I and Thou

Martin Buber was an Austrian-Israeli philosopher and professor, nominated ten times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and seven times for the Nobel Peace Prize. He is also well known for reviving Hasidism, a mystical movement that swept East European Jewry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His interest in Hasidism significantly informed his dialogical, or “I-Thou,” philosophy.

I’d been aware of Buber (his name had always elicited an immature chuckle) and his book I and Thou for years before finally deciding to read it, a circumstance that I can thank the West Asheville Library for. I was browsing their philosophy shelf one day several weeks ago and spotted the bare green spine with its typeset title, and thumbed through it. The book was relatively small, but I could tell the text was challenging—impressionistic here and liturgical in its circling repetition there. Weird words were capitalized and hyphenated. Some sections were short and sparse, with one-sentence paragraphs, while others were denser—long paragraphs made of long sentences held together by dashes and question marks.

The book sat on my dining room table for at least two weeks before I picked it up of a random afternoon and began reading it on the dining room balcony. Starting at the very beginning, with Walter Kaufmann’s lengthy prologue, itself written in a style similar to the book in question but more aptly titled “I and You,” I could see this would be a slow read. But it was oddly pleasant in its disorienting-ness, and I didn’t mind having to read most of the paragraphs twice. I sensed the words were attempting to convey the unconveyable, and it’d be best to not try too hard to grasp them, and simply enjoy them.

Beyond the 41-page prologue lay the 129 pages of Buber’s text, which he first started writing in 1916, “impelled,” he says in the book’s afterword, “by an inner necessity. A vision that had afflicted me repeatedly since my youth but had always been dimmed again, had now achieved a constant clarity that was so evidently supra-personal that I soon knew that I ought to bear witness of it.” He finished the first draft in 1919 and completed the final version in 1922. The book was first published in 1923. 

My thoughts on I and Thou may seem paltry compared to any number of religion and philosophy scholars who’ve written about it, and whose writings I have not read. But as Buber himself says in the book Pointing the Way, “My interpreting, like everyone else’s, is conditioned through my being… And if I show what I have found, I guide him who lets himself be guided to the reality of the text. To him whom I teach I make visible the working forces of the text that I have experienced.”

Each of us sees the world through a lens that’s unique to us and colored by our proclivities. As you may know, I’ve been very interested in group psychotherapy for the past year and counting. I started running my first interpersonal process group in late July of 2024, and a second group in early January of 2025. Already I’m wondering if I should get a third group going. I’m in a Masters of Group Therapy Club that meets on Zoom for fifty minutes three times a week, and I’m a member of a process group that meets once a week for eighty minutes. When I’m not leading or participating in such groups, I’m reading and writing about them. The word obsession feels like an understatement. So it makes sense that much of what I encounter in life outside of my group studies, I experience through a group-oriented lens. I definitely read I and Thou through this lens. (If you’d like to learn more about process groups, you can read my blog post from July of 2024 that focused on the book The Group Therapy Experience, by Louis Ormont.

When, for instance, Buber says that “all actual life is encounter,” I interpret “actual life” as referring to those moments in which we feel alive, and “encounter” as the meeting of two or more people with all their typical defenses set aside, which is ideally what happens in a process group. All the usual pleasantries are dropped, as are any attempts to control our—or anyone’s else’s—emotional experience. We let the experience happen. If we feel scared, we say so. If we feel annoyed or angry or sad or happy, we say so. We let others know us, as we’re manifesting as us in the moment, and in that way, we come to know ourselves better. And Buber would say that we come to know God better. When we can show up authentically for someone else, and they for us, we contact God. In this sacred encounter—what Buber calls “the basic word I-You”—we actually become ourselves. “Man becomes an I through a You,” he writes. “The basic word I-You can be spoken only with one’s whole being. The concentration and fusion into a whole being can never be accomplished by me, can never be accomplished without me. I require a You to become; becoming I, I say You.”

