Martin Buber (1878 to 1965) was an Austrian-born Jewish philosopher whose book I and Thou (1923) says there are two basic ways of meeting the world: as an It, an object to be used, studied or managed, or as a Thou, a living presence met with the whole of ourselves. An I–Thou relationship is that second kind of meeting, and Buber held that it is possible not only with people but with animals, a tree, or a work of art. His account can be set beside Therapeutic Shamanism’s, in which the whole living world is a family of beings, though Buber was not an animist.
Who was Martin Buber? #
A philosopher, scholar and translator who wrote in German and Hebrew. He was born in Vienna in 1878 and spent much of his childhood with his grandparents in Lemberg, now Lviv.1 He became known for retelling the tales of the Hasidic masters, edited the journal Der Jude, and with Franz Rosenzweig made a German translation of the Hebrew Bible. He taught at the University of Frankfurt until the Nazis dismissed him in 1933, settled in Jerusalem in 1938 as a professor at the Hebrew University, and worked there for a shared, bi-national future for Jews and Arabs.2 He was nominated many times for the Nobel Prizes in Literature and for Peace, and died in Jerusalem in 1965.1
What is an I–Thou relationship? #
A meeting in which the other is not a thing but a presence. Buber’s starting point is that there are two “primary words” we can speak, I–It and I–Thou, and that each brings a different kind of world and a different kind of self into being. In I–It we experience, use, classify and arrange things. In I–Thou we are in relation; the other is met directly and as a whole, with nothing in between, and it can only be spoken with the whole being. Hence his best-known line: “All real living is meeting.”3
The English word “Thou” comes from Ronald Gregor Smith’s English translation. Buber’s German Du is simply the ordinary, familiar word for “you”, without the formal, poetic ring of “Thou”, and Walter Kaufmann’s 1970 translation opens with a prologue called “I and you”.4
Can we meet a tree as a Thou? #
Buber said yes, and his tree is the book’s most famous passage. He describes all the ways of taking a tree as an It: as a picture, as movement, as a species to be classified, as an expression of physical laws, as numbers. Then, he says, it can also happen that in considering the tree he becomes bound up in relation to it, and the tree is no longer an It. It is no impression or play of the imagination; it stands bodied over against him and has to do with him, as he with it.5
He claims no more than the meeting itself. Asked whether the tree has a consciousness like ours, he answers that he has no experience of that, and that what he meets is “no soul or dryad of the tree, but the tree itself”.5 Later he answered readers who asked how far this goes. With animals there is a true, if partial, mutuality, which he called the threshold of mutuality; with plants, which cannot respond in deed, there is still a reciprocity of their very being.6
How does Buber’s idea connect with animism and Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Through the meeting itself, though the two describe it from different starting points. In animism everything is alive and conscious, rocks, rivers, mountains and the wind included, and this is far more than a belief, because animists actually experience the world in this way. There is no hierarchy, and everything is part of one big family of beings.7 The world is profoundly alive, and it can be communicated with.8 See What does it mean to say the world is alive and full of persons?
Buber came to his tree from Jewish philosophy, and he makes no claim about the tree’s inner life. Animism begins from the other side, with the aliveness of the tree and of everything else. What they share is the turn from treating other beings as things to be used towards meeting them as someones. In Therapeutic Shamanism that meeting is with the Animal, Plant and Stone PeopleStone People. All physical matter: mountains, sea, rivers, clouds, sun and stars: the oldest and widest of the Peoples. As some animist cultures put it, ‘we are just the Stone People, dancing for a while’. Read the full answer, met as kin and as teachers. See How do humans communicate and build relationships with the other-than-human Peoples?
Does Buber say we should live in I–Thou all the time? #
No. Every Thou in our world, he says, must sooner or later become an It again, which he calls the exalted melancholy of our fate. The I–It attitude is not evil in itself, and in his own words “without It man cannot live. But he who lives with It alone is not a man.”9 The danger he names is the world of It taking over completely.
A similar balance runs through Therapeutic Shamanism’s account of hunter-gatherer life. Hunter-gatherers seem to have had a sense of separateness available when they needed it, above all when facing physical danger, and a sense of interconnectedness that they could fully enter in shamanic journeys and other practices. In everyday life the two ran side by side, a sense of self and equally a sense of being part of a larger whole. Our modern problem is that we have fallen almost entirely into separateness.10
Can a therapist and client meet as I and Thou? #
Buber and Carl Rogers discussed this in a public dialogue in 1957. Rogers compared the meeting at the heart of person-centred therapy with the I–Thou relationship, and said that when a client really changes, a real connection of that kind forms between them. Buber did not fully agree, pointing out that the relationship between therapist and client stands on a somewhat unequal footing. Both allowed that true moments of mutual meeting do happen in therapy.11 Buber’s postscript to I and Thou makes the same point, that a healing relationship of this kind has a built-in limit to its mutuality.12
The person-centred view runs through Therapeutic Shamanism too. Early psychotherapy mirrored the power imbalances of a hierarchical society, whilst in person-centred therapy the therapist and client meet as equals, each with a different area of expertise.13 See Who was Carl Rogers, and why does he matter to Therapeutic Shamanism?
What have critics said about I and Thou? #
It has had critics from the start. Franz Rosenzweig, Buber’s friend and collaborator, objected that its account of I–It gave I–Thou “a cripple for an opponent”. Walter Kaufmann, who translated it again in 1970, judged its style “more affected than honest”, and Buber’s philosophical writing in general has been found suggestive but elusive.14
Buber answered readers’ objections in the postscript he added to the book. To those who took it for mysticism he wrote that the I–Thou relationship “has not a mystical nature”, and needs no leaving of the ordinary norms of human thinking. And the book itself gives I–It its place, saying that it “is not of evil” and that nobody can live without it.15
