When the Other Disappears
Martin Buber, Existential Guilt, and the Ethical Conflict of the Phenomenological Tradition
Some texts continue to be read long after they were written. This may be because they offer clear answers, but more often it is because they touch on questions that resist closure. My blog post on Martin Buber's theory of existential guilt and shame was published in 2012 and has since been the most-read post on the blog Praktisk Filosofi [Practical Philosophy]. The text took as its starting point Buber's distinction between legal guilt, feelings of guilt, and a deeper existential guilt that arises when a person recognizes that they have damaged a relationship or failed in their responsibility within a concrete life situation.
That this particular text continues to be read may have a simple explanation: guilt and shame concern nearly everyone. But it may also be because Buber offers a language for something many people experience but struggle to express. A person can be legally innocent and still feel guilty. They can be condemned by others without having done anything wrong. They can carry shame for violations inflicted on them by others. And they can have done something wrong without feeling the guilt their surroundings expect.
Buber helps us distinguish between these experiences. But he does more than that. He shows that guilt is not simply an act that can be isolated and judged. Guilt arises in a world we share with others. It concerns bonds that have been broken, responsibility that was not taken, and possibilities for human presence that were lost.
This is why Buber remains relevant. He reminds us that the human being is not first and foremost a closed individual, but a being that comes into existence in relation. At the same time, this insight belongs to a larger philosophical context. Behind Buber lie traces of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology. Beside him stands Martin Heidegger, who both extends and breaks with Husserl. And nearby we find Hannah Arendt, who carried insights from Heidegger but moved the question of human existence into the world of politics and responsibility.
Among these four thinkers unfolds a philosophical conversation – and an ethical conflict – that still concerns us today.
Back to Experience
Edmund Husserl sought to lead philosophy back “to the things themselves.” Before we explain the human being by means of theories, causal models, or diagnostic categories, we must try to describe how the world is actually experienced. Phenomenology was to investigate how something shows itself to consciousness, and how meaning comes into being in experience.
This starting point matters greatly for understanding guilt and shame. Guilt is not merely an objective fact that can be registered from outside. It is also something experienced. Shame is not merely a reaction that can be explained through psychology or social adaptation. It can permeate the entire way a person experiences themselves, their body, the other, and their place in the world.
For Husserl, consciousness is always directed toward something. We see, remember, fear, hope, or feel shame about something. Experience is intentional: it has a direction. But the world is not only my world. It presents itself as a shared world, populated by other subjects who likewise see, think, and act. Intersubjectivity therefore becomes a decisive problem in Husserl's phenomenology.
In the fifth of his Cartesian Meditations, Husserl asks how the other can appear to me as another subject and not merely as a physical body or object. I have direct access to my own experience, but not to the other's inner life. Yet I encounter the other as more than an object. The other's body appears as a lived body, an expression of its own center of experience. Through the other, the world is confirmed as a world we share, not as a private representation created by my own consciousness (Husserl, 1982).
Here lies an important trace leading toward Buber. Husserl understands that the other cannot be reduced to a thing among things. The other helps constitute the shared world. But Husserl's question remains largely a question of how the other can be experienced and known by a subject. The relation is still investigated from the standpoint of the ego's consciousness.
Buber shifts the starting point itself. He does not merely ask how I can know that the other is a subject. He asks what happens when I address the other as a “Thou.”
Heidegger's Break with the Philosophy of Consciousness
Martin Heidegger was Husserl's student and one of the most significant continuers of phenomenology. But he held that Husserl still took as his starting point a traditional understanding of the human being as a cognizing subject confronting a world of objects.
For Heidegger, the human being is not first a consciousness that subsequently attempts to reach the world. The human being is already being-in-the-world. From the outset we find ourselves within a meaningful landscape of language, tools, relations, habits, history, and practical tasks. The world is not something we observe from outside; it is the context in which we already live.
This was a radical philosophical step. Heidegger made phenomenology existential and ontological. The question was no longer primarily how the world shows itself to consciousness, but what it means to be a human being – a Dasein – that relates to its own being.
The other, too, has a place in Heidegger's analysis. The human being is fundamentally Mitsein, being-with. We always live in a world already shared with others. Even when we are alone, our way of understanding the world is shaped by language, practices, and expectations originating in a human community.
Yet a conflict with Buber arises here.
For Heidegger, being-with becomes an existential structure. It describes how the human being always already finds itself together with others. But the concrete other does not necessarily emerge as a “Thou” making an irreplaceable claim on me. The other can become part of the world in which I attempt to live authentically or inauthentically. Heidegger's central question concerns Dasein's relation to its own being, its finitude, and its death.
Buber's question is different. He does not first ask how the human being can become authentic in relation to its own existence. He asks how the human being becomes an I in the encounter with a thou.
