Abstract

It is not three years since Martin Buber’s death at Jerusalem but not too soon for such a major and systematic re-evaluation of his ontology as that contained in this volume by Babolin. The author proposes nothing less than the initiation of critical debate as to how Man’s openness to being implies his awareness of what is other than himself and leads ultimately to his consciousness of Being as Other. It is a discussion which boldly presents Buber as the highest articulater of the existentialist phenomenology but leads up to and away from this summit with copious documentation and an admirable insight into its slow flowering in German intellectualism; it is a discussion which takes us from the foundation and quality of being through the theoretical implications of human experience to Buber’s supreme and decisive message: ‘Knowledge of Man presupposes knowledge of the absolute, the mystic, Thou’.