I and Thou

“The world has no part in the experience. It permits itself to be experienced, but has no concern in the matter. For it does nothing to the experience, and the experience does nothing to it.”

Human beings typically think of experience as the primary lens through which to view the world, but this is insufficient. The primary lens needs to be the lens of relation, which requires dialogic communication; this is something that nature (apart from other human beings) cannot do. The world (e.g., trees, fish, grass, the stars) cannot speak back and respond to human speech, and so this experience of the human is actually no experience at all for the world.

“THE SPHERES IN WHICH THE WORLD OF RELATION ARISES are three. First, our life with nature […] Second, our life with men […] Third, our life with spiritual beings.”

From the human perspective, there are three objects of the relation: nature, people, spirits. All three objects will be related to human beings in their own unique way: nature without the possibility of response; humans as the natural partners in dialogue; spirits as those which cannot be heard, but from which humans cannot avoid having a sense of being called.

“IF I FACE A HUMAN BEING AS MY Thou, and say the primary word I—Thou to him, he is not a thing among things, and does not consist of things.”

Buber here makes the distinction between the person as a consumable object, and the person as an unquantifiable presence that is only met with the affirmation as other. The object of the progress toward the world of I—Thou is to make human interaction truly personal, rather than an experience of pure consumption.

“Just as the melody is not made up of notes nor the verse of words nor the statue of lines, but they must be tugged and dragged till their unity has been scattered into these many pieces, so with the man to whom I say Thou. I can take out from him the colour of his hair, or of his speech, or of his goodness. I must continually do this. But each time I do it he ceases to be Thou.”

Recognition of the other as Thou is recognition of the other as a unified whole. When the other is broken down into their component parts, or into the various qualities that make them up, then they can each be acquired, consumed, and made a part of the I’s memory; in this way, they become simply an object to be consumed. When the wholeness of the other is taken all together, however, this unified wholeness is present to the I as the Thou. The struggle is against the consistent human tendency to always break the other Thou down into an It.

“RELATION IS MUTUAL. My Thou affects me, as I affect it.”

In human experience with objects, with those things the I calls It, only the I is affected. The world is not affected when human beings experience it. When the other is encountered as Thou, however, the effect is mutual and reciprocal; the unique interaction with any Thou is that there is a mutual exchange of presence and recognition.

“The elementary impressions and emotional stirrings that waken the spirit of the ‘natural man’ proceed from incidents—experience of a being confronting him—and from situations—life with a being confronting him—that are relational in character.”

It is relation that brings to life what is truly natural in the human species. Not the experience of objects out in the world—of which one can be one of many—but in the encounter with the other relational being, the “natural” aspect of the person is drawn out and given existence.

“The ante-natal life of the child is one of purely natural combination, bodily interaction and flowing from the one to the other. Its life’s horizon, as it comes into being, seems in a unique way to be, and yet again not to be, traced in that of the life that bears it.”

The relational aspect of the human person can be seen in a primal and fundamental way when human life in the womb is considered. The human life in the womb is the prime example of relation and dependence; the life of the one who carries the child is wholly consumed by the one it carries, and the life of the one within the womb is wholly dependent on the one by whom it is being carried. In a way like no other relationship, this existential reality is manifest in a physical way.

“TO MAN THE WORLD IS TWOFOLD, in accordance with his twofold attitude. He perceives what exists round about him—simply things, and beings as things; and what happens round about him—simply events, and actions as events […] [O]n the other hand, man meets what exists and becomes as what is over against him, always simply a single being and each thing simply as being. What exists is opened to him in happenings, and what happens affects him as what is.”

The world is a complex place, and the nuance and duplicitous nature of reality is actually contained within the human person (and is not present out in the world). When a person looks on the world as simply events and activity that occur around him, then what is perceived is the world of I—It. However, when a person looks on the world as containing individual beings that are capable of coming into contact, then the world is opened up as the home of I—Thou.

“And in all the seriousness of truth, hear this: without It man cannot live. But he who lives with It alone is not a man.”

