Address is the addressed speech act that speaks to the other as the Thou-pole of an encounter. It is not merely a form of language but the constitutive figure of the I-Thou relation: in address the other is not described or grasped, but spoken to.
Buber: I-Thou as primary word
In I and Thou (1923) Martin Buber posits two primary words: I-Thou and I-It. It is not the I that is primary, but the respective word-pair, which discloses respectively different modes of reality. “All actual life is encounter” (I, §6). The Thou is not experienced — as the object of a consciousness — but addressed — as a presence to which I expose myself. Whoever says Thou is, in the saying, already changed.
Address is thus no special case of speaking but its primordial form: before we speak about someone, we speak to them.
Rosenstock-Huessy: vocative before indicative
In Die Sprache des Menschengeschlechts (1963/64) Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy develops a grammatical anthropology. His thesis: the human being is first called upon before they speak. Vocative and imperative precede the indicative. The child is called by name before it can formulate descriptions. Language is primarily response to address, not primarily self-expression.
Ebner: the pneumatological Thou
Ferdinand Ebner (Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten, 1921) sharpens this: the spiritual life of the I is not from itself but from the Thou. “I-solitude” (Icheinsamkeit) — the pathological closure against the Thou — is the spiritual catastrophe; the word spoken in truthfulness opens it.
Levinas: the face as proto-address
For Emmanuel Levinas (Totality and Infinity, 1961) address is still more original than the word: the face of the other “speaks” before it says anything. It obligates ethically — “Thou shalt not kill” — before any content is thematized. The matter of saying (le Dire) is exposure to the other; the said (le Dit) is its secondary consolidation.
Constitution through recognition
Robert Spaemann (Persons, 1996, ch. 8) gathers this together: persons “exist only in the plural.” The personal reality of a human being is not derived from properties but bestowed and answered in recognition. Address is one form of such recognition. Whoever says Thou says it to a Thou that already is Thou — and that, by being-said-Thou, at the same time enters the world as a Thou.
What address is not
Whoever says Thou to a non-personal counterpart — a robot, an AI assistant, an app — does not perform address in the full sense. This is phenomenologically incontestably real and psychologically effective, but ontologically an AI quasi-address: address to a something that is treated as though it were a someone (Spaemann). The linguistic form is the same; the act is not.
Ontological classification
- is a speech act, specifically an addressed one
- constitutive for: dialogue, encounter, Communio Personarum
- the addressee is necessarily a person
- essentially different from: AI quasi-address
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- Buber, Martin (1923): I and Thou. Transl. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Scribner.
- Ebner, Ferdinand (1921): Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten. Pneumatologische Fragmente. Innsbruck: Brenner. (German)
- Rosenstock-Huessy, Eugen (1963/64): Die Sprache des Menschengeschlechts. 2 vols. Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider. (German)
- Levinas, Emmanuel (1961): Totality and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority. Transl. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
- Spaemann, Robert (1996): Persons. The Difference between ‘Someone’ and ‘Something’. Transl. Oliver O’Donovan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
- Humboldt, Wilhelm von (1827, printed 1828): Über den Dualis. Lecture at the Berlin Academy. In: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 6 (Academy edition). (German)