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buber's concept of difference and totality
genesis and cause: disposition or ontology?

buber's concept of difference and totality

quickly
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Posted 01/21/08 - 01:37 PM: Subject: buber\\'s concept of difference and totality	#1
[Preface: I am currently in the process of reading I and Thou, and hence haven't finished the work. Nor have I finished Anti-Oedipus.] Buber, in I and Thou, establishes these rules for the dispositional state which qualifies the subject when confronted with two separate modalities of perception and activity: 1. "The I of the basic word I-It appears as an ego [own-being, self-being; translators note] and becomes conscious of itself as subject (of experience and use)" (112). 2. "The I of the basic word I-You appears as a person and becomes conscious of itself as subjectivity," (112) sans "of," i.e. without knowledge of having or owning the experience of its activities. 3. "Whoever stands in relation [i.e., as I-You], participates in an actuality; that is, in a being that is neither merely a part of him nor merely outside him. All actuality is an activity in which I participate without being able to appropriate it. Where there is no participation, there is no actuality. Where there is self-appropriation, there is no actuality. There more directly the You is touched, the more perfect is the participation" (113). Buber uses these claims to reinforce the following passage, which I want to depart from traditional interpretations of Buber on. He states: "The fiery matter of all my capacity to will surging intractably, everything possible for me revolving primevally, intertwined and seemingly inseparable, the alluring glances of potentialities flaring up from every corner, the universe as a temptation, and I, born in an instant, both hadns into the fire, deep into it, where the one that intends me is hidden, my deed, seized: now! And immediately the menace of the abyss is subdued; no longer a coreless multiplicity at play in the iridescent equality of its claims; but only two are left alongside each other, the other and the one, delusion and task." (101). Later, he states: "The man to whom freedom is guaranteed does not feel oppressed by causality" (101). At times, Buber uses second rule of relation (2, above) to describe his relationship to a totality - something which is either beyond, below, or on an equal level with language - e.g.: totality, man, and nature, all aspects of the "You" which "calls" Being - in which case his statements regarding causality (that it is a proliferation of determinant multiplicities of object-oriented dispositions) seem to indicate that causal necessity is something which can be overthrown or ignored by accepting "meaning," or the union of "freedom and fate": the free choice to action as whole being later recognized as "determined" by a causal chain, and hence seemingly "destined." However, at other times, Buber acknowledges that the subject who participates in being holds a privileged sway (control) over determining forces and, resultantly, can effect or interrupt a causal chain in super-ordinary ways - to effectively halt or break the effect which a particular cause may have. In this case, that somebody by the exercise of a free act can "hold sway" over causality would seem to indicate that participation in Being (relationship, activity) is recognition of multiplicity and becoming - that the subject, without awareness of himself as subject, affects - and is effected by - the processes and objects which surround him. In this case, the "disposition" is transposed into a fundamental ontology, similar in some respects to Levinas - although splitting the difference is easy - in which the "ethics of becoming" is an ethics of *recognizing difference through totality* - that is, recognizing the totality of possible becomings and processes which surround and call as destiny the subject and realizing their difference from a conceptual reality as observer. This seems to be encompassed in the doctrine of *returning, which he describes as: "actualized freedom," or the process of causing to become* and returning to a state of stasis/experience, and then recognizing the proliferation of difference, and repeating the process. In this respect, my reading of Buber accords in some respects to a preliminary reading of Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, which, admittedly, I have yet to finish. The schizophrenic is similarly engaged in becoming as the recognition of process, but becoming is singularly linked to immanence which includes all invincible (as opposed to vincible) limiting factors which preclude a course of action, and the actualization of a process which, in turn, creates the possibility of further process. For example, Buber's critique of a vulgar Marxism seems to accord with Deleuze and Guattari's similar critique of singularly class-centric Marxist analysis: "...the state is no longer led: the stokers still pile up coal, but the leaders merely seem to rule the racing engines. And in this instant while you speak, you can hear as well as I how the machinery of the economy is beginning to hum in an unwonted manner; the overseers give you a superior smile, but death lurks in their hearts. They tell you that they have adjusted the apparatus to modern conditions; but you notice that henceforth they can only adjust themselves to the apparatus, as long as that permits it...[Y]ou know that there is nothing to be inherited but the despotism of the proliferating It under which the I, more and more impotent, is still dreaming that it is in command...Man's will to profit and will to power are natural and legitimate as long as they are tied to the will to human relations and carried by it" (Buber 97). "...capitalism, through tis process of production, produces an awesome schizophrenic accumulation of energy or charge, against which it brings all the vast powers of repression to bear, but which nonetheless continues to act as capitalisms limit...Capitalism institutes or restores all sorts of residual and artificial, imaginary, or symbolic territorialities, thereby attempting, as best it can, to recode, to rechannel persons who have been defined in terms of abstract quantities...The real is not impossible; it is simply more and more artificial...As a corollary of this law, there is the twofold movement of decoding or deterritotializing flows on the one hand, and their violent and artificial reterritorialization on the other" (Deleuze, Guattari34). In both passages, the notion of deterritorialization then reterritorialization, or in Buber, I would argue, the "entering into relationship after recognizing multiplicity and difference" (or "becoming I-You"), fundamentally works as the process of dissolving and resolving contradictions and neurosis/psychosis in the environment which effect the interior dispositions of the subject. In this case, it would also seem that freedom, albeit resolved in different and contradictory ways in each author - I assume Deleuze would argue against Buber's concept of I-You relationship in a spiritual sense as "Oedipal," or falsely channeling desire; Buber would argue that Deleuze escapes into a sort of "destiny-less" nihilism - functions as a limited immanent reality which effects and is affected by the dispositions achieved in the subject. This, then, causes me to interpret the notion of "relationship" and the "call of the You/being" which initiates a process of becoming in Buber to be a coded version of the fundamental project, as expounded in the existentialists. That is, the relationship calls for participation not as a totality into which one enters (as the romantics sublime in nature), but as the actualization of possibility, fundamentally limited since immanent, which results from difference. Merely the stylistic emphasis in both authors seems to differ - one praises, the other disparages. Your thoughts? Edited by quickly on 01/21/08 - 01:46 PM
"Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: 'here are our monsters', without immediately turning the monsters into pets." -Jacques Derrida

