Summary of Chapter 3 (1st half)
In this wide-ranging chapter, Buber uses his theory of I-It and I-You to think about how civilization can become more mutual, reciprocal, and relational. In part, this requires moving beyond thinking about any one kind of relation and instead understanding the I-You as part of a larger worldview. Thus, he begins the chapter with this line: “Extended, all lines of relationships intersect in the eternal You.” This means there is some permanent “You” from which all other relations spring and to which all relations ultimately refer. Buber reflects on whether this “eternal You” is what other people have called God. The “eternal You” is similar to God, but over the course of this chapter, Buber will have to clarify in what specific ways this is so. In turn, Buber will need to survey different religious and spiritual traditions in order to distinguish what he means by “eternal You” from what others have meant by “God.”
Before he does so, he develops a few more insights into what the I-You relation means. He considers walking down a path and encountering someone else along the way. In this encounter, he only knows the path he has taken, and not the path that the other has taken. So the reciprocity entailed by their entering into a relation with someone does not mean complete knowledge of the other. Moreover, any relation that results from this encounter would be both active and passive. It is passive because chance determined the encounter of two people who meet randomly on a road. It is as if one is chosen to enter a relation as much as one chooses to enter a relation. But the relation itself will require pure action and participation. Thus it is both active and passive.
That something can be both active and passive is not a contradiction. Indeed, one of the larger points of Buber’s theory, he explains, is that, rather than put them into contradiction, we can think of opposite terms as two different aspects of one unity. This, ultimately, is what the distinction between I-You and I-It means. It is not as if there is a world of things belonging to “It” and a world of relational persons belonging to “You.” There is only one world, and “You” and “It” merely name two different ways of being oriented toward it. We can either separate ourselves off from the world and think we are distinct from “It.” Or we can immerse ourselves in the flow of the world, belonging fully to a “You.” This is different from how philosophers usually talk about the “twoness” of the world, where there is the “real” world and then a world of “appearances": for example, a tree "as it really is" in the world, and then the trees "as it appears to us." For Buber, instead, there is no split between reality and appearance, but only between attending to reality as an It or as a You.
Attending to something in the world as a “You” means being consumed by it. Rather than standing distinct and contemplating an object, we are fully immersed in whatever “You” captivates us. This is what Buber means by calling relations “exclusive.” When addressing and being addressed by a “You,” it as if nothing else exists: everything else is excluded. We focus completely on the “You.” If this You becomes an It—if we start to think of an object instead of being completely immersed in a relation—then this can seem like a bad thing. For it occurs to us that this thing is just one thing among many other things. Why did we let it monopolize our attention? We are excluding attention to the rest of the universe by focusing on this one It.
In contrast, what Buber calls the “eternal You” is both exclusive and inclusive. With God, “unconditional exclusiveness and unconditional inclusiveness are one.” God is exclusive because, like with any You, when we are encountering Him we are completely and only immersed in this one relation; nothing else matters. But in the case of God, the eternal You, the You is everything: the whole world and all of time. So we are consumed by the You, but there is nothing excluded from it. We are immersed in a relation that includes all.
How does one “find” God, or this “eternal You” that consumes us exclusively while including everything? Buber says it is not possible to “seek” God. One cannot go out with a plan to locate or capture God, since God is all. But God is found when we are wholly immersed in a You, for remember that every You is a part of the eternal You. Buber writes: “Whoever goes forth to his You with his whole being and carried to it all the being of the world, finds him whom one cannot seek.” God is not sought, but constantly revealed in our total involvement in relation with a You.
The first half of Chapter 3 reflects upon what this means in terms of how we sense our relationship with God. Buber considers how many people think of their relationship in terms of a feeling, in particular a feeling of dependency on God. He says that this feeling is “essential” to understanding our relation with God, but it is not the whole picture. For one, feelings belong to the “soul.” This means they are something inside of us, whereas relations are actually between us and something else. So a feeling is not part of the relation itself. More importantly, dependency is not quite the right word for this relation. Remember that relations are both active and passive. So, too, is there an active component with God. Buber calls this active component “creation.” With God, “we encounter the creator, offer ourselves to him, helpers and companions.” We participate in a relation with God rather than depending completely on him.
Analysis of Chapter 3 (1st half)
In many ways, Chapter 2 is a historical and political diagnosis of what Buber sees as a crisis in humanity today. This has to do with the predominance of the I-It experience. Now, Chapter 3 is an effort to explore spiritual solutions to this crisis. Along the way, he makes arguments that are both metaphysical and theological. The metaphysical arguments deal with the nature of reality. The theological arguments deal with the nature of God.
One of the overlooked but vastly important contributions Buber makes to philosophy is his refusal of the difference between reality and “appearances.” Buber agrees that there is a “twoness” to the world, but he re-frames what this twoness is. Rather than reality versus appearances, it is the I-You versus the I-It. And by claiming that this twoness has do with the mode of existence of mankind, rather than the existence of the world, he places the question of humanity at the foundation of the world. He is essentially saying that all this philosophical talk about what the world is versus how the world is represented overlooks the more important question: how man relates to the world in different ways.
Theologically, Buber always defines not only the world, but God, through his distinction between I-It and I-You. Notice the logical development of his argument. He has gone from differentiating two modes of existence through to an analysis of each of them, and now concludes that God is the name for the maximization of one, the You. Thus, his theology builds up to God rather than begins with it. He does not begin with what some scripture says about God, but rather constructs a God as the logical consequence of his own philosophy.
This has the added effect that the eternal You, or the God of Buber’s philosophy, cannot be claimed by any one religious tradition. It follows from a philosophy of ontology, rather than from some scriptural source. In this way, Buber also secures the universalism of God. All Yous converge in the eternal You, after all. That means no person or group of people have a closer relation to God based on their system of belief. Rather, any person has access to God by way of following his You.
Buber’s metaphysical and theological projects converge in his reflections on human agency. Remember that metaphysically, Buber has re-cast questions about the existence of the world as questions about man’s relation to the world, thus centering humanism. And theologically, he has positioned God not as some impersonal creator, but as the ultimate You in which all relations converge. Together, these insights mean that humans are active creators of their world with God. It is the nature of this activity, and what it means for re-framing religious practice, that Buber will explore in the second half of this Chapter.
