Martin Buber (1878—1965) - tbytahoe.org · Martin Buber (1878—1965) Martin Buber was a prominent twentieth century philosopher, religious thinker, political activist and

Martin Buber (1878—1965)Martin Buber was a prominent twentieth centuryphilosopher, religious thinker, political activist andeducator. Born in Austria, he spent most of his life inGermany and Israel, writing in German and Hebrew. Heis best known for his 1923 book, Ich und Du (I andThou), which distinguishes between “I-Thou” and “I-It”modes of existence. Often characterized as anexistentialist philosopher, Buber rejected the label,contrasting his emphasis on the whole person and

“dialogic” intersubjectivity with existentialist emphasis on “monologic” self-consciousness. In his later essays, he defines man as the being who faces an “other” andconstructs a world from the dual acts of distancing and relating. His writing challenges Kant,Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dilthey, Simmel and Heidegger, and he influencedEmmanuel Lévinas.

Buber was also an important cultural Zionist who promoted Jewish cultural renewal throughhis study of Hasidic Judaism. He recorded and translated Hasidic legends and anecdotes,translated the Bible from Hebrew into German in collaboration with Franz Rosenzweig, andwrote numerous religious and Biblical studies. He advocated a bi-national Israeli-Palestinianstate and argued for the renewal of society through decentralized, communitariansocialism. The leading Jewish adult education specialist in Germany in the 1930s, hedeveloped a philosophy of education based on addressing the whole person througheducation of character, and directed the creation of Jewish education centers in Germanyand teacher-training centers in Israel.

Most current scholarly work on Buber is done in the areas of pedagogy, psychology andapplied social ethics.

Table of Contents

Buber, Martin | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://www.iep.utm.edu/buber/

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Biography1. Philosophical Anthropology

Introductiona. “I-Thou” and “I-It”b. Distance and Relationc. Confirmation and Inclusiond. Good and Evile. Hindrances to Dialoguef.

2.

Religious WritingsHasidic Judaisma. Biblical Studiesb.

3.

Political Philosophy4. Philosophy of Education5. References and Further Reading

Generala. Mythologyb. Philosophical Worksc. Political and Cultural Writingd. Religious Studiese. Secondary Sourcesf.

6.

1. BiographyMordecai Martin Buber was born in Vienna in February 8, 1878. When he was three, hismother deserted him, and his paternal grandparents raised him in Lemberg (now, Lviv) untilthe age of fourteen, after which he moved to his father’s estate in Bukovina. Buber wouldonly see his mother once more, when he was in his early thirties. This encounter he describedas a “mismeeting” that helped teach him the meaning of genuine meeting. His grandfather,Solomon, was a community leader and scholar who edited the first critical edition of theMidrashim traditional biblical commentaries. Solomon’s estate helped support Buber until itwas confiscated during World War II.

Buber was educated in a multi-lingual setting and spoke German, Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish,English, French and Italian, with a reading knowledge of Spanish, Latin, Greek and Dutch.At the age of fourteen he began to be tormented with the problem of imagining andconceptualizing the infinity of time. Reading Kant’s Prolegomena to All Future Metaphysicshelped relieve this anxiety. Shortly after he became taken with Nietzsche’s Thus SpokeZarathustra, which he began to translate into Polish. However, this infatuation withNietzsche was short lived and later in life Buber stated that Kant gave him philosophic


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freedom, whereas Nietzsche deprived him of it.

Buber spent his first year of university studies at Vienna. Ultimately the theatre culture ofVienna and the give-and-take of the seminar format impressed him more than any of hisparticular professors. The winters of 1897-98 and 1898-99 were spent at the University ofLeipzig, where he took courses in philosophy and art history and participated in thepsychiatric clinics of Wilhelm Wundt and Paul Flecksig (see Schmidt’s Martin Buber’sFormative Years: From German Culture to Jewish Renewal, 1897-1909 for an analysis ofBuber’s life during university studies and a list of courses taken). He considered becoming apsychiatrist, but was upset at the poor treatment and conditions of the patients.

The summer of 1899 he went to the University of Zürich, where he met his wife PaulaWinkler (1877-1958, pen name Georg Munk). Paula was formally converted fromCatholicism to Judaism. They had two children, Rafael (1900-90) and Eva (1901-92).

From 1899-1901 Buber attended the University of Berlin, where he took several courses withWilhelm Dilthey and Georg Simmel. He later explained that his philosophy of dialogue was aconscious reaction against their notion of inner experience (Erlebnis) (see Mendes-Flohr’sFrom Mysticism to Dialogue: Martin Buber’s Transformation of German Social Thoughtfor an analysis of the influence of Dilthey and Simmel). During this time Buber gave lectureson the seventeenth century Lutheran mystic Jakob Böhme, publishing an article on him in1901 and writing his dissertation for the University of Vienna in 1904 “On the History of theProblem of Individuation: Nicholas of Cusa and Jakob Böhme.” After this he lived inFlorence from 1905-06, working on a habilitation thesis in art history that he nevercompleted.

In 1904 Buber came across Tzevaat Ha-RIBASH (The Testament of Rabbi Israel, the Baal-Shem Tov), a collection of sayings by the founder of Hasidism. Buber began to recordYiddish Hasidic legends in German, publishing The Tales of Rabbi Nachman, on the Rabbiof Breslov, in 1906, and The Legend of the Baal-Shem in 1907. The Legend of the Baal-Shemsold very well and influenced writers Ranier Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka and Herman Hesse.Buber was a habitual re-writer and editor of all of his writings, which went through manyeditions even in his lifetime, and many of these legends were later rewritten and included inhis later two volume Tales of the Hasidim (1947).

At the same time Buber emerged as a leader in the Zionist movement. Initially under theinfluence of Theodor Herzl, Buber’s Democratic Faction of the Zionist Party, butdramatically broke away from Herzl after the 1901 Fifth Zionist Congress when theorganization refused to fund their cultural projects. In contrast to Herzl’s territorial Zionism,


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Buber’s Zionism, like that of Ahad Ha’am, was based on cultural renewal. Buber put togetherthe first all-Jewish art exhibition in 1901, and in 1902 co-founded Jüdischer Verlag, apublishing house that produced collections of Jewish poetry and art, with poet BertholdFeiwel, graphic artist Ephraim Mosche Lilien and writer Davis Trietsche. This dedication tothe arts continued through the 1910s and 20s, as Buber published essays on theatre andhelped to develop both the Hellerau Experimental Theatre and the Dusseldorf Playhouse (seeBiemann and Urban’s works for Buber’s notion of Jewish Renaissance and Braiterman forBuber’s relation to contemporaneous artistic movements).

