Martin Buber: An Overview
By Shea Stevens
"Tillich and Martin Buber, who was another teacher of mine in Frankfurt, had more influence on me than any other psychologists or psychoanalysts. I was impressed with the way they respected people."
-Laura Perls, 1977“Tillich and Buber were much more than what one usually thinks of as theologians. They were really psychologists… They were interested in people, they were not talking about subjects. Listening to Buber and Tillich, you felt they were talking directly to you and not just about some thing. The kind of contact they made was essential in their theories.
-Laura Perls, 1992
Buber’s Early Life
Martin Buber was born in Vienna, Austria on Feburary 8, 1878 to a Jewish family. His parents divorced when he was three, and he was then raised by his grandfather.
“We both leaned on the railing. I cannot remember that I spoke of my mother to my older comrade. But I hear how the big girl said to me: ‘No, she will never come back.’
I know that I remained silent, but I cherished no doubt of the truth of the spoken words. It remained fixed in me from year to year. It cleaved ever more to my heart, but after more than ten years, I had begun to perceive it as something that concerned not only me, but all men. Later I once made up the word “Verging”: “mis-meeting” or “mis-encounter” to designate the failure of a real meeting between men and men.”
-Martin Buber, Fragments
In Fragments, Buber recounts his early years and family relationships. There he says he attended the Franz Joseph Gymnasium as a youth, a majority Polish Catholic school with a Jewish minority, and remarked that no attempt was made to convert him while he was there. He wrote that he himself carried forward an “antipathy to all missionary activity,” rooted in those early experiences.
Counter to his family’s expectations and religious customs, Buber began to read secular philosophy, including Plato, Kant, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. In 1896 he began studies in Vienna. Shortly after, he began to work in the Zionist movement. In 1899 he met his wife, Paula Winkler, who would convert from the Catholic Church to Judaism. Buber spent some time also at the University of Leipzig, and while there he belonged to a socialist club. His friend, Gustav Landauer, formed a Bund and Buber was a member, and participated in the forming of a short-lived commune outside of Berlin. There was tension between the two due to Buber’s disagreement with the use of violence. Buber was friends with Frieda and Erich Fromm. Both Fromm and Buber called for a two-nation state in Palestine.
I and Thou
In 1923 Buber published his classic essay, I and Thou.
Some of its central themes are the difference between distance and connection, objectification, and inter-subjectivity; the “between.”
I wrote a post on my blog about dialogic relation and Buber here , and an article in New Gestalt Voices edition 8 here, discussing I and Thou. It’s a work that has deeply inspired me and many others in the gestalt tradition.
Some of the most well-known concepts in Buber’s work are confirmation, inclusion, dialogue, ‘I-Thou’ relating and ‘I-It’ relating, and ‘the between’.
Later Years
Buber was immersed in the same circles and intellectual environment as the Gestalt Psychologists, Laura and Fritz Perls, and Kurt Goldstein. Laura Perls was his student in Frankfurt. Martin Buber became an honorary professor at the University of Frankfurt in 1930. When Hitler came into power in 1933, Buber resigned in protest and founded a school for Jewish adult education. In 1938, he moved to Jerusalem and began work as a professor at Hebrew University.
Buber participated in a public dialogue with Carl Rogers on April 18, 1957 at the University of Michigan. There Buber was emphatic that a truly I-Thou relationship cannot happen in a therapist-client relationship because of the asymmetry of the power imbalance, although Rogers’ therapeutic approach comes closer to the I-Thou attitude than others do. Rogers, on the other hand, wanted to say that he believes there is an I-Thou dynamic that he experiences at times with his clients.
Martin Buber died in Jerusalem on June 13, 1965. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Nobel Peace Prize.
“The sicknesses of the soul are sicknesses of relationships”
-Buber, Dialogical Psychotherapy, 1966“Buber was interested in the way each person individuates herself as entirely unique by tapping into “genius,” such that self-actualization is analogous to the creation of a work of art.”
-Feigenbaum, 2023, p. 172
Gestalt in Buber’s Early Work
Buber’s early works featured the concept of gestalt as a principle of vitality, wholeness, and realization. This was brought to my attention by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on Martin Buber, written by Zank and Braiterman. Here is a quote from that entry:
“Commenting upon a work by Michelangelo, Buber speaks of Gestalt as hidden in the raw material, waiting to emerge as the artist wrestles with the dead block. The artistic struggle instantiates and represents the more fundamental opposition between formative (gestaltende) and shapeless (gestaltlose) principles. The tension between these, for Buber, lay at the source of all spiritual renewal, raging within every human individual as the creative, spiritual act that subjugates unformed, physical stuff. It is the free play of Gestalt that quickens the dead rigidity of form.”
In Maurice Friedman’s introduction to Buber’s Daniel, he remarks that Buber’s earlier work held a mysticism that featured an “immediacy and presentness” which was retained in his later work, “even when he [later] decisively discarded his philosophy of unity through realization for his philosophy of meeting what is ever against us” (p. x, emphasis added.)
In that introduction Friedman also points out that in Buber’s 1912 essay, “Das Gestaltende” (“The Formative”), we see Buber posing this “fundamental opposition between a formative and a formless principle, one that gives form and one that will not let itself be formed” (p. 19). This, according to Buber, is seen most essentially as an inner struggle within each human soul. Form represents, in this work, a fruitful “direction of energy” that makes possible both personal and interpersonal growth, according to Friedman. In Buber’s Daniel, there seems to be a balanced appreciation of both “direction” and “form.” Form without an energy, a direction of movement, is stagnant; it becomes crystallized.
References:
Buber, M. 2016. “Das Gestaltende: nach einer Ansprache (1912)”. Der Jude, vol 1 (May 1916), pp. 68-72.
Buber, M. 1964. Daniel. Trans. Maurice Friedman. Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Feigenbaum, Kenneth (2023) "Buber the Radical Egalitarian and Buber and Psychology," Comparative Civilizations Review: Vol. 89: No. 89, Article 14. Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/ccr/vol89/iss89/14
Zank, Michael and Zachary Braiterman, "Martin Buber", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2023/entries/buber/>.