I-Weaving-Thou?

Martin Buber's I and Thou

Martin Buber, in I and Thou, talks of "relation" as taking precedence over objects in the grand scheme of things. He identifies the two "vital primal words" out of which all "primal experiences" emerge as I–affecting–Thou and Thou-affecting-I (see pp. 21-22, Ronald Gregor Smith translation). These primal words get "split asunder" by us, in our wrongheadedness. The participle affecting is "given eminence as an object." The primal relation between oneself (I) and another (Thou) mutates into using Thou as a means to an end, the end usually being some sort of personal gratification. Thus does a separate "I" arise from I–Thou and thenceforth try to control things. In consequence, each Thou becomes an It: an object.

The Walter Kaufman translation of I and Thou pictured here renders these two words of primal relation as "I–acting–You" and "You–acting–I" (p. 73). Kaufman says in a footnote that the German original for "I–acting–You," Ich–wirkend–Du, is "as odd as the translation [he gives] above."

The German verb wirken means to act, to take effect, to operate, to weave. What if we think of Buber's primary words as connoting "I–weaving–You" and "You–weaving–I"? That would make it seem as if our separate and individual beings are somehow illusory, that each being has to be "woven" by another, and vice versa, out of the relation of one to the other that paradoxically takes precedence over being itself. Each relatant may possess some sort of intrnisic, inert substance — or not. But the intrinsic, inert substance of the individual relatants should not be confused with the reality they weave when they act together, one with another.

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word

The primacy of relation over being is a main concern of Thomas M. King in Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word.

In Plato's writings, the dialogue titled The Sophist has a protagonist named, simply, "the Stranger" (see pp. 168ff.) "The Sophist" is the Stranger's interlocutor. The Sophist uses verbal trickery to demonstrate that the higher world of Pure Being is All — so much so that the "lower world" in which we think we live is an illusory nonentity! There is no material world. There is only the true world of abstract ideas.

The Stranger dissents. He offers a different, albeit odd definition of what it means to exist (pp. 172-3):

My notion would be, that anything which possesses any sort of power to affect another, or to be affected by another, if only for a single moment, however trifling the cause and however slight the effect, has real existence; and I hold that the definition of being is simply power ([Greek] dunamis). ...

We said that a being was an active or passive energy, arising out of a certain power which proceeds from elements meeting with one another.

Here, the "elements meeting with one another" would seem to correspond to Buber's I and Thou. Power, dunamis (the Greek word from which we get dynamic), active or passive energy: these formulations contrast starkly with the everyday notion of brute objects or elements existing independently of relations, and only then entering into various relations with one another.


My limited understanding of quantum physics suggests to me that this is the message here as well: there are really no fixed "things" at the bottom of material existence. Rather, there are dynamic relationships among entities we (erroneously) think of as solid things.

These "things" are the quarks (the constituents of protons and neutrons) and the leptons (such as an electron). They are elusive, uncertain, indeterminate beings ... until, that is, we engage them, in the act of observing them. Our observation somehow "weaves" them into the sort of hard, firm, measurable existence we need them to furnish to us.


Another analogy comes from the world of music. A simpleminded view of music would be that it is made up of notes. Yet the real truth is that music is composed of relationships among notes.

Take "Happy Birthday":Music readers can see that the first phrase ("Happy birthday to you...") has the notes C–C–D–C–F–E. Music theorists know that these represent tones 5–5–6–5–8–7 of the F Major scale, where, in effect, 8 (F) equals 1, the F an octave lower. The entire song ends on 8 or F. This is the tonal center of the song when the song is played in the key of F Major. The other tones — for instance, 5 or C — "want" to arrive at the tonal center.

Yet there is nothing intrinsic to C that makes it want to arrive at F. It is only the relationships that are set up among the various tones as the melody unfolds that make it clear to the ear that the final destination is, and has to be, F.

If "Happy Birthday" is transposed into the key of C Major, then the final destination becomes C. Tone 5 of that new scale is G. So all the C notes in the notation above become G notes, all the F notes become C notes, and so on — yet the tune, the tones, and the dynamic relationships remain the same!

Conclusion: whatever the intrinsic properties (if any) of the notes, what really counts is the dynamic relationships that are set up among the notes of the melody, even as it unfolds. It is as if the tones of the melody weave one another out of the material — the "yarn" or "thread" — of the otherwise inert notes.

Enchantment, Zen, and Spiritual Dialogue

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word is far too good a book to have gone, as it has, tamely out of print. (It is available used here.) Consider this passage about the spirituality of Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus:

[As a young man] he became lost in the timeless identity of "saint" until a voice within his own soul — or was it his soul? — asked him a question about time: "How will you be able to endure this life in the seventy years you have yet to live?"

Ignatius had set his will into the most all-inclusive identity he knew — only to find that the setting was not complete. He had been absorbed by the [sacred] texts he read and the phrases that he carried about in his copybook. The enchantment lasted six or eight months until a very momentary impulse ... questioned the permanence of his will. ... In deciding to be a knight of God Ignatius had tried to will deeply, yet suddenly it was clear: his will was not all-inclusive. Something still escaped — integrity had been lost with the sin of Adam. He could not lose himself in a perfect ethic, for a perfect ethic remains impersonal and atemporal, while Ignatius remained an individual in time.

Ignatius had to devise a new way to handle the difference between the ethical ideal and his own inner experience: that is, he devised a spirituality. (p. 54-55)

Here, in this brief passage, is the crucial distinction between an ethic, based on religion, and a spirituality. King then adds:

A spirituality, any spirituality, could be defined as a way of dealing with the moods, urges and impulses that act on their own apart from the intent of the will. It is different from an ethic, for an ethic is an objective code and ignores how one feels, while a spirituality takes account of the very feelings that an ethic ignores. An ethic is concerned with the deeds one intends and for which one is responsible. While, in contrast, a spirituality is concerned with the inner life, a life which seems to go its own way apart from one's intent and for which one is not directly responsible.

An ethic is a sort of ideal. When one hears it told of in words, it can exert an enchantment, making the hearer, in effect, a "knight-errant" who henceforth roams the world, going hither and yon doing noble deeds. That is the gist of Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes' classic novel, which King analyzes at length. King sets the Don Quixote story and that of Ignatius — along with those of other notable idealists such as Socrates — into the context of the enchantment that the words and teachings of Jesus exerted upon his apostles and disciples.