The paradox of the I—Thou supremacy is that it is not all that is required. While I—Thou is the highest reality, it is not all reality, for human beings do in fact need the I—It relation to exist for their lesser needs. In this way, it is analogous to the realities of philosophy and plumbing. Philosophy may be an objectively higher and more beautiful thing than the practice of indoor plumbing, but nobody could deny the objective reality that indoor plumbing is a radically necessary and useful thing (without which human life would be objectively worse).

“SPIRIT IN ITS HUMAN MANIFESTATION is a response of man to his Thou. Man speaks with many tongues, tongues of language, of art, of action; but the spirit is one, the response to the Thou which appears and addresses him out of the mystery. Spirit is the word.”

For Buber, spirit is practically equivalent to speech. The mystery of speech and language is what is unique about human beings, and thus is the aspect of nature that is spiritual. The ability of human beings to communicate with one another, and address each other as Thou, is then seen to be a spiritual thing—in contrast to what might be called a “physical” or “natural” thing like the movement of the human body, for instance.

“Take knowledge: being is disclosed to the man who is engaged in knowing, as he looks at what is over against him […] Only as It can it enter the structure of knowledge.”

As Buber has addressed in previous pages, the being of Thou is higher and more fundamental than the existence and experience of It. However, the being of Thou is only ever encountered; if the other as Thou is to ever truly be known, then it needs to be broken down and received as It in order for the various quantifiable qualities and parts to be seen, acknowledged, and acquired as intellectual knowledge that an individual can be said to possess.

“The true community does not arise through peoples having feelings for one another (though indeed not without it), but through, first, their taking their stand in living mutual relation with a living Centre, and, second, their being in living mutual relation with one another.”

Human beings have a proclivity for making value judgments based on their feelings. While the human emotional experience is an important one, Buber makes the observation that it is not actually feelings that are the cause and bond of human community; rather, human community needs to flow out of a pre-existing commitment to a central tenet that can be agreed upon, and on the rational concord that living beings can establish with one another for the sake of their mutual good. Feelings, hopefully, would follow in the wake.

“THE PRIMARY WORD I—It is not of evil—as matter is not of evil. It is of evil—as matter is, which presumes to have the quality of present being. If a man lets it have the mastery, the continually growing world of It overruns him and robs him of the reality of his own I.”

The word and world of I—It is not evil, contrary to common misconception based on a negative judgment in the light of the world and word of I—Thou. Nature, objects, knowledge are all in fact good things. What causes the I—It reality to collapse into something that could be called evil is when the I—It presumes to suppress and replace the I—Thou. When a person allows the I—It relation to become the guide, then they have fallen away from the true path.

“Individuality makes its appearance by being differentiated from other individualities. A person makes his appearance by entering into relation with other persons.”

Contemporary mores and language see individuality and personhood essentially as synonyms. Buber, on the other hand, sees them as competitive realities. The I is ossified into individuality when it makes itself an individual over and against other individuals, when it separates itself from all other things to set itself up as a monad. Personhood, on the other hand, sparks into being when the I sees itself as part of a network or relationship.

“There are not two kinds of man, but two poles of humanity. No man is pure person and no man pure individuality. None is wholly real, and none wholly unreal. Every man lives in the twofold I.”

While the author has previously laid out the distinction between the individual and the person, the fact remains that in reality this dichotomy exists within each and every single I. There are not individuals and persons, but there are people who house both the individual and the person within them, and the struggle is to constantly distance oneself from the former in order to fully embody the truth of the latter.

“THE EXTENDED LINES OF RELATIONS meet in the eternal Thou. Every particular Thou is a glimpse through to the eternal Thou; by means of every particular Thou the primary word addresses the eternal Thou.”

The most fantastic claim that Buber makes—and one that gives the whole system its unifying force—is the observation that every single Thou which one could encounter in the world is ultimately ordered to, and subsumed under, the Eternal Thou—and this Eternal Thou is God. Every individual encounter with a created Thou is thanks to the uncreated Eternal Thou.

“Of course God is the ‘wholly Other’; but He is also the wholly Same, the wholly Present. Of course He is the Mysterium Tremendum that appears and overthrows; but He is also the mystery of the self-evident, nearer to me than my I.”

