Abstract

Reading and re-reading the difficult and important small book I and Thou, by Professor Martin Buber, which Mr. Ronald Gregor Smith has translated with so much care and skill, and trying to make it clearer to myself in words of my own, I find myself at odds on the threshold with the translator's Introduction. He is explaining the title and the general theme of the book:—“There is, Buber shows, a radical difference between a man's attitude to other men and his attitude to things. The attitude to other men is a relation between persons, to things it is a connexion with objects. In the personal relation one subject—I—confronts another subject—Thou; in the connexion with things the subject contemplates and experiences an object. These two attitudes represent the basic twofold situation of human life, the former constituting the ‘world of Thou,’ and the latter the ‘world of It’”.