4. Martin Buber

Abstract

In 1957 a little man of about eighty years gave a series of lectures at the Washington School of Psychiatry. He had come to the United States from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem to speak under the auspices of an institution concerned with restoring to health the mentally ill or aberrant. The guest was a philosopher, not a renowned therapist. Yet for Martin Buber (1878- ) himself such a designation is both acceptable and unacceptable. On the one hand he concerns himself with the objective world as philosophy conceptualizes it. On the other hand his primary concern is not speaking about God in an abstract or an objective manner as a philosopher might do. Rather, in what Buber calls the life of dialogue, he would speak with God in the concrete immediacy of human experience. [excerpt