Sarah Robertson

9/25/14

It vs Thou 

Martin Buber breaks down the words It and Thou into objects and living beings. Buber says that I is broken down into two relations, encounters and experiences. The I that goes with encounters is broken into Thou and You, both subjects. The I that deals with experience is broken into It, She and He; one subject and one object.  The difference between encounters and experiences is that experiences are confined to you and happen in your thoughts. A subject is doing while an object is acted upon, the object does not have a story. An It is a thing and has borders. Thou is more personal while It is depersonalized. Every It borders on other its. It, reality of thing, only exists on borders of others, It has a limit. Where You/Thou is said to have no borders.  

Buber has opened my thoughts up to a new perspective. I personally agree with what Buber has to say. I believe that It has boundaries and refers only to objects.  One should not call a person an It because it dehumanizes them. They have a name and gender and mainly they are a living being.  An It is an object that is not a living being, and object that does not sustain or create life. Thou is a more personal word. Thou refers to people and experiences and has no boundaries. A He or She is not an It. A He or She is not an object. A He or She is a person, therefor a Thou. Thou comes with experiences which living beings have. A Thou cannot have boundaries because experiences do not have boundaries. One cannot put boundaries on experiences. Because Thou has no boundaries one must be referring to a living thing when they call that thing a Thou. When Buber talks about spirit he says that “Spirit in its human manifestation is man’s response to his You...” To me Buber is saying that in order to experience spirit man must be You, he cannot be an It. An It cannot experience spirit. Spirit has no boundaries and neither does Thou. It has boundaries, therefore It cannot experience spirit. This just shows that when referring to an It, one must be talking of something that has boundaries, an object. When one is referring to a Thou, they are speaking of a human or anything that can create life and has no limits.