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Reading is about how one opens the book.

—Alexander Gelley

Martin Buber stands out as a spiritual thinker whose work has had a profound impact on twentieth-century thought. This impact came primarily through his breakthrough book, Ich und Du. This book, first published in December 1922, shortly before his forty-fifth birthday, became a seminal work, articulating an emerging philosophy of dialogue that helped shape an era of philosophical, theological, and religious thought.

The book became a kind of manifesto of what came to be known as Buber’s philosophy of dialogue. It also became the foundation for a whole discourse of dialogue in communication theory, psychotherapy, and international diplomacy. It was quickly recognized as Buber’s masterpiece; he considered it to be his most important work: “I and Thou stands at the beginning . . . everything else is only illustration and completion.”1

It is one of a handful of works that stand out as modern classics because of the lasting value of its breakthrough insight. In 1937, fifteen years after its first publication, Ich und Du entered the English-speaking world as I and Thou. People continue to refer to it today to ground their understanding of its key distinction between I-Thou and I-It.

1. Decline: The Reception of I and Thou has Reduced Buber’s Message to an It

Yet in the years since its first publication, a whole industry of commentary and appropriation has arisen in response to it. Its interpreters have worked assiduously to domesticate the book. In the process they have reduced it to being just another fragment in the mosaic of the existing culture; that is, they have reduced its contents to an “It.” Buber’s distinction between I-Thou and I-It and the book itself quickly became central icons of “the philosophy of dialogue.” As a result, Buber’s concerns that led to the book became flattened into a formula—“I-Thou” vs. “I-It”—and the philosophy of dialogue became packaged and commodified as an item in the twentieth-century marketplace of ideas. “I-Thou” became shorthand for practices of attentive, empathetic listening in conversation, the preferred alternative to treating one’s interlocutor as merely another “It,” a functional means to one’s self-initiated ends.

Therefore, although Buber’s thinking in I and Thou arose from a profound elementary experience, the language of this work quickly became reduced to a common currency so that “people began to talk of ‘the I-Thou relationship’ and ‘the I-Thou’” as glibly as they might “talk of ‘original sin’ or ‘the natural man,’” thus reducing Buber’s thinking to “a few simple vivid concepts.”2 Buber himself wrote of the special period of the book’s gestation and of the loss that would come about if he tampered with it once that period had passed.3 At the heart of I and Thou Buber characterized this very kind of decline of entities in the realm of the human spirit, whether in the arts or in the human relation to the divine: “This is the exalted melancholy of our lot, that every Thou in our world must become an It.”4

When commentators read I and Thou as the expression of Buber’s mature thought, often they use it to divide his work into an early mystical phase completely divorced from a mature phase which they characterize as that of the true Buber, the exponent of dialogical philosophy. Prime among these interpreters is Paul Mendes-Flohr, the historian of modern German-Jewish intellectual culture. Mendes-Flohr divides Buber’s thought into two intellectual phases, in which an about-face to the “dialogical” Buber is opposed to the immature stance of the “mystical” Buber.5 Maurice Friedman, Buber’s primary biographer, tends to concur with Mendes-Flohr. Yet his division of Buber’s thinking into three parts—into mystical, existential, and dialogical phases—suggests a more fluid sense of Buber’s intellectual development.

Buber himself interprets the development of his thinking by dividing it into his immature work before I and Thou and his mature work that emerged beginning with I and Thou. For Buber, the inescapable reality of World War I and its aftermath served as the catalyst of his mature thinking.6 In a key piece of writing interpreting the development of his thinking titled “A Conversion,” and dating to events in 1914, Buber emphasizes the discontinuity for which those events serve as a hinge.7 Given Buber’s use of the metaphor of conversion, it should be noted that conversion as transformation does not mean a complete upending of one’s self-substance and conceptual tools. Rather, it marks a shift of orientation from one set of reference points to another, a shift that casts the contents of one’s thinking and experiencing in a new light.

