Abstract
Martin Buber’s writings on technology are scarce and seemingly subordinated to what he described in I and Thou as the “tyranny of the It”. But a closer look at his writings reveals, in fact, a life-long reflection on the dialogical potentiality of things—whether artworks, buildings, or machines—that echoed broader discourses on technology at the time. Beginning with Julius Goldstein’s Die Technik (1912), which Buber edited for his series Die Gesellschaft, and concluding with Buber’s reception and critique of Heidegger, especially during the 1950s, we can see that Buber critically engaged with the question of technology with respect to labor and community, art and artisanship, and the ethics of thinghood. The essay contextualizes Buber’s repeated call to “humanize technology” in early 20th-century debates on technology and in the post-1945 crisis of humanism. What it argues is that Buber framed technology not only through its aesthetic potential, as Werk, but also as another form of solidarity and care without which community and respect for our environment would not be possible.
Highlights
Martin Buber’s writings on technology are scarce and seemingly subordinated to what he described in I and Thou as the “tyranny of the It”
What it argues is that Buber framed technology through its aesthetic potential, as Werk, and as another form of solidarity and care without which community and respect for our environment would not be possible
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Summary
In April 1961, at the age of 83, Martin Buber hosted a series of conversations with. Kibbutz members at his Jerusalem home. As a philosopher, who claimed to know nothing of ideal worlds and always insisted on the rooted reality of his thought, Buber traveled along a “narrow rocky ridge”, as he often put it, that refused itself to clearcut moral distinctions and conceptual dichotomies. “The world of machines”, he wrote “which once was intended by its inventors to be a faithful slave to our communal will, exhibits today, as it is driven by an anti-communal will, the same satanic autonomy as the magic broom in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice”.8 As his response to the Kibbutz members suggests, Buber thought of technology as a necessary “evil”, but as something that could be “humanized”, as an actual space in which human relationships could manifest themselves. Vilém Flusser, in his phenomenology of Things and Non-Things, called the “de-vulgarization (perhaps sacralization?) of the vulgar”.15
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