I. Vienna, A Child

When Buber was three, his mother left.

She left with another man. She did not take the child. She did not say goodbye to the child. One day she was simply not there.

He was sent to his grandparents in Galicia (then the eastern part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), in the city of Lemberg. He grew up in their house. His grandfather, Solomon Buber, was a Jewish scholar of Midrash who had self-published several serious commentaries. His grandmother was a woman who could read Hebrew — a rare thing in nineteenth-century Jewish families. The two old people did all they could to care for the boy whose mother had left him.

But.

The boy was waiting.

He could not quite say what he was waiting for. He just often went to the train station in Lemberg and stood on the platform watching the trains come and go. He watched the people getting off. He watched to see whether his mother was among them. He knew she would not come — others had told him she would not. But he watched anyway.

One day in his early teens, he saw a neighbor girl at the train station. She was a few years older. She looked at him and said:

"Your mother isn't coming back."

Buber said later that this was one of the most important moments of his life.

Not because what the girl said was cruel. She had not meant to hurt him. She had simply spoken what was true. It was important because in that instant he realized something —

That neighbor girl had really seen him. She had seen a small boy standing on the platform, waiting. She had not walked past him. She had not treated him as background. For one second, she had seen him, and had said something to him that was true for him.

Whatever the content of her sentence — in that one second, two people had really met.

Buber thought about this for the rest of his life.

What does it mean for two people really to meet? Not to pass each other. Not to exchange social formalities. Not to transact. To, for one second, really see each other.

He gave this kind of moment a name, later. He called it I-Thou — Ich-Du.

His whole philosophy begins from that name.

II. Hasidism

In his early twenties, Buber began traveling to the Jewish villages of Eastern Europe.

He had been born in Vienna and raised among intellectual Jews in Lemberg — a relatively secular Jewish family. He read philosophy and art history at universities in Vienna, Leipzig, Zurich, Berlin. By the standards of his time, he was a Westernized, well-educated Jewish intellectual writing in German.

But the older he got, the more he was drawn to another kind of Judaism in Eastern Europe.

Hasidism.

Hasidism was a Jewish mystical movement that began in eighteenth-century Ukraine. Its founder was the Baal Shem Tov, "Master of the Good Name." The movement broke from the dominant Jewish currents of its time, which emphasized learning and law. Hasidism held that every ordinary person — an illiterate peasant, a small trader, a cobbler at the corner — could touch the holy in his own daily life. How? By full attention. By doing each action fully. By really washing one's hands when one washed them, by really praying when one prayed, by really speaking with one's wife when one spoke with her.

Not by leaving daily life for some sacred place. By making daily life itself sacred.

Hasidism had many old rabbis. Each rabbi had his own small community (called a court). Around each old rabbi, stories circulated — what he had done, what he had said, how he had treated those who came to see him.

Buber spent decades collecting these stories.

From his early twenties — a young intellectual in a Viennese suit — he traveled to small villages in Ukraine, Poland, Romania, finding the Hasidim still alive and listening to them tell the stories of the rabbis they had known. Most of these stories had been transmitted orally. Some had short Jewish manuscript records. Most were passed from one generation's voice to the next.

He gathered these stories. He translated them into German. He shaped them into books. From 1908 onward they appeared, volume by volume. Two of the most important were The Tales of Rabbi Nachman and The Great Maggid and His Followers. In the 1950s he published the two-volume Tales of the Hasidim — a selection of more than seven hundred stories.

Why did he do this?

Not because the stories were academically important. Because the stories were the record of a particular way of being. The way the Hasidic rabbis lived was, Buber thought, what modern people most lacked — a way of truly treating the one who stands before you as Thou rather than as It.

Here is one of the stories Buber told many times:

Someone asked Rabbi Moshe Leib: "How can one love another person?" The rabbi said: "I learned this from a peasant."

The peasant had been drinking with him in a tavern. Halfway through the drinks, the peasant asked the rabbi: "Do you love me?" The rabbi said: "I do, of course." The peasant said: "Then do you know what I lack?" The rabbi could not answer. The peasant said: "If you do not know what I lack, how can you love me?"

The story stops there.

Buber told this story all his life because it makes one thing clear: to love another person is not a feeling; it is to know what that person lacks, and to care about what he lacks. If you do not know, you are not in front of that person. You are in front of your own concept of him.

The Hasidic rabbis spent their lives doing this — really being in front of another person.

Buber was not Hasidic himself. He did not keep Hasidic observance, did not wear Hasidic dress, did not belong to any court. But he spent his life translating these stories, because he held that what these stories recorded was the practice of his own philosophy.

