Summary of Chapter 2
In Chapter 1, Buber explained that biologically and historically, individuals and cultures begin with a “You” relation to the world. But as individuals age, and as cultures mature, there is an increase of the “It” world. For Buber, this is the move from being a fetus and baby to being a thinking adult, and from being a primitive culture to a modern civilization. In order to mature or develop, we have to learn how to “use” the world, to make it meet our needs. This is fundamentally thinking of the world as “It,” as a thing. But the downside is that we lose our power to relate, to enter into meaningful and immersive relations with the world. Buber calls this “living in the spirit.”
For Buber, “Spirit” is “man’s response to his You.” We dwell within a spiritual space when we are in reciprocal and dynamic exchange with something perceived as You. But often, our response to the You shuts it down into an It. We try to study it as an object rather than enter into a relation with it as a partner. Buber considers art and science. Something may hit you with the force of scientific truth or aesthetic beauty, which is a You. But after we study this encounter, trying to break down its parts into facts or attributes, we tame the You. We make it an object of contemplation rather than a co-participant in a “pure action.”
Buber is particularly interested in how the You becomes It in relations among humans. Buber thinks mankind divides life with fellow men into one of two things. The first are institutions, which correspond more to the It and are about externally organizing human affairs into a system. The second are feelings, which correspond more to the I because they are about feelings inside someone. So institutions are external and feelings are internal. But they are both part of an I-It relation, and they both ignore the relationship of a You. Thus, both are cut off from actual life and its flow in the present. They are about cutting up or dissecting life into more manageable objects and pieces.
To compensate for the spiritual poverty of this I-It arrangement, people might try to reform feelings or institutions, rather than leave them both behind in pursuit of the You. For instance, people might try to get feelings into institutions. This is in phrases like a “loving community” where the seemingly cold and external order of institutions becomes infused with more personal feelings. But stuffing feelings into institutions is no “substitute” for actual, loving reciprocity among men. Feelings are involved in reciprocity, but reciprocity cannot be derived from them. The same is true for an institution like marriage. Love between partners can be deeply reciprocal and mutual, but this is because of their relation, not because of the institution of marriage or the feeling of love itself.
Buber clarifies that the It world is not itself evil. What Buber thinks is important is for the You world to predominate, or and that occasional instrumental (I-It) uses of the world are “tied to the will to human relations” rather than attempts to abandon or sidestep the You world. In turn, Buber is relatively uninterested in questions of the state and the economy, or how to order institutions and design marketplaces. These are not unimportant questions, he says. But they are unrelated to the deeper question of living within the spirit of relation.
Today’s world is obsessed with “It,” and this means, in part, an obsession with causality. Rather than enjoy a pure presence, the It world wants to know how A causes B and B leads to C. This is the hegemony of rationality in modern times. In turn, people see the world as organized by causational laws. They develop laws of life that spell out the stages of development or psychological laws that explain the workings of the mind or social and cultural laws the tell us how societies are organized and change. These laws are essentially modern manifestations of fate. People think they are ruled by fate. And in turn, people come to believe in “doom” or the coming of some inevitable disaster they are helpless to control. After all, they think, everything is ruled by laws, so they have no agency.
To remedy this situation, Buber thinks we need to resurrect more I-You relationality. He thinks the It and the You are basically in competition over the I, in terms of how much the I orients to the world instrumentally or relationally. If we orient to the world as It, there is “natural differentiation,” which means a difference between the “ego” and the world. In contrast, if we orient to the world as You, there is “natural association,” and instead of an isolated ego, there are persons relating to persons in the fullness of “subjectivity.” To conclude this Chapter, Buber provides two models of the I-You relation from Western literature and philosophy: Socrates and Goethe. Socrates was an ancient Greek philosopher known for what has become the Socratic method, which is about learning through dialogue. Goethe was a famous German author from the late 18th and early 19 centuries. His novels similarly put characters into dialogue and conversation. Because of their interest in reciprocity and truth being developed not by an individual but in relation, Socrates and Goethe together symbolize the I-You relation. That they are from different cultures and very different histories shows that this relation is not historically or culturally specific, but, as Buber says, “resounds through the ages.”
Analysis of Chapter 2
A challenge for a book like I and Thou, because of its range of topics, is managing a balance between the universal and the particular. On the one hand, Buber has a universal theory of ontology, or how people can have one of two modes of existence at a given time. On the other hand, he wants to show how cultures are different from one another and change over time. Thus, “primitive” cultures are different from “modern” cultures, just as a culture today is different from itself in the past. Buber accomplishes this balance by saying the fundamental distinction—You and It—exists across time and place, but the priority of one over the other changes.
In turn, Buber demonstrates a kind of nostalgia for the past. He seems to think modernity has alienated mankind from a more fulfilling relation with the world. This may not be surprising given the time Buber is writing, just after the massive destruction of World War I. This was the first war that employed modern warfare technologies and machines, leading to death on a tremendous scale. No doubt, there was some amount of treating other human beings as "It" that made it possible to participate in so much destruction. Reeling from such chaos, Buber and other writers in the 1920s turned to a sense of the past as a more nurturing place. Buber does so with a theory, however, which means his nostalgia is informed. He explains why the past might have been a different time: it was because of the priority of the I-You relation.
At the same time, it would be a mistake to call Buber a Luddite, or someone who calls for the destruction of new technologies. In fact, he is very realistic about the need for technology, and even for the I-It experience, in order to improve the quality of life of mankind. He does not have a naïve nostalgia for the past, which many people forget was a time of dramatically shorter life expectancy, widespread famine and disease, not to mention sharp social and political inequality. Nor is he calling for some naïve return to the land, as if leaving urban modernity and returning to an agrarian life would be a salve for the world’s problems.
Instead, remember that what Buber likes about the past is not just some certain configuration of society or the economy, but the predominance of the I-You. And there is no reason the I-You cannot predominate again even within the modern industrial society in which we live. It is not a question of changing the world, but of changing how we relate with the world. This is the limit of his metaphor. For an adult cannot become a fetus again, even though Buber thinks the fetus-mother relation is a model of the I-You relation. And a society cannot simply become “primitive” again, as if it could demolish and then forget its cities and machines. But a society or a person can develop a new I-You relation now, in the present.
There is, nonetheless, a certain primitivism in Buber’s writing. That means an idealization of cultures that he perceives as less advanced. This was in fact a widespread tendency in colonial cultures of the early 20th century. Many people wanted to escape what they perceived as the confines of European civilization, and they felt that the regions that Europe had colonized, including Africa, the Americas, and the Indian subcontinent, might provide better ways of life. Buber participates in this trend when he assumes that indigenous cultures are closer to the origin of life, like a baby rather than an adult. But he departs from the major primitivist tendencies because he thinks the I-You relation is universal and can come to predominate in any culture at any time.
