Martin Buber

In this essay, I explore the political significance of depression, particularly as a prominent form of resistance to conditions of life under contemporary global capitalism. After noting the political context of the second beatitude, which suggests a form of mourning that bears witness to public suffering, I assert that under the current dominance of the disease model, depression has lost its political voice. This loss is of grave concern given evidence that the culture of late capitalism (neoliberalism) has initiated a global epidemic of depression. I reframe depression as the final cry of souls diminished under these conditions. Finally, I denote the qualities of such souls, illustrating with a pastoral psychotherapy case summary. A dream presented during the termination phase not only provides a clinical presentation of the attributes of souls under neoliberal governance, but suggests how voice may ultimately be restored even when depression has become unconscious.
Keywords: Depression, Melancholy, Neoliberalism, Capitalism, Political resistance, Soul

Writing a diary offers an avenue for healing a damaged sense of Self. Diarists record interactions with Others that both confirm and invalidate. Simultaneously, they exercise agency in framing these interactions. In this essay I explore the dialogic nature of 18 diary entries written by " Paul, " an autistic man, who shared them with me during my master's thesis research. Through internally dialogic strategies such as playing with genres, adding layers, and creating characters, Paul captured and resisted invalidating interactions with others. Additionally , by designing his diary to be shared with others, Paul cultivated the space for an I–Thou connection.

What does interreligious dialogue look like from different religious perspectives? What does it do? One way of answering these questions is by examining historical examples of “religious dialogue”. These illustrate first-hand the rhetoric of interreligious dialogue. This article examines three case studies: (1) from 2nd-century Rome, Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho; (2) from 12th-century Spain, the Kuzari by Judah Halevi the Jew alongside the Dialogus of Petrus Alfonsi, a Christian convert from Judaism (both discuss Islam); (3) from 18th-century Berlin, Moses Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem and Johann Caspar Lavater’s Nathanael. Each contextualized case-study reveals the creative, morally enigmatic tension between commitment to hearing the religious Other, the utility of the Other for demarcating one’s own religious identity, and the epistemological contradictions of religious systems. Borrowing Martin Buber’s insight that the Ich (the “I”) needs a Du (a “you”) to form itself but must transform that Du into a third person es (an “it”), this article shows how complicated a process religious co-production through dialogue is—one which is both morally problematic and ethically promising. Here, literary dialogues establish a general feature of interreligious dialogue: the requirements of self-construction, not just the need for peaceful coexistence, recommend the adoption of a strong dialogical tolerance.

The annual Eranos conference in Ascona, Switzerland, contributed immensely to discourse about religion and spirituality from its inception in 1933. These gatherings, which revolved largely around the psychologist Carl Jung, investigated religious consciousness by way of spiritual “symbols” or “archetypes.” Such images were generally treated as timeless, autonomous phenomena that penetrate beyond historical particularities and social forms into the transcendent depths of the mystical Self. Discourse at Eranos thus portrayed the essence of religion as decontextualized and deethicized. The present article demonstrates that the German-Jewish philosopher Martin Buber was already sensitive to the sociopolitical dangers of this approach when he lectured at Eranos in 1934. The essay that emerged out of those lectures, “Sinnbildliche und sakramentale Existenz im Judentum (Symbolic and Sacramental Existence in Judaism),” is widely read as a classic of Buber’s writings on Hasidism. And yet, the historical details surrounding Buber’s Eranos lectures, especially as evidenced in the unpublished letters between him and the conference organizer, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, as well as the stenographer’s typescript of Buber’s live orations, shed remarkable new light on the well-known essay. “Sinnbildliche und sakramentale Existenz” was, in fact, composed largely as a polemic against Jung and his followers at Eranos, a number of whom were aligned with National Socialism and other fascist movements. In an act of scholarly resistance, Buber challenged widespread perspectives at Eranos regarding symbolism, Gnosticism, and the nature of religion. In so doing, he anticipated later critiques of Eranos that took shape in the 1990s.

Buber's distinction between the 'I-It' mode and the 'I-Thou' mode is seminal for dialogic education. While Buber introduces the idea of dialogic space, an idea which has proved useful for the analysis of dialogic education with technology, his account fails to engage adequately with the role of technology. This paper offers an introduction to the significance of the I-It/I-Thou duality of technology in relation to opening dialogic space. This is followed by a short schematic history of educational technology which reveals the role technology plays, not only in opening dialogic space, but also in expanding dialogic space. The expansion of dialogic space is an expansion of what it means to be 'us' as dialogic engagement facilitates the incorporation, into our shared sense of identity, of aspects of reality that are initially experienced as alien or 'other'. Augmenting Buber with an alternative understanding of dialogic space enables us to see how dialogue mediated by technology, as well as dialogue with monologised fragments of technology (robots), can, through education, lead to an expansion of what it means to be human.

