Martin Buber (1878–1965) was a prolific author, scholar, literarytranslator, and political activist whose writings—mostly inGerman and Hebrew—ranged from Jewish mysticism to socialphilosophy, biblical studies, religious phenomenology, philosophicalanthropology, education, politics, and art. Most famous among hisphilosophical writings is the short but powerful bookI andThou (1923) where our relation to others is considered astwofold. TheI-it relation prevails between subjects andobjects of thought and action; theI-Thou relation, on theother hand, obtains in encounters between subjects that exceed therange of the Cartesian subject-object relation. Though originallyplanned as a prolegomenon to a phenomenology of religion,I andThou proved influential in other areas as well, including thephilosophy of education. The work of Martin Buber remains a linchpinof qualitative philosophical anthropology and continues to be cited infields such as philosophical psychology, medical anthropology, andpedagogical theory. Buber’s writings on Jewish nationalrenaissance, Hasidism, and political philosophy made him a majortwentieth-century figure in Jewish thought and the philosophy ofreligion. Buber’s extensive writing on the political dimensions of biblical historiography and prophetic literature not only made contributions to the history of religion but also to contemporary discussions on political theology with an anarchistic bent. His translation, with Franz Rosenzweig, of the Hebrew Bible into German remains a classic in the German language.

• 1. Biographical Background
• 2. Philosophical Influences
• 3. The early Buber:Gestalt as a means of realization
• 4. Philosophy of Dialogue:I and Thou
• 5. Zionism
• 6. Political Theology
• 7. Distance and Relation: Late Philosophical Anthropology
• 8. Criticism
• 9. Honors and Legacy
• Bibliography
  • Works Cited
  • Bibliographies
  • Selected Early Works by Martin Buber
  • Collections and Editions of Writings and Letters
  • Buber in English
  • Selected Edited Volumes on Martin Buber
  • Secondary Literature
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Biographical Background

The setting of Buber’s early childhood was late-nineteenth-century Vienna, then still thecosmopolitan capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a multiethnicconglomerate whose eventual demise (in the First World War) effectivelyended the millennial rule of Catholic princes in Europe.Fin-de-siècle Vienna was the home of light opera andheavy neo-romantic music, French-style boulevard comedy and socialrealism, sexual repression and deviance, political intrigue and vibrantjournalism, a cultural cauldron aptly captured in Robert Musil’sThe Man Without Qualities (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften,1930–1932).

Buber’s parents, Carl Buber and Elise née Wurgast, separatedwhen Martin was four years old. For the next ten years, he lived withhis paternal grandparents, Solomon and Adele Buber, in Lemberg (now:Lviv/Ukraine) who were part of what one might call the landed Jewisharistocracy. Solomon, a “master of the old Haskala” (“[ein] … Meister der alten Haskala”; Buber 1906b, Dedication) who called himself “a Pole of the Mosaic persuasion”(Friedman [1981] p. 11), produced the first modern editions of rabbinicmidrash literature yet was also greatly respected in the traditionalJewish community. His reputation opened the doors for Martin when hebegan to show interest in Zionism and Hasidic literature. The wealth ofhis grandparents was built on the Galician estate managed by Adele andenhanced by Solomon through mining, banking, and commerce. It providedMartin with financial security until the German occupation of Poland in1939, when their estate was expropriated. Home-schooled and pampered byhis grandmother, Buber was a bookish aesthete with few friends his age,whose major diversion was the play of the imagination. He easilyabsorbed local languages (Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, German) and acquiredothers (Greek, Latin, French, Italian, English). German was thedominant language at home, while the language of instruction at theFranz Joseph Gymnasium was Polish. This multilingualism nourishedBuber’s life-long interest in language.

Among the young Buber’s first publications are essays on, andtranslations into Polish of, the poetry of Arthur Schnitzler and Hugovon Hofmannsthal. Buber’s literary voice may be best understood asprobingly personal while seeking communication with others, forging apath between East and West, Judaism and Humanism, nationalparticularity and universal spirit. His deliberate and perhaps somewhatprecious diction was nourished by the contrasts between the Germanclassics he read at home and the fervently religious to mildly secularGalician Jewish jargon he encountered on the outside. Reentering theurban society of Vienna, Buber encountered a world brimming withAustrian imperial tradition as well as Germanic pragmatism, whereradical new approaches to psychology and philosophy were beingdeveloped. This was a place where solutions to the burning social andpolitical issues of city, nation, and empire were often expressedin grandly theatrical oratory (Karl Lueger) and in the aestheticizingrhetoric of self-inscenation (Theodor Herzl). As a student of arthistory, German literature, and psychology in Vienna, Leipzig,Zürich, and Berlin, Buber made himself at home in a bohemian worldof letters.

From 1900 to 1916, Buber and his life-partner, the author PaulaWinkler (1877–1958; pen-name: Georg Munk), moved to Berlin where theybefriended the anarchist Gustav Landauer (1870–1919) and attended thesalon of the Hart brothers, an epicenter ofJugendstilaesthetics. Early on in this period Buber was active in the Zionistmovement of Theodor Herzl, who recruited him as the editor of hisjournalDie Welt. In 1904, the year Herzl died, Buber finishedhis dissertation on the problem of individuation in Nicholas of Cusaand Jakob Boehme and he took a position as literary editor for Ruetten& Loening, a publishing house whose mid-nineteenth century Jewishfounders (Rindskopf and Löwental) had made a fortune with theperennially best-sellingStruwwelpeter, a politicallyincorrect book of drawings about ill-behaved children (Wurm, 1994). Atthe beginning of the century, the publisher was looking to move beyondthe gilded editions of Goethe and Schiller that they were publishing at thetime. Buber became their agent of modernization. One of the first booksBuber placed here was his retelling of the stories of Rabbi Nachman,one of the great figures of Eastern European Hasidism. The flagshippublication edited by Buber was an ambitious forty-volume series ofsocial studies, titledDie Gesellschaft, that appeared between1906 and 1912. As editor, Buber recruited and corresponded with many of the leading minds of his time.

In 1916, Martin and Paula moved to Heppenheim/Bergstrasse, half-waybetween Frankfurt/Main and Heidelberg. At that time, his friend GustavLandauer severely criticized Buber’s enthusiasm for the salutaryeffect that, as Buber saw it, the war was having on a hithertofragmented society (Gesellschaft), transforming it into anational community (Gemeinschaft). Buber later claimed that itwas at this time that he began to draft the book that was to becomeI and Thou. In Frankfurt, Buber met Franz Rosenzweig(1886–1929) with whom he was to develop a close intellectualcompanionship. In the early nineteen twenties, Rosenzweig recruitedBuber as a lecturer for his unaffiliated (“free”) Jewishadult education center (Freies jüdisches Lehrhaus) and hemanaged Buber’s appointment as university lecturer in Jewishreligious studies and ethics, a position endowed by a Jewish communitythat initially opposed Buber as too radical. Rosenzweig also becameBuber’s chief collaborator in the project, initiated by the youngChristian publisher Lambert Schneider, to produce a new translation ofthe Bible into German, a project he continued after Rosenzweig’sdeath. Dismissed by the Nazis from the university in 1933, Buber servedas the architect of German Jewish teacher re-education through theso-calledMittelstelle für jüdischeErwachsenenbildung (Simon, 1959). In 1937 Buber received along-coveted call to teach at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (officially founded in 1925), an institution whose creation he had promoted since 1902 and that he represented as a member of its board of overseers. In Jerusalem, Buberreturned to the field of social philosophy, an academic appointment theuniversity administration wrested from a faculty that deemed the“Schriftsteller Dr. Martin Buber” neither a genuine scholar of religion nor sufficiently educated as a specialist in Jewishstudies. World-famous in his later years, Buber traveled and lecturedextensively in Europe and the United States.

