See also the preview for this review.
I wrote the notes for this review quite a while ago, but didn't write the review right after reading the book. This may have been somewhat of a mistake, as I now am not connected to the material and can't add much beyond the notes. But luckily my notes have somewhat of a conclusion to them, and so maybe it is somewhat as though I have written the review already.
--
[Notes:]
Thoughts after reading Maurice Friedman's introduction:
Friedman (p. xiv) says
Not every relation between persons is an I-Thou one, nor is every relation with an animal or thing an I-It. The difference, rather, is in the relationship itself. I-Thou is a relationship of openness, directness, mutuality, and presence. It may be between man and man, but it may also take place with a tree, a cat, a fragment of mica, a work of art -- and through all these with God, the "eternal Thou" in whom the parallel lines of relation meet.This makes "I-Thou" sound understandable to me. I don't remember it being that clear when I read I and Thou, but maybe it was there all along. If I take it as a fairly faithful representation of I and Thou, I would say that I experience I-Thou relating fairly commonly and that it is not an exceptional state. Except, when it comes to people. I find that I tend to see people in terms of how I am afraid of them or how I could use them, or how I desire them, or in some way or another I have an automatic agenda with respect to them. But I don't have this kind of agenda toward plants or inanimate objects, and I don't think I usually have this toward animals.
I find even when opening the door to leave a room, that I approach it with openness, directness, mutuality, and presence. (I don't see it as I-It even when I'm using it instrumentally.) I think, because I see it as the unmediated speech of God and so simply part of my relationship with God, like any other speech between him and me, and toward God I have (maybe Buber would say, I must have) a relationship of openness, directness, mutuality, and presence. The world is just God's speech -- except, where some being who is other than God is asserting themselves in such a way that God fades to the background and I must relate to them instead of God. Then all the agenda-thinking comes in.
Simantic words are the beings which God speaks, but I suppose to be more accurate, there is a component of what comes from people which those people speak as well, although a lot of what comes into my experience body from them is not 100% of their willing. When I see the simantic word of a person, it is loaded, like a loaded term that a person handles carefully to avoid controversy. But God, plants, (all or almost all) animals, bricks, asphalt, the sun, etc. are unloaded simantic words. All words have connotations, but some of them have such connotations that they are loaded.
(One inanimate object that I do find loaded is my laptop. Maybe because so much human speech comes through it, and so much of my own speech goes out through it, so it has become "humanized" to me.)
I think most people are naturally addicted to people and warp themselves and their view of reality to fit what some group "wants" them to believe. Our people-addiction causes us to have agendas for the people around us. Or agendas of getting away from them as fear-objects. We are so addicted to them that we fear them, even beyond whatever objective risk they may pose us with physical weapons. And thus if they rule us we are unable to see them as people. Prosociality makes it so you have to love the people around you, but since you don't choose to love them, it's not really you who loves them. So we are urged to love people, but that urge to love, if external, or internalized, is an obsessing, controlling force, an externalized or internal addiction, and it prevents us from really loving people.
This amounts to a bitter critique of (a) humanism. Can I offer anything better than that humanism? One thing I can offer is to say that being alone is fine. You're not going to die. You have to be weaned from your human addiction first, though, or else it might not work out. It helps to seek to love God, and to come to see the phenomenal world as spoken by him. When you live in a default state of "I-thou" connection with God, then you can be alone as much as you want.
The alternative to prosocial humanism isn't "ego" or insanity in a world where you are the only one who exists, but rather to become in tune with God on the level of phenomenal presence, where every experience is a message from God. You can be fed as much from God alone as from other people. Then, you don't have to be addicted to them.
There is some danger that if you are not addicted to people, they can't be used as tools to force you to grow up. Maybe people-addiction is a necessary slavery to help you grow closer to God? But it seems that there should be a more Millennial way to learn, and that God prefers to teach us things that way, because he dislikes the brutality of our lives as much as we do, and more so. Why can't God just guide us gently to learn directly from him? Why use people as bludgeons and acids on us? Maybe the problem is in us, to make us need people. But otherwise, I think that a person by themselves (with God), with perhaps some kind of food for thought, or perhaps either internalized or written-down Scripture, could learn the lessons of holiness, without other people being involved. Maybe when there is something "rough and uncomprehending" in us, like a sheep, we need to be treated like an animal. But we are sons and daughters of God, and we don't have to be animals (or children) all our lives -- instead, always children of God, but adult children instead. Perhaps some people need other people to help them overcome their sins. But it's better not to to take the rough and random path of a sheep, and instead to walk on the trail or road.
