Martin Buber's central idea was simple and radical: we either use the world or we truly meet it. We say
It, or we say
You - and everything human turns on the difference.
Saying You is a short introduction to his thought, in plain language, for readers who have been told Buber matters but who have found him hard to understand.
Everyone reads
I and Thou. It is the least clear thing he wrote. Buber spent the next forty years saying the same things in ordinary prose, in essays and lectures almost nobody reads, and it is that work this book concentrates on - set out in order, with the arguments attached, in about a hundred pages.
By the end you will know:
- What he actually claims about people: that you are not a self who then goes on to have relationships, but a self made by them.
- Why meeting cannot be manufactured, and what has to be true before it can happen at all.
- What he means by God, and why the account can work for both secular and religious people.
- Why he thought the state was often the enemy of community, and what he suggested instead.
- What the serious objections to him are, and how well he answers them.
No prior reading assumed. Chronology and bibliography included.
