Martin Buber : Biography

Martin Buber was born in Vienna in 1878 and died in 1965. He was a
jewish philosopher and theologian. From 1925 Buber lectured on Jewish
religion and ethics at the University of Frankfurt am Main until the rise of Nazi
power forced him to leave in 1933. Settled in Palestine from 1938, Buber
became professor of social philosophy at the Hebrew university. After his
retirement in 1951, he lectured extensively outside Israel and also became the
first president of the Israel Academy of Science and Humanities.

Bubers Philosophy Summary I

and Thou
The basic formulation of Bubers philosophy (the philosophy of dialogue) is
contained in I and Thou (Ich und Du in German) where he makes a radical
distinction between two basic attitudes of which men are capable, described
as I-Thou and I-It.

I-Thou designates a relation between subject and subject, a

relation of reciprocity and mutuality

I-It is the relation between subjet and object, involving some

form of utilization or control, the object being wholly passive.

The I in the two situation also differs : in the I-Thou it appears only within the
context of the relationship and cannot be viewed independently, whereas in
the I-it situation the I is an observer and only partly involved. The I-Thou
situation cannot be sustained indefinitely and every Thou will at times become
an It. Through this situation objective knowledge is acquired and finds
expression. In a healthy man there is a dialectical interaction between the two
situations : every I-it contains the potential of becoming I-Thou, the situation in
which mans true personality emerges within the context of his world.

Bubers notion of God is that of te eternal Thou, the only I-Thou situation that
man can sustain indifinitely; in it God is recognized in all things as the wholly
other, not observed but revealing himself.

I and Thou Quotes

All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware
The world is twofold for man in accordance with his twofold attitude
What has to be given up is not the I but that false drive for self-affirmation,
which impels man to flee from the unreliable, unsolid, unlasting, unpredictable,
dangerous world of relation into the having of things
No purpose intervenes between I and You, no greed and no anticipation;
and longing itself is changed as it plunges from the dream into appearance.
Every means is an obstacle. Only where all means have disintegrated
encounters occur
Love is responsibility of an I for a You: in this consists what cannot consist in
any feeling the equality of all lovers

Martin Buber
First published Tue Apr 20, 2004; substantive revision Thu Dec 4, 2014
Martin Buber (18781965) was a prolific author, scholar, literary translator, and political
activist whose writingsmostly in German and Hebrewranged from Jewish mysticism to
social philosophy, biblical studies, religious phenomenology, philosophical anthropology,
education, politics, and art. Most famous among his philosophical writings is the short but
powerful book I and Thou (1923) where our relation to others is considered as twofold.
The I-it relation prevails between subjects and objects of thought and action; the IThou relation, on the other hand, obtains in encounters between subjects that exceed the
range of the Cartesian subject-object relation. Though originally planned as a prolegomenon
to a phenomenology of religion, I and Thou proved influential in other areas as well,
including the philosophy of education. The work of Martin Buber remains a linchpin of

qualitative philosophical anthropology and continues to be cited in fields such as

philosophical psychology, medical anthropology, and pedagogical theory. Buber's writings on
Jewish national renaissance, Hasidism, and political philosophy also made him a major
twentieth-century figure in Jewish thought and the philosophy of religion.
1. Biographical Background
2. Philosophical Influences
3. The early Buber: Gestalt as a means of realization
4. Philosophy of Dialogue: I and Thou
5. Zionism
6. Political Theology
7. Distance and Relation: Late Philosophical Anthropology
8. Criticism
9. Honors and Legacy
Bibliography
o Works Cited
o Bibliographies
o Selected Early Works by Martin Buber
o Collections and Editions of Writings and Letters
o Buber in English
o Selected Edited Volumes on Martin Buber
o Secondary Literature
Academic Tools
Other Internet Resources

 Related Entries

1. Biographical Background
The setting of Buber's early childhood was Vienna, then still the cosmopolitan capital of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, a multiethnic conglomerate whose eventual demise (in the First
World War) effectively ended the millennial rule of Catholic princes in Europe. Fin-desicle Vienna was the home of light opera and heavy neo-romantic music, French-style
boulevard comedy and social realism, sexual repression and deviance, political intrigue and
vibrant journalism, a cultural cauldron aptly captured in Robert Musil's The Man Without
Qualities (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, 19301932).
Buber's parents, Carl Buber and Elise ne Wurgast, separated when Martin was four years
old. For the next ten years, he lived with his paternal grandparents, Solomon and Adele
Buber, in Lemberg (now: Lviv/Ukraine) who were part of what one might call the landed
Jewish aristocracy. Solomon, a master of the old Haskala ([ein] Meister der alten
Haskala; Buber 1906b, Dedication) who called himself a Pole of the Mosaic persuasion
(Friedman [1981] p. 11), produced the first modern editions of rabbinic midrash literature yet
was also greatly respected in the traditional Jewish community. His reputation opened the
doors for Martin when he began to show interest in Zionism and Hasidic literature. The
wealth of his grandparents was built on the Galician estate managed by Adele and enhanced
by Solomon through mining, banking, and commerce. It provided Martin with financial
security until the German occupation of Poland in 1939, when their estate was expropriated.
Home-schooled and pampered by his grandmother, Buber was a bookish aesthete with few
friends his age, whose major diversion was the play of the imagination. He easily absorbed
local languages (Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, German) and acquired others (Greek, Latin,
French, Italian, English). German was the dominant language at home, while the language of
instruction at the Franz Joseph Gymnasium was Polish. This multi-lingualism nourished
Buber's life-long interest in language.
Among the young Buber's first publications are essays on, and translations into Polish of, the
poetry of Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Buber's literary voice may be best
understood as probingly personal while seeking communication with others, forging a path
between East and West, Judaism and Humanism, national particularity and universal spirit.
His deliberate and perhaps somewhat precious diction was nourished by the contrasts
between the German classics he read at home and the fervently religious to mildly secular
Galician Jewish jargon he encountered on the outside. Reentering the urban society of
Vienna, Buber encountered a world brimming with Austrian imperial tradition as well as

