I and Thou

Book Overview

I and Thou (Ich und Du), published in German in 1923, is Martin Buber's most famous work and one of the foundational texts of twentieth-century dialogical philosophy. It is a short, aphoristic, almost poetic book, written in three parts, which argues that the fundamental fact of human existence is not the isolated self — as the philosophical tradition from Descartes to the existentialists had largely assumed — but the relation between self and other. Buber introduces two basic "primary words" that structure all human life: the primary word I-Thou and the primary word I-It. The first names the attitude of genuine meeting, in which one being is present to another as a whole person; the second names the attitude of experience and use, in which the world is treated as a collection of objects to be known, managed, and consumed.

The book's central claim is compressed in its most famous sentence: "All real living is meeting." Real life, life that is fully human, does not consist in solitary reflection or in the mastery of objects; it consists in the event of genuine encounter, in which an I becomes an I through meeting a Thou. The book moves from the relation between persons, through the relation between the human being and nature, to the relation between the human being and what Buber calls the "eternal Thou" — the divine, which can never be reduced to an It. Since its appearance, I and Thou has been read by philosophers, theologians, psychologists, and educators, and its vocabulary — "I-Thou," "I-It," "meeting," "the between" — has entered the general language of modern thought. The standard English translation is by Ronald Gregor Smith, first published in 1937, which rendered the German Du as "Thou" and gave the English-speaking world its title I and Thou.

Author Context

Martin Buber (1878-1965) was a Jewish philosopher, theologian, and educator, born in Vienna and raised partly in the home of his grandfather, the midrashic scholar Solomon Buber, in Lemberg (Lviv). He studied philosophy at the universities of Vienna, Berlin, Leipzig, and Zurich, and was drawn early to mysticism and to the Jewish mystical movement of Hasidism, whose stories and teachings he collected and retold throughout his life. Around the time of the First World War, Buber moved away from his early mystical emphasis toward what he called the "dialogical principle": the conviction that the decisive reality of human existence is not the union of the soul with the divine but the relation between human beings, and that God is encountered in and through genuine meeting. I and Thou was written during this turn, and it remains the fullest statement of his dialogical philosophy.

Buber's life spanned many of the great events of the twentieth century. He was active in the Jewish cultural renaissance, and from 1923 he taught at the University of Frankfurt, where he worked with the philosopher Franz Rosenzweig on a new German translation of the Hebrew Bible. He left Germany in 1938 for Palestine, where he taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and he spent the rest of his life writing, teaching, and advocating for a binational vision of Arab-Jewish coexistence — a political position that made him a controversial figure. The same dialogical conviction that animates I and Thou shaped his social thought: because human beings become themselves only in relation, he argued, a just society must be built on genuine mutuality between persons and peoples, not on the domination of one by another.

Historical Background

I and Thou appeared in 1923, in the Weimar Republic, a period of profound cultural crisis in which the mechanization of life, the collapse of traditional community, and the shock of the First World War had thrown inherited forms of meaning into question. Buber wrote against two dominant tendencies of modern thought. The first was the individualism of the Cartesian tradition, which treated the self as the primary reality and the world, including other people, as objects of knowledge and use. The second was the collectivism of the age, which dissolved the individual into the mass — the nation, the party, the class. Buber's answer to both was the "between" (das Zwischen): the sphere of genuine relation that exists neither in the individual nor in the collective but between persons, in the meeting itself.

The book also belongs to the larger existentialist turn of the 1920s. It was written in implicit dialogue with Kierkegaard, whose emphasis on the "single individual" before God Buber both honored and criticized; with the phenomenology of Husserl; and with the early Heidegger, whose Being and Time (1927) would appear four years later with its own account of being-with-others (Mitsein). Buber's claim is more radical than any of these: the human being is not first a self who then enters relations. The full "I" exists only in relation; apart from meeting, the self is not yet fully a self. This is a reversal of the modern philosophy of the subject — a reorientation of philosophy from the solitary "I think" to the dialogical "I meet."

Core Ideas

The Two Primary Words

Buber's ontology begins with language. The human world, he argues, is constituted by "primary words" — not single words but word-pairs, because every "I" is said with one of two companions: "I-Thou" or "I-It." There is no "I" in itself; the "I" of the I-Thou relation differs from the "I" of the I-It relation. The primary word I-It is the word of experience and use: it treats the world as a collection of objects — things to be perceived, known, classified, and exploited. The primary word I-Thou is the word of relation: in it, I stand before another being as a presence, not as an object. The Thou is not an object of experience; it is a partner in relation. Buber insists that both attitudes are necessary — we could not live without treating much of the world as It — but that the I-It attitude becomes destructive when it is totalized, when other persons are reduced to cases, roles, or resources.

Relation and the Emergence of the Self

Buber's central claim is that the self is constituted in relation. In the I-Thou meeting, I do not first exist and then encounter the other; in the meeting, I become an I. This is why "all real living is meeting": the fullness of human existence is not achieved in solitary self-reflection but in the event of genuine encounter. The I-Thou relation is not something we can produce at will; it is an event of grace that happens to us, though we can prepare for it through attention, presence, and openness. It also cannot be sustained; life moves in rhythm between relation and objectification, between Thou and It. Every great meeting passes, and the beloved Thou can become an It. But the possibility of meeting remains, and the person who has known relation is permanently changed.

