Buber Part I
Buber - Commentary on I and Thou First Section
(These are very sketchy marginalia of my own - for what they are worth in your own reading!)
** Note that he sees speaking as equivalent to being - think of God/Christ as Word in John’s Gospel. (53)
** Note that ‘I’ is different depending on the type of relationship.
** The ‘I’ is ONLY constituted in relationship (54).
** Activities=the world of ‘I-IT.’ Activities are time bound, finite; relation is unbounded, in a way; infinite.
** Experience (56) is all ‘I-IT’ - subject->object.
** P. 57- has a reference to Moses and also to the 6th chapter of Isaiah (see note). Introduces the three spheres: nature, human, divine.
** 58 - sphere of nature – it’s hard to imagine the reciprocity of human and tree; easier to imagine with, say, a dog.
** 59 - sphere of human-human relation. Think of falling in love as what is described here - and the book does owe a lot to his feelings about his wife. Also note use of ‘confront’; this doesn’t mean ‘as opponent’ - see p. 45 - it means ‘have an encounter,’ or ’come face to face.’
** 60 – ‘experience’ as contrasted to ‘stand in relation.’ Then a lovely section about the relation between the creator of an art production and the art work. When the creative act works well, one can’t step aside/outside the art, but stand with it/in it/in relation to it. And for the ‘receptive beholder,’ the art work invites a You relation.
** 62 - note that the small ‘it’ can be referencing the You in the ‘I-You’ dynamic – it’s confusing here. The ‘I-It’ dynamic always is with a capitalized ‘It’. Note that ‘I’ can only become fully ‘I’ AS I encounter You.
** 63 - The ‘I-You’ dynamic is in the radical PRESENT tense - can only happen NOW in encounter. This section seems very Buddhist to me!
** 64 - continues the time sense: fears and anticipations of future are not in the present - thus they don’t exist. VERY Buddhist.
** 65 - fine ideas and ideals are ‘objects’ - they lead us AWAY from real encounter with real beings.
** 66 - Action in terms of ‘You’/person is ‘love’ - response and more – it’s a dynamic presence BETWEEN us.
** 67 - AND in this relation, we connect to something More. The bottom of the page starts an imaginary dialogue with someone questioning the author to help get clarification – that’s what the ‘—‘ bullets are for.
** 68 - note statement on hating being closer to relation than indifference - close to Biblical point here.
** Bottom 68 - impossibility of SUSTAINING the ‘I-You’ relation - it keeps slipping into ‘I-It.’
** 69 - more on this - very much the same issue as the impossibility of staying in a mystical state of awareness, at least for most of us - the trained practitioner of spiritual practices is supposedly able to enter into a more permanent state of this sort of awareness.
** 70-75 - The stuff about ‘primitive man’ - this seems VERY speculative to me - typical of early 20th Century Western scholarship in its assumptions about non-Western cultures being debased and early versions of Western culture (writers like Freud and Jung made these assumptions too). He is assuming that individuals in these non-Western cultures don’t have a developed sense of self, an ego, which he also discusses as the case with infant humans in our culture. He also argues (p. 75, in dialogue with another imaginary questioner) that Western culture has lost something important in its more ‘advanced’ development. I see in this a yearning for a closer connection to the world of nature.
** 76 moves into the discussion of early childhood development, where the development of the sense of self, the ‘ego’ is taking place. This discussion brings up issues I’ve read about in feminist psychology where this normative ego development describes here is more typical of the development of the male individual, with the more dramatic separation from and differentiation from the mother (where the female stays in closer identification and relation). Fascinating to see an article in the recent Newsweek arguing that male and female BRAINS develop differently, and not because of culture. Here’s the Web site for the story: http://www.msnbc.com/news/958646.asp?cp1=1
** p. 74-75 describes the ‘cosmic pathos’ of the ‘I’ where the “basic word I-It, the word of separation, has been spoken." That’s the infant separation from the mother, and the separation of humanity from nature - according to Susan Griffin (Woman and Nature, among other books).
** p. 79 - optical and tactile contact with the infant - very much supported by research - that infants track caregiver faces VERY early, and that being deprived of touch, infants will sicken and die. Also, language interchange is simply necessary to the physical development of the brain.
** 80 - development of self-consciousness - I become something of an object for my own perception. He goes on (81) to describe this cognitive development as a kind of estrangement.
** 82 - an aside about the INNATE order underlying our efforts to impose order.
** Then (82 lower section) a series of contrasts between the two worlds of ‘I-You’ and ‘I-IT’ - again, making the experience of ‘I-You’ seem very much the ecstatic experience of falling in love, or ecstatic mystical experience.
** 84- 'It' ’is known and safe; the ‘I-You’ world is dangerous - one can lose control! But it’s important, too, to understand that these realms/worlds are in a dialectic, where one moves back and forth, and they merge into one another.