Humanizing the It: Martin Buber on Technology and the Ethics of Things

Abstract

Martin Buber’s writings on technology are scarce and seemingly subordinated to what he described in I and Thou as the “tyranny of the It”. But a closer look at his writings reveals, in fact, a life-long reflection on the dialogical potentiality of things—whether artworks, buildings, or machines—that echoed broader discourses on technology at the time. Beginning with Julius Goldstein’s Die Technik (1912), which Buber edited for his series Die Gesellschaft, and concluding with Buber’s reception and critique of Heidegger, especially during the 1950s, we can see that Buber critically engaged with the question of technology with respect to labor and community, art and artisanship, and the ethics of thinghood. The essay contextualizes Buber’s repeated call to “humanize technology” in early 20th-century debates on technology and in the post-1945 crisis of humanism. What it argues is that Buber framed technology not only through its aesthetic potential, as Werk, but also as another form of solidarity and care without which community and respect for our environment would not be possible.