The Eternal Thou

The third part of the book extends the dialogical principle to the relation between the human being and God. Every particular Thou is a glimpse of the eternal Thou: in every genuine meeting with another being, we touch the presence that can never be reduced to an object. God, for Buber, is "the eternal Thou" — the Thou that can never become an It, the presence that is always present though never possessable. The book is not a work of systematic theology; it is an account of the religious life as the life of relation. Religion, on this view, is not primarily the acceptance of doctrines or the performance of rituals but the living relation between the human being and the eternal Thou, a relation that runs through and beyond all particular meetings. This is also why Buber rejects the objectification of God: as soon as God is made into an object of thought, a "being" among beings, the eternal Thou is reduced to an It. God is not the object of religious experience; God is the presence in which all genuine meeting participates.

The Between (das Zwischen)

Buber's ontology introduces a third category that escapes both individualism and collectivism: the between. The genuinely human is neither in the individual nor in the aggregate but between persons, in the event of meeting. The between is not a thing; it is the sphere of relation that comes into being whenever two beings are genuinely present to one another. This category has had enormous influence beyond philosophy, because it gives a name to something everyone recognizes but that individualist and collectivist theories both miss: the reality of dialogue, of mutuality, of the shared situation that is more than the sum of its parts. The between is where language becomes dialogue, where love becomes mutual, where education becomes encounter, and where the political becomes a meeting of persons rather than a collision of masses.

Key Themes

Several themes run through the book. The first is the distinction between relation and experience: the Thou is never merely experienced; it is met. The second is the rhythm of Thou and It, the inescapable oscillation between presence and objectification that structures human life. The third is the critique of the "specialists of the It" — the modern technologists, bureaucrats, and systems that reduce persons to functions, a critique that has only grown more relevant with the spread of digital mediation. The fourth is the theme of responsibility: the person who has entered the I-Thou relation cannot be indifferent, because relation brings with it the claim of the other. And the fifth is the theme of speech: Buber's philosophy of language holds that genuine speech is not the transmission of information but the event of address and response, in which the other is called to be present.

Philosophical Meaning

The philosophical meaning of I and Thou lies in its reorientation of the fundamental categories of philosophy. Since Descartes, modern philosophy had begun from the thinking subject; Buber begins from the relation. Since Kant, the world had been understood through the categories of experience and use; Buber insists that the I-Thou relation is not a species of experience but something different in kind, the event in which existence is most fully itself. The book thus offers a philosophy of existence that is neither subjectivist nor objectivist: the human being is neither a solitary self nor a mere object among objects, but a being whose very selfhood is realized in meeting. This has profound consequences for ethics, for the philosophy of religion, and for the understanding of meaning: meaning is not discovered by the isolated intellect but given in the event of relation. The book also stands as a corrective within existentialism itself: where Kierkegaard stressed the lonely individual and Heidegger stressed the structure of Dasein, Buber insists that the deepest truth of existence is not isolation but dialogue, not solitary anxiety but mutual presence.

Influence

I and Thou has been one of the most influential philosophical works of the twentieth century. It founded the dialogical tradition, which was developed by thinkers such as Franz Rosenzweig and, in a different register, by Emmanuel Levinas, whose philosophy of the face of the other carries Buber's dialogical principle into ethics. In theology, the book shaped Jewish and Christian thought alike; Paul Tillich engaged Buber's work, and the dialogical understanding of God as the eternal Thou entered Protestant theology through him and others. In psychology, Buber's categories were taken up by humanistic and existential psychotherapy — most prominently by Carl Rogers, whose client-centered therapy is grounded in the dialogical encounter between therapist and client — and by the school of dialogical pedagogy associated with Buber's educational writings. In social and political thought, the concept of the between influenced theories of community and of communication, including later work on the public sphere. Within this archive, the book connects the existentialism philosophy with the existentialist wisdom collection, and its dialogical themes are developed in the Buber on I and Thou quote page.

Related Quotes

"Alles wirkliche Leben ist Begegnung." / "All real living is meeting."

— Martin Buber, I and Thou, Part One (1923; trans. Ronald Gregor Smith, 1937). The book's most famous sentence, treated in full in Buber on I and Thou.

"Faith is namely this paradox that the single individual is higher than the universal..."

— Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (1843). The individual-before-God emphasis that Buber both honors and corrects with his dialogical principle; see Kierkegaard on Faith.

"Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom."

— Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety (1844). The existentialist account of the solitary self that Buber's philosophy of relation reorients; see Kierkegaard on Anxiety.

"The 'essence' of Dasein lies in its existence."

— Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, section 9. The contemporary account of existence to which Buber's dialogical alternative responds; see Heidegger on Being.

Sources

1. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1937; 2nd ed. with a postscript by Buber, 1958). The standard English translation; readers should be aware that the German Du is rendered throughout as "Thou."
2. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Martin Buber." Scholarly context for the dialogical principle and the book's place in Buber's thought.
3. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Martin Buber." An accessible overview of the I-Thou and I-It distinction and its influence.
4. Paul Arthur Schilpp and Maurice Friedman, eds., The Philosophy of Martin Buber (Library of Living Philosophers, La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1967). A major critical assessment, including Buber's replies to his interpreters.