I and Thou
Martin Buber(1923)
Two words, placed side by side, remake the whole of philosophy. Martin Buber published this slender, incantatory treatise in 1923, arguing that human existence unfolds in two fundamental modes: the "I-It" relation, in which we treat the world as object to be used, and the "I-Thou" relation, in which we stand before another being in full presence, withholding nothing. The prose reads more like poetry than argument, each sentence hewn and weighed. Buber, a Vienna-born thinker steeped in Hasidic tradition, located the divine not in doctrine but in encounter, in the moment when one being truly faces another. Every genuine meeting, he insists, is a meeting with the eternal. The book is philosophy as prayer, addressed to anyone willing to listen.
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Kierkegaard diagnoses the self's failure to relate, which is exactly the It-world Buber wants to escape.
Weil reaches for the same direct encounter with the divine, but through affliction where Buber reaches through relation.
Marcus Aurelius practises the same attention to the present moment, though the Stoic's thou is the cosmos rather than a person.