I do think it's possible that people need people because for some reason God is prevented from talking to us gently and directly, by some kind of negotiation with Satan. But then, like any other slavery, that's something to be escaped when possible, and considered lamentable when not possible.
--
Sidebar: Thinking about addiction. I see a moderate Internet addiction in me. Trying ways to control that. Social media is addictive because we're addicted to people and information. I have to use social media (more or less) for practical purposes. But it's bad.
I grew up without a TV in the house. Someone I knew had a TV growing up but could only watch -- one hour a day? One hour a week? I don't remember exactly. Maybe I could try something like that with social media.
People who quit nicotine do other things to sort of exercise the habit. Looking at Indonesian Wikipedia is still a grabbing for information. But it feels less "loaded" or "Doritos-y" because the language isn't worn in to my mind, and the random pages I see talk about things that I'm not normally into sometimes.
--
Now I've read up to the end of the first part, "Dialogue". I had thoughts after the first section within the part, but forgot them before I had the chance to write them down, and my mind was not deeply impressed by them, I guess. I do remember thinking that Buber's basic philosophy articulates fairly well with simantism, could be a module added on to MSLN. I just read the second two sections, and didn't have as many thoughts. I think maybe sometime in the future I'll come back to the first section and see what I think -- maybe recover some of those thoughts I had -- but for now I'll move on.
Overall, it seems like Buber is preaching to the choir to people nowadays. I think to actually practice "dialogue" is not always done. But he sounds like a fairly mainstream humanist to my ears, though he expresses himself in a non-mainstream, philosophical way.
I like Buber more as a portal into the concept of wordless dialogue, and thus into relating to God, as part of epistemic and ethical theism. Also, it's interesting to think about how Buber's concepts of dialogue and being whole-souled would apply to nations. Can two nations experience an analogue of Buberian dialogue? Could a nation be whole-souled? It would have to be, I think, to be engage in what could be called Buberian international dialogue.
But, interpersonal relationships are important, and maybe it's good to hear his sermon again. (As though maybe a message starts off fresh / alien and fully confrontational and communicative, and then that exact message when it has become standard, assimilated, uncontroversial / familiar, is spoken to a "choir" ("preaching to the choir"), becomes a sermon.)
--
up to p. 54 (The Question to the Single One, The Single One and his Thou)
Buber has been talking about how Kierkegaard seemed to think you should only address God as Thou (make God first relationally? Or even significant at all above a certain threshold?). Kierkegaard chooses renunciation (of Regine Olsen) so that he can love God.
On p. 54, Buber asks:
--Who is there who confesses the God whom Kierkegaard
and I confess, who could suppose in decisive insight that God wants
Thou to be truly said only to him, and to all others only an
unessential and fundamentally invalid word -- that God demands of us
to choose between him and his creation?--
Does Buber need God to be such that he does not demand of us to choose between him and his creation? I don't know if this is maybe a difference between a Jewish and Christian approach to things. Buber was certainly well-read in Christianity and allowed himself to be influenced by non-Jewish thoughts, so maybe a Christian approach to things via the cross would not be foreign to him after all. But maybe it would. And Kierkegaard, from my perspective not fully knowing his work but having some familiarity with it and his life story, seems particularly valuable as an example of someone living out the cross. When the Romans come to burn the early Christians, the early Christians have a choice: God, or life? This choice could be seen as: God, or creation?, in that life is created by God and full of his creations. What kind of Christian can choose life over a death for God without shuddering at the betrayal? So for a Christian (or an aspiring Christian, perhaps) like Kierkegaard, it is a bit frightening to think of choosing creation over God. Even a Jew wouldn't want to make creation an idol. Maybe Buber would answer (as I think he does, in a way) that loving creation and loving God are inseparable. As though it is only possible to love God through creation.
I know from personal experience that it is possible to love God apart from love of creation. Maybe Buber had never experienced that. Maybe Kierkegaard had, and maybe had to "renounce" Regine (as if she were his prize) in order to learn it.
