What's Right and Wrong with Martin Buber
I-Thou in a Time of Post-Humanism
Martin Buber is one of the most influential religious and Jewish thinkers of the 20th century. He is famous for the distinction he draws between I-Thou and I-It. I-Thou relations are characterized by mutuality and reciprocity and genuine care; I-It relations are characterized by objectification and domination. With the rise of AI assistants and a general cultural trend towards post-humanism, Buber’s thought once again requires a closer look. How do we relate to the TikTok influencer seeking tips for pretending to be donkeys? How should we field the requests of teenagers who say they are cyborgs or video game characters or trees?
Buber draws a sharp distinction between I-Thou encounters and I-It ones. If you enter a salary negotiation, for example, with an I-It mindset, your only goal is to “win” the negotiation by getting the outcome you want: a raise. If you enter it from an I-Thou perspective, the goal is to connect uniquely with the other person—which may or may not help you get your raise, but that’s not the point. After all, your relationship is a portal to a relationship with the divine. You want your souls to see one another. The rest is commentary.
Buber thought you could have I-Thou relations with non humans. Perhaps some tree-huggers feel a difference between engaging the tree as an object to be cut down or used for shade (per The Giving Tree) and a subject, in some neo-pagan sense. Buber’s mysticism exceeds humanism. The Google employee who got fired for personifying a chatbot may also be said to have an I-Thou relation with the AI. From a Buberian point of view, you can’t criticize whether this is appropriate. You can only say whether the dynamic is indeed an I-Thou dynamic. Does that mean that two bots could have an I-Thou encounter with one another? Buber doesn’t say, but he would distinguish two vectors in my questioning. In one, I’m asking a scientific question: does AI experience and express I-Thou. In the other, I’m asking you a question in an effort to connect. The former is I-It thinking, the second I-Thou. Buber is right to make the distinction. All content has an illocutionary context. But it’s also a cop-out. We can’t ask analytical questions without falling into accusations of “I-It” thinking? Also, why the binary? We need I-It type questions to connect with others. When we go for a walk or a movie with a date, we share an object of conversation—that shared reference point mediates the relationship but it also enables it.
I have three challenges to Buber:
I-It and I-Thou are not absolute, but interwoven. Context matters. Specificity is good. An I and a Thou meeting in spiritual space-time tells us less than a banker from Detroit and a librarian from Kazakhstan meeting at the deli.
I-Thou should not be the aim of all relationships or all moments of connection, and when it is made to be, leads to forced (and thus fake) intimacy.
Not all loving and meaningful relationships are characterized the pay-off of an I-Thou sentiment. For example, taking care of an infant or visiting a sick or delusional person may not feel connecting, but it is certainly an act of Hesed (lovingkindness).
Where is Buber right?
Buber is right that non-instrumental, non-dominating, open-ended relating is rare and important. Buber is right (contra Descartes) that subjectivity is a function of how the self relates to others. Buber is right that human relationships can feel like religious experiences and be a source and site of spiritual meaning. Buber is right that theologians, especially modern ones, tend to treat God as a scientific object rather than a being to whom one can relate. And thus he is right that Biblical scholarship, which takes the text as an It, misses something which a devotional posture understands. The same, by the way, should stand for how we relate to Homer or Shakespeare or Duchamp. Works which we approach with a desire for legibility will yield legibility. But connection and encounter often also involve some mystery and illegibility—if they were all too known they wouldn’t be other.
Buber’s critique of Jewish Law, Pauline in its way, is consistent with his absolutist distinction between I-Thou and I-It. We should not and cannot separate letter and spirit, without killing both. If you want to make I-Thou real, you have to integrate it somehow with I-It. It will be imperfect, but not for that reason less authentic or meaningful.
I’m sorry: I don’t understand exactly your challenges to Buber. In I & Thou, Buber, in his quite idiosyncratic language, seems to allow for your point 1 -- I-Thou relations are specific, even if, as per his own illustration, specific to that cat, or, for that matter, to that tree. As regard your second point, he is also quite aware that one cannot “navigate” the “real world” in the quasi-transcendent state that I-Thou seems to imply, and that of necessity, human relationships require transactional grounding. The point, as I took it, in part, is to be aware that transactional relations, even if the most intimate, erect barriers to a fully conscious, as aware as possible, potential transcendent engagement. The non-human examples were posited, I think, to point us, ultimately, to the human interactions, and the awareness of the divine that those interactions could allow us. All that said, it is difficult for me to see how Buber’s thought could be actualized in our lives on any on-going basis. He offers, as far as I can see, no method, no technique. It’s kind of like socialism: it might be a nice thought, but application in reality is another matter altogether.