quickly
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Posted 04/27/08 - 11:59 PM:	#2
I wonder, too, if it's possible for Buber to be extended into Levinas in this way. Levinas' ethical relationship is the foundation of all ontical investigations of ontology; and Buber's speaking of the primordial word to nature and man then becomes the primary source of disagreement between Levinas and Buber, in my opinion. If the relationship is asymmetrical, it would appear to be because the relationship (I-You) isn't specifically related to the Other as the other consciousness, but the Other as a more general alterity. Buber seems to leave the possibility for potentiality with nature (the creative working-up), and thus legitimizes the movement through capitalism as a necessary component of the communal state. Levinas, on the other hand, doesn't specifically engage the political because his ethical system cannot deal with nature as such, cannot deal with a critique of labor in a positive direction, only as an alienating force. That's why I wonder about difference-based ontologies and the Buberian ontology, because Buber never explicitly delineates one, only the relationship one has to beings generally; but it seems that he has Nietzschean echoes. Does anybody think that the Jewish ethical thought could be translated into a foundational ethics which would limit the possible potentialities of the self which Deleuze/Guattari/Foucault discuss? The ontologies seem compatable, since even in Buber the divinity is never discussed as specifically outside the world (one could argue; or if it is, as outside in a religious mode incompatable with a dualism), and his discussion of relationship could found an ethics of self which a self constituted outside of itself can only render in terms of potentiating change.
"Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: 'here are our monsters', without immediately turning the monsters into pets." -Jacques Derrida

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