«Atto copernicano del pensiero moderno»? (Dis)continuità in Martin Buber prima e dopo il 1923

Ich und Du (I and Thou) has always been seen as the cornerstone and the trigger of dialogical thinking, but by Buber’s own admission, it has anticipations and prefigurations in the works of the previous phase, centred on mystical religiosity and on the dynamics of experience, from the first Chassidic Collections (1906-1908) to Daniel (1913). The sharp break between mysticism and dialogue must therefore be blurred and reshaped, and the present article intends to show continuities and persistences, linguistically and lexically, as well as conceptually, between the season of Buber’s philosophy of dialogue in its most mature expression (which coincides with the publication of I and Thou in 1923) and the pre-dialogical phase. The “novelty” that distinguishes I and Thou from the previous production is to be sought “outside the book”, in the events of the Arab-Jewish conflict between 1917 and 1921, which was already in an acute phase in the years parallel to the composition of the book, in Buber's relationship with the Zionist movement, which was conflicted to the point of breaking with the leadership and leaving it in 1921, in the writings that accompany the historical events from 1916 to 1923, in his insistence on the Arab question and on the need for reconciliation.