Buber was the editor of the weekly Zionist paper Die Welt in 1901 and of Die Gesellschaft, acollection of forty sociopsychological monographs, from 1905-12 (On Die Gesellschaft seeMendes-Flohr’s From Mysticism to Dialogue: Martin Buber’s Transformation of GermanSocial Thought). His influence as a Jewish leader grew with a series of lectures givenbetween 1909-19 in Prague for the Zionist student group Bar Kochba, later published as“Speeches on Judaism,” and was established by his editorship of the influential monthlyjournal Der Jude from 1916-24. He also founded, and from 1926-29 co-edited, Die Kreaturwith theologian Joseph Wittig and physician Viktor von Weizsäcker. Always active inconstructing dialogue across borders, this was the first high level periodical to be co-editedby members of the Jewish, Protestant and Catholic faiths. Buber continued inter-religiousdialogue throughout his life, corresponding for instance with Protestant theologians PaulTillich and Reinhold Niebuhr.

Despite his prolific publishing endeavors, Buber struggled to complete I and Thou. Firstdrafted in 1916 and then revised in 1919, it was not until he went through a self-styled three-year spiritual ascesis in which he only read Hasidic material and Descartes’ Discourse onMethod that he was able to finally publish this groundbreaking work in 1923. After I andThou, Buber is best known for his translation of the Hebrew Bible into German. Thismonumental work began in 1925 in collaboration with Franz Rosenzweig, but was notcompleted until 1961, more than 30 years after Rosenzweig’s death.

In 1923 Buber was appointed the first lecturer in “Jewish Religious Philosophy and Ethics” atthe University of Frankfurt. He resigned after Hitler came into power in 1933 and wasbanned from teaching until 1935, but continued to conduct Jewish-Christian dialogues andorganize Jewish education until he left for British Palestine in 1938. Initially Buber hadplanned to teach half a year in Palestine at Hebrew University, an institution he had helpedto conceive and found, and half a year in Germany. But Kristallnacht, the devastation of hislibrary in Heppenheim and charges of Reichsfluchtsteuer (Tax on Flight from the Reich),because he had not obtained a legal emigration permit, forced his relocation.


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Buber engaged in “spiritual resistance” against Nazism through communal education,seeking to give a positive basis for Jewish identity by organizing the teaching of Hebrew, theBible and the Talmud. He reopened an influential and prestigious Frankfurt center forJewish studies, Freies jüdisches Lehrhaus (Free Jewish House of Learning) in 1933 anddirected it until his emigration. In 1934 he created and directed the “Central Office forJewish Adult Education” for the Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden (NationalRepresentation of German Jews).

After giving well-attended talks in Berlin at the Berlin College of Jewish Education and theBerlin Philharmonie, Buber, who as one of the leading Jewish public figures in Germanybecame known as the “arch-Jew” by the Nazis, was banned from speaking in public or atclosed sessions of Jewish organizations. Despite extreme political pressure, he continued togive lectures and published several essays, including “The Question to the Single One” in1936, which uses an analysis of Kierkegaard to attack the foundations of totalitarianism (seeBetween Man and Man).

After his emigration Buber became Chair of the Department of Sociology of HebrewUniversity, which he held until his retirement in 1951. Continuing the educational work hehad begun in Germany, Buber established Beth Midrash l’Morei Am (School for theEducation of Teachers of the People) in 1949 and directed it until 1953. This preparedteachers to live and work in the hostels and settlements of the newly arriving emigrants.Education was based on the notion of dialogue, with small classes, mutual questioning andanswering, and psychological help for those coming from detention camps.

From the beginning of his Zionist activities Buber advocated Jewish-Arab unity in endingBritish rule of Palestine and a binational state. In 1925 he helped found Brit Shalom(Covenant of Peace) and in 1939 helped form the League for Jewish-Arab Rapprochementand Cooperation, which consolidated all of the bi-national groups. In 1942, the Leaguecreated a political platform that was used as the basis for the political party the Ichud (orIhud, that is, Union). For his work for Jewish-Arab parity Dag Hammarskjöld (thenSecretary-General of the United Nations) nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1959.

In addition to his educational and political activities, the 1940s and 50s saw an outburst ofmore than a dozen books on philosophy, politics and religion, and numerous public talksthroughout America and Europe. Buber received many awards, including the Goethe Prize ofthe University of Hamburg (1951), the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (1953), the firstIsraeli honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1961), and theErasmus Prize (1963). However, Buber’s most cherished honor was an informal studentcelebration of his 85 birthday, in which some 400 students from Hebrew University ralliedth


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outside his house and made him an honorary member of their student union.

On June 13, 1965 Martin Buber died. The leading Jewish political figures of the timeattended his funeral. Classes were cancelled and hundreds of students lined up to saygoodbye as Buber was buried in the Har-Hamenuchot cemetery in Jerusalem.

2. Philosophical Anthropology

a. IntroductionMartin Buber’s major philosophic works in English are the widely read I and Thou (1923), acollection of essays from the 1920s and 30s published as Between Man and Man, a collectionof essays from the 1950s published as The Knowledge of Man: Selected Essays and Goodand Evil: Two Interpretations (1952). For many thinkers Buber is the philosopher of I andThou and he himself often suggested one begin with that text. However, his later essaysarticulate a complex and worthy philosophical anthropology.

Buber called himself a “philosophical anthropologist” in his 1938 inaugural lectures asProfessor of Social Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, entitled “What isMan?” (in Between Man and Man). He states that he is explicitly responding to Kant’squestion “What is man?” and acknowledges in his biographic writings that he has never fullyshaken off Kant’s influence. But while Buber finds certain similarities between his thoughtand Kant’s, particularly in ethics, he explains in “Elements of the Interhuman” (in TheKnowledge of Man, 1957) that their origin and goal differ. The origin for Buber is alwayslived experience, which means something personal, affective, corporeal and unique, andembedded in a world, in history and in sociality. The goal is to study the wholeness of man,especially that which has been overlooked or remains hidden. As an anthropologist he wantsto observe and investigate human life and experience as it is lived, beginning with one’s ownparticular experience; as a philosophic anthropologist he wants to make these particularexperiences that elude the universality of language understood. Any comprehensive overviewof Buber’s philosophy is hampered by his disdain for systemization. Buber stated thatideologization was the worst thing that could happen to his philosophy and never argued forthe objectivity of his concepts. Knowing only the reality of his own experience, he appealed toothers who had analogous experiences.

Buber begins these lectures by asserting that man only becomes a problem to himself andasks “What is man?” in periods of social and cosmic homelessness. Targeting Kant andHegel, he argues that while this questioning begins in solitude, in order for man to find who


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he is, he must overcome solitude and the whole way of conceiving of knowledge and realitythat is based on solitude. Buber accuses Hegel of denigrating the concrete human person andcommunity in favor of universal reason and argues that man will never be at home orovercome his solitude in the universe that Hegel postulates. With its emphasis on history,Hegel locates perfection in time rather than in space. This type of future-oriented perfection,Buber argues, can be thought, but it cannot be imagined, felt or lived. Our relationship to thistype of perfection can only rest on faith in a guarantor for the future.

