Martin Buber

Martin Buber (1878–1965) is one of those rare philosophers whose central work is also great literature. I and Thou — slim, strange, more prose poem than philosophical argument — is nearly impossible to summarize without reducing it to something it is not. The experience of reading it is itself a demonstration of its thesis: it does not merely describe genuine encounter; in its best passages, it enacts it. Buber lived at the intersection of philosophy, theology, Hasidic mysticism, and political thought, and his work resists the disciplinary boundaries that would contain it.

Core Ideas

Buber was born in Vienna, raised largely in Lemberg (now Lviv) by his grandfather Solomon Buber — a distinguished Midrash scholar — after his parents’ marriage dissolved when he was three. His early encounter with the Hasidic tradition through his grandfather was formative: Hasidism’s emphasis on the divine presence in everyday life, its insistence that the encounter with God happens in the midst of concrete human relationship rather than in mystical withdrawal, became the experiential seed of Buber’s mature philosophy.

His early intellectual development was shaped by neo-Kantian idealism, Nietzsche (he gave lectures on Nietzsche as a young man), and the mystical tradition. His Ecstatic Confessions (1909) anthologized mystical experience from across traditions. But Buber would later repudiate his early mysticism — not the content, but the framing. The early mysticism emphasized union with a transcendent One, a dissolution of the individual in the divine. The mature Buber came to believe this was wrong: the divine is not found in withdrawal from relation but precisely in genuine relation. The I-Thou relation is the locus of the encounter with the eternal Thou.

I and Thou (1923) is the distillation of this mature vision. Its philosophical move is to show that the distinction between I-Thou and I-It is not primarily about what we relate to but about how we relate. Even a stone can be met in an I-Thou relation; even a person can be reduced to an I-It. What distinguishes I-Thou is not the nature of the other but the quality of presence — the willingness to let the other address me, to allow myself to be affected, to encounter the other in their full particularity rather than in terms of my categories and needs. This requires a fundamental change of orientation: from the stance of the subject who perceives and uses objects to the stance of the one who is willing to be genuinely met.

The concept of the “between” (das Zwischen) is one of Buber’s most original contributions. The between is not located in either party to a genuine encounter — it is the space that arises between them when dialogue becomes real. Buber resisted both subjective idealism (the idea that the meeting is located in the subject’s mind) and naive realism (the idea that it is located in objective external reality). The between is a third thing: the event of genuine meeting, which belongs to neither party alone. This anticipates the intersubjective field theorized by later relational psychoanalysts, and the “field” that Circling practitioners describe.

Buber also wrote extensively on education, arguing that the teacher-student relationship at its best is itself an I-Thou relation — not the transmission of information from subject to object, but the meeting of two persons in the presence of the subject matter, which itself becomes alive in that meeting. His concept of “inclusion” — the teacher’s capacity to experience the student’s side of the encounter without abandoning their own — is a sophisticated description of what we might now call empathy or intersubjective attunement. And his political thought — particularly his work on Zionism and his advocacy for a binational Arab-Jewish state in Palestine — was consistently shaped by his relational philosophy: genuine political community requires genuine encounter, not just shared interest.

In his final decades, Buber engaged in sustained philosophical dialogue with Levinas — who acknowledged Buber’s decisive influence on his own thought, even as he developed it in directions Buber resisted. The question of the asymmetry of ethical responsibility — whether the I-Thou relation is symmetrical, as Buber believed, or whether I am always more responsible for the other than they are for me, as Levinas argued — is one of the most important unresolved debates in the philosophy of relation.

Key Works

• I and Thou (1923, trans. Walter Kaufmann 1970) — The central text. Kaufmann’s translation is preferred; his translator’s preface is itself essential reading.
• Between Man and Man (1947) — Essays expanding the philosophy of dialogue; more accessible and more practically oriented than I and Thou.
• Tales of the Hasidim (1947) — Buber’s retelling of Hasidic stories; the experiential ground for the philosophy.
• The Knowledge of Man (1965) — Late essays, including “Elements of the Interhuman” — a clear and direct statement of the philosophy of dialogue.
• Paul Mendes-Flohr, Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent (2019) — The definitive biography.

Connections

• I-Thou — The concept for which Buber is known; the philosophical heart of his work.
• Relational Ground — Buber’s “in the beginning is relation” is the clearest statement of relational ontology in the modern philosophical tradition.
• Intersubjectivity — Buber’s between anticipates the intersubjective theories of Benjamin, Ogden, and relational psychoanalysis.
• Phenomenology — Buber’s philosophy is adjacent to but distinct from phenomenology; he came to similar conclusions through different routes.
• Donald Winnicott — Winnicott’s holding environment creates the developmental conditions for the I-Thou encounter Buber describes.

Quotes

“In the beginning is relation.” — I and Thou

“All real living is meeting.” — I and Thou

“The I of the primary word I-Thou is a different I from that of the primary word I-It.” — I and Thou

“Every particular Thou is a glimpse through to the eternal Thou.” — I and Thou