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.
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.
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