Instead, Buber locates realization in relations between creatures. Overcoming our solitude,which tends to oscillate between conceiving of the self as absorbed in the all (collectivism)and the all as absorbed into the self (solipsistic mysticism), we realize that we always exist inthe presence of other selves, and that the self is a part of reality only insofar as it is relational.In contrast to the traditional philosophic answers to “What is man?” that fixate on reason,self-consciousness or free will, Buber argues that man is the being who faces an “other”, anda human home is built from relations of mutual confirmation.

b. “I-Thou” and “I-It”Martin Buber’s most influential philosophic work, I and Thou (1923), is based on adistinction between two word-pairs that designate two basic modes of existence: I-Thou”(Ich-Du) and “I-It” (Ich-Es). The “I-Thou” relation is the pure encounter of one whole uniqueentity with another in such a way that the other is known without being subsumed under auniversal. Not yet subject to classification or limitation, the “Thou” is not reducible to spatialor temporal characteristics. In contrast to this the “I-It” relation is driven by categories of“same” and “different” and focuses on universal definition. An “I-It” relation experiences adetached thing, fixed in space and time, while an “I-Thou” relation participates in thedynamic, living process of an “other”.

Buber characterizes “I-Thou” relations as “dialogical” and “I-It” relations as “monological.”In his 1929 essay “Dialogue,” Buber explains that monologue is not just a turning away fromthe other but also a turning back on oneself (Rückbiegung). To perceive the other as an It isto take them as a classified and hence predictable and manipulable object that exists only asa part of one’s own experiences. In contrast, in an “I-Thou” relation both participants exist aspolarities of relation, whose center lies in the between (Zwischen).

The “I” of man differs in both modes of existence. The “I” may be taken as the sum of itsinherent attributes and acts, or it may be taken as a unitary, whole, irreducible being. The “I”of the “I-It” relation is a self-enclosed, solitary individual (der Einzige) that takes itself as thesubject of experience. The “I” of the “I-Thou” relation is a whole, focused, single person (der


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Einzelne) that knows itself as subject. In later writings Buber clarified that inner life is notexhausted by these two modes of being. However, when man presents himself to the worldhe takes up one of them.

While each of us is born an individual, Buber draws on the Aristotelian notion of entelechy,or innate self-realization, to argue that the development of this individuality, or sheerdifference, into a whole personality, or fulfilled difference, is an ongoing achievement thatmust be constantly maintained. In I and Thou, Buber explains that the self becomes eithermore fragmentary or more unified through its relationships to others. This emphasis onintersubjectivity is the main difference between I and Thou and Buber’s earlier Daniel:Dialogues on Realization (1913). Like I and Thou, Daniel distinguishes between two modesof existence: orienting (Rientierung), which is a scientific grasp of the world that linksexperiences, and realization (Verwirklichung), which is immersion in experience that leadsto a state of wholeness. While these foreshadow the “I-It” and “I-Thou” modes, neitherexpresses a relationship to a real “other”. In I and Thou man becomes whole not in relationto himself but only through a relation to another self. The formation of the “I” of the “I-Thou”relation takes place in a dialogical relationship in which each partner is both active andpassive and each is affirmed as a whole being. Only in this relationship is the other truly an“other”, and only in this encounter can the “I” develop as a whole being.

Buber identifies three spheres of dialogue, or “I Thou” relations, which correspond to threetypes of otherness. We exchange in language, broadly conceived, with man, transmit belowlanguage with nature, and receive above language with spirit. Socrates is offered as theparadigmatic figure of dialogue with man, Goethe, of dialogue with nature, and Jesus, ofdialogue with spirit. That we enter into dialogue with man is easily seen; that we also enterinto dialogue with nature and spirit is less obvious and the most controversial andmisunderstood aspect of I and Thou. However, if we focus on the “I-Thou” relationship as ameeting of singularities, we can see that if we truly enter into relation with a tree or cat, forinstance, we apprehend it not as a thing with certain attributes, presenting itself as a conceptto be dissected, but as a singular being, one whole confronting another.

Dialogue with spirit is the most difficult to explicate because Buber uses several differentimages for it. At times he describes dialogue with spirit as dialogue with the “eternal Thou,”which he sometimes calls God, which is eternally “other”. Because of this, I and Thou waswidely embraced by Protestant theologians, who also held the notion that no intermediarywas necessary for religious knowledge. Buber also argues that the precondition for a dialogiccommunity is that each member be in a perpetual relation to a common center, or “eternalThou”. Here the “eternal Thou” represents the presence of relationality as an eternal value.At other times, Buber describes dialogue with spirit as the encounter with form that occurs in


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moments of artistic inspiration or the encounter with personality that occurs in intensiveengagement with another thinker’s works. Spiritual address is that which calls us totranscend our present state of being through creative action. The eternal form can either bean image of the self one feels called to become or some object or deed that one feels called tobring into the world.

Besides worries over Buber’s description of man’s dialogue with nature and spirit, threeother main complaints have been raised against I and Thou. The first, mentioned by WalterKaufmann in the introduction to his translation of I and Thou, is that the language is overlyobscure and romantic, so that there is a risk that the reader will be aesthetically swept alonginto thinking the text is more profound than it actually is. Buber acknowledges that the textwas written in a state of inspiration. For this reason it is especially important to also read hislater essays, which are more clearly written and rigorously argued. E. la B. Cherbonnier notesin “Interrogation of Martin Buber” that every objective criticism of Buber’s philosophy wouldbelong, by definition, to the realm of “I-It”. Given the incommensurability of the two modes,this means no objective criticism of the “I-Thou” mode is possible. In his response Buberexplains that he is concerned to avoid internal contradiction and welcomes criticism.However, he acknowledges that his intention was not to create an objective philosophicsystem but to communicate an experience.