Germanic pragmatism, where radical new approaches to psychology and philosophy were
being developed. This was a place where solutions to the burning social and political issues
of city, nation, and empire were often expressed in grandly theatrical oratory (Karl Lueger)
and in aestheticizing rhetoric and self-inscenation (Theodor Herzl). As a student of art
history, German literature, and psychology in Vienna, Leipzig, Zrich, and Berlin, Buber
made himself at home in a bohemian world of letters.
From 1900 to 1916, Buber and his life-partner, the author Paula Winkler (18771958; penname: Georg Munk), moved to Berlin where they befriended the anarchist Gustav Landauer
(18701919) and attended the salon of the Hart brothers, an epicenter
of Jugendstil aesthetics. Early on in this period Buber was active in the Zionist movement of
Theodor Herzl, who recruited him as the editor of his journal Die Welt. In 1904, the year
Herzl died, Buber finished his dissertation on the problem of individuation in Nicholas of
Cusa and Jakob Boehme and he took a position as literary editor for Ruetten & Loening, a
publishing house whose mid-nineteenth century Jewish founders (Rindskopf and Lwental)
had made a fortune with the perennially best-selling Struwwelpeter, a politically incorrect
book of drawings about ill-behaved children (Wurm, 1994). At the beginning of the century,
the publisher was looking to move beyond the gilded editions of Goethe and Schiller that
they were publishing at the time. Buber became their agent of modernization. One of the first
books Buber placed here was his retelling of the stories of Rabbi Nachman, one of the great
figures of Eastern European Hasidism. The flagship publication edited by Buber was an
ambitious forty-volume series of social studies, titled Die Gesellschaft, that appeared
between 1906 and 1912.
In 1916, Martin and Paula moved to Heppenheim/Bergstrasse, half-way between Frankfurt
and Heidelberg. At that time, his friend Gustav Landauer severely criticized Buber's
enthusiasm for the salutary effect that, as Buber saw it, the war was having on a hitherto
fragmented society (Gesellschaft), transforming it into a national community (Gemeinschaft).
Buber later claimed that it was at this time that he began to draft the book that was to
become I and Thou. In Frankfurt, Buber met Franz Rosenzweig (18861929) with whom he
was to develop a close intellectual companionship. In the early nineteen twenties,
Rosenzweig recruited Buber as a lecturer for his unaffiliated (free) Jewish adult education
center (Freies jdisches Lehrhaus) and he managed Buber's appointment as university
lecturer in Jewish religious studies and ethics, a position endowed by a Jewish community
that was initially opposed Buber as too radical. Rosenzweig also became Buber's chief
collaborator in the project, initiated by the young Christian publisher Lambert Schneider, to
produce a new translation of the Bible into German, a project he continued after
Rosenzweig's death. Dismissed by the Nazis from the university in 1933, Buber served as the
architect of German Jewish teacher re-education through the so-called Mittelstelle fr
jdische Erwachsenenbildung (Simon, 1959). In 1937 Buber received a long-coveted call to
teach at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, an institution he had helped to found and that

he had occasionally represented as a member of its board of overseers. In Jerusalem, Buber

returned to the field of social philosophy, an academic appointment the university
administration wrested from a faculty that deemed the Schriftsteller Dr. Martin Buber
neither a genuine scholar of religion nor sufficiently educated as a specialist in Jewish
studies. World-famous in his later years, Buber traveled and lectured extensively in Europe
and the United States.
Buber's wide range of interests, his literary abilities, and the general appeal of his
philosophical orientation are reflected in the far-flung correspondence he conducted over the
course of his long life. As the editor of Die Gesellschaft, Buber corresponded with Georg
Simmel, Franz Oppenheimer, Ellen Key, Lou Andreas-Salom, Werner Sombart, and many
other academics and intellectuals. Among the poets of his time with whom he exchanged
letters were Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Hermann Hesse, and Stefan Zweig. He was
particularly close to the socialist and Zionist novelist Arnold Zweig. With poet Chaim
Nachman Bialik and the later Nobel laureate Sh. Y. Agnon Buber shared a deep interest in the
revival of Hebrew literature. He published the works of the Jewish Nietzschean story-teller
Micha Josef Berdiczewsky. He was a major inspiration to the young Zionist cadre of Prague
Jews (Hugo Bergmann, Max Brod, Robert Weltsch) and, while he was able to organize and
direct Jewish adult education in Germany, he inadvertently provided a last bastion for the
free exchange of ideas for non-Jews as well. Buber's name is intimately linked with that of
Franz Rosenzweig and his circle (Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Hans Ehrenberg, Rudolf
Ehrenberg, Viktor von Weizscker, Ernst Michel, etc.), an association that manifested itself,
among others, in the journal Die Kreatur (192629). The journal Der Jude, founded and
edited by Buber from 1916 until 1924, and several editions of his speeches on Judaism made
Buber the central figure of the Jewish cultural renaissance of the early twentieth century.
Buber's work awakened many young intellectuals from highly assimilated families, such as
Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem, and Ernst Simon, to the possibility of embracing Judaism as
a living faith, but some outstanding figures in this generation, among them the young Leo
Strauss, developed their own profiles in resisting the seductions of Buberism. Buber
counted among his friends and admirers Christian theologians such as Karl Heim, Friedrich
Gogarten, Albert Schweitzer, and Leonard Ragaz. His philosophy of dialogue entered into
the discourse of psychoanalysis through the work of Hans Trb, and is today among the most
popular approaches to educational theory in German-language studies of pedagogy.

