Quick Answer
One idea, stated in a hundred difficult pages, that permanently changes how you notice your own behaviour. Buber's claim is that there are two ways of standing toward anything: using and classifying it, or meeting it whole. Neither is the property of the thing. Both are ways you can be. And the second cannot be manufactured, which makes this an unusually honest book and a frustrating one, because it hands you no technique at all.
Key Takeaways
- Two modes of relation, not two kinds of thing. The same person can be met either way.
- I-It is necessary and not the enemy. The problem is a life with nothing else in it.
- It cannot be willed, which is either the deepest point in the book or its central evasion.
- Read Kaufmann's translation and understand why he refused the word Thou.
- The prose is oracular and resists summary on purpose. Expect to reread.
🕑 14 min read
What This Book Is
Ich und Du was published in German in 1923. It is roughly a hundred pages, divided into three parts, with no chapters in the ordinary sense, no footnotes, and almost no argument in the form philosophers usually recognise.
Buber is not building a case. He is trying to make you notice something you already do, constantly, without having a name for it, and the whole book is a sustained attempt to get that noticing to happen.
The claim is simple to state and nearly impossible to hold onto: everything you encounter, you encounter in one of two ways, and which way you choose determines what the thing is to you, and also what you are while you are doing it.
On length and difficulty: this is one of the shortest genuinely difficult books in modern philosophy. The difficulty is not vocabulary and not background knowledge. It is that Buber writes in a compressed, incantatory style that refuses to explain itself, and a reader looking for definitions will not find them.
Who Martin Buber Was
Born in Vienna in 1878, largely raised by his grandfather in Galicia, a scholar of Jewish tradition. Buber studied philosophy and art history, became involved early with cultural Zionism, and spent years collecting and retelling the stories of the Hasidic masters, which he published in versions that made them available to a European readership for the first time.
He translated the Hebrew Bible into German with Franz Rosenzweig, a project that occupied decades and was concerned above all with recovering the spoken, immediate quality of the text.
He taught in Frankfurt until the Nazis forced him out, ran Jewish adult education under the regime for several years, and emigrated to Jerusalem in 1938, where he taught at the Hebrew University.
He argued for the rest of his life for a binational state and for Jewish and Arab coexistence, a position that made him unpopular in most directions. That is worth knowing when reading him on relation, because he applied the idea where it cost him something.
The Two Primary Words
Buber's opening move is grammatical and strange. He says the world is twofold for us because our attitude is twofold, and that this attitude is expressed in two primary words, which are not single words but word pairs.
One is I-Thou. The other is I-It.
The crucial and easily missed point is that neither half stands alone. There is no bare I. The I of I-Thou is a different I from the I of I-It, because who you are in a given moment is constituted by how you are relating.
In I-It, you experience. You observe, describe, compare, categorise, predict, use. The other stands over against you as an object with properties, and you remain intact, at a distance, unchanged by the transaction.
In I-Thou, you meet. Nothing is held back, nothing is being extracted, and no description is being formed. The relation is mutual and it changes you, because you are in it rather than in front of it.
Not Two Kinds of Thing
Everything depends on getting this right, and most summaries get it wrong.
There is no category of Thou-objects and no category of It-objects. A tree can be met either way. So can a piece of music. So can a person, and this is where it bites: another human being is not automatically a Thou. You can spend a whole marriage in I-It, relating to a person as a set of functions, habits and reliabilities, and never once meet them.
Conversely, Buber insists the tree can be met as Thou, not by attributing a soul to it or pretending it speaks, but by standing before it in a way that does not reduce it to specimen, timber or scenery.
The mode belongs to the relation. It is a decision you make, or fail to make, over and over, and largely without noticing.
Test it against your own week. Think of a conversation you had where you were, the entire time, working out what to say next, or how you were coming across, or what you needed from the other person. Then think of a conversation, probably rarer, where none of that was running and you simply were not separate from what was happening. Both were conversations with a human being. Buber's whole point is that they were not the same kind of event, and that you can tell the difference instantly, from the inside, without any theory at all.