This concept reminds me of the Sanskrit phrase tat tvam asi, from an ancient Hindu text called the Upanishads. Tat tvam asi. I am that. You can take the phrase “I am that, expressed as ________,” and fill in the blank with anything. Literally anything. I am that, expressed as a bird. I am that, expressed as a tree. I am that, expressed as a river, a baby, a politician, a criminal, a trash can, a daffodil, a fellow process-group member. Tat tvam asi.

As Buber says, “The form that confronts me I cannot experience nor describe; I can only actualize it. And yet I see it, radiant in the splendor of the confrontation, far more clearly than all clarity of the experienced world. Not as a thing among the ‘internal’ things, not as a figment of the ‘imagination,’ but as what is present.”

When he refers to the “experienced world,” he’s referring to what he also calls the It-world (capital I), which I would argue is the world we all inhabit most of the time. In this world, we experience people rather than encounter them; we use them rather than actualize them. The It-world must exist, and according to Buber, “it offers us all sorts of stimulations and excitements, activities and knowledge. In this firm and wholesome chronicle the You-moments appear as queer lyric-dramatic episodes. Their spell may be seductive, but they pull us dangerously to extremes, loosening the well-tried structure, leaving behind more doubt than satisfaction, shaking up our security—altogether uncanny, altogether indispensable.” He goes on to say that “without It [capital I] a human being cannot live. But whoever lives only with that is not human.”

As a leader and member of process groups, which focus on staying in the here-and-now, embodying the purest presence possible, I sometimes get caught on the notion that all of life should be that way. But all of life can never be any one way, and saying that it should all be one long encounter of pure presence is akin to saying we shouldn’t have egos. Egos are essential. “Egos appear,” Buber writes, “by setting themselves apart from other egos. Persons appear by entering into relation to other persons… The purpose of setting oneself apart is to experience and use, and the purpose of that is ‘living’—which means dying one human life long. The purpose of relation is the relation itself—touching the You. For as soon as we touch a You, we are touched by a breath of eternal life.”

Here Buber defines our typical approach to “living” as “dying one human life long.” He is acknowledging the fact of our mortality. The ego is a necessary product of a mortal life. Like our human body, it sets itself apart as a discrete entity, something solid and separate and nameable. As muscles cling to bone, so the ego clings to personality to know that it exists, knowing existence is fleeting. As Buber says, “The person beholds his self; the ego occupies himself with his My [capital M]: my manner, my race, my works, my genius.” Itself being an answer to the condition of mortality, the ego has a deadening effect. In its focus on what Buber calls being-that-way (a three-part hyphenate referring to the ways in which one differs from others), the ego “moves away from being.” This moving away is an essential element to functioning in civilization. Unfortunately it seems to have become the primary element. But according to Buber, “participation [in actuality] remains in [us] as a living potentiality.” In this potentiality, Buber writes, “the desire for ever higher and more unconditional relation and for perfect participation in being arises and keeps rising.”

Process groups offer one way of fulfilling the desire for “perfect participation in being.” Not in being-that-way, as the ego would prefer, but in simply being. Of course the ego will still try to assert itself in the group context, because it’s been conditioned to do so since we were children, but the work of the group is to notice that assertion and put words to its arising. The ego wants to hide our vulnerability and protect us from the sometimes-overwhelming vulnerability of others, but when we simply name our emotional experience as it’s happening, the ego is suddenly out of a job. When the only objective is to be with one’s experience and give voice to it—when there’s no end goal “out there” to achieve—then time and space fall away, and we find ourselves floating in what can only be described as eternal. “Eternity and the Here-and-Now are the exact same thing,” to quote Jack Kerouac. Buber would call this thing the “You-world.”