If you have to have creation, or you have to have renunciation, either of them seem like things that could turn out to be spiritually dangerous to you, keep you from fully loving God. It depends on the person as to which is more dangerous than the other.
I don't think that creation is something to not love at all. I think it should be loved like you love yourself, sort of in the background or as instrumental to your journey toward God. To help someone else on their journey is worth doing. But basically, I think everything should be oriented toward God. There should be an intimacy that each person has with God and not with anyone else.
I don't know about saying "an unessential and fundamentally invalid word" -- I wouldn't say that second place is that bad a prize for each person to take, while God takes first place. I tend to think that good love of people is a mixture of high-quality love, pristine like water from a mountain spring, and equally high-quality, pristine and clear, indifference. For me, I and the people around me, are bit players in my life story, as I would like to be in theirs, who do not need complex characterization, do not have to have our natures disclosed to the point of inciting intense will.
However, I understand that this is my perspective, and goes along with my more-monastic / celibate life experiences and preferences. Maybe I'm not as solitary as Kierkegaard? So I'm somewhere between Buber and Kierkegaard? But I think I lean more toward Kierkegaard in this.
I would guess that Buber, Kierkegaard, and I are/were all introverts. But, perhaps Buber was not as much an introvert as I am -- maybe Kierkegaard takes the prize of "most introverted", although when he was younger, he went out a lot. I don't want to "legislate" from the perspective of my own personal preferences. Maybe it's best for the "Buberians" to see the world in a more Buber-like way, and for the "Kierkegaardians" to see the world in a more Kierkegaard-like way. I would still want to emphasize that despite personal temperament and life situations, making creation (or specific creations) into an idol is a real spiritual danger, one which even a "Buberian" should be careful to avoid. It's possible that I'm misinterpreting Buber, but I feel like he might be insisting that we can't renounce creation, and that feels dangerously close to saying we have to have it, and thus need it to be saved. I think that as long as a person loves God and is willing to go all the way to fully loving God, God is all they need.
But now I think about it, and I think maybe I could agree with Buber's emphasis on creation if we assume that human beings only become more holy through some kind of communication from God, and that the only way to communicate is through simantic words, each of which is a union of noetic relations and phenomenal content, which is about as much "created; a creation" as anything can be. Some kind of creation is necessary as a tool for God to communicate with us, and after all, both we and God are made out of simantic words. So maybe I don't see as strict a division between God and creation.
However, I think the blurring of God and creation is valid only on one level of reality (maybe that of "immaterialism"), while the difference, in a easygoing way, is seen on another (that of "simantism"), while the difference is seen in a sharper and starker way on yet another (that of "legitimism"). In other words, we all might be part of the same pages and have the same ink on us, us and God being one book. But the ink communicates words and characters doing things, and these have a distinct reality as they relate to each other. And then some words and characters refer to beings which are foundational to the whole book and who are in some sense higher (or truer) than all others. And within the story, the difference between the different characters is there.
--
p. 62 (The Question to the Single One, The Single One and the Body Politic)
Buber says something like "marriage and being part of the body politic are ways that you are forced to confront others as others". Is this a good thing? How good is it, if it is good? Is it a necessary thing? If necessary, is it a praiseworthy thing or a necessary evil, or more or less neutral, or mixed?
I think if the greatest spiritual danger is egoism, then all manner of being bound to people and forced to deal with them so that you see other people as other is maybe necessary. And I think egoism can get in the way of people loving God. In other words, if you're stuck in yourself, then you can't seek God. Maybe you can be broken out of yourself by being forced to confront people deeply. Will you then go to seek God? Some people will, some people won't. I think the greatest spiritual danger is to not love God with all of your being. So making "marriage and dealing with the body politic" a big deal is potentially misleading by emphasizing an instrumental means to loving God as an end in itself. I'm not sure that Buber makes this mistake, exactly, but I feel like his text emphasizes the humanist angle to this question, which I think does push on "you need to confront other people to see them as others through marriage or the body politic in order to be saved".
Marriage has its challenges, but so does celibacy. I would read the challenges of marriage not as essentially being most valuable as ways of teaching you to see the other as other and thus to get out of egoism, but to be sources of disestablishedness, which enable us to seek God. Celibacy can be a source of disestablishedness as well.
