Summary of Afterword
Buber’s Afterword was not included in the original publication of I and Thou. In fact, it was written for the second edition of the book, in 1957, whereas the first edition was published in 1923. He opens the afterword by explaining his motivations for writing it after such a lapse of time. On the one hand, he has simply had time to expand his thinking from the original book, mostly to better understand how his theory applies to other fields such as sociology. But most importantly, he wants to open up a “dialogic relationship” with the reading public. For the past 30 years, he had diligently responded to letters from readers who wanted clarification on different points in the book. Now, he will answer the most frequency asked questions in writing available to all. Thus, the afterword is largely structured as long answers to a few select questions.
The first question deals with the difference in relations among the three spheres Buber has delineated. One can have relations with nature or with men or with spiritual matter. What, however, is the difference between relations in each of these spheres? Buber answers that the difference has to do with the degree or kind of reciprocity involved. Recall, from Chapter 3, that Buber thinks relations with men are the nearest to relations with the eternal You because their involvement in linguistic communication better models the reciprocity of address and reply. When we have a dialogue, there is reciprocity in the very fact of the dialogue. The same cannot be said when I am in relation with, say, a tree or a rock.
Buber develops a hierarchy of reciprocity. In relations when animals, there is the “threshold of mutuality.” This means we can come close to a perfectly reciprocal relation with animals, closer than we could with a rock. But animals, unlike humans, lack a distinction between You and It. Therefore, they cannot engage as a You in the same way a conversational partner can engage me as a You. It is close to human reciprocity, but not quite. In contrast, the non-sentient material world of plants and other objects—“from stones to stars,” as Buber phrases it—is the “pre-threshold of mutuality.” A stone does not even get as close as animals, because there is no chance of reply at all. This does not mean there is no reciprocity—a stone may still react to my involvement with it—but it does mean it is an even further step removed from human mutuality.
Finally, Buber discusses what he calls the “over-threshold of mutuality.” This refers to the spiritual realm, rather than the natural realm of animals or stones. Within the spiritual realm, Buber distinguishes between what can be sensed and what cannot be sensed yet. Sometimes, spiritual truths have been revealed to men and written down in scriptures or expressed in objects. He gives an example from architecture: the Doric column, which, to Buber, is a spiritual form without an instrumentality. It is pure expression of verticality, and it invites our relation because we must become involved in its meaning. In contrast, man has not yet sensed some parts of the spiritual world. They have yet to be revealed to him.
After answering this question of how reciprocity with the natural and spiritual realms differs from the human, Buber returns to relations between men to answer a question about their own limits. For although relations between men can, ideally, be reciprocal, he acknowledges they very often do not achieve complete mutuality. Just because you and I can reply to each other on equal terms does not mean we always do so. For Buber, this is usually a question of power, and it is not always a problem that relations among men do not become completely mutual. He gives two examples: the relation between a teacher and a student and the relation between a therapist and a patient. If a teacher or therapist were on completely mutual terms with a student or patient, then teaching and healing would cease. This is because both teaching and healing require what Buber calls confrontation. People do not dissolve into an all-encompassing You, because they have to be confronted by what they are learning or trying to overcome.
The next questions Buber addresses deal with the nature of God or the eternal You. How is it that, as Buber has said in Chapter 3, the eternal You is both “exclusive” and inclusive”? To answer the question, Buber says he will focus in on the nature of the relation to God, not on the nature of God himself. But he will nonetheless mention, in passing, how we often talk about God as a person. In fact, for Buber, God has three attributes: spirit, nature, and personlikeness. Just as we can enter in relations with nature, with men, or with spiritual matters, God is manifest in all three realms and can be sensed in each. These are not different parts of God, but different aspects. We can sense the same God naturally, interpersonally, or spiritually. In each case, God brings his “absoluteness” into his relation with men. This is how the relation is both exclusive and inclusive, because the absoluteness includes everything and also is so immersive that it excludes our attention from anything else.
In conclusion, Buber explains that relation with God cannot be “proved” any more than you can prove the existence of God. Because God is the eternal You, he cannot be deduced or proved through logic or rules. Similarly, a relation with God cannot be proved, but “anyone who dares to speak of it bears witness and invokes the witness of those whom he addresses—present or future witness.” To prove relation would be to turn God into a thing, into an It. But there is another way to see evidence of relation with God, Buber says in conclusion. By continuing to live within and model relations with others, we can continue the relation with God, in whom all relations converge.
Analysis of Afterword
It should not be surprising that this Afterword is essentially structured as a dialogue, or at least a response to questions. Remember that in Chapter 3, Buber said the relations between humans are the closest to relations with God because they are conducted in language, and in language, there can be call and response. In many ways, the readers who wrote to him in the intervening years since the publication of I and Thou were responding to his call, and now he responds to theirs. Thus, the Afterword is a culmination of the project of dialogue itself, not just in theory but also in practice.
Most of the points in the Afterword are clarifications of points Buber had already made in the first edition. For instance, he does not really revise or expand the idea of God as both inclusive and exclusive; instead, he reinforces it. The piece that does seem new, however, is Buber’s more careful delineation between the different realms of the world. On closer inspection, there are now five realms, as the natural realm has divided into sentient and non-sentient things, and the spiritual has divided into the already revealed and the yet-to-be-revealed. In each realm, the possibility of relation is different depending on the extent of reciprocal communication possible.
This is another instance in which, while doing a spiritual philosophy, Buber actually touches upon and performs other philosophical work as well. Now Buber has provided a principle for cutting up the world into different categories, in the same way that scientists divide the world into kingdoms, species, and so on. The single principle that Buber uses to divide the world is the possibility of communication with man. Thus, this is a worldview in which man is at the center. Again, Buber commits to a humanism that does not see man as one random thing among others, but as the center of meaning and meaning-making in the world.
Buber’s discussion of teachers and therapists deserves some special attention, in part because many philosophers of education have turned to I and Thou as a defense of equalizing relations between teachers and students. In this case, a teacher should not be thought of as an authority figure who transmits knowledge to a student. Instead, a teacher and a student are working together, on equal footing, in the process of learning. Some of this line of thinking has been called “radical pedagogy” and has been advanced most influentially in the writings of Paolo Freire. In Buber’s Afterword, however, he actually advocates for more of a moderate position. It is true that a student needs to be active in the learning process, in the same way that Buber says we should not pray “thy will be done” to God, but instead participate in creating the world together. But it is also necessary, Buber says, for the teacher and student to remain on somewhat different footing. For the teacher does know things the student does not, and the very act of teaching requires a relation of incomplete reciprocity.
By emphasizing this point, Buber reminds us of a theme throughout I and Thou: that the I-It relation is necessary but not sufficient. It is necessary because in order to survive this world, we must step out of complete immersion and learn how to use objects. But it is insufficient because it leaves us spiritually unfulfilled and alienated from one another and God. The solution is what he has called earlier a “cross-fertilization,” in which the two modes of existence mix with one another. The teaching relation is perhaps the best model of this, as it nears pure relation, but also acknowledges the necessity of an I-it relation. From this relation, we can learn other ways of combining the I-It and the I-You.
