I and Thou

Martin Buber, a Jewish Austrian, was born in 1878 and died in 1965, at the age of 87. Buber’s childhood was spent in Vienna, which was at the time the capital of the soon-to-fall Austro-Hungarian empire, which dissolved in the wake of the First World War. Raised by his grandparents on his father’s side—his parents divorced when he was a young child—Buber matured into adulthood with a significant amount of wealth thanks to the financial background of his grandfather. From his adolescence, Buber showed a profound ability to learn languages, learning Hebrew, German, and Polish as modern languages, and learning Latin, Greek, French, English, and Italian later as academic interests. In 1899, at the age of 21, Martin met Paula Winkler, whom he would later marry, and with whom he would have two children (son Rafael and daughter Eva). Paula would die in 1958, seven years before Martin’s own death in 1965.

An academic from the start, Buber spent the first years of his career doing publishing and translating work, interested especially in language and poetry. It was not until his later thirties that he began to show interest and develop research in the areas that would serve as the foundation of his work I and Thou. In addition, his reputation as an esteemed scholar was greatly helped by his appointment to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he began to focus his teaching and research on social philosophy. From that point on, Buber’s fame only grew; he eventually became a world-famous scholar, giving lectures on the international circuit for decades. His influence was vast, and other famous intellectuals—figures such as Leo Strauss and Albert Schweitzer—counted him among their major influences. For his part, Buber saw Immanuel Kant as a major influence and inspiration.

The work for which he is best known, I and Thou, remained of primary interest to him throughout his life, and he never departed from his principle convictions laid out within the text. During his life, he was not widely regarded by those in his own field of academic philosophy, but his reputation in the wider world of academia—as well as those generally interested in the intellectual life—was high. His rise to prominence began in the early years of the 20th century, but really took off after the close of World War II. Buber is generally considered to be one of the greatest 20th-century existentialist philosophers, and was nominated for Nobel Prizes a grand total of 17 times (10 times for literature, and seven for the Nobel Peace prize). Over the course of his life, Buber was nominated for and awarded with many other honorifics, including the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (1953), the Bialik Prize for Jewish Thought (1961), and the Erasmus Prize (1963).

Buber’s literary output was prolific. He published more than 60 books over the course of his academic career, and almost all of his work has been translated into English (the translation of which occurred often during his own lifetime). I and Thou remains one of the defining works of his thought, and is still considered influential to this day.