Buber takes up the discontinuity of his thinking again in his 1957 foreword to a collection of his essays.8 We will consider this passage in detail in chapter 6 below, where we consider “The Teaching of the Tao” (1910), an essay presenting a number of Buber’s core global spiritual insights, yet made controversial by his later comments in this foreword.9

Even though the younger Buber’s emphasis on ecstasy gave way to the mature Buber’s vision of life as the dialogical task of “hallowing the everyday,” the latter still carries forward a mystical dimension. Buber apparently describes this mysticism of his maturity when he characterizes the spirituality of the Baal-Shem-Tov in his 1928 introduction to the great zaddik’s testament. It is

a realistic and active mysticism, a mysticism for which the world is not an illusion from which man must turn away in order to reach true being, but the reality between God and him in which reciprocity manifests itself . . . . [This mysticism] preserves the immediacy of the relation, guards the concreteness of the absolute and demands the involvement of the whole being; one can . . . also call it religion for just the same reason. Its true English name is perhaps: presentness.10

It is indisputable that Buber’s thinking evolved and was shaped in part by the historical events of his lifetime. Yet dividing a person’s lifetime of thinking into phases, like dividing history into periods, imposes a structure from outside a person’s actual lived experience and oversimplifies a complex process. It can obscure as much as it reveals. For an adequate interpretation, it is as important to see the continuities in a person’s ways of thinking as it is to see the discontinuities. From start to finish, the great nourishing ground of Buber’s thinking, the aquifer of culture that he drew on, was his dual German-Jewish heritage.

The degree to which I and Thou is a Jewish work has been a matter of debate. One interpreter even wrote a book to advance the thesis that I and Thou is a thoroughly Jewish work.11 Buber’s interpreters have often responded to his dual heritage by dividing his works between his European-based “universal” writings and his Jewish-biblical writings. Yet as a German Jew, Buber drew on both parts of his dual heritage, both from the Judaism of Eastern Europe’s Hasidic villages and from the philosophical discourse of the German-speaking universities. After pulling back from his early Zionist activism and undertaking a five-year period of intense immersion in Hasidic studies, Buber spent the years leading up to World War I contextualizing Judaism and defining its spirituality while developing his “universalistic,” that is, nonsectarian, “philosophy of realization.”12 In this period both aspects of his work, his Judaism and his universalism, played off each other in a creative ferment that would be reframed and deepened by the traumas of the war years.

In a retrospective statement late in his life, Buber himself used the image of the threshold to stake out his position as liminal, as a stance existing in a space between the two cultures:

I have sought, in a lifelong work, to introduce the Hasidic life-teaching to present-day Western man. It has often been suggested to me that I should liberate this teaching from its “confessional limitations,” as people like to put it, and proclaim it as an unfettered teaching of mankind. Taking such a “universal” path would have been for me pure arbitrariness. In order to speak to the world what I have heard, I am not bound to step into the street. I may remain standing in the door of my ancestral house: here too the word that [the teaching] utters does not go astray.13

Buber’s position is clear: he places his life work at the threshold between the “house” of his ancestral heritage and the “street” of global humanity. From this vantage, he can introduce Hasidic teaching to the modern world. Thus, we can imagine Buber occupying this liminal space, grounded in the riches of his tradition as his voice calls out to address us in our common humanity. In true dialogical fashion, he listens, he hears, and he speaks the word of this teaching to any and all who will listen.

In a summative essay published near the end of his life, Buber explains that his life’s work is based on a central insight that is at once both Jewish and universal:

Since about 1910 [my understanding of] the central truth of Judaism and Hasidism . . .—on this point, no doubt has touched me during the whole time—has its origin in the immovable central existence of values that in the history of the human spirit and in the uniqueness of every great religion has again and again given rise to those basic attitudes concerning the authentic way of man. Since having reached the maturity of this insight, I have not made use of a filter; I became a filter.14

To paraphrase Buber here, the central truth of Judaism has its origin in core values that have repeatedly given rise to the authentic way of human life, both throughout the history of the human spirit and in the particularities of every great religion. Buber’s appeal to the image of the center here is at once both Jewish and universal. Following this passage he specifically discusses the teaching stories of Zen Buddhism, Sufism, and Franciscan Christianity alongside those of Hasidism as expressions of this “authentic way of man.” This vision is at once both universal and particular, for it is built on the foundations of Judaism that are at the same time the foundations of authenticity in every great tradition. True to his notion of being, he did not manipulate the filter or nexus between this way and his audience—Martin Buber, the man himself, in his lived life, became that nexus. As he concluded, “I became a filter.”