‘The Education of Character,’  one of several articles that Martin Buber dedicated to the subject of education, was originally delivered as a lecture to teachers. The central and most intriguing aspect of this article, however, concerns its implicit registers – expression of aesthetic and mystical concerns that Buber does not acknowledge in his explicit voice. These issues were first raised in Buber’s early work, Daniel,  published in German in 1913. Subsequently, Buber became highly ambivalent about this book, expressing certain reservations about it and even prohibiting its reissue for many years. Yet the voices articulated in Daniel recur in ‘The Education of Character,’ despite Buber’s own efforts to silence them. It is as if Buber’s discussion of the concepts of realization (Verwirklichung) and orienting (Rientierung) were secretly and imperceptibly transplanted from Daniel into ‘The Education of Character’ by another person.
‘The Education of Character’ concerns the encounter between pupil and educator and the myriad ways in which such an encounter can take place in an educational setting. Buber’s explicit discussion, that conceals the silenced voices within the text, centers on the creation of an aesthetic encounter, (unintentionally) presenting the pupil as a sort of artwork.
The aesthetic dimension of the pupil-educator encounter is not merely some marginal aspect of Buber’s article. An aesthetic encounter poses the potential threat of shaping a relationship based on admiration and even leading to a forbidden romantic connection. In this context, I call for reconsideration of the possibility of conducting a full dialogic encounter within an educational framework. As stated in the conclusion, educator and pupil cannot share such a dialogic affinity because of the high price each pays within the educational process. Moreover, an in depth examination of Buber’s text will suggest that his conception of dialogic education, based on “an interaction between two fully present human beings,” results in a kind of Socratic dialogue, guiding the listener in a clearly defined and “preferred” direction chosen by the educator. This study maintains that once teachers are aware of the tension between dialogue and instruction and the failure it embodies, they become capable of producing an “inclusive, directed dialogue.”

The current article revisits the tenuous relationship between Martin Buber's conception of divine rule on earth (theopolitics) with Carl Schmitt's famous notion of political theology, by underscoring their shared, though diametrically opposed interest in Gnostic ideas. Based on a reading of Buber's heretofore unpublished lectures on Judaism and Christianity, the study outlines the nexus between the German tradition of scientific research, religious ideology and political visions, in order to show that Buber's treatment of Gnosticism in the lectures is belied by an implicit critique of Schmitt's dualistic distinction between friend and foe that legitimizes the subversion of liberal democracy. The Gnostic canon that Buber identifies in certain parts of the New Testament is shown to be based on the very same scientific research that fed Schmitt's fascination with Gnostic teachings.

From the special issue in honor of Paul Mendes-Flohr's 80th birthday, edited by Claudia Welz, Christian Wiese, and Bjarke Mørkøre Stigel Hansen.

“Post-traditional” Jewishness—a distinctively modern condition wherein past sources of theological authority and religious normativity are no longer self-evident—has been one of the most abiding interests in Paul Mendes-Flohr’s writings for more than four decades. The present article traces the contours of this concern over time. In a number of publications between 1978 and 1987, Mendes-Flohr highlights “secular religiosity” as a manifestation of post-traditional Jewishness, exemplified by figures such as Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig. These early writings intimate the possibility of a critical and yet nonetheless integrated Jewish religious subject, grounded hermeneutically in Jewish sources and sociologically in the Jewish community of destiny (Schicksalsgemeinschaft). Starting in the late 1980s, however, Mendes-Flohr’s representations of post-traditional Jewishness begin to emphasize greater degrees of complexity and, indeed, fragmentation. These later writings gesture less to visions of secular religiosity than toward postures of “undogmatic, pluralistic, and open” self-reflectivity before the ever-changing faces of reality. Throughout this rich trajectory in Mendes-Flohr’s thought, though, we see that he returns continually—and ever more trenchantly—to dialogical life as a grounding principle.

Engaging with the philosophical writings of Iris Murdoch, we submit that there are difficulties
associated with providing a good description of morality that are intimately connected with difficulties in
understanding other human beings. We suggest three senses in which moral philosophical reflection needs
to account for our understanding of others: (1) the failure to understand someone is not merely an intellectual
failure, but also engages us morally; (2) the moral question of understanding is not limited to the
extent to which we understand a particular person, but also presents itself in how we picture difficulties in
understanding people; and (3) “philosophical pictures of morality” fundamentally shape the conceptual
framework we use to investigate morality, as well as the analysis of morality we find illuminative and
satisfactory. Exploring the implications of these claims, we ask what it means to think of others as the same,
or as different, from ourselves. We then consider the ethical significance of finding, or not finding, our feet
in our encounters with others, dwelling on how the metaphor of movement reveals one way in which we are
never at peace in the exploration of morality.

This paper addresses the issue of human spatiality as existential givenness, taking as its fundamental orientation relationality, namely the natural tendency towards the other as my co-man (Mitmensch) in order of instituting the basic place for such a spatiality: the being-with-one-another (Miteinandersein). If the being-with-one-another embodies the basic place of this spatiality, then the encounter between an I and a you represents the culmination of such a place.
Given these assumptions, a comparison will be offered between two paradigmatic modes of interpreting the I-you relation (i.e. Duheit). On the one hand, Martin Buber’s Zwischenontologie, on the other Karl Löwith’s Mitanthropologie. This comparison will reveal that the space of the relation established by I and you to depends on its ability to stay within the limit of an anthropic perimeter.

Communication ethics conventions commence with locality: historical, social, cultural, and psychological situatedness. Dialogic ethics, as instantiation of communication ethics, does not rest in provinciality alone; dialogic ethics incorporates Immanuel Kant’s and Hannah Arendt’s emphasis on enlarged mentality, which limits provinciality as one seeks a world greater than immediate proximity. Dialogic ethics invites revelatory possibilities of learning from difference, functioning as pragmatic resistance to imposed answers. Dialogic ethics is “hope for this hour” (Buber 1967/1952), in an era constituted by ethical conflict. Dialogic ethics demands an enlarged mentality that refuses to dismiss the unique characteristics of another’s local home. This essay assumes a pragmatic conviction: dialogic ethics is the primary communicative hope in an era defined by ethical contention and conflict.