Why I-It Is Not the Villain
The most common distortion of this book turns it into a moral scheme in which I-Thou is good and I-It is a failure. Buber says the opposite, plainly.
I-It is necessary. Without it there is no knowledge, no memory, no planning, no medicine, no engineering, no ordinary competence at anything. A surgeon who could not regard a body as an object would be useless. The whole enterprise of science lives here, and Buber does not sneer at it.
He also says something harder: every Thou must become an It. The encounter cannot be sustained. It passes, the person or thing settles back into being an object of your knowledge, and this is not a failure of nerve or attention. It is the structure of the thing. What was met becomes what is known, and what is known is an It.
The danger he identifies is not the existence of the It-world but its expansion until nothing else remains available. A person can live entirely there, competently, successfully, and never notice what is missing, and Buber thought whole societies could organise themselves that way.
The Part That Frustrates Everyone
Here is the hinge, and it is the reason this book cannot be turned into a workshop.
The encounter cannot be produced. It cannot be sought, engineered, practised into being or achieved by preparation, because seeking is an instrumental posture. The moment you are trying to have an I-Thou encounter in order to get something, including in order to be a person who has them, you have adopted exactly the stance that forecloses it.
What Buber offers instead is a formulation that has annoyed readers for a century: the Thou meets me through grace, and it is not found by seeking, and yet my whole being must be involved. Both halves at once. Nothing you can do will produce it, and it will not happen if you are passive.
This is either the most honest thing in the book or its central evasion, and reasonable readers land on both sides.
The case for honesty: it is simply true that the moments in life when you were completely present were not the ones you scheduled, and that trying to be spontaneous is self-defeating in a way that has nothing to do with mysticism.
The case against: a claim that cannot fail is doing no work. If encounter cannot be sought, then no advice can be given, no practice recommended, and no one can ever be shown to have got it wrong.
The Three Spheres
Buber distinguishes three domains in which relation occurs, and the middle one is the least discussed.
With nature, relation happens below the level of speech. The tree does not answer, and Buber refuses to say it does, but he insists something reciprocal occurs that is not merely projection.
With human beings, relation happens in speech. This is the sphere everyone quotes, and it is where the book has had its greatest practical influence.
With what he calls spiritual beings, relation happens above speech. This is the least clear part of the book. He seems to mean the encounter with a form that demands to be made: the work an artist meets before it exists, which addresses them and requires an answer in paint or words or music. The artist does not invent it and does not simply receive it.
The Eternal Thou
The third part turns to God, and Buber's definition is characteristically stripped down: the eternal Thou is the Thou that by its nature cannot become an It.
Every other encounter fades into knowledge. This one, he says, does not, because there is nothing there to be objectified. Which means that the moment you have a doctrine about God, a description, a set of attributes, you are no longer in relation with God but in possession of a concept.
His further claim is the one that gives the book its shape. The extended lines of every particular relation, he says, meet in the eternal Thou. Every genuine encounter with anything is already a partial encounter with God, not as a symbol or a stepping stone, but because that is what encounter is.
The consequence he draws is anti-mystical in an important sense, and it separates him sharply from the traditions of withdrawal. You do not find God by turning away from the world toward an inner absolute. You find God in the full turning toward whatever is in front of you. Absorption into the divine is not the goal, because absorption dissolves the two parties and relation requires two.
The Hasidic Soil
The book names no tradition and belongs to one.
Buber had spent years with the Hasidic material, and the central Hasidic instinct, that holiness is available in the ordinary act and the ordinary encounter rather than only in study or ascetic withdrawal, runs through every page of this book with the vocabulary removed.
The Hasidic stories he collected are full of masters who are found doing something unremarkable, and whose whole teaching is contained in the quality of attention they bring to it. I and Thou is that instinct rendered as philosophy for readers who would never open a book of tales.
It is worth reading his Hasidic collections alongside this, because they show what the abstract idea looked like in the practice it came from. Scholars have criticised those retellings as more Buber than source, which is fair and does not change their usefulness here.