Regarding his stance within Judaism, Buber locates himself on the side of Aggadah, the side of stories and images and inspiration, as opposed to Halakha, the side of the law and its interpretation and application. He makes this clear in a passage in “The Holy Way” (1918) where, speaking across the divide between them, he addresses those on the side of Halakha whom he calls “the dogmatists of the law”:

Oh you who are safe and secure, you who take refuge behind the bulwark of the law in order to avoid looking into God’s abyss! Yes, you have solid, well-trodden ground under your feet, whereas we hang suspended over the infinite deep, looking about us. Oh, you heirs and heirs of heirs who have but to exchange the ancient golden coins into crisp new bills, while we, lonely beggars, sit at the street corner and wait for the coming of the One who will help us. Yet we would not want to exchange our giddy insecurity and our untrammeled poverty for your confidence and your riches. . . . To you God is Being who revealed Himself once and never again. But to us He speaks out of the burning bush of the present, and out of the Urim and Tummim of our innermost hearts.15

In this dialogical passage Buber sets his spiritual thinking apart from that of the rabbis, the traditional systematic interpreters of Torah, identifying his position as an image-oriented, existential one. The foundational story of Moses’ encounter with YHWH becomes existential through being lifted into the burning present, just as the discernment once practiced as divination by means of the Urim and Tummim, the ancient Hebrew oracle objects, now takes place in the immediacy of our innermost hearts.

In a late essay that confirms the meaning of Buber’s Aggadic stance vis à vis the rabbis, he insists the purpose of the giving of the law on Mount Sinai was not to make the covenant people “good” but to lead them “beyond themselves into the sphere of the ‘holy.’ . . . Thus, every moral demand is set forth as one that shall raise the human people to the sphere . . . where the difference between the ethical and the religious is suspended in the breathing-space of the divine.”16 The absolute norm is actually relational; it is given to show the people how to “follow in His way,” that is, how to live “before the face of the Absolute.”17

In sum, Buber’s complete enculturation in German academic life was part of his identity. Its counterpoint was his spiritual quickening, beginning with his early encounters with the Hasidim in their Central European villages and culminating in his spiritual initiation and his periods of intense study of Hasidic writings (1904–1909, 1919–1921). As a German-Jewish academic, Buber was perfectly equipped to bridge these two realms. Accordingly, the fact remains that one can choose to read I and Thou as a philosophical or sociological work and thus see it as the expression of a universal philosophy of dialogue. At the same time, one can choose to read the book as a theological work and thus see it as the expression of a Jewish religious philosophy.

I believe rather than dividing the development of Buber’s thinking into contrasting periods or categorizing I and Thou as either Jewish or German, it may be more helpful to see his thinking in terms of its continuities and in relation to the crisis periods he underwent. Two crises stand out: first, his response to his rupture with Herzl in 1903, and second, his response to the murder of Landauer in 1919 at the climax of the war period. We will look closely at these two crises in chapter 2 below.18

2. The Nature of the Work—Three Readings

Taken together, three major readings of Buber suggest the profound range and depth of I and Thou as a multivalent testament to Buber’s breakthrough. Each locates I and Thou in relation to a tradition, whether that of modern German social science, Taoism and the study of Taoism in the West, or Hasidism and the centrality of the zaddik figure in Hasidic tradition.

In one reading, Paul Mendes-Flohr locates I and Thou in the modern field of social science as the publication that inaugurated Buber’s philosophy of dialogue. Mendes-Flohr found Buber’s “‘romantic discontent’ with modernity” to be shared by many European intellectuals of Buber’s generation and limned out an affinity between Buber’s “celebration of I-Thou relations in the face of the insidious prevalence of I-It relationships and Tönnies’ romantic conception of Gemeinschaft [community]—characterized by relations of mutual trust and care.”19 For Mendes-Flohr, therefore, Buber’s philosophy of dialogue and his presentation of it in I and Thou amounts to “a grammar for the reconstruction of Gemeinschaft.”20