Marriage brings with it a kind of unfreedom -- either your spouse restrains you from being yourself, or along with your spouse you are incentivized to remain whatever self you've negotiated yourselves to become together. Maybe you can change, together, or become an ideal together, but there's an obvious danger to "regressing to the mean" if you can't intentionally coordinate your spiritual movements. The mean says "do what's default in your culture" and if the two of you can't both pick the same non-default to go down, you won't support each other, or even might undermine each other, but you will tend to continue to support the default in each other.
Celibacy brings with it a kind of poverty. Speaking generally, a celibate person is free, but poor, while a married person is wealthy, but unfree. Poverty causes the celibate person to seek God, while unfreedom causes the married person to seek God. There is trouble in the celibate's life as well as in the married person's life, and that trouble can disestablish, leading to the opportunity to be close to God.
I'll guess, maybe following Buber, that one can draw an analogy between participation in the body politic and marriage, that it has similar attractions, troubles, upsides, and downsides.
p. 62
--But to this we are led by marriage, if it is real, with a
power for which there is scarcely a substitute, by its steady
experiencing of the life-substance of the other as other, and still
more by its crises and the overcoming of them which rises out of
the organic depths, whenever the monster of otherness, which blew
on us with its icy demon's breath and now is redeemed by our risen
affirmation of the other, which knows and destroys all negation,
is transformed into the mighty angel of union of which we
dreamed in our mother's womb.--
--
pp. 62 - 65 (still in the The Single One and the Body Politic section)
Buber goes on to say something like that the body politic consists both of the "near-neighbor" (my term) or "private sphere" (Buber's term) connections, at such a small scale that you can really feel how you are a part of it and also relate to all the members as individual people; and also the "public sphere" (Buber's term), where you can't grasp the individuality or concreteness of each person.
One of them lends itself to being "the crowd" that Kierkegaard doesn't like (the public sphere), but the other doesn't (the private sphere). Buber says "the crowd" happens when people are caught up in a mass moment, like with some protests, or when public opinion invalidates private opinion, where people give up their own thinking to fit in. Buber does see the danger in this, but thinks that the body politic goes beyond this "crowd".
I don't know what Kierkegaard meant by "the crowd is untruth", but a possible way that "crowd" can be "untruth" (or at least "untrustworthy in a way related to knowing and believing") is when you outsource your responsibility to know the truth and to relate to God, yourself, to the people around you. You go to church and the church worships God, but you don't. Or you only do with part of your being and sort of "go along with the ride" of the church. Or you are part of a small group of friends, and you find yourself filled by your conviviality and your particularness, but that filling keeps you from really hungering for God and/or the truth. It isn't exactly fair to call the "near-neighbors" of Buber's private sphere a "crowd", but I can see how Kierkegaard's "Single One" should still be concerned about Buber's private sphere with all its belonging and concreteness, with its temptation to keep the Single One from really directly facing and seeking God and the truth.
--
I don't want to make it sound like singleness, celibacy, poverty, etc. are completely safe, in contrast to conviviality, marriage, and wealth. I do think that the latter three are more appealing and therefore tempting than the former three. But, single, celibate, poor people should be aware that in their isolation and poverty, they are likely to do things that are desperate, or be tempted to doing those things. Hunger taken generally is good because one of the hungers is the hunger for God and truth. But there are specific hungers which are bad, or even not worth feeling.
It is always possible to favor singleness, celibacy, and poverty over God, and to not obey God's specific desires for how we are supposed to work for him, because of those biases. I think that it's tempting to think that when life seems to make sense, it reflects God's will. I think there's something to that heuristic that when life draws you toward something that is on some level positive, it's God's will for you, but it may not be the basically positive thing that God really wants for you. You may find yourself drawn toward a providentially-ordained-looking job, for instance, and think that it was God who ordained it through all the events of timing, and "opened doors", through which it came. And, given your heart and your previous life choices, it probably was God saying, this is my plan for you, accept it. But if you had a more faithful heart or made better decisions in the past, you might have been given something else, which God would have liked better. God makes life choices make sense to us, often, by blessing us, because that's how we trust him and how our motivations flow. We conceive of blessing, more automatically, through the lens of conviviality, marriage, and wealth. So we are probably biased, more often, to think that conviviality, marriage, and wealth go along with doing God's will, when that may not be the case.
