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Title: I and Thou by Martin Buber, Ronald Gregor Smith ISBN: 0-7432-0133-7 Publisher: Scribner Pub. Date: June, 2000 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.17 (24 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Spirituality Palatable to Even the Crankiest of Aetheists
Comment: Martin Buber has achieved something amazing in this slim book. All you really need to read is Part One of I and Thou (more appropriately translated as 'I and You' in my opinion) to understand his very practical philosophy. There is more profundity in those 30 pages than in all the religious / "metaphysical studies" / spirituality aisle books you'll ever see.
For some reason, Buber is always shelved under Judaica, when Philosophy seems like a better place for him, but anyway don't be scared off by the religious categorization. This book is as secular as they come, and therefore safe for the avowed atheists out there.
Anyway, after reading enormous doses of literature, and a pretty good smattering of Western philosophy, this was the first book to have simple, applicable advice; it is at one and the same time a metaphysical system and a doctrine of how to live the good life. As far as I know, these two branches of philosophy usually seem pretty far apart, except in religion, in which case you are forced to accept absurdities as the price of this marriage.
Buber is neither an optimist nor a pessimist. He's an existentialist but I find him more 'useful' than other Ex's because his theory is not just a laying bare of hypocrisy -- Buber actually gives you a way of taking positive action to enrich your life.
Lest you misunderstand this convoluted review, there is nothing Anthony Robbins-ish about Buber. He's not a rah-rah go team life coach lightweight.
Just read it.
Rating: 4
Summary: very good
Comment: Fascinating, dynamic little book. Buber's perspective on spirituality is very non-dogmatic and refreshing.
Rating: 1
Summary: the world of the You as mythopeotic
Comment: Buber argues that there is a separate world, called the I-You, where humanity has the potential to live in relationships that are perfectly connected. Before individuals enter the I-You world, they must first reside in the I-It world where we see other people as objects for our own experience. Rather than knowing people in their entirety, we perceive specific aspects about them. In the I-It world humanity lives in time and space with a distinct border between each individual. The I in the I-It world is the I of the ego whose existence is defined by "setting themselves apart from other egos" by creating status differences among each other. In the I-You world, rather than experience each other, we have relation with each other. Buber defines relation as never dependency, but always reciprocity. In this perfect relationship both sides know everything about each other rather than just particular aspects. There are no borders between people. The I in the I-You world is a whole person. Buber is careful to distinguish the person from the ego: "The person says, 'I am'; the ego says, 'That is how I am.' 'Know thyself' means to the person: know yourself as being. To the ego it means: know your being-that-way."
I do not think that the I-You world, as Buber defines it, exists. One problem to consider is that of knowledge. To assert that we can know a whole person is very problematic. Buber does not hedge his words in this matter: "for what, then, does one Know of the You? Only everything. For one no longer knows particulars." Forget, for a moment, the problems of knowledge in general. Buber is treating both the I and the You as unrealistically monolithic. We debate internally the meaning of our own person. On what side of that debate should the You take? Nor does Buber's work account for the barriers that we erect when we send out false images of ourselves to others. Who do we reciprocate relation with: another person's carefully crafted image of himself or his hidden, true self?
There can be no distinction between the world of the It and the world of the You because of the problem of ends. Buber uses more favorable language to describe the world of the You while using pejorative language to describe the world of the It. In this way he indirectly implies that we should favor the You, but Buber never provides an argument that one is better than the other. Why would one want to live in the I-You world? The reader ought to pause for a moment and answer that. Whatever answer the reader comes up with is an end. That makes the world of the I-You a means toward that end or in Buber's lexicon: an object.
Another characteristic of the world of the It that the You cannot escape is experience. Buber casts experience and relation as two mutually exclusive worlds. Only objects can be experienced, so the world of relationship is therefore forced beyond the realm of experience. The problem here is that all things that exist must also be experienced at some point, by someone. This is more than just the limits of Western empiricism. When people talk about matters of faith that exist beyond the confines of the test tube, they are not saying that such things can never be experienced, because they are not trying to turn the object of their faith into something other than an object. People of faith argue that the properties of their belief either cannot be experienced at this moment or cannot under present conditions. Once the time or conditions have changed, then faith is no longer required.
The unstoppable force of economic growth sets up an inevitable social decline in the conditions that support Buber's fragile I-You relationships. He connects economic growth and the accumulation of wealth as an "increase of the It-world" and a threat to relation. After introducing this problem, Buber argues against pessimism from a cyclical understanding of history. Buber sees wealth accumulation as limited to what he calls sick times, implying a pendulum will eventually swing back to more healthy, frugal, and simple times. Buber clearly got this one wrong. While the global economy does experience a business cycle that punctuates leaps in growth with temporary retrenchment, the long-term reality is an ever growing expansion of the I-It world.
At the time, Buber was not a lone voice against the economic structure of society. Socialists, who wanted to see less of the same wealth accumulation that concerned Buber, were advocating public ownership of the means of production so that the coercive power of the state would enforce equality and relationship reciprocity in society. Buber opposed them. He found the inevitable growth in political power of a socialist state as an equal threat to the I-You world that simply replaced the "will to profit" with the "will to power." Either market forces or the technocrats who try to stop them will continue to grow and crowd out the world of the I-You even if such a world existed.
The I-You world, as Buber defines it, does not exist because of the problem of knowing others, all relationships are means, all relationships are experiences, and economic growth will continue to crowd it out, but I do not want to say that Buber has nothing to offer. If we collapse the world of the I-You into the I-It, that does not mean that relationships become dirty. We need to stop looking at the world of the It as something bad. We need to begin accepting selfishness, and stop creating mythopoetic notions of altruism as a human ideal beyond the reach of the less enlightened. Then we will see that economic growth does not threaten relationships, it makes them more valuable. Satiated material desires will demand more challenges, and there is nothing more challenging than getting to know someone's true self.
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Title: Good and Evil by Martin Buber ISBN: 0023162805 Publisher: Prentice Hall Pub. Date: 01 December, 1980 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Between Man and Man (Routledge Classics) by Martin Buber, Ronald Gregor-Smith, Maurice Friedman ISBN: 0415278279 Publisher: Routledge Pub. Date: 03 May, 2002 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: The Way of Man: According to the Teaching of Hasidism by Martin Buber ISBN: 0806500247 Publisher: Lyle Stuart Hardcover Pub. Date: May, 1995 List Price(USD): $6.95 |
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Title: The Courage to Be by Paul Tillich, Peter J. Gomes ISBN: 0300084714 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: August, 2000 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: God in Search of Man : A Philosophy of Judaism by Abraham Joshua Heschel ISBN: 0374513317 Publisher: Noonday Press Pub. Date: 01 June, 1976 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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