Paige Bier_24 Sept._Martin Buber: I-It V. I-Thou

It is important to unfold Belden Lane’s quote on page 29 where he says, “What, in the possibilities of being, could have become a Thou-place for us has remained an It-place, shorn of any bond of union”. Lane’s quote quite simply provides a foundation for the outline of this reflection. In this reflection, I will distinguish my interactions with the constituents of a particular place as objects- It and as subjects- Thou through excerpts of Martin Buber’s book and the particular environment of a pond.

On page 54, Buber says, “I perceive something. I feel something. I imagine something. I want something. I sense something. I think something”, can these acts of what we "perceive", "feel", etc. act as the deciding factors between objects and subjects?

Growing up on a farm down in Georgia, my family and I loved visiting the lake to watch the sun go down. However, the only times we went down to the lake were with a tackle box in hand. The lake was never viewed as a sanctuary of the fish but more as a market place for dinner. Each time we went down to the lake, we would cast our rod with the intent to catch food. This defined the lake as a subject because we only saw it for our own personal purpose—for food. Not a night went by that we sat on the dock to feed the fish or to toss bread for the ducks swimming by yet Buber says, “But isn’t the communal life of modern man bound to be submerged in the It-world?” (p. 96).

Later on, my family and I moved to Virginia where we have a coy pond in our backyard. My family and I sit together and listen to the water as it falls down the different colored stones to enter the pond where the fish breathe. We look into the clarity of the water to find the blurred images of orange and white coy fish that fill the pond. These fish are “living beings whose life interacts with other living beings in this particular environment” (Reddick). The fish are subjects within the pond, referred to as their own project. Buber says, “When a culture is no longer centered in a living and continually renewed relational process, it freezes into the It-world which is broken only intermittently by the eruptive, glowing deeds of solitary spirits” (103). The reason that the Thou-place can exist here is because the culture is centered in a living and continually renewed relational process.

I must convey that the “Thou-place” can only become an “It-place” through God or “solitary spirits”. Page 126 says, “What has to be given up is not the I, as most mystics suppose: the I is indispensable for any relationship, including the highest, which always presupposes an I and You. What has to be given up is not the I but that false drive for self-affirmation which impels man to flee from the unreliable, unsolid, unlasting, unpredictable, dangerous world of relation into the having of things”; therefore, we must not remain in the world but to remain in our true purpose here in the world will bring us to God. The divide between the true purpose of the pond lies in the definition of its sanctuary: the true purpose of the pond is to be a sanctuary for the fish, not to be a sanctuary for the people to have food.