Buber, Martin. I and Thou.
The significance of the effect is not so obvious in the relation with the Thou spoken to men. The act of the being which provides directness in this cause is usually understood wrongly as being one of feeling. Feelings accompany the metaphysical and metapsychical fact of love, but they do not constitute it. The accompanying feelings can be of greatly differing kinds. The feeling of Jesus for the demoniac differs from his feeling for the beloved disciple; but the love is the one love. Feelings are “entertained”: love comes to pass. Feelings dwell in man; but man dwells in his love. That is no metaphor, but the actual truth. (14)
Love does not cling to the I in such a way as to have the Thou only for its “content,” its object; but love between I and Thou. The man who does not know this, with his very being know this, does not know love; even though he ascribes to it the feelings he lives through, experiences, enjoys, and expresses. Love ranges in its effect through the whole world. (15)
In the eyes of him who takes his stand in love, and gazes out of it, men are cut free from their entanglement in bustling activity. Good people and evil, wise and foolish, beautiful and ugly, become successively real to him; that is, set free they step forth in their singleness, and confront him as Thou. (15)
Love is responsibility of an I for a Thou. (15)
The “bad” man, lightly touched by the holy primary word, becomes on who reveals. How we are educated by children and by animals! We live our lives inscrutably included within the streaming mutual life of the universe. (16)
- So long as love is “blind,” that is, so long as it does not see a whole being, it is not truly under the sway of the primary word of relation. Hat is by nature blind. Only a part of a being can be hated. He who sees a whole being and is compelled to reject it is no longer in the kingdom of hate, but is in that of human restriction of the power to say Thou. He finds himself unable to say the primary word to the other human being confronting him. (16)
Little, disjointed, meaningless sounds still go out persistently into the void. But one day, unforeseen, they will have conversation – does it matter that it is perhaps with the simmering kettle? It is conversation. Many a movement terms reflex is a firm trowel in the building up of the person in the world. (27)
It is simply not the case that the child first perceives an object, then, as it were, puts himself in relation with it. But the effort to establish relation comes first – the hand of the child arched out so that what is over against him may nestle under it; second is the actual relation, a saying of Thou without words, in the state preceding the word-form; the thing, like the I, is produced late, arising after the original experiences have been split asunder and the connected partners separated. In the beginning is relation – as category of being, readiness, grasping form mould for the soul; it is the a priori of relation, the inborn Thou. (27)
The development of the soul in the child is inextricably bound up with that of the longing for the Thou, with the satisfaction and the disappointment of this longing, with the game of his experiments and the tragic seriousness of his perplexity. (28)
Genuine understanding of this phenomenon, which is injured by every attempt to lead it back into more confined spheres, can only be promoted if, during its observation and discussion, its cosmic and metacosmic origin is kept in mind. For it reaches out from the undivided primal world which precedes form, out of which the bodily individual who is born into the world, but not yet the personal, actualized being, has fully emerged. For only gradually, by entering into relations, is the latter to develop out of this primal world. (28)
Through the Thou a man becomes I. That which confronts him comes and disappears, relational events condense, then are scattered, and in the change consciousness of the unchanging partner, of the I, grows clear, and each time stronger. To be sure, it is still seen caught in the web of relation with the Thou, as the increasingly distinguishable feature of that which reaches out to and yet is not the Thou. But it continually breaks through with more power, till a time comes when it bursts its bonds, and the I confronts itself for a moment, separated as though it were a Thou; as quickly to take possession of itself and from then on to enter into relations in consciousness of itself. (29)
This is part of the basic truth of the human world, that only It can be arranged in order. Only when things, from being our Thou, become our It, can they be co-ordinated. The Thou knows no system of co-ordination. (31)
The world of It set in the context of space and time.
The world of Thou is not set in the context of either of these.
The particular Thou, after the relational event has run its course, is bound to become an It.
The particular It, by entering the relational event, may become a Thou.
These are the two basic privileges of the world of It. They move man to look on the world of It as the world in which he has to live, and in which it is comfortable to live, as the world, indeed, which offers him all manner of incitements and excitements, acticity and knowledge. (33-34)
And in all seriousness of truth, hear this: without It man cannot live. But he who lives with It alone is not a man. (34)
Despite sundry stoppages and apparent retrogressions the progressive augmentation of the world of It is clearly discerned in history. (37-38)