Buber’s wide range of interests, his literary abilities, and thegeneral appeal of his philosophical orientation are reflected in thefar-flung correspondence he conducted over the course of his longlife. As the editor ofDie Gesellschaft, Buber correspondedwith Georg Simmel, Franz Oppenheimer, Ellen Key, LouAndreas-Salomé, Werner Sombart, and many other academics andintellectuals. Among the poets of his time with whom he exchangedletters were Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Hermann Hesse, and StefanZweig. He was particularly close to the socialist and Zionist novelistArnold Zweig. With poet Chaim Nachman Bialik and the later Nobellaureate Sh. Y. Agnon Buber shared a deep interest in the revival ofHebrew literature. He published the works of the Jewish Nietzscheanstory-teller Micha Josef Berdiczewsky. He was a major inspiration tothe young Zionist cadre of Prague Jews (Hugo Bergmann, Max Brod,Robert Weltsch), and the Jewishadult education system he organized under the Nazis inadvertently provided a last bastionfor the free exchange of ideas for non-Jews as well. Buber’s name isintimately linked with that of Franz Rosenzweig and his circle (EugenRosenstock-Huessy, Hans Ehrenberg, Rudolf Ehrenberg, Viktor vonWeizsäcker, Ernst Michel, etc.), an association that manifesteditself, among others, in the journalDie Kreatur(1926–29). The journalDer Jude, founded and edited byBuber from 1916 until 1924, and several editions of his speeches onJudaism made Buber a central figure of the Jewish culturalrenaissance of the early twentieth century. Buber’s work awakenedmany young intellectuals from highly assimilated families, such as Ernst Simon, to the possibility of embracing Judaism as a living faith. Others, among them Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem, and Leo Strauss, developed their scholarly and philosophical agendas in critical appreciation of Buber without giving in to the seductions of “Buberism.” Bubercounted among his friends and admirers Christian theologians such asKarl Heim, Friedrich Gogarten, Albert Schweitzer, and LeonardRagaz. His philosophy of dialogue entered into the discourse ofpsychoanalysis through the work of Hans Trüb, and is today amongthe most popular approaches to educational theory in German-languagestudies of pedagogy.

2. Philosophical Influences

Among Buber’s early philosophical influences were Kant’sProlegomena, which he read at the age of fourteen,and Nietzsche’sZarathustra. Haunted by the seeming infinity of space and time, Buber found solace in Kant’s understanding thatspace and time are mere forms of perception that structure the manifold of sensory impressions. At the same time, Kant allows to think of being as transcending the pure forms of human intellection. Buber’s mildly religious reading of Kant, which seems both conventional and autodidactic, seems to have been untrammeled by the debates between the various schools of neo-Kantianism that developed since the 1860’s and came to dominate much of the academic teaching of philosophy across Germany until the First World War. From Nietzsche and Schopenhauer Buberlearned the importance of the will, the power to project oneselfheroically into a fluid and malleable world, and to do so according toone’s own measure and standard. Though Buber’s philosophyof dialogue is a decisive step away from Nietzschean vitalism, thefocus on lived experience and embodied human wholeness, as well as theprophetic tone and aphoristic style Buber honed from early on,persisted in his subsequent writings. Between 1896 and 1899 he studied thehistory of art, German literature, philosophy, and psychology inVienna, Leipzig (1897/98), Berlin (1898/99), and Zurich (1899). In Vienna heabsorbed the oracular poetry of Stefan George, which influenced himgreatly, although he never became a disciple of George. In Leipzig andBerlin he developed an interest in the ethnic psychology (Völkerpsychologie) of WilhelmWundt, the social philosophy of Georg Simmel, the psychology of CarlStumpf, and thelebensphilosophische approach to thehumanities of Wilhelm Dilthey. In Leipzig he attended meetings of theSociety for Ethical Culture (Gesellschaft für ethischeKultur), then dominated by the thought of Lasalle andTönnies.

From his early reading of philosophical literature Buber retained someof the most basic convictions found in his later writings. In Kant hefound two answers to his concern with the nature of time. If time andspace are pure forms of perception, then they pertain to things onlyas they appear to us (asphenomena) and not tothings-in-themselves (noumena). If our experienceof others, especially of persons, is of objects of our experience,then we necessarily reduce them to the scope of our phenomenalknowledge, in other words, to what Buber later calledtheI-It relation. Yet Kant also indicated ways ofmeaningfully speaking of the noumenal, even though not in terms oftheoretical reason. Practical reason – as expressed in "maxims of action," categorical imperatives, or principles of duty we choose for their own sake and regardless of outcome – obliges us to consider persons as ends in themselves rather than means to an end. This suggests something like an absoluteobligation. Teleological (aesthetic) judgment, as developed in Kant’sThird Critique, suggests the possibility of a rational grounding ofrepresentation. Taken together, Kant’s conceptions of ethics andaesthetics resonated with Buber’s notion that the phenomenon is alwaysthe gateway to the noumenon, just as the noumenal cannot beencountered other than in, and by way of, concrete phenomena. Thus Bubermanaged to meld Kantian metaphysical and ethical conceptions into amore immediate relation with things as they appear to us and as werepresent them to ourselves. Buber succeeded in translating this theoretical dialectic of immediacy and distance, phenomenal encounter and reflexivity, into a style he cultivated in his writing but also in his manner of personal interactions. Buber sought not only to describe but to live the tension between a Dionysian primacy of life in its particularity, immediacy, and individuality and the Apollonian world of form,measure, and abstraction as inter-dependent forces. Both are constitutive ofhuman experience in that they color our interactions with the other innature, with other human beings, and with the divine Thou. Buber thus developed his own distinctive voice in the emerging chorus of writers, thinkers, and artists of his time who rallied against the widely-perceived "alienation" associated with modern life.

3. The early Buber:Gestalt as a means of realization

Buber’s early writings include anthologies, such asThe Tales ofRabbi Nachman (1906),The Legend of the Baal Shem Tov(1908), and mystical writings from world religions (EcstaticConfessions, 1909), lectures on Judaism (On Judaism,1967b), and an expressionist dialogue on “realization”(Daniel, 1913). His essays on the arts include reflections onthe Isenheim Altarpiece, the dance of Nijinsky (Pointing theWay, 1957), Jewish art, and the painter Lesser Ury (The FirstBuber, 1999a). Common to these early productions is thepreoccupation with shape (Gestalt), movement, color,language, and gesture as the means of a “realized” or“perfected” particular human existence that representslife beyond the limits of spatio-temporal duration imposed on us inthe manner of a Cartesian grid.

The German wordsForm (form) andGestalt (heretranslated as “shape”) are not identical, although, inEnglish, it is easy to confuse one with the other. Buber usesGestalt as a term of central, constitutive, and animatingpower, contrasting it with the Platonic termForm, which heassociates with a lack of genuine vitality. Commenting upon a work byMichelangelo, Buber speaks ofGestalt as hidden in the rawmaterial, waiting to emerge as the artist wrestles with the dead block.The artistic struggle instantiates and represents the more fundamentalopposition between formative (gestaltende) and shapeless(gestaltlose) principles. The tension between these, forBuber, lay at the source of all spiritual renewal, raging within everyhuman individual as the creative, spiritual act that subjugatesunformed, physical stuff (1963b: 239). It is the free play ofGestalt that quickens the dead rigidity of form.

