I and Thou by Martin Buber, translated by Walter Kaufmann (.ePUB) or by Ronald Gregor Smith (.PDF)
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Overview: The philosophical and theological classic that presents two ways of engaging with existence: viewing others as separate objects, or viewing them as full beings that are connected to the self as well as to God. Martin Luther King, Jr. cited the "I-Thou" relationship in his Letter From a Birmingham Jail, noting that the "I-It" relationship in segregation reduced human beings to things.
Genre: Non-Fiction > Faith, Beliefs & Philosophy
1. I and Thou, 1970 translation by Walter Kaufmann
I and Thou, Martin Buber’s classic philosophical work, is among the 20th century’s foundational documents of religious ethics. "The close association of the relation to God with the relation to one’s fellow-men … is my most essential concern," Buber explains in the Afterword. Before discussing that relationship in the book’s final chapter, Buber explains at length the range and ramifications of the ways people treat one another, and the ways they bear themselves in the natural world. "One should beware altogether of understanding the conversation with God … as something that occurs merely apart from or above the everyday," Buber explains. "God’s address to man penetrates the events in all our lives and all the events in the world around us, everything biographical and everything historical, and turns it into instruction, into demands for you and me."
Throughout I and Thou, Buber argues for an ethic that does not use other people (or books, or trees, or God), and does not consider them objects of one’s own personal experience. Instead, Buber writes, we must learn to consider everything around us as "You" speaking to "me," and requiring a response. Buber’s dense arguments can be rough going at times, but Walter Kaufmann’s definitive 1970 translation contains hundreds of helpful footnotes providing Buber’s own explanations of the book’s most difficult passages.
2. I and Thou, 1937 translation by Ronald Gregor Smith
‘The publication of Martin Buber’s I and Thou was a great event in the religious life of the West.’ Reinhold Niebuhr
Martin Buber (1897-19) was a prolific and influential teacher and writer, who taught philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem from 1939 to 1951. Having studied philosophy and art at the universities of Vienna, Zurich and Berlin, he became an active Zionist and was closely involved in the revival of Hasidism. Recognised as a landmark of twentieth century intellectual history, I and Thou is Buber’s masterpiece. In this book, his enormous learning and wisdom are distilled into a simple, but compelling vision. It proposes nothing less than a new form of the Deity for today, a new form of human being and of a good life. In so doing, it addresses all religious and social dimensions of the human personality. Translated by Ronald Gregor Smith.
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Translated by Walter Kaufmann
https://ouo.io/qhUeo8
https://ouo.io/NE4rqu
Translated by Ronald Gregor Smith
https://ouo.io/oTaIY4
https://ouo.io/VTPXm8
