Martin Buber split all human relating into two words: I–Thou and I–It
In 1923 Martin Buber argued that we meet the world in two basic ways. Treat a person as an object to use or analyse, and you live in I–It. Meet them wholly, as a presence rather than a thing, and you enter I–Thou. That short essay made him one of the most influential philosophers of dialogue.
Buber was born in Vienna on 8 February 1878 into an observant Jewish family. His parents split up when he was three, and he was raised in Lemberg, now Lviv, by his grandfather Solomon Buber, a scholar of rabbinic literature, and grew up speaking Yiddish and German. A personal religious crisis pushed him away from Jewish custom and towards Kant, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and in 1896 he went to Vienna to study philosophy, art history and philology.
His philosophy of dialogue is a form of existentialism, and it reached well beyond philosophy into social psychology and religious thought. Ich und Du, known in English as I and Thou, appeared in 1923. Some researchers think he borrowed the idea of encounter from the psychiatrist Jacob L. Moreno, whose writings he met in Vienna around the First World War. From 1925 he also worked on translating the Hebrew Bible into German, and he retold Hasidic tales in an evocative, often poetic style. He had been drawn to the Hasidim in 1903, admiring how their faith infused daily life.
Buber was a cultural Zionist for nearly fifty years, but an unorthodox one. He clashed respectfully with Theodor Herzl, seeing Zionism as a path to social and spiritual renewal rather than a purely political project, and called his outlook Hebrew humanism. From the early 1920s he argued for a binational state shared by Jews and Arabs, helping to found the group Brit Shalom in 1925 and the Ihud party in 1942.
Politics repeatedly reshaped his life. Made an honorary professor at Frankfurt in 1930, he resigned as soon as Hitler took power in 1933 and set up a Jewish adult education office as Jews were shut out of public schooling. In 1938 he left for Jerusalem, where he taught anthropology and sociology at the Hebrew University, and after 1948 he was Israel's best-known philosopher. Nominated ten times for the Nobel Prize in Literature and seven times for the Peace Prize, he never won either. He died in Jerusalem on 13 June 1965.
Source: Martin Buber