Starting with an outline of Buddhist history from a psychoanalytic perspective, this paper uses ideas from philosophy and psychoanalysis to consider the nature of the psychological effectiveness of religious objects. It suggests that the development of the devotional cult of Buddhas 'without form' such as Amitābha, at-first-glance surprising when juxtaposed with the founding vision of Gautama Siddhartha, tells us a great deal about the psychological needs that impel the evolution of religious thinking. Distinguishing religious objects from mythological ones, it argues that 'religious objects' are, more specifically, allegorical objects that can be encountered in the second person; that these may not always be well described as 'illusion'; and that they may in some cases be better understood as providing opportunities for experience that, like the transference in psychoanalysis, may have far-reaching psychological impacts.

The article explores Rabindranath Tagore's ideas on child education, focusing on Ta-gore's notion of the child, method and nonmethod in education, a deep understanding of education in relation to the child's surroundings, and the ways in which Tagore envisaged the relationship between the child and the teacher-the guru-shishya dynamics. These investigations are transcultural in nature in that they engage with several thinkers and different clusters of ideas from the Western tradition, namely, Tolstoy, Rousseau, William Godwin, Martin Buber, Froebel, and others. The article also demonstrates how some of Tagore's ideas fall in line with certain contemporary discourses on child education.

Migrants, coming to Germany, must attend integration courses in order to obtain a residence permit. These courses are comprised of a language section as well as an orientation section. The latter's purpose is, according to the German Federal Agency for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), the transmission of knowledge of the German legal system, culture, and history and especially of democratic values of the German political system (BAMF, 2017, p. 6). This article examines the challenges that instructors and participants of those courses face when it comes to the teaching and learning of democratic values, based on a qualitative research conducted in 2018. As the theoretical lens, this article incorporates the concept of dialogue by Martin Buber.

This paper starts from the thought that we cannot take for granted that a society’s highest values will survive in the long term as effective motivators within that society. By ‘highest values’ I mean values such as justice, concern for members of weak and minority groups, and respect for promises and for the attempt to speak truthfully – values that apply at the highest level of generality. If they are to survive and to be effective, two things may be necessary: firstly, unpredictable ‘epiphanic’ moments in which the power of these values is emotionally experienced by individuals, and secondly, institutions and a vocabulary in which these values can be remembered, discussed and affirmed in emotionally and imaginatively impactful ways. I shall suggest, with reference in particular to the thought of Emmanuel Levinas and Ronald Dworkin, that the second of these factors, the remembering and affirmation of values, marks out the crucial, perhaps even the irreplaceable, contribution of a ‘religion’ to a society. The failure, within psychoanalysis and also more widely, to appreciate the working of this function in a society over generations may mean that the consequences of ‘growing out of religion’ (Winnicott) have not yet been adequately recognized.

There has been increased interest in what the philosophical subdiscipline of phenomenology can contribute to medical humanities due to its dual emphases on practicality and its attempt to understand the experience of others, thus positioning it as a potentially helpful conceptual toolkit to guide clinical care. Using various figures from the phenomenological tradition, most prominently Martin Heidegger and Martin Buber, the authors illuminate relevant philosophical concepts, employ them in various examples, and provide three principles revolving around empathy, communication, and listening to patients’ individual values to guide medical professionals who practice the art of medicine in cancer care settings.

Literary pieces featuring the double depict an encounter between the protagonist and another person, who is her identical other. Therefore they face various difficulties related to a threat cast on their unique identity, and this encounter challenges their process of self-definition. Martin Buber sees the existence of the other as essential for the occurrence of self-constitution within an individual. He maintains that any person needs another person to obtain confirmation of what she is and is born equipped with the ability to confirm her fellow-person in the same way (1959). However, as the other encountered by a doppelgänger protagonist is not truly " other " , the latter might confront a difficulty in the different stages of Buber's self-constitution process. This paper seeks to shed light on the inter-and intra-personal relationships depicted in literary pieces focusing on the theme of the double, such as The Double (Dostoyevsky [1846] 1997; Saramago 2002), Despair (1965), and Too Much Nina (Orbach 2011), emphasizing the limitations cast by the encounter with the identical other on the protagonist's self-constitution, as put forward by Buber.

The paper explores what it could mean to speak of love as involving a delight in ‘the simple actuality’ of another. Developing strands in Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of perception it is argued that the relation between recognising this as a particular individual and recognising particular qualities in her may be close to the reverse of what might be supposed: a recognition of this distinctive smile being dependent on a recognition of who this is. The fundamental place of particulars, as opposed to kinds (transferable properties), in our thought about those we know and care for is developed through a phenomenological treatment of our perception of faces, and through a critique of treatments of proper names in the spirit of Frege. It is in our speaking to (rather than ‘about’) those we know (rather than ‘know about’) that we find a relation to a particular that is direct - not mediated by a description of its properties – that Russell sought in ‘knowledge by acquaintance’.

