You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The Bases of values in Martin Buber's thought are his philosophy of dialogue and his philosophical anthropology, or the study of the problem of man. On this twofold foundation he establishes such basic value categories as the distinction between “I-Thou” and “I-It” relationships and that between “dialogue” and “monologue,” the responsibility of the whole person to meet and respond to what addresses him in the “lived concrete,” the primacy of the dialogical over the psychological, confirmation and “imagining the real,” genuine speech and the “essential We,” the distinction between “existential guilt” and neurotic guilt-feelings. These categories can help illuminate the value problems that arise in group psychotherapy and that are central to the goal and direction of such therapy.
“I-Thou” AND “I-It”
Martin Buber's philosophy of dialogue is best known through its classic presentation in his little book I and Thou, the second edition of which, including an important new postscript by Buber, was published by Scribner's in 1958. In this book Buber makes his now famous distinction between the two relationships or basic attitudes that constitute human existence: the “I-Thou” and the “I-It.” What distinguishes these relationships is not the object of the relation, but the nature of the relationship itself and the difference between the “I” that enters into the one relationship and the “I” that enters into the other. The “I-Thou” relation is direct, mutual, present. In it the other person is related to in his uniqueness and for himself, and not in terms of his relations to other things. In an “I-Thou” relation my partner reveals himself to me directly, as just the person he is. I do not seek for his meaning by enregistering him in one or another general category. In the “I-It” relationship, on the other hand, the other is my object and not my partner. I observe him and use him; I establish his relation to this or that general category. I know him with the same detachment that