Meetings

by Martin Buber, Maurice S. Friedman (Translator)

Meetings sets forth the life of one of the twentieth-century's greatest spiritual philosophers in his own words. A glittering series of reflections and narratives, it seeks not to describe his life in its full entirety, but rather to convey some of his defining moments of uncertainty, revelation and meaning. Recalling the question on the infinity of space and time which nearly drove Buber to suicide at the age of fourteen, his adolescent 'seduction' by Nietzsche's work, his hero-worship of Ferdinand Lassalle and his love of Bach's music, Meetings has no equal as a portrait of an unique intellect in progress. Like Buber's great works Between Man and Man and The Way of Man , it evokes a tactile, earthly concept of meaning ultimately found, as Maurice Friedman writes in his introduction, 'not in conceptual or systematic thought but in the four-dimensional reality of events and meetings'.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theology, Memoir, Biography, Judaism

120 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1977

About the author

Martin Buber was an Austrian-born Jewish philosopher best known for his philosophy of dialogue, a religious existentialism centered on the distinction between the I-Thou relationship and the I-It relationship.

Buber came from a family of observant Jews, but broke with Jewish custom to pursue secular studies in philosophy. In 1902, Buber became the editor of the weekly Die Welt, the central organ of the Zionist movement, although he later withdrew from organizational work in Zionism. In 1923 Buber wrote his famous essay on existence, Ich und Du (later translated into English as I and Thou), and in 1925 he began translating the Hebrew Bible into the German language.

In 1930 Buber became an honorary professor at the University of Frankfurt am Main, and resigned in protest from his professorship immediately after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. He then founded the Central Office for Jewish Adult Education, which became an increasingly important body as the German government forbade Jews to attend public education. In 1938, Buber left Germany and settled in Jerusalem, in the British Mandate of Palestine, receiving a professorship at Hebrew University and lecturing in anthropology and introductory sociology.

Reviews

[ص مصطفی · Rating 5 out of 5]

تمام این کتاب برای این نوشته شده تا مفهوم این جملات، آخرین جملات این کتاب، بهتر فهمیده شود:

"Books are pure, men are mixed; men are made up of prattle and silence, and their silence is not that of animals but of men. Out of the human silence, behind the prattle, the spirit whispers to you, the spirit 'as soul': She, she is the beloved…

I knew nothing of books when I came forth from the womb of my mother, and I shall die without books, with another human hand in my own. I do, indeed, close my door at times and surrender myself to a book, but only because I can open the door again and see a human being looking at me."