The “It-world,” on the other hand, “hangs together in space and time.” In stepping from one world to the next and back again, we claim our humanness. Buber asserts that “the individual You must become an It when the event of relation has run its course. The individual It can become a You by entering into the event of relation.” In process groups, we gather to see what can happen, not what must happen. But inevitably we return to the world of musts—the It-world of financial burdens, familial responsibility, bodily maintenance, and the like. We need to be an It [capital I] just as much as we need to be a You [capital Y]. Buber calls it alternating between actuality and latency. “Every individual You must disappear into the chrysalis of the It in order to grow wings again.”

No doubt there are some very special humans out there (the Buddha comes to mind) who can walk around in You-mode all the time with no need of a chrysalis retreat, contacting God in everyone they meet and allowing everyone to contact God through them. But most of us need a break from that. Indeed, most of us need to feel swaddled by the constricting forces of ego and the It-world more often than we need to experience the boundlessness of eternity or the You-world. We’re not God, after all. We’re human beings—what Ernest Becker called “gods with anuses”—we shit; we bleed; we break; we cry; we sweat; we cough; we puke; we die. And yet: we have this eternal part to us, what the Buddhists call emptiness, which is untouched by all the vicissitudes of life. It is the part out of which everything arises and the part back to which everything recedes. And when we can just be with our experience—not judging it or defending it or trying to hide it or turn away from it or move too quickly on from it—when we can just make space for it and see it and feel it—then we can experience that emptiness. And in that space there is nothing to fear, because there’s nothing to lose.

I think it’s safe to say that most people aren’t inhabiting this space nearly enough in the high-tech world we’ve created, which is probably what Buber would call a “sick age.” He says, “In sick ages it happens that the It-world, no longer irrigated and fertilized by the living currents of the You-world, severed and stagnant, becomes a gigantic swamp phantom and overpowers man. As he accommodates himself to a world of objects that no longer achieve any presence for him, he succumbs to it. Then common causality grows into an oppressive and crushing doom.” Each of us can do whatever we’re inclined to do (or not) to “irrigate and fertilize” the It-world with “the living currents of the You-world,” so that people can feel their godliness—their aliveness and expansiveness—and reenter the “gigantic swamp phantom” of the It-world just a little more fortified, so maybe they don’t succumb to it. I do my part by running process groups. They are a form of summoning, as when Buber writes, “In such ages the person in the human being…comes to lead a subterranean, hidden, as it were invalid existence—until it is summoned.” The process group is one way to “tend with holy care the holy treasure of our actuality that has been given to us for this life and perhaps for no other life that might be closer to the truth.”

The more we can experience “the holy treasure of our actuality,” the more we can rest assured that we’re making the most of this life, which is the only life we can count on. “We’re on the spot,” to quote my favorite living Zen priest, Edward Espe Brown. In process groups people often say they don’t like being put on the spot, but all of us are always on the spot, from the second we take birth. We’re in for it. This is it. What are we going to do? Well, knowing what to do is much easier when we know how we feel.

My husband and I just started watching the television series Normal People, based on the Sally Rooney novel by the same name, and in the second episode the two main characters are talking about feelings. The girl accuses the guy (both of them high school seniors) of never expressing a single opinion, and he says it’s because he doesn’t know what he thinks about most things. “Surely you know how you feel?” she asks in a charming Irish accent. He says something like, “Not usually, no,” and she says, “Then how do you know what you want?” He says he doesn’t know what he wants. That sounds like a bleak way to move through life if you ask me. How boring. Or to use Buber’s words, how “severed and stagnant.” How many people are walking around like this, spiritually maimed, lost, fumbling their way through this precious and impermanent life?

Making the most of this life is, you might say, in the broadest sense, how each of us fulfills our destiny. In I and Thou, Buber’s take on destiny is fascinating. He says that destiny does not lead us, it waits for us. “[We] must proceed toward it without knowing where it waits for [us]. [We] must go forth with [our] whole being… It will not turn out the way [our] resolve intended it; but what wants to come will come only if [we resolve] to do that which [we] can will.” He differentiates between the little will and the great will. The former is “unfree and ruled by things and drives,” while the latter “moves away from being determined to find destiny.”

