Metaphysical dialogue
Martin Buber and the religion of the Christmas
Abstract
The article examines Martin Buber's doctrine against the background of Russian religious philosophical thought — the metaphysics of total-unity and the utopia of God-manhood. "Dialogue of consent" (Bakhtin) between Buber and his predecessors and contemporaries — from Vl. Solov'ev to M. Bakhtin — can hardly be "recorded" in the form of direct influences and reciprocal responses to specific words and texts. This is an inaudible dialogue of kindred souls who know about their kinship, which is rooted in the cultural and historical context of the epoch of the crisis of rationalistic culture and requires contextual analysis for its description. Buber's meeting with Russian thought takes place in the international semantic space of the 20th-century neo-mysticism, which absorbed a centuries-old tradition of mystical consciousness. By connecting to this context the religious teaching of East-Jewish Hasidism, Buber emphasizes and develops the principle of dialogue inherent in European and Russian mysticism: the reintegration of the sensual and supersensible worlds in the image of a morally perfect person he conceives as a result of the transition from the monologic "subject-centered"(Habermas) paradigm of thinking to the dialogic transsubjective vision of the world.
