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TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

TO THE SECOND EDITION

IT IS NOW ALMOST THIRTY-FIVE YEARS since Ich und Du first appeared in Germany, and over twenty years since the first English edition. Since that time Martin Buber’s work has become widely known in a great variety of fields. In the present book, as well as in later works which illustrate or add to it, he has something specific to say to many kinds of specialists: to educators, to doctors, to politicians, to sociologists, to biblical critics, even to poets, and certainly to theologians and philosophers.

In my original introduction I tried to express my awareness of a kind of revolutionary simplicity in the content of I and Thou. Many of the early readers shared that sense, so that some were even inclined to say that I and Thou, after all, was only saying what a candid reader might find in the primitive message of the New Testament, especially in the teaching of Jesus. There is this amount of truth in this view, that Buber, deeply immersed as he is in the concretion, the historical and dramatic forms of thinking characteristic of his Hebrew tradition, has been able, both in I and Thou and in many of his later writings, in some measure to recover and to express the unique force at work in the Christian tradition as well. The two traditions, the Jewish and the Christian, are indeed separated by a specific confession about certain historical events; but they are looking all the time at the same events. It is the point on the way, not the way itself, which is different. Moreover, the expectation characteristic of Buber’s writing is not dissolved in the Christian tradition, but is embodied in a faith which, though markedly eschatological, still has hope as one of its chief elements. In I and Thou the two traditions interact and illuminate one another in a remarkable and moving way.

But in my early attempt to introduce English-speaking readers to what Buber has to say I was in the main content to point simply to the effect Buber was already having upon theological thought—and, of course, at that time chiefly in Germany. The many printings of the English edition which have appeared since 1937 mention the work of Karl Heim, Friedrich Gogarten and Eberhard Grisebach. It is now possible to add the names of Paul Tillich and Karl Barth, though with these two writers the connexions are intricate, and certainly do not allow talk of any mere “influence” of Buber’s thought in a simple way. Buber’s own Nachwort to the volume Schriften über das dialogische Prinzip (Heidelberg, 1954), has a highly interesting comment on Barth’s position as expressed in his Kirchliche Dogmatik, in the second part of the “Doctrine of Creation.” To this might be added the remarkable recent essay by Barth, Die Menschlichkeit Gottes (“Theologische Studien,” Nr. 48, 1956). But a discussion of this connexion would take us too far. Nor need we mention here more than a few names of those in the Anglo-Saxon world who since then have explicitly acknowledged Buber’s influence: J. H. Oldham, M. Chaning-Pearce, John Baillie, H. H. Farmer, Reinhold Niebuhr, Sir Herbert Read. The list could be extended, and no doubt it could range into other fields, especially those of psychotherapy and education. Leslie H. Farber, for instance, the Chairman of the Faculty, The Washington School of Psychiatry, has recently paid a remarkable tribute (in Psychiatry, May 1957) to Buber’s work in its relation to the work of psychiatrists and social scientists.

The serious question, however, is not how far writers in various fields of interest have found Buber’s thought congenial and illuminating, how far they have really entered into his main concern, and how far they have simply made a certain use of his distinctions and categories: these matters, though interesting both in themselves and as material for a study of the shifting thought-forms of our time, must be left aside in this note. The serious question is how each reader is to approach Buber’s work, especially the present book, and what he is to expect of it.

This is certainly not a normal question in the approach to most writers; but it is necessary here. In my original introduction I spoke of Buber as a poet, and even as a mystic of a certain kind. I am still inclined to retain, with reservations, the description of “poet”; but the description of “mystic” is on the whole one that leads to too great a danger of misunderstanding, and should be rejected. Of course there are many kinds of mystics, as there are many kinds of poets. But in the end, it seems, there is no word to describe the remarkable combination in Buber’s writing of concrete imagery and situation with a sense of overtones, and at the same time with a kind of directness which lays a special claim upon the reader. It is this last element, the element of claim, calling for a specific response, which might make it possible to use of Buber’s work a word which has become fashionable in recent years—namely, “existentialist”; but this word, too, has many different associations. Certainly, in Buber’s work the connexion with the “father” of existentialism, Søren Kierkegaard, is clear and unmistakable; and the content of Buber’s experience, with its wide range—through nature and history, and including the “eternal Thou,” the Absolute Person—can offer a corrective to much truncated and emaciated existentialism in our time.