He says Jesus himself was a "person of the book," who, when tempted by Satan, doggedly "affirmed the word over his appetite." Jesus told Satan, among other things, "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God" (see p. 118). It is the story of every knight-errant and idealist: words take precedence over material things.

Unlike all the other idealists, though, Jesus was further characterized by his humanity, his fundamental compassion. His feeling for others was based, not on words coming to him from above the world, but on his own experience in the world. Don Quixote was far too abstracted from the real world to offer much in the way of human compassion, even to Sancho Panza.


One who in modern times was enchanted, just as Jesus was, by the word of God was Thomas Merton. As a young Trappist monk, at the tender age of 31 in 1946, Merton wrote his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain. Published two years later in 1948, it told of how Merton had left a life of atheism and dissipation with the intent and desire to witness the voice of God in contemplative prayer.

Like St. Ignatius, Merton subsequently found that his determination to simply listen in prayerful silence to the enchanting words uttered by God above was undermined by an unquenched force within his own soul. Much as he wanted his life of prayer to remove him bodily from the world of sense experience, as it were — to annul the contingent existence of this material world in favor of the Ground of all existence, God — his inner being balked. He wrote of this perplexing turn of events, "There is in my heart this great thirst to recognize totally the nothingness of all that is not God" (see p. 151). But this "nothingness" which he despised would not let Merton leave quietly.

Merton had orginally assumed that there was an either-or choice to be made: either the light of God was to be his chosen abode, or the "darkness" of the world would be. There was no "in between" possible, so he embraced the former and excluded the latter.

Yet the sense world would not meekly disappear.

At first, Merton's recognition of this brute fact "filled his veins with drops of terror" (see p. 153). He was, to borrow a phrase, dazed and confused by the stubbornness of the material world in declining to cooperate with his noble program.


His rescue from crisis and confusion came in the form of a Zen awakening (see p. 152 in King). Merton one day began, simply, to see the world again! It now seemed to possess, oddly enough, an intriguing "neutrality that cannot be written down" in words. No formulaic incantation, of the sort by means of which he wished to bring about his soul's absorption into a higher light, remained available to Merton. Once the awakening had begun, he knew "the reality of the present and of solitude divorced from past or future." And this reality happened right here on earth!

He was accustomed to defining his reality in accordance with a pat verbal teaching, a set of aptly chosen words into which he could be drawn, taking him away from the material world. Now he fell so in love with the irreducibly physical parts of the world that he took to snapping photographs of old wood and weather-beaten rocks, using what he called his "Zen camera." This camera of Merton's made no judgments whatever. The pictures it made had no meaning — and that, says King, "was their importance. For, Merton would explain, in order to be complete, every monk and every person must experience one's own 'meaninglessness'!" (p. 154).


Merton's approach to life changed utterly, from one of contemplation to one of meditation. In the former, the whole point was to become so immersed in a spoken word beyond the ordinary senses that "the sense world would disappear." Contemplation, his word for such an immersion, was basically a monologue.

Meditation, though, was a dialogue that "occurs only in the earthly and historical curcumstances of one's life." "To meditate we do not rise out of the nothing [of the contemplative self]; rather we make [in Merton's words now] a 'return to the center of our own nothingness' ... . Nothingness is necessary for dialogue" (pp. 154-155).

"Nothingness" for Merton meant the opposite of Being. Nothingness went from being a negative to a positive for him; it had actually become a thing, as it were, to take seriously. For nothingness turned out to have an undeniable reality apart from Being.

"Darkness," for its part, had also become something more: more, that is, than the absence of light. Again, Merton found there was a distinction to be drawn between Nonbeing — i.e., the absence of the immaterial Word of God, who was the very Ground of Being — and the sheer presence of a material reality.

Out of the revelation implied in this Zen awakening, Merton finally broke his contemplative silence. He began, instead of just listening in awed silence to the Word of God, to exchange words with the Most High. He would come to write of this experience that "the alternation of darkness and light can [itself] constitute a kind of dialogue between the Christian and God" (p. 156).


The life of Jesus was likewise an alternation of light and darkness, King points out. Jesus was the light which the darkness could not comprehend, as the gospel of John tells us. His words spelled enchantment to all with ears to hear.

Then, after his time as a teacher or rabbi was at an end, there came Jesus's passion and crucifixion. Satan, as promised, had found the "appropriate time" to turn what had been the Purest of All Light into darkness, falsehood, and confusion. This was no longer a matter of verbal enchantment; this was experience — precisely the reality which had been summarily rejected by one and all while the enchantment lasted. At that fateful moment, "Word and world had never seemed further apart" (p. 130).

Yet, at one and the same time, King writes, "By his passion [Jesus] would become a 'visible and powerful manifestation of God' to all the world" (pp. 143-144). This was what Jesus himself had foretold: "The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself." Not just his Jewish brethren — all men, Jews and gentiles alike, would be enlightened by the evil darkness cast over Good Friday.

Paradoxically, that is, "[Jesus's] glory would be manifest on the cross where all power, all sense and meaning were defeated." It would be a Zen moment par excellence: the crucifixion of Jesus as a koan for the whole world to see. It told humanity that when all words and meanings fail, when darkness seems utter, an enlightenment or illumination — one that is, strictly speaking, without meaning — is still available to us. To find it, we only need to do as Merton advised: "Don't think. Look!" Look, that is, at the Son of Man, incomprehensibly nailed to a wooden cross.


King tells us that Merton progressed from self-proclaimed atheist to a practitioner of contemplative religion, en route to finding his true spiritual life. There were three stages in his transformation. His original, atheistic stage began to wear thin when he "saw he was living a selfish life and using others for his own pleasure" (p. 157). An avid reader, he by chance struck upon a book, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy by Etienne Gilson, in which he found a Latin word describing God as "Of Himselfness" (see p. 150). The particular word was Aseitas. It became Merton's enchanting incantation, his abracadabra, his touchstone in the unfolding process of "coming out of his solitary identity [to] enter Another."

