Buber writes that it is possible for nature to also become a Thou for us, even though they lack the consciousness, continuity, and independence that make us human. The consequence of this is that non-human entities are given a true “otherness.” The Thou is the only way in which these beings are capable of having such an otherness, and elevates them above the level of passive objects of our thought or tools for us to use.
For Buber, then, we are bound to the world but are not one with it. Our intellect keeps us separate from the world, while our intuition allows us to peer into its depths. All things within the world of the senses arise out of meetings and the other that is a part of that meeting with each of us. These are meetings of being and being between an individual and an “other” that we are unable to know as it is in itself, a notion reminiscent of Kant. It is from these instances of interaction that our senses create what we witness as another being in nature.
The ethical is only to be found in those instances in which humans are confronted with their own potentiality and makes a decision based solely on a determination of what is intrinsically right and wrong in their own specific situation. Buber calls these decisions an individual’s “personal direction,” something which hinges on what one is meant to be. The ethical decision is supposed to be made with this thought in mind, making it a completely personal decision. This is a freedom of response and responsibility, not an ethics couched in a concrete morality; norms should not become maxims.
Buber avoids charges of moral relativism by explaining that the command to follow these norms is always latent within us, but is called forth in some way by a concrete situation that we never could have anticipated. Therefore, the norms take on different meanings in the various contexts in which they are needed. The ethical action is an action that moves between the I and the Thou and that binds them together. The good of the ethical then is not a concrete thing but grows from the concrete nature of situations encountered everyday, from which decisions are made based on our “personal direction.”
Buber’s “eternal Thou” is God, but not in a traditional way. He rejected any and all proofs of God’s existence, and says he knows nothing of God nor of any metaphysics of faith. Buber is instead interesting in the path to God, as we can never actually know God or his attributes. The only way we can know God is through our relation to him. He says, “God…[can] only be addressed and not expressed.” God is then found in any place in which we also find the Thou, such as nature, other human beings, and art; when we see the Thou in them, we also see the eternal Thou.
Buber’s God is not metaphysical God, nor is it a person, and can never be an object of our thought. To be faithful is to be in a binding relationship with this Being that is the eternal Thou, which Buber describes as having found “the certainty that the meaning of existence is open and accessible in the actual lived concrete.” The eternal Thou is constantly and in every moment met in the present, and manifests itself through the concrete. It is this participation that is human truth.
Source: A Companion to Continental Philosophy. Ed. Simon Critchley and William R. Schroeder. Blackwell Publishing, 1999.
