I and Thou

T. & T. Clark, Edinburgh, 1937 First edition in English of the author's masterpiece. Octavo, original wrappers as issued. xiii, 120 printed pages. No ownership marks nor inscriptions. Pages evenly toned; some offsetting on facing, preliminary blank leaves and rear free endpaper. 14 x 21 cm. Original tan paper covers (not price clipped), with black lettering on the spine and upper cover. Spine creased and torn at the foot of the spine (revealing original sewn and glued gatherings). Some light handling marks and very slight fading. No repairs. First editions are rare. Martin Buber's I and Thou [Ich und Du] was to have served as a prolegomenon to his five-volume project, (a project Buber abandoned) & has long been acclaimed as a classic. Many prominent writers have acknowledged it as a landmark influence on their work. Buber tried to make religious belief and practice perspicacious in light of a general philosophical anthropology. ("The close association of the relation to God with the relation to one's fellow-men is my most essential concern," Buber explains in the Afterword). I and Thou is considered to have inaugurated a Copernican revolution in theology () against the scientific-realistic attitude (Bloch [1983], p. 42), but it has also been criticized for its reduction of fundamental human relations to just two the I-Thou and the I-It. "One should beware altogether of understanding the conversation with God as something that occurs merely apart from or above the everyday," Buber explains. "God's address to man penetrates the events in all our lives and all the events in the world around us, everything biographical and everything historical, and turns it into instruction, into demands for you and me." Throughout I and Thou, Buber argues for an ethic that does not use other people (or books, or trees, or God), and does not consider them objects of one's own personal experience. Instead, Buber writes, we must learn to consider everything around us as "You" speaking to "me," and requiring a response. On a more biographical note, the philosopher of the I and Thou allowed very few people to call him by his first name; the theorist of education suffered no disturbance of his rigorous schedule by children playing in his own home; the utopian politician alienated most representatives of the Zionist establishment; and the innovative academic lecturer barely found a permanent position in the university he had helped to create the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. WorldCat locates just one single copy worldwide, in the British Library.. 1st Edition. Soft cover. Good.