MS Paint Philosophy: Martin Buber - I and Thou

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• published: 02 Oct 2012
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An MS Paint Philosophy on the topic of Martin Buber's I and Thou. The entire video is created using graphics created in MS Paint and images which are in the public domain. Transcript for the video is included in the description: Martin Buber, known almost exclusively for his landmark 1923 essay titled I and Thou, is a Jewish philosopher whose work has influenced everything from abstract existentialist thought to modern ethics. Whether Buber's beard influenced his philosophy is still unknown. Existentialism is by far the greatest influencer of Buber's I and Thou, fitting given that it was existentialism which inspired Buber's interest in pursuing philosophy, which was a break from his deeply rooted Judaic beliefs which forbade an interest in non-secular philosophy. The focus of Buber's I and Thou could easily be said to purely concerned with relationships, the variety and mutability of which is centered around a locus of Buber's grappling with how to philosophically understand God. When we say that Buber was concerned with relationships we don't mean that Buber was really worried about the facebook status' of his best friends, Buber was attempting to find a way to categorize the different ways in which we experience reality by the way in which we have a relationship to it. For Buber, an individual's relationship to their experience exists in two modes; I-It and I-Thou. Their particular differences are complex, and are best understood in pieces. The 'I' is consciousness, and is reflexively defined, that is, it exists because it exists. The 'It' is an objectified notion of experience, something that is separated as an individual element of an experience. The 'Thou' is the whole picnic, transcendental and ineffable, Buber's most concrete descriptions about the 'Thou' all point to the necessity of its remaining undefined "When thou is spoken the speaker has no thing for his object". Is this all making sense? Bad news, it won't in a second, for what the great bearded one giveth he also sees fit to taketh away. The tricky business, for Buber, is that in identifying an I-Thou relationship it is no longer an I-Thou relationship. Certain parallels can be drawn here between Buber's idea of an I-Thou and the Buddhists Nirvana. Thou is an experience, but to say you're experiencing it... doesn't really work. Ignoring his own fallacy, Buber outlines three general ways in which believes the I-Thou relationship most commonly takes place: 1) "First, our life with nature" taking a page from Thoreau for this one, Buber puts special emphasis on the pre-linguistic relationship with the great outdoors. 2) "Second, we live our life with men" Obviously not just men, but what Buber means here is that relationships with other humans can, and should be, boundless (as Kant would put it, more than mere means to our ends, but as ends in-themselves.) 3) "Third, our life with intelligible forms" Boiled down, this means that there are just some things which are indescribably existing in the sphere of the I-Thou. You could have an I-Thou relationship with a dust mote... or Buber's beard. And, in a sort of a subnote to a footnote, Buber makes the point that for any of these three modes, to even describe something as a Thou is to limit it within language. And now we know what an I-Thou relationship might be like, maybe. What about the I-It relation? As one would hope, the I-It is a more concise and concrete version of the I-Thou relation. For the sake of brevity, the I-It relationship might be thought of as any experience of something. Given this, any I-Thou can become a relation of I-It, hence the complexity in describing or knowing an I-Thou relationship. By the act of definition of that undefinable I-Thou, certain features are focused upon in order to bring them into relation with the I in such a way that we can begin to describe and understand them as distinct. The most obvious distinction between the I-Thou and I-It relationship is in their immediacy; all I-It relationships are in the past, they are fixed, all I-Thou relationships are present, they are timeless. Buber had this final remark on the subject "What then, do we experience of thou -- just nothing, for we do not experience it. -- what, then, do we know of thou? -- Just everything for we know nothing isolated about it anymore." The original idea for the "Three Minute Philosophy" format which initially inspired this series should be credited to Collegebinary. All content in this video as well as the ideas and opinions expressed herein the product of this author.