DURING THE LAST two or three years I have become an avid reader of David Brooks’ column in The New York Times. I don’t know of any other columnist who writes essays similar to those Brooks writes. He seems to me to be a contemporary prophet calling us to examine our lives, to evaluate how we are living and to examine our consciences.
However, even I was surprised to see that Brooks’ Nov. 1 column was devoted to the thought of philosopher Martin Buber. Probably the most well known of all the personalist philosophers, Buber is one of my favorite thinkers. I find his vision of reality absolutely beautiful and profoundly true. I teach his philosophy in three of my courses at St. John’s University. His philosophy contains insights that I hope students will not only master for an exam or for a grade in a course, but also embrace deeply so that the insights change their lives and continue to influence them even after they have graduated from college.
Buber distinguished two ways of relating and called them I-Thou and I-It. An I-It relationship tends toward being utilitarian. If I am relating to you as though you are a thing, rather than a person, and I ask who you are, then it is quite possible that by that question I mean: what can you do for me, how can I use you, what function can you play in my life. Buber thought that it was all right to have an I-It relation with a thing, but it was immoral to have an I-It relationship with a person.
Offering a good description of the two types of relationships, Brooks writes the following:
“I-It relationships come in two varieties.
“Some are strictly utilitarian. You’re exchanging information in order to do some practical thing, like getting your taxes done.
“But other I-It relationships are truncated versions of what should be deep relationships. You’re with a friend, colleague, spouse or neighbor but you’re not really bringing your whole self to that encounter. You’re fearful, closed or withdrawn – objectifying her, talking at her, offering only a shallow piece of yourself and seeing only the shallow piece of her.
“I-Thou relationships, on the other hand, are personal, direct, dialogical – nothing is held back. A Thou relationship exists when two or more people are totally immersed in their situation, when deep calls to deep, when they are offering up themselves and embracing the other in some total, unselfconscious way, when they are involved in ‘mutual animated describing.’”
Five Characteristics
Buber claimed that an I-Thou relationship had five characteristics which are the following: ineffable, intense, direct, present and mutual. By ineffable, Buber wanted to indicate that an I-Thou relation is mysterious, that no one, including Martin Buber, could understand such a relationship completely.
I think that there are four mysteries in every I-Thou relation: the mystery of the I, the mystery of the Thou, the mystery of the relationship and the mystery of God, Who is part of every I-Thou relationship. Buber claimed that when we meet another person in an I-Thou relationship, we also meet God. He thought that even an atheist in an I-Thou relationship could also meet God.
By intense, I think Buber meant that the relationship was deep and not something one could enter into casually. By present, I think Buber meant that each person is there for the other. By direct, he meant each person goes past superficial impressions of the other and meets the other at the center of his or her personhood. By mutual, Buber wished to indicate that it takes two to have an I-Thou relation. An individual cannot force an I-Thou to happen. What an individual can do is be open and receptive and willing to allow an I-Thou to happen.
Atheists Can Meet God
Though Buber’s ideas are beautiful, his book, “I and Thou,” is not easy reading. However, I find that with some notion of Buber’s main ideas, college students can work through the book and enjoy it. I wonder how many readers of Brooks’ column tried to read Buber’s “I and Thou.”
I find especially attractive Buber’s insistence that through an I-Thou relation an atheist can meet God. My guess is that some atheists would object to this part of Buber’s philosophy. For me it suggests an explanation of how some atheists can seem to be very moral. Though they do not consciously affirm the existence of God, some atheists and agnostics seem like very good people.
Buber claimed that an I-Thou relation could happen between two human persons, between a human and God and between a human and some object of nature, for example, a tree. The image I have of Buber’s view of God is that God is waiting to encounter us and is eager to encounter us. I think that is a profoundly true view of God.
Father Lauder is a philosophy professor at St. John’s University, Jamaica, and author of “Pope Francis’ Spirituality and Our Story” (Resurrection Press).