His philosophy of I-Thou is the conceptualization of this stance. The Hasidic stories he translated are the concrete records of it.

Both, on him, are one work.

III. I and Thou

1. Buber was forty-five. He published a small book of less than a hundred pages.

The German title was Ich und Du.

In English, I and Thou.

This book changed all twentieth-century discussion of "relation."

Its central claim is simple. Buber said: a person does not first have an "I" and then enter into relations with the world. A person has an "I" only within relation.

And there are two basic kinds of relation.

Buber called them basic words — Grundworte. Each basic word is not a single word but a hyphenated pair:

The first: I-It — Ich-Es. The second: I-Thou — Ich-Du.

These two "I"s are not the same I.

The "I" in I-It is observer, user, classifier, predictor. It faces an object — something it can analyze, something it can use, something it can absorb into its concept system. Most of daily life is I-It relation. I look at the clock ("it shows three"); I drink water ("it quenches"); I drive a car ("it goes fast"); I greet a colleague ("she's on that project"). All of these are I-It.

I-It is not bad. It is necessary. Without I-It we could not survive — we have to predict the motions of objects, use tools, sort the things of the world. I-It is the larger part of human life.

But I-It is not all.

Sometimes — only sometimes — something else happens.

You look at a person. Or you look at a tree. Or you listen to a piece of music. Or you look at a child. In that instant, the thing facing you is no longer your object. It shows itself to you as itself. It is not "an Asian man," not "a cypress," not "Mozart's K. 622" — it is itself, that specific existence which cannot be fully described by your language.

In that instant you, too, are no longer the observer. You, too, are no longer the user. In that instant you stand as yourself before the existence that faces you.

That instant is I-Thou.

Buber said: a person becomes truly a person only in I-Thou moments.

The "I" in I-It is incomplete — it is a functional subject using objects. The "I" in I-Thou is the full I — an I that stands as a whole, indivisible existence in front of another whole, indivisible existence.

But I-Thou cannot be sustained.

This is the most difficult and most important point of Buber's philosophy.

The moment you try to sustain I-Thou, the moment you try to grasp it, the moment you try to analyze it, the moment you try to keep it going — it becomes I-It. I-Thou is a state, and the very nature of that state is that it disappears in the moment of being grasped.

Every Thou eventually returns to It. This is not tragedy. This is structure. We live in the world of I-It; I-Thou is the cleft moment through which something else shows. After every I-Thou moment passes, its trace remains in us — but the moment itself is gone.

Buber said: what a person can do is not "maintain" I-Thou; it is to re-enter I-Thou. Again and again. Always going to see again the one in front of you as Thou, rather than as It.

This is hard.

Most of the time we do not manage it. Our wife is "her," our child is "him," our colleague is "she" — nouns, objects, predictable existences. Then in some instant — perhaps over a meal, perhaps in an argument, perhaps in the quiet before a child falls asleep, looking up at us — that person suddenly shows as Thou. We, too, are seen as Thou by that person. Two whole existences face each other for one second.

That second is I-Thou.

That second passes. We return to I-It.

But that second really happened. We live for those seconds.

IV. The Eternal Thou

The deepest layer of Buber's philosophy comes at the end.

He said: every concrete Thou is a window onto an eternal Thou — das ewige Du.

What is the eternal Thou?

Buber does not give a direct definition. He says — after you have an I-Thou moment with a particular person, after that moment is gone, something is left in you. That something is not a memory of that particular person. It is something deeper, something that was opened in that moment.

That something points in a direction.

In that direction stands a Thou that can never become an It.

That Thou which can never become an It he called das ewige Du — the eternal Thou.

Most people raised in religious traditions will at once call this thing "God." Buber does not refuse this name — he himself is Jewish; he uses it. But he insists: the eternal Thou is not an object. You cannot describe its attributes. You cannot prove its existence. You cannot bargain with it.

You can only walk toward it.

And the way to walk toward it is not to leave the world for some sacred place. The way to walk toward it is to enter more I-Thou moments — with the concrete people, the concrete trees, the concrete things of this world.

Every I-Thou moment is one step toward the eternal Thou.

This is the central Hasidic stance restated in philosophical language. The Hasidic rabbis say "in every action there is the divine"; Buber says "every I-Thou moment leads toward the eternal Thou." The two sentences are one thing.

Buber places this at the end of I and Thou. This part of the book is the hardest to read — because he is writing about something that cannot be written about clearly. He himself knows this. He is not arguing. He is pointing in a direction.

He says the eternal Thou is different for every person walking toward it — because every person's I-Thou moments are different. But all these different Thou's point in the same direction.

