#buber

«Por su esencia, el conocimiento filosófico del hombre es reflexión del hombre sobre sí mismo, y el hombre puede reflexionar sobre sí únicamente si la persona cognoscente, es decir, el filósofo que hace antropología, reflexiona sobre sí como persona.»

Martin Buber: ¿Qué es el hombre? Fondo de Cultura Económica, pág. 20. México, 1949

TGO

@bocadosdefilosofia

“February 27, 1989

Dear Ken,

As CSP would say: It's a sweet thing, my dear Ken, for you to want to dedicate your book to me. But it may be misleading to dedicate to me CSP's Reasoning and the Logic of Things, your edition of the Cambridge Conferences Lectures. I'm not sure CSP would approve. Let me explain.

As you well know, I am not a student of Peirce. I am a thief of Peirce. I take from him what I want and let the rest go, most of it. I am only interested in CSP insofar as I understand his attack on nominalism and his rehabilitation of Scholastic realism. I am only interested in his "logic" insofar as it can be read as an ontology, or, as CSP said, insofar as he "takes the Kantian step of transferring the conceptions of logic to metaphysics."

Which is to say, I have not the slightest interest in his formal logic, existential graphs and such like. I use his "logic of relatives" for my own purposes, that is, as a foundation for my own categories. That means that I expropriate his two categories, Secondness and Thirdness, as the ground of an ontology, setting aside "Firstness" since it, Firstness, is an idealized notion and is not to be found exemplified in "reality." As CSP put it, "it is the mode in which anything would exist for itself, irrespective of anything else. . . ." But, of course, nothing exists like that but only in relation to something else.

Accordingly, if CSP defines himself as a logician, as he does in these Cambridge lectures, I am rather massively uninterested, same only when he strays from formal logic and allows his "logic" to stray into ontology.

But this is not the worst if it. What would set CSP spinning in his grave is the use I intend to put him to. As you probably already know, and if you don't, let us keep the secret between us, I intend to use SP as one of the pillars of a Christian apologetic. CSP, of course, made himself clear about religion in general, "a barbaric superstition" - and Christianity in particular - especially "the miracle mongers of the synoptic gospels." To be specific, I think that CSP's notion that Christianity was a development out of earlier Asian traditions, especially Buddhism (to quote you), is the silliest kind of nonsense. I have seen it, ever since reading Kierkegaard, as quite the contrary. Kierkegaard (and I) would see Buddhism, and most of the great contemplative religions as "scientific" in a broad sense, that is, as professing general truths which can be arrived at by anyone, anywhere and at any time. Christianity (and Judaism) would fall into what Kierkegaard land I) would call the "religious" stage, that is, the being open to "news," of the singular (scandalous) event, the Jewish covenant, the Christian incarnation and news of same.

As you may know, I have been at some pains to sketch out an "anthropology," a theory of man by virtue of which he is understood to be by his very nature open to the kerygma and "news." You can see why I not only diverge radically from CSP here, but find him in the enemy camp when he says things like: "The clergymen who do any good don't pay much attention to religion. They teach people the conduct of life, and on the whole in a high and noble way." So did "Booda," Socrates, Gandhi, and yes, Jesus. But Jesus taught something else far more subversive.

So if you want to dedicate this book to me, please do so with the understanding that I admire at the most one percent of it (two pages) and with the understanding to that it would spin CSP in his grave. Naturally I love the idea - using CSP as the foundation of a Catholic apologetic, which I have tentatively entitled (after Aquinas) Contra Gentiles.

As I was saying, what I hope to do is to use CSP's "ontology" of Secondness and Thirdness (not Firstness) as the ground for a more or less scientific introduction to a philosophical anthropology. Such an ontology, I think, would debouche directly into the phenomenology of the "existentialists," like Marcel, Heidegger, Buber, et al.

Anyhow I'm afraid you can't enlist me in your attempt to publish CSP's book and I think you see why. But good luck.

This is a pleasant way to spend a Sunday afternoon, sounding off at you.

Best,

But it was not only that. When he himself spoke of silence—though not of his own, which he never touched on directly—he did not interpret it as soundless prayer but as soundless weeping or as "a soundless scream". The soundless scream is a reaction to a great sorrow. [...] By reading between the lines we discover that it is particularly his, Mendel of Vorki's reaction to the hour in which "the present is too corrupted". The time for words is past. It has become late.

Andrew Sweeney, Reinventing Beauty