I and Thou

⚖The case for it

Two ways of meeting anything: as an It you use, or as a You you stand before. Readers describe the distinction changing how they treated actual people that same day, which is not what philosophy usually manages. “Whoever says You does not have something; he has nothing, but he stands in relation,” Buber writes, and that line gets marked and reread on its own. The afterword and the pages on the Eternal You clarify what came before, which is why the second pass pays off more than the first. One reader took from it that “the world is not a collection of objects for our manipulation,” and Kaufmann's fifty page prologue, the clearest writing in the volume, is worth reading twice.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Readers say “there are pages that are simply not understandable,” stalling mid paragraph unable to parse the claim, and say Buber “deliberately circumlocates and obfuscates his meaning” rather than stating a plain idea plainly. The aphoristic register reads to others as “stream-of-conscious rambling,” frustrating anyone wanting a thesis defended in steps. The third part turns to God, which loses secular readers who came for the philosophy of relation. The 1937 Smith translation gets called “marred by many inaccuracies,” and one well-known reader graded the whole book a failure, rejecting the mystique around its difficulty.

— the honest librarian

2h

honest hours

3

sittings