more Buber

15::October::2009 13:02 → permalink

Human dialogue, therefore, although it has its distinctive life in the sign, that is in sound and gesture (the letters of language have their place in this only in special instances, as when, between friends in a meeting, notes describing the atmosphere skim back and forth across the table), can exist without the sign, but admittedly not in an objectively comprehensible form. On the other hand an element of communication, however inward, seems to belong to its essence. But in its highest moments dialogue reaches out even beyond these boundaries. It is completed outside contents, even the most personal, which are or can be communicated. Moreover it is completed not in some ‘mystical’ event, but in one that is in the precise sense factual, thoroughly dovetailed into the common human world and the concrete time-sequence. — Martin Buber (1947, p. 5)

It is within this essence — passing back and forth in the continuum of relation — where all human encounter actualizes itself. A unique characteristic of life, it is the same essence, that je ne sais quois that Schrödinger posits as negentropy, the tendency towards which is a unique characteristic of life. This essence is not objectively comprehensible. It is recognized when the engagement which is the genuine dialogic instance is explored in all its intricacies (after the fact). Or it can be seen operating when simply observing other humans engage. People-watching without pretension or preconception will bring a profound understanding of the human encounter. On the surface, dialogue is judged by its linguistic content; even more abstractly, encounter is measured against the metric of knowledge- or information-transfer.

The tendency of life towards negentropy is sourced in the human-to-human encounter. For without this encounter, life would, literally, cease, in the case of the energized exchange of reproductive encounter. But isn’t it such that any human-to-human encounter affects change on both the Self and the Other? Change that may not immediately be recognized as creative, but none-the-less is essentially creative in that it is the site of change, evolution, growth, and/or transformation.

Buber, Martin. (1947). Between Man and Man. Gregor-Smith, Ronald (Translator). Florence, KY: Routledge.

What then is that precious something that contained in our food which keeps us from death? That is easily answered. Every process, event, happening — call it what you will; in a word, everything that is going on in Nature means an increase of the entropy of the part of the world where it is going on. Thus a living organism continually increases its entropy — or, as you may say, produces positive entropy — and thus tends to approach the dangerous state of maximum entropy, which is death. It can only keep aloof from it, i.e. alive, by continually drawing from its environment negative entropy — which is something very positive as we shall immediately see. What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy. Or, to put it less paradoxically, the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help produce while alive. — Erwin Schrödinger (1948, p. 68)

Schrödinger, Erwin. (1948). What if Life?. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
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