Then Merton went through the difficult transition phase called by the mystics the "night of the senses." On the other side of that night he found the religion and God he sought. "The word Aseitas delivered him," King tells us, into Paradise. Merton had in effect traded his own false and selfish Aseitas — his puny individual "of himselfness" — for subjection to God's true Aseitas. "He found God through a word ... through the words of revelation [which] he would contemplate."

Later would come Merton's Zen awakening, after another experience of night: the mystics' "night of the soul." It was the flip side of the night of the senses, a perturbation that beset Merton with terror and confusion. And morning broke yet again for Merton, when his Zen awakening arrived.

Merton thenceforth traded in contemplation for meditation: prayerful dialogue between him and God. King generalizes upon Merton's spiritual rebirth thus:

But perhaps all people are like Merton — perhaps all of us strive to become independent lords of a world centered about ourselves and our pleasures, to become Aseitas. But just as one is about to get such a world in place, one can be enchanted (by God or anyone), drawn out of one's self into a "higher" world in which one forgets the world one tried to establish. And, most puzzling of all, one finds the experience a liberation (one has been freed from the demands of being God). Later one will return to one's self and wonder how another could call one out of one's self and into life, but that is what has happened. Only after one has gone apart from one's self, is one able to make a real choice. It is only after "Orpheus" (the enchanting other [figure in Greek mythology]) has spoken that one's choice can include more than one's own self interest. "Orpheus" has revealed Paradise, a Paradise apart from one's autonomy and plans for control, a Paradise in which one is radically dependent. We cannot understand why something so opposed to selfishness can bring us joy. We fear to lose the Paradise [just as we once feared] to lose the world we can control. But if we give priority to the enchantment, then the moment is religious — no matter who the "Orpheus" is. Religion is a surrender of the self to the One whose words bring us Paradise. (p. 157)

You start, in other words, with yourself (stage one). An enchanting Word at some point leads you through a dark night of the senses into the light of a higher world beyond this one, a Paradise of silent melting, hopefully, into Pure Being (stage two). You presently return to yourself, however, after a dark night of the soul erodes the permanency of your joyful submission to Immaterial Being (stage three). You arrive right back where you started, but with a twist. You've been changed inalterably. Your orientation is now spiritual — not selfish, not religious, but spiritual. You can speak to, and with, God. Moreover, you can make choices out of that dialogue.

In fact, you have to make such choices. "A spirit," writes King (p. 158), "is an unsteady alliance of both worlds, enchantment and earth; it is the unity formed of the enchanting other and the earthen self, the Word and the World." Only by making choices can you steady that "unsteady alliance."

"Then one asks oneself what one will allow the [former] enchantment to mean," King says. It certainly appeared to be blissful, eternal love, at first, but now that particular honeymoon is over and it's time for the marriage proper to begin. Marriage needs to be a dialogue, a matter of making all the hard and easy choices together.

As with earthly marriage, so with the life of the spirit. After the enchantment of the honeymoon, after the dark night of the soul, there comes a new spiritual life of intercourse: communion and dialogue with God.

Consciousness, Relational Processes, and Immaterial Substance (Q2Q XIII)

David J. Chalmers's The Conscious Mind

This is the 13th in my "Quickening to Qualia" series of posts, the most recent of which was Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans (Q2Q XII). One main topic has been the ideas of the philosopher of mind David J. Chalmers in The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Chalmers's topic is consciousness, a.k.a. sentience or subjective experience.

An idea of what he means by consciousness comes from the question, "What is it like to see the color red?" The fact that it is "like" something to see red, says Chalmers, is odd enough to deserve explanation in and of itself, above and beyond any explanations that can be given of merely physical/functional brain activities.

Chalmers gives a lengthy philosophical argument as to why we ought to accord consciousness an unusual sort of existence: purely mental, in that the explanation of consciousness cannot be reduced to the level of workings of the merely physical or material constituents of the brain, i.e., the neurons.

He also argues to the conclusion that there is nothing logically necessary about consciousness's "supervenience" on physical facts: an imaginable "zombie world" just like ours except that our doppelgangers have no inner, subjective experience would be, he says, entirely possible. If we met these doppelgangers, their lack of sentience would by no means be apparent to us.

Ergo, Chalmers says, there must be a natural law associating conscious experience with the cognitive processing of information in such a way that it makes no difference to how we actually function in the world ... for if consciousness did make a difference, then we'd surely be able to tell our zombie doppelgangers weren't exactly like us.


I'd like to raise a possible objection to his arguments, but before I do so I'd like to mention my ulterior motive in doing it. It's a subtle one, and at the moment I'm not even quite sure whether my objection actually is going to serve its interests.

In my previous posts on the subject, I mentioned that Chalmers believes there is a special law of nature linking consciousness to cognition. That helps bolster the case for the God hypothesis, I felt. Chalmers himself, though not biased in favor of religion, speaks figuratively of God having to do "extra work" to introduce such a law into his creation. I simply removed the word "figuratively" from that thought and credited God with having made such a law so he could (eventually, once evolution had done its work) commune with creatures as sentient as he.

Since laying out my own arguments along those lines, I've been nagged by doubts. The notion of God doing "extra work" to establish a cognition-consciousness link makes him into a sort of artisan who, when he finds he needs an extra tool, proceeds to make one on the spot. In this case, the tool is an additional law of nature and not a tangible object in the material domain. Yet the picture is one of an ad hoc, tool-fashioning artisan.


Artisans manipulate and exploit things: objects, not subjects; in Martin Buber's lingo, they live off the domain of It, not in the domain of Thou.

Martin Buber's I and Thou

In his book I and Thou, Buber shows that God as "eternal Thou" looks for us to stand in I–Thou relationship with him. We, on the other hand, are apt to apply the "primary word" I–It to that and every other relationship we have. The first pronoun I in each of these primary words is not the same as the I in the other. The I of I–Thou is what God wants of us, not the I of I–It.

So, at least intuitively, it seems decidedly odd that God would start things off, creation-wise, by assuming an artisan-like I–It posture toward his creation. Such a posture, per Buber, does not rise to the level of true relation – as in, "In the beginning is relation" (see p. 18, Ronald Gregor Smith translation). For Buber, "relation" implies encounter and dialogue. But only one-way understanding and artisan-style exploitation are possible, when Thou collapses into It.


