Ronald Smith

Certainly, in Buber’s work the connexion with the “father” of existentialism, Søren Kierkegaard, is clear and unmistakable; and the content of Buber’s experience, with its wide range—through nature and history, and including the “eternal Thou,” the Absolute Person—can offer a corrective to much truncated and emaciated existentialism in our time.

But however one may seek to define these elements, a reader of I and Thou must come with the question rising up in himself which is the question for Buber: how may I understand my experience of a relation with God?

For Buber himself God’s transcendence, his absolute otherness, is so thoroughly involved in his whole understanding of the relation between God and man, that it is difficult to select one point rather than another in his exposition of this.