Discussions of Jewish responses to modernity often focus on what is new or what has adapted or evolved in Judaism in the face of modernity's challenges. However, contrary to convention, this paper argues that, at least in principle, neither has the challenge nor the response changed all that much. Through an examination of several key modern Jewish thinkers, including Spinoza, Mendelssohn, Rosenzweig, and Buber, and by focusing on a traditional Jewish concept and value, the Love of God, this paper claims that the Love of God functions as the orienting principle for much of modern Jewish thought, just as it did throughout the history of Judaism. Upon demonstrating the consistent presence of the concept of the Love of God throughout the Jewish tradition, and especially in much of modern Jewish thought, this paper goes on to briefly reflect on the importance and vitality of the concept of the Love of God for both Judaism and modernity, despite and beyond the commercialization and cheapening of the concept of Love in recent times.

This paper raises some questions about the possibilities and limits of the design of services. Services are a cobweb of interactions between men and women. Reflection about the design of services needs to construct a consistent philosophical inquiry about these human interactions in order to try to understand what can and cannot be designed. The aim has been to contribute to this reflection by considering the philosophical anthropology and the dialogical principle of Martin Buber.
(Original online at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.2752/144871304X13966215067912)

There are numerous Holocaust documentaries, novels, memoirs, and movies depicting the endangered lives of Jewish children during World War II. As viewers and readers, flipping the pages or watching the images onscreen forces us to consider our place in relation to those individuals who have seen the unthinkable. We consume their stories, their testimonies – their vivid remembrances which transcend the place and space of fading-memories to become re-imagined, and lived-again through the painful acts of telling. We become witnesses to the stories told by these witnesses of true horrors (Felman & Laub, 1992). Louis Malle's (1987) film Au Revoir Les Enfants forces us, as viewers, to undertake this difficult task through the eyes of a nearly-silent protagonist – a Jewish boy named Jean Kippelstein, hidden in a private Catholic school in Vichy France by the school's headmaster, Father Jean, in 1944. The relations between Father Jean and his pupils are all complex and unravel over the course of the narrative, culminating in a final tragic scene with fatal consequences.

I contend that for filmic testimonies such as Au Revoir Les Enfants, the body of the endangered Jewish child is the operational and educational site of trauma. The narrative is fully able to “make the suffering body the small, focused universe of the tormented and a vehicle for rendering unimaginable experience tangible to readers” ( Vickroy, 2002, p. 33) as it stands-in for an immeasurable collective experience. Describing acts of consumption signposted throughout the film, I assert that Au Revoir Les Enfants stands in as a social and bodily topography of education in times of crisis. The film works subtly to remind us that the trauma of the Holocaust is a collective as much as personal experience; it forces viewers to construct an ethical and critical consciousness about events otherwise washed away through time, dangerously finding redemption through history's fading memory.

Taking place in a school where bodies are literally made uniform by dressing alike, the body of the Jewish child stands out as the site of displacement, dysfunction, perhaps even dys-embodiment –embodiment that is not quite right, that is called into view and put into harm's way. Bodies in this film are writ large in the classroom and become the site/sight of education about the im/possibilities of universalizing the bodily experience. Treatments of the body become visceral narratives that tie together layers of national and personal trauma. Employing Leder's (1990) argument about the dis-appearing/dys-appearing body, I interrogate the filmic signposting the body as simultaneously consumer and consumed, excessive and grotesque, and ultimately, wholly transgressive.

However, I also suggest that films such as Au Revoir Les Enfants remind us about the possibility of opening up the educational dialogic (Buber, 1947/2002) on account of the body's powerful, central place. This is not to say that the transgressive body can be saved; rather, that the film forces a reflection about the possibilities of learning about alternate life experiences – including danger, death, and disability – through the bodily conditions inseparable from those who experience them. To that end, the relationships in the film illustrate both the possibilities and failures of the dialogic within education at its most vulnerable times and in its most endangered spaces.

In this essay, I challenge the egocentric tradition which privileges the standpoint of an isolated individual, and propose a speech-based dialogical approach as an alternative. Considering that the egocentric tradition can be deciphered in part by analyzing the distortions undergone by pronominal discourse in the language of classical philosophy, I reexamine the pragmatics of ordinary language featuring the pronoun I in an effort to recover a more relational understanding of persons. I develop such an analysis of the deep grammar of pronominal discourse under the heading of ‘I–you connectedness’. I–you connectedness emphasizes the communicative structure of experience, in particular the phenomenological importance of the addressee, the inseparability of ‘I’ and ‘You’, and the nature of the alternation between them. I–you connectedness is the best thematized within living speech, which is invariably oriented towards an interlocutor, and animated by mutual address. Yet, I–you connectedness extends beyond living speech to other modalities of meaning, notably thinking and writing, where one notes a similar orientation to a living, imagined, or virtual addressee. I–you connectedness extends, therefore, beyond discursive experience, and captures the deep dialogic dimension of meaning in pre-linguistic and extralinguistic life. I briefly consider its implications for theoretical and practical issues within robotics and AI.