But however one may seek to define these elements, a reader of I and Thou must come with the question rising up in himself which is the question for Buber: how may I understand my experience of a relation with God? To speak of this relation in such a way that it is neither subdued by any intolerance clinging to a dogmatic form, nor left as a mere ripple of sensation upon an otherwise meaningless existence; to speak of it in terms which do not merely identify it with concepts or with feelings, but do justice to its inner nature—this is Buber’s chief concern. He speaks, therefore, however qualified his language, of a direct or immediate relation with God. I do not intend to enlarge upon the questions raised by such a description: clearly it is the terminology which lends most justification to the description of Buber as a “mystic.” How to join this understanding of the chief element in man’s life as direct relation to God with an understanding of concrete human experience is a difficulty which Buber himself faces anew in the Postscript he has written for this edition. What in any case is clear is that Buber does speak out of what he himself regards as a relation with God which is basic to true humanity: a relation largely unrecognised today, yet one which is essential for the recovery of true humanity in all spheres. This relation he presents in I and Thou with a variety and subtlety and richness of experience which are at the same time able to convey the sense of that relation as a presence and a demand upon the reader.

If this is the main concern throughout the book—and indeed, as Buber himself says in the Postscript, through almost all his writings—then the now familiar categories of I–Thou and I–It which are unfolded here must be seen as taking a secondary place. They are pointers to the human situation, in its intricate interweaving of the personal and the impersonal, of the world to be “used” and the world to be “met.” But the very intricacy of that situation makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to use these distinctions as a kind of open sesame to the whole world of our experience. It is certainly necessary that I should warn the reader against a too facile assumption of these distinctions as involving clear-cut divisions between two worlds in which man may move. There is one world, which is twofold; but this twofoldness cannot be allocated to (let us say) on the one hand the scientist with a world of It and (let us say) on the other hand the poet with a world of Thou. Rather, this twofoldness runs through the whole world, through each person, each human activity. To recognise this is to recognise the need for reserve, for concreteness, for what Buber elsewhere calls “the hallowing of the everyday.” Any situation may become the vehicle of the “eternal Thou.” Human existence today, in its particular peril, cannot be rescued by any shibboleth, but only by the kind of sober re-appraisal which may be found in the pages of this book.

In particular, it is worth drawing the reader’s attention to Buber’s explanations given in the new Postscript. Especially in his reiteration of what he means by the personal, and by God as Person, he has enriched his position against a possible objection from the side of an ontological assertion about God’s being. While maintaining the category of the personal as strictly attributable to God, he has to some extent obviated the criticism that God and man might be considered as being equal partners in a conversation. It is, I suspect, against such a position, derived by others, not by Buber himself, from Buber’s dialogical personalism, that Paul Tillich is speaking, when he writes (in his Systematic Theology, I, 127) that “If it [revelation] is brought down to the level of a conversation between two beings, it is blasphemous and ridiculous.” For Buber himself God’s transcendence, his absolute otherness, is so thoroughly involved in his whole understanding of the relation between God and man, that it is difficult to select one point rather than another in his exposition of this. The otherness which runs through man’s whole relation to his world points to this transcendence, at the same time as the transcendence is drawn into the whole world. I do not mean that Buber himself would use such a term as transcendence, but that the reality to which this term points is fully present in the thought of I and Thou.

From my original introduction I now repeat the last two paragraphs. The inadequacy of a translation to do more than hint at the power of the original is specially noticeable with a poetical work of this kind. Footnotes might have helped to explain a word or two, or indicate nuances of the German which the English has lost; but, though the word might have been explained, the impact of the argument would have been dissipated rather than strengthened. The text stands therefore without any commentary. To the reader who finds the meaning obscure at a first reading we may only say that I and Thou is indeed a poem. Hence it must be read more than once, and its total effect allowed to work on the mind; the obscurities of one part (so far as they are real obscurities, and not the effect, as they must often be, of poor translation) will then be illumined by the brightness of another part. For the argument is not as it were horizontal, but spiral; it mounts, and gathers within itself the aphoristic and pregnant utterances of the earlier part.

I have to thank many friends and helpers for advice given at various points, in particular Frau Dr. Elisabeth Rotten, of Saanen, Switzerland, who repaired a little of the havoc I wrought at points with the original text, and most of all Dr. Buber himself, whose courteous and encouraging help lightened my task considerably.

Only one or two verbal changes have been made in the text of this edition: I now use “spiritual beings” for “geistige Wesenheiten” on pages 22 and 98, and now translate “Umkehr” by “turning” (which is more in line with biblical usage than the rather obscure “reversal”).

R.G.S.

Glasgow University,

November 1957