2. Philosophical Influences
Among Buber's early philosophical influences were Kant's Prolegomena, which he read at
the age of fourteen, and Nietzsche's Zarathustra. Haunted by the edgelessness of time and
space, Buber found solace in Kant's understanding that space and time are forms of human
intuition by which we organize a chaotic manifold of sense perceptions, and that being

transcends human concepts like finitude or infinity. From Nietzsche and Schopenhauer he
learned the importance of human will, the power to project oneself heroically into the world
of flux, and to do so according to one's own measure and standard. Though Buber's
philosophy of dialogue is a decisive step away from Nietzschean vitalism, the focus on lived
experience and embodied human wholeness, as well as the prophetic tone and aphoristic
style Buber honed from early on, persisted in his subsequent writings. Between 1896 and
1899 he studied the history of art, German literature, philosophy, and psychology in Vienna,
Leipzig (97/98), Berlin (98/99), and Zurich (99). In Vienna he absorbed the oracular poetry
of Stefan George, which influenced him greatly, although he never became a disciple of
George. In Leipzig and Berlin he developed an interest in the ethno-psychology of Wilhelm
Wundt, the social philosophy of Georg Simmel, the psychology of Carl Stumpf, and
thelebensphilosophische approach to the humanities of Wilhelm Dilthey. In Leipzig he
attended meetings of the Society for Ethical Culture (Gesellschaft fr ethische Kultur), then
dominated by the thought of Lasalle and Tnnies.
From his early reading of philosophical literature Buber retained some of the most basic
convictions found in his later writings. In Kant he found two answers to his concern with the
nature of time. If time and space are pure forms of perception, then they pertain to things
only as they appear to us (as phenomena) and not to things-in-themselves (noumena). Thus
time concerns the way in which we experience not just things but also people. If our
experience of others, especially of persons, is of objects of our experience, then we
necessarily reduce them to the scope of our phenomenal knowledge, in other words, to what
Buber later called the I-Itrelation. Yet Kant also indicated ways of meaningfully speaking of
the noumenal, even though not in terms of theoretical reason. Practical reason i.e., the
categorical imperative-obliges us to consider persons as ends in themselves rather than
means to an end. This suggests something like an absolute obligation. Teleological
(aesthetic) judgment, as developed in Kant's Third Critique, suggests the possibility of a
rational grounding of representation. Taken together, Kant's conceptions of ethics and
aesthetics resonated with Buber's notion that the phenomenon is always the gateway to the
noumenon, just as the noumenal cannot be encountered other than in and by way of concrete
phenomena. Thus Buber managed to meld Kantian metaphysical and ethical conceptions into
a more immediate relation with things as they appear to us and as we represent them to
ourselves that resonated with a conception of reality in its immediacy that he had discovered
in Nietzsche. Buber thus conceives of the Dionysian primacy of life in its particularity,
immediacy, and individuality and the Apollonian world of form, measure, and abstraction as
inter-dependent. Both are constitutive of human experience in that they color our interactions
with the Other in nature, with other human beings, and with the divine Thou.

3. The early Buber: Gestalt as a means

of realization

Buber's early writings include anthologies, such as The Tales of Rabbi Nachman (1906), The
Legend of the Baal Shem Tov (1908), and mystical writings from world religions (Ecstatic
Confessions, 1909), lectures on Judaism (On Judaism, 1967b), and an expressionist dialogue
on realization (Daniel, 1913). His essays on the arts include reflections on the Isenheim
Altarpiece, the dance of Nijinsky (Pointing the Way, 1957), Jewish art, and the painter Lesser
Ury (The First Buber, 1999a). Common to these early productions is the preoccupation with
shape (Gestalt), movement, color, language, and gesture as the means of a realized or
perfected particular human existence that represents life beyond the limits of spatiotemporal duration imposed on us in the manner of a Cartesian grid.
The German words Form (form) and Gestalt (here translated as shape) are not identical,
although, in English, it is easy to confuse one with the other. Buber uses Gestalt as a term of
central, constitutive, and animating power, contrasting it with the Platonic term Form, which
he associates with a lack of genuine vitality. Commenting upon a work by Michelangelo,
Buber speaks of Gestalt as hidden in the raw material, waiting to emerge as the artist
wrestles with the dead block. The artistic struggle instantiates and represents the more
fundamental opposition between formative (gestaltende) and shapeless (gestaltlose)
principles. The tension between these, for Buber, lay at the source of all spiritual renewal,
raging within every human individual as the creative, spiritual act that subjugates unformed,
physical stuff (1963b: 239). It is the free play of Gestalt that quickens the dead rigidity of
form.
The wrestling with form and its overcoming and its reanimation with living energy in Buber's
early work was rooted in a concern with the embodiment of perception and imagination.
Whether writing about Hasidic masters, Nijinsky, religiosity, Judaism, mysticism, myth, the
Orient, or the Isenheim Altar, Buber always returned to the same fundamental dynamics.
Everything starts from the most basic facts of human existence: the body and motion. As
understood by the early Buber (following a Kantian intuition), the world is one in which the
objective spatial order was dissolved, where up and down, left and right, bear no intrinsic
meaning. More fundamentally, orientation is always related to the body, which is, however,
an objective datum. Ethical life remains inextricably linked, within the world of space, to the
human body and to physical sensation as they reach across the divide toward an
unmitigated Erlebnis. The unity, so important to Buber's early conception of the self, was
not an original one. It was instead the effect of those gestural acts that dance it out
(Pointing the Way, 1957).
Buber conceived of political community as a type of plastic shape, an object (or subject)
ofGestaltung and hence realization. Just as he had enlivened Kant's distinction between
phenomenon and noumenon with his literary imagination, so too he transformed the valuetheoretical distinction between Gesellschaft (society) and Gemeinschaft (community), types
of social aggregation theorized by Ferdinand Tnnies, into a wellspring for his political

