On Buber

From:  Jeanine Czubaroff (2000) Dialogical rhetoric: An application of Martin Buber's philosophy of dialogue, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 86:2, 168-189, DOI: 10.1080/00335630009384288

Martin Buber addresses the fundamental question of philosophical anthropology, what is the nature of human existence, in his essays "What is Man?" and "Distance and Relation." Describing the essence of human existence as "the eternal meeting of the One with the Other" (WM, 205), he identifies two ontological movements which underlie the meeting or relating which is at the heart of being human. The first movement, "distancing" or "setting at a distance" is a presupposition of the second, relating or "entering into relationship." That setting at a distance is a presupposition of entering into relation is, "plain from the fact that one can enter into relation only with being which has been set at a distance, more precisely, has become an independent opposite. And it is only for man that an independent opposite exists" (D&R, 59-60). As far as we know, only the human being, in becoming a self-conscious, distinct individual, experiences others as over-against the self. Once the human being experiences the self and other as separate, opposite, and over-against each other, s/he experiences the desire for entry into personal relations (60). Not surprisingly, "speech" ("the great character of men's life with one another," D&R, 68) is the human being's primary means of establishing contact and coming to an understanding over situations (See, WM, 117). Indeed, says Buber, "the mystery of the coming-to-be of language and that of the coming-to-be of man are one" (WS, 117). 

The two basic movements at the foundation of human experience, that is, taking one's distance and entering into relation, give rise to two possible modes of experiencing the other/world: "observation and use" (I, 115) and "You-saying" (I&T, 82-85).  In the mode of observation and use we experience ourselves as self-conscious ego or subject over-against the other as an "It" or object which we may observe, manage, or manipulate for our own purposes. As ego we "have" things, experience, and feelings. This mode of being gives rise to traditional subject-object relation and abstract, conceptual, "socially objectified" knowledge about the world. On the other hand, when we say "You" to the other, we experience ourselves as "subjectivity" or persons who are addressed by the other as person. As an I who says "You," we participate in actuality or being. Buber writes, "Whoever stands in [dialogical] relation, participates in an actuality; that is, in a being that is neither merely a part of him nor merely outside him" (I&T, 113). This mode of being gives rise, as we will see, to a way of knowing distinct from subject-object knowing, and to a human existential truth "which opens itself to one just in one's existence as a person" (WS, 120)—that is, in one's existence in relation to another. For Buber, no individual is exclusively "ego" and no persons exclusively "person." However, some human beings are more ego-oriented and some more person-oriented (I&T, 114-115). Instrumental, "observation and use" (or, I-It) relations are essential for human survival, dialogical or personal relations, are essential to being fully human.