Existentialism is a style of philosophy that attempts to keep thought in relationship with reality by resisting the natural human tendency to confuse essence (whatness) for existence (thatness), and reduce existence to essence.

We strive, against human nature, to maintain our personal faith that “existence precedes essence.”

Perhaps for some existentialists, the maxim “existence precedes essence” is a statement of fact. For me, however, it is a profession of faith — an intention — an aspiration — a prayer.

What set me on this course this morning was a sentence from Kaufmann’s translation of I and Thou. I will make minor edits to make it more digestible to contemporary readers:

The doctrine of immersion demands and promises penetration into the thinking One, “that by which this world is thought,” the pure subject. But in lived actuality no one thinks without something being thought; rather, that which thinks is as dependent on that which is thought as vice versa. A subject that annuls the object to rise above it annuls its own actuality. A thinking subject by itself exists — in thought, as the product and object of thought, as a limit-concept that lacks all imaginable content; also in the anticipatory determination of death for which one may also substitute its metaphor, that deep sleep which is virtually no less impenetrable; and finally in the assertions of a doctrine concerning a state of immersion that resembles such deep sleep and is essentially without consciousness and without memory. These are the supreme excesses of It-language. One has to respect its sublime power to ignore while at the same time recognizing it as something that can at most be an object of living experience but that cannot be lived.

Philosophical content is conceptual, and therefore, necessarily I-It. But philosophical practice may or may not do its work within a context of I-Thou, and it may or may not take its content as given within an I-Thou metaphysic. In other words, it might proceed from I-Thou, toward I-Thou, or it might confine the entire endeavor to a generic, solitary I constructing and It-system to account for an It reality.

When Buber says “that which thinks is as dependent on that which is thought as vice versa,” I read him as acknowledging the necessity of I-It for I-Thou, while denying its sufficiency.

“Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.” — Saint-Exupery