speeches and writings. The first arena for his social, psychological, and educational
engagement was the Zionist movement. Buber's interest in social philosophy was stimulated
by Gustav Landauer whom he recruited to write the volume on revolution for his series Die
Gesellschaft. As a pioneer of social thought and a student of Georg Simmel, Buber
participated in the 1909 founding conference of the German sociological association. While
Buber's social-psychological approach to the study and description of social phenomena was
eclipsed by quantitative approaches, his interest in the constitutive correlation between the
individual and his and her social experience remained an important aspect of his philosophy
of dialogue. It came to the fore again in his last academic position at Hebrew University in
Jerusalem, where he taught social philosophy (prominent students: Amitai Etzioni, Shmuel
Eisenstadt).
Buber's thought matured under the impact of the realization that he had unduly romanticized
the war. Buber's 1916 lead essay of the new journal Der Jude still praised the war as an
opportunity for the modern Jew to forge out of the chaos of rupture a feeling for community,
connection, a new unity, a unified Gestalt, one that could restore the Jewish people to a
condition of wholeness. For Buber's friend Landauer, such thoughts were very painful
very repugnant, and border on incomprehensibility. Object though you will, I call this
manner aestheticism and formalism and I say that you have no rightto try and tuck these
tangled events into your philosophical scheme (schnen und weisen Allgemeinheiten): what
results is inadequate and outrageous (Letters of Martin Buber, p. 189). Landauer continued
to argue, Historical matters can only be talked about historically, not in terms of formal
patterns (formalem Schematismus) I gladly grant that behind this is the desire to see
greatness; but desire alone is not sufficient to make greatness out of a confused vulgarity
(ibid., 1901). Landauer's challenge to the grotesque fusion
of Erlebnis, Gemeinschaft, and Gestalt out of world war and mass slaughter precipitated the
end of aesthetic religiosity in Buber's work.

4. Philosophy of Dialogue: I and Thou

Buber's best-known work is the short philosophical essay I and Thou (1923), the basic tenets
of which he was to modify, but never to abandon. In this work, Buber gives expression to the
intuition that we need to withstand the temptation to reduce human relations to the simple
either/or of Apollonian or Dionysian ( Apollo is the god of reason and the rational, while Dionysus
is the god of the irrational and chaos)., rational or romantic ways of relating to others. We are
beings that can enter into dialogic relations not just with human others but with other animate
beings, such as animals, or a tree, as well as with the Divine Thou. The duality of relations
and, at its extreme, their coincidence, may serve as the key to Buber's mature thought on
everything from his approach to biblical faith to his practical politics in matters of JewishArab relations in Palestine. I and Thou was first translated into English in 1937 by Ronald

Gregor Smith and later again by Walter Kaufmann. In the 1950s and 60s, when Buber first
traveled and lectured in the USA, the essay became popular in the English-speaking world as
well.
Whereas before World War I Buber had promoted an aesthetic of unity and unification, his
later writings embrace a rougher and more elemental dualism. Buber always opposed
philosophical monism( the philosophical view that a variety of existing things can be explained in
terms of a single reality or substance), which he identified with Bergson, and objected to
doctrines of immersion, which he identified with Buddhism. Complicating the
undifferentiated shape of mystical experience (as sought by the medievals, including
Eckhart, as an annihilation of self), the profoundly dualistic world-view proffered in I and
Thou references Cusa's coincidentia oppositorum as an expression of human limits. Buber's
text reduces the relation between persons, animate objects, and deity to three expressive
signifiers: I, You, and It. They are the elemental variables whose combination and recombination structure all experience as relational. The individuated elements realize
themselves in relations, forming patters that burst into life, grow, vanish, and revive. Human
inter-subjectivity affirms the polymorphous I-Thou encounter. Resting upon the claim that no
isolated I exists apart from relationship to an other, dialogue or encounter transforms each
figure into an ultimate and mysterious center of value whose presence eludes the concepts of
instrumental language. The heteronomous revelation of a singular presence calls the subject
into an open-ended relationship, a living pattern, that defies sense, logic, and proportion;
whereas the I-It relationship, in its most degenerate stage, assumes the fixed form, the
density and duration of hyper-realist painting, of objects that one can measure and
manipulate. At the core of this model of existence is the notion of encounter as revelation.
As understood by Buber, revelation is the revelation of presence (Gegenwart). In contrast
to object (Gegenstand), the presence revealed by revelation as encounter occupies the
space in between the subject and an other (a tree, a person, a work of art, God). This in
between space is defined as mutual (gegenseitig). Contrasting with the Kantian concept of
experience (Erfahrung), Erlebnis(encounter), or revelation of sheer presence, is an ineffable,
pure form that carries not an iota of determinate or object-like conceptual or linguistic
content. Buber always insisted that the dialogic principle, i.e., the duality of primal words
(Urworte) that he called the I-Thou and the I-It, was not an abstract conception but an
ontological reality that he pointed to but that could not be properly represented in discursive
prose.
The confusion (and/or con-fusion) between philosophy and religion is especially marked in I
and Thou. While Buber seems to lack a fully worked-out epistemology and occasionally
revels in paradoxes that border on mystical theology, it has been argued that Buber did
indeed solve the inherent difficulty of dialogics that it reflects on, and speaks of, a human
reality about which, in his own words, one cannot think and speak in an appropriate manner
(Bloch [1983] p. 62). Debates about the strength and weakness of I and Thou as the