Finally, I and Thou is often criticized for denigrating philosophic and scientific knowledge byelevating “I-Thou” encounters above “I-It” encounters. It is important to note that Buber byno means renounces the usefulness and necessity of “I-It” modes. His point is rather toinvestigate what it is to be a person and what modes of activity further the development ofthe person. Though one is only truly human to the extent one is capable of “I-Thou”relationships, the “It” world allows us to classify, function and navigate. It gives us allscientific knowledge and is indispensable for life. There is a graduated structure of “I-It”relations as they approximate an “I-Thou” relationship, but the “I-Thou” remains contrastedto even the highest stage of an “I-It” relation, which still contains some objectification.However, each “Thou” must sometimes turn into an “It”, for in responding to an “other” webind it to representation. Even the “eternal Thou” is turned into an It for us when religion,ethics and art become fixed and mechanical. However, an “I-It” relation can be constituted insuch a way as to leave open the possibility of further “I-Thou” encounters, or so as to close offthat possibility.

c. Distance and RelationIn I and Thou Martin Buber discusses the a priori basis of the relation, presenting the “I-Thou” encounter as the more primordial one, both in the life of humans, as when an infant


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reaches for its mother, and in the life of a culture, as seen in relationships in primitivecultures. However, in the 1951 essay “Distance and Relation,” written in the midst of thePalestinian conflicts, he explains that while this may be true from an anthropologicalperspective, from an ontological one it must be said that distance (Urdistanz) is theprecondition for the emergence of relation (Beziehung), whether “I-Thou” or “I-It”. Primaldistance sets up the possibility of these two basic word pairs, and the between (Zwischen)emerges out of them. Humans find themselves primally distanced and differentiated; it is ourchoice to then thin or thicken the distance by entering into an “I-Thou” relation with an“other” or withdrawing into an “I-It” mode of existence.

Only man truly distances, Buber argues, and hence only man has a “world.” Man is the beingthrough whose existence what “is” becomes recognized for itself. Animals respond to theother only as embedded within their own experience, but even when faced with an enemy,man is capable of seeing his enemy as a being with similar emotions and motivations. Even ifthese are unknown , we are able to recognize that these unknown qualities of the other are“real” while our fantasies about the other are not. Setting at a distance is hence not theconsequence of a reflective, “It” attitude, but the precondition for all human encounters withthe world, including reflection.

Buber argues that every stage of the spirit, however primal, wishes to form and express itself.Form assumes communication with an interlocutor who will recognize and share in the formone has made. Distance and relation mutually correspond because in order for the world tobe grasped as a whole by a person, it must be distanced and independent from him and yetalso include him, and his attitude, perception, and relation to it. Consequently, one cannottruly have a world unless one receives confirmation of one’s own substantial andindependent identity in one’s relations with others.

Relation presupposes distance, but distance can occur without genuine relation. Buberexplains that distance is the universal situation of our existence; relation is personalbecoming in the situation. Relation presupposes a genuine other and only man sees the otheras other. This other withstands and confirms the self and hence meets our primal instinct forrelation. Just as we have the instinct to name, differentiate, and make independent a lastingand substantial world, we also have the instinct to relate to what we have made independent.Only man truly relates, and when we move away from relation we give up our specificallyhuman status.

d. Confirmation and InclusionConfirmation is a central theme of Martin Buber’s philosophic texts as well as his articles on


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education and politics. Buber argues that, while animals sometimes turn to humans in adeclaring or announcing mode, they do not need to be told that they are what they are and donot see whom they address as an existence independent of their own experience. But becauseman experiences himself as indeterminate, his actualization of one possibility over anotherneeds confirmation. In confirmation one meets, chooses and recognizes the other as asubject with the capacity to actualize one’s own potential. In order for confirmation to becomplete one must know that he is being made present to the other.

As becomes clear in his articles on education, confirmation is not the same as acceptance orunconditional affirmation of everything the other says or does. Since we are not borncompletely focused and differentiated and must struggle to achieve a unified personality,sometimes we have to help an “other” to actualize themselves against their own immediateinclination. In these cases confirmation denotes a grasp of the latent unity of the other andconfirmation of what the other can become. Nor does confirmation imply that a dialogic or“I-Thou” relation must always be fully mutual. Helping relations, such as educating orhealing, are necessarily asymmetrical.

In the course of his writing Buber uses various terms, such as “embrace” or “inclusion”(Umfassung), “imagining the real” (Realphantasie), and in reference to Kant, “synthesizingapperception,” to describe the grasp of the other that is necessary for confirmation and thatoccurs in an “I-Thou” relation. “Imagining the real” is a capacity; “making present” is anevent, the highest expression of this capacity in a genuine meeting of two persons. This formof knowledge is not the subsumption of the particularity of the other under a universalcategory. When one embraces the pain of another, this is not a sense of what pain is ingeneral, but knowledge of this specific pain of this specific person. Nor is this identificationwith them, since the pain always remains their own specific pain. Buber differentiatesinclusion from empathy. In empathy one’s own concrete personality and situation is lost inaesthetic absorption in the other. In contrast, through inclusion, one person lives through acommon event from the standpoint of another person, without giving up their own point ofview.

e. Good and EvilMartin Buber’s 1952 Good and Evil: Two Interpretations answers the question “What isman?” in a slightly different way than the essays in Between Man and Man and TheKnowledge of Man. Rather than focusing on relation, Good and Evil: Two Interpretationsemphasizes man’s experience of possibility and struggle to become actualized. Framing hisdiscussion around an analysis of psalms and Zoroastrian and Biblical myths, Buberinterprets the language of sin, judgment and atonement in purely existential terms that are


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influenced by Hasidic Judaism, Kant’s analysis of caprice (Willkür) and focused will (Wille),and Kierkegaard’s discussion of anxiety. Buber argues that good and evil are not two poles ofthe same continuum, but rather direction (Richtung) and absence of direction, or vortex(Wirbel). Evil is a formless, chaotic swirling of potentiality; in the life of man it isexperienced as endless possibility pulling in all directions. Good is that which forms anddetermines this possibility, limiting it into a particular direction. We manifest the good tothe extent we become a singular being with a singular direction.

Buber explains that imagination is the source of both good and evil. The “evil urge” in theimagination generates endless possibilities. This is fundamental and necessary, and onlybecomes “evil” when it is completely separated from direction. Man’s task is not to eradicatethe evil urge, but to reunite it with the good, and become a whole being. The first stage of evilis “sin,” occasional directionlessness. Endless possibility can be overwhelming, leading manto grasp at anything, distracting and busying himself, in order to not have to make a real,committed choice. The second stage of evil is “wickedness,” when caprice is embraced as adeformed substitute for genuine will and becomes characteristic. If occasional caprice is sin,and embraced caprice is wickedness, creative power in conjunction with will is wholeness.The “good urge” in the imagination limits possibility by saying no to manifold possibility anddirecting passion in order to decisively realize potentiality. In so doing it redeems evil bytransforming it from anxious possibility into creativity. Because of the temptation ofpossibility, one is not whole or good once and for all. Rather, this is an achievement thatmust be constantly accomplished.

