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The Two I–Thou Relations in Martin Buber's Philosophy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

Stuart Charmé
Stuart Charmé
Affiliation:
University of Chicago Divinity School, Chicago, Illinois 60637
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Extract

Maurice Friedman, the leading scholar of Martin Buber's work, notes that “the question must even arise whether the philosophy of dialogue, the I-Thou relation between man and man, cannot stand by itself as an autonomous ethic, grounded in Buber's anthropology, but not necessarily tied with the relation between man and God.” Friedman then suggests that Buber's philosophy of religion and interpretation of the Bible do provide an important source of his ethics. An examination of Buber's thought reveals, however, that the tie between his philosophy of dialogue as an ethics and his view of the relation between man and God is indeed not necessary in some ways and perhaps not even possible.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 70 , Issue 1-2 , April 1977 , pp. 161 - 174
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1977

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References

1 Friedman, Maurice, “The Bases of Buber's Ethics,” The Philosophy of Martin Buber (ed. Schilpp, Paul Arthur; La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1967) 171.Google Scholar

2 Buber, Martin, I and Thou (New York: Scribner's, 1958) 123–24.Google Scholar

3 Ibid., 38.

4 For an account of Buber's relation to mysticism, see Friedman, Maurice, “Martin Buber's Encounter with Mysticism,” Human Inquiries: Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, 10 (1970) 43–81.Google Scholar

5 Buber, Martin, Ekstatische Konfessionen (Jena: Diederichs, 1909) xi–xxvi.Google Scholar

6 From a letter from Martin Buber to Maurice Friedman superscribed “Tübingen 23.8.54” quoted by Friedman, “Buber's Encounter with Mysticism,” 62–63.

7 Buber, Martin, “The Holy Way,” On Judaism (ed. Glatzer, Nahum; New York: Schocken, 1967) 126.Google Scholar

8 Buber, Martin, Pointing the Way (New York: Schocken, 1957) ix–x.Google Scholar

9 See Friedman, Maurice, Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue (New York: Harper, 1960) chap. 4.Google Scholar

10 ”Buber's Encounter with Mysticism,” 81.

11 I and Thou, 8.

12 Ibid., 14.

13 Ibid., 4.

14 Ibid., 8.

15 Ibid., 9.

16 Ibid., 33.

17 Ibid., 15.

18 Buber, Martin, The Knowledge of Man (New York: Harper, 1965) 157.Google Scholar

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid., 158.

21 Ibid.

22 Buber, Martin, Between Man and Man (London: Collins, 1964) 30.Google Scholar This type of relation to reality is not very different from the somewhat mystical encounter with a chestnut tree which Jean-Paul, Sartre describes (Nausea [New York: New Directions, 1964] 170–80)Google Scholar when he recognizes the inability to capture existence in descriptions or language.

23 I and Thou, 111.

24 Ibid., 10.

25 Sidney, and Rome, Beatrice, eds., Philosophical Interrogations (New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1964) 54–55.Google Scholar

26 I and Thou, 4.

27 Ibid., 38.

28 Buber says he read Kant when he was 15 and learned that space and time have nothing to do with the inner nature of the world but are only an appearance to the senses (Between Man and Man, 169).

29 I and Thou, 5.

30 Ibid.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid., 112.

33 Between Man and Man, 19.

34 Ibid., 19–20.

35 The Knowledge of Man, 79.

36 Ibid., 69.

37 I and Thou. 11.

38 The Knowledge of Man, 84.

39 Between Man and Man, 33–34.

40 Ibid., 65.

41 The Knowledge of Man, 70. To a certain extent Buber, a student of Dilthey, must be seen in the philosophical tradition of “life philosophy” with its concern for lived experience. Dilthey's famous distinction between “explanation” and “understanding” (verstehen) obviously influenced Buber. In some ways I-Thou is quite similar to the method of verstehen, and I-It may be associated with the explanatory method of the natural sciences.

42 Ibid., 85.

43 Ibid., 69.

44 I and Thou, 48.

45 Ibid., 47.

46 Ibid., 55.

47 Ibid., 51.

48 Ibid.

49 Ibid., 99.

50 Ibid., 15.

51 It is somewhat ironic that Buber criticizes the monistic absorption of the mystic precisely for eliminating the object of consciousness. He says, “… in lived reality there is not something thinking without something thought, rather is the thinking no less dependent on the thing thought than the latter on the former. A subject deprived of its object is deprived of its reality” (I and Thou, 87).