Buber here shows his reliance on the rhetoric of Augustine of Hippo, the 5th-century African Bishop of the Christian tradition, who spills oceans of ink in The Confessions speaking of God as the one who is more interior than the person’s innermost being. The Eternal Thou, on account of its nature, is simultaneously wholly transcendent—above all other things—and wholly immanent—present to all and everything, everywhere, all at once.

“What distinguishes sacrifice and prayer from all magic?—Magic desires to obtain its effects without entering into relation, and practises its tricks in the void. But sacrifice and prayer are set ‘before the Face,’ in the consummation of the holy primary word that means mutual action: they speak the Thou, and then they hear.”

The contrast of religion and prayer to magic is based on the distinction between the worlds of It and Thou. Religion, sacrifice, prayer, all these are realities ordered to a person whom one is related to by love; they are acts which are rendered to one who is immediately present, to the Thou. Magic, on the other hand, is an act directed toward an It, as something manipulative that can be carried out with no relation whatsoever.

“In every sphere in its own way, through each process of becoming that is present to us, we look out toward the fringe of the eternal Thou; in each we are aware of a breath from the eternal Thou; in each Thou we address the eternal Thou.”

In every I—Thou relation there is some kind of communication. Between human beings, this reality is quite obvious: One can speak while the other listens, and the process can be reversed from one back to another. With the I—Thou relation of the Eternal Thou, however, the communication is not as obvious. The person reaches out to the Eternal Thou with intention, with an inner word, and yet the Eternal Thou does not respond in kind. What happens, in contrast, is the experience of the I as being spoken to in a silent manner. In addition, the Eternal Thou must also be seen in every other Thou with which relation can be established.

“He who approaches the Face has indeed surpassed duty and obligation—but not because he is now remote from the world; rather because he has truly drawn closer to it. Duty and obligation are rendered only to the stranger; we are drawn to and full of love for the intimate person.”

The Face is another way of referring to Thou, and is an image that vividly brings out the idea of the other as a form of immediate presence. Considering the other as the Face, as personal presence, helps to illuminate the distinction between duty and privilege. One acts out of duty and obligation even to one whom one does not know; love and intimacy, however, are only possible with the one to whom one feels drawn personally. This latter is only possible within the I—Thou relation.

“[M]an’s thirst for continuity is unsatisfied by the life-structure of pure relation, the ‘solitude’ of the I before the Thou, the law that man, though binding up the world in relation in the meeting, can nevertheless only as a person approach and meet God. He longs for extension in space, for the representation in which the community of the faithful is united with its God. Thus God becomes the object of a cult.”

The paradox of the relation established between the I and the Eternal Thou—that is, with God—is that the dynamic relation of presence naturally flows out into the desire of the human to establish cultic ritual in order to extend this experience into the world of I—It. The human person longs for this experience to be prolonged and made more readily accessible, and so this is (in part) the logic behind sacrifice, prayer, and religion.

“In belief and in a cult form can harden into an object; but, in virtue of the essential quality of relation that lives on in it, it continually becomes present again […] The fact that true prayer lives in the religions witnesses to their true life: they live so long as it lives in them.”

The dynamic beauty of cult (i.e., religion) is that the cult which is established in order to transform the Eternal Thou into an It is capable of ascending back again from the world of I—It up to the world of I—Thou. This is the truth inherent in the act of prayer: religion lives or dies on account of the seriousness with which the Eternal Thou is approached as a living subject. Prayer makes the cult capable of making the Eternal Thou present.

“Every I—Thou relationship, within a relation which is specified as a purposive working of one part upon the other, persists in virtue of a mutuality which is forbidden to be full.”

One of the nuances that needs to be noted in I—Thou relations between human beings is that there are certain relations that exist intrinsically for the sake of allowing one I to work on another I. The example in the text speaks about a teacher and student, or about a therapist and patient. These can be genuine examples of I—Thou relations of presence, and yet there is not the fullness of the I—Thou relation on account of the intrinsic imbalance in power and perspective in certain relationships that exist in order to facilitate the perfection of one person through the immediate agency of the other (as a kind of secondary cause).