- Length
- 192 pagesKaufmann, I and Thou, Scribner, 1970
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
I and Thou
A hundred and fifty pages arguing that the difference between treating someone as a person and treating them as a thing is not a moral rule but two different ways of being in the world. It is the most widely read work of Jewish philosophy of the twentieth century and is quoted more often than it is understood.
- Date
- 1923
- Author
- Martin Buber
- Region
- Germany and later Jerusalem
- Language
- German
- 1937 English, Ronald Gregor Smith Established the title everyone knows; in copyright Attested
- 1970 English, Walter Kaufmann Argues that Thou is misleading and uses You; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Narrative — Argument carried by story, image or confession
- Transmission
- Translated — Reached its later readers in another language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years back to what it answers
- 77 years
Read far outside philosophy - in theology, education, psychotherapy and nursing - and often at the cost of the argument it contains.
What the book says
A short book, written in something close to prose poetry, arguing that there are two fundamentally different ways of standing toward anything and that the difference goes all the way down. In the first, I encounter something as an It: an object among objects, with properties, in a location, available for description, comparison and use. This is the attitude of science, of ordinary practical life, and of most of what we do, and Buber says nothing against it except that it cannot be everything. In the second, I meet a Thou: not a thing with qualities but a presence addressed wholly and in the present, in a relation where neither party is an object for the other. The two words are not names for kinds of entity but for the whole posture of a person, so the same tree, the same stranger, the same piece of work can be met either way. Buber insists that the Thou cannot be sustained - every Thou becomes an It again, and must - and that this is a sorrow rather than a defect. The last part argues that every particular meeting is a glimpse of an eternal Thou that can never become an It.
What it argues
That relation is prior to the things related, and that a philosophy starting from subjects and objects has already missed what matters. The I of I-It and the I of I-Thou are not the same I: a person constituted by handling objects is a different person from one constituted by meeting others, and Buber's claim is that we become ourselves in the second. The account is not a moral prescription. He is not saying that one ought to treat people as ends, in Kant's sense; he is describing two modes of encounter, one of which cannot be entered by deciding to and cannot be held. The eternal Thou is introduced as what every particular meeting points toward, which is where the book becomes theology and where readers most often part company with it.
What it answered
Kierkegaard on the solitary individual, and the objectifying tendency of a scientific age that Buber saw extending into how people treat each other. He is also writing out of a specific tradition: his work on Hasidic tales, which occupied him for decades, supplied the sense of encounter that this book generalises, and the argument is unintelligible without it.
How it argues
By assertion and image rather than by argument, which is the book's method and its main liability. There are no numbered claims, few examples that function as evidence, and a great deal of prose that works by cadence. Buber holds that the subject cannot be argued for in the ordinary way, because setting the relation out as a thesis would already convert it into an It - so the writing tries to enact what it describes. Readers who accept this find the book profound; those who do not find it evasive, and both reactions are common among philosophers.
The moment
Germany in 1923, between the wars, with Buber teaching Jewish religious philosophy at Frankfurt. He and Franz Rosenzweig began a translation of the Hebrew Bible into German that Buber finished alone forty years later. He was forbidden to teach by the Nazi regime in 1935, organised Jewish adult education under it until he left for Palestine in 1938, and spent his later years arguing, unsuccessfully and to considerable unpopularity, for a binational Arab-Jewish state.
How it travelled
Into practice more than into philosophy. The I-Thou distinction became foundational in twentieth-century theology, Christian as much as Jewish, and it entered psychotherapy through Carl Rogers, who debated Buber publicly in 1957; education through the literature on the teacher-pupil relation; and medicine and nursing through work on how patients are treated. Levinas took the encounter with another person as the starting point of ethics and did so partly against Buber, arguing that the relation is asymmetrical rather than mutual.
The strongest objection
That the central distinction cannot be tested and does not have to be. Buber offers no way of establishing when an I-Thou encounter has occurred, no criterion that would let two people disagree about a case and settle it, and no account of what would count against the claim that relation is prior to its terms - so the book asks to be recognised rather than assessed. That is a coherent position about a subject that may require it, and it means the argument cannot do the work in philosophy that it does in theology and in practice. Levinas' objection is different and sharper: the mutuality Buber describes may falsify the actual encounter, in which the other person makes a claim on me that I do not make on them.
Why read it
For the first part, which contains the distinction and takes an hour, and because the difference it names is one most people recognise immediately in their own lives. Use Kaufmann's translation and read his introduction; the familiar Thou is archaic in a way the German Du is not, and the misleading solemnity it gives the book has done real damage to its reception.
- First printed
- 1923
- First in English
- 1937
- Digitised
- No
The German title uses the familiar Du rather than the formal Sie, which English cannot render; Kaufmann's 1970 translation argues at length that Thou is misleading and uses You, and his introduction is a substantial essay on the problem.
Ronald Gregor Smith's 1937 English established the title everyone knows. Kaufmann's 1970 version is more accurate and less familiar; both are in copyright.
Where it stands
Live in the fields that adopted it and marginal in academic philosophy, where its refusal of argumentative form has kept it at a distance. Its concepts are in general circulation to a degree very few philosophical books achieve.
On quoting this book
The German is public domain in some jurisdictions but both English translations are in copyright, and the central term is rendered differently in each. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether it is philosophy or religious writing is disputed and Buber's method makes the question hard to settle. Whether the eternal Thou follows from the analysis of ordinary encounters or is added to it is argued by readers sympathetic to the first part. How much the translation of Du as Thou distorted the English-language reception is a real question that Kaufmann pressed hard. And Buber's political positions, particularly on binationalism, have been read both as following from this philosophy and as separate from it.