foundation of a system hinge, in part, on the assumption that the five-volume project, to
which this book was to serve as a prolegomenon (a project Buber abandoned), was indeed a
philosophical one. Buber's lectures at the Freies jdisches Lehrhaus and his courses at
University of Frankfurt, as well as letters to Rosenzweig show that, at the time of its writing,
he was preoccupied with a new approach to the phenomenology of religion (cf. Schottroff,
Zank). In Buber's cyclical conception of the history of religions, the revelation of presence
mixes into and animates the living and lived forms of historical religion (institutions, texts,
rituals, images, and ideas), becoming over time ossified and rigid and object-like, but
structurally open to the force of renewal based on new forms of encounter as revelation. The
history of religion as described by Buber in the closing words of I and Thou is a contracting,
intensifying spiral figure that has redemption as its telos. It would be artificial, however, to
separate Buber's interest in religious phenomena from his interest in a general philosophical
anthropology. Rather, Buber seems to have tried to find one in the other, orput differently
to make religious belief and practice perspicacious in light of a general philosophical
anthropology.

5. Zionism
At the very beginning of his literary career, Buber was recruited by the Budapest-born and
Vienna-based journalist Theodor Herzl to edit the main paper of the Zionist party, Die Welt.
He soon found a more congenial home in the democratic faction of cultural Zionists led
by Chaim Weizmann, then living in Zurich. Buber's phases of engagement in the movement's
political institutions alternated with extended phases of disengagement, but he never ceased
to write and speak about what he understood to be the distinctive Jewish brand of
nationalism. Buber seems to have derived an important lesson from the early struggles
between political and cultural Zionism for the leadership and direction of the movement. He
realized that his place was not in high diplomacy and political education but in the search for
psychologically sound foundations on which to heal the rift between modern realpolitik and a
distinctively Jewish theological-political tradition. Very much in keeping with the nineteenthcentury Protestant yearning for a Christian foundation of the nation-state, Buber sought a
healing source in the integrating powers of religious experience. After a hiatus of more than
ten years during which Buber spoke to Jewish youth groups (most famously the Prague Bar
Kokhba) but refrained from any practical involvement in Zionist politics, he reentered
Zionist debates in 1916 when he began publishing the journal Der Jude, which served as an
open forum of exchange on any issues related to cultural and political Zionism. In 1921
Buber attended the Zionist Congress in Carlsbad as a delegate of the socialist Hashomer
Hatzair (the young guard). In the debates that followed the first anti-Zionist riots in
Palestine, Buber joined the Brit Shalom, which argued for peaceful means of resistance.
During the Arab revolt of 193639, when the British government imposed quotas on
immigration to Palestine, Buber argued for demographic parity rather than trying to achieve a

Jewish majority. Finally, in the wake of the Biltmore Conference, Buber (as a member
of Ihud) argued for a bi-national rather than a Jewish state in Palestine. At any of these stages
Buber harbored no illusion about the chances of his political views to sway the majority but
he believed that it was important to articulate the moral truth as one saw it. Needless to say,
this politics of authenticity made him few friends among the members of the Zionist
establishment.
At the theoretical core of the Zionism advanced by Buber was a conception of Jewish
identity being neither a religious nor a national form, but a unique hybrid. From early on,
Buber rejected any state-form for the Jewish people in Palestine. This was clear already in a
widely-noted 1916 exchange of letters with the liberal philosopher Hermann Cohen. Cohen
rejected Zionism as incommensurate with the Jewish mission of living as a religious minority
with the task of maintaining the idea of messianism that he saw as a motor of social and
political reform within society at large. In contrast, Buber embraced Zionism as the selfexpression of a particular Jewish collective that could be realized only in its own land, on its
soil, and in its language. The modern state, its means and symbols, however, were not
genuinely connected to this vision of a Jewish renaissance. While in the writings of the early
war years, Buber had characterized the Jews as an oriental type in perpetual motion, in his
later writings the Jews represent no type at all. Neither nation nor creed, they uncannily
combine what he called national and spiritual elements. In his letter to Ghandi, Buber
insisted on the spatial orientation of Jewish existence and defended the Zionist cause against
the critic who saw in it only a form of colonialism. For Buber, space was a necessary but
insufficient material condition for the creation of culture based on dialogue.
A Gesamtkunstwerk in its own right, the Zionist project was to epitomize the life of dialogue
by drawing the two resident nations of Palestine into a perfectible common space free from
mutual domination.

