2 Responses to Samuel Fleischacker- Words of a Living God -part one

1. Dustin N Atlas says:

   October 31, 2014 at 9:00 am

   The reading of Buber is an odd one. “At the origin of this sort of theology stands of course Martin Buber, whose I-You encounter — the core of all revelation, for Buber — is widely understood to be pre-linguistic.” I don’t know if this is ‘widely understood’ or not, but it seems wrong.

   Even in the passage cited, Buber is writing about the “prelinguistic _word_” [vorzunglichen Wort]. What exactly this is, is open to interpretation, and to different translations, but it is certainly not “wordless”. The “I-You” is a “basic word”–again, open to interpretation, or even dismissal, but cannot be considered an endorsement of “wordless encounter”. The writer may not like the way Buber uses language, or his idea of what a word is (I find Buber troubling here), but it doesn’t mean that encounters are dissociated from language. Buber _is_ interested in the relation of language to what is ‘outside,’ ‘above,’ or ‘below’ language–and really, all but the most banal forms of deconstruction have to take this up–but this does not make him interested in wordlessness.

   Finally, this: “Wordless encounter theologians draw a sharp distinction between language and reality.” I would argue the opposite, and, if anything, that’s their problem. Buber is problematic not because he draws a sharp line between language and the world, but because he includes so much of the world in language: silent words, primal words, ground words, ‘prelinguistic’ words, all of these blur the distinction between word and world.

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   • Dustin N Atlas says:

     October 31, 2014 at 9:02 am

     I should mention that I quite enjoyed reading the article, even if I disagreed with it.

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