Here I’m reminded of Taoism, which encourages us again and again to stop forcing shit. Stop fighting. Stop resisting. Obviously if someone is outright attacking us we will do what we can to defend ourselves. If by simply stepping to the right will result in our avoiding being struck by a bus, then we’ll obviously step to the right. But this is different from forcing things or interfering. Buber says the truly free person does not interfere, “nor does he merely allow things to happen. He listens to that which grows, to the way of Being [with a capital B] in the world, not in order to be carried along by it but rather in order to actualize it in the manner in which it, needing him, wants to be actualized by him—with human spirit and human deed, with human life and human death. He believes [in destiny], but this implies: he encounters.”

All actual life is encounter. How do you want to be actualized by me? I have no idea. All I can do is “go forth with my whole being,” and trust that in doing so, I will play a crucial role in the actualization of every being who crosses my path when I am speaking the basic word I-You—that is, when I am fully embodied, not resisting my experience, not trying to make anything happen, or prove a point, or what have you.

I love the idea of destiny waiting for me, as opposed to leading me. It feels like destiny that I’m facilitating process groups right now, and I definitely hadn’t been thinking for years and years leading up to now that it was my destiny to facilitate process groups. I’ve simply followed my various interests, and at one point I became interested in joining a process group, and then I became interested in—or rather obsessed with—the idea of running my own. And now I’m running two, and with each session I lead I realize how much more there is to learn about it, and about my group members, and about myself. It’s endlessly interesting and challenging. A given group session can go an infinite number of ways, and none of those ways is necessarily better than another; each has something different to offer. I’m realizing now that that would be a really cool movie for process group nerds: a Sliding Doors take on one group therapy session, exploring multiple variations of said session, based on whatever intervention the group leader uses. And in every iteration, the leader would be proceeding without knowing what waited for her, going forth with her whole being. Not merely allowing things to happen (though there certainly would be a lot of that), but listening to that which grows, to the way of Being (with a capital B) in the group, not in order to be carried along by it but rather in order to actualize it in the manner in which it, needing her, wants to be actualized by her—with human spirit and human deed…

Buber says that the You encounters us by grace—“it cannot be found by seeking.” Much like destiny, or what Buber refers to later in the book as “the meaning of life.” We often think of life’s meaning in terms of a question that needs an answer, but Buber asserts that the meaning of life does not require an answer: “It does not wish to be interpreted by us—for that we lack the ability—only to be done by us.” He goes on to say that the meaning of life cannot be experienced, “but it can be done…it wants to be born into the world by [us]…in the uniqueness of [our] being.” We don’t know the meaning of life. We do the meaning of life. And we do it through a complete acceptance of the present moment and whatever and whomever we encounter in that moment. In what I assume is a reference to Exodus 3:14, or the Old Testament encounter of the burning bush, Buber says, “The word of revelation is: I am there as whoever I am there. That which reveals is that which reveals. That which has being is there, nothing more.”

But while destiny or the meaning of life cannot be found by seeking, I’d argue that we can definitely put ourselves in situations that increase our chances of encountering it—that is, of doing it. An interpersonal process group is just such a situation. Group members don’t demand of one another to reveal the God in themselves. But they do make space for that God to arise. They sit in a circle of chairs with the intention of confronting one another unflinchingly, with openness and bravery. (As group psychotherapist Marcée Turner says, group rooms are not necessarily safe spaces, but they are brave spaces.) And as Walter Kaufmann says in his prologue to I and Thou, “God is present when I confront You. But if I look away from You, I ignore him.” In group, we don’t look away. And in that steady gaze, we see others for who and what they really are, and we see our own faces looking back. Tat tvam asi.

Thank you for reading this. I’ wishing you all the courage needed to go forth with your whole being in this eternal present moment that we call life. Not severed and stagnant, but connected and becoming, always becoming.