Sarah Scott

Sarah Scott is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Manhattan College in New York City. She is the editor of Martin Buber: Creaturely Life and Social Form (Indiana University Press, 2022), and has published on the significance of Buber’s moral philosophy for sexual ethics, Buber’s aestheticism and account of moral imagination, and Buber’s early work on Nicholas of Cusa. Beyond her work on Buber, she conducts research in ethics and the history of philosophy, especially women philosophers.

 

 

Abstract: 

“The Body that Questions: Embodiment in Buber’s Moral Philosophy”

In a little studied reference to Martin Buber, Franz Fanon ends Black Skin, White Masks writing, “Was my freedom not given to me then in order to build the world of the You? … My final prayer: O my body, make of me always a man who asks questions!” Taking this passage as inspiration, I explore the role of embodiment in Buber’s moral philosophy. Several passages in Buber’s writing describe deeply embodied encounters, such as dancing, sexual relations, and violence and torture. In analyzing these passages, I ask: What does it mean to know an other in and through body? How does embodiment serve as the location of freedom and the provocation to question? What does it mean to enact morality through the body, such that it is as questioning bodies that we build the world of the You?