From Gadamer’s essay, “Hermeneutics And Historicism”:

Let us then consider Strauss’ defense of classical philosophy from a hermeneutic point of view. We will consider one example. Strauss shows very well that the I-Thou-We relation, as it is called in modern thinking, is known in classical political philosophy by a quite different name: friendship. He sees correctly that the modern way of talking about the “problem of the Thou” is based on the fundamental primacy of the Cartesian ego cogito. Strauss now thinks he sees why the ancient concept of friendship is correct and the modern formulation false. It is quite legitimate for someone who is attempting to discover the nature of the state and society to consider the role of friendship. But he cannot talk with the same legitimacy about the “Thou.” The Thou is not something about which one speaks but that to which one speaks. By taking the function of the Thou as a basis, instead of the role of friendship, one is missing the objective communicative nature of the state and society.

What is completely absent in the business environment, and what causes it to suffer akrasia (moral incontinence) and what prevents us from holding collectivities to the same standards as we hold individual persons (despite the fact that corporations are extended legal personhood!) — is that we do not grasp the fundamental difference between an I-It relationship (also known as the “ontic”) and an I-Thou relationship.