Turning to the Other

Martin Buber's Call to Dialogue in I and Thou

Donovan D. Johnson

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781532699153
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

I and Thou is a summons calling us to dialogue today. Like the call Buber himself received, the book invites us to encounter the Other, our counterparts both human and eternal. Buber's spiritual awakening, his engagement with his people and his times, his wide reading, and his grief are contexts that open up this call to us to join with him in the fullness of a life of dialogue.If we follow Buber into his study, into the struggle of his inner life, into his achievement of dialogical existence--he opens up the wonders of I and Thou to us as his testament and his call to us to turn to dialogue, and he shows us the path to the fulfillment of that life. This book ushers us to that place.

Chapter 1

Reopening I and Thou

Reading is about how one opens the book.

—Alexander Gelley

Martin Buber stands out as a spiritual thinker whose work has had a profound impact on twentieth-century thought. This impact came primarily through his breakthrough book, Ich und Du. This book, first published in December 1922, shortly before his forty-fifth birthday, became a seminal work, articulating an emerging philosophy of dialogue that helped shape an era of philosophical, theological, and religious thought.

The book became a kind of manifesto of what came to be known as Buber’s philosophy of dialogue. It also became the foundation for a whole discourse of dialogue in communication theory, psychotherapy, and international diplomacy. It was quickly recognized as Buber’s masterpiece; he considered it to be his most important work: “I and Thou stands at the beginning . . . everything else is only illustration and completion.”1

It is one of a handful of works that stand out as modern classics because of the lasting value of its breakthrough insight. In 1937, fifteen years after its first publication, Ich und Du entered the English-speaking world as I and Thou. People continue to refer to it today to ground their understanding of its key distinction between I-Thou and I-It.

1. Decline: The Reception of I and Thou has Reduced Buber’s Message to an It

Yet in the years since its first publication, a whole industry of commentary and appropriation has arisen in response to it. Its interpreters have worked assiduously to domesticate the book. In the process they have reduced it to being just another fragment in the mosaic of the existing culture; that is, they have reduced its contents to an “It.” Buber’s distinction between I-Thou and I-It and the book itself quickly became central icons of “the philosophy of dialogue.” As a result, Buber’s concerns that led to the book became flattened into a formula—“I-Thou” vs. “I-It”—and the philosophy of dialogue became packaged and commodified as an item in the twentieth-century marketplace of ideas. “I-Thou” became shorthand for practices of attentive, empathetic listening in conversation, the preferred alternative to treating one’s interlocutor as merely another “It,” a functional means to one’s self-initiated ends.

Therefore, although Buber’s thinking in I and Thou arose from a profound elementary experience, the language of this work quickly became reduced to a common currency so that “people began to talk of ‘the I-Thou relationship’ and ‘the I-Thou’” as glibly as they might “talk of ‘original sin’ or ‘the natural man,’” thus reducing Buber’s thinking to “a few simple vivid concepts.”2 Buber himself wrote of the special period of the book’s gestation and of the loss that would come about if he tampered with it once that period had passed.3 At the heart of I and Thou Buber characterized this very kind of decline of entities in the realm of the human spirit, whether in the arts or in the human relation to the divine: “This is the exalted melancholy of our lot, that every Thou in our world must become an It.”4

When commentators read I and Thou as the expression of Buber’s mature thought, often they use it to divide his work into an early mystical phase completely divorced from a mature phase which they characterize as that of the true Buber, the exponent of dialogical philosophy. Prime among these interpreters is Paul Mendes-Flohr, the historian of modern German-Jewish intellectual culture. Mendes-Flohr divides Buber’s thought into two intellectual phases, in which an about-face to the “dialogical” Buber is opposed to the immature stance of the “mystical” Buber.5 Maurice Friedman, Buber’s primary biographer, tends to concur with Mendes-Flohr. Yet his division of Buber’s thinking into three parts—into mystical, existential, and dialogical phases—suggests a more fluid sense of Buber’s intellectual development.

Buber himself interprets the development of his thinking by dividing it into his immature work before I and Thou and his mature work that emerged beginning with I and Thou. For Buber, the inescapable reality of World War I and its aftermath served as the catalyst of his mature thinking.6 In a key piece of writing interpreting the development of his thinking titled “A Conversion,” and dating to events in 1914, Buber emphasizes the discontinuity for which those events serve as a hinge.7 Given Buber’s use of the metaphor of conversion, it should be noted that conversion as transformation does not mean a complete upending of one’s self-substance and conceptual tools. Rather, it marks a shift of orientation from one set of reference points to another, a shift that casts the contents of one’s thinking and experiencing in a new light.

Buber takes up the discontinuity of his thinking again in his 1957 foreword to a collection of his essays.8 We will consider this passage in detail in chapter 6 below, where we consider “The Teaching of the Tao” (1910), an essay presenting a number of Buber’s core global spiritual insights, yet made controversial by his later comments in this foreword.9

Even though the younger Buber’s emphasis on ecstasy gave way to the mature Buber’s vision of life as the dialogical task of “hallowing the everyday,” the latter still carries forward a mystical dimension. Buber apparently describes this mysticism of his maturity when he characterizes the spirituality of the Baal-Shem-Tov in his 1928 introduction to the gr...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• The Conventions Used in This Book
• Key Linking the Sixty-One Sections of I and Thou with the German, Smith, and Kaufmann Pages
• Chronology—The Life and Work of Martin Buber
• Chapter 1: Reopening I and Thou
• Chapter 2: Buber’s Spiritual Initiation
• Chapter 3: Buber’s Task Finds its Rhetoric
• Chapter 4: Buber’s Life in Dialogue
• Chapter 5: Buber’s “No” to Objectification
• Chapter 6: Buber’s “Yes” to the Way
• Chapter 7: Exposition of I and Thou—Part One
• Chapter 8: Exposition of I and Thou—Part Two
• Chapter 9: Exposition of I and Thou—Part Three
• Chapter 10: The Open Challenge
• Appendix 1: Chart: The Three Global Traditions in “The Teaching of the Tao” (Chapter 6)
• Appendix 2: Buddhist Texts Quoted in I and Thou (Chapter 9)
• Appendix 3: and Thou Expresses a Hebraic Vision
• Bibliography