The way Chalmers speaks of consciousness makes an It of it, so to speak. By that I mean that in Chalmers's view sentience is but a glorified thing: a mental thing, true, but still a thing. It exists by virtue of a natural law or laws, just as material things come into being by virtue of the operation of natural laws. In the latter case, the laws are those of physics; in the former, they are putatively laws of mind. Still, the mechanism of conferring existence is the same. A law or laws exploits existing facts to create further facts. Nothing gets created ex nihilo. What already exists is merely refashioned and given new qualities.

To Buber, only I–Thou, or standing in mutual relation, is truly creative. I–It is but a cobbler, an artificer. Relation takes precedence over existence. (As for essence or being-qua-being, existent entities – relatants such as you or I and the eternal Thou – do possess it, it looks like, but it is unfathomable to us in this life; see pp. 86ff.)

My ulterior motive in challenging Chalmers is accordingly to take God out of the artisan business. I would prefer consciousness itself to be, in some sense, relational.


My takeoff point in trying to refute Chalmers comes from a fact about music. To wit, what it is like to experience hearing a note or a chord depends on its tonal context.

Most Western music is tonal. It sets up a key: a certain note, say C or D-flat, is established early on as the tonal center of the piece, the note to which the melody inevitably gravitates. Typically at the end of the piece, or of a section within the piece, the melody returns to the tonic note, leading the listener to experience a feeling of release of tension, resolution, and completion.

In addition to the melody, each piece of music has a harmonic structure, typically expressed as a series of chords accompanying the melody. This set of chord "changes" — also known as the chord "progression" — is as important to the musical experience as is the melody which the progression serves to set off. Each chord is usually based on one of the degrees of the scale defined by the key of the piece.

If the key is C Major, for example, the notes of the ascending melodic scale are C, D, E, F, G, A, and B, before the scale returns to the tonic C an octave higher. A chord based on the first scale degree, C, is said to be a (Roman numeral) I, or "one," chord. A chord based on the fifth scale degree, A, is a V, or "five," chord. So the chord Amaj ("A Major") is a V chord when the key is C Major.

A chord like Amaj is experienced differently when it is a V chord than when it is a I chord. The ear "hears" it as a source of tension and not a source of resolution. Same chord + different context = different experience.

The same is true of a single note. In C Minor, the note A brings tension and suspense, the high point of the melodic roller coaster. In the key of A Major, the very same note, A, signifies the end of the ride.

It is as if the experience of music is constituted by the associated contextual relationships. If it can be said that "consciousness exists" — which is in fact one of Chalmers's most basic assumptions — then perhaps existence per se is constituted by relation: perhaps the inner nature of reality itself is that it is constituted by dialogue!

Perhaps the information processing centers of the brain, as they encounter a piece of music that is being auditioned, are in dialogue with one another, and out of this dialogue pops conscious experience!

Or, maybe consciousness is dialogue. By virtue of it, the notes of the music can be said to be "talking to one another" within the mind somehow, and we experience that dialogue as "what it is like to hear music."

Consciousness might accordingly be the "shadow" of the relationships that arise among the various physical components of the mind as they go about their separate-but-intertwined information-processing duties. If so, then Chalmers may be wrong: there are no actual "facts" of conscious experience (see p. 161). Conscious experiences would lack facts and properties as well, because they are only the "shadows" of relations.


According to Chalmers, the "properties" of consciousness are its qualia: the qualitative "feels" that are associated with our subjective experiences. If we see something that is red, the quale (sing. of qualia) it invokes accounts for "what it is like to see red." Each quale in the mind might be thought of as a distinct "chunk" of consciousness, waiting to be invoked as a particular experience.

These qualia seemingly exist on a non-causal plane of immaterial existence: they play no role in the "closed causal loop" of the physical world. Still, qualia form what Chalmers might call the "substance" of consciousness. Substance is what makes things things, rather than empty placeholders. For example, according to him (see p. 153) things that exist in the physical world would be nothing but empty placeholders, were it not for their intrinsic properties: their substance. To him, intrinsic properties equal substance.

And (see p. 125) "conscious experience involves properties," as well — the qualia — even though consciousness is mental, not material. In Chalmers' philosopher-speak, intrinsic properties are ontological; they confer existence. The very first premise of Chalmers's entire argument (see p. 161) is, in fact, that consciousness exists. Hence, consciousness must be constituted by some sort of ontological chunks that give it its substance.

So I now see that I must dispute Chalmers at his very first reasoning step. I am not at all certain that consciousness exists, in the sense of having ontological substance. I'd say a thing might be real without yet existing, if it is entailed by a relation.

The idea of reality-in-relation, I think Martin Buber is saying, precedes and is different from the idea of reality-in-being. For example, in Christian theology the mutual love between the Father and the Son is at first real-in-relation and only then (as Holy Ghost) real-in-being. The second kind of reality "proceeds from" the first, in the same way that the Nicene Creed says the Holy Ghost "proceeds from the Father and the Son," the first two divine Persons who, it is sometimes said, "abide in" one another.

If reality-in-being proceeds from reality-in-relation, and if consciousness is pure reality-in-relation, then Chalmers starts out on completely the wrong basis. We can take consciousness very, very seriously, indeed, without ascribing to it existence, being, or ontological substance.


Buber provides yet another possible way to look at it, though. It comes amid a lengthy discussion of how his thought compares and contrasts with Buddhism (pp. 83-95, Smith translation). He warns us that some of the interpretations that have been given to the Buddha's teachings in effect violate the primal I–Thou relation. Yet he also finds the Buddha's life in itself to be anything but contradictory to his thesis. It is as if Buddha was intentionally silent about what he himself knew about I–Thou in order to present a teaching to men that would take them beyond I–Thou to the annulment of suffering: "of becoming and passing away" (p. 139, Kaufman translation). This happens by virtue of absorption or immersion into True Being.

Buber disdains such absorption or immersion as a proper goal of life as really lived. Yet Buber can also commend the Buddha:

The Buddha knows saying You to man — that is clear from his greatly superior, but also greatly direct, intercourse with his disciples — but he does not teach it: to this love, which means "boundless inclusion in the heart of all that has become," the simple confrontation of being by being remains alien. In the depths of his silence he certainly knows, too, the You-saying to the primal ground, transcending all the "gods" whom he treats like disciples; it was from a relational process that became substance that his deed came, clearly as an answer to the You; but of this he remains silent. (p. 140, Kaufman, in which the translator uses "You" instead of "Thou").