That direction is the direction toward which all real meeting moves.

Not religious doctrine. Not church. Not ritual. The direction in which every moment of really seeing another person is itself moving — toward something further, somewhere.

V. Translating Scripture

1. Buber was forty-seven.

A Jewish philosopher eight years younger came to him — Franz Rosenzweig. Rosenzweig was already suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), gradually losing the use of his speech. He knew he would not live long. But he wanted to do one big thing with Buber.

Translate the Hebrew Bible into German.

A new German translation.

Why a new one?

There was already a German Bible — Luther's, four hundred years old. The German-speaking world read the Bible as Luther's Bible. But Luther's was a translation that made the Bible read like comfortable German. The strange features of Hebrew, the foreign features, the things in Hebrew that did not sound like normal language — Luther smoothed them all into flowing German. To read Luther was to feel oneself reading a German classic, not a text from another language, another culture, another world.

Buber and Rosenzweig wanted to do the opposite.

They wanted German readers to feel the strangeness of the Hebrew.

Hebrew sentence structure is not German. Many Hebrew nouns come from verbs ("knowledge" comes from the action of "knowing"; "way" comes from the action of "walking"). The same root reappears across the Hebrew Bible, building internal networks of echo. Hebrew is full of concrete and bodily images — "anger" in Hebrew is "the nose growing hot"; "compassion" comes from "womb."

Luther's translation digested all of this. Buber and Rosenzweig's translation was to keep it — even when this meant German that was uncomfortable to read.

They put the verbal quality of Hebrew into German. They made German compound words to reflect the echoes of Hebrew roots. They let anger really have a "nose" in it. They re-broke the lines, following the breath rhythm of Hebrew chant rather than the grammar rhythm of German.

This was a philosophy of translation — translation is not making another language into your own; it is letting your language be changed a little by another.

Rosenzweig died in 1929. They had just finished the Five Books of Moses. Buber went on alone. From 1929 to 1962 — over thirty years — Buber alone completed the German translation of the entire Hebrew Bible. He did this through the most difficult decades for European Jews of the twentieth century. In the middle of it, he lived through the Nazi rise, through Kristallnacht (his own home was struck that night), through the flight from Germany, through the news of the Shoah, through the disappearance of nearly everyone of his Jewish generation in Europe.

He kept translating.

At eighty-four he completed the last volume.

Why does this matter for this essay in Round Six?

Because translation is itself one of the most concrete practices of leaving a place for the other.

Every language has its own world — its own concepts, its own rhythm, its own echoes. When you translate a text from one language to another, you have two choices:

One: domesticate it into your language. Let the foreign features disappear; let the translation read as if it had originally been in your language. The reader is comfortable — but the price of that comfort is that the reader has not really touched the otherness of the foreign tongue.

Two: keep it as other. Let your language be changed a little by that other language. The reader feels some strangeness — but the strangeness is real, because the text really did come from a different world.

The first choice absorbs the other. The second leaves a place for the other.

Buber's life of translation was the second. His translation of Hasidic stories was this — he did not Germanize them; he kept the specific voices of the East European Jewish villages. His translation of Scripture was this — he did not let the Hebrew Bible read like German classic; he let German readers hear the Hebrew.

This was his I-Thou philosophy at the level of language.

Every language is a Thou for every other language. You can treat it as It — an object from which you extract information. You can treat it as Thou — an existence that deserves to change your own language a little.

Buber chose the second, all his life.

VI. Jerusalem

1. Buber was sixty.

He left Germany.

He had stayed five years after the Nazis came to power in 1933. Through those five years he had continued to teach, continued to translate, continued to edit Jewish adult-education projects. He believed there was still room in Germany for a quiet kind of Jewish intellectual work.

The Kristallnacht of November 9, 1938 told him that room was gone.

He was permitted to leave. He went to Jerusalem.

The Hebrew University asked him to be a professor — to teach social philosophy. He was sixty, and he had to learn a new language (his mother tongues were German and Yiddish, not Hebrew) in order to lecture. He did it. He taught at the Hebrew University until he retired in 1951.

This city had Jews and Arabs.

Buber's home was in Talbiyeh — a mixed neighborhood. His neighbors included Arabs. Among his colleagues at the Hebrew University were people whose position was close to his, particularly Judah Magnes, the rector of the Hebrew University. Magnes was an American-born rabbi who, like Buber, had argued from the 1920s for Jews and Arabs to share a single state.

They both belonged to a group called Brit Shalom.

In Hebrew, Brit Shalom means "Covenant of Peace."