6. Political Theology
Buber honed his political theology in response to the conflict between fascism and
communism, the two main ideologies dominating mid-twentieth century Europe. His
national-utopian thought shared traits with both of these extreme positions and made him, in
fact, one of the few Jewish personages acceptable as a partner for debate with moderates
National Socialists in the early 1930s, a proximity he himself vigorously dismissed as a
misperception. His political position remained indissolubly linked to his philosophicaltheological commitment to the life of dialogue developed in I and Thou. According to Buber,
politics was the work by which a society shapes itself. He rejected any hardened ideological
formations of the collective and thus objected to the solutions articulated on either political
extreme. He understood these to recognize neither an I nor a Thou in social life. Buber
particularly opposed the notion that the political sphere rested on the friend/enemy

distinction, as theorized by the ultra-conservative jurist Carl Schmitt. Buber's political ideal,
a-cephalic and utopian as it was, was derived from his reconstruction of the ancient
Israelite polity as reflected in the Book of Judges.
As presented by Buber in the 1930s, the primary governing trope of Jewish political theology
divine kingship (Knigtum Gottes)represents an answer to Schmitt, whose political
theology allowed divine power to be absorbed by the human sovereign. Buber resisted this
slippage, privileging instead the anti-monarchical strata of the Hebrew Bible. In his 1932
book on theKingship of God, the biblical hero Gideon from chapter eight of the Book of
Judges stands out as the leader who, beating back the Philistine enemy, declines any claim to
hereditary kingship. What Buber reads as a genuine, unconditional no to political
sovereignty rests on an unconditional yes affirming the absolute kingship of God. Against
the theory staked out by Schmitt, the assertion that God alone is sovereign means that God's
authority is non-transferable to any human head or political institution. Thus Buber preserves
the notion of divine sovereignty over all forms of state apparatus and tyranny. Buber
privileged simple, preliminary, primitive, and immediate forms of government, insisting that
genuine theocracy is not a form of government at all, but rather a striving against the
political tide. No theological work of art, the messianic ideal of divine kingship found in
the Hebrew Bible is presented as a reliable image preserved by the collective memory of
tradition. Buber maintained that once upon a time the Israelite deity YHWH was, in fact,
the heretog or warrior-king of the people. But he also knew that he was unable to posit this
for certain, and so proceeded to admit that the image reflects not a historical actuality that we
can know but only a historical possibility.
In Paths in Utopia (1947), Buber was to plot the image of perfect space as one composed
of lines that allow no fixed definition, the zone between the individual and collective
constantly recalibrated according to the free creativity of its members. The relationship
between centralism and decentralization is a problem whichcannot be approached in
principle, butonly with great spiritual tact, with the constant and tireless weighing and
measuring of the right proportion between them. A social pattern, utopia was based on a
constant drawing and re-drawing of lines of demarcation (Paths in Utopia, 1996, p. 137).
An experiment that did not fail, the Jewish village communes in Palestine (i.e.
the kvutza, kibbutz, and moshav) owed their success to the pragmatism with which their
members approached the historical situation, to their inclination towards increased levels of
federation, and to the degree to which they established a relationship to the society at large.
Single units combine into a system or series of units without the centralization of state
authority (ibid., 1428). Nowherein the history of the Socialist movement were men so
deeply involved in the process of differentiation and yet so intent on preserving the principle
of integration (ibid., 145). They discovered [t]he right proportion, tested anew every day
according to changing conditions, between group-freedom and collective order (ibid., 148).
It is not difficult to recognize in this description of the modern Jewish agricultural collective

an updated version of the biblical tribal past that Buber idealized in his work on the primitive
Israelite polity of the age of the biblical judges.

7. Distance and Relation: Late

Philosophical Anthropology
Responding to the unfolding political chaos in Europe and to the struggle between Jews and
Arabs in Palestine, Buber's philosophical oeuvre assumed a more occasionalist and essayistic
form in the late 1930s and 1940s. In addition to the works cited above and works on religion,
the Bible, and prophetic faith, his last major philosophical publication was The Eclipse of
God (1951). What unites all of the late works as a group is the common emphasis on
philosophical anthropology, the place of the individual person in the world vis--vis other
human beings in human community. Whether reflecting on man, the Jew, or the single
one, always critical to Buber's late thought is the tension between distance and relation, and
the role of mediated images in dialogical, open-ended, non-fixed relation to the social and
natural world. In this, Buber addressed, but never directly, the tension between fact and
value, explored with more rigor in later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German
philosophy and in post-war Anglo-American analytic philosophy.
One of the signature pieces from this period is the essay on Kierkegaard, The Question to
the Single One (1936). Buber turns to Kierkegaard in order to force the question of
solipsism. For Buber, the Danish philosopher stands for a modern alienation from the world.
The question Buber asks is whether it is even possible to conceive of the human being as a
single one. According to Buber, Kierkegaard's love of God excludes the love of his
neighbor, the fellow creature with whom we constitute the world in human terms. With his
eye on the creation of Genesis, Buber describes man as a subject hovering over and
embracing the creaturely world. In this model, there is no renunciation of objects and
political life. At the same time, relation does not mean the giving oneself over to the crowd.
The embrace of creaturely existence remains vexing. Buber characterizes the human being in
terms of potentiality within factual and finite limits, not in terms of the radicality he sees
in Kierkegaard. That is to say, instead of positing a radical dichotomy between community
and the single one, Buber argues that they are compatible with, and necessary for, one
another.
This critique of the single one in relation to a larger social world belongs to the world-picture
established by Buber in the essay What is Man? (1938). At stake for Buber was a
knowledge of the human person as a whole, i.e., a complete understanding of human
subjectivity. The methodological key to the essay is a philosophical anthropology. Buber
assumed that only by entering into the act of self-reflection can the philosophical
anthropologist become aware of human wholeness based on a structural distinction between