Whatever the merits of Buber's dispute with Buddhism, it is clear from the above that for Buber, a relational process can in fact become substance. He is saying that the Buddha first engaged in a dialogue with the eternal You. This was a relational process. It was then turned into the (immaterial) substance of the Buddha's actual teaching.


If a relational process in the domain of I–Thou can become a (possibly immaterial) substance within the I–It domain, then perhaps this is where the so-called qualia of consciousness come from. Perhaps each time we hear a piece of music which uses, say, the A major chord as a V chord, the relational process between us–as–I and the music-as-Thou simply turns the notes of the A major triad into the immaterial substance of "what it is like to hear a V chord," just for the present moment.

This appears to be a valuable formulation of the situation we live in. It allows qualia-as-substance to exist, if only ephemerally. It accounts for why consciousness per se is not part of the closed loop of physical-world causality. That would seem to please Chalmers.

Yet it also allows a Martin Buber to extol "how I [that is, any person] cause my attitude of soul to the world to grow to life, to life that acts upon the world" (p. 94, Smith). The relational process which becomes substance is, for Buber, the only thing that is truly creative of new reality.


However, it appears that this formulation might not totally satisfy Chalmers, who insists that consciousness is not absolutely entailed by what goes on in the brain, or transpires between the brain and the sensory world. There could, after all, be a Zombie World in which the denizens possess no conscious experience.

It looks to me as if Buber would say, if confronted with such a claim as Chalmers', that the crucial distinction is, rather, this: an I–Thou relational process will always produce, in the It domain, the (possibly immaterial) substance of a new reality. On the other hand, an I–It relational process will not yield a new reality, only (at best) the reconfiguration of an existing substance. For Buber, a Zombie World in which no relational process yields consciousness is a world of nothingness; it could never even conceivably exist.

In Search of Martin Buber (V)

Martin Buber's I and Thou

Yet again I take up the philosophy of Martin Buber, as represented in his 1923 work I and Thou. In the previous installment, In Search of Martin Buber (IV), and in its predecessor, In Search of Martin Buber (III), I mentioned how key the Book of Job is to Buber's view of God as Thou. Job's wealth, offspring, and repute were taken away from him by the Lord, who subjected Job to humiliation upon humiliation and woe upon woe, just in order to test him. Job cried out to God to respond to his plaints face to face, and God appeared to Job from a whirlwind. We learn from this Old Testament book that such dialogue with the Lord, no matter what evils may be visited upon one, is one's best and only refuge.

Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces

The late myth guru Joseph Campbell also referred to Job in his 1948 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in his chapter on "Atonement with the Father":

In the Biblical story of Job, the Lord makes no attempt to justify in human or any other terms the ill pay meted out to his virtuous servant, "a simple and upright man, and fearing God, and avoiding evil." Nor was it for any sins of their own that Job's servants were slain by the Chaldean troops, his sons and his daughters crushed by a collapsing roof. When his friends arrive to console him, they declare, with a pious faith in God's justice, that Job must have done some evil to have deserved to be so frightfully afflicted. But the honest, courageous, horizon-searching sufferer insists that his deeds have been good; whereupon the comforter, Elihu, charges him with blasphemy, as naming himself more just than God.

When the Lord himself answers Job out of the whirlwind, He makes no attempt to vindicate His work in ethical terms, but only magnifies His Presence, bidding Job to do likewise on earth in human emulation of the way of heaven: "Gird up thy loins now like a man; I will demand of thee, and declare thou unto me. Wilt thou also disannul my judgment? Wilt thou condemn me, that thou mayst be righteous? Hast thou an arm like God? or canst thou thunder with a voice like him? Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty. Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud and abase him. Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place. Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret. Then I will also confess unto thee that thine own hand can save thee." (p. 147)

The will of God, Campbell says, "derives from a center beyond the range of human categories." Buber would say that all such categories are from the world of It, not Thou, since categories are first and foremost tools that we use to keep things separate from one another and from ourselves, so that we can manipulate them. When we take our stand in relation to the eternal Thou — he who is, of course, the One God — all those categories are dissolved and all supposedly separate things are taken up into the global presence. In that exclusive presence, nothing in this world gets excluded!

"In the relation with God unconditional exclusiveness and unconditional inclusiveness are one," writes Buber (p. 78, Ronald Gregor Smith translation). "He who enters on the absolute relation is concerned with nothing isolated any more, neither things nor beings, neither earth nor heaven; but everything is gathered up in the relation."

Standing in such absolute relation to God-as-Thou produces one's life's meaning, one's destiny. This is what Job finds out when he is given a mission to "abase" the proud: to give what we would term a wake-up call to those who live in a self-sufficient world of manipulating and exploiting all the categories of It. Thus God needs something from Job, and this is why God tells Job, perhaps somewhat surprisingly to us, that "thine own hand can save thee."

Each person needs God; God needs each person. Buber has this to say (p. 82): "You know always in your heart that you need God more than everything; but do you not know too that God needs you — in the fullness of his eternity needs you? How would man be, how would you be, if God did not need him, did not need you? You need God, in order to be — and God needs you [in order to offer him] the very meaning of your life."

Sacrifice and prayer, Buber tells us (p. 83), "are set 'before the Face [of God]', in the consummation of the holy primary word that means mutual action: they speak the Thou [i.e., they say Thou to God, they call God by the second-person-familiar pronoun], and then they hear."