The wrestling with form and its overcoming and its reanimation withliving energy in Buber’s early work was rooted in a concern withthe embodiment of perception and imagination. Whether writing aboutHasidic masters, Nijinsky, religiosity, Judaism, mysticism, myth,“the Orient,” or the Isenheim Altar, Buber always returnedto the same fundamental dynamics. Everything starts from the most basicfacts of human existence: the body and motion. As understood by theearly Buber (following a Kantian intuition), the world is one in whichthe objective spatial order was dissolved, where up and down, left andright, bear no intrinsic meaning. More fundamentally, orientation isalways related to the body, which is, however, anobjective datum. Ethicallife remains inextricably linked, within the world of space, to thehuman body and to physical sensation as they reach across the dividetoward an unmitigatedErlebnis. The “unity,” soimportant to Buber’s early conception of the self, was not anoriginal one. It was instead the effect of those gestural acts that“dance it out” (Pointing the Way, 1957).

Buber conceived of political community as a type of plastic shape,an object (or subject) ofGestaltung and hence realization.Just as he had enlivened Kant’s distinction between phenomenon andnoumenon with his literary imagination, so too he transformed thevalue-theoretical distinction betweenGesellschaft (society)andGemeinschaft (community), types of social aggregationtheorized by Ferdinand Tönnies, into a wellspring for hispolitical speeches and writings. The first arena for his social,psychological, and educational engagement was the Zionist movement.Buber’s social philosophy was stimulated and decisively influenced by his close friend, the anarchist Gustav Landauer, whom he recruited to write the volume on revolution for his seriesDie Gesellschaft. As a pioneer of social thought and a student of Georg Simmel, Buber participated in the 1909 founding conference ofthe German sociological association. Buber’s social-psychologicalapproach to the study and description of social phenomena and his interest in the constitutive correlation between the individual and his and her social experienceremained important aspects of his philosophy of dialogue. It came tothe fore again in his last academic position at HebrewUniversity in Jerusalem, where he taught social philosophy (prominentstudents: Amitai Etzioni, Shmuel Eisenstadt).

Buber’s thought matured under the impact of Landauer’s harsh critique, which persuaded Buber that he had unduly romanticized the war. Buber’s 1916 lead essayfor the new journalDer Jude still praised the war as anopportunity for the modern Jew to forge, out of the chaos of rupture, afeeling for community, connection, a new unity, a unifiedGestalt, one that could restore the Jewish people to acondition of wholeness. For Buber’s friend Landauer, suchthoughts were “very painful…very repugnant, and borderline incomprehensible. Object though you will, I call this way of thinking aestheticism and formalism and I say that you have no right…to try and tuck these tangled events into your philosophical scheme(schönen und weisen Allgemeinheiten): what results isinadequate and outrageous” (Letters of Martin Buber, p.189; transl. modified). Landauer continued to argue, “Historical matters can onlybe talked about historically, not in terms of formal patterns(formalem Schematismus) … I gladly grant that behindthis is the desire to see greatness; but desire alone is not sufficientto make greatness out of a confused vulgarity” (ibid., 190–1).Landauer’s challenge to the grotesque fusion ofErlebnis,Gemeinschaft, andGestalt out ofworld war and mass slaughter precipitated the end of aestheticreligiosity in Buber’s work.

4. Philosophy of Dialogue:I and Thou

Buber’s best-known work is the short philosophical essayI andThou (1923), the basic tenets of which he was to modify, but neverto abandon. In this work, Buber gives expression to the intuition thatwe need to withstand the temptation to reduce human relations to thesimple either/or of Apollonian or Dionysian, rational or romanticways of relating to others. We are beings that can enter into dialogicrelations not just with human others but with other animate beings,such as animals, or a tree, as well as with the Divine Thou. Theduality of relations and, at its extreme, their coincidence, may serveas the key to Buber’s mature thought on everything from hisapproach to biblical faith to his practical politics in matters ofJewish-Arab relations in Palestine.I and Thou was firsttranslated into English in 1937 by Ronald Gregor Smith and later againby Walter Kaufmann. The German original was an instant classic and remains in print today. In the 1950s and 60s, when Buber first traveledand lectured in the USA, the essay became popular in theEnglish-speaking world as well.

Whereas before World War I Buber had promoted an aesthetic of unityand unification, his later writings embrace a rougher and moreelemental dualism. Buber always opposed philosophical monism, which heidentified with Bergson, and objected to “doctrines ofimmersion,” which he identified with Buddhism. Complicating theundifferentiated shape of mystical experience (as sought by themedievals, including Eckhart, as an annihilation of self), theprofoundly dualistic world-view proffered inI and Thoureferences Cusa’scoincidentia oppositorum as anexpression of human limits. Buber’s text reduces the relationbetween persons, animate objects, and deity to three expressivesignifiers: “I”, “You”, and “It”. They are the elemental variables whosecombination and re-combination structure all experience as relational.The individuated elements realize themselves in relations, formingpatterns that burst into life, grow, vanish, and revive. Humaninter-subjectivity affirms the polymorphousI-Thou encounter.Resting upon the claim that no isolated I exists apartfrom relationship to an other, dialogue or “encounter”transforms each figure into an ultimate and mysterious center of valuewhose presence eludes the concepts of instrumental language. Theheteronomous revelation of a singular presence calls the subject intoan open-ended relationship, a living pattern, that defies sense, logic,and proportion; whereas theI-It relationship, in its mostdegenerate stage, assumes the fixed form of objects that one can measure and manipulate.At the core of this model of existence is the notion of encounter as“revelation.” As understood by Buber, revelation is therevelation of “presence” (Gegenwart). In contrastto “object” (Gegenstand), the presence revealed byrevelation as encounter occupies the space “in between” thesubject and an other (a tree, a person, a work of art, God). This“in between” space is defined as “mutual”(gegenseitig). Contrasting with the Kantian concept ofexperience (Erfahrung),Erlebnis (encounter), orrevelation of sheer presence, is an ineffable, pure form that carriesnot an iota of determinate or object-like conceptual or linguisticcontent. Buber always insisted that the dialogic principle, i.e., theduality of primal words (Urworte) that he called theI-Thou and theI-It, was not an abstract conceptionbut an ontological reality that he pointed to but that could not beproperly represented in discursive prose.

The confusion (and/or con-fusion) between philosophy and religion isespecially marked inI and Thou. While Buber seems to lack afully worked-out epistemology and occasionally revels in paradoxes thatborder on mystical theology, it has been argued that Buber did indeedsolve the inherent “difficulty of dialogics that it reflects on,and speaks of, a human reality about which, in his own words, onecannot think and speak in an appropriate manner” (Bloch [1983] p.62). Debates about the strength and weakness ofI and Thou asthe foundation of a system hinge, in part, on the assumption that thefive-volume project, to which this book was to serve as a prolegomenon(a project Buber abandoned), was indeed a philosophical one.Buber’s lectures at theFreies jüdisches Lehrhausand his courses at University of Frankfurt, as well as letters toRosenzweig show that, at the time of its writing, he was preoccupiedwith a new approach to the phenomenology of religion (cf. Schottroff,Zank). In Buber’s cyclical conception of the history ofreligions, the revelation of presence mixes into and animates theliving and lived forms of historical religion (institutions, texts,rituals, images, and ideas), becoming over time ossified and rigid andobject-like, but structurally open to the force of renewal based on newforms of encounter as revelation. The history of religion as describedby Buber in the closing words ofI and Thou is a contracting,intensifying spiral figure that has redemption as its telos. It wouldbe artificial, however, to separate Buber’s interest in religiousphenomena from his interest in a general philosophical anthropology.Rather, Buber seems to have tried to find one in the other,or—put differently—to make religious belief and practiceperspicacious in light of a general philosophical anthropology.

