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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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from Henri Bergson
  • Also has some resonances with Martin Buber I/Thou now that I think about it. Technic/reason/science is I/It , Magic/intuition/holism is I/Thou.
from Weird Studies/Exotica
  • Touched on I and Thou at the end. Hm – anticolonialism is the objects insisting they are not Its and nust be treated as subjects (Thou). It puts the well-intentioned white guys in a difficult position, because I-Thou is only reached through grace, guilt doesn't really help you get there.
from Weird Studies/Matt Cardin
  • A mention that the Socratic dialogs are very I and Thou
from RD Laing
  • Sounds very Martin Buber, contrasting relation between whole selves and splitting into id-ego-superego. But also like a holist, and I've been trained to sneer at those.
from The Face of God
  • Mentions I and Thou, reminding me that there are different flavors of I.
from friendliness
  • p84 – that section is quite a magical piece of writing. Ref to I and Thou
from Weird Studies/Graham Harman
  • Harman doesn't exactly explain this either, in fact he is against the explanations offered by either of the two mainstream theories, which he calls "shams". The third table is not propositional, it isn't even knowledge as such, it's more relational, like love or sympathy or compassion. Sounds like I and Thou.
from Finite and Infinite Games
  • It has a certain family resemblance to Martin Buber's I and Thou. Like Buber, he has a very sharply-drawn dichotomy between two radically different modes of being. In Buber, the two modes are modes of relating, distinct attitudes between the self and the world – one rather mundane, the other obviously special and superior, although not usually readily available.
from Weird Studies/MC Richards
  • Opening is very I and Thou. Dialog between artist and material, how they greet each other. And holism
from Technic and Magic
from holism
  • Ah OK this is an exact parallel to Buber's I and Thou. Holism is an I/Thou stance, and it implies a coherence and soul to the self and its Thou that just precludes the kind of mechanical analysis Minsky wants to do. An entirely different world, and the I is not the same I as found in the I/It world.
from Weird Studies/Courses/Bergson
  • There's something very I and Thou about this – another dualistic system, where I/It corresponds to the boring rational ways of knowing and relating, and I/Thou to something deeper and relational. Although Buber isn't that metaphysical (to his credit IMO)
from Finite and Infinite Games
  • Carse died recently, but shortly before I was lucky enough to attend a Zoom meeting with him, set up by some of his superfans in the Ribbonfarm community. I got to ask him if there was a Martin Buber connection and he acknowledged the influence.
from Weird Studies/Courses/Weirding
  • Buber, should link my I and Thou Ribbonfarm essay. Or do I, how about listening to their take first? They are talking about finding thous in the inanimate, my essay is about how it's tough even with the animate.
from Nietzsche
from RD Laing
  • Taking off from Martin Buber
    • In human society, at all its levels, persons confirm one another in a practical way, to some extent or other, in their personal qualities and capacities, and a society may be termed human in the measure to which its members confirm one another.
from benediction
  • This kind of blessing ritual is a way to bootstrap an I and Thou relationship. If you see a tree, that's I-It, but blessing a tree addresses it as a Thou and generates the corresponding kind of I.

Martin Buber

30 Oct 2021 - 04 Sep 2026
Open in Logseq
    • I had a guest post up at ribbonfarm, which turned out to be a conceptual salad of Martin Buber, cognitive psychology, the culture of Asperger's, and social media. The word stance is used.
    • A large tweetstorm by Zohar Atkins on Buber.
    • Despite my Jewish background, I think I found I and Thou via the Whole Earth Catalog and Ken Kesey:
    • Notes on Kesey commentary
      • local political action, well sure, ok, but only if it "communicates with the area of diseased consciousness"
      • Everything short of the toe-to-toe Truth and Love that comes from real confrontation of individual consciousness is just playing with Barbie dolls.
      • This is a very 60s idea, that the way to real relationship is via "confrontation". I guess I vibe with that intellectually, given my self-identification as a conflict theory guy. But I don't have the right social skills or environment to practice it. Have been searching.
    • From JFM (not sure where but logged Mar 21st, 2025)
      • Buber’s I-Thou is sometimes taken as a kind of anthropotechnical heuristic: “Look what happens when I choose to approach this It as a Thou.” But this is not what Buber means. What he means is that there is a modality in which things reveal themselves as always-already Thous, such that they thereby transcend any reduction to physical or instrumental ratios we might subject them to. This dimension of things is as real—and more fundamental—than the realm of I-It, which recognizes personhood only at the subject end of a relation. If we use “metaphysical” in the colloquial sense of “beyond physics, i.e. spiritual,” then I-Thou is intrinsically metaphysical. That Shinto approaches this divine dimension of the world as an immanent one is laudable, because it allows for a modal dualism where there might otherwise have been a substance dualism, as in Descartes and many forms of Protestantism. However, I would argue that the sacramental cosmos affirmed by orthodox Christianity is very much like Shinto on this point.