Online Seminar Series: I & Thou by Martin Buber
**Events may have been canceled or postponed. Please contact the venue to confirm the event.
Date & Time
Sun, Feb 20 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Address (map)
1129 Maricopa Highway #156
Online Seminar Series
I and Thou by Martin Buber – Part I
Sunday, February 20, 2022
Published in 1923, I and Thou (German Ich und Du) cemented Martin Buber’s already substantive reputation in Weimar Germany, and, following its first 1937 translation, in the English philosophic, theologic, and psychological circles. Yet for all its popularity, and Martin Buber’s eminence in those circles and Jewish intellectual circles, the text remains elusive, poetic, and peculiar. We take for granted Buber’s arguments for “dialogic” relationships, but in knowing the name of the text, we often miss the path he illumines in the forest of words we speak.
As Jorge Luis Borges commented, “….I remember reading, some thirty years ago, the works of Martin Buber — I thought of them as being wonderful poems. Then, when I went to Buenos Aires, I read a book by a friend of mine, Dujovne, and I found in its pages, much to my astonishment, that Martin Buber was a philosopher and that all his philosophy lay in the books I had read as poetry. Perhaps I had accepted those books because they came to me through poetry, through suggestion, through the music of poetry, and not as arguments…”
No Jewish thinker has had as much broad influence in philosophy, theology, and psychology in the West in the 20th more than Martin Buber. His seminal work, I and Thou, supplies a commonly-used tagline, yet is thick and difficult to read, so much so that his translator notes…”Buber’s delight in a language gets between him and his readers…”
What is the nature of the dialogue Buber encourages us to seek? How carefully must we tread in such dialogue, and what words abet or hinder? Does Buber suggest to us a “larger picture” than the simple “dialogic” that seems to have reduced a powerful title into a commonplace phrase? We invite you to join us for three seminars in this series, each two months apart.
February 20 reading :
I and Thou – A Prologue by Kaufmann, First Part by Buber
(pages 9-85 in the Touchstone edition)
Schedule:
12:00-2:00PM PST
Tutor:
Dennis Gura
Location:
Online. Register to receive the link.