I and Thou (SparkNotes Philosophy Guide)
By SparkNotes
()
About this ebook
Making the reading experience fun!
SparkNotes Philosophy Guides are one-stop guides to the great works of philosophy–masterpieces that stand at the foundations of Western thought. Inside each Philosophy Guide you’ll find insightful overviews of great philosophical works of the Western world.
Read more from Spark Notes
Bird by Bird (SparkNotes Literature Guide) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5King Lear: No Fear Shakespeare Deluxe Student Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5As You Like It (No Fear Shakespeare) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Measure for Measure (No Fear Shakespeare) Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Much Ado About Nothing (No Fear Shakespeare) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Tempest (No Fear Shakespeare) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Macbeth: No Fear Shakespeare Deluxe Student Edition Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Richard III (No Fear Shakespeare) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5No Fear Shakespeare Audiobook: Romeo & Juliet Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Winter's Tale (No Fear Shakespeare) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Outsiders (SparkNotes Literature Guide) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRomeo and Juliet: No Fear Shakespeare Deluxe Student Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5No Fear Shakespeare Audiobook: Julius Caesar Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Two Gentlemen of Verona (No Fear Shakespeare) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAtlas Shrugged SparkNotes Literature Guide Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMerchant of Venice: No Fear Shakespeare Deluxe Student Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tempest: No Fear Shakespeare Deluxe Student Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Othello (No Fear Shakespeare) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5100 Years of Solitude (SparkNotes Literature Guide) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Raisin in the Sun (SparkNotes Literature Guide) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDune (SparkNotes Literature Guide) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMerchant of Venice (No Fear Shakespeare) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Henry V (No Fear Shakespeare) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Comedy of Errors (No Fear Shakespeare) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/51984 SparkNotes Literature Guide Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Henry IV Parts One and Two (No Fear Shakespeare) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5King Lear (No Fear Shakespeare) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Julius Caesar: No Fear Shakespeare Deluxe Student Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Richard II (No Fear Shakespeare) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related to I and Thou (SparkNotes Philosophy Guide)
Related ebooks
Thunder in the Soul: To Be Known By God Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Wisdom of Heschel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Abraham Joshua Heschel--Philosopher of Wonder: Our Thirty-Year Friendship and Dialogue Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLove Poems from God Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAmerican Prophets: Seven Religious Radicals and Their Struggle for Social and Political Justice Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Necessary Death: What Horror Movies Teach Us About Navigating the Human Experience Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsI and Thou Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5SoulShaping (Second Edition): From Soul Neglect to Spiritual Vitality Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGod in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Faithful Presence: The Promise and the Peril of Faith in the Public Square Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Myth of Colorblind Christians: Evangelicals and White Supremacy in the Civil Rights Era Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWonder Where All the Wonder Went?: Clues to Finding Wonder in this World Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsYour Longing Has a Name: Come Alive to the Story You Were Made For Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTurning to the Other: Martin Buber’s Call to Dialogue in I and Thou Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsInterrupting Silence: God's Command to Speak Out Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Story We Find Ourselves In: Further Adventures of a New Kind of Christian Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Sea Accepts All Rivers & Other Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAmerican Prophets: The Religious Roots of Progressive Politics and the Ongoing Fight for the Soul of the Country Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Nature and Destiny of Man Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Inconvenient Gospel: A Southern Prophet Tackles War, Wealth, Race, and Religion Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Pacifist Way of Knowing: John Howard Yoder's Nonviolent Epistemology Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMoral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Last Word and the Word after That: A Tale of Faith, Doubt, and a New Kind of Christianity Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5My God and I: A Spiritual Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Rise: An Authentic Lenten Devotional Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The (Un)Common Good: How the Gospel Brings Hope to a World Divided Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5When All Else Fails: Rethinking Our Pastoral Vocation in Times of Stuck Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Book Notes For You
Gavin de Becker’s The Gift of Fear Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence | Summary Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V. E. Schwab: Conversation Starters Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Midnight Library: A Novel by Matt Haig: Conversation Starters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Summary of The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Summary: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O'Neill: Conversation Starters Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5The Compound Effect: Jumpstart Your Income, Your Life, Your Success by Darren Hardy: Conversation Starters Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The 5 AM Club Summary: Business Book Summaries Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson: Conversation Starters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Summary of 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan B. Peterson Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Summary of Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love by John Gottman: Conversation Starters Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Summary of The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSummary of Ichiro Kishimi's and Fumitake Koga's book: The Courage to Be Disliked: Summary Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor: Conversation Starters Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi: Summary by Fireside Reads Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides: Conversation Starters Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez: Conversation Starters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Workbook for Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Summary of Poverty, by America By Matthew Desmond Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker: Conversation Starters Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related categories
Reviews for I and Thou (SparkNotes Philosophy Guide)
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
I and Thou (SparkNotes Philosophy Guide) - SparkNotes
I and Thou
Martin Buber
© 2003, 2007 by Spark Publishing
This Spark Publishing edition 2014 by SparkNotes LLC, an Affiliate of Barnes & Noble
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.
