POINTS OF INTEREST

DANIEL FORBES ON MARTIN BUBER: “Buber suggests that we can ‘know’ the world and other people in two every different ways, ‘experience’ and ‘encounter.’ An experience converts the event of perception into a representation and generates a relation Buber calls ‘I-It’ – a conceptual relation where the perceiver holds something within consciousness as a sort of object or thing to be understood or used. Before there can be an experience there must first be an encounter – an event of entering into a direct relationship with a being. Any encounter provokes the conscious self to generate an experience that represents that being – and once the experience has been generated, the immediacy of the encounter is lost. Buber suggests that if we resist the tendency to covert this other being into a representation an instead try to live within the moment of the encounter as long as we can, we participate in a concrete relation that Buber calls ‘I-You.’ This involves just trying to be with the other, without trying to know the other, since an attempt to know the other person will only produce a distorted objectification. If I try to describe and understand the other person in a reflective or analytical way, then I will being the process of objectively representing that person in my own thought – and at that point I am really describing and understanding my own projection of that person. Since all that I can ever describe is a biased interpretation of the other person distorted by my desires, the experience of an encounter as an I-You relation will inevitably be indescribable. What’s more, the kind of life I live – one that is dominated by experiences, or one that is dominated by encounters – will determine the sort of person I am. If I spend my time analyzing the things I perceive in order to objectively understand them and use them for my own purposes, the world for me will become the objects that I have constructed through my own thought. It is impossible to never objectify what we perceive; objectification is necessary for us to survive and successfully navigate our world.”

MICHAEL SIGRIST ON EDMUND HUSSERL: “A retention is not a memory. While memory is a mode of consciousness by which we are aware of the past, retention is a feature of our conscious experience of the present. You can experience the present moment without memory, but you cannot experience the present moment without retention.”

WILLIAM JAMES: The specious present “is no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions.”

HERACLITUS: “For the waking there is one common world, but when asleep each person turns away to a private one.” ( )