Buber developed his explicit critique of Heidegger particularly in the text “What Is Man?,” later published in Between Man and Man. The critique targets what Buber saw as Heidegger's insufficient development of the human being's basic dialogical relation. Heidegger had described being-with, but had not, in Buber's view, granted the interhuman encounter sufficient independent significance.
The difference can be stated simply:
Heidegger asks: How can the human being relate truthfully to its own being?
Buber asks: How can the human being encounter the other such that both I and thou can emerge as persons?
The first question is ontological. The second is dialogical and ethical.
A Broken Kinship
It is tempting to read Buber and Heidegger as pure opposites – one dialogical and ethical, the other ontological and impersonal. But such a picture conceals both how much they actually shared, and how close and conflict-ridden their relationship in fact was.
Both abandoned the Cartesian starting point at which Husserl ultimately remained: an I that is first consciousness, and that must then build a bridge to the world and to the other. The German scholar Meike Siegfried has shown, in an extensive study, that Buber's I–Thou relation and Heidegger's being-in-the-world can be understood as two kindred attempts to turn philosophy away from the isolated, cognizing subject – a movement extending from Descartes to Husserl (Siegfried, 2010, as cited in Mendes-Flohr, 2014).
This kinship was not merely conceptual. It was also personal – and considerably closer than posterity has often suggested. In 1957, Buber and Heidegger met for the first time, at an estate on Lake Constance, to plan a joint conference on language together with the physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. They took long walks on the island of Mainau and talked for hours – first about philosophy, and eventually, more cautiously, about guilt and reconciliation. Buber later described the meeting with self-deprecating humor, but firmly denied that it amounted to any reconciliation: the conversation was, as he himself put it, matter-of-fact and not religious (Mendes-Flohr, 2014). When Heidegger, at the end of their meeting, invited him to his cabin in the Black Forest to continue the conversation, Buber declined.
Buber was no uncritical admirer. A few years earlier, he had publicly condemned Heidegger's embrace of National Socialism, and he entered the collaboration on the language conference with his eyes open. What he sought, then, was not reconciliation but a substantive philosophical disagreement (Mendes-Flohr, 2014).
The conference never took place as intended. Buber's wife died in the summer of 1957, and he withdrew from most of his international engagements. Yet both thinkers nonetheless delivered, independently of one another, lectures that can be read as an echo of the interrupted conversation. Heidegger held that language, in its deepest sense, is a Sage des Seins – a saying of being, in which the human being is above all one who is addressed by being and answers by virtue of this address. Buber, who studied Heidegger's lecture closely afterward, responded with his own lecture, “Das Wort, das gesprochen wird” [“The Word That Is Spoken”], in which he maintained that the ontological character of a word cannot be understood apart from the fact that it is spoken to someone (Buber, 1965; Mendes-Flohr, 2014). The truth a word carries, he argued, is not the unconcealedness of being (aletheia), but the simpler, Hebraic truth of faithfulness – faithfulness between human beings, or between the human being and God.
Here, perhaps, lies the most precise formulation of the difference between them. Heidegger gives us the ontological grammar for why the human being can be addressed at all – why it is not a closed consciousness but a being that is always already open to something beyond itself. Buber insists that this openness is not enough until it is answered by another human being, named or nameless. Their kinship sharpens the break rather than softening it: it is precisely because they stood so close to one another in their rejection of the philosophy of consciousness that the difference between an event of being and an ethical encounter emerges so clearly.
I–Thou and I–It
In I and Thou, Buber describes two fundamental ways of relating to the world: I–It and I–Thou.
The I–It relation is necessary. We must be able to observe, analyze, compare, categorize, and use. The natural sciences, administration, technology, and much of everyday life presuppose that something can be made an object of investigation and action. The other, too, can appear to me as a particular person with characteristics, functions, and a social identity.
The problem arises when I–It becomes the only way we relate.
A person can be reduced to their diagnosis, their offense, their function, their political affiliation, or their place within a system. A client can become a case. A patient can become a disease profile. A student can become a result. A refugee can become a number. A person can become a representative of a group we already believe we know.
In the I–Thou relation, something else happens. The other is not met merely as the sum of their characteristics. The other is allowed to emerge as a living and irreplaceable human being. I do not merely regard the other; I respond to the other's presence. The relation becomes mutual, even if not necessarily symmetrical.
Buber does not claim that we can live permanently within the I–Thou relation. Every Thou will again enter the world of experience and description and thereby become an It. But the possibility of the I–Thou encounter is decisive. Without it, the world grows rigid. People become objects of one another's needs, fears, categories, and power.
This is where Buber's philosophy derives its ethical force. He does not first formulate a rule for what we ought to do. He shows how the very manner in which we meet the other carries moral significance. Before the concrete violation, there is often a more fundamental shift: the other has already been reduced from a Thou to an It.
Existential Guilt
This relational understanding also underlies Buber's theory of existential guilt.
