Considerations on Humanismo hebreo y nuestro tiempo, by Martin Buber

Abstract

This paper presents and comments on the book Humanismo hebreo y nuestro tiempo, by Martin Buber. The book brings together eleven essays written by Buber between 1926 and 1939 and forming part of an anthology. In it, the Jewish philosopher and theologian seeks to show how Western culture rests on the biblical tradition and how contemporary movements such as positivism, Marxism and other schools, by undermining that tradition, brought about a crisis of culture. His purpose is to recover these elements and to make of them the foundations of a phenomenology of relation capable of confronting contemporary indifference towards other human beings and towards God. In doing so, he would also overcome the problems arising from mass society, from mechanistic sociologism and from the reduction of Spirit to the manifestations of the psychological unconscious that feeds contemporary atheism.