Thou, You, and Why It Matters
The English title has caused a century of misunderstanding, and this is worth several minutes of your attention before you buy an edition.
German has two words for you. Sie is formal, used with strangers and in professional life. Du is intimate, used with family, close friends, children and lovers. Buber wrote Ich und Du, and every German reader hears the familiar form: the word you use with someone you are close to.
English lost that distinction. Thou survives only in the King James Bible and in old poetry, and it now sounds archaic, lofty and religious, which is close to the opposite of what Du conveys.
The first English translation used Thou and the phrase entered the language. Walter Kaufmann's 1970 translation refused it and used I-You, arguing at length in his prologue that Thou makes the book sound solemn and churchy when Buber was pointing at something intimate and ordinary.
Kaufmann is right about the German. He is also fighting a phrase that had already won. The practical advice: buy Kaufmann's translation for its accuracy and its excellent prologue, and understand that when anyone says I-Thou they mean what Buber meant by Du.
The Serious Objections
Three, and they are not trivial.
The prose. Buber writes in a lofty, aphoristic register that many readers find beautiful and many find evasive. He rarely defines a term, rarely argues for a claim, and frequently restates rather than develops. Whether this is appropriate to the subject, since a book about non-instrumental encounter can hardly proceed instrumentally, or whether it is a way of avoiding accountability, is a genuine question.
The symmetry. Emmanuel Levinas, who admired Buber, argued that the mutuality is wrong. The ethical relation, on his account, is asymmetrical: the other person addresses me and puts me under obligation before any question of reciprocity arises, and describing this as a meeting of equals softens exactly what is demanding about it. This is the most substantial philosophical objection to the book.
The slogan problem. I-Thou has become a phrase people use to mean roughly authentic connection, deployed in management training and relationship advice with none of the structure that made it interesting. Buber cannot be blamed for this, and any reader will have to work past the degraded version to reach the argument.
What It Changed
The reach of this short book is remarkable.
Humanistic and existential psychotherapy took from it the idea that the therapeutic relationship is itself the agent of change rather than the container for a technique. The philosophy of education took the argument that a student met as an It cannot be educated in any deep sense. Medical ethics and the enormous literature on the doctor-patient relationship run directly out of the observation that a person can be treated expertly and never once addressed.
Interfaith work adopted the framework wholesale, because it offers a way of meeting another tradition that is neither conversion nor comparison.
And a great deal of ordinary contemporary vocabulary about being present with someone, or really seeing them, or treating people as ends rather than means, has passed through this book on its way to the language.
How to Actually Read It
Slowly, and not straight through.
Ten pages a sitting is enough. The prose is dense in a way that punishes momentum, and reading fast produces the sensation of having understood without the substance of it.
Read Kaufmann's prologue first. It is long, opinionated and the best available guide to what the book is doing and what the translation choices cost.
Expect the third part, on the eternal Thou, to be the hardest, and do not treat failing to follow it as a failure. Most readers get the most from the first part and return to the third years later.
And read it a second time. This is one of the small number of books where the second reading is a different book, because the first one is spent working out what the terms mean and only the second can attend to what is being said with them.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you have ever noticed the difference between talking to someone and being with them, and wanted a way to think about it that is neither sentimental nor psychological.
Read it if you work with people professionally, in therapy, teaching, medicine or care, because the book names the failure mode of every such profession precisely.
Read it alongside the Jewish mystical material it grew out of, and after or alongside Heidegger if you want the contrast between two very different responses to the same century.
Do not read it for technique, for a practice, or for a system. There is none, on principle, and a reader who needs one will finish it annoyed.
The most usable thing in Buber is not the encounter, which you cannot arrange, but the noticing, which you can. Once you have the distinction you start catching yourself: in the middle of a conversation, realising you have been assembling a response rather than listening; realising you have been managing an impression; realising that the person in front of you has become a problem to be handled. That catching does not produce the meeting. It does clear the thing that was in the way, and Buber is careful to say that this is the only part of it that belongs to you. Everything after is not yours to arrange, and the discipline is entirely in stopping the interference rather than in generating the result.
