PERSON
Martin Buber
The Austrian-born Jewish philosopher who divided all of human experience into two orientations—I-Thou and I-It—and whose account of genuine encounter as the ground of meaning became, against all expectation, the most precise philosophical instrument available for diagnosing what happens when human beings begin treating AI systems as though they were persons.
Martin Buber drew a line through the whole of human experience with a single distinction. There are two primary words, he wrote in the opening pages of
I and Thou in 1923, and neither is a single word but a word-pair: I-Thou and I-It. The I that speaks I-Thou is a different I from the one that speaks I-It, because the primary word shapes not only the relation but the relator. Born in Vienna in 1878, raised between Western European intellectual culture and Eastern European
Hasidic mysticism, educated across Vienna, Leipzig, Berlin, and Zurich, Buber emigrated to Palestine in 1938 where he joined the Hebrew University and remained until his death in 1965. The I-Thou distinction was always, for him, a description of lived reality distilled from philosophical reflection, Hasidic study, and practical engagement with some of the most intractable problems of human coexistence.