Buber interprets the claim that in the end the good are rewarded and the bad punished as theexperience the bad have of their own fragmentation, insubstantiality and “non-existence.”Arguing that evil can never be done with the whole being, but only out of inner contradiction,Buber states that the lie or divided spirit is the specific evil that man has introduced intonature. Here “lie” denotes a self that evades itself, as manifested not just in a gap betweenwill and action, but more fundamentally, between will and will. Similarly, “truth” is notpossessed but is rather lived in the person who affirms his or her particular self by choosingdirection. This process, Buber argues, is guided by the presentiment implanted in each of usof who we are meant to become.

f. Hindrances to DialogueAlong with the evasion of responsibility and refusal to direct one’s possibilities described inGood and Evil: Two Interpretations (1952), Buber argues in “Elements of the Interhuman”(1957, in The Knowledge of Man) that the main obstacle to dialogue is the duality of “being”(Sein) and “seeming” (Schein). Seeming is the essential cowardice of man, the lying that


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frequently occurs in self-presentation when one seeks to communicate an image and make acertain impression. The fullest manifestation of this is found in the propagandist, who triesto impose his own reality upon others. Corresponding to this is the rise of “existentialmistrust” described in Buber’s 1952 address at Carnegie Hall, “Hope for this Hour” (inPointing the Way). Mistrust takes it for granted that the other dissembles, so that ratherthan genuine meeting, conversation becomes a game of unmasking and uncoveringunconscious motives. Buber criticizes Marx, Nietzsche and Freud for meeting the other withsuspicion and perceiving the truth of the other as mere ideology. Similarly, in his acceptancespeech for the 1953 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, “Genuine Dialogue and thePossibilities of Peace” (in Pointing the Way), Buber argues the precondition for peace isdialogue, which in turn rests on trust. In mistrust one presupposes that the other is likewisefilled with mistrust, leading to a dangerous reserve and lack of candor.

As it is a key component of his philosophic anthropology that one becomes a unified selfthrough relations with others, Buber was also quite critical of psychiatrist Carl Jung and thephilosophers of existence. He argued that subsuming reality under psychological categoriescuts man off from relations and does not treat the whole person, and especially objected toJung’s reduction of psychic phenomenon to categories of the private unconscious. Despitehis criticisms of Freud and Jung, Buber was intensely interested in psychiatry and gave aseries of lectures at the Washington School of Psychiatry at the request of Leslie H. Farber(1957, in The Knowledge of Man) and engaged in a public dialogue with Carl Rogers at theUniversity of Michigan (see Anderson and Cissna’s The Martin Buber-Carl Rogers Dialogue:A New Transcript With Commentary). In these lectures, as well as his 1951 introduction toHans Trüb’s Heilung aus der Begegnung (in English as “Healing Through Meeting” inPointing the Way), Buber criticizes the tendency of psychology to “resolve” guilt withoutaddressing the damaged relations at the root of the feeling. In addition to Farber, Rogers andTrüb, Buber’s dialogical approach to healing influenced a number of psychologists andpsychoanalysts, including Viktor von Weizsäcker, Ludwig Binswanger and Arie Sborowitz.

Often labeled an existentialist, Buber rejected the association. He asserted that while hisphilosophy of dialogue presupposes existence, he knew of no philosophy of existence thattruly overcomes solitude and lets in otherness far enough. Sartre in particular makes self-consciousness his starting point. But in an “I-Thou” relation one does not have a split self, amoment of both experience and self-reflection. Indeed, self-consciousness is one of the mainbarriers to spontaneous meeting. Buber explains the inability to grasp otherness asperceptual inadequacy that is fostered as a defensive mechanism in an attempt to not be heldresponsible to what is addressing one. Only when the other is accorded reality are we heldaccountable to him; only when we accord ourselves a genuine existence are we heldaccountable to ourselves. Both are necessary for dialogue, and both require courageous


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confirmation of oneself and the other.

In Buber's examples of non-dialogue, the twin modes of distance and relation lose balanceand connectivity, and one pole overshadows the other, collapsing the distinction betweenthem. For example, mysticism (absorption in the all) turns into narcissism (a retreat intomyself), and collectivism (absorption in the crowd) turns into lack of engagement withindividuals (a retreat into individualism). Buber identifies this same error in EmmanuelLévinas’ philosophy. While Lévinas acknowledged Buber as one of his main influences, thetwo had a series of exchanges, documented in Levinas & Buber: Dialogue and Difference, inwhich Buber argued that Lévinas had misunderstood and misapplied his philosophy. InBuber’s notion of subject formation, the self is always related to and responding to an“other”. But when Lévinas embraces otherness, he renders the other transcendent, so thatthe self always struggles to reach out to and adequately respond to an infinite other. Thisthrows the self back into the attitude of solitude that Buber sought to escape.

3. Religious Writings

a. Hasidic JudaismIn his 1952 book Eclipse of God, Martin Buber explains that philosophy usually begins with awrong set of premises: that an isolated, inquiring mind experiences a separate, exteriorworld, and that the absolute is found in universals. He prefers the religious, which incontrast, is founded on relation, and means the covenant of the absolute with the particular.Religion addresses whole being, while philosophy, like science, fragments being. Thisemphasis on relation, particularity and wholeness is found even in Buber’s earliest writings,such as his 1904 dissertation on the panentheistic German mystics Nicholas of Cusa andJakob Böhme, “On the History of the Problem of Individuation: Nicholas of Cusa and JakobBöhme.” Nicholas of Cusa postulates that God is a “coincidence of opposites” and that He“contracts” himself into each creature, so that each creature best approximates God byactualizing its own unique identity. Böhme similarly presents God as both transcendent andimmanent, and elaborates that perfection of individuality is developed through mutualinteraction.

The same elements that attracted Buber to Nicholas of Cusa and Böhme he found fulfilled inHasidism, producing collections of Hasidic legends and anecdotes (Tales of Rabbi Nachman,The Legend of the Baal-Shem and Tales of the Hasidim) as well as several commentaries(including On Judaism, The Origin and Meaning of Hasidism and The Way of Man:According to the Teaching of Hasidism). The Hebrew tsimtsum expresses God’s


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“contraction” into the manifold world so that relation can emerge. In distinction from theone, unlimited source, this manifold is limited, but has the choice and responsibility to effectthe unification (yihud) of creation. The restoration of unity is described as “the freeing of thesparks,” understood as the freeing of the divine element from difference through thehallowing of the everyday.

In addition to defining Hasidism by its quest for unity, Buber contrasts the Hasidicinsistence on the ongoing redemption of the world with the Christian belief that redemptionhas already occurred through Jesus Christ. Each is charged with the task to redeem their selfand the section of creation they occupy. Redemption takes place in the relation between manand creator, and is neither solely dependent on God’s grace nor on man’s will. No original sincan prohibit man from being able to turn to God. However, Buber is not an unqualifiedvoluntarist. As in his political essays, he describes himself as a realistic meliorist. One cannotsimply will redemption. Rather, each person’s will does what it can with the particularconcrete situation that faces it.