5. Zionism

At the very beginning of his literary career, Buber was recruited bythe Budapest-born and Vienna-based journalist Theodor Herzl to edit themain paper of the Zionist party,Die Welt. He soon found amore congenial home in the “democratic faction” of“cultural Zionists” led by Chaim Weizmann, then living inZurich. Buber’s phases of engagement in the movement’s politicalinstitutions alternated with extended phases of disengagement, but henever ceased to write and speak about what he understood to be thedistinctive Jewish brand of nationalism. Buber seems to have derived animportant lesson from the early struggles between political andcultural Zionism for the leadership and direction of the movement. Herealized that his place was not in high diplomacy and politicaleducation but in the search for psychologically sound foundations onwhich to heal the rift between modernrealpolitik and adistinctively Jewish theological-political tradition. Very much inkeeping with the nineteenth-century Protestant yearning for a Christianfoundation of the nation-state, Buber sought a healing source in theintegrating powers of religious experience. After a hiatus of more thanten years during which Buber spoke to Jewish youth groups (mostfamously the Prague Bar Kokhba) but refrained from any practicalinvolvement in Zionist politics, he reentered Zionist debates in 1916when he began publishing the journalDer Jude, which served asan open forum of exchange on any issues related to cultural andpolitical Zionism. In 1921 Buber attended the Zionist Congress inCarlsbad as a delegate of the socialist Hashomer Hatzair (“theyoung guard”). In the debates that followed the firstanti-Zionist riots in Palestine, Buber joined theBrit Shalom,which argued for peaceful means of resistance. During the Arab revoltof 1936–39, when the British government imposed quotas on immigrationto Palestine, Buber argued for demographic parity rather than trying toachieve a Jewish majority. Finally, in the wake of the BiltmoreConference, Buber (as a member ofIhud) argued for abi-national rather than a Jewish state in Palestine. At any of thesestages Buber harbored no illusion about the chances of his politicalviews to sway the majority but he believed that it was important toarticulate the moral truth as one saw it. Needless to say, thispolitics of authenticity made him few friends among the members of theZionist establishment.

At the theoretical core of the Zionism advanced by Buber was aconception of Jewish identity that was neither entirely determined by religion nor by nationality, but constituted a unique hybrid. From early on, Buber rejected any state-form for the Jewish people in Palestine. This was clear already in awidely-noted 1916 exchange of letters with the liberal philosopherHermann Cohen. Cohen rejected Zionism as incommensurate with the Jewishmission of living as a religious minority with the task of maintainingthe idea of messianism that he saw as a motor of social and politicalreform within society at large. In contrast, Buber embraced Zionism asthe self-expression of a particular Jewish collective that could berealized only in its own land, on its soil, and in its language. Themodern state, its means and symbols, however, were not genuinelyconnected to this vision of a Jewish renaissance. While in the writingsof the early war years, Buber had characterized the Jews as an orientaltype in perpetual motion, in his later writings the Jews represent notype at all. Neither nation nor creed, they uncannily combine what hecalled national and spiritual elements. In his letter to Gandhi, Buberinsisted on the spatial orientation of Jewish existence and defendedthe Zionist cause against the critic who saw in it only a form ofcolonialism. For Buber, space was a necessary but insufficient materialcondition for the creation of culture based on dialogue. AGesamtkunstwerk in its own right, the Zionist project was toepitomize the life of dialogue by drawing the two resident nations ofPalestine into a perfectible common space free from mutualdomination.

6. Political Theology

Buber honed his political theology in response to the conflictbetween fascism and communism, the two main ideologies dominatingmid-twentieth century Europe. His national-utopian thought sharedtraits with both of these extreme positions and made him, in fact, oneof the few Jewish personages “acceptable” as a partner fordebate with moderate National Socialists in the early 1930s, aproximity he himself vigorously dismissed as a misperception. Hispolitical position remained indissolubly linked to hisphilosophical-theological commitment to the life of dialogue developedinI and Thou. According to Buber, politics was the work bywhich a society shapes itself. He rejected any hardened ideologicalformations of “the collective” and thus objected to thesolutions articulated on either political extreme. He understood theseto recognize neither an I nor a Thou in social life. Buber particularlyopposed the notion that the political sphere rested on the friend/enemydistinction, as theorized by the ultra-conservative jurist CarlSchmitt. Buber’s political ideal, “a-cephalic” andutopian as it was, was derived from his reconstruction of the ancientIsraelite polity as reflected in the Book of Judges. Conversely, it has been argued, his reading of Judges was inspired by the anarchism of Landauer. (See Brody (2018))

As presented by Buber in the 1930s, the primary governing trope ofJewish political theology—divine kingship (KönigtumGottes)—represents an answer to Schmitt, whose politicaltheology allowed divine power to be absorbed by the human sovereign.Buber resisted this slippage, privileging instead the anti-monarchicalstrata of the Hebrew Bible. In his 1932 book on theKingship ofGod, the biblical hero Gideon from chapter eight of the Book ofJudges stands out as the leader who, beating back the Philistineenemy, declines any claim to hereditary kingship. What Buber reads asa genuine, unconditional “no” to political sovereigntyrests on an unconditional “yes” affirming the absolutekingship of God. Against the theory staked out by Schmitt, theassertion that God alone is sovereign means that God’s authority isnon-transferable to any human head or political institution. ThusBuber preserves the notion of divine sovereignty over all forms ofstate apparatus and tyranny. Buber privileged simple, preliminary,primitive, and immediate forms of government, insisting that genuine“theocracy” is not a form of government at all, but rathera striving against the political tide. No “theological work ofart,” the messianic ideal of divine kingship found in the HebrewBible is presented as a reliable image preserved by the collectivememory of tradition. Buber maintained that once upon a time theIsraelite deity YHWH was, in fact, theheretog or warrior-king of the people. But he also knew thathe was unable to posit this for certain, and so proceeded to admitthat the image reflects not a historical actuality that we can knowbut only a historicalpossibility.

InPaths in Utopia (1947), Buber was to plot the “imageof perfect space” as one composed of lines that allow no fixeddefinition, the zone between the individual and collective constantlyrecalibrated according to the free creativity of itsmembers. “The relationship between centralism anddecentralization is a problem which…cannot be approached inprinciple, but…only with great spiritual tact, with theconstant and tireless weighing and measuring of the right proportionbetween them.” A “social pattern,” utopia was basedon a constant “drawing and re-drawing of lines ofdemarcation” (Paths in Utopia, 1996, p. 137). An“experiment that did not fail,” the Jewish villagecommunes in Palestine (i.e. thekvutza,kibbutz, andmoshav) owed their success to the pragmatism with which theirmembers approached the historical situation, to their inclinationtowards increased levels of federation, and to the degree to which theyestablished a relationship to the society at large. Single unitscombine into a system or “series of units” without thecentralization of state authority (ibid., 142–8).“Nowhere…in the history of the Socialist movement were men sodeeply involved in the process of differentiation and yet so intent onpreserving the principle of integration” (ibid., 145). Theydiscovered “[t]he right proportion, tested anew every dayaccording to changing conditions, between group-freedom and collectiveorder” (ibid., 148). It is not difficult to recognize inthis description of the modern Jewish agricultural collective anupdated version of the biblical tribal past that Buber idealized in hiswork on the primitive Israelite polity of the age of the biblicaljudges.