Still, it could be the case that God wants a celibate person to marry in order to work for God better, as much as it could be the case that God wants a person seeking marriage to choose to be celibate instead, in order to work for God better.
--
Finished The Question to the Single One.
I have to say that I have only been reading in a somewhat superficial way. Something about Buber's writing style defeats my attempts to read it. When I look carefully, it seems like he uses understandable words with understandable grammar, but somehow I have a hard time connecting with his sentences. Maybe in some cases he's writing about realities which I have not seen? I suspect that my own writing is in some way not fully readable to everyone.
--
Read Education.
Similarly hard to connect with Buber's sentences here. I did find it somewhat helpful to read the writing under my breath.
Had some good ideas, and may be worth reading if you're interested
in education. The part that stood out to me most was this (p. 98;
the eighth "conglomeration of paragraphs":)
--The relation in education is one of pure dialogue.
--I have referred to the child, lying with half-closed eyes waiting for his mother to speak to him. But many children do not need to wait, for they know that they are unceasingly addressed in a dialogue which never breaks off. In face of the lonely night which threatens to invade, they lie preserved and guarded, invulnerable, clad in the silver mail of trust.
--Trust, trust in the world, because this human being exists -- that is the most inward achievement of the relation in education. Because this human being exists, meaninglessness, however hard pressed you are by it, cannot be the real truth. Because the human being exists, in the darkness the light lies hidden, in fear salvation, and in the callousness of one's fellow-men the great Love.--
To me it seems that this means something like "a teacher, though supposedly they are teaching a subject, is really becoming a sort of figure in the inner landscape of a child, enabling the child to trust". The child is able to have "security trusting" (Joseph Godfrey's term from Trust of People, Words, and God), trust in the universe as a whole, because a human steps in to perform a certain role, by being a certain person who happens to be put in the child's life in order to teach a subject.
When a student learns, they are the ones who teach themselves, and the teacher can only help so far. So the student must trust enough to take the chance of being wrong, or of stepping out into "darkness" (all the confusing and unknown things which make up the world before we learn) to make it into "light" (clarity and knowledge). To existentially trust, overall, enables self-trust, and trust of the educational process, so that oneself and one's task of learning can be connected with.
The image of a "dialogue that never breaks off" is how I experience my relationship with God. In a way it does have interruptions, like how the mother isn't constantly with the child (I would suppose) in Buber's image. But it also doesn't. I don't think this dialogue is something I can completely take for granted, but I do think that in reality it has been going on my whole life, at some level or other, whether I realized it or not. I can't take for granted that I will always be open to God or be on the path to being open to God. But God is always open to me, unless and until I completely reject him.
I think it's appealing to think of the child relating to the mother (and thus each person relating to God) according to a purely wordless dialogue. Buber is particularly valuable as someone who points out that wordless dialogue happens. But mothers are persons and not just "eternal Thous", and as persons, they may say something (with words), that a child needs to hear, understand, and perhaps obey. Similarly with God. We need to trust God in how he supports us, in some ways wordlessly, and also to trust his words which tell us what he values, what he commands, and who he is.
It is safe to assume that if you completely trust God and follow him, you will be safe in the end. But part of trusting God involves going out to look for the words which he has already spoken, and learning the principles with which we can identify those words when they are present all around us. So we have to take action, and often initiative, in trusting God. Also, trusting God is something we have to consciously renew at some points, and there is danger there.
--
Read The Education of Character.
This is the most clearly-written part (at least to me). I think for many people it would be the best thing to read first of this book. If they like it, they could read the preceding parts which reinforce it, and if they want further reinforcement, they could read I and Thou.
I can see applications to cultural altruism. It occurs to me that one way to try to solve the problem of determining the best values is to see what kind of people we have to be to really teach values. The values of good teachers are the right ones for everyone to have. Buber's text might support "being whole-souled", or maybe a little further from his wording and maybe not 100% the same concept, but one which goes along with it "not being fake" / "being real". I don't know that a "morality of good teaching" determines enough, but it seems like it is a good thing to make sure is in your axiology.
Politics is culture war, but what if it were conceived of as education? Could political people become educators?
--
Reflecting a bit before going on in the book...
One danger of being into Buber's philosophy is that if you are really into the concrete personal being in front of you, then you will reshape your mind somewhat to only be attuned to concrete personal beings in front of you, and you may neglect distant or future people, or God.