Sparknotes is a registered trademark of SparkNotes LLC
Spark Publishing
A Division of Barnes & Noble
120 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10011
www.sparknotes.com /
ISBN-13: 978-1-4114-7322-5
Please submit changes or report errors to www.sparknotes.com/.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Context
Summary
Important Terms
Philosophical Themes, Arguments, Ideas
Book I, aphorisms 1-8
Part I, aphorisms 9-19
Part I, aphorisms 19-22
Part I, aphorisms 23-29
Part II, aphorisms 1-6
Part II, aphorisms 6-8
Part II, aphorisms 9-13
Part III, aphorisms 1-4
Part III, aphorisms 5-14
Part III, aphorisms 15-17
Important Quotations
Key Facts
Study Questions
Review & Resources
Context
Background Information
Martin Buber was one of the great religious thinkers of the 20th century. He was born in Vienna, Austria in 1878, but sent at the age of three to live with his grandfather in Lvov, Galicia, because of his parents' failing marriage. Buber ended up spending his entire childhood in Lvov, and was greatly influenced by the towering figure of his caregiver, Solomon Buber. Solomon Buber was a successful banker, a scholar of Jewish law, and one of the last great thinkers of the Jewish Enlightenment or Haskalah. He was also a deeply religious man who prayed three times daily, shaking with fervor. Solomon Buber exposed his grandson to two of the three obsessions that would guide the younger Buber's thought: the mystical Jewish movement of Hasidism which tries to imbue the ordinary routines of daily life with a divine joy rooted in communal living, and the more intellectual movement of the Haskalah which tries to link the humanist values of the secular Enlightenment to the tenets of Jewish belief.
From 1896 until 1900, Buber studied philosophy and art history at the University of Vienna. There he discovered the intellectualism of philosophers such as Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, as well as the Christian mysticism of Jakob Bohme, Meister Eckehart, and Nicholas of Cusa. It was probably while eagerly reading these works, and relating them to the spiritual childhood he had known in Lvov, that Buber began to formulate the questions that would lead him on his lifelong search for religious meaning: he began to ponder the sense of alienation (from fellow man, from the world, even from oneself) which overcomes every human being from time to time. He wondered whether this temporary alienation is an essential aspect of the human condition and whether it might indicate a deep-seated yearning for something necessary to human life, that is, for a true unity with the world and with God.
As an adolescent, Buber began his search for religious meaning by separating himself from the Jewish community. He ceased to observe the myriad strict Jewish laws and immersed himself in his own questions. He described himself as living in a world of confusion.
In 1897, early in his university career, Buber returned to the Jewish community, drawn by what would become the third fundamental influence in his life: modern political Zionism. Zionism sought to redefine Judaism as a nationality rather than simply a religion, with Hebrew as the Jewish language and Israel as the Jewish homeland. Buber quickly became active in the movement, particularly in its cultural and religious aspects. In 1901 he was appointed editor of the Zionist periodical Die Welt
, and in 1902, after leaving Die Welt
, he founded the publishing house of Judische Verlag.
By late 1902 Buber began to break away from Zionism and to rediscover Hasidism. He searched out the early literature of the Hasidic movement, and he became convinced that in its earliest incarnation, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, it embodied the ideal religious stance: a relationship between god and man that is based in dialogue. He examined other religions as well, studying their history and thought, and developed his conception of this divine relationship in greater detail. In 1923 he published the result of two decades of thought in his greatest work, I and Thou.
In 1924, having finished and published I and Thou, Buber began to study the Hebrew Bible, and claimed to find in it the prototype of his ideal dialogical community. While continuing to collect Hasidic legends and to develop his theories of religion, he also began to translate the Hebrew Bible into German. In 1930 he was appointed professor of Jewish religion and ethics at the University of Frankfurt at Mainz. In 1933, when Hitler rose to power, Buber was forced to leave his university post and began to teach in the Jewish ghettos. He spent this period strengthening the religious and spiritual resources of German Jewry in the face of the overwhelming dangers they faced, primarily through adult education.
In 1938 Buber fled Germany for Palestine where he became professor of the sociology of religion at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. As he had been in Germany, Buber quickly became an active community leader in Palestine. He directed the Yihud movement, together with Y.L. Magnes, which sought to bridge Arab-Jewish understanding and to create a binational state. He also served as the first president of the Isreali Academy of Science and Humanities. In his later years, Buber began to apply his unique conception of man's relationship to the world to diverse fields. He developed a theory of psychotherapy based on the dialogical relationship and a theory of social philosophy intended as an alternative to Marxism.
Historical Context
Though Buber's philosophy has influenced thinkers in all religious traditions, he was first and foremost a Jewish thinker, and his intellectual development is best viewed in that historical context. Buber lived through a time of radical transition in the Jewish community: he saw the secular enlightenment seducing Jews away from