In the article “Guilt and Guilt Feelings,” he distinguishes between actual guilt and the subjective feelings of guilt that may or may not correspond to what a person has actually done. The article was published in the journal Psychiatry in 1957.
Feelings of guilt can be intense without actual guilt being present. They can be weak or absent even when a serious violation has occurred. It is therefore not sufficient to ask how guilty a person feels.
Existential guilt arises when a person, in a concrete situation, has damaged the order of human relationships of which they themselves are a part. It concerns more than the breaking of laws or taboos. It concerns the person's responsibility for the life they have actually lived, and for the effects their actions or omissions have had on others.
Guilt is therefore both personal and relational. It cannot simply be explained away as an unpleasant symptom. If a person has genuinely violated another, there must be a path through acknowledgment, endurance, responsibility, and – where possible – atonement or repair.
But this is not the same as self-punishment.
A person can become trapped in guilt feelings without taking responsibility. Self-accusation can be so all-consuming that the guilty party remains preoccupied only with themselves. “I am a terrible person” can, in some cases, forestall the harder question: “What did I do to the other, and what is now required of me?”
Buber shifts attention from the intensity of feeling to the reality of the relation.
The same distinction is necessary when we try to understand shame. The one who has been violated may internalize the shame and experience themselves as damaged, unclean, or unworthy. The shame becomes real as experience, but does not necessarily tell the truth about guilt. The victim may bear the shame, while the one who committed the violation escapes both shame and guilt feelings.
Guilt and shame must therefore be kept distinct. Otherwise we risk holding the violated responsible for the violation while allowing the responsible party to hide behind an absence of feeling.
From Husserl to Buber
There is thus a philosophical movement from Husserl to Buber, but it is not a simple line of development in which one thinker succeeds another.
Husserl teaches us to return to experience and to take the other's subjectivity seriously. Heidegger shows that the human being is not an isolated consciousness but already finds itself within a shared, historical world. Buber radicalizes the relation by claiming that the I itself comes into being through the encounter with a Thou.
For Husserl, the question is how the other can appear to me as another subject.
For Heidegger, the question is how being-with belongs to human existence.
For Buber, the question is what happens between me and the other when we truly meet.
This difference is decisive. The other is not merely a philosophical problem to be solved, nor merely part of the ontological structure of my own existence. The other can speak to me, interrupt me, and make claims on me. I can answer – or fail to answer.
It is in this space between address and answer that responsibility arises.
The Philosophical Conflict Becomes Historical
The conflict between these thinkers is not merely conceptual. It also played out within a European history in which the question of the relation to the other had catastrophic consequences.
Husserl was born into a Jewish family and had converted to Christianity. After the Nazi seizure of power, he was affected by antisemitic policy and marginalized at the university. Heidegger, his former student and successor at Freiburg, joined the NSDAP in 1933 and became rector of the university that same year.
The relationship between Husserl and Heidegger had already been weakened by deep philosophical disagreements before 1933. It would therefore be too simple to explain the rupture between them solely through Nazism. But Heidegger's political choices and his failure to support his former teacher mean that the philosophical disagreement cannot be held entirely separate from the moral question.
In 1941, Heidegger agreed that the dedication to Husserl be removed from a new edition of Being and Time, at the publisher's request. The event has become a symbol of the serious rupture between mentorship, philosophy, and political responsibility, even though the historical details and motives still require nuanced treatment.
Here philosophy meets its own test.
It is possible to write profoundly about human being and yet fail in the encounter with a concrete human being. It is possible to analyze authenticity without acting courageously when history demands it. It is possible to understand that the human being is always being-with, yet fail to stand with the one who is excluded.
This does not mean that Heidegger's philosophy can be reduced to his political failure. Being and Time remains one of the most important philosophical works of the twentieth century. But the relation between thought and action cannot be dissolved either. Heidegger's life poses an uncomfortable question to philosophy: is it sufficient to think truthfully about Being if one does not respond responsibly to the other's vulnerability?
Buber would hardly have accepted such a separation between philosophy and lived relation.
Hannah Arendt: From Being to World
Hannah Arendt makes this conflict even more complex. She was Heidegger's student and, as a young woman, had a romantic relationship with him. She was profoundly influenced by his philosophy but eventually developed an independent project that, on decisive points, moved away from his focus on Being.
Arendt does not first ask what it means to be. She asks what it means to live together in a shared world.
For her, the human being is characterized by plurality. We are alike in the sense that we are all human, but no one is identical to any other. This diversity is not a problem to be overcome. It is the very condition for politics, speech, and action.
Through speech and action we show who we are. We step forward before others and begin something that cannot be fully controlled. Arendt therefore links human freedom to birth and beginning – to natality. Every human being enters the world as a new beginning and carries the possibility that something unexpected may occur (Arendt, 