I don't know if this is fair to apply to Buber himself, but I get the feeling when I read his philosophy that it would appeal to and encourage people who tend to think that to love God reduces to loving people. Certainly, when you love people in a concrete, personal, instinctual way, that love is much heavier and real-seeming than the love you might try to have for God. But is that compelling feeling trustworthy? The compelling feeling a young man has that he will marry "Alice" is also what he will later feel for "Brenda", "Calypso", "Diana", and "Elysia". And he won't marry any of them and in many cases, it never would have been a good idea if he had. Or the compelling feeling of shame and failure someone may feel may seem persuasive and true, but they shouldn't kill themselves. The feeling that you are going to marry someone someday is beautiful, and the feeling that you are shameful and a failure is (brutally) real, and weighty. Is it the case that if you feel a compelling feeling for the concrete person in front of you that is beautiful and real, you have found the truth? Or is it still possible for that to be misleading in some way? Could it be that loving people is a subset of love, and that you need to love God as well? Or do we simply know, in a wordless way, that concrete personal love is the highest, when we feel it, and because we know it wordlessly, no words can speak against it?
Maybe practically speaking it's easy to deal with this dilemma by pointing out that for people to have true well-being, they need to love God, and they need to love as God loves. For us, this means that we must both love in the concrete personal way, and love the distant and future beings, because God loves in a concrete personal way, and God also loves all beings, including those distant to us, and future beings. I'm not sure Buber would object to this, but I think the emphasis of his writing could appeal to or motivate people who don't see things this way.
A related danger is that because of Buber's emphasis on the concrete personal, and finding God in ordinary lived life, one might think that this life is all that matters, and the first death is all that matters. I think human instincts say very clearly that the first death matters. Caring about the second death is physically more difficult, but (I think) if you think, you will see that the second death matters, and matters far more than the first death. It can be difficult to reconcile the compelling instinctual moment with its heavy, loud speech with the quiet voice that you have to work to obey. Going with your instincts feels more natural and even humble, more honest. Using those three feelings as criteria can help you avoid bad thinking sometimes. But if your instincts are out of touch with reality, the naturalness, humility, and honesty you feel can be misleading.
--
Caring about the second death is something that (some) teachers do. Do healers do it? Buber seems like he would appeal to the helping professions, to teachers and social workers, but also doctors and especially therapists and psychiatrists. It seems that the whole mindset of a healer (which Buber's philosophy fits into well) is a powerful one, but if it's focused primarily or exclusively on the first death, it is a dangerously misleading one.
One might say that healing precedes teaching. If you have a terrible stomachache, you probably can't learn most lessons. I can see that, but I suspect that the process of healing can involve some hidden tradeoff, the signing of some hidden contract.
One hidden contract can be that you "have to" adopt the identity of a sick person. You have to say "I am a sick person in need of help." You have to make the inner part of you, your "I", or even "I"-saying, sick, and then (ideally), you can get healing of all the flesh and clothes around that inner part. Are you ever allowed to say "Okay, I'm not a sick person in need of help anymore, I'm out of here."? Some healers (and parts of "health culture") let you do it. But others don't want you to.
Is this a problem? If you adopt the identity of "I am a sick person in need of help", it does things to you. You are fearful, guilty, needy and thus unhappy, and you don't trust yourself. You adopt the identity of a small person, and not a large person. This mentality keeps you from fighting evil most effectively. All you can do is heal and need, you can't be a soldier. It inhibits vision. It may pave the way to giving in to some temptations. You may feel a need to control or infect people who are healthy in the way that you are not, because you think that it's morally wrong for people to think they are healthy, even if by making them think they are unhealthy, they become unhealthy.
I would say that I'm okay with valuing healing if it produces that innermost healing, but even being healthy in that way doesn't necessarily make you a good person. But what if healing could actually end up causing people to be holy?
The trick is that healing is something that can be done to someone, and can be passively received. If you have an abscess, you could be in a coma and someone could remove it, and you could benefit from that operation, without even consenting to it. But the critical element of morality, of coming into tune with God, is that it is something you do yourself. To turn toward God is an action you must take. Nobody can make you take that action, or engineer that action in you. You must consciously do it yourself. So the healing of the innermost person may be helpful because when that part is healed, it is easier (I think) to say "I can do things", among those things, to repent. But, of course, this kind of healing only leads people to the water, and they can choose not to drink. Maybe teaching leads them closer to the water, and should be provided, but they still can choose not to drink.
