Briefly, he says that our relationships are either between persons (an “I” and a “thou”) or with objects (an “I” and an “it”). Sometimes, though, we treat persons as if they were objects.
Buber, by the way, uses “thou” instead of “you.” He was writing in German, which has the highly personal second person pronoun “du,” in addition to the formal second person pronoun “Sie.” Other languages have the same distinction, such as the Spanish familiar form “tu” and the formal “Usted.”
The personal version is used for people we feel a close relationship to: family members, friends, those we love. Also, social inferiors. The formal version is more polite and respectful, used to address people we encounter in the course of business and other formal interactions, as well as social superiors. English used to have this same distinction: “thou” was the personal form; the plural “you” was the formal, polite form. For some reason, English over the years has lost this distinction, and we now use “you” as our second person pronoun. “Thou” survives only in archaic contexts, such as literature, and, importantly (sometimes) in church.
It is highly significant that we can use “thou” to address God. He is far above us, so we might think we should use the formal and respectful “you.” And yet, we can use the same pronoun to speak to God that we use to address our closest and most intimate friends. That is to say, we have a personal relationship with Him.
When Luther translated the Bible into German, he used “du” to address God. The other vernacular translations, such as the King James Version, followed suit. This is a major reason why we use “thou,” though I believe using the equivalent personal form was used in prayers pre-dating Luther.
I have heard it said that we shouldn’t use “thou” in church anymore because it’s too formal. Ironically, “thou” is less formal than “you.”
Anyway, here is a sample and a link to Peter Leithart’s discussion:
Martin Buber’s classic I and Thou describes a doubleness in human life that is captured by two “primary words,” I-It and I-Thou. The contrast is not merely between two modes of human contact with the world. The I itself is different, depending on whether I is connected to an It or a Thou.
When engaged with things, the I is one pole of an I-It duality. Encountering an It, I stand at a distance to analyze and dissect, classify and count, and formulate laws. The I that faces It is a partial I, a subject over against objects, an individual that is not yet a full person.
The world of I-Thou, by contrast, is a world of relation, in which the Ibecomes fully personal. I-Thou is perfected in a relation unmediated by ideas or aims, foreknowledge or fancy. In this world, “every means is an obstacle. Only when every means has collapsed does the meeting come about.” I-Thou is a relation of sheer presence and presentness.
Among primitive peoples, things are personal, so that even contact with a tree is an I-Thou relation. Infants, too, enter the world longing for a Thou. In short, “in the beginning is relation—as category of being, readiness, grasping form, mould for the soul.”
Children outgrow their primitive yearning for relation. The “I” shrinks “to a functional point, to a subject which experiences and uses.” Non-primitive people—that is, moderns—have done the same at a macro-level, abandoning a universal I-Thou to become consumers and users of things. Modern society is “sunk in the world of It.”
[Keep reading. . .]
The applications, some of which Leithart gets into, are endless.
We often treat human beings as objects, as tools, something to use to get us what we want. For example, women are “objectified” in pornography, prostitution, and immoral sexual relationships, treated impersonally as an “it.” But “love” is a relationship between two “thou’s.”
Sometimes we treat God as an “it,” as an object to use, scrutinize, and know at a distance. Whereas He is the ultimate “thou,” the ground of our own personhood.
Illustration by Geralt, via Pixabay, CC0, Creative Commons
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