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I AND THOU BY MARTIN BUBER TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION HIS work in its original, German form has already, since its publication fourteen years ago, exercised on the Continent an influence, quite out of proportion to its slender size. In view of this influence alone it may be affirmed that I and Thou will rank as one of the epochmaking books of our generation. It has hitherto been comparatively unknown among Englishspeaking students of philosophy and theology. I and Thou is to be understood in the context of Bubers previous intensive study, chiefly of Jewish mystical writings. It is not an isolated phenomenon among his works, but represents the culmination of the intensely religious interest that characterises them all. It is, indeed, philosophical but it is not an academic work of discursive philosophy. It is mystical, but it belongs to what PringlePattison has termed the higher Mysticism of real communion with God, as distinguished from the debased1 mysticism that sub stitutes for the real present world a world of illusory delights, where absorption in the Diym is experi enced. The decrying of mysticism as a whole, fashion able today among Protestant writers, has a weighty retort in the present work. For an indubitably real mystical experience is here set forth, not with contempt for the means of human expression but with finished and delicate power. For this reason, though we might call and Thou a philosophicalreligious poem, it belongs essentially to no single specialised class of learned work. It has a direct appeal to all those who are interested in living religious experience rather than in theological debates and the rise and fall of philosophical schools. It has first and foremost to be judged on its intrinsic meritsby the impact, that is to say, which it makes on our actual, responsible life, as persons and as groups, in the modern world. This immediate value of Bubers work becomes clear if we consider its main thesis. There is, Buber shows, a radical difference between a mans attitude to other men and his attitude to things. The attitude to other men is a relation between persons, to things it is a connexion with objects. In the personal relation one subject I confronts another subjectThou, in the connexion with things the subject contemplates and experiences an object. These two attitudes represent the basic twofold situation of human life, the former constituting the. world of Thou , and the latter the world of It The content and relation of these two worlds is the theme of and Thou. The other person, the Thou, ,is shown to be a realitythat is, it is given to me, but it is not bounded by me: Thou has no bounds the 1 Though the second person singular pronoun has almost dis appeared from modern English usage, it remains in one important spherein prayer. By its retention in the English text, therefore, far from suggesting an obscure situation, it keeps the whole thought iii the personal and responsible sphere in which alone it is truly to be understood. TJiou cannot be appropriated, but I am brought up short against it.
Elegant, simple, incisive...
| Customer Rating:  | | Buber's not at all pedantic about his philosophy here. The book's structure utilizes a lyrical simplicity to broach the "between" that, in the full service of irony, has no spatial coordinates at all. Buber contentedly points at (more than reaches towards) the metaphysical glue that is the fingerprint of something much greater, and he uses repetition to soften the blow of its intellectual uncertainty. I, for one, think of Buber as akin to Kierkegaard (I'm sure to evoke scowls for overlooking the difference between Buber's traditional role in his religious community and Kierkegaard's arrant iconoclasm), especially in light of this work, which gives the terrifying recesses of irrationality a new humanism. |
My Favorite Book
| Customer Rating: | | I was a philosophy major in college and I've read a lot of works out there. I can tell you that this is by far my favorite book. Buber's ideas are so simple yet so profound - he offers a way to be in the world that is real, useful, and ultimately fulfilling. This book has helped me in my business relations (I work in sales) as well as my personal relations. It is also beautifully written (translated from the German). If you want to be inspired, read this book! |
The Gem at the Navel of the Lotus
| Customer Rating: | Ich und Du (badly) translated as I And Thou, by Martin Buber, takes me beyond any book I've ever read before. I had to read it with another selection, because after a few pages, my soul became saturated, and I had to read something else.
I am at a loss for how to describe this book. The Third Testament hints at the idea.
We construct the world in one of two ways: either through a relationship, which engages our entire being in the encounter (an I-You relationship), or through experiencing objects as the means to an end, engaging only a part of ourselves in an I-It relationship.
From this simple seed, Buber grows three chapters and an afterward. Walter Kaufman, who translated the work, wrote a 50 page introduction, which is in itself a wonder to experience.
The experience of reading the book was amazing, although I'm not sure that I learned as much as I might have. What Buber did was to give me words to explain how I believe, what I experience, and what I long for. I must read it again. And again. And again.
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This book has to be a hoax
| Customer Rating:  | | This book is difficult to read or to understand. Perhaps something has been greatly lost in the translation or else it is a complete hoax. I found it to be full of disjointed ideas and apparent nonsense. |
A half-departure from liberal theology
| Customer Rating: | Ich und Du ("I and Thou") is one of those philosophical texts which, like Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, consist of the elaboration of a single thought. The thought is stated up front: human beings have a double relation to the world: Ich-Du and Ich-Es. The Ich-Es relation reifies and separates things out (whether they be "internal" or "external" things), while the Ich-Du relation is nothing but relation itself. The Eswelt is a world of nebeneinander and the laws that govern nebeneinander, while the Duwelt is a seamless experience of "presence." The Ich that reaches out and the Du that reaches back (neither of which reflects on "what" they individually are) constitute an exclusive circular reality (Ausschließlickheit) untroubled by causal and spatiotemporal regress. To be sure, the Duwelt collapses into the Eswelt, which means that the Ich and the Du degenerate into so many instances of Es, but there is always the possibility of resurrecting the Ich & Du hidden within the Es.
There are different kinds of Ich-Du relation: 1) with nature (presumably before we know to call it "nature"), in which case we stand at the "threshold of speech"; 2) with human beings, in which case speech coincides with the Ich-Du relation; and 3) with "spiritual beings," in which case the relation itself is speechless, but it can generate speech. (This third relation is very much in the spirit of romantic poesis.) A special subset of the third relation is the relation to God, who is the Du beyond every particular Du. God is the only Du with whom our relation cannot degrade into an Ich-Es relation, because there is no Es beyond every individual Es for which God could be mistaken. (There are, too be sure, many things which people falsely call "God," things which are really part of nature or of ourselves, such as Schleiermacher's Abhangigkeitsgefühl or Rudolf Otto's Kreaturgefühl, as Buber specifically points out).
What is essential in every case is the duality of the relation. Buber warns against interpreting the Ich-Du as a self-relation of the Ich (i.e. Hegel) or as a kind of "symmetry breaking" (to use a term from physics), which can be restored to oneness at the proper mystical "heat."
One of the explicit objects of this text is to move beyond liberal Protestant theology, i.e. beyond a theology that grounds the religious in some quality of subjective experience. For Buber, religion occurs before there is a subject, and once we arrive at the subject, we find it impossible to even think of religion apart from the subject's relation to another. Buber exploits the pronoun Du ("you") to draw our attention to an experience of encounter (rather than reflection or feeling) inadequately addressed by rational philosophy, and he employs this experience in the service of religion.
Buber may not go far enough, however. He moves beyond the subject, but he does not move beyond religion-as-experience, which is the real drawback of liberal theology. In a sense, Buber is freeing God from the subject only to bind him down to "relation" (Beziehung), which hovers somewhere between subject and object, and is not obviously "religious" at all. There is nothing in Buber's argument protecting it, for example, from a biological-evolutionary explanation of the Ich-Du relation, or a psychoanalytic one. Buber overcomes one obstacle only to land himself before another one.
Sorry if that was a little technical. |
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