--
Thinking about Buber overall, makes me think about the Kantian idea that one should treat people as ends and not as means. I feel like I exist as means and not as an end, and I naturally see the people around me as means. We are all background characters in each other's stories, and the real story is how each of us seeks God. I exist as means to the end of other people being means. I am means toward the interests of Legitimacy. I will always be means for that and I will never be done with that. Legitimacy is what is most valuable, and so I will always be an instrument toward it/him/them. Legitimacy is a person and a community of persons. The "head of state" and "head of government" of Legitimacy is God. We will always be means toward the (ongoing) end of what is really right, and what is really right is a person.
I'm not sure what Buber would make of that last paragraph. I haven't read I and Thou in a long time, so there are probably details to what Buber says there -- possibly details in the first part of Between Man and Man that I missed or have already forgotten -- which close off some degrees of freedom in what I can say about Buber with respect to this question, but I can say a few provisional things now. Buber has "I-Thou" relations and "I-It", as though we relate to people as ends in themselves without agendas, or as parts of our agendas. But I perhaps want to say that there is some kind of relationship whereby another person is part of God's agenda, and I am part of God's agenda. If "God's agenda" is really just my agenda, then I think effectively that's an I-It relationship. But if "God's agenda" is something that is out of my control, then maybe it's closer to an I-Thou relationship. But that other person does not exist in a freestanding way, and neither do I. This way, there is always a purpose to people, always an ethical orientation, and people never exist in their own rights, but are inherently oriented toward God. Does God relate to people in an I-Thou way if they must be oriented toward his agenda? The idea of Legitimacy says that God and God's agenda are one thing. So an agenda can relate personally to people, at least, God can. But I think God's relationships with us would be either a mix of I-Thou and I-It, or something else orthogonal to those categories.
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Finished reading Part 5: What is Man?, Section One: The Progress of the Question.
I guess my main response is to think about the ideas of cosmos, infinity, and the asking of the question "what is man?". Buber sees a pattern where people find a way to fit man into the cosmos, giving them security, and then they don't deeply ask the question "what is man?". Some people, though, see infinity and man has no place in the cosmos, or stands out, or is alone in some way and is forced to see himself in a strange or alien way, asking "what is man?".
The MSLN response, I could say, is that the cosmos is just God and you, and peripherally the other people connected to God. The cosmos is also what God speaks to you. So there is a two-fold cosmos. In the base reality, you, God, and each other person, all is finite. But God can speak the simantic word of infinity to you. And you and he will experience it to the full. God feels the depth that you feel when you ask "who am I?" or "what is man?", though he knows more about you or about humans, all that there is to know. He is as bewildered as you are, and perhaps he wonders sometimes "who am I?" or "what is God?", even if he knows all the facts that can be known about himself, and understands how those facts work together. He may not be ignorant about himself the way that we usually are, but still find his own existence to be a thing of wonder, that is even heartbreaking.
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Thinking back to the "Kierkegaard / Buber debate". I take "Kierkegaard" to be a representative of "sometimes you need to renounce the people you love in order to love God" and "Buber" to be a representative of "you never need to renounce the people you love in order to love God because to love them is to love God". Both these positions seem necessary, correct, compelling, and wrong.
I think it is important to love God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength. I think I have a capacity to love God through loving people, and a capacity for loving God exclusively, with no other people admitted to that part of my life. In order to love God with all of my heart, soul, mind, and strength, I have to offer what is exclusive to God through an exclusive relationship, and offer what is communal to God through a more typically Buberian relationship in which others are admitted. It's a bad idea for "Buber" to miss out on the essential message of "Kierkegaard", and vice versa. Kierkegaard might have been right about Regine Olsen (or her life reality) occupying a part of him that only should have been given to God, requiring him to renounce her. Buber might be right that sometimes renunciation is not what God wants us to do, and that relating to people may not keep God out of our lives.