The group had existed since 1925 — thirteen years before Buber arrived in Jerusalem. The group's central position was that on this land there should be founded one state, two peoples, equal citizenship. Not a state of the Jews. Not a state of the Arabs. A state in which both peoples were equal citizens.

This was a minority position at the time. Most of those who at the time argued that Jews should establish a state in this land argued for a state in which Jews dominated. Most Arab leaders argued that this land belonged entirely to the Arabs. Brit Shalom was a minority on both sides.

Buber was one of the central figures of this minority.

He wrote articles. He lectured at the Hebrew University. He took part in attempts at Jewish-Arab dialogue. When he wrote in Hebrew, he kept a strict — he never used inflammatory language, never used the framing of "us against them," never reduced the other people to "threat" or "obstacle."

1948.

Through fire, the State of Israel declared its founding.

Buber did not oppose the existence of a Jewish national state. He had lived through Nazi Germany. He knew that a people needs a place where it can stand. He publicly supported the new state's existence.

But he warned, publicly —

A people cannot build itself by reducing another people to an object.

He said this, in various forms, many times, from 1948 onward to the end of his life.

He criticized certain government policies. He spoke publicly for certain villages whose people had been driven out. He signed certain open letters. In the 1950s he joined Ihud ("Unity"), a group continuing the direction of Brit Shalom — Jewish-Arab dialogue.

He was not a politician. He had no political power. He did what he could — speak, write, sign.

His work did not change the direction of the government. He knew this. He kept doing it.

Why?

Because he had spent his life teaching I-Thou.

If you really teach I-Thou, you cannot make an exception for one Thou outside your own people. Either you really teach I-Thou or you do not. You cannot teach I-Thou for your own people and I-It for another people. That would not be I-Thou philosophy. That would be philosophy in service of one's own people.

Buber insisted on being a real I-Thou philosopher.

This meant teaching I-Thou even toward the people who were politically the other.

This meant that — when his own people had acquired the power to reduce another people to an object — he had to warn his own people not to do this.

Not because he did not love his own people. Because he did.

A people that reduces another people to an object becomes itself an object — it is no longer a people with a face; it has become a system carrying out a function. Buber did not want his own people to become that.

He kept speaking. To the end of his life.

June 13, 1965.

Buber died in Jerusalem. Eighty-seven years old.

At his funeral, there were Jews. And there were Arabs.

The work of his life closed in this way.

VII. He and Levinas

1. Paris.

Buber was eighty. He had come to Europe from Jerusalem to give several lectures. On one of those visits he met Levinas.

Levinas was fifty-two. He had been reading Buber since the 1930s. He had written long essays on Buber. He held Buber in deep regard, and held a serious critique.

Their meeting in Paris that time was friendly. Two Jewish philosophers, twenty-eight years apart in age, talking about the philosophy of the other in the ruins of postwar Europe.

But their philosophies were not the same.

Buber taught I-Thou — a symmetric meeting. Two persons facing each other, each leaving a place for the other, each appearing as Thou to the other. What Buber described was the moment of meeting — and in that moment, no one was higher and no one was lower; the two were equal.

Levinas taught the face and infinite responsibility — an asymmetric relation. The face of the other places on me an infinite demand; I am responsible to the other, but I should not require that the other be equally responsible to me. If I require symmetry, the other is absorbed into a framework of "reciprocity" — the other ceases to be truly other; the other has become a counterpart of mine.

Levinas thought Buber's I-Thou had not gone far enough.

Not that Buber was wrong. That Buber had stopped at a place where one could go further.

Levinas said: your I-Thou moment with another person is real. But the deeper thing is that the ethical demand the other places on you precedes that meeting moment. Before you can meet him, he has already placed on you the command "Thou shalt not kill me." This command is not the consequence of the meeting. It is the precondition of the meeting. You are able to enter I-Thou because the other has already placed that command on you and you have accepted it.

Buber heard the critique.

Buber did not fully accept it. He insisted I-Thou was an equal meeting — Levinas's "infinite responsibility" sounded too heavy, too one-sided; it would let the I disappear before the other, and that, too, was not real meeting.

Neither of them persuaded the other.

But neither of them reduced the other to It.

Their philosophies were different. Their languages were different. Their emphases were different. Both spoke of the other, but they did not speak of the same kind of other. Buber spoke of the other in the moment of meeting. Levinas spoke of the other in the ethical command.

Two ways of speaking about the other.

When we read these two figures, we can see what each saw, and we can see what each did not see.

