Buber

Martin Buber

Martin Buber's whole philosophy turns on a point of grammar that is really a point of metaphysics: there is, he says, no bare "I" at all. There is only the I of two different word-pairs, I-It and I-Thou, and the I in each is a different I. When I say "It," I hold the world at arm's length as a thing to be examined, used, and added to my store of experience. When I say "Thou," or You, I step out of that distance into relation and meet the other as a whole presence. We live, Buber says, by swinging between these two basic words, and nearly everything that gives a human life its meaning happens in the rarer and harder of the two.

I-It. The first basic word governs the world of experience and use. In the I-It relation, whatever stands before me, a tree, a stranger, an idea, is an object: a thing among things, a bundle of properties to be catalogued, a means to my ends, something I observe, analyze, and employ. Buber does not despise this; we could not live for an hour without It, and all of science, technology, and ordinary practical dealing depend on it. But It is not the whole of the world, and a person who lived entirely in I-It, however successful, would be living among objects and never quite meeting anything, the most efficient and the most alone of beings.

I-Thou. The second basic word opens the world of relation. In the I-Thou meeting I do not experience the other or use it; I stand in relation to it, addressing it and addressed by it as a whole being rather than a sum of traits. The relation is direct, unmediated by concepts or purposes; it is mutual, for the Thou acts upon me as I act upon it; and it is present, happening now and not stored away as information. "All real living," Buber writes in the line that condenses the book, "is meeting." Such a meeting can come with another person, with a tree met as a presence rather than a specimen, even with a work of art, and it cannot be willed into being or held; it arrives as grace and passes, and we cannot live in it continuously, but without it we have not lived.

The between. Buber's decisive move is to locate reality neither in the self, as idealism does, nor in the object, as materialism does, but in what he calls the between, das Zwischen. The meaning of a genuine encounter is not inside me and not inside you; it lives in the space of the relation itself, in what happens between us. Relation, for Buber, is primary, and the persons are not two ready-made atoms that happen to collide but selves that come fully to be only in the meeting. This is the ground of what he called the philosophy of dialogue.

Dialogue. Out of this comes a precise ethics of speech. Buber distinguishes genuine dialogue, in which each turns to the others as they really are and means them, from its two counterfeits: technical dialogue, which is the mere trading of information, and the monologue disguised as dialogue, in which people seem to speak together but each is really only listening to himself or using the other for his own ends. The whole worth of a conversation, and of a relationship, lies in whether one confirms the other in their being or reduces them to a function. To make the other present, and to be made present by them, is the dialogical life.

The eternal Thou. Buber's theology grows directly from his philosophy of relation. Every particular I-Thou meeting, he holds, is a glimpse of and an address to the eternal Thou, which is God, the one Thou that by its very nature can never become an It, never be used or possessed or reduced to a concept. We do not reach God by turning away from the world into mystical absorption; we meet the eternal Thou through and along the lines of our genuine relations with the beings of the world, which all converge in it. The same conviction runs through his lifelong work on Hasidism, whose tales he retold to recover their central insight, the hallowing of the everyday, the meeting of God not in a separate holy realm but in the ordinary act performed with full presence.

What this room reads. Buber wrote Ich und Du in 1923, and its German original is not yet in the public domain, while the standard English translations, Ronald Gregor Smith's of 1937 and Walter Kaufmann's of 1970, are under copyright. This room therefore carries no primary-text corpus: the chat answers from training knowledge, says so plainly, and cites I and Thou and his other works (the essays gathered as Between Man and Man, theTales of the Hasidim) by title rather than by a retrieved passage. The arrangement follows the site's disclosed-thin practice for twentieth-century figures whose translations remain in copyright.

Few short books have traveled as far as I and Thou, which reshaped not only philosophy but theology, psychotherapy, and education, wherever people have tried to think clearly about what it means really to meet another. Read now, Buber is the philosopher of relation, who taught that a person is not a self-enclosed atom but a being that comes to itself only in encounter, and that the divine is found not above the world but in the face of the You who stands before us. He took the existential seriousness of the single individual from Soren Kierkegaard and the relational protest against abstract idealism from Ludwig Feuerbach, who had first set the words I and Thou against the solitary march of Hegel's Spirit; and he handed to Emmanuel Levinas the conviction that ethics begins in the meeting with the other, though Levinas would make that relation less a mutual exchange than an infinite, one-sided responsibility. Against Martin Heidegger's account of a self thrown among things, Buber holds out the between. It is still where he points: not inward to the self, not outward to the object, but into the meeting.