Category Archives: Ethics

Buber’s “Elements of the Interhuman”

Ethics, Judaism, Philosophy

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 of what I mean by Jewishness.

I say this essay summarizes my ethic, but that doesn’t mean it summarizes what my ethic was prior to reading the essay (which I read for the first time early this year). I’m not sure exactly how much I was persuaded by this particular essay the first time I read it, but I can say that the process of reading most of Buber’s writings this year did change me ethically. It wasn’t a persuasion away from my earlier ethic, but it was a persuasion beyond it. Also, it was my first experience of sharing this species of ethic-ethos with another soul – and considering that the species of ethic-ethos is an ethic of sharing ethic-ethos, that was a major life event. Sharing this ethic-ethos was an actualization of something that had before existed as mere faith. The fact that Buber existed to me only as an author makes little difference. (If you understand why I would say this, you’ll understand my hostility to all pomo “death of the author” talk. If an author is dead to you, you are dead to humanity. A person who rejoices at the announcement of the author’s death fears and hates authentic love. Love is fearsome especially if you know what it is, but this is what courage is for: love is the root of courage’s undeniable value. All people admire courage, whether they want to or not, even if they cannot love. Courage points to love, even if it seems to point into nothing.)

The standout idea of this essay the first time I read it was the distinction Buber made between the interhuman and the social. It made such an impression on me that it’s possible I noticed no other idea in the essay. A brilliant insight can blot out all surrounding ideas with its glare. In the last several days I’ve re-read several of the sections multiple times. Even on adjacent days the same passage can read entirely differently. Key personal insight: I am sensitive and effective in the interhuman sphere, but half- or three-quarters-blind and paralyzed in the social sphere. I need the social.

Nietzsche, Buber, Amor Fati, and Thou

Ethics, Hermeneutics, Philosophy

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 Nietzsche’s world with him. He could have liberated Nietzsche from the plain-sight solitary confinement that finally crushed him, which Nietzsche always knew was fated to crush him, which he chose as his fate. Nietzsche would not abandon his cell:, the exit was sealed, but the entrance was open.

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The moral thrust of Nietzsche’s philosophy:

Following his liberation by skepticism, and subsequently his liberation from skepticism, newly freed to affirm and to will, a philosopher “goes under”: he immersively, forgetfully, participates in everyday life for the sake of learning.

The purpose of his learning at first appears to be to elevate himself as an individual to ever-new visions of life, but soon (and too late) the philosopher’s philosophy brings him to the realization that the substance and purpose of his vision extends far beyond the individual and individualism. However, this overcoming of individualism is, above all, not a retreat to contemporary collectivism. He finds another vision of both the individual and the collective that radically transfigures the meaning of both. That vision, from which the world is seen – both as a whole and in part – in a very new and better way, is height.

(A note on depth and height: The dimension of philosophical depth is existential and transcendental. It has to do with being, and being is outside the domain of memory. We cannot remember a state of being, per se, essentially; we only recall it. We call the state back to mind through recollecting the images in which the being was originally reflected. To know being, one must actually be there. “Going under” means being under, and being under means forgetting, no longer being at the height, no longer seeing from the height. All one can take with him is the mere surface fact of the height, a conceptual image of the height that at best serves to orient our movement, like a map, driving directions, or snapshots of landmarks.)

So, in going under, essential height is sacrificed for a time for the sake of comprehensive knowledge, which includes most of all knowledge of the “inward experience” of every “elsewhere”, of limitation and error. The pursuit of knowledge of the inward experience of “elsewhere” is sublimated justice: the capacity to experience all things as necessary, innocent and ultimately beautiful, which is what is meant by Amor Fati. The fully-seen, fully-affirmed inner-elsewhere is the knowledge acquired in the depths and carried back to the height. The learning of many kinds of being and many kinds of overcoming is the purpose of the forgetful participation in the everyday, but this is also another stage; the overcoming points to an eventual enduring overcoming: a stabilization of height.

Nietzsche said repeatedly that his own greatest danger was pity. Knowing solitude and the experience of suffering alone, he found it excruciating to know someone was suffering, much less suffering in solitude and he was overwhelmed by the desire to relieve that suffering.