7. Distance and Relation: Late Philosophical Anthropology

Responding to the unfolding political chaos in Europe and to thestruggle between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, Buber’s philosophicaloeuvre assumed a more occasionalist and essayistic form in thelate 1930s and 1940s. In addition to the works cited above and workson religion, the Bible, and prophetic faith, his last majorphilosophical publication wasThe Eclipse of God (1951). Whatunites all of the late works as a group is the common emphasis onphilosophical anthropology, the place of the individual person in theworld vis-à-vis other human beings in human community. Whetherreflecting on “man,” “the Jew,” or “thesingle one,” always critical to Buber’s late thought is thetension between distance and relation, and the role of mediated imagesin dialogical, open-ended, non-fixed relation to the social andnatural world. In this, Buber addressed, but never directly, thetension between “fact” and “value,” exploredwith more rigor in later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germanphilosophy and in post-war Anglo-American analytic philosophy.

One of the signature pieces from this period is the essay onKierkegaard, “The Question to the Single One” (1936). Buberturns to Kierkegaard in order to force the question of solipsism. ForBuber, the Danish philosopher stands for a modern alienation from theworld. The question Buber asks is whether it is even possible toconceive of the human being as a “single one.” According toBuber, Kierkegaard’s love of God excludes the love of hisneighbor, the fellow creature with whom we constitute “theworld” in human terms. With his eye on the creation of Genesis,Buber describes man as a subject hovering over and embracing thecreaturely world. In this model, there is no renunciation of objectsand political life. At the same time, relation does not mean the givingoneself over to the crowd. The embrace of creaturely existence remainsvexing. Buber characterizes the human being in terms of“potentiality” within factual and finite limits, not interms of the “radicality” he sees in Kierkegaard. That isto say, instead of positing a radical dichotomy between community andthe single one, Buber argues that they are compatible with, andnecessary for, one another.

This critique of the single one in relation to a larger social worldbelongs to the world-picture established by Buber in the essay“What is Man?” (1938). At stake for Buber was a knowledgeof the human person as a whole, i.e., a complete understanding of humansubjectivity. The methodological key to the essay is a philosophicalanthropology. Buber assumed that only by enteringinto the act of self-reflection can the philosophical anthropologistbecome aware of human wholeness based on a structural distinctionbetween epochs of human habitation and epochs of human homelessness. Inthe former, philosophical anthropology is cosmological, i.e.fundamentally related to the world and to human environments. In thelatter, human subjectivity is conceived of as self-standing andindependent. The conceptual tension is between being at home in auniverse of things in contrast to what is presented as the collapse ofa rounded and unified world vis-à-vis self-divided forms ofconsciousness. In order to preserve the imbrication of singularselfhood and the bonding of human personhood, Buber rejected the falsechoice between individualism and collectivism. As Buber alwaysunderstood it, human wholeness lies in the meeting of the one with theother in a living fourfold relation to things, individual persons, themystery of Being, and self. Every living relation is essential andcontributes to human wholeness because human wholeness(“man’s unique essence”) is known or posited only inliving out a set of relations.

If relationship constitutes the fundamental datum of humanwholeness, it remains also true that relation was not understood byBuber independent of its conceptual antipode, namely“distance.” As developed in the essay “Distance andRelation” (1951), relation cannot take shape apart from or withoutthe prior setting of things, persons, and spiritual beings at adistance. For Buber, this setting of things, persons, and beings at adistance is the only way to secure the form of otherness without whichthere can be no relation. For without the form of otherness there can be noconfirmation of self insofar as the confirmation of the I is alwaysmediated by the other who confirms me, both at a distance and inrelation, or rather in the distance that is relation and the relationthat is difference.

While Buber most famously understood theI-Thou relationship as onebased on immediacy, he always steeped his thought in the power ofmediating images and other plastic forms as the material stuff ofinter-subjective relationship. In the essay "Man and his Image-Work,"Buber set out to understand something about the formation of images inrelation to the world, the world encompassed by art, faith, love, andphilosophy. Buber postulated three levels of world formation. The firsttwo levels are the familiar Kantian concepts of a noumenal“x” world and a phenomenal sense-world of form, comprisingthe world as shaped by and in images and concepts. Buber’sconception of the third level, what he calls the world of perfect form,derives from the mystical tradition. This paradoxical level of worldformation is expressed in terms of perfected form-relations. In art,faith, and philosophy, the human image-work emerges out of relationalencounters between persons and an independent "world" that exists onits own, but is not imaginable.

The concern about “images” in relation to distance anddialogue surfaced again in Buber’s last major work,TheEclipse of God (1952). The so-called “eclipse of God”was Buber’s symbol for the spiritual crisis in postwar Westerncivilization. It designated a philosophical collapse as much as a moralone. Like Sartre and Heidegger, Buber directed his attention toconcrete existence. But unlike his fellow“existentialists,” Buber was moved by the interactionbetween humans, individually and collectively, and an absolute realitythat exceeds the human imagination. Against Sartre, Heidegger, and alsoCarl Jung, Buber rejected the picture of self-enclosed human subjectsand self-enclosed human life-worlds beyond which there are no external,independent realities. Towards the end of his career as a writer andthinker, Buber sought to maintain the distinction and relation betweenthe human subject and an external other in order tosustain an ontological source of ethical value in opposition to thefalse absolutes of a modern world that had fused the absolute with thepolitical and historical products of the human spirit.

8. Criticism

Philosophical criticism of Buber tends to focus on three areas: [1]epistemological questions regarding the status of theI-Thouform of relationship and the status of the object-world delimited bytheI-It form of relationship, [2] hermeneutical questionsregarding Buber’s reading of Hasidic source material, and [3] doubtsregarding the author’s rhetoric and style that touch upon thephilosophy of language. All three lines of criticism have at theircore the problem of the conflict between realism and idealism,world-affirmation and world-denial.

The nature of the world picture in Buber’s magnum opus hasalways been among the most contested aspects of Buber’sphilosophy in the critical literature.I and Thou isconsidered to have inaugurated “a Copernican revolution intheology (…) against the scientific-realistic attitude”(Bloch [1983], p. 42), but it has also been criticized for itsreduction of fundamental human relations to just two—theI-Thou and theI-It. Writing to Buber after thepublication ofI and Thou, Rosenzweig would not be the lastcritic to complain, “In your setting up the I-IT, you give theI-Thou a cripple for an opponent.” He continued to rebuke,“You make of creation a chaos, just good enough to provideconstruction material (Baumaterial) for the newbuilding” (Franz Rosenzweig,Briefe und Tagebücher,pp. 824–5). In Jewish philosophical circles, it has been long arguedthat Buber was unable to ward off the relativism, subjectivism, andantinomianism that are said to permeate non-realist epistemologies andontologies. Building on Rosenzweig’s complaint againstBuber’s epistemology, Steven Katz called for a“realism” that affirms the rich world of stable objectsextended in time and space. It is still widely assumed by his criticsin Jewish philosophy that in his critique of Jewish law and theI-It form of relationship Buber rejected the world ofobject-formsin toto.

In addition to hermeneutical arguments regarding historicism,anti-historicism, literary style and poetic license, arguments aboutthe picture of Hasidism that emerged out of Buber’s research andwriting are also based upon the philosophical world picture as it tookshape in Buber’s philosophical universe. Against Buber’s corpus ofHasidica, the doyen of Kabbalah scholarship, Gershom Scholem, was oneof the first to throw down the gauntlet. Scholem argued that Buber’sfocus on the genre of folk-tales obscured the theoretical works withinthe corpus Hasidic literature, where the phenomenon of (gnostic) worlddenial was more pronounced than in the popular tales. Buber’s latercollections of Hasidic tales in particular reflect a this-worldlyethos at odds with important tenets of Hasidic mysticism. WhereasBuber’s early, neo-romantic Hasidica assumed a more distant and evenantagonistic relation to the world of time and space, critics, such asScholem, Katz, and Schatz-Uffenheimer, focused their critique almostexclusively on the later body of work, in which a this-wordlycosmology was more sharply articulated, in line with Buber’s ownrenewed interest, starting in the mid to late 1920s, with quotidianforms of existence.

