Buber, on the social vs the interhuman: It is usual to ascribe what takes place between men to the social realm, thereby blurring a basically important line of division between two essentially different areas of human life. I myself, when I began nearly fifty years ago to find my own bearings in the knowledge of … Continue reading Social and interhuman
Sketchy thoughts which might not make sense without the full context… Once again I’m thinking about Buber’s distinction between the social and the interhuman. I think the essential difference between the two is this: In an interhuman relationship two participants are involved, and through dialogue the participants can directly influence the relationship that binds them; … Continue reading Individual, interhuman, social
I need to go back and read Buber and see if he denied the validity of the I-It relationship. If he did, I disagree with him. As important as I-Thou is, I-It cannot be reduced to a mere corruption of I-Thou. * I-It is what mediates our I-Thou relationships. In my view I-Thou deepens in … Continue reading “To keep you is no benefit.”
I knew a dude (in the most precise sense) in high school who spelled out “Angus Van Osbourne” on his chest with band-aids, and then laid out in the sun in order to inverse-tan the words into his skin. (For the uninitiated, this was a concatenation of the names of the reigning trinity of hard … Continue reading Angus Van Osbourne
There is a huge difference between someone who seeks ways to measure things and someone who rejects the existence of anything he cannot measure. Measuring is a mysterious activity. * A Romantic correctly notes that some things are beyond the grasp of cognition, and positively values these things. The commonest form of Romantic, however, proceeds … Continue reading Overcoming Romanticism
Mediocre – ORIGIN late 16th cent.: from French médiocre, from Latin mediocris ‘of middle height or degree,’ literally ‘somewhat rugged or mountainous,’ from medius ‘middle’ + ocris ‘rugged mountain.’ Excellent – ORIGIN late Middle English : from Latin excellentia, from the verb excellere ‘surpass’, from ex– ‘out, beyond’ + celsus ‘lofty.’ * Are the excellent … Continue reading The rugged many, the vulnerable few
Yesterday I wrote this: Love is the active desire to share a world, to see with. Love pursues the accomplishment of perfect sharing despite futility. Some will point out the futility and on that basis to give up the pursuit, but this happens when love is lacking. – Would someone who loves chocolate refuse to … Continue reading Perfection
In “‘From the Native’s Point of View’: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding” Clifford Geertz outlines a fundamental concept of anthropology: The formulations have been various: “inside” versus “outside,” or “first person” versus “third person” descriptions; “phenomenological” versus “objectivist,” or “cognitive” versus “behavioral” theories; or, perhaps most commonly, “emic” versus “etic” analyses, this last deriving … Continue reading Notes on emic versus etic
Have you ever been in a conversation like this? You are trying to make yourself understood to another person. He is listening very carefully, responding point by point, and each point makes sense… but somehow you know you are not really being heard. You attempt to express this feeling. The response is something to the … Continue reading Dialogue and debate
Bernstein: … the notion of dialogue has been present from the very beginning of Gadamer’s discussion of play as the “clue to ontological explanation.” When one enters into a dialogue with another person and then is carried further by the dialogue, it is no longer the will of the individual person, holding itself back … Continue reading Primacy of dialogue
I think I took more from Gadamer than I realized. I think I may have introjected that understanding into my reading of Buber, too, though I am not sure how much. * Some distinctions: 1) an empathetic, reconstructive understanding of the subjectivity (that is the way of seeing) of fellow-subjects 2) a sympathetic, participatory understanding … Continue reading People inside-outside
I had another amazing morning reading Bernstein. As I’ve said before, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism triggered a major turning point in my intellectual life. Rereading it, I’ll also say it is one of the clearest, most insightful and most useful books I’ve ever read. I meant to post some excerpts from what I read this … Continue reading The books of my life
One of my favorite philosophical feelings is looking out on the world and seeing every relevant problem roughly settled. Unknowns and dangers remain, but everything is in its place, doing what it must do and ought to do. I think this is the feeling happy old men have when they walk around on land they … Continue reading Feeling panoptic
I have to learn to live on terms with the social, as opposed to the inter-human, to use Buber’s incredibly valuable distinction. I’ve tried to avoid and hide from and otherwise escape the social. I tried to pull a fast one and conflate the inter-human for the authentically social. I’ve tried to morally deny it … Continue reading Being social
Buber and Levinas make me feel very Jewish. I am tempted to say that I am already Jewish, but then I catch myself. To say that my disposition toward Judaism already qualifies me as being Jewish is to succumb to the excessive theorizing tendency of Protestant Christianity. In Judaism as I understand it, the Jewish … Continue reading Not Jewish yet
Nietzsche: Always at home. – One day we reach our goal — and now we point with pride to the long journeys we took to reach it. In truth we did not notice we were traveling. But we got so far because at each point we believed we were at home. * Rumi (yet again): … Continue reading On the horizons of the yet-unknowable
I picked through several books today without getting traction in any one of them. I started with Richard J. Bernstein’s The New Constellation: Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity looking for references to Martin Buber and Emanuel Levinas (who is generally considered Buber’s heir). I was looking for a summary of their differences, mostly to see if … Continue reading The I, the We, the Other, and transcendence
Excerpt from Buber’s “Elements of the Interhuman”: But what does it mean to be ‘aware’ of a man in the exact sense in which I use the word? To be aware of a thing or a being means, in quite general terms, to experience it as a whole and yet at the same time without … Continue reading Empathy and holism
I just finished rereading Buber’s “Distance and Relation”, and it made me want to list the ways other people can exist to one another. * Another person can be nonexistent, latent in the environment: unnoticed, in blind irrelevance. Another person can exist as an object that emerges from the environment: noticed, but relevant functionally, not … Continue reading Reflection on “Distance and Relation”
Some ideas I find myself reconsidering regularly, from oldest to newest: A fragment from one of Rilke’s letters, on the need for a lover to love the distance between himself and the beloved Zeno’s paradoxes C. S. Lewis’s “Meditation in a Toolshed” Dostoevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor” With the first three, reconsideration usually means renewed hostility … Continue reading Day and night