I consider the intertextuality between Chinese and Western thought by exploring how images, metaphors, and ideas from the texts associated with Zhuangzi and Laozi were appropriated in early twentieth-century German philosophy. This interest in "Lao-Zhuang Daoism" encompasses a diverse range of thinkers including Buber and Heidegger. I examine (1) how the problematization of utility, usefulness, and "purposiveness" in Zhuangzi and Laozi becomes a key point for their German philosophical reception; (2) how it is the poetic character of the Zhuangzi that hints at an appropriate response to the crisis and loss of meaning that characterizes technological modernity and its instrumental technological rationality; that is, how the "poetic" and "spiritual" world perceived in Lao-Zhuang thought became part of Buber's and Heidegger's critical encounter and confrontation with technological modernity; and (3) how their concern with Zhuangzi does not signify a return to a dogmatic religiosity or otherworldly mysticism; it anticipates a this-worldly spiritual (Buber) or poetic (Heidegger) way of dwelling immanently within the world.

The article introduces the problematics of the classical two-valued logic on which Western thought is generally based, outlining that under the conditions of its logical assumptions the subject I is situated in a world that it cannot address. In this context, the article outlines a short history of cybernetics and the shift from first- to second-order cybernetics. The basic principles of Gordon Pask’s 1976 Conversation Theory are introduced. It is argued that this second-order theory grants agency to others through a re-conception of living beings as You logically transcending the I. The key principles of Conversation Theory are set in relation to the poetic forms of discourse that played a key role in art as well as philosophical thinking in China in the past. Second-order thinking, the article argues, is essentially poetic. It foregoes prediction in favour of the potentiality of encountering tomorrow’s delights.

In discussion with Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Franz Fischer and Emmanuel Levinas, Ephraim Meir outlines a novel conception of a selfhood that is grounded in dialogical thought. He focuses on the shaping of identity in present day societies and offers a new view on identity around the concepts of self-transcendence, self-difference, and trans-difference. Subjectivity is seen as the concrete possibility of relating to an open identity, which receives and hosts alterity. Self-difference is the crown upon the I; it is the result of a dialogical life, a life of passing to the other. The religious I is perceived as in dialogue with secularity, with its own past and with other persons. It is suggested that with a dialogical approach one may discover what unites people in pluralist societies.

A famous Hasidic tale that depicts the decline of mysticism in Hasidic circles also bespeaks the power of storytelling. This study tracks the metamorphosis of this classic tale over a century of its retelling by writers-including Martin Buber, S. Y. Agnon, Gershom Scholem, Walter Kaufmann, Elie Wiesel, and Abba Kovner-who each fashioned the tale in their own image. These authors affirmed but also challenged the tale's message about the efficacy of storytelling. The use of the tale in Passover celebrations and other contemporary trends are also considered. The question is raised as to whether transmitters have a duty of care not to corrupt the story.

This paper discuses Levinas's critique of Buber's notion of reciprocity, contrasting it with the prominent place of the "other" in Levinas's own thought. I maintain that Buber’s thought does not lend itself to an ethical relation that commences with or is founded upon the other. Ethics, according to Buber, begins when one says Thou, since in genuine dialogue one cannot handle or take over the other side. Simultaneously, one must be concerned for one's own side; one must focus on the will with which one enters into the relation. Accordingly, ethics is not based on the other, but on reciprocity. While reciprocity, in turn, does not mean symmetry. Unlike Levinas, Buber believes that "if all were clothed and well nourished, then the real ethical problem would become wholly visible for the first time."

A discussion of the influence of Martin Buber is not easily limited to the philosophical anthropology he espoused. Nor is the political thinking of Hannah Arendt easily removed from criticism of the philosophies (and -phers) that informed her. Both Buber and Arendt attacked the beastly shoulders of a misapplied messianism as it emerged in modern Germany. Hegel, Heidegger, Marx and to some degree Nietzsche would affect this misplacement, and Arendt and Buber for their part would enter into a shared critique that is often neglected, despite promising attempts in a comparative direction made by Ellis, Engel and Riker. In this essay, I make the case that the contributions of Buber and Arendt – their shared assessments of the viability of the public realm, the need for common responsibility and the recurrent decision to engage with otherness in practical terms – point to an innovative critique of the forcible abstraction of a more traditional messianic made by German views of history. In the midst of the crises identified as correlates of a misapplied messianic, the hope as Buber and Arendt see it lies in the capacity for reflective and courageous identification and education between human individuals as they live towards one another.

The violent death of Landauer in May 1919 at the end of the Räterepublik of Munich left
several of his best friends with a terrible feeling: a sense of tension between the unique
hopes incarnated by Landauer and the spiritual and political void his passing left behind.
This article is an attempt to capture the tragic shift from a living revolutionary who projected his unique anarchist views onto the failed Munich Revolution to the efforts of a group of close friends who searched to save their dear Landauer from the infamy of failure, making of his months in Munich and his death an important amendment to his spiritual and political legacy.

Flannery O’Connor's "Revelation" explores Martin Buber’s theme of existential movement toward God in the post-Holocaust world, where God is not dead but in "eclipse." In the story Ruby Turpin turns from I-It relationships to I-Thou, especially a powerful intimation of Buber's "eternal Thou." The violent encounter between a young woman and Ruby initiates a process that allows for prophetic speech, upends Ruby’s status quo taxonomies, and prepares Ruby for an experience of theophany at the end of the narrative. The eclipse of God lifts, and Ruby, thanks to a “visionary light” that suffuses the natural world, perceives a heavenly revelation and hears a resounding “hallelujah."

