essentially a summary of my own ethic. When I say that I “feel Jewish”, this essay is an example … Continue reading Buber’s “Elements of the Interhuman”
From “Distance and Relation”: The basis of man’s life with man is twofold, and it is one – the wish of every man to be confirmed as what he is, even as what he can become, by men; and the innate capacity in man to confirm his fellow men in this way. That this capacity … Continue reading Martin Buber on self-becoming
I started a new “Amor Fati” theme in my wiki, and was struck again with the idea that Martin Buber could have saved Nietzsche’s life. This, however, does not mean that Buber could have told Nietzsche something that Nietzsche did not already know. It means that Buber could have gone to him… entered and shared … Continue reading Nietzsche, Buber, Amor Fati, and Thou
For my entire adult life, I’ve returned, again and again, to C. S. Lewis’s “Meditation in a Toolshed”, usually to re-critique it from a subtle variation on the same basic complaint. In his meditation, Lewis observes a beam of light from the side, and has an insight that this looking at the beam of light … Continue reading Jewishly
For the last week, I have been closely and carefully reading a long, gnarly and crucially important passage from Buber’s I and Thou, in both the Smith and Kaufmann translations. One benefit of understanding this book to be a prayer is that I am much more relaxed about getting through the book. The point of … Continue reading L’Chaim faith
Existentialism is a style of philosophy that attempts to keep thought in relationship with reality by resisting the natural human tendency to confuse essence (whatness) for existence (thatness), and reduce existence to essence. We strive, against human nature, to maintain our personal faith that “existence precedes essence.” Perhaps for some existentialists, the maxim “existence precedes … Continue reading Existentialism
Mysticism reduces one’s relationship with God to one’s own experience of God. It belongs to a more general tendency to reduce all relationship with being (and beings) to one’s own experience of being (and beings). Like all religiosities, including, especially, fundamentalism, mysticism can even take forms that dispense with God. It goes like this: “I … Continue reading Viddui: I have mysticized
Yes, I am using ChatGPT as a weird kind of thought partner. If you find yourself recoiling slightly, I understand. I have the same reaction. But it is a valuable exercise. Consider the following exchange: Me: How faithfully does this represent Leibniz’s monadology? “The fundamental unit of the universe is not the atom, nor a … Continue reading ChatGPT as thought partner
Buber reverses an insight of conventional wisdom. When thinking of “the other” a typically empathetic view would be something like: We should regard an other (a Thou) as an alter-ego, a fellow-I. Buber would, rather, have us think of our own I as an alter-Thou.