The consummation of the I–Thou relation with God in mutual action is, for Campbell, what Job underwent as "atonement with the Father," which is one key stage in the full canonical "hero's journey." The mythic hero in the mythos of every culture accomplishes the same basic trajectory:

Departure:
• Hero's call to adventure
  
• Hero's initial refusal of call
  
• Hero's receipt of aid from a supernatural personage
  
• Hero's outbound threshold-crossing
  
• Hero's figuratively re-entering the womb to experience a rebirth
  
Initiation:

• Trials of the hero
  
• Meeting by the hero of "the Goddess"
  
• Temptation of the hero by a woman, which must be resisted
  
• Hero's atonement with the Father
  
• Apotheosis (hero's becoming, as it were, godlike)
  
• Hero's receipt of the "ultimate boon" or gift from the Father
  
Return:

• Hero's initial refusal of the return
  
• Hero's "magic flight" away from the Father's house
  
• Hero's rescue by someone outside the Father's house
  
• Hero's crossing of the return threshold
  
• Hero's return as "master of two worlds"
  
• Hero's gaining the "freedom to live"
  

In his discourse on mutual action, Buber has this to say about freedom:

Yes; in pure relation you have felt yourself to be purely dependent, as you are able to feel in no other relation — and simply free, too, as in no other time or place: you have felt yourself to be both creaturely and creative. You had the one feeling then no longer limited by the other, but you had both of them limitlessly and together." (p. 82)

This, for Buber, is what the hero's "freedom to live" really means.

In Search of Martin Buber (IV)

Martin Buber's I and Thou

Once again I investigate the philosophy of Martin Buber in his 1923 book I and Thou. My previous installment in this series was In Search of Martin Buber (III).

There will be those who suspect the discussion in that last installment of trying to demote morality, especially as it pertains to God and religion. That is not my intent. To show why I don't think spirituality à la Buber imperils questions of right and wrong, I'd like to borrow and adapt an argument certain philosophers make about human sentience.

Why we have sentience or a capacity to have conscious experiences above and beyond the complex information processing we use to succeed in this world (the way Job succeeded before his downfall) is hard to explain. Philosophers of mind are not agreed on this, but some say conscious experience — "what it is like" to see the color red, for instance — simply cannot be explained with recourse to cause and effect in the physical domain of this world. There is also a mental sphere which is not physical but which "supervenes" on the physical.

A telling argument can be made to that effect by showing that there conceivably could have been an alternate world whose denizens are doppelgangers. They seem just like us, physically and behaviorally ... but they don't experience anything. This so-called "zombie world" would be externally indistinguishable from our own. We would have the uncanny experience of meeting up with our zombie twins if we went there, but we simply would not be able to tell that our zombie twins were having no experiences whatsoever!

I'd like to extend and adapt that same argument to suggest that there conceivably could be an alternate world in which our doppelgangers also lack what Buber calls "man's sense of Thou."

This "Thou-sense" might be what some philosophers imagine as a relational component of the mind, in addition to the physical component and the conscious component. Admittedly, I am not aware of any actual philosophers who consider this third component real — a lot of them don't even consider the second, conscious component real. Still, given how hard it is to argue for consciousness being real-though-immaterial, it's not surprising that philosophers would take a pass on asserting this sort of third component which Buber would call the "sense of Thou" or the "inborn Thou."

So let us simply stipulate, for the sake of this discussion at least, that there is in the mind such a third, relational component, a Thou-sense. Our zombie twins presumably might be lacking it as well as the second component, consciousness. When we observe these zombies in their hypothetical doppelganger world, would we be able to tell their Thou-sense was missing?

Perhaps yes, perhaps no. My main point here is that we wouldn't be able to tell, simply based on observing their moral behavior.

Remember, the zombies in this imaginary "Z-world" are just like us, physically and behaviorally. For instance, if we were to be able to peek into such a zombie world, we would not find our zombie twins acting as if it were a cardinal sin to fail to run down pedestrians in crosswalks whenever possible. Nor would we find proper crosswalk etiquette to be a matter of random chance, or momentary mood. Either of those two scenarios would be ruled out by our stipulation that our zombie twins behave just like us. They seem to observe moral standards and ethical rules as much (or as little) as we do.

The Thou-sense is not about morals or ethics. It is what it is like to know we would sooner die than never encounter our Thou, ever again. There's no way to be sure our zombie twins know what that feels like.


I think this Thou-sense is in fact a "component" of our minds, but only in the following way. Our capacity for subjective, conscious experience — our sentience — actually is a separate mental component, built atop of all of that physical information processing going on in our brains. It's separate because, strictly speaking, it doesn't have to exist — witness our zombie doppelgangers — and because, were it to be absent, every last one of the cause-and-effect events taking place in this material world with which we interact would still be exactly the same ... just as it is in the Z-world in which there is no Thou-sense.

The Thou-sense, though, is not really a third, separate mind component, but rather a relationship between the consciousness "module" and the information-processing "module" comprising the physical workings of our brains.

We can think of both of the paired brain-state modules, consciousness and information processing, as "things" in the It-world. On that view, even consciousness or sentience is an It. Conscious experience may not be wholly material, but it can still be looked on as a suitable object of scientific investigation.

But if Thou-sense were just another It, that would seem to be a contradiction in terms. To imagine that the eternal Thou is never an It, while the inborn Thou is only an It, simply doesn't compute.

Thinking of Thou-sense as a relation, not a truly separate module of the mind, sidesteps that problem and makes Thou-sense primary in the same way that Buber calls all relation primary when he says, "In the beginning is relation" (p. 18).

At another point (p. 22), Buber further qualifies the primary word I–Thou as "the vital primal words I–affecting–Thou and Thou–affecting–I." When the participle — the word affecting — has been "split asunder" from the pronouns and in itself "given eminence as an object," continues Buber, Thou degenerates into mere It, and the I of I–Thou is degraded to the I of I-It. I take this to mean that there is a difference between "affecting" in the domain of Thou and "causing" in the domain of It.

Extending that view, if consciousness is thoroughly acausal and the cognitive information processing of the brain alone is causal, then there can't be a domain of Thou, for us, without the existence of consciousness within us. No Thou-sense without sentience, in other words. So, if that thinking is correct, then our hypothetical Z-world, which lacks sentience, also lacks Thou-sense.

Which means the sense of Thou of which we are capable is as extraordinary as the sentience which we experience — if not more so.

In Search of Martin Buber (III)

Martin Buber's I and Thou

I continue to explore the philosophy of Martin Buber and his early-twentieth-century book I and Thou, along with how that outlook compares with the worldview of the late astronomer Carl Sagan. My previous installment in this series was In Search of Martin Buber (II).

To Sagan — though he was a non-believer in the God of his Judaic heritage — I attribute the accolade of having stood in I–Thou relation to the cosmos itself, to all that is and ever will be. Buber, who was a practicing Hasidic Jew, wrote (see p. 79 of the Ronald Gregor Smith translation, not the Walter Kaufman translation pictured here): "When you hallow this life you meet the living God." No one hallowed this life more than Carl Sagan.

