Portrait · Self · 1923
Plate · Generated interpretation
I and You
A book says the world can be met as an It, or addressed as a You. Consciousness, here, is a kind of relation, not a sealed lamp.
- Germany and later Jerusalem, on the page
- Interwar Europe
Two chairs. Which word would you risk, It or You?
Listen · Eve
0:00 / —:—
Leipzig, 1923. Martin Buber publishes Ich und Du. The book is short and does not behave like a treatise. It offers two basic words, two ways a world can be met: Ich-Es and Ich-Du, I-It and I-You. The You cannot be possessed, measured, or used. It can be addressed. When the address holds, Buber says, the It-world recedes. When it breaks, as it always does, the You becomes an It again. That breaking is not a sin in the book. It is how a world is livable. God, in the third part, is the eternal You. That is a theological claim, not a finding.
Buber was born in Vienna in 1878 and raised, in part, in Lemberg, in a world of Jewish learning and of Hasidic tales he would later retell. Ich und Du is not those tales. It is a grammar of relation written in German between the wars. Ronald Gregor Smith’s English (1937) made the title I and Thou. Walter Kaufmann’s (1970) argued for You: Du, in 1923, was ordinary intimacy, not church-archaic. The house’s title on this plate, “I and You,” follows that pressure without pretending the translations are one book.
Ich und Du. Leipzig: Insel, 1923. Smith 1937; Kaufmann 1970. Kaufmann’s prologue is a later argument about tone. It is not Buber’s 1923 sentence.
An It is how we know objects, tools, fragments, even other people when we need them as functions. A You is not a better mood toward the same object. It is a different standing. Buber will not let the You be stored. The moment is lived, then it is gone, and the It-world is necessary again. This is not a method for better conversations at work. It is a claim about the grammar of meeting, including meeting what the book calls God.
All actual life is encounter.
Levinas will later refuse to let the Other be gathered even as You. Buber is earlier and warmer. They should not be made to agree. The eternal You is Buber’s theology. Taking it as a theory of consciousness is already a translation.
Buber left Germany for Jerusalem in 1938. The book outlived the language-world it was written in. Later readers will use I-Thou as a slogan for presence. The 1923 pages are sterner: most of life is It, and must be, and the You is not a technique one applies to an It to improve it.
Whether a You can be addressed in a sentence about You is the book’s own strain.
Distant echoes
Echo
Postwar France · Paris, on the page
The face that obliges
Buber’s You and Levinas’s face both interrupt possession. One is dialogue. One is command.
Echo
Mid-1960s computing · MIT, Project MAC
The secretary and the script
ELIZA can be treated as a You for a few minutes. Buber would call that an It wearing a You’s grammar. The strain is the same sentence.
One question remains
Self · Who or what is having the experience?
If I speak about you, have I already turned you into an It?