The Music of the Spheres: Buber and Religious Responsiveness

Philosophers are intoxicated with foundations, with the rational grounding of our beliefs and practices. In this paper, I advance a very different way of thinking about grounding. Our ways are grounded, I suggest, not in reasons but in our human modes of responsiveness. We respond, for example, to the suffering of others. Making sense of this is not a matter of finding reasons. We are moved by an imperative that is categorical, but not derived from a rational principle. We experience the categorically imperative flowing in our lives.[1]
My special interest in this paper is our religious responsiveness, my alternative to rationalist approaches to religion. Faith, including religious faith, is not in the end a matter of reasons but rather an ear for the music of the spheres. I see Martin Buber as a fellow traveler. I explore his approach to intimacy with God and its coherence (or lack of it) with traditional Abrahamic religions.

[1] Cf. Henry Bugbee, The Inward Morning, (Bald Eagle Press. 1958)