Ontologia da vida em comunidade em Martin Buber

Abstract

This work aims to highlight Martin Buber's contribution to understanding the major current problems represented primarily by hedonistic individualism and alienating collectivism. It also emphasizes Buber's alternative, which is the proposal for life in authentic communities founded on dialogue, a place of experience in the immediacy of face-to-face interaction and reciprocity. Community and life are ontologically linked. Liquid modernity promotes, as a consequence of its values, the alienation of human beings from one another. The community way of life is the opposite of the atomized society in which individuals compete with each other, live in solitude, and become depressed to the point of suicide, while great nations wage genocidal wars. In contemporary societies, objective and instrumentalized I-It relationships predominate, to the detriment of the authentic I-Thou relationship, which underpins an ethics of otherness and genuine dialogue. The center of community life is the spirituality that reveals itself in relationship. In the abundant sources of Jewish tradition and in the profound dialogue with Western culture, Buber finds an alternative that proves plausible and current.