It is also important to love God with all of your being and love your neighbor as yourself. The theistic has to take precedence over the human. Relating to people in such a way that you relate to God is somewhat dangerous, if it really turns out to be a case of loving your neighbor, that pays lip service to theism, or even a case where you really do love God through loving your neighbor, but the way in which you love God is not you loving God with all of your being -- rather, maybe, you don't love with all of your being, or you love your neighbor with all of your being, or you love the totality of humans with all of your being, or even somehow you love yourself with all of your being.
The road of renunciation and theism is hard and unpopular, and "Buber" takes the path that is healthier and more sane. So "Buber"'s is the way that will become more popular, typically, and thus in the long run "Buber" is more dangerous than "Kierkegaard", if there is some way in which "Buber" "binds to the receptor" of the part of us that needs what "Kierkegaard" uniquely offers.
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Finished reading Part 5, Section Two: Modern Attempts.
This is the end of the book, except for the Afterword. At this point I would say that my response to the book is, I would change the emphasis of it from "between man and man" to "between person and person" or "between personal being and personal being", so that this "between" thing can be satisfied between a human and God, and not just between a human and a human.
I think the book overall can be good to read, for those interested in personhood, the question of "what is a person?", and the relationship between personal beings. I agree with Buber that individualism (a true individualism that excludes God) and collectivism both sound like bad tendencies and Buber's "between" sounds better. I think Buber is kind of saying what is now "received wisdom" (like what Scott Alexander pointed out about Hobbes seeming obvious in retrospect). We all know that we should relate one on one in rich ways so that we see each other's humanity. So it's not an exciting message, it seems, in this current moment as far as I can see online. David Brooks is into Buber, that's true. But I don't see a lot of people on Twitter talking about Buber, unlike the Gen Z(/Millennial?) Simone Weil trend. Someone I once knew pointed out that the problem with Buber is that only nice people read him. I don't know how true that is, but it sounds plausible. Part of me wants to point out that nice people probably feel strengthened when they read Buber, and producing cultural artifacts that pretty much just strengthen nice people is a good thing. But part of me sees my interlocutor's point, which is that you have to change the minds of "bad guys" or "sensible guys" more than saying the same old thing to "nice guys". I feel like Buber doesn't get "nice guys" to change the world, at least, I don't feel him motivating me very much, assuming I'm a "nice guy".
Perhaps one of the defects of Buber's teaching is that he favors agendalessness. You can do a lot of good in an agendaless way, but some good (probably) can't be done in an agendaless way. So, maybe a good adjunct to Buber's teaching of promoting one on one, small group dialogue, is for agenda-based people to figure out ways to engineer those experiences. My guess is that there are a decent number of churches that think about things like this, whether they are aware of Buber or not. I don't know if secular groups think this way, but I would bet at least one school and at least one business has tried to incorporate these ways of thinking. Possibly even the military, as ironic as that might sound (building esprit de corps is important, even if your combat unit is being trained to kill people, which, it's hard to avoid thinking in some way is a denial of their humanity).
This points out how agendas consume agendaless people. The agendaless thing to do is to love your family and support them. Then, they will go off and work for a collectivity, like a multinational corporation, which will perhaps cheat people, exploit the environment, dodge taxes, develop technology that moves us closer to being able to destroy civilization -- and then whatever taxes are paid by your family will go to the other big collectivity, the government, which pays for wasteful and yet all-too-effective wars. I don't think Buber was naive enough to think that you can avoid all agendas and all agenda-ed thinking. But, it might be tempting, if anyone got really excited about this book, for them to ignore the bigger picture (perhaps even pointed to within the book in passing) of how we have to use "I-It" thinking, or use tough-minded mental software like desert watchfulness, or warlike determination, or doing math, or something in that vein, as opposed to the beautiful and timeless-feeling meetings that happen between... humans and humans... when they get into their own dimension, as Buber puts it in the very last chapter of this section ("Prospectus"). People read books, and reality, for their emphasis, sometimes, as opposed to their details.
Having said all those caveats, I do think that as relatively unexciting as Buber's main teaching might be to some people, to enter that timeless-feeling, present place is a good thing to learn, and I've certainly gotten a lot out of Buber's wordless dialogue, especially as explicated in the dream at the very beginning of the book. Maybe Buber's teaching (like some others out there) is a good song to practice until its second nature, as an etude even if not as the most exciting four-chord anthem.
Now, having appeared to have given a conclusion to these notes, I should read Buber's Afterword...
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Finished reading the Afterword. I don't have anything to add here.
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