The analytic philosopher Steven T. Katz, author of an importantessay about the particularism of mystical language, articulated a rangeof criticisms directed against Buber’s writings (Katz, 1985).More recently, Katz revisited and mitigated some of these earliercriticisms that included the charge of antinomianism, the lack of anaccount for the enduring character of theI-Thou relation, andthe misrepresentation of Hasidic thought (Katz in Zank, 2006). Whatremains most objectionable in Buber is the tendency toward anaestheticization of reality and the problem of Buber’s oftenslippery poetic rhetoric. Walter Kaufmann, who produced a secondEnglish translation ofI and Thou, articulated his displeasurewith Buber most strongly. While he did not regard the lack of deepimpact of Buber’s contributions to biblical studies, Hasidism, andZionist politics as an indication of failure, Kaufmann consideredIand Thou a shameful performance in both style and content. Instyle the book invoked “the oracular tone of falseprophets” and it was “more affected than honest.”Writing in a state of “irresistible enthusiasm,” Buberlacked the critical distance needed to critique and revise his ownformulations. His conception of theI-It was a“Manichean insult” while his conception of theI-Thou was “rashly romantic and ecstatic,” andBuber “mistook deep emotional stirrings for revelation.”(Kaufmann [1983] pp. 28–33). The preponderance in Buber’s writings ofrhetorical figures, such as “experience,”“realization,” “revelation,”“presence” and “encounter,” and hispredilection for utopian political programs such as anarchism,socialism, and a bi-national solution to the intractable nationalconflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, are in line with avagueness in his philosophical writing that often renders Buber’sthought suggestive, but elusive. Similar criticisms apply toBuber’s claim that language has the power to reveal divinepresence or uncover Being.

Buber’s earlyJugendstil rhetoric was a far cry fromtheneue Sachlichkeit of the nineteen twenties (Braiterman,2007). While similarly inclined literary authors like Hermann Hessepraised Buber’s German renditions of Hasidic lore and his Bibletranslation later gained popular praise among German theologians,others, among them Franz Kafka, Theodor W. Adorno, and SiegfriedKracauer, spoke of Buber’s style disparagingly.

On a more biographical note, thephilosopher of the “I and Thou” allowed very few people tocall him by his first name; the theorist of education suffered nodisturbance of his rigorous schedule by children playing in his ownhome; the utopian politician alienated most representatives of theZionist establishment; and the innovative academic lecturer barelyfound a permanent position in the university he had helped to create—the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Some of the most dedicated studentsof this inspiring orator and writer found themselves irritated by theconflict between their master’s ideas and their own attempts at puttingthem into practice. In the final analysis it seems as if Buber alwaysremained the well-groomed, affected, prodigiously gifted, pamperedViennese boy, displaced in a land of horses and chemists, whose bestcompany were the works of his own imagination and whose self-stagingovertures to the outside world were always tainted by his enthusiasmfor words and for the heightened tone of his own prodigious voice.

9. Honors and Legacy

Largely ignored by academic philosophers, Buber was already widelyrecognized and reviewed across the larger field of German lettersbefore World War I. He rose to renewed prominence in Germanyafter World War II, where his Bible translation, collections of Hasidicstories, and writings on the philosophy of dialogue have remained inprint ever since. Among the honors Buber received after 1945 were theGoethe Prize of the City of Hamburg (1951), the Friedenspreis desDeutschen Buchhandels (Frankfurt am Main, 1953), and the Erasmus Prize(Amsterdam, 1963). Significant students who considered their own work acontinuation of Buber’s were Nahum Glatzer (Buber’s onlydoctoral student during his years at the university in Frankfurt,1924–1933, later an influential teacher of Judaic Studies at BrandeisUniversity), Akiba Ernst Simon (historian and theorist of education inIsrael who first met Buber at the Freies jüdisches Lehrhaus inFrankfurt, and who returned from Palestine to work with Buber for theMittelstelle für jüdische Erwachsenenbildung), andimportant Israeli scholars, such as Shmuel Eisenstadt, Amitai Etzioni,and Jochanan Bloch, who knew Buber in his later years when he taughtseminars on social philosophy and education at the Hebrew Universityof Jerusalem. As for the United States, Buber’s American translatorand biographer Maurice Friedman, a prolific author in his own right,almost single-handedly introduced Buber to post-war American religionscholars and the larger reading public. In addition to Friedman,Walter Kaufmann, the author of one of the first English-languagestudies of Nietzsche as well as books on religion and existentialism,helped to popularize Buber in the United States, despite theabove-cited critique of Buber’sI and Thou. It was Kaufmannwho first included Buber in the canon of religious existentialism inthe 1950s and 1960s. In Jewish philosophy, Buber’s name has since beeneclipsed by those of Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas.

Bibliography

Works Cited

• Braiterman, Zachary, 2007,The Shape of Revelation: Aestheticsand Modern Jewish Thought, Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress.
• Brody, Samuel H., 2018,Martin Buber’s Theopolitics, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Friedman, Maurice, 1981,Martin Buber’s Life and Work: TheEarly Years, 1878–1923, New York: Dutton.
• Bloch, Jochanan/Gordon, Hayyim (ed.), 1983,Martin Buber.Bilanz seines Denkens, Freiburg i. B.
• Kaufmann, Walter, 1983, “Bubers Fehlschläge und seinTriumph” in Bloch [1983], pp. 22ff.
• Wurm, Carsten, 1994,150 Jahre Rütten & Loening… Mehr als eine Verlagsgeschichte, Berlin:Rütten & Loening.
• Zank, Michael, 2006, “Buber andReligionswissenschaft: The Case of His Studies on BiblicalFaith” inNew Perspectives on Martin Buber,Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, pp. 61–82.

Bibliographies

• Catanne, Moshe, 1961,A Bibliography of Martin Buber’s Works(1895–1957), Jerusalem: Bialik Institute.
• Cohn, Margot, 1980,Martin Buber. A Bibliography of HisWritings, 1897–1978. Compiled by Margot Cohn and Raphael Buber.Jerusalem: Magnes Press. This is the most authoritative bibliographycompiled by Buber’s long-time secretary and his son.
• Friedman, Maurice, 1963, “Bibliographie” in PaulArthur Schilpp and Maurice Friedman (ed.),Martin Buber,Stuttgart: Kohlhammer1.
• Kohn, Hans, 1930,Martin Buber, Hellerau: J. Hegner. This biographyincludes a bibliography of Buber’s writings from 1897 to 1928. Thesecond edition (1961) contains bibliographic updates by RobertWeltsch.
• Moonan, Willard, 1981,Martin Buber and His Critics. AnAnnotated Bibliography of Writings in English Through 1978, NewYork & London: Garland. With a list of the abstracts, indices,and bibliographies consulted by the author, indices of translators andauthors writing on Buber, and subject indices of writings by and aboutBuber.