In a second reading, Jonathan R. Herman presents I and Thou as a product of Buber’s intense intercultural encounter with Chuang Tzu, “in a manner of speaking, the original dialogical philosopher some twenty-five hundred years ago.”21 Accordingly, Buber’s formulation of the I-Thou relation is “a culturally transplanted accretion to Taoist mysticism, an organic growth of Chuang Tzu’s philosophy in a new historical and spiritual context.”22 Herman’s radical conclusion is that I and Thou can be read as the presentation of “a profound transformation of self before the text of Chuang Tzu.”23

In The Hebrew Humanism of Martin Buber, first published in 1966, Grete Schaeder suggests a third reading when she puts the Hasidic tradition, and in particular the figure of the zaddik, at the core of Buber’s dialogical vision. She points out that Der Grosse Maggid (The Great Maggid, to date still untranslated), first published in 1921, was the direct product of Buber’s transitional years (1912–1919), and therefore it “occupies a central position among his works on Hasidism” and accordingly works as a kind of gloss on I and Thou.24

Beginning with Buber’s spiritual awakening at the age of twenty-six when he received “the calling to proclaim [the “perfect man,” the zaddik] to the world,”25 Buber’s life became more and more identified with the figure of the zaddik, the holy man who serves as leader of the Hasidic community. In “My Way to Hasidism” (1918), Buber traced the stages of “his gradual initiation into the being-tradition of the zaddik.”26 This initiation amounted to a “growing familiarity with the tradition of the zaddik from within.”27 This inner transformation lies at the core of I and Thou.

Schaeder sees Buber’s change during the war years (1912–1919) not as a break with his earlier views but rather as a change in his emphasis “from the power of the zaddik to his service.”28 To Schaeder, Buber’s misencounter with a young man who came to him for help in 1914 and its aftermath constituted a “shattering experience” which “finally placed Buber within the tradition of the zaddik.”29 Like the zaddiks who turned from “all esoteric knowledge, all ecstatic cleaving to God . . . to the daily involvement of [their] entire being, [their] being present for the sake of others,” Buber turned “from realization that remained conceptual and literary to the presentness of the entire person for the sake of others.”30 The new element that emerged during this process, the “turning,” marks Buber’s existential shift from “the realm of thought to the ‘realizing mode’”31 Schaeder then quotes Robert Weltsch, who completed Buber’s first biography, begun by Hans Kohn, to link Buber’s identification with the zaddik figure to the emergence of his dialogical philosophy: “The origin of Buber’s turning to dialogic thinking was at least partly in his immersion in the immediacy of Hasidic speech.”32

Each of these three readings provides a very different context for understanding I and Thou, yet each in its own way presents a kind of transformation as the dynamic core of the work. Transformation is the issue and the outcome of Buber’s two periods of creative withdrawal, times of focusing inward which initiated him into the realm of the spirit and then later into the world of dialogue.

3. Recovery

If we work to approach Buber’s book as Thou, we can see it as a testament not to a doctrine but to Buber’s inner struggle which calls forth a new, deeper “I” within. For the book is much more than merely a philosophical statement—it is a white-hot distillation from the fire of Buber’s imagination when it burned most brightly. It is the product of an intense process of intellectual struggle and marks Buber’s breakthrough to a new level of resolution expressing this process, thereby functioning as a testament to Buber’s life’s work as a path-breaking thinker.

If I and Thou teaches us anything, it teaches us how to read—how to let the text before us become a Thou that confronts us so that “all talk about [the eternal Thou] is sacrificed to the voice that speaks to us.”33 Thus, if we take Buber as our teacher, we can develop an approach to the book that takes us beyond the packaged formulations to the nuances, the layers, the depth—the Presence—to which Buber points and invites us. I and Thou opens up the way to encounter “the Other”—and this includes text as well as person, cat, tree, or rock. Thus, I and Thou can teach us how to read I and Thou.

