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The broader creation as existing within the 'I-you'
The following is a quote from a post-script to the work 'I-Thou' where Buber posits how non-humans could be considered as incorporated within 'I-you' knowing.
- If - as the book says we can stand in the I-you relationship not
merely with other men, but also beings and things which come to meet us
in nature, what is it that makes the real difference between the two relationships?
Or, more closely, if the I-you relationship requires a mutual action which
in fact embraces both the I and the you, how may the relation to something
in nature be understood as such a relationship?
More precisely still, if we are to assume that we are granted a kind of mutuality by beings and things in nature as well, which we meet as our 'you', what then is the character of this reciprocity and what justification have we for using this fundamental concept in order to describe it?
Clearly there is no unified answer to this question. Instead of grasping nature as a whole, in our customary fashion, we must here consider its different fields separately.
Man once tamed animals, and he is still capable of this singular achievement. He draws animals into his atmosphere and moves them to accept him, the stranger in an elemental way, and to respond to him. He wins from them an often astronishing active response to his approach, to his addressing them, and moreover a response which in general is stronger and directer in proportion as his attitude is a genuine saying of 'you'. Animals, like children, are not seldom able to see through any hypocritical tenderness.
But even outside the sphere of taming a similar contact between men and animals sometimes take place - with men who have in the depths of their being a potential partnershipwith animals, not predominantly persons of 'animal' nature, but rather those whose very nature is spiritual.
An animal is not, like man, twofold: the twofold nature of the primary words I-Thou and I-it is strange to it, even though it can turn to another being as well as consider objects. Nevertheless we should like to say that there is here a latent twofoldness. That is why we may call this sphere, in respect of our saying of 'you' out towards the creature, the threshold of mutuality.
It is quite different with those spheres of nature where the spontanaity we share with the animals is lacking. It is part of our concept of a plant that it cannot react towards our reaction towards it: it cannot 'respond.' Yet this does not mean that here we are given simply no reciprocity at all. The deed or attitude of an individual being is certainly not to be found here, but there is a reciprocity which is nothing but being in its course (seind).
That living wholeness and unity of the tree, which denies itself to the sharpest glance of the mere investigator and discloses itself to the glance of one who says 'you', is there when he, the sayer of 'you', is there: it is he who vouchsafes to the tree that it manifest this unity and wholeness; and now the tree which is in being manifests them. Our habits of thought make it difficult for us to see that here, awakened by our attitude, something lights up and approaches us from our course of being. In the sphere we are talking of we have to do justice, in complete candour, to the reality which discloses itself to us.
I should like to describe this large sphere, stretching from stones to stars, as that of the pre-threshold or preliminal, i.e. the stage before the threshold.
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