Selected Early Works By Martin Buber

• 1906–1912,Die Gesellschaft. Sammlung sozial-psychologischerMonographien [Society. A Collection of Social-PsychologicalMonographs], Frankfurt am Main: Rütten & Loening. 40 volumes.The first volume (Werner Sombart,Das Proletariat) includesBuber’s introduction to the series.
• 1906b,Die Geschichten des Rabbi Nachman [The Tales ofRabbi Nachman], Frankfurt am Main: Rütten & Loening. Dedicatedto “the memory of my grandfather, Salomon Buber, the last masterof the old haskalah.” (“Meinem Großvater Salomon Buber dem letzten Meister der alten Haskala bringe ich dies Werk der Chassidut dar in Ehrfurcht und Liebe.”)
• 1908,Die Legende des Baal Schem [The Legend of the BaalShem], Frankfurt: Rütten & Loening (second edition: 1916). Onthe founder of the Hasidic movement in early eighteenth-centuryPodolia/Volynia,
• 1911a,Chinesische Geister- und Liebesgeschichten [ChineseGhost and Love Stories], Frankfurt: Rütten & Loening.
• 1911b,Drei Reden über das Judentum [Three Speecheson Judaism], Frankfurt: Rütten & Loening, 1911 (second,“complete” edition, 1923). Dedicated to “mywife.”
• 1913,Daniel: Gespräche von der Verwirklichung[Daniel, Dialogues on Realization], Leipzig: Insel-Verlag.
• 1916–24,Der Jude. Eine Monatsschrift [The Jew. AMonthly], Wien/Berlin: R. Löwith and Berlin: JüdischerVerlag. Founded by Buber, who edited it during these years and wrotemany contributions.
• 1918,Mein Weg zum Chassidismus. Erinnerungen [My Path toHasidism. Recollections], Frankfurt: Rütten & Loening.Dedicated to “my beloved father.”
• 1919,Der heilige Weg. Ein Wort an die Juden und an dieVölker [The Holy Path. A Word to the Jews and to theGentiles], Frankfurt: Rütten & Loening. Dedicated to“my friend Gustav Landauer at his grave.”
• 1922,Der grosse Maggid und seine Nachfolge [The GreatMaggid and his Succession], Frankfurt: Rütten & Loening.
• 1923,Ich und Du [I and Thou], Leipzig: Insel Verlag.
• 1924,Das verborgene Licht [The Hidden Light], Frankfurt:Rütten & Loening.
• 1925ff,Die Schrift. Zu verdeutschen unternommen von MartinBubergemeinsam mit Franz Rosenzweig. Buber andRosenzweig’s translation of the Hebrew Scriptures was published byLambert Schneider first in his own publishing house in Berlin, between1933 and 1939 under the heading of Schocken Verlag, Berlin, and again,after 1945, through the newly founded Lambert Schneider Verlag,Heidelberg.
• 1926–29,Die Kreatur [Creation], Berlin: LambertSchneider. A quarterly edited by Buber with the Protestantpsychologist Victor von Weizsäcker and the dissident Catholictheologian Joseph Wittig.

Collections and Editions of Writings and Letters

• 1953–62,Die Schrift. Verdeutscht von Martin Buber gemeinsammit Franz Rosenzweig, improved and complete edition in fourvolumes, Cologne: J. Hegner.
• 1953a,Hinweise. Gesammelte Essays, Zurich: Manesse.
• 1962,Werke. Erster Band:Schriften zurPhilosophie [Works, Volume One:PhilosophicalWritings], Munich and Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider.
• 1963a,Werke. Dritter Band:Schriften zumChassidismus [Works, Volume Three:Writings onHasidism], Munich and Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider.
• 1963b,Der Jude und sein Judentum. Gesammelte Aufsätze undReden, Cologne: J. Hegner.
• 1964,Werke. Zweiter Band:Schriften zur Bibel[Works, Volume Two:Writings on the Bible], Munichand Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider.
• 1965,Nachlese. Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider. Englishtranslation: 1967a.
• 1972–75,Briefwechsel aus sieben Jahrzehnten, edited byGrete Schaeder, Volume I: 1897–1918 (1972), Volume II: 1918–1938(1973), Volume III: 1938–1965 (1975), Heidelberg: LambertSchneider.
• 1996,The Letters of Martin Buber: A Life of Dialogue,edited by Nahum Glatzer and Paul Mendes-Flohr, Syracuse: SyracuseUniversity Press.
• 2001ff,Werkausgabe, edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr, PeterSchafer, Martina Urban, Bernd Witte and others. Gutersloh: GutersloherVerlagshaus.

Buber in English

• 1937,I and Thou, transl. by Ronald Gregor Smith,Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark. 2^nd Edition New York: Scribners,1958. 1^st Scribner Classics ed. New York, NY: Scribner, 2000,c1986
• 1952,Eclipse of God, New York: Harper and Bros.2^nd Edition Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977.
• 1957,Pointing the Way, transl. Maurice Friedman, NewYork: Harper, 1957, 2^nd Edition New York: Schocken,1974.
• 1960,The Origin and Meaning of Hasidism, transl. M.Friedman, New York: Horizon Press.
• 1964,Daniel: Dialogueson Realization, New York,Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
• 1965,The Knowledge of Man, transl. Ronald Gregor Smithand Maurice Friedman, New York: Harper & Row. 2^ndEdition New York, 1966.
• 1966,The Way of Response: Martin Buber; Selectionsfrom his Writings, edited by N. N. Glatzer. New York: SchockenBooks.
• 1967a,A Believing Humanism: My Testament, translation ofNachlese (Heidelberg 1965) by M. Friedman, New York:Simon and Schuster.
• 1967b,On Judaism, edited by Nahum Glatzer and transl. byEva Jospe and others, New York: Schocken Books.
• 1968,On the Bible: Eighteen Studies, edited by NahumGlatzer, New York: Schocken Books.
• 1970a,I and Thou, a new translation with a prologue“I and you” and notes by Walter Kaufmann, New York:Scribner’s Sons.
• 1970b,Mamre: Essays in Religion, translated by GretaHort, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.
• 1970c,Martin Buber and the Theater, Including Martin Buber’s“Mystery Play” Elijah, edited and translated withthree introductory essays by Maurice Friedman, New York, Funk&Wagnalls.
• 1972,Encounter: Autobiographical Fragments. La Salle,Ill.: Open Court.
• 1973a,On Zion: the History of an Idea, with a newforeword by Nahum N. Glatzer, Translated from the German by StanleyGodman, New York: Schocken Books.
• 1973b,Meetings, edited with an introduction and bibliographyby Maurice Friedman, La Salle, Ill.: Open Court Pub. Co. 3rd ed.London, New York: Routledge, 2002.
• 1983,A Land of Two Peoples: Martin Buber on Jews andArabs, edited with commentary by Paul R. Mendes-Flohr, New York:Oxford University Press. 2^nd Edition Gloucester, Mass.:Peter Smith, 1994
• 1985,Ecstatic Confessions, edited by PaulMendes-Flohr, translated by Esther Cameron, San Francisco: Harper &Row.
• 1991a,Chinese Tales: Zhuangzi, Sayings and Parables andChinese Ghost and Love stories, translated by Alex Page, with anintroduction by Irene Eber, Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities PressInternational.
• 1991b,Tales of the Hasidim, foreword by Chaim Potok, NewYork: Schocken Books, distributed by Pantheon.
• 1992,On Intersubjectivity and CulturalCreativity, edited and with an introduction by S.N. Eisenstadt,Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• 1994,Scripture and Translation, Martin Buber and FranzRosenzweig, translated by Lawrence Rosenwald with Everett Fox.Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• 1996,Paths in Utopia, translated by R.F. Hull. Syracuse:Syracuse University Press.
• 1999a,The First Buber: Youthful Zionist Writings ofMartin Buber, edited and translated from the German by Gilya G.Schmidt, Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press.
• 1999b,Martin Buber on Psychology and Psychotherapy: Essays,Letters, and Dialogue, edited by Judith Buber Agassi, with aforeword by Paul Roazin, New York: Syracuse University Press.
• 1999c,Gog and Magog: A Novel, translated from the Germanby Ludwig Lewisohn, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
• 2002a,The Legend of the Baal-Shem, translated byMaurice Friedman, London: Routledge.
• 2002b,Between Man and Man, translated by RonaldGregor-Smith, with an introduction by Maurice Friedman, London, NewYork: Routledge.
• 2002c,The Way of Man: According to the Teaching ofHasidim, London: Routledge.
• 2002d,The Martin Buber Reader: Essential Writings, editedby Asher D. Biemann, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
• 2002e,Ten Rungs: Collected Hasidic Sayings,translated by Olga Marx, London: Routledge.
• 2003,Two Types of Faith, translated by Norman P.Goldhawk with an afterword by David Flusser, Syracuse, N.Y.: SyracuseUniversity Press.