A hundred pages, one idea, and no technique whatsoever.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Several English translations exist and our reasons for preferring Kaufmann's are set out above.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is I and Thou about?
Martin Buber's 1923 argument that there are two fundamentally different ways of standing toward anything, which he calls I-Thou and I-It, and that the person doing the standing is not the same in each. It is a book about relation rather than about objects or about the self.
What is the difference between I-Thou and I-It?
In I-It you experience something: you observe it, classify it, use it, hold it at a distance as an object with properties. In I-Thou you meet something with your whole being, without reserve and without using it for anything. The first is knowledge about. The second is encounter.
Is I-It bad?
No, and this is the most common misreading. Buber is explicit that I-It is necessary, that no one could live without it, and that all science, planning and ordinary competence depend on it. The problem is not its existence but a life in which it is the only mode available.
Can you make an I-Thou encounter happen?
Buber says no. It cannot be produced by technique or sought as an outcome, because the seeking is itself an instrumental posture and therefore an I-It stance. You can only make yourself available to it, which is a genuinely awkward position for anyone wanting a practice.
What is the eternal Thou?
Buber's term for God, defined by a single property: the Thou that never becomes an It. Every particular encounter, he argues, is a glimpse along a line that meets in the eternal Thou, so relation with God is not a separate activity but what genuine relation with anything already participates in.
Who was Martin Buber?
An Austrian-born Jewish philosopher, 1878 to 1965, who collected and retold Hasidic tales, translated the Hebrew Bible into German with Franz Rosenzweig, left Germany for Jerusalem in 1938, and argued throughout his life for a binational solution in Palestine.
Should it be translated Thou or You?
This is a real dispute. The German Du is the intimate, familiar form used with family and close friends. English Thou now reads as archaic and reverent, which reverses the effect. Walter Kaufmann's translation uses I-You for that reason, and his argument is strong, though I-Thou is the phrase that entered the language.
Is it a difficult book?
Very, though not because of technical vocabulary. It is short and written in dense, aphoristic, deliberately non-systematic prose that resists paraphrase. Buber does not argue in the ordinary sense; he states, circles and restates, and readers used to philosophical argument often find this exasperating.
What did Levinas object to?
That Buber's relation is too symmetrical. Levinas argued that the ethical situation is asymmetrical, that the other person makes a claim on me that I cannot make reciprocal, and that describing the encounter as mutual meeting understates the obligation involved.
How does the Hasidic background matter?
Considerably. Buber spent years collecting Hasidic stories, and the tradition's insistence that the divine is met in ordinary acts and encounters rather than in withdrawal from the world is the soil this book grew in, even though the book itself names no tradition.
What has the book influenced?
A great deal: humanistic and existential psychotherapy, the philosophy of education, interfaith dialogue, medical ethics and the literature on the doctor-patient relationship, and much of the vocabulary in which people now describe genuine as against transactional connection.
Who should read it?
Anyone willing to read a hundred difficult pages slowly for one idea that will not leave them afterwards. It is not an introduction to anything, has no technique in it, and rewards rereading more than most books of its length.
You already know the difference
Buber is not introducing you to something foreign. He is naming an experience you have had many times and have never had a word for, and the reason the book is difficult is that he is trying to point at it without turning it into an object, which is exactly the move that would destroy it. You do not need to accept his theology, follow his third section, or resolve the argument with Levinas to get the use of him. You need only start noticing which mode you are in, several times a day, without judging yourself for the answer. That noticing is the whole of what is available to you, and Buber would say it is enough.
Sources & References
- Buber, Martin (1923). Ich und Du; English as I and Thou.
- Kaufmann, Walter (1970). Translation and prologue, on the case for I-You.
- Smith, Ronald Gregor (1937). The first English translation.
- Buber, Martin. Tales of the Hasidim, for the tradition behind the argument.
- Levinas, Emmanuel. Writings on Buber and the asymmetry of the ethical relation.
- Scholarship on Buber's biblical translation work with Franz Rosenzweig.
- Literature on Buber's influence in psychotherapy, education and medical ethics.