epochs of human habitation and epochs of human homelessness. In the former, philosophical
anthropology is cosmological, i.e. fundamentally related to the world and to human
environments. In the latter, human subjectivity is conceived of as self-standing and
independent. The conceptual tension is between being at home in a universe of things in
contrast to what is presented as the collapse of a rounded and unified world vis--vis selfdivided forms of consciousness. In order to preserve the imbrication of singular selfhood and
the bonding of human personhood, Buber rejected the false choice between individualism
and collectivism. As Buber always understood it, human wholeness lies in the meeting of the
one with the other in a living fourfold relation to things, individual persons, the mystery of
Being, and self. Every living relation is essential and contributes to human wholeness
because human wholeness (man's unique essence) is known or posited only in living out a
set of relations.
If relationship constitutes the fundamental datum of human wholeness, it remains also true
that relation was not understood by Buber independent of its conceptual antipode, namely
distance. As developed in the essay Distance and Relation (1951), relation cannot take
shape apart from or without the prior setting of things, persons, and spiritual beings at a
distance. For Buber, this setting of things, persons, and beings at a distance is the only way to
secure the form of otherness without which there can be no relation. For without the form of
otherness there can be no confirmation of self insofar as the confirmation of the I is always
mediated by the other who confirms me, both at a distance and in relation, or rather in the
distance that is relation and the relation that is difference.
While Buber most famously understood the I-Thou relationship as one based on immediacy,
he always steeped his thought in the power of mediating images and other plastic forms as
the material stuff of inter-subjective relationship. In the essay "Man and his Image-Work,"
Buber set out to understand something about the formation of images in relation to the world,
the world encompassed by art, faith, love, and philosophy. Buber postulated three levels of
world formation. The first two levels are the familiar Kantian concepts of a noumenal x
world and a phenomenal sense-world of form, comprising the world as shaped by and in
images and concepts. Buber's conception of the third level, what he calls the world of perfect
form, derives from the mystical tradition. This paradoxical level of world formation is
expressed in terms of perfected form-relations. In art, faith, and philosophy, the human
image-work emerges out of relational encounters between persons and an independent
"world" that exists on its own, but is not imaginable.
The concern about images in relation to distance and dialogue surfaced again in Buber's
last major work, The Eclipse of God (1952). The so-called eclipse of God was Buber's
symbol for the spiritual crisis in postwar Western civilization. It designated a philosophical
collapse as much as a moral one. Like Sartre and Heidegger, Buber directed his attention to
concrete existence. But unlike his fellow existentialists, Buber was moved by the

interaction between humans, individually and collectively, and an absolute reality that
exceeds the human imagination. Against Sartre, Heidegger, and also Carl Jung, Buber
rejected the picture of self-enclosed human subjects and self-enclosed human life-worlds
beyond which there are no external, independent realities. Towards the end of his career as a
writer and thinker, Buber sought to maintain the distinction and relation between the human
subject and an external other in order to sustain an ontological source of ethical value in
opposition to the false absolutes of a modern world that had fused the absolute with the
political and historical products of the human spirit.

8. Criticism
Philosophical criticism of Buber tends to focus on three areas: [1] epistemological questions
regarding the status of the I-Thou form of relationship and the status of the object-world
delimited by the I-It form of relationship, [2] hermeneutical questions regarding Buber's
reading of Hasidic source material, and [3] doubts regarding the author's rhetoric and style
that touch upon the philosophy of language. All three lines of criticism have at their core the
problem of the conflict between realism and idealism, world-affirmation and world-denial.
The nature of the world picture in Buber's magnum opus has always been among the most
contested aspects of Buber's philosophy in the critical literature. I and Thou is considered to
have inaugurated a Copernican revolution in theology () against the scientific-realistic
attitude (Bloch [1983], p. 42), but it has also been criticized for its reduction of fundamental
human relations to just twothe I-Thou and the I-It. Writing to Buber after the publication
of I and Thou, Rosenzweig would not be the last critic to complain, In your setting up the IIT, you give the I-Thou a cripple for an opponent. He continued to rebuke, You make of
creation a chaos, just good enough to provide construction material (Baumaterial) for the
new building (Franz Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebcher, pp. 8245). In Jewish
philosophical circles, it has been long argued that Buber was unable to ward off the
relativism, subjectivism, and antinomianism that are said to permeate non-realist
epistemologies and ontologies. Building on Rosenzweig's complaint against Buber's
epistemology, Steven Katz called for a realism that affirms the rich world of stable objects
extended in time and space. It is still widely assumed by his critics in Jewish philosophy that
in his critique of Jewish law and the I-It form of relationship Buber rejected the world of
object-forms in toto.
In addition to hermeneutical arguments regarding historicism, anti-historicism, literary style
and poetic license, arguments about the picture of Hasidism that emerged out of Buber's
research and writing are also based upon the philosophical world picture as it took shape in
Buber's philosophical universe. Against Buber's corpus of Hasidica, the doyen of Kabbalah
scholarship, Gershom Scholem, was one of the first to throw down the gauntlet. Scholem

