Tra spirito e storia, Platone e Isaia: l’utopia “sporca” di Martin Buber = Between Spirit and History, Plato and Isaiah: Martin Buber’s “Dirty” Utopia

Abstract

Tracing utopia involves confronting the etymological ambiguity of its prefixes—eu and ou—which simultaneously make it a good place and a non-place: a good place that is not. This contribution presupposes this inherent duplicity in utopia as a method, adopting Martin Buber's category of "dirty utopia": a utopian thought devoid of teleology, impotent yet animated by a dialogical desire for universal justice, capable of accepting confrontation with the human world and its contradictions. The paper is divided into two parts: the first examines the relationship between spirit and history in Buber's critique of evaluative sociology, which omits the ethical responsibility of the social scientist and the transformative function of critique; the second compares Plato's utopia, which tends toward de-responsibilization and imposition on reality, with that of Isaiah, understood as a dialogical call to responsibility and dialogical conversion. From this perspective, tracing utopia means identifying in its "dirt" the very condition of its transformative effectiveness, remaining faithful to what Buber hopes for: a good-place-that-is-not, precarious but capable of making spirit and history dialogical partners.