Martin Buber
30 Oct 2021 - 20 Aug 2025
- I had a guest post up at ribbonfarm, which turned out to be a conceptual salad of Martin Buber, cognitive psychology, the culture of Asperger's, and social media. The word stance is used.
- A large tweetstorm by Zohar Atkins on Buber.
Time for a @threadapalooza on Martin Buber (1878-1965), philosopher, theologian, sociologist, translator, novelist, mystic, and romantic. Buber would not be on Twitter, seeing it as a degraded form of relationship and emblematic of what he called "the Eclipse of God."
— Zohar Atkins (@ZoharAtkins) September 13, 2021 - Not really sure how I/Thou valorization of the relational self related to Buddhist and other doctrines of no-self.
- Buber's I/It stance seems very related to the Buddhist “aggregates of grasping ” (upadanaskandha)
- This question is taken up explicitly in BCH's Philosophy of Zen Buddhism
- Despite my Jewish background, I think I found I and Thou via the Whole Earth Catalog and Ken Kesey:
- Notes on Kesey commentary
- local political action, well sure, ok, but only if it "communicates with the area of diseased consciousness"
Everything short of the toe-to-toe Truth and Love that comes from real confrontation of individual consciousness is just playing with Barbie dolls.
- This is a very 60s idea, that the way to real relationship is via "confrontation". I guess I vibe with that intellectually, given my self-identification as a conflict theory guy. But I don't have the right social skills or environment to practice it. Have been searching.