In this paper, I formulate an existentialist view on the dialogue with the past, based on the philosophy of Martin Buber. This view is meant to supplement the traditional, hermeneutical view on the dialogue with the past. In the first part of this paper, I argue that the traditional hermeneutic view on the dialogue with the past is somewhat restricted. In the work of people such as Schleiermacher, Dilthey or even Gadamer, dialogue is always regarded as a primarily cognitive event, focused on the “I” rather than the “you.” I argue that this means that they take only one aspect of the metaphor into account, and ignore the more existential dimension of dialogue. As an alternative, I use the philosophy of Martin Buber to formulate a point of view that does embrace the existential side of dialogue. I also compare the Buberian view of dialogue with that of Gadamer, and I suggest in which a Buberian historian would differ from a Gadamerian historian

The environmental crisis has motivated the rise of the green movement, and this has been accompanied with the articulation and development of various environmental ethical accounts. In my thesis I shall propose and defend an application of Martin Buber’s philosophy of dialogue as a foundation for environmental ethics. I argue that a philosophy which is to serve as a foundation for environmental ethics has to be able to explain why the environmental crisis has come about, and it also has to show how we can enter into a sound relationship with Nature characterised by respect instead of destructive exploitation.

In The Existential Philosophy of Etty Hillesum Meins G.S. Coetsier breaks new ground by demonstrating the Jewish existential nature of Etty Hillesum’s spiritual and cultural life in light of the writings of Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Hillesum’s diaries and letters written between 1941 and 1943 illustrate her struggle to come to terms with her personal life in the context of the Second World War and the Shoah. By finding God under the rubble of the horrors, she rediscovers the divine presence between humankind, while taking up responsibility for the Other as a way to embrace justice and compassion. In a fascinating, accessible and thorough study, Coetsier dispels much of the confusion that assails readers when they are exposed to the bewildering range of Christian and Jewish influences and other cultural interpretations of her writings. The result is a convincing and profound picture of Etty Hillesum's path to spiritual freedom. In The Existential Philosophy of Etty Hillesum Meins G.S. Coetsier offers an account of Etty Hillesum's spiritual and cultural life in light of the writings of Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

This article, written 18 years ago in 2003, focuses on ‘reinventing politics in Israel and Palestine,’ which means laying the groundwork now for a kind of Jewish-Palestinian Zapatismo, a grassroots movement to ‘reclaim the commons’ (Klein 2001; Esteva and Prakash 1998). This would mean moving towards direct democracy, participatory economy and genuine autonomy for the people; towards Martin Buber’s vision in his Paths in Utopia (originally published in Hebrew in 1945) of “an organic commonwealth . . . that is a community of communities” (1958: 136). We might call it the ‘no-state solution.’

Forms of neoliberal governmentality do not work here, are unsustainable. At all spatial scales, Israelis and Palestinians have learnt they have no security from the bankruptcy of its iterations: a tale of Sisyphus, Tolstoy’s ‘government is violence’ writ monstrous, its icon the Separation Wall. Indeed, the impasse in Israel/Palestine is, in its distinctive form, a microcosm of the pervasive vacuity of our received political imaginaries. And the ruling elites that administer them. In a sense, this conflict is emblematic of the “perverse perseverance of sovereignty,” its “vicious, security-based ontology” (Burke 2002). We need to turn that authoritarian ontology on its head. Precisely where community has imploded and the commons is controlled on both sides of the divide by hierarchies of violence.

The conflict and Israel’s self-identity and national myth are at a ‘liminal’ moment. A time for fresh vision. Israel/Palestine offers a unique microlaboratory for experimenting with another kind of polity, advancing, to echo Kropotkin, from mutual struggle to mutual aid (Salzman 2002, 2003; Cleaver 1993). Its very aporia demands a new array of algorithms: “This does not mean unity for socialism or any other singular post-capitalist ‘economic’ order, but rather the building of … a new mosaic of interconnected alternative approaches to meeting our needs and elaborating our desires” (Cleaver 1997). And in that sense drafting alternative models of polity to address the general crisis of the capitalist world-system that Wallerstein (1998) diagnoses.

I speculate here on a staged transformation: moving from two states (Stage One) to a unitary, bi-national state (Stage Two), and on to what we might call the ‘Jerusalem Cooperative Commonwealth.’ Paradoxically, the present Geneva Accords initiative, its endgame a Bantustan-like Palestinian state, is a potential step forward in this dialectic. The public mood on both sides of the divide and international geopolitical configurations demand some such exit. Ordinary Palestinians under Occupation require oxygen, a shell for security. A stopgap emergency measure on which to build a dialectic for its sublation.

Paths in Utopia?
In charting new decentralized institutions, Wallerstein speaks about ‘utopistics’: “not the face of the perfect (and inevitable) future, but the face of an alternative, credibly better, and historically possible (but far from certain) future” (1998: 2). A utopistic heuristic, in some ways along the lines of Martin Buber’s envisioning in the mid-1940s – a “Commune of Communes” or “League of Leagues” (Buber 1958: 147-148) – drained of its now largely toxic Zionist marrow, is in order in the disorder of Israel/Palestine. To generate another kind of political and economic imaginary. Harvey has noted that there is a time and place “where alternative visions, no matter how fantastic, provide the grist for shaping powerful forces for change. I believe we are precisely at such a moment. Utopian dreams … are omnipresent in the signifiers of our desires” (2000: 195).