Selected Edited Volumes on Martin Buber

• Bloch, Jochanan/Gordon, Hayyim (ed.), 1983,Martin Buber.Bilanz seines Denkens, Freiburg i. B.: Herder.
• Licharz, Werner/Schmidt, Heinz (ed.), 1989,Martin Buber(1878–1965). Internationales Symposium zum 20. Todestag. Twovolumes (Series: Arnoldshainer Texte), Arnoldshain: Haag and Herchen.
• Schilpp, Paul Arthur/Friedman, Maurice (ed.), 1963,MartinBuber, (Series: Philosophen des 20. Jahrhunderts), Stuttgart, Kohlhammer.English edition: 1967,The Philosophy of Martin Buber.(Series: Library of Living Philosophers, vol. XII). Lasalle/Ill.: OpenCourt. Among the contributors to this volume are, aside from Buberhimself, Max Brod, Emmanuel Lévinas, Emil Brunner, EmilFackenheim, Marvin Fox, Nahum Glatzer, Mordecai Kaplan, WalterKaufmann, Gabriel Marcel, Nathan Rotenstreich, RivkaSchatz-Uffenheimer, Ernst Simon, Jacob Taubes, C.F. vonWeizsäcker, and Robert Weltsch.
• Zank, Michael (ed.), 2006,New Perspectives on MartinBuber, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. With essays by Joseph Agassi,Leora Batnitzky, Ilaria Bertone, Asher Biemann, Zachary Braiterman,Micha Brumlik, Judith Buber Agassi, Steven T. Katz, Paul Mendes-Flohr,Gesine Palmer, Andrea Poma, Yossef Schwartz, Jules Simon, MartinaUrban, and Michael Zank

Secondary Literature

• Avnon, Dan, 1998,Martin Buber. The Hidden Dialogue,Lanham, Boulder, New York, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield.
• Babolin, A., 1965,Essere e Alteritá in MartinBuber, Padova: Gregoriana.
• Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 1958,Einsame Zwiesprache. MartinBuber und das Christentum, Cologne: J. Hegner.
• Berkovits, Eliezer, 1962,A Jewish Critique of the Philosophyof Martin Buber, New York: Yeshiva University.
• Bloch, J., 1977,Die Aporie des Du, Heidelberg: LambertSchneider.
• Brody, Samuel H., 2018,Martin Buber’s Theopolitics, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Blumenfeld, Walter, 1951,La antropologia filosofica de MartinBuber y la filosofia antropologica; un essayo, Lima: TipografiaSanta Rosa.
• Braiterman, Zachary, 2007,The Shape of Revelation: Aestheticsand Modern Jewish Thought, Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress.
• Casper, Bernhard, 1967,Das dialogische Denken: FranzRosenzweig, Ferdinand Ebner, Martin Buber, Freiburg i. B., Basel,Wien: Herder.
• Dujovne, L., 1966,Martin Buber; sus ideas religiosas,filosoficas y sociales, Buenos Aires: Bibliografica Omeba.
• Friedman, Maurice, 1955,Martin Buber. The Life ofDialogue, Chicago: University of Chicago.
• Friedman, Maurice, 1981,Martin Buber’s Life and Work. Theearly years. 1878–1923., New York: Dutton.
• Horwitz, Rivka, 1978,Buber’s Way to I and Thou. An HistoricalAnalysis, Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider.
• Kavka, Martin, 2012, “Verification (Bewahrung) inMartinBuber” Journal of Jewish Thought andPhilosophy 20 (1):71–98.
• Katz, Steven, 1985,Post-Holocaust Dialogues, New York:New York University Press.
• Kohn, Hans, 1930,Martin Buber, Hellerau: J. Hegner. Second edition:Cologne: Melzer, 1961. First biography of Buber, published on the occasion ofhis fiftieth birthday.
• Koren, Israel, 2002, “Between Buber’sDaniel and HisI and Thou: A New Examination” inModernJudaism 22 (2002): 169–198.
• Lang, Bernhard, 1964,Martin Buber und das dialogische Leben,Bern: H. Lang.
• Mendes-Flohr, Paul, 1989,From Mysticism to Dialogue. MartinBuber’s Transformation of German Social Thought, Detroit: WayneState University Press.
• Mendes-Flohr, Paul, 2019,Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent, New Haven/Ct and London: Yale University Press.
• Poma, Andrea, 1974,La filosofia dialogica di MartinBuber, Torino: Rosenberg and Sellier.
• Schaeder, Grete, 1966,Martin Buber, HebräischerHumanismus, Göttingen: Vandenhoek and Ruprecht. English:1973,The Hebrew Humanism of Martin Buber, transl. by NoahJ. Jacobs, Detroit: Wayne State University.
• Simon, Ernst, 1959,Aufbau im Untergang, Tübingen:Mohr. English: 1956, “Jewish adult education in Nazi Germany asspiritual resistence” inYearbook of the Leo BaeckInstitute, London: Secker & Warburg, Nr. 1,pp. 68–105. On the Mittelstelle für jüdischeErwachsenenbildung, a centralized institution, run by Buber from1933–38, in charge of reeducating Jewish teachers who had beenforced out of the general school system under the Nazis.
• Smith, M. K., 2000 [2009], “Martin Buber on education,”inThe Encyclopaedia of Informal Education, [available online, retrieved: Dec 3, 2014].
• Theunissen, Michael, 1964, “Bubers negative Ontologie desZwischen” inPhilosophisches Jarhbuch, Freiburg andMunich: Alber, pp. 319–330.
• Theunissen, Michael, 1965,Der Andere. Studien zurSozialontologie der Gegenwart, Berlin: De Gruyter. English: 1984,The Other: Studies in the Social ontology of Husserl, Heidegger,Sartre, and Buber, transl. by Christopher Macann, Cambridge: TheMIT Press, 1984.
• Wood, R., 1969,Martin Buber’s Ontology; An Analysis of“I and Thou”, Evanston, Illinois: NorthwesternUniversity Press.
• Urban, Martina, 2008,Aesthetics of Renewal: Martin Buber’sEarly Representation of Hasidism as Kulturkritik, Chicago:University of Chicago Press.

Academic Tools

	How to cite this entry.
	Preview the PDF version of this entry at theFriends of the SEP Society.
	Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO).
	Enhanced bibliography for this entryatPhilPapers, with links to its database.

Other Internet Resources

• Information on the Martin Buber Werkausgabe Published on behalf of Philosophische Fakultät der HeinrichHeine Universität Düsseldorf and Israel Academy of Sciences andHumanities, edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr and Bernd Witte.
• Buber Timeline, A brief biographic sketch maintained by the online project of the Museum for German History in Berlin.

Related Entries

Dilthey, Wilhelm |education, philosophy of |Nietzsche, Friedrich |Rosenzweig, Franz |Wundt, Wilhelm Maximilian