The Hebrew notions of kavana, or concentrated inner intention, and teshuva, or (re)turningto God with one’s whole being, express the conviction that no person or action is so sinfulthat it cannot be made holy and dedicated to God. Man hallows creation by being himselfand working in his own sphere. There is no need to be other, or to reach beyond the human.Rather, one’s ordinary life activities are to be done in such a way that they are sanctified andlead to the unification of the self and creation. The legends and anecdotes of the historiczaddikim (Hasidic spiritual and community leaders) that Buber recorded depict persons whoexemplify the hallowing of the everyday through the dedication of the whole person.

If hallowing is successful, the everyday is the religious, and there is no split between thepolitical, social or religious spheres. Consequently Buber rejects the notion that God is to befound through mystical ecstasy in which one loses one’s sense of self and is lifted out ofeveryday experience. Some commentators, such as Paul Mendes-Flohr and MauriceFriedman, view this as a turn away from his earlier preoccupation with mysticism in textssuch as Ecstatic Confessions (1909) and Daniel: Dialogues on Realization (1913). In laterwritings, such as “The Question to the Single One” (1936, in Between Man and Man) and“What is Common to All” (1958, in The Knowledge of Man), Buber argues that special statesof unity are experiences of self-unity, not identification with God, and that many forms ofmysticism express a flight from the task of dealing with the realities of a concrete situationand working with others to build a common world into a private sphere of illusion. Buber isespecially critical of Kierkegaard’s assertion that the religious transcends the ethical.Drawing on Hasidic thought, he argues that creation is not an obstacle on the way to God,but the way itself.


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Buber did not strictly follow Judaism’s religious laws. Worried that an “internal slavery” toreligious law stunts spiritual growth, he did not believe that revelation could ever be law-giving in itself, but that revelation becomes legislation through the self-contradiction of man.Principles require acting in a prescribed way, but the uniqueness of each situation andencounter requires each to be approached anew. He could not blindly accept laws but feltcompelled to ask continually if a particular law was addressing him in his particularsituation. While rejecting the universality of particular laws, this expresses a meta-principleof dialogical readiness.

Buber’s interpretation of Hasidism is not without its critics. Gershom Scholem in particularaccused Buber of selecting elements of Hasidism to confirm his “existentialist” philosophy.Scholem argued that the emphasis on particulars and the concrete that Buber so admireddoes not exist in Hasidism and that Buber’s erroneous impressions derive from his attentionto oral material and personalities at the expense of theoretical texts. In general Buber hadlittle historical or scholarly interest in Hasidism. He took Hasidism to be less a historicalmovement than a paradigmatic mode of communal renewal and was engaged by the dynamicmeaning of the anecdotes and the actions they pointed to. In a 1943 conversation withScholem, Buber stated that if Scholem’s interpretation of Hassidism was accurate, then hewould have labored for forty years over Hasidic sources in vain, for they would no longerinterest him.

b. Biblical StudiesIn addition to his work with Hasidism, Martin Buber also translated the Bible from Hebrewinto German with Franz Rosenzweig, and produced several religious analyses, includingKingship of God, Moses: The Revelation and the Covenant, On the Bible: Eighteen Studies,The Prophetic Faith and Two Types of Faith. Counter to religious thinkers such as KarlBarth and Emmanuel Lévinas, Buber argues that God is not simply a wholly transcendentother, but also wholly same, closer to each person than his or her own self. However, God canbe known only in his relation to man, not apart from it. Buber interprets religious texts, andthe Bible in particular, as the history of God’s relation to man from the perspective of man.Thus, it is not accurate to say that God changes throughout the texts, but that the theophany,the human experience of God, changes. Consequently, Buber characterizes his approach astradition criticism, which emphasizes experiential truth and uncovers historical themes, incontrast to source criticism, which seeks to verify the accuracy of texts.

When translating the Bible, Buber’s goal was to make the German version as close to theoriginal oral Hebrew as possible. Rather than smoothing over difficult or unclear passages,he preferred to leave them rough. One important method was to identify keywords


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(Leitworte) and study the linguistic relationship between the parts of the text, uncovering therepetition of word stems and same or similar sounding words. Buber also tried to wardagainst Platonizing tendencies by shifting from static and impersonal terms to active andpersonal terms. For instance, whereas kodesh had previously been translated “holy,” he usedthe term “hallowing” to emphasize activity. Similarly, God is not the “Being” but the“Existing,” and what had been rendered “Lord” became “I,” “Thou” and “He.”

Buber made two important distinctions between forms of faith in his religious studies. In the1954 essay “Prophecy, Apocalyptic, and the Historical Hour” (in Pointing the Way), hedistinguishes between “apocalyptic” approaches, which dualistically separate God fromworld, and regard evil as unredeemable, and “prophetic” stances, which preserve the unity ofGod with the world and promise the fulfillment of creation, allowing evil to find directionand serve the good. In the prophetic attitude one draws oneself together so that one cancontribute to history, but in the apocalyptic attitude one fatalistically resigns oneself. Thetension between these two tendencies is illustrated in his 1943 historical novel Gog andMagog: A Novel (also published as For the Sake of Heaven: A Hasidic Chronicle-Novel).

In Two Types of Faith (1951), Buber distinguishes between the messianism of Jesus and themessianism of Paul and John. While he had great respect for Jesus as a man, Buber did notbelieve that Jesus took himself to be divine. Jesus’ form of faith corresponds to emunah,faith in God’s continual presence in the life of each person. In contrast, the faith of Paul andJohn, which Buber labels pistis, is that God exists in Jesus. They have a dualistic notion offaith and action, and exemplify the apocalyptic belief in irredeemable original sin and theimpossibility of fulfilling God’s law. Buber accuses Paul and John of transforming myth,which is historically and biographically situated, into gnosis, and replacing faith as trust andopenness to encounter with faith in an image.

4. Political PhilosophyMartin Buber’s cultural Zionism, with its early emphasis on aesthetic development, wasinextricably linked to his form of socialism. Buber argues that it is an ever-present humanneed to feel at home in the world while experiencing confirmation of one’s functionalautonomy from others. The development of culture and aesthetic capacities is not an end initself but the precondition for a fully actualized community, or “Zionism of realization”(Verwirklichungszionismus). The primary goal of history is genuine community, which ischaracterized by an inner disposition toward a life in common. This refutes the commonmisconception that an “I-Thou” relation is an exclusive affective relation that cannot workwithin a communal setting. Buber critiques collectivization for creating groups by atomizingindividuals and cutting them off from one another. Genuine community, in contrast, is a


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group bound by common experiences with the disposition and persistent readiness to enterinto relation with any other member, each of whom is confirmed as a differentiated being.He argues that this is best achieved in village communes such as the Israeli kibbutzim.

In his 1947 study of utopian socialism, Paths in Utopia, and 1951 essay “Society and theState” (in Pointing the Way), Buber distinguished between the social and political principles.The political principle, exemplified in the socialism of Marx and Lenin, tends towardscentralization of power, sacrificing society for the government in the service of an abstract,universal utopianism. In contrast, influenced by his close friend, anarchist Gustav Landauer,Buber postulates a social principle in which the government serves to promote community.Genuine change, he insists, does not occur in a top-down fashion, but only from a renewal ofman’s relations. Rather than ever-increasing centralization, he argues in favor of federalismand the maximum decentralization compatible with given social conditions, which would bean ever-shifting demarcation line of freedom.

Seeking to retrieve a positive notion of utopianism, Buber characterizes genuine utopiansocialism as the ongoing realization of the latent potential for community in a concrete place.Rather than seeking to impose an abstract ideal, he argues that genuine community growsorganically out of the topical and temporal needs of a given situation and people. Rejectingeconomic determinism for voluntarism, he insists that socialism is possible to the extent thatpeople will a revitalization of communal life. Similarly, his Zionism is not based on thenotion of a final state of redemption but an immediately attainable goal to be worked for.This shifts the notion of utopian socialism from idealization to actualization and equality.

Despite his support of the communal life of the kibbutzim, Buber decried European methodsof colonization and argued that the kibbutzim would only be genuine communities if theywere not closed off from the world. Unlike nationalism, which sees the nation as an end initself, he hoped Israel would be more than a nation and would usher in a new mode of being.The settlers must learn to live with Arabs in a vital peace, not merely next to them in apseudo-peace that he feared was just a prelude to war. As time went on, Buber becameincreasingly critical of Israel, stating that he feared a victory for the Jews over the Arabswould mean a defeat for Zionism.

Buber’s criticism of Israeli policies led to many public debates with its political leaders, inparticular David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister. In a relatively early essay, “TheTask” (1922), Buber argued that the politicization of all life was the greatest evil facing man.Politics inserts itself into every aspect of life, breeding mistrust. This conviction strengthenedover time, and in his 1946 essay “A Tragic Conflict” (in A Land of Two Peoples) he describedthe notion of a politicized “surplus” conflict. When everything becomes politicized, imagined


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conflict disguises itself as real, tragic conflict. Buber viewed Ben-Gurion as representative ofthis politicizing tendency. Nevertheless, Buber remained optimistic, believing that thegreater the crisis the greater the possibility for an elemental reversal and rebirth of theindividual and society.

Buber’s relationship to violence was complicated. He argued that violence does not lead tofreedom or rebirth but only renewed decline, and deplored revolutions whose means werenot in alignment with their end. Afraid that capital punishment would only create martyrsand stymie dialogue, he protested the sentencing of both Jewish and Arab militants andcalled the execution of Nazi Adolf Eichmann a grave mistake. However, he insisted that hewas not a pacifist and that, sometimes, just wars must be fought. This was most clearlyarticulated in his 1938 exchange of letters with Gandhi, who compared Nazi Germany to theplight of Indians in South Africa and suggested that the Jews use satyagraha, or non-violent“truth-force.” Buber was quite upset at the comparison of the two situations and replied thatsatyagraha depends upon testimony. In the face of total loss of rights, mass murder andforced oblivion, no such testimony was possible and satyagraha was ineffective (seePointing the Way and The Letters of Martin Buber: A Life of Dialogue).

5. Philosophy of EducationIn addition to his work as an educator, Martin Buber also delivered and published severalessays on philosophy of education, including “Education,” given in 1925 in Heidelberg (inBetween Man and Man). Against the progressive tone of the conference, Buber argued thatthe opposite of compulsion and discipline is communion, not freedom. The student is neitherentirely active, so that the educator can merely free his or her creative powers, nor is thestudent purely passive, so that the educator merely pours in content. Rather, in theirencounter, the educative forces of the instructor meet the released instinct of the student.The possibility for such communion rests on mutual trust.

The student trusts in the educator, while the educator trusts that the student will take theopportunity to fully develop herself. As the teacher awakens and confirms the student’sability to develop and communicate herself, the teacher learns to better encounter theparticular and unique in each student. In contrast to the propagandist, the true educatorinfluences but does not interfere. This is not a desire to change the other, but rather to letwhat is right take seed and grow in an appropriate form. Hence they have a dialogicalrelationship, but not one of equal reciprocity. If the instructor is to do the job it cannot be arelationship between equals.

Buber explains that one cannot prepare students for every situation, but one can guide them


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to a general understanding of their position and then prepare them to confront everysituation with courage and maturity. This is character or whole person education. Oneeducates for courage by nourishing trust through the trustworthiness of the educator. Hencethe presence and character of the educator is more important than the content of what isactually taught. The ideal educator is genuine to his or her core, and responds with his or her“Thou”, instilling trust and enabling students to respond with their “Thou”. Buberacknowledges that teachers face a tension between acting spontaneously and acting withintention. They cannot plan for dialogue or trust, but they can strive to leave themselvesopen for them.

In “Education and World-View” (1935, in Pointing the Way), Buber further elaborates that inorder to prepare for a life in common, teachers must educate in such a way that bothindividuation and community are advanced. This entails setting groups with different world-views before each other and educating, not for tolerance, but for solidarity. An education ofsolidarity means learning to live from the point of view of the other without giving up one’sown view. Buber argues that how one believes is more important than what one believes.Teachers must develop their students to ask themselves on what their world-view stands,and what they are doing with it.

6. References and Further Reading

a. General“Interrogation of Martin Buber.” Conducted by M.S. Friedman. Philosophic Interrogations. Ed. S. and B.

Rome. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964.Questions by more than 50 major thinkers and Buber's responses.

Martin Buber Werkausgabe. Ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr and Peter Schäffer. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Ver-lagshaus, 2001.

A critical 21-volume compilation of the complete writings of Buber in German, designed to replace Buber’s self-edited Werke.

The Letters of Martin Buber: A Life of Dialogue. Ed. Nahum N. Glatzer and Paul Mendes-Flohr. Trans.Richard and Clara Winston and Harry Zohn. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1996.

Includes letters to his wife and family as well as many notable thinkers, including Gandhi, Walter Benjamin, Al-bert Einstein, Herman Hesse, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Gustav Landauer and Dag Hammarskjöld.

The Martin Buber Reader. Ed. Asher Biemann. New York: Macmillan, 2002.The Philosophy of Martin Buber: The Library of Living Philosophers, 12. Ed. Paul A. Schilpp and Mau-

rice Friedman. La Salle, I.L.: Open Court, 1967.Large collection of essays by Gabriel Marcel, Charles Hartshorne, Emmanuel Lévinas, Hugo Bergman, JeanWahl, Ernst Simon, Walter Kaufmann and many others, with Buber’s replies and autobiographical statements.

Werke. 3 vols. Vol I: Schriften zur Philosophie. Vol 2: Schriften zur Bible. Vol. 3: Schriften zur Chassidis-


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mus. Munich and Heidelberg: Kösel Verlag and Lambert Schneider, 1962-63.Comprehensive collection (more than four thousand pages long), edited by Buber. Lacks some very early andvery late essays, which may be found in the Martin Buber Archives of the Jewish National and University Li-brary at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

b. MythologyTales of Rabbi Nachman. Trans. Maurice Friedman. Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 1988.The Legend of the Baal-Shem. Trans. Maurice Friedman. London: Routledge, 2002.Tales of the Hasidim (The Early Masters and The Later Masters). New York: Schocken Books, 1991.Gog and Magog: A Novel. Trans. Ludwig Lewisohn. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1999.Previously published as For the Sake of Heaven: A Hasidic Chronicle-Novel.

c. Philosophical WorksBetween Man and Man. Trans. Ronald Gregor-Smith. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Good introduction to Buber’s thought that includes “Dialogue,” “What is Man?” “The Question to the SingleOne” (on Kierkegaard), and lectures on education.

Daniel: Dialogues on Realization. Trans. Maurice S. Friedman. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965.Early work, important for understanding the development to I and Thou.

Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation Between Religion and Philosophy. Trans. Maurice Friedman. At-lantic Highlands, N.J.: International Humanities Press, 1988.

Includes critiques of Heidegger, Sartre and Jung.

Good and Evil: Two Interpretations. Pt. 1: Right and Wrong, trans. R.G. Smith. Pt. 2: Images of Goodand Evil, trans. M. Bullock. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1997.

Very helpful to an understanding of Buber’s moral philosophy and relation to existentialism.

I and Thou. Trans. Ronald Gregor-Smith. New York: Scribner, 1984.I and Thou. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.The Knowledge of Man: Selected Essays. Trans. Maurice Friedman and Ronald Gregor-Smith. Amherst,

N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1998.Mature and technical, with the important “Distance and Relation” and lectures given for the Washington Schoolof Psychiatry.

d. Political and Cultural WritingA Land of Two Peoples: Martin Buber on Jews and Arabs. Ed. Paul R. Mendes-Flohr. Chicago: Univer-

sity of Chicago Press, 2005.Israel and the World: Essays in a Time of Crisis. New York: Schocken Books, 1963.On Zion: The History of an Idea. Trans. Stanley Godman. New York: Schocken Books, 1986.Paths in Utopia. Trans. R. F. Hull. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1996.

History and defense of utopian socialism, including analyses of Marx, Lenin, Landauer and kibbutzim.

Pointing the Way: Collected Essays. Ed. and trans. Maurice Friedman. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Human-ities Press, 1988.


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Mix of early and late essays, including essays on theatre, Bergson and Gandhi, and “Education and World-View,” “Society and the State,” “Hope for the Hour” and “Genuine Dialogue and the Possibilities of Peace.”

The First Buber: Youthful Zionist Writings of Martin Buber. Trans. Gilya G. Schmidt. Syracuse, N.Y.:Syracuse University Press: 1999.

e. Religious StudiesEcstatic Confessions: The Heart of Mysticism. Ed. Paul R. Mendes-Flohr. San Francisco: Harper & Row,

1985.Hasidism and Modern Man. Ed. and trans. Maurice S. Friedman. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958.Kingship of God. Trans. Richard W. Scheimann. New York: Harper, 1973.Moses: The Revelation and the Covenant. Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 1998.On Judaism. Ed. Nahum Glatzer. New York: Schocken Books, 1967.On the Bible: Eighteen Studies. Ed. Nahum Glatzer. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.The Origin and Meaning of Hasidism. Ed. and trans. Maurice Friedman. New York: Horizon Press,

1960.The Prophetic Faith. New York: Collier Books, 1985.The Way of Man: According to the Teaching of Hasidism. London: Routledge, 2002.

Best short introduction to Buber’s interpretation of Hasidism.

Two Types of Faith. Trans. Norman P. Goldhawk. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2003.

f. Secondary SourcesAnderson, Rob and Kenneth N. Cissna. The Martin Buber-Carl Rogers Dialogue: A New Transcript

With Commentary. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997.Atterton, Peter, Mathew Calarco, and Maurice Friedman, eds. Lévinas & Buber: Dialogue and Differ-

ence. Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press, 2004.Mix of primary sources, commentaries and argumentative essays.

Biemann, Asher D. Inventing New Beginnings: On the Idea of Renaissance in Modern Judaism. Stan-ford, C.A.: Stanford University Press, 2009.

Details Buber’s notions of Jewish Renaissance and aesthetic education.

Braiterman, Zachary. The Shape of Revelation: Aesthetics and Modern Jewish Thought. Stanford, C.A.:Stanford University Press, 2007.

Studies the relation between the philosophy of Buber and Rosenzweig and the aesthetics of early German mod-ernism, especially the transition from Jugendstil to Expressionism.

Friedman, Maurice S. Encounter on the Narrow Ridge: A Life of Martin Buber. New York: ParagonHouse, 1991.

Biography largely condensed from Martin Buber's Life and Work.

Friedman, Maurice S. Martin Buber's Life and Work. 3 vols. Vol 1: The Early Years, 1878-1923. Vol. 2:The Middle Years, 1923-1945. Vol 3: The Later Years, 1945-1965. Detroit: Wayne State UniversityPress, 1988.

Mendes-Flohr, Paul. From Mysticism to Dialogue: Martin Buber’s Transformation of German Social


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Thought. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989.Explores the influence of Landauer, Dilthey and Simmel, and Buber’s work as the editor of Die Gesellschaft.

Schmidt, Gilya G. Martin Buber’s Formative Years: From German Culture to Jewish Renewal,1897-1909. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995.

Buber’s early intellectual influences, life during university studies and turn to Zionism.

Scholem, Gershom. “Martin Buber’s Conception of Judaism,” in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: SelectedEssays. Ed. Werner Dannhauser. New York: Schocken, 1937.

Shapira, Avraham. Hope for Our Time: Key Trends in the Thought of Martin Buber. Trans. Jeffrey M.Green. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999.

Systematic presentation of Buber’s main philosophic concepts.

Theunissen, Michael. The Other: Studies in the Social Ontology of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Bu-ber. Cambridge, M.A.: MIT Press, 1984.

Urban, Martina. Aesthetics of Renewal: Martin Buber’s Early Representation of Hasidism as Kulturkri-tik. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Discusses Buber’s hermeneutics, notions of anthology and Jewish renewal, and phenomenological presentationof Hasidism.

Author InformationSarah ScottEmail: [email protected] New School for Social ResearchU. S. A.


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Martin Buber (1878—1965) - tbytahoe.org · Martin Buber (1878—1965) Martin Buber was a prominent twentieth century philosopher, religious thinker, political activist and