Sourcing Buber and Levinas, this is a project in dialogical ethics in which I offer a constructive critique of the discourse of intersubjectivity and its failure to consider shame as proper and fitting to every human relation.  Current shame literature predominantly relegates the emotion of shame to a curious epiphenomenon of subjectivity, perhaps adaptive in evolutionary terms, but more probably psychopathological.  This thesis denies the claims that shame is reducible to brain states, or constituted by beliefs.  Rather, shame as a moral emotion is a pre-thinking apprehension of what is real in human relation.  Shame is an apprehension of asymmetry in the dyadic relation; shame gives the conscious subject information about her relations that can be, but need not be, secondarily conceptualized.  In these relational apprehensions is the very origin of moral responsibility, and so it is not only a dangerous but a catastrophic move to ignore the experiences of shame and their ethical implications.

I will suggest that intersubjectivity is not a metaphor for relation, but is a literal space between two human beings in dialogue, where their consciousness resides during the activity of being present to each other.  I situate this claim within an externalism model of consciousness:  the meeting of subject and object involves a between where consciousness of the subject meets the object.  In the case of intersubjectivity, I am speaking not just of subject-object relation, but of the special case of two conscious subjects who meet each other and establish an intentional between of dialogue.  This dialogical relation need not be of two conceptualizing, self-conscious subjects; indeed, I will argue that the fundamental moral ground occurs in the between of naïve sayings to and apprehensions of each other.  Shame is one of those naïve apprehensions of the relational between; specifically, it is an apprehension of asymmetry and distance between the two. 

If shame were the only mode of intersubjective awareness, then relation could not be maintained.  Shame would constantly push the dyad apart with its apprehensions of the distance that comes with asymmetry.  I suggest that empathy is the other mode of participating in and apprehending intersubjectivity, and that empathy apprehends the symmetry and mutuality of subjects in relation.  But if empathy was the only mode of apprehension, the relation would also collapse into a state of indistinguishable alikeness of the two.  Instead, in every particular relation, both apprehensions are in play.  Shame and empathy exist in a dialectical tension that maintains the relation of intersubjectivity.

The claim that unrestrained empathy can lead to a failure in relation and moral responsibility might seem counterintuitive, particularly in light of contemporary praise for empathy as a moral emotion par excellence.  In this thesis, however, I will suggest that empathy is not sufficient for ethical deliberation.  Empathy is an apprehension that the proximate other is a person like me, but this accesses only half of the metaphysical reality of relation.  When engaged by the thinking self, empathy without shame leads to the belief that others are like me; this projection is at its core a reduction of the other.  Apprehensions of the difference, distance, and asymmetry of the vulnerable other in relation balance the mutuality that occurs when the subject apprehends the other’s similarities.  In other words, shame is the ground for subsequent understanding that the other is not like me, such that response and responsibility demonstrates proper discretion as the complement to mutuality.  Shame apprehends the alterity of the other, and this moral fact must moderate an inordinate enthusiasm for what is revealed by empathy.

Human beings do not always exist in intersubjective meeting.  There are several alternatives to intersubjectivity in conscious living.  The subject may move from a naïve openness to the relation to conceptualizing the other as object rather than as another person.  In this move, the intersubjective space is transformed by the thinking subject to a subject-object relation.  Or, the subject may move away from the other to engage non-human objects in the world or ideas in her own mind as objects for her intentionality.  These are natural forms of consciousness.  But moral consciousness requires attending to the moral facts of the relational between. 

A fitting shame has been misunderstood and unappreciated in current ethical discourse of relation.  Too often shame is confused with either shaming or thinking about shame, both of which interfere with naïve being-in-relation.  I will suggest that neither is shame proper, but rather misplaced shame, inordinate shame, or second-order thinking about shame, all of which to varying degrees compete with a sustained participation in relational reciprocity.  My intention is to return shame to its proper place in dialogical ethics, while still accounting for the many forms of unfitting “shame” that are of concern in their own right.

There have been a number of conversation partners of assistance in this project, with the richest contributions coming from the works of Emmanuel Levinas.  Levinas is keenly aware of the naïve sayings of the other that present in the form of accusation.  Accusation apprehends and reinforces the asymmetry of the dyadic relation.  In a dialogue of accusation, both shame-disgrace and shame-discretion are present as forms of apprehending the accusation; these forms of shame delineate the terms of moral responsibilitiy.  But accusation and asymmetry are only part of the story when constructing a relation of reciprocity.  I draw in particular from Martin Buber and his articulation of the I-Thou relation to comment on the role of mutuality in dialogue.  I suggest that Buber’s mutuality involves empathy as an apprehension of the other, complementary to fitting shame.  By placing the dialogical concepts of Levinas and Buber in proximity, I suggest that there is a fuller appreciation for the sayings of each to the other in dynamic reciprocity:  co-subjects, as dyad, speak shame and empathy to each other in the very origins of being-in-relation.  In that very speaking is moral response and responsibility.

In each chapter of this thesis, I have offered specific case studies about physician-patient relation and medicine.  This serves two primary purposes.  The first is to provide a specific relation that is marked by readily observable asymmetries, so that the importance of shame to relation is more apparent.  It can be too easy to consider dialogical ethics in terms of relations more prominently marked by mutuality, such as friendship or kinship; notably, shame is also properly present to relationships with strong mutuality and empathy, if not so easily discerned.  The case studies are meant to illustrate particular instances of asymmetry in a conceptually-accessible kind of relation.  The second purpose is to consider the application of my thesis to a specific kind of relation and its community.  Can a thesis on moral shame and its fittingness to relation give guidance to understanding moral responsibility in the physician-patient relationship and in medical professionalism? What ethical considerations arise for physicians who do or do not experience fitting shame in their patient relations and in the medical community?  These questions represent just the beginning of testing theoretical claims in actual practice.