argued that Buber's focus on the genre of folk-tales obscured the theoretical works within the
corpus Hasidic literature, where the phenomenon of (gnostic) world denial was more
pronounced than in the popular tales. Buber's later collections of Hasidic tales in particular
reflect a this-worldly ethos at odds with important tenets of Hasidic mysticism. Whereas
Buber's early, neo-romantic Hasidica assumed a more distant and even antagonistic relation
to the world of time and space, critics, such as Scholem, Katz, and Schatz-Uffenheimer,
focused their critique almost exclusively on the later body of work, in which a this-wordly
cosmology was more sharply articulated, in line with Buber's own renewed interest, starting
in the mid to late 1920s, with quotidian forms of existence.
The analytic philosopher Steven T. Katz, author of an important essay about the particularism
of mystical language, articulated a range of criticisms directed against Buber's writings
(Katz, 1985). More recently, Katz revisited and mitigated some of these earlier criticisms that
included the charge of antinomianism, the lack of an account for the enduring character of
the I-Thourelation, and the misrepresentation of Hasidic thought (Katz in Zank, 2006). What
remains most objectionable in Buber is the tendency toward an aestheticization of reality and
the problem of Buber's often slippery poetic rhetoric. Walter Kaufmann, who produced a
second English translation of I and Thou, articulated his displeasure with Buber most
strongly. While he did not regard the lack of deep impact of Buber's contributions to biblical
studies, Hasidism, and Zionist politics as an indication of failure, Kaufmann considered I
and Thou a shameful performance in both style and content. In style the book invoked the
oracular tone of false prophets and it was more affected than honest. Writing in a state of
irresistible enthusiasm, Buber lacked the critical distance needed to critique and revise his
own formulations. His conception of the I-Itwas a Manichean insult while his conception
of the I-Thou was rashly romantic and ecstatic, and Buber mistook deep emotional
stirrings for revelation. (Kaufmann [1983] pp. 2833). The preponderance in Buber's
writings of rhetorical figures, such as experience, realization, revelation, presence
and encounter, and his predilection for utopian political programs such as anarchism,
socialism, and a bi-national solution to the intractable national conflict between Jews and
Arabs in Palestine, are in line with a vagueness in his philosophical writing that often renders
Buber's thought suggestive, but elusive. Similar criticisms apply to Buber's claim that
language has the power to reveal divine presence or uncover Being.
Buber's early Jugendstil rhetoric was a far cry from the neue Sachlichkeit of the nineteen
twenties (Braiterman, 2007). While similarly inclined literary authors like Hermann Hesse
praised Buber's German renditions of Hasidic lore and his Bible translation later gained
popular praise among German theologians, others, among them Franz Kafka, Theodor W.
Adorno, and Siegfried Kracauer, spoke of Buber's style disparagingly.
On a more biographical note, the philosopher of the I and Thou allowed very few people to
call him by his first name; the theorist of education suffered no disturbance of his rigorous

schedule by children playing in his own home; the utopian politician alienated most
representatives of the Zionist establishment; and the innovative academic lecturer barely
found a permanent position in the university he had helped to createthe Hebrew University
of Jerusalem. Some of the most dedicated students of this inspiring orator and writer found
themselves irritated by the conflict between their master's ideas and their own attempts at
putting them into practice. In the final analysis it seems as if Buber always remained the
well-groomed, affected, prodigiously gifted, pampered Viennese boy, displaced in a land of
horses and chemists, whose best company were the works of his own imagination and whose
self-staging overtures to the outside world were always tainted by his enthusiasm for words
and for the heightened tone of his own prodigious voice.

9. Honors and Legacy

Largely ignored by academic philosophers, Buber was already widely recognized and
reviewed across the larger field of German letters before World War I. He rose to renewed
prominence in Germany after World War II, where his Bible translation, collections of
Hasidic stories, and writings on the philosophy of dialogue have remained in print ever since.
Among the honors Buber received after 1945 were the Goethe Prize of the City of Hamburg
(1951), the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (Frankfurt am Main, 1953), and the
Erasmus Prize (Amsterdam, 1963). Significant students who considered their own work a
continuation of Buber's were Nahum Glatzer (Buber's only doctoral student during his years
at the university in Frankfurt, 19241933, later an influential teacher of Judaic Studies at
Brandeis University), Akiba Ernst Simon (historian and theorist of education in Israel who
first met Buber at the Freies jdisches Lehrhaus in Frankfurt, and who returned from
Palestine to work with Buber for theMittelstelle fr jdische Erwachsenenbildung), and
important Israeli scholars, such as Shmuel Eisenstadt, Amitai Etzioni, and Jochanan Bloch,
who knew Buber in his later years when he taught seminars on social philosophy and
education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. As for the United States, Buber's American
translator and biographer Maurice Friedman, a prolific author in his own right, almost singlehandedly introduced Buber to post-war American religious scholars and the larger reading
public. In addition to Friedman, Walter Kaufmann, the author of one of the first Englishlanguage studies of Nietzsche as well as books on religion and existentialism, helped to
popularize Buber in the United States, despite the above-cited critique of Buber's I and Thou.
It was Kaufmann who first included Buber in the canon of religious existentialism in the
1950s and 1960s. In Jewish philosophy, Buber's name has since been eclipsed by those of
Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas.