I AND THOU
Martin Buber
Translated by Ronald Gregor Smith
Copyright © 1958 Charles Scribner’s Sons
Copyright renewed © 1986 by Raphael Buber
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Books by Martin Buber
Between Man and Man
Eclipse of God
For the Sake of Heaven
Hasidism and Modern Man
I and Thou
Israel and the World
Knowledge of Man
The Legend of the Baal-Shem
Mamre, Essays in Religion
Meetings
On Judaism
On the Bible: Eighteen Studies
On Zion: The History of an Idea
The Original Meaning of Hasidism
Paths in Utopia
Pointing the Way
The Prophetic Faith
The Tales of Rabbi Nachman
Tales of the Hasidim
Ten Rungs: Hasidic Sayings
To Hallow this Life: An Anthology
Two Types of Faith
The Way of Response
The Writings of Martin Buber
TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE
TO THE SECOND EDITION
IT IS NOW ALMOST THIRTY-FIVE YEARS since Ich und Du first appeared in Germany, and over twenty years since the first English edition. Since that time Martin Buber’s work has become widely known in a great variety of fields. In the present book, as well as in later works which illustrate or add to it, he has something specific to say to many kinds of specialists: to educators, to doctors, to politicians, to sociologists, to biblical critics, even to poets, and certainly to theologians and philosophers.
In my original introduction I tried to express my awareness of a kind of revolutionary simplicity in the content of I and Thou. Many of the early readers shared that sense, so that some were even inclined to say that I and Thou, after all, was only saying what a candid reader might find in the primitive message of the New Testament, especially in the teaching of Jesus. There is this amount of truth in this view, that Buber, deeply immersed as he is in the concretion, the historical and dramatic forms of thinking characteristic of his Hebrew tradition, has been able, both in I and Thou and in many of his later writings, in some measure to recover and to express the unique force at work in the Christian tradition as well. The two traditions, the Jewish and the Christian, are indeed separated by a specific confession about certain historical events; but they are looking all the time at the same events. It is the point on the way, not the way itself, which is different. Moreover, the expectation characteristic of Buber’s writing is not dissolved in the Christian tradition, but is embodied in a faith which, though markedly eschatological, still has hope as one of its chief elements. In I and Thou the two traditions interact and illuminate one another in a remarkable and moving way.
But in my early attempt to introduce English-speaking readers to what Buber has to say I was in the main content to point simply to the effect Buber was already having upon theological thought—and, of course, at that time chiefly in Germany. The many printings of the English edition which have appeared since 1937 mention the work of Karl Heim, Friedrich Gogarten and Eberhard Grisebach. It is now possible to add the names of Paul Tillich and Karl Barth, though with these two writers the connexions are intricate, and certainly do not allow talk of any mere “influence” of Buber’s thought in a simple way. Buber’s own Nachwort to the volume Schriften über das dialogische Prinzip (Heidelberg, 1954), has a highly interesting comment on Barth’s position as expressed in his Kirchliche Dogmatik, in the second part of the “Doctrine of Creation.” To this might be added the remarkable recent essay by Barth, Die Menschlichkeit Gottes (“Theologische Studien,” Nr. 48, 1956). But a discussion of this connexion would take us too far. Nor need we mention here more than a few names of those in the Anglo-Saxon world who since then have explicitly acknowledged Buber’s influence: J. H. Oldham, M. Chaning-Pearce, John Baillie, H. H. Farmer, Reinhold Niebuhr, Sir Herbert Read. The list could be extended, and no doubt it could range into other fields, especially those of psychotherapy and education. Leslie H. Farber, for instance, the Chairman of the Faculty, The Washington School of Psychiatry, has recently paid a remarkable tribute (in Psychiatry, May 1957) to Buber’s work in its relation to the work of psychiatrists and social scientists.
The serious question, however, is not how far writers in various fields of interest have found Buber’s thought congenial and illuminating, how far they have really entered into his main concern, and how far they have simply made a certain use of his distinctions and categories: these matters, though interesting both in themselves and as material for a study of the shifting thought-forms of our time, must be left aside in this note. The serious question is how each reader is to approach Buber’s work, especially the present book, and what he is to expect of it.
This is certainly not a normal question in the approach to most writers; but it is necessary here. In my original introduction I spoke of Buber as a poet, and even as a mystic of a certain kind. I am still inclined to retain, with reservations, the description of “poet”; but the description of “mystic” is on the whole one that leads to too great a danger of misunderstanding, and should be rejected. Of course there are many kinds of mystics, as there are many kinds of poets. But in the end, it seems, there is no word to describe the remarkable combination in Buber’s writing of concrete imagery and situation with a sense of overtones, and at the same time with a kind of directness which lays a special claim upon the reader. It is this last element, the element of claim, calling for a specific response, which might make it possible to use of Buber’s work a word which has become fashionable in recent years—namely, “existentialist”; but this word, too, has many different associations. Certainly, in Buber’s work the connexion with the “father” of existentialism, Søren Kierkegaard, is clear and unmistakable; and the content of Buber’s experience, with its wide range—through nature and history, and including the “eternal Thou,” the Absolute Person—can offer a corrective to much truncated and emaciated existentialism in our time.
But however one may seek to define these elements, a reader of I and Thou must come with the question rising up in himself which is the question for Buber: how may I understand my experience of a relation with God? To speak of
