ABSTRACT
Criticism Martin Buber’s I and Thou received criticism from a wide variety of perspectives in the years after publication.1 The most fundamental criticisms have concerned whether Buber’s division of existence into just two modes, I-It and I-Thou, does justice to the complexity of human engagement with the world. Walter Kaufmann claimed, for example, that human reality is not “twofold,” as Buber suggests but “manifold,” and that Buber’s account was therefore reductive and simplified.2 Emil Fackenheim* argued a similar point, suggesting that there should be a third mode between these two attitudes.3
