Buber: All Real Living Is Meeting

Original Text

"Alles wirkliche Leben ist Begegnung."

This is the most famous sentence of Martin Buber's Ich und Du (1923), translated into English as I and Thou. It appears in Part One, in the opening movement of the book, where Buber establishes the two fundamental "word-pairs" of human existence: the primary word Ich-Du (I-Thou) and the primary word Ich-Es (I-It). The German word Begegnung means encounter or meeting in the fullest sense — a face-to-face presence between two beings that are genuinely present to each other. The sentence is not a description of occasional encounters; it is a claim about the nature of life itself: real life, life that is fully human, happens in meeting.

Translation

"All real living is meeting."

The standard English rendering is Ronald Gregor Smith's, from the first English translation of I and Thou (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1937). The translation is deceptively simple. "Real living" (wirkliches Leben) carries the ontological weight of the German: not merely "living" in the biological sense, but genuine, authentic existence as opposed to the reduced existence of the I-It attitude. "Meeting" (Begegnung) names the event in which two beings enter into relation as subjects, each present to the other as a whole person, rather than as objects to be used, known, or classified. The sentence claims that such meeting is not one activity among others; it is the very stuff of a real human life.

Context

Buber wrote Ich und Du in 1923, in the Weimar Republic, a period of cultural crisis in which the mechanization of life and the collapse of traditional community were already visible. A Jewish philosopher and theologian, Buber had turned from his earlier mystical interests toward what he called the "dialogical principle": the conviction that the fundamental fact of human existence is not the isolated self, as much of modern philosophy had assumed, but the relation between self and other. The book was written partly in dialogue with the existentialism of the day — Buber was an attentive reader of Kierkegaard, and the book can be read as a rejoinder to Kierkegaard's focus on the "single individual" before God. It also stands in implicit conversation with Heidegger, whose Being and Time appeared four years later with its own account of Mitsein, being-with-others. Buber's claim is more radical than either: the human being is not first a self who then enters relations; the self is constituted in and through the meeting.

Meaning

The sentence means that the quality of a human life is determined by the quality of its encounters. Buber distinguishes two fundamental attitudes. In the I-It attitude, I relate to the world as a collection of objects: things to be known, used, experienced, and classified. This attitude is necessary — we cannot live without treating much of the world as It — but it is not the whole of life, and when it becomes total, the human being is reduced to the level of an object among objects. In the I-Thou attitude, I relate to another being as a presence rather than a thing: the Thou is not an object of experience but a partner in relation, and in this meeting I become fully I. "All real living is meeting" therefore means that the I emerges only in relation: there is no fully human self apart from genuine encounter. The sentence is an invitation to recognize that the decisive moments of life are not the moments of solitary reflection but the moments of presence — with another person, with nature, with the eternal Thou.

Philosophical Interpretation

Buber's sentence is one of the clearest statements of the dialogical tradition within existentialism. Where Descartes grounded the self in solitary thought — "I think, therefore I am" — Buber grounds the self in relation: the full "I" exists only in the meeting with a Thou. This reverses the direction of modern philosophy of the subject. For Kierkegaard, the single individual's relation to God is the center of existence; for Buber, that relation is itself a form of meeting — the eternal Thou that is never wholly It — and the human relation to other persons is its earthly model. For Heidegger, being-with-others (Mitsein) is an existential structure of Dasein; for Buber, meeting is not a structure but an event, a grace that cannot be produced at will, only entered. The sentence also carries an ethical charge: if real life is meeting, then the reduction of persons to objects — in bureaucracy, ideology, or exploitation — is not merely wrong but a failure of reality itself. The I-It attitude that treats the other as a case, a resource, or a role is, in Buber's terms, a retreat from real living.

Related Concepts

The idea that real life is meeting belongs with the existential concepts of presence as the full attention to what is before us, authenticity as the selfhood achieved in genuine relation rather than in isolation, and attention as the discipline that makes meeting possible. The contrast between meeting and the isolation of the I-It attitude connects to despair, the condition of the self cut off from relation, and to the existentialist diagnosis of meaninglessness as the emptiness of a life reduced to objects.

Related Learning Path

To explore the dialogical alternative to the solitary self, begin with What Is Authenticity? and What Is Existentialism?, which frame the tradition Buber transformed. His emphasis on relation over isolation can be contrasted with Heidegger's account of being-with-others and with Kierkegaard's picture of the isolated individual in his account of despair. For the deeper background in the philosophy of dialogue and the good life, explore the existentialist wisdom collection and the topic of meaning as it develops through the tradition.