Buber, Between Man And Man (In) Bb.pdf - PolkFolk

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between man and man
Of thinking
To all unprejudiced reflection it is clear that all art is from its
origin essentially of the nature of dialogue. All music calls to an
ear not the musician’s own, all sculpture to an eye not the
sculptor’s, architecture in addition calls to the step as it walks in
the building. They all say, to him who receives them, something
(not a “feeling” but a perceived mystery) that can be said only in
this one language. But there seems to cling to thought something
of the life of monologue to which communication takes a second,
secondary place. Thought seems to arise in monologue. Is it
so? Is there here—where, as the philosophers say, pure subject
separates itself from the concrete person in order to establish and
stabilize a world for itself—a citadel which rises towering over
the life of dialogue, inaccessible to it, in which man-withhimself,
the single one, suffers and triumphs in glorious solitude?
Plato has repeatedly called thinking a voiceless colloquy of the
soul with itself. Everyone who has really thought knows that
within this remarkable process there is a stage at which an
“inner” court is questioned and replies. But that is not the arising
of the thought but the first trying and testing of what has
arisen. The arising of the thought does not take place in colloquy
with oneself. The character of monologue does not belong to the
insight into a basic relation with which cognitive thought
begins; nor to the grasping, limiting and compressing of the
insight; nor to its moulding into the independent conceptual
form; nor to the reception of this form, with the bestowal of
relations, the dovetailing and soldering, into an order of conceptual
forms; nor, finally, to the expression and clarification in
language (which till now had only a technical and reserved
symbolic function). Rather are elements of dialogue to be discovered
here. It is not himself that the thinker addresses in the
stages of the thought’s growth, in their answerings, but as it
were the basic relation in face of which he has to answer for his