Steven Kepnes, in a study of Buber’s thinking entitled The Text as Thou, uses the language of hermeneutics to trace how a text can become a Thou.34 Yet Buber, using the compactness of poetic expression, presents just this transformative process within the heart of I and Thou. There he writes that we can learn to read a spiritual text (such as I and Thou) as “the word become life”—Buber’s struggle and potentially ours—and “life become teaching”—an image of “how life is lived in the spirit, in the presence of Thou.” As a testament to such a life lived in the spirit, the text stands before new readers “perpetually ready to become a Thou and thereby to open up the world of Thou once again—no, more than standing ready, it actually comes to them ever again and touches them” (§32h).

4. Overview of this Book

The chapters of this book amount to a series of forays into the world of Martin Buber and into the world presented to us by I and Thou. Taken together, these forays constitute a quest for understanding, which in dialogical terms is the quest for an adequate response to Buber’s call to dialogue.

This introductory chapter has presented I and Thou as a spiritual treasure worthy of reclaiming from the cloud of familiarity that has reduced it to just another piece of cultural goods. Chapter 2 presents the two-part spiritual initiation of Martin Buber as the crucial development, the immediate context out of which I and Thou was created. The first was Buber’s spiritual awakening in response to the testament of the founder of Hasidism when Buber was a young man. The second phase of this spiritual initiation took place when Buber was struck by the loss of his friend at mid-life. His struggle to come to terms with that loss resulted in the breakthrough expressed in I and Thou.

Chapter 3 lays out the nature of Buber’s message: he felt compelled to proclaim it; at the same time, he had to develop unique, original means to do so. Buber’s struggle with the depths in the face of his loss led him to develop these means, summed up in his metaphor of “pointing,” and in the rhetoric he developed to express his message in his construction of I and Thou.

Chapter 4 presents I and Thou in the context of the relationships that punctuated Buber’s life, some of which are chronicled in his “Autobiographical Fragments.” The chapter begins with the early loss of his mother, which led to his concept of Vergegnung, “mismeeting,” and his subsequent relationships with his paternal grandmother and his wife, Paula. His spiritual initiation through reading the Testament of Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, the Baal-Shem-Tov, is linked to the influence of his paternal grandfather, Salomon Buber, a scholar of the Jewish Haskalah. Following on Buber’s great mismeeting with his mother, subsequent mismeetings, such as with the Rev. William Hechler and then with a youth named Mehe, became occasions for Buber’s further reflection and growth. Finally, Buber’s friendships with Gustav Landauer and Franz Rosenzweig, both fellow German Jewish intellectuals, became the major remaining relationships that shaped and embodied his dialogical life.

Chapters 5 and 6 lay out some of the contexts of the book as they influenced the development and major motifs of Buber’s thinking. First, chapter 5 explores the existential edge of Buber’s thinking that intensified in the transitional years around World War I. This existential dimension developed along with his specifically Jewish thinking, so that his Judaism and his universalism dialectically reinforced each other. Buber’s change of position on the role of Erlebnis (inner experience) in the spiritual life became a major pivot point in the development of his thinking. This and other changes in his thinking necessitate careful consideration of his controversial early treatise on Taoism in chapter 6 and of the concepts it developed: the teaching, the master, “the one thing needful,” the Tao—all of which came into play in the evolution of Buber’s understanding of Hasidic spirituality. These broad, free-ranging intellectual and cultural contexts all serve as reference points for the reading of I and Thou, and they all intersect in our construction of the meaning of the book.

Chapter 7, the exposition of part one of I and Thou, is informed by the metaphor of the journey. This metaphor helps us to see connections between Buber’s spiritual initiation and what he points to when he takes us to his window to show us what he sees. As our guide on the journey, he begins by showing us two paths, two alternative opportunities of existence. The first is the dialogical fullness to which he beckons us, even though to some this realm appears to be a will-o’-the-wisp. The second is the world of I-It, the illusory, fractured, consuming stance that to Buber leads to ultimate destruction. Once these two loci are established, Buber traces the journey humanity has already taken from its beginnings in dialogical promise down to the present moment of our complicity with the It-world. He first traces this journey at the broad anthropological level, and then again at the level of individual psychospiritual development. Once he has brought us to the present moment, we are faced with a crisis: we must choose how to proceed on the journey, either to continue on the downward way or to radically change course—to turn so that we move toward the realization of our potential as dialogical beings. In this way part one leads us to this crisis.

