I and Thou is at the Core of Martin Luther King's Vision

        In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” Martin Luther King put empathic thinking at the core of his argument for racial equality. He used Buber’s distinction between “I-It” and “I-Thou” to support this value:

All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an "I-It" relationship for an "I-Thou" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful.     —  Martin Luther King, “Letter from Birmingham Jail”

        It is appropriate that King referred to Buber’s pivotal distinction to support his argument, as we see when we look further at what Buber writes about the position of love. Note how for Buber, relating to the other as Thou is love:

To whoever stands in love and sees by means of it, people are seen as detached from their entanglement in busy-ness. Good people and evil, wise and foolish, beautiful and ugly—one after the other they become real to him as Thou; that is, set free, they emerge as unique beings in their over-againstness . . . and so he can be effective, helping, healing, educating, raising up, rescuing.  (I and Thou §19b)

        Vulnerability is an essential part of the nature of such love:

Love is the responsibility of an I for a Thou. In this lies the commonality — impossible in any feeling whatsoever — of all who love, from the smallest to the greatest and from the blissfully secure one, whose life is committed to a single loved one, to the one who all his life is nailed to the cross of the world and is empowered and daring enough to take on the immensity and venture to love mankind.  (I and Thou §19b)

        Elsewhere, Buber illuminates this in his comments on the Hebrew word re’ah, “neighbor,” used in the commandment to “love your neighbor” in Leviticus 19:18:

One’s re’ah is anyone to whom I stand in an immediate and reciprocal relationship, and this through any kind of situation in life, through community of place, through common nationality, through community of work, through community of effort, especially also through friendship. . . . “Love thy re’ah” means: be lovingly disposed towards men with whom you have to do at any time in the course of your life.                         -- Martin Buber, Two Types of Faith 69-70

See Turning to the Other 156-58 for my further exposition of Buber’s concept of love.

Meister Eckhart — from Hochheim to Heppenheim

        Buber once proclaimed Meister Eckhart to be the greatest of Europe’s religious geniuses, yet “but a late emissary of the Oriental master” (i.e., Jesus, “Spirit of the Orient,” 68, 1913). Eckhart was a frequent reference point for Buber and significantly influenced his thinking, thanks in large part to the influence of Gustav Landauer. Buber’s writing over the years included many references to Eckhart. See Turning to the Other, pages 107 and 235 for examples of Eckhart in Buber’s writings.

         Eckhart von Hochheim was a Dominican friar who was born in 1260 in Thuringia, now central Germany. He was a monastic leader who trained and supervised monks and nuns in Saxony, in Strasbourg, and at the University of Paris. He was a major link in a heritage of spirituality that began with Jesus and has included Pseudo-Dionysus, Heinrich Suso, The Cloud of Unknowing, Martin Luther, Saint John of the Cross, Jacob Boehme, and Matthew Fox. Eckhart was one of the first Roman Catholic clerics to preach sermons in the vernacular, thereby contributing to the development of the German language. More than half of his extant sermons were preached in Middle High German.  

Meister Eckhart  (1260-1328)

Gustav Landauer  (1870-1919)

            Buber’s friend Gustav Landauer was translating a selection of Eckhart’s works into modern German when Buber met him in 1900. Landauer published his translations under the title Meister Eckharts mystische Schriften (Meister Eckhart’s Mystical Writings) in 1903. In 1920, a year after Landauer’s murder, Buber published a re-edited version of this book as a memorial tribute to his friend. Buber’s choice of font for this publication stands out. Buber had worked as an editor for the publisher Rütten & Loening for over ten years beginning in 1904, the year he received his Ph.D. His dissertation had been on Heinrich Suso and Jacob Boehme, figures recommended to him by Landauer—both of these mystical thinkers who were heirs of Eckhart’s legacy. In Buber’s work as an editor he had modernized the publisher’s traditional style, incorporating Jugendstil motifs into Rütten & Loening’s publications. Landauer’s original 1903 book was set in a modern Roman font. Buber’s new release in 1920, when he lived in Heppenheim near Frankfurt, reverted to the older German fraktur font, perhaps as a gesture to highlight the heritage of the book as a memorial tribute to his friend. This change of style is clear in the examples below. 

Title Page -- Jugendstil format

Title Page -- German Fraktur Font