Word: buber
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...visiting philosopher walked into a New York barbershop, sat down in a chair, and, while the scissors clicked away, he closed his eyes, deep in thought. Before he realized what was happening, most of his thick, long beard was gone. The philosopher was Martin Buber, the world's leading Jewish thinker. Today Buber's beard has grown back to its full splendor, and he once more looks like what he is: a modern Jewish patriarch...
Vienna-born Martin Buber, 77, lives in Jerusalem, where he taught philosophy at the Hebrew University from 1938 until his retirement five years ago. Long a prominent Zionist thinker, he is now at odds with the Israeli government, and the splinter group of which he is a leader (Ihud, meaning Union) is almost the only voice in Israel advocating cooperation with the Arabs. But Buber's main achievement lies in his tense, paradoxical, spiritual philosophy that has perhaps been as influential among Christian theologians, e.g., Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, as among Jews. A new book...
...Martin Buber, the Life of Dialogue, by Philosophy Professor Maurice S. Friedman of Sarah Lawrence College (University of Chicago; $6) is the first comprehensive study of Buber's thought...
Meaning v. Thought. Buber's work is influenced by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky. It is also inspired by an 18th century Jewish movement called Hasidism. The modern Hasidism (from the Hebrew hasid, meaning pious) sprang up in the Polish ghettos and followed the zaddikim, or holy men, who rebelled against excessive emphasis on law and scholarship, which seemed to confine Judaism. They were cheerful mystics who insisted on sharing their personal inspirations with the whole community. Buber, a leading collector of Hasidic lore, is in a sense himself a zaddik. He too rebels against the overrigid emphasis...
...Buber points always to the duality of things-good v. evil, love v. justice, order v. freedom. But he offers no happy middle way between them. Man must not try to choose either-or, nor may he pretend that no real contradiction exists; he can only accept the tension of both opposites. "According to the logical conception of truth," he says, "only one of two contraries can be true, but in the reality of life as one lives it they are inseparable. I have occasionally described my standpoint to my friends as the 'narrow ridge.' I wanted...