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Martin Buber (1878–1965)

Buber’s central claim is that relation is not something a subject does — it is where the subject comes into being. The distinction between I-Thou and I-It is not a distinction between two kinds of object but between two modes of existence. In I-It, I experience the world as a collection of things to be used, known, categorised. In I-Thou, I stand in relation — a meeting in which neither party is reduced to an object of the other’s experience. “All real living is meeting.” The I of I-Thou is a different I from the I of I-It: the relation constitutes the self, not the other way around. This makes Buber’s philosophy a philosophy of between (das Zwischenmenschliche) — the space of encounter that belongs to neither party alone.

Life

Born in Vienna in 1878. His parents separated when he was three, and he was raised by his grandparents in Lemberg (now Lviv), where his grandfather Solomon Buber was a distinguished scholar of Midrash. The early dislocation — the “mismeeting” with his mother, as he later called it — marked his philosophical attention to presence and absence in encounter.

He studied philosophy and art history in Vienna, Leipzig, Berlin, and Zurich. In his twenties he was active in the Zionist movement, though his Zionism was cultural and binational rather than political-statist — he advocated for a shared Jewish-Arab community in Palestine, a position that put him at odds with mainstream Zionism. His early intellectual work centred on Hasidism, the mystical-communal movement within Judaism, which he interpreted as a lived practice of I-Thou relation — presence, spontaneity, the sanctification of the everyday.

He held a professorship at the University of Frankfurt from 1924 until the Nazi rise to power in 1933, when he was progressively excluded from academic life. He directed Jewish adult education in Germany under increasingly hostile conditions until emigrating to Palestine in 1938. He became professor of social philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he remained until his retirement. He continued to advocate for Jewish-Arab dialogue, often in isolation from Israeli political consensus. He died in Jerusalem in 1965.

I-Thou and I-It

I and Thou (Ich und Du, 1923) is Buber’s central work. The human world is twofold, corresponding to two “basic words” (Grundwörter): I-Thou (Ich-Du) and I-It (Ich-Es).

I-It is the mode of experience, knowledge, and use. In I-It, the other is an object — an It — that I observe, classify, manipulate, or consume. I-It is not inherently wrong; science, practical life, and ordinary knowledge all operate in I-It. But it treats the other as bounded, knowable, available for my purposes. The I of I-It is the subject who has experiences — the experiencing, knowing, using self.

I-Thou is the mode of relation, meeting, encounter. In I-Thou, the other is not an object but a presence — a Thou — met in the fullness of their being, not reduced to any category or use. I-Thou is not an experience (experiences are I-It by nature — they have content, they can be described) but an event: it happens between us. The I of I-Thou is a different self — constituted by the relation, not prior to it. “I become through my relation to the Thou; as I become I, I say Thou.”

The Thou cannot be held. Every Thou inevitably becomes an It — the moment of meeting passes, and the other becomes an object of reflection, memory, description. This is not a failure but a structural feature: lived relation and reflective knowledge alternate. The danger is not I-It as such but a world in which I-It crowds out I-Thou entirely — in which everything, including other persons, becomes an object of use.

The eternal Thou

The I-Thou relation points beyond any particular Thou. Every genuine meeting — with a person, a work of art, a natural form — carries a trace of what Buber calls the eternal Thou: God, understood not as an object of belief or theology but as the Thou that can never become an It. “The extended lines of relations meet in the eternal Thou.” The eternal Thou is not a metaphysical entity behind the world but the address that is present in every genuine encounter — the between made absolute.

Buber’s theology is relational, not doctrinal. God is not known through propositions but met in relation. This distances him from both dogmatic theology (which turns God into an object of knowledge — an It) and mysticism (which dissolves the self into God, eliminating the between). Buber insists on the betweenness: relation requires two, and the dissolution of the self into the divine is a collapse of relation, not its fulfilment. His reading of Hasidism emphasises this: the holy is not found in withdrawal from the world but in the sanctification of everyday encounter.

The between

Buber’s social philosophy develops the I-Thou insight into a concept of the “interhuman” (das Zwischenmenschliche) — the between. The between is not a psychological state in either party but a reality that arises in genuine meeting and belongs to neither alone. Dialogue — real dialogue, not the exchange of monologues — is the mode in which the between comes alive.

This gives Buber a distinctive political and educational philosophy. Education is not the transfer of knowledge from teacher to student but an encounter in which both are present. Community is not a collective overriding individuals but the pattern of genuine relations among them — what Buber calls “community of otherness.” His binational Zionism follows: a shared land requires meeting between peoples, not the domination of one by the other.

Where Buber stops

The I-Thou relation is dyadic — it names what happens between two. Buber’s concept of community is built from dyadic encounters, but the passage from the pair to the group, and from the group to the institution, is where the framework thins. How I-Thou scales to a community of millions, to political structures and institutions, to collective life beyond the pair, is a question Buber names (community, dialogue, education) but does not systematically develop. Levinas took the encounter further into ethics — making the face of the Other the source of infinite obligation — while criticising Buber’s Thou as too symmetrical, too reciprocal, not sufficiently attentive to the asymmetry of ethical demand.

The impermanence of the Thou — every Thou becomes an It — is a structural feature Buber accepts. But it means the philosophy of meeting is also a philosophy of loss: the highest mode of existence is the one that cannot be sustained. Whether this impermanence is a profound insight about the nature of relation or a limitation of the dyadic model (perhaps sustained forms of meeting are possible through shared practices, institutions, or languages that Buber’s framework underweights) is an open question.

Key works

See also: Levinas · Heidegger · Arendt