His self-prescription, after several personal catastophes, was finally to go under only with his mind, but to keep his heart bound to the height. What does this mean, practically? It means that one must overcome the notion that the ideal of pity – of “suffering-with” – is the highest ideal, and to recognize a higher compassion, which Nietzsche called “joying-with“: “Fellow rejoicing, not fellow suffering, makes the friend.”

Joying-with can appear to be a form of detachment, but it is a detachment only from a reflexive emotional response that undermines the long-term good. It is the opposite of indifference.

Skepticism and probability

Ethics, Hermeneutics

Some people, when faced with uncertainty, weigh all the factual and interpretive possibilities and respond to the one that seems most probable. Sometimes they’ll cycle through a whole series of possibilities, one at a time.

Others generate multiple possibilities, and weigh the degree of uncertainty of each, looking for overlap between the most plausible possibilities. They then respond practically to the whole probabilistic cloud as a single situation.

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The latter approach is optimal for hermeneutics, for concepting, for psychology, and for pretty much any situation involving extreme indeterminacy or doubt. There’s the facts and there’s the interpretive arrangements, and each modifies the other. Knowing how to dismantle an interpretation (which can look for all the world like reality itself) into bits of data and then to reassemble them into multiple divergent interpretations, when combined with an active imagination and a nuanced recall results in the capacity to generate a vast array of persuasive possibilities. Everything is left liquid to some degree. It’s a gift and a curse.

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For a skeptic, no knowledge is complete until it includes the meta-knowledge of ground of certainty. To lose track of this is to lose command of the knowledge.

Pragmatist inkling?

Ethics, Hermeneutics, Holarchy, Metaphysics, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Pragmatism

I’m beginning to suspect praxis is knowledge viewed from the inside… the essential counterpart to what is apparent when knowledge self-reflects or presents itself as knowledge. Consider this possible developmental process: 1) knowledge begins as an instinctive response to a novel situation, 2a) then the response is iterated and refined within the same and similar situations, 2b) and the refined response is demonstrated and imitated between subjects who participate in the interation and refinement process, 3) then the response is reflectively stabilized through analogies and models, and becomes a verbally communicable practice then finally 4) vocabulary is developed for the practice.

I’m sure I’ll see this in Rorty once I start him, because practically I began thinking like a pragmatist back in 2005, when I had to imitate Bernstein’s manner of thinking in order to follow him (learned the steps of his intellectual dance). That is the only way to understand philosophy as such. Since then I’ve applied Bernstein’s ideas and style to many problems – including design problems and political problems I’ve encountered at work. I’ve also found that same style of thought in Wittgenstein and the smattering of pragmatist thought I’ve read. Now I am interested in learning the vocabulary and the ethics of the pragmatist community.

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I’ve worked intensely and uninterruptedly for 40 months, to be able to say this (relatively) clearly: Hermeneutics is spiritual pragmatism. By spirit, I mean the intellect, but not the intellect that is the mental dimension of an essentially corporeal reality. Spirit is intellect acknowledged as the ground of reality.

Reading hermeneutically is navigating the author’s subjectivity by the objects of his inquiries. The real goal of hermeneutics is not to acquire facts, nor even to uncover the structure by which the author orders his factual reality, but rather to learn to think with the author through his work, and eventually to be able to approach problems as the author would approach them. Such practical knowledge cannot be transferred mind-to-mind across the membrane of individual subjectivities as reflective theoretical knowledge can. It requires gradual merging of wills, until one’s intellectual movements spontaneously mirror or at least play off the movements of the other, and understanding flows in without sharp anomalies or blurry romantic notions.

Hermeneutics is intellectual dance; it is spiritual pragmatism; and it is trans-subjective transcendental phenomenology. It all takes place in the borders between whole and part, mastery and tentative participation, insidedness and outsidedness, in knowing how to know when you do not yet know, and knowing the kinds of knowing one might have or not yet expect.

I set out to account for what it was exactly that Nietzsche did to me. He taught me the dance of dances.