Word: buber
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Buber formulates his position in terms of two philosophical catch phrases: I-It and I-Thou...
...when lovers find in each other only a projection of themselves. Similarly, I-It appears in religion, as when man uses God merely for his peace of mind, or abstracts Him in complicated logical systems, or regards Him as so large and overpowering that He is out of reach. Buber refuses to see God as the "wholly Other" of Swiss Theologian Karl Barth or the "Mysterium Tremendum" of German Theologian Rudolph Otto. "Of course God is the 'wholly Other,' " Buber writes, "but He is also the wholly Same, the wholly Present. Of course He is the Mysterium Tremendum...
...Thou stands for the kind of meeting -love or even hate-in which two beings face and accept each other as truly human. This produces what Buber calls a dialogue-a fusion of action and response, of choosing and being chosen-that engages man's highest qualities. But I-It relationships are necessary for the everyday world. For I-Thou meetings are "strange, lyric and dramatic episodes, seductive and magical, but tearing us away to dangerous extremes, loosening the well-tried context . . . shattering security." Therefore, says Buber, modern man tries to escape from I-Thou in many ways, notably...
Ultimately, Buber applies the I -Thou idea to man's meeting with God, whom he calls the "Eternal Thou." This confrontation, says Philosopher Friedman, is "perhaps best understood from the nature of the demand which one person makes on another if the two of them really meet . . . If you are to meet me, you must become as much of a person as I am . . . In order to remain open to God [man] must change in his whole being...
...Perhaps Buber's greatest merit is that, almost alone among modern Jewish thinkers, he has returned to the intensely personal dialogue with God that is characteristic of the Old Testament and existed among the sages and rabbis before the Middle Ages. In their writings God often sounds like a member of the family to be submitted to but nonetheless argued with: "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him," said Job, "but I will maintain mine own ways before...