"The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable: through the embracing of one of its beings"
About this Quote
Buber offers a kind of existential judo here: he concedes the world won’t submit to our hunger for a clean explanation, then pivots to a different form of access - not comprehension, but contact. The sentence is engineered to rebuke the modern fantasy that knowledge is primarily mastery. “Not comprehensible” names the limits of systems, theories, even theology when it turns into bookkeeping. “Embraceable” reclaims meaning as something you enter, not something you solve.
The sly pressure point is that the embrace isn’t directed at “the world” in the abstract. It happens “through the embracing of one of its beings.” That’s classic Buber: reality isn’t most real at the level of concepts (“It”), but at the level of relation (“Thou”). The subtext is a critique of detachment - the posture that treats people, nature, and even God as objects to be categorized, optimized, or explained away. You don’t get closer to the world by building a better map; you get closer by meeting someone, fully, without converting them into a case study.
Context matters. Writing in the wreckage of early 20th-century Europe - industrial rationality, mass politics, war, the bureaucratic stripping of persons into numbers - Buber insists that intimacy is not escapism but resistance. “One of its beings” sounds modest, almost clinical, yet it’s radical: a single genuine encounter becomes a doorway into a world that refuses totalizing sense. Meaning, for Buber, is not an answer. It’s a relation you keep.
The sly pressure point is that the embrace isn’t directed at “the world” in the abstract. It happens “through the embracing of one of its beings.” That’s classic Buber: reality isn’t most real at the level of concepts (“It”), but at the level of relation (“Thou”). The subtext is a critique of detachment - the posture that treats people, nature, and even God as objects to be categorized, optimized, or explained away. You don’t get closer to the world by building a better map; you get closer by meeting someone, fully, without converting them into a case study.
Context matters. Writing in the wreckage of early 20th-century Europe - industrial rationality, mass politics, war, the bureaucratic stripping of persons into numbers - Buber insists that intimacy is not escapism but resistance. “One of its beings” sounds modest, almost clinical, yet it’s radical: a single genuine encounter becomes a doorway into a world that refuses totalizing sense. Meaning, for Buber, is not an answer. It’s a relation you keep.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
|---|---|
| Source | I and Thou (Ich und Du), Martin Buber, 1923 , commonly cited source for the line “The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable…” (translation variants exist). |
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