Buber saw the reality of the meeting moment — but he may have underestimated the asymmetric ethical structure that lies before the meeting. Levinas saw the reality of asymmetric ethics — but he may have underestimated the moment in which two persons can stand to each other as equal Thou.

The two together are more complete than either alone.

This is why we wrote Levinas in the previous essay, and Buber in this one. Both must be heard. Both reach the other to the deepest. The two together give us a more complete picture of the other.

The theme of Round Six is the other. We are not writing one philosophy of the other. We are writing several. Each way of leaving a place for the other has its insight, and has its limit. Only by setting them alongside one another can the other be acknowledged from many angles.

Buber's other is the Thou in meeting. Levinas's other is the face in command.

The next essay will be another. The one after that, another.

None of them is complete. All of them together face toward a completion.

That completion is always at a distance.

Kant called that completion the kingdom of ends. Buber called it the eternal Thou. Levinas called it the infinite.

Different languages. The same direction.

VIII. The Bridge

When Buber walked up, he was older than the others who had come before.

He looked to be in his eighties. Not tall. His beard was long, gray-white, falling several inches from his chin. His eyes were large and gentle. He wore a dark robe — neither a suit nor Hasidic dress, something of his own.

He walked unhurriedly, but steadily.

He reached the middle of the bridge.

Hypatia was there. The astrolabe was still in her hand. Aquinas stood on the other side. His hands were empty. Bergson, leaning on his cane not far off, nodded to him. Levinas was also in the middle of the bridge. The two of them gave each other a small smile when they saw one another. They had met — that one time in Paris, in 1958.

"Shall we continue from where we left off?" Levinas said in French. "Perhaps this time we can hear each other a little better." Buber answered in German.

The two laughed.

They did not approach each other for further talk. They each stood in their own place on the bridge. Each knew where the other was. Each knew that what they had been doing was two faces of the same work. That was enough.

At the far end of the bridge, Kant was standing. Tonight Kant was a little clearer than before — you could see the color of his clothing. He still did not come over.

Across from the bridge, on that road, the sky had darkened. Lightning.

There were people on that road, walking.

The ones farthest along were no longer visible.

Closer in — that man in the professor's robe, Heidegger — had walked further than last time. He no longer turned to look back at the bridge.

Buber glanced once over toward that road.

In the last twenty-some years of his life — in Jerusalem — he too had stood at a distance and watched that road. He had seen some among his own people beginning to walk along it. He had written for decades, signed dozens of open letters, given many public talks — not in order to stop them, but so that they would at least know where the road was leading.

He knew he had not stopped them.

He knew the storm was falling on that road.

He was not particularly sad. He knew that which road a person walks is that person's own affair. He had done what he could — speak, write, sign, go on speaking until eighty-seven.

He turned back. The astrolabe in Hypatia's hand caught the moonlight in the wind. The moonlight was mild.

He said something to Hypatia — neither Greek nor Hebrew, but German. Hypatia did not understand the words, but she could tell from his tone that what he had said was friendly. She smiled at him.

Aquinas, on the other side, said something quietly in Latin. Bergson, who heard it, translated for Buber into French. Buber laughed.

Hypatia, Aquinas, Bergson, Levinas, Buber — five names. But the middle of the bridge was not just five people. The bridge held people accumulated from generation to generation. A field of figures. Some drawing equations. Some watching corn. Some writing poems. Some reading star charts. Some writing novels. Some sketching diagrams. Some crouching off to one side taking notes. Some sitting and looking into the distance. Some speaking quietly with their neighbors. Each had a different language. Each came from a different time. Each had done different specific work. But they had all done the same kind of work — leaving a place for the other in their own time.

Across from the bridge — on that road, in the storm — Heidegger was walking further away. At the far end of the bridge — at Kant's place — the wind blew mildly. On the bridge in the middle — many people, mild moonlight.

The figure who had always been looking into the distance, the one at the far end of the bridge, looked at Hypatia, at Aquinas, at Bergson, at Levinas.

This time he looked at Buber.

Buber lifted his head. His eyes met the eyes of the one who had always been looking into the distance, very briefly.

Buber smiled. Not a smile of thanks. A smile that said I know you are there.

The other smiled lightly back.

Then both of them turned to their own directions.

Buber stood in the middle of the bridge. He had died in Jerusalem at eighty-seven. While he was alive, he had done what he could do — he had written I and Thou, he had translated Hasidic stories, he had translated Scripture, he had, in his own city, left a place for another people.

He knew that what he was doing was infinite. He knew that infinite was not something he could complete. He had done it anyway.^[1][2]

Han Qin (秦汉) · @hqinjarsy · Great Lives