- I and Thou (1923) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_and_Thou
- Buber’s best-known work, setting forth his critique of modern objectification in relationships with others.
- I–It and I–Thou
- A person sitting next to a complete stranger on a park bench may enter into an “I–Thou” relationship with the stranger merely by beginning to think positively about people in general
- The essential character of “I–Thou” is the abandonment of the world of sensation, the melting of the between, so that the relationship with another “I” is foremost.
- Like the I–Thou relation, love is a subject-to-subject relationship. Love is not a relation of subject to object, but rather a relation in which both members in the relationship are subjects and share the unity of being.
- Buber’s work also influenced the Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. The “I–Thou” relationship is quoted in his Letter from Birmingham Jail and his sermon, “A Testament of Hope.” In that sermon, King describes the cultural and legal climate of segregation in his time as an “I–It” relationship, and that only when the divinity within the African American population is seen is the relationship transformed to “I–Thou.” King says, “I cannot reach fulfillment without thou“. He also mentions this unique relationship in his Letter, reiterating that the “I–It” relationship inherent in segregation does reduce human beings to “things”.
Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an “I – It” relationship for an “I – Thou” relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression of man’s tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness?
Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963) [p. 119/293]
The universe is so structured that things go awry if men are not diligent in their cultivation of the other regarding dimension . ” I ” cannot reach fulfillment without “thou . ” The self cannot be self without other selves.
Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967) [p. 625]
See also: Pilgrimage to Nonviolence (1960) [p. 35]