I think Sagan was in contact with what Buber calls "the eternal Thou"; though irreligious, Sagan partook of what Buber terms "man's sense of Thou" via his scientific wonder and awe. Hence his cherishing of this vast cosmos we call the universe surely turned into, in Buber's words, "a discovering of the primal, of origin."

Buber writes of such a discoverer: "His sense of Thou, which cannot be satiated until he finds the endless Thou, had the Thou present to it from the beginning; the presence had only to become wholly real to him in the reality of the hallowed life of the world" (p. 80).

Carl Sagan's The Demon- Haunted World

Sagan wrote, in The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark:

"Spirit" comes from the Latin word "to breathe." What we breathe is air, which is certainly matter, however thin. Despite usage to the contrary, there is no necessary implication in the word "spiritual" that we are talking of anything other than matter (including the matter of which the brain was made), or anything outside the realm of science. ... Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or of acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both. (pp. 29-30).

Buber, for his part, held that "the world of sense does not need to be laid aside as though it were illusory. There is no illusory world, there is only the world — which appears to us as twofold in accordance with our twofold attitude" (p. 77). Or, again, "God cannot be inferred in anything — in nature, say, as its author, or in history as its master, or in the subject [i.e., the human person] as the [basis of the] self ... . Something else is not 'given' and God then elicited from it; but God is the Being that is directly, most nearly, and lastingly, over against us [i.e., it is God who most immediately faces us], that may properly only be addressed, not expressed" (pp. 80-81). It is this non-inferred, non-elicited, immediate God whom I think Sagan encountered.


So I think Buber and Sagan are saying the same things in different words. I think of it this way: the eternal Thou, God, whom we can address only in dialogue, can be engaged in many, albeit disparate, ways: religion, spirituality, science. If the stand we take (i.e., if our relational "attitude") is a proper one, the dialogue is real. Otherwise, we simply face nothingness.

It is as if there were an extra axis to reality. There are manifestly three axes of visible space, each orthogonal — at right angles — to the others. Science sees those. But there is also an axis of relationship, above and beyond length, breadth, and height. It is orthogonal to the other three ... which of course cannot be so unless you imagine an extra, unseen, spirit dimension, in a four-dimensional reality.

The "things" from which Buber says God cannot in any way be inferred or elicited exist entirely in the three non-spiritual dimensions. Science studies them and figures out how those things are produced by ordinary causes and effects. Meanwhile, our morality and ethics concern how we act in this, the material world of It — to use Buber's terms — rather than the relational world of Thou.

Reality's "extra" axis of relationship and dialogue — whenever we acknowledge our spiritual birthright and step forth along it toward the Thou — makes no difference to the material, causal world. Rather, it simply turns It into Thou for us. That ineffable act of stepping forth: it at one and the same time makes no difference materially and makes all the difference spiritually.


If morality and ethics relate only to the material domain of reality, does "being spiritual" excuse us from moral exigencies? Not at all. The domain of I-Thou relationality is distinct from morality, that's all. Distinct, but not separate.

This is what the Book of Job teaches us. Job was as upstanding as they come, as attested to by his copious offspring and material wealth. Yet God apparently wanted to "test" Job in order to see whether Job understood the distinction between mere uprightness and being in right relation with the eternal Thou. God visited no end of humiliation and woe upon the formerly wealthy patriarch, whose three friends tried to help him figure out what he had done wrong. Their explanations sounded pretty good to most people's ears, but they didn't satisfy Job. Instead of taking to heart these rationalizations from the sort of thinking done in the It-world, Job stepped forth into near-blaspemy, calling God himself into question. In Buber's terms, Job sought I–Thou dialogue with God.

And God at long last responded, appearing to Job out of a whirlwind and answering Job's charges face to face. The message here is that I–Thou dialogue with the Lord God is possible; indeed, it is indispensible ... and it trumps all considerations of righteousness, fecundity, and moral standing in the It world.

This is why Buber says "in the beginning" is relation (p. 18). Relation precedes all else: moral, ethical, material. Relation is primary.

Acolytes of Certitude

"Opening in theaters everywhere" today is the documentary movie Jesus Camp, which depicts life in a kids' evangelical Christian summer camp in, of all places, Devil's Lake, N.D.

Michael Sragow, reviewing it in The (Baltimore) Sun, says the movie, on the good side, shows children who are "immersed in something larger than their immediate appetites. Their dedication and energy could be positive qualities." On the bad side

... their certitude will horrify anyone outside this insular world [of evangelical-fundamentalist Christianity]. Parents home-school them with creationist curricula. Pastors inculcate them with the belief that their brand of Christianity should inform all public debate. So they march right into a closed system of thought and practice that's even more appalling in children than in adults ... .

In the current issue of TIME, columnist Andrew Sullivan's "When Not Seeing Is Believing" takes aim at "the utter certainty of those who say they have seen the face of God or have surrendered themselves to his power or have achieved the complete spiritual repose promised by the Books of all three [great monotheisms]: the Torah [of Judaism], the Gospels [of Christianity], the Koran [of Islam]."

Fundamentalists of any religion are acolytes of certitude.

In Jesus Camp, "the Rev. Becky Fischer, who runs the Kids on Fire summer camp ... [is of the] view that Christians should imbue their young with the same zealotry that turns young Islamists toward jihad. She doesn't see zealotry as the problem. But she's a serious, committed woman with the intensity and verve of a true believer. If she devoted herself to a secular cause like conservation, she'd win a cascade of puff pieces and softball talk-show spots."

According to TIME's Sullivan, "Complete calm comes from complete certainty. In today's unnerving, globalizing, sometimes terrifying world, such religious certainty is a balm more in demand than ever." Yet Sullivan, who is a liberal Catholic, favors "the much derided moderate Muslims, tolerant Jews and humble Christians [who relish] something called spiritual humility and sincere religious doubt. Fundamentalism is not the only valid form of faith [says Sullivan], and to say it is, is the great lie of our time."


