Martin Buber: I and Thou

[struggle4progress]

... The one primary word is the combination I-Thou. The other primary word is the combination I-It ... 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 ...

When Thou is spoken, the speaker has no thing for his object. For where there is a thing there is another thing. Every It is bounded by others; It exists only through being bounded by others. But when Thou is spoken, there is no thing. Thou has no bounds ...

These are the two basic privileges of the world of It. They move man to look on the world of It as the world in which he has to live, and in which it is comfortable to live, as the world, indeed, which offers him all manner of incitements and excitements, activity and knowledge. In this chronicle of solid benefits the moments of the Thou appear as strange lyric and dramatic episodes, seductive and magical, but tearing us away to dangerous extremes, loosening the well-tried context, leaving more questions than satisfaction behind them, shattering security — in short, uncanny moments we can well dispense with. For since we are bound to leave them and go back into the “world,” why not remain in it? Why not call to order what is over against us, and send it packing into the realm of objects? Why, if we find ourselves on occasion with no choice but to say Thou to father, wife, or comrade, not say Thou and mean It? To utter the sound Thou with the vocal organs is by no means the same as saying the uncanny primary word; more, it is harmless to whisper with the soul an amorous Thou, so long as nothing else in a serious way is meant but experience and make use of ...

http://www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/passages/buber.htm

[BurtWorm]

1. That clarifies things considerably.

:crazy:

[struggle4progress]

2. Perhaps it is precisely at this point that our inability to communicate is clearest:

"I and Thou" was one of the more influential theological works of the 20th century, and the distinction Buber makes between the subject-object relation and the subject-subject relation is a fundamental distinction, involving completely different worlds; both relations exist. Both relations are important, but everyone answers the question "What does it mean to be authentically human?" by deciding where to place the primary existential emphasis

[Goblinmonger]

3. That dude needs

to seriously stop bogarting that J.

[struggle4progress]

4. Maybe. But if Germany had listened to Buber in 1923, perhaps I-Thou relations

would prevented the I-It relations that led to the Shoah

[mothergooseminute]

5. Fascinating

Thanks for the insights. It's complicated.

[Jim__]

6. The excerpt sounds more like philosophy than theology.

Does he expand these basic relationships into their theological implications in the whole work? If so, can you describe what these implications are?

[struggle4progress]

7. It's probably unfair to summarize a book in a sentence

but perhaps roughly I-Thou is the realm of the sacred

[Jim__]

8. I realize you can't summarize a book in 1 sentence.

But that does help to clarify where he's going. Thanks.

[onager]

9. Not even native German speakers understand Buber.

Whole books, and probably collections, have been written in German over just WTF he was trying to say. Pretty ironic, considering the German language is usually noted for precision and clarity - thanks partly to those 27-part compound nouns the Germans put together when they need to define something.

No, I don't speak or write German. But in my Weird Hobby I often bang my head against German technical/military terms.

Like this one, which looks easy: the word blitzkrieg, translated as "lightning war" on every WWII documentary we ever watched. But that's not really a German word. Some historians claim it was invented by TIME magazine in 1939. Adolf Hitler himself said he had never seen the word until he read it in Italian newspapers. If you wanted the equivalent of "blitzkrieg" in German - "war of movement" - it's Bewegungskrieg. Which is the term the Germans themselves used for that style of war. (Thanks to Strategy & Tactics magazine for that bit o' trivia.)

Translating Buber has the same problem, not helped by his use of idiomatic (and idiosyncratic) German. Buber was Austrian, which may be part of the problem.

The word translated as "Thou" is not what he said. He used the intimate German word for "you" - du. There is no English equivalent of that word. And apparently Germans can't figure out what he meant, either.

[struggle4progress]

10. um ... "thou" was the intimate English pronoun, now archaic

The distinction between singular thou/thee and plural you/ye once also distinguished the familiar singular thou/thee from formal singular you/ye. The familiar singular has now largely disappeared in English. The Quakers continued the distinction a while, rather irritating the authorities by addressing them in the familiar, the authorities (as is often typical of authorities) were unable to distinguish between a friendly familiar and an inadequately respectful or contemptuous familiar

... In 1694 Penn published "The Rise and Progress of the People Called Quakers," which began as a preface to George Fox's Journal. Penn described the examples of Quaker testimonies ... Sixth, they do not respect authorities more than other persons. Seventh, they use the plain language of thou and thee to every person ...
Quakers: Fox and Penn's Holy Experiment
http://san.beck.org/GPJ14-Quakers.html

... Something at least there was in the friendly streets of the city,
Something that spake to her heart, and made her no longer a stranger;
And her ear was pleased with the Thee and Thou of the Quakers,
For it recalled the past, the old Acadian country,
Where all men were equal, and all were brothers and sisters ...
Evangeline
Part the Second. V.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
http://www.classicreader.com/book/146/11/

I suppose many Germans of the Weimar era could have had difficulty with Buber's text and his emphasis on Ich-Du. The country had no real democratic tradition then and was obsessed with authority and formal titles

... Broadly speaking, du is used when speaking to or with ...
• family
• good friends ...
Using du inappropriately can sound too familiar and friendly. It can even be condescending or patronizing, and can be used to signal contempt, a lack of respect, or outright rudeness ... Because du signals intimacy, solidarity, and affect, younger people tend to use it ... Sie is also associated with formal titles. Someone you would address as Frau Winter, Herr Schmidt, or with a title like Professor or Doktor is someone you would use the pronoun Sie, and never du, with. The shift to du typically involves a corresponding shift to using first names ...
Du and Sie
http://www.languagerealm.com/german/du_sie.php

[trotsky]

11. "Whole books... have been written in German over just WTF he was trying to say."

I can't think of anything more perfect, then, for a pretentious wannabe deep thinker to throw out as if it's some kind of existential point that the rest of the plebes on the planet will never be able to grasp. That explains quite a bit!