ABSTRACT
Positioning Prior to the publication of I and Thou in 1923, Buber had produced a variety of works. These include two volumes of re-written Hasidic legends, The Tales of Rabbi Nachman in 1906, and The Legend of the Baal Shem in 1908. He also wrote his first fully original philosophical book, Daniel: Dialogues on Realization in 1913. This anticipates aspects of I and Thou insofar as it distinguishes between two modes of human existence, foreshadowing the distinction he would later make between the attitudes of “I-Thou” and “I-It.” In Daniel, Buber contrasts an “orienting” perspective-a detached, ordering attitude, linking experiences to one another according to one’s goals-with a “realizing” one, in which one submerges oneself in an experience, and so grasps its full meaning and intensity.1