My hope is that my analysis will help restore shame to its proper place in dialogical ethics, and counteract a troublesome trend towards malignant, intrusive empathy as a solitary justification for certain ethical judgments and actions.  Empathy is an insufficient ground for personal and community responsibility.  Our ethical responsibilities as subjects and co-subjects in community must be better responsive to fitting disgrace and discretion in our primary relational spaces.  It is shame that is spoken by the face of the vulnerable other, inviting me to a genuine dialogue with another who is like me in certain respects, but unlike me in a way that is revelatory of who and what I am, and also of my potential for and call to responsibility.  I end with the suggestion that shame prompts the request that the vulnerable other remain present to me in speaking and provoking shame, so that I habituate the disposition of responsibility for her sake and for my own.

Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas-two of the most prominent Jewish thinkers of the 20th century-both refused to conceive of one's relation to the other in purely cognitive terms. They differed, however, in their characterization of the structure and nature of the intersubjective encounter. Whereas Buber emphasized the horizontal and reciprocal character of the I-Thou relation, Levinas insisted that the relation between self and other is in the first instance a vertical relation of responsibility. In the following contribution, we will present and analyze the disagreement between Buber and Levinas and assess to what extent their exchange might be relevant for contemporary debates on second-person engagement.

(on line) ON SOLIDARITY: GRAMSCI'S OBJECTIVITY AS A CORRECTIVE TO BUBER'S I-IT I and Thou sets out a dichotomy of human interactions between the merely objective I-It and the intense intersubjective relationship of the I-Thou, creating a problem of how one is to differentiate the I-It relations that are healthy and natural, and those that are limiting and detrimental. As a corrective to this ambiguity, I posit the principle of solidarity as a relation which retains the personhood of the Other yet still confines it to what Buber calls the I-It "relation". To do this I will discuss similar attitudes such as sympathy and camaraderie using them to draw out the meaning of solidarity in contradistinction to them, and show how solidarity functions as Gramsci's Objectivity. keywords Martin Buber, Antonio Gramsci, intersubjectivity, objectivity, solidarity 249 ON SOLIDARITY: GRAMSCI'S OBJECTIVITY AS A CORRECTIVE TO BUBER'S I-IT Rather the house of man about which he is concerned now stands between houses, between neighboring houses, between the houses of his neighbors (Buber, 2002, pp. 94-95). Eric Mohr points out in his work "Mixing Fire and Water: A Critical Phenomenology" (2016) that the social role of phenomenology will be a key feature to the future of phenomenological research. Mohr seeks to accomplish this by bringing together the social analysis of Critical Theory, with the phenomenological method of Max Scheler, into a "critical phenomenology". As the field of critical phenomenology grows 1 it will be necessary to consider more in depth the notions of community and solidarity from within the perspective of phenomenology. Key to a social understanding of phenomenology is the personalist phenomenological tradition, which Mohr obviously appreciates as evidenced by his reliance on Scheler. However, if one is to understand the particularly social aspects of phenomenology, it is important to return to their dialogical roots. As such, this paper will seek to explore the value as well as the limitations of Buber's account of community and social interaction. In this way, this paper is also a work of Critical Phenomenology, working to bring into dialogue the Dialogical analysis of Buber with the social theory of Gramsci, and to use the interaction of their thought as a way of investigating the idea of solidarity and community. In I and Thou, Martin Buber sets out a dichotomy of human interactions between the merely objective view of the I-It, which calculates and measures, and the intense intersubjective relationship of the I-Thou. This distinction creates a problem of how one is to differentiate the various sorts of I-It "relations". Some I-It relations are clearly healthy and natural, while others are limiting and detrimental to human interaction. As a corrective measure to the ambiguity of Buber's work, I posit, over the course of this paper, the principle of solidarity as a non-I-Thou relation which retains the dignity and personhood of the Other in a way that still confines it to what Buber calls the I-It "relation". To do this, I will discuss similar attitudes such as sympathy and camaraderie, and use them to draw out the meaning of solidarity in contradistinction to them. In drawing out solidarity, I will also address the meaning of community, with particular attention paid to Buber's understanding of community. Buber's distinction between the living dynamic existence of community and merely useful organization of collective, which he derives from the It/Thou distinction, provides the basis 1 Evidenced by the inauguration of the new Journal of Critical Phenomenology this year.

My paper is related to applied ethics with special reference to the ethics of communication. The task of this discipline is to defend otherness in the various contexts where it exists. The departure point for my paper is the observation that the physician–patient relationship, instead of being the place of therapeutic alliance, is increasingly becoming a source of conflict, as is shown by the statistics on legal actions between doctors and patients, lack of communication skills identified amongst patients, and cases of burnout amongst doctors. This situation calls on ethics to take two steps simultaneously. Firstly, it must not forego the duty of indicating the rules. Secondly, it must be capable of suggesting directions where those same rules can be applied. Succeeding in this task is decisive not only in domains where the ethical approach may be welcomed, but also for ethics as such, otherwise destined to be a disembodied specialization.