Summary of Chapter 3 (2nd half)
The second half of Chapter 3 continues a discussion of God as the “eternal You” and considers this God in relation to the history of religious thought. Buber begins by considering different religious practices that organize different relations with God. He starts with prayer and sacrifice, which he thinks are the most prominent ways in which people position themselves dependent on God. A phrase like “let your will be done” captures this perfectly: there is no activity on the part of the speaker of this prayer, who is completely passive. Remember that Buber doesn’t like this kind of dependency, because it hides that a pure relation involves activity and agency. A posture of complete submission removes the speaker’s agency and thus makes this relation not a relation at all.
On the other end of a spectrum of religious practices, the opposite of prayer and sacrifice, is what Buber calls “immersion.” Here, instead of someone submitting themselves to God, making the “I” dependent on God, immersion tries to create a unity so that “I and God are one.” This is usually done through dissolving the self and eliminating the self’s desires. The leading model for this is the teachings of Buddha, who stressed asceticism. The idea was that if you could renounce yourself and your worldly desires, you could become one with the more ideal and non-worldly God.
In contrast to both dependency and immersion, Buber returns to his own sense of an I-You relation, which instead stresses actualization. This is about being actively involved in realizing the relation that exists between I and God. What matters is the kind of relation, not the object of the relation. Thus, Buber rejects that ascetic teaching that a “worldly’ life stands between us and God, and that we need to remove ourselves from the world in order to become closer to God. Instead, Buber thinks we are with God when we relate to the world—any part of the world—as You rather than as It.
The point is not to exclude certain parts of the world. The point, rather, is to prevent our relation to the world as You descending into a relation of It. Remember that, on the one hand, Buber thinks this is inevitable and impossible to avoid. We will always descend into It at times. But the key is to make this just a part of a larger rhythm that, on the whole, orients toward and is guided by the "You." In this case, perceiving an It is like taking a “deep breath” before returning to You. We may have temporary periods of latency before and after actualization with You. But as long as these are just pauses within a larger “pure relationship,” then “the You remains present” throughout these pauses, just as we continue to be alive between breaths.
Buber then talks about how the You most often descends into It, and how to reverse the process. Recall that Buber opened the book with a discussion of three spheres: nature, men, and spirits. The eternal You is present within each of these spheres. But too often, these spheres in which pure relation is possible end up being co-opted by “knowledge.” Relations become reduced to what we can use and know about the physical, psychical, and spiritual realm. Instead of doing this, Buber argues, we should give ourselves over completely to being involved in the pure relation, which touches upon the eternal You. As one example, Buber considers the difference between loving a woman “so that her gaze returns the ray of the eternal You” versus “lusting after ever repeated triumph.” In objectifying a sexual partner and reducing them only to the sexual experience, we reduce being completely present with a “You.” It is this state of being completely present that is like being with God.
Of the three spheres, Buber thinks it is in our relations with men that we most immediately approach a relation with the eternal You. This is because relations with men are characterized by language. I talk in words and you reply in words. What we have in common—the medium of our relation—is language, and in our relation, “language becomes perfected.” This brings about a complete and evident reciprocity. Through our communication, we witness mutuality more easily than we could in relation with a tree, for instance, which cannot return our speech. Thus, for Buber, “the relation to a human being is the proper metaphor for the relation to God—as genuine address is here accorded a genuine answer.”
Two more reflections round out Buber’s analysis in this Chapter. This first is about revelation. Buber looks at how God “reveals” things to men, which is really about man entering into the presence of the spirit. Buber describes three features of such a revelation. It is actually reciprocal, which means man participates along with God; it provides the confirmation of meaning; and this meaning is not of another life or another world, but of our life and our world. Again, presence means immersion in the present, which means revelation cannot be of something like heaven or hell, which is not present. Rather, revelation is an opening up to the world right here and now.
The second reflection that concludes I and Thou has to do with why we talk about God as a thing—an It—even though God is the eternal You. This is related to the question of how revelation becomes “content.” A content is some message people try to communicate or share like an object, which means it has already lost its original presence as truth about the world. Buber says there are two main things to explore in relation to this question of how You becomes It. One has to do with individual psychology and man’s desire to possess God, like an object. The other has to do with the history of religion and the fact that powerful revelations stand at the beginning of the formation of religious communities. Here, a revelation becomes a story that people share as their common origin. Buber thinks these communities are important. But the revelation itself only exists in the present in which it is experienced as relation.
Analysis of Chapter 3 (2nd half)
The second half of Chapter 3 is a deeper dive into the nature of God and man’s relation with the eternal You that God is. Notice how, as in the last Chapter, Buber does not associate God with any particular religion. He is also careful to sample teachings from a variety of traditions—including Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, and Hindu—as he shows how different religious practices have gotten close to a relation with You but have gotten stuck in some way of turning away from the world or treating the world as It. Buber’s goal is not to evaluate different religions or hold one up as superior. In fact, he is indicating how God is accessible to anyone regardless of their religious tradition.
Notice also that his criticisms of particular religious practices, including asceticism and prayer, are motivated entirely by how they fit into the spiritual philosophy he has already constructed. This provides a sort of neutral comparison of religious practices in terms of how close they get to an I-You relation. Thus, the earlier philosophical distinction Buber made in which he replaced the metaphysical picture of reality versus appearance with a humanist picture of I-You versus I-It now comes into play to evaluate asceticism, which ends up looking like the theological equivalent of the metaphysical picture. Asceticism evaluates the substance of the world and divides it into parts, whereas Buber advocates attitudes over things.
As it turns out, at the core of Buber’s spirituality is a deep humanism. Thus, relations with human beings are the nearest model and closest gateway to relation with the eternal You because of their obvious reciprocity. This is also an unspoken reversal of metaphysical philosophies. Whereas many philosophers tend to think of language as something that removes us from the world, because it is symbolic rather than the “thing itself,” Buber elevates language as the ultimate medium for relationality because it facilitates dynamic, real-time reciprocity. It is also an invitation to his readers. For although this book may have seemed a one-sided affair, with Buber the author not able to respond to readers, the fact that the book is written in language means there is the possibility for response. Indeed, the Afterword that Buber published a generation later is a response to letters he received from readers.
As Buber will also go on to acknowledge in the Afterword, there is of course a limitation to the ideal picture Buber provides here. For although it is possible for humans to enter into reciprocal relations because of language, the great problem remains that they rarely do. Power dynamics create all sorts of inequalities in relations. In turn, the political questions that Buber originally sidestepped may not be able to be ignored forever. How do we create societies in which reciprocity is the norm rather than the exception? What is the role of democracy and social institutions that enforce equality? For all Buber’s interest in changing our attitudes to the world, he does not come to the point of offering concrete steps or analyses in this direction.
Nonetheless, Buber ends on a profound note by concluding with a discussion of revelation that foregrounds the here and now rather than some dream of utopia. Buber thinks we need to become more immersed in the present, and especially the present we share with one another, rather than dreaming of some future in which all the world’s problems are solved. Perhaps that is why he is short on programmatic suggestions. Moreover, to give a list of policies to follow would be a monologue rather than a dialogue; that would make it opposed to the spirit of I and Thou overall. Buber leaves his book open and dedicated to the present as an invitation for all of us to enter into relation now, rather than going back to our armchairs to plan up the possibility of relation later.