Chapter 8 presents part two of I and Thou as Buber’s exposition of the agon of human existence. Buber traces the decline of humanity into the depths of modern alienation, our being engulfed ever more deeply in the It-world. In the course of his exposition he begins to unfold the alternative to this destructive course as teshuvah, which is the turning to relating that opens the path to renewal and recovery. Buber then shows some of the dynamics of a life characterized by the chiaroscuro of continual teshuvah, turning toward the presence of Thou in each new circumstance. Once the horror and the hope offered by these two paths is laid out, we are presented with a dilemma designed to prompt us to make the existential choice between them: we must choose whether to continue down the path toward destruction or to turn toward relation in dialogue with others and with the eternal Thou.

Chapter 9 lays out part three of I and Thou, which focuses on the eternal Thou and on the nature of revelation. Part three begins with critiques of obstacles to the dialogical relation to the eternal Thou, both those created by modern spiritual thinkers—Schleiermacher, Otto, Scheler, and Kierke­gaard—and those created by doctrines of absorption in Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist mystical traditions. Buber then revisits how the dialogical is manifested in nature, in interhuman existence, and in the realm of culture. I and Thou reaches a high point in Buber’s exposition of his concept of revelation. For him revelation is that which first opened to him in his spiritual initiation and continues as an ongoing, universal reality. I and Thou as a whole serves as a manifesto of dialogical reality and it is this reality that Buber celebrates as an element of a larger proposed project: the revival of Hebrew Humanism.

Chapter 10 concludes this study of I and Thou by placing Buber’s call to the dialogical life in our contemporary global context. Accordingly, it locates Buber between exile and homecoming, between tradition and modernity, and between East and West. It then sums up the dialogical core of his vision. Finally, it characterizes Buber’s voice as a prophetic voice that allows us to properly see I and Thou as Buber’s invitation to us to turn toward the other in a life of genuine dialogical existence within the shifting flux of our times.

1. Buber, cited in Kohn and Weltsch, Martin Buber, 454.

2. Kaufmann, “Buber’s Religious Significance,” 282–83.

3. Buber, “Replies to My Critics,” 706.

4. Buber, I and Thou, §22a; see Buber, “Man and His Image-Work,” 159–65.

5. Mendes-Flohr, From Mysticism to Dialogue.

6. Buber, “Afterword,” 214–16.

7. Buber, “Dialogue,” 13–14.

8. Buber, “Foreword,” xv–xvi.

9. Pages 116–45.

10. Buber, “Baal-Shem-Tov’s Instruction,” 180–81.

11. Breslauer, Chrysalis of Religion.

12. Buber continued giving his addresses on Judaism in Prague at the same time he was writing Daniel: Dialogues on Realization.

13. Buber, “Hasidism and Modern Man,” 41–42; this version follows Avnon’s reading in Martin Buber, 117.

14. Buber, “Interpreting Hasidism,” 221 (emphasis Buber’s).

15. Buber, “Holy Way,” 137.

16. Buber, “Religion and Ethics,” 104.

17. Buber, “Religion and Ethics,” 105.

18. Pages 13–40.

19. Mendes-Flohr, From Mysticism to Dialogue, 9.

20. Mendes-Flohr, From Mysticism to Dialogue, 10.

21. Herman, I and Tao, 193.

22. Herman, I and Tao, 193.

23. Herman, I and Tao, 193.

24. Schaeder, Hebrew Humanism, 300; Buber, “Autobiographical Fragments,” 34; Buber’s long preface to Der grosse Maggid was reprinted in part as “Spirit and Body of the Hasidic Movement,” 113–49.

25. Buber, “My Way to Hasidism,” 59.

26. Schaeder, Hebrew Humanism, 305.

27. Schaeder, Hebrew Humanism, 305.

28. Schaeder, Hebrew Humanism, 304.

29. Schaeder, Hebrew Humanism, 306.

30. Schaeder, Hebrew Humanism, 307.

31. Schaeder, Hebrew Humanism, 303.

32. Kohn, quoted in Schaeder, Hebrew Humanism, 306.

33. Kaufmann, “Buber’s Religious Significance,” 683.

34. Kepnes, Text as Thou, 19–78.