Word: buber
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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...
...Buber formulates his position in terms of two philosophical catch phrases: I-It and I-Thou...
...when lovers find in each other only a projection of themselves. Similarly, I-It appears in religion, as when man uses God merely for his peace of mind, or abstracts Him in complicated logical systems, or regards Him as so large and overpowering that He is out of reach. Buber refuses to see God as the "wholly Other" of Swiss Theologian Karl Barth or the "Mysterium Tremendum" of German Theologian Rudolph Otto. "Of course God is the 'wholly Other,' " Buber writes, "but He is also the wholly Same, the wholly Present. Of course He is the Mysterium Tremendum...
...Thou stands for the kind of meeting -love or even hate-in which two beings face and accept each other as truly human. This produces what Buber calls a dialogue-a fusion of action and response, of choosing and being chosen-that engages man's highest qualities. But I-It relationships are necessary for the everyday world. For I-Thou meetings are "strange, lyric and dramatic episodes, seductive and magical, but tearing us away to dangerous extremes, loosening the well-tried context . . . shattering security." Therefore, says Buber, modern man tries to escape from I-Thou in many ways, notably...