So, wow, what a cultural divide we have going in America and the world: fundamentalism vs. the rest of us. Still, it must hastily be added that the fundamentalism on view in Jesus Camp and in Sullivan's article is something of a caricature that does not represent all evangelicals or all religious conservatives. For instance, I don't agree with Sullivan that the conservatism of the new pope, Benedict XVI, patterns with the rest of the caricature. Not that I fully understand where Benedict is coming from, but he does not seem to me to represent the same resistance to reason and insistence on inerrant scriptural revelation of the true fundamentalist. There is nothing more adverse to Sullivan's hopes for moderation and rational dialogue than arbitrarily lumping the sheep in with the goats.

Plus, it would seem to me that the real meaning of Jesus to us is squarely anti-divisionist. Jesus confronted the Pharisees and others in his own society who blamed "unclean" Jews — the poor, the sick, the "demon-possessed" or mentally ill, those too uneducated to know and observe the Law — for the demise of the independent nation of Israel at Rome's hands. Jesus stood for not marginalizing anyone except possibly those so lacking in true spiritual sense that ostracism was their main stock in trade. His message was firmly one of spiritual and political solidarity. Anyone who, out of their own fear and loathing, claimed that associating with those not just like them was drawing God's ire upon the entire nation did not pass muster with Jesus.

Today's acolytes of certitude conquer their own fear and loathing with zeal and fervor and then blessedly lose sight of their original fear. Their critics, whether liberals in the same faith traditions or freethinkers, conquer their fears by castigating the conservatives, usually in print. High-tech stonings, those; remember when Jesus interceded on behalf of a harlot who was being stoned to death by the conservatives of his time? Liberals are sometimes no better.

Nobody really seems to have any idea how we can come together, barring having the other side regain its senses. What we need is fewer verbal brickbats coming in the form, basically, of here's-the-truth monologues. What we need is more true dialogue.

In Search of Martin Buber (II)

In In Search of Martin Buber (I) I discussed my recognition that in some strange way I have been seeming to move beyond religion, with its emphasis on hard-and-fast precepts and sets of mandatory practices, to spirituality, in which precept and practice give way to, shall we say, presence.

Martin Buber's I and Thou

The recognition came in large part by way of my exposure to the philosophy of Martin Buber in his early-twentieth-century book I and Thou and to the worldview of the late astronomer Carl Sagan. To Sagan, though he was an atheist, I attributed the accolade of having stood in I–Thou relation to the cosmos itself, to all that is and ever will be.

Since that last post I have continued to read I and Thou with an eye towards blogging about it on a regular basis — and found all my erstwhile ability to write coherently about such arcane subjects oddly absent in this particular case.

This morning I woke up with, for the first time, an awareness of why. I realized that most of my blogging has been in service to just one partly hidden purpose: to try to persuade myself of something. For example, the stuff I've been posting about Carl Sagan was to persuade myself that Sagan indeed had a deeply spiritual outlook, despite his irreligion, and thus that religion is at best a scaffolding for constructing the cathedral of a "real" truth which lies at its spiritual center.

With Buber, once you develop some sort of rapport with his thought, it's different. Once you "grok" I and Thou — once you achieve complete intuitive understanding of it — it stands as self-evident.

That word, grok, comes from Robert A. Heinlein's 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land. It is the Martian verb for "drink," and figuratively it means "to drink in all available aspects of reality," "to become one with the observed." Buber might say that only a Thou can truly be grokked; we can experience and use an It, we cannot grok it.


I and Thou can only be grokked. It can't really be explained or taught. Explaining and instructing in are actually forms of persuasion. If I explain to you, say, Einstein's theory of relativity, what I am basically intent upon doing is persuading you that your commonsense notions of time, space, and gravity aren't quite true. If I instruct you in Christian belief, I am seeking to persuade you that that Christian belief makes sense.

It isn't that way at all with Buber's thought, which goes right on past truth and sense — which after all are only from the world of It — to encounter. For Buber, the fulcrum of reality is in meeting, by way of whomever or whatever one's own Thou is — for Sagan, it was the entire cosmos — the eternal Thou. The latter is God.

I was about to say, just then, "The latter properly understood is the eternal Thou or God" But that would get the thought all wrong. Understanding, too, is just It. The correct formulation might be, "The latter properly met is Thou." To Buber, the relation between I and Thou, when the two properly meet, is primal. It comes before all else. That relation is not a matter of truth, sense, instruction, persuasion, or anything else from the world of It. It is, basically, a matter of dialogue.


In true dialogue, neither party tries to win the other over. Rather, there is a full sharing of the respective way or path which each party has trodden to arrive at their joint meeting place. To achieve full sharing, there must be mutual and unstinting acceptance of the other party in the exact moment of the I–Thou meeting, which is necessarily nothing other than the immediate present, the now. In the immediate present, an only in it, I and Thou abide together.

Each party to the I–Thou dialogue hallows the other: makes the other holy. Each party hails the other: makes the other hale, or whole in health. Or, what is hailed and hallowed, sanctified and made whole, is always the Thou which is affirmed in the mutual relation between the two parties who meet.

It can be said that the I and the Thou affect one another in this way — that is, they have such an effect on one another — but this is not the word "effect" as commonly used, as in "cause and effect." Cause and effect are from the world of It, not Thou. The I–Thou meeting does not set aside the It-world of cause and effect, the subject of Carl Sagan's beloved scientific understanding of the cosmos. Rather, it takes up into itself the whole of the It-world intact. There is no contradiction here. There is only the contradistinction between the two "attitudes" or "poles" we all have and move between. One attitude or pole gives us the I of I-It, and the other attitude or pole, if and when we manage to "take our stand" in Thou, gives us the entirely different I of I-Thou.

Buber says we can expect to take our stand in Thou only fleetingly and momentarily. The rest of the time, our I is closer to the I of I–It. My reading of that is that our individual I does not merge into an ethereal principle of universal awareness such as Brahman in Hinduism, or Buddha-consciousness in Buddhism. We come face-to-face with God as Thou; we do not "become God." We do not dissolve into something unnameable above and beyond the material world. For this reason, Buber does not care for what he calls "mysticism" or even what he calls "spirituality." Buber's thought could be called the distillation of Western monotheism.


So it would seem that, in view of the above, I actually do have a lot to say about Buber and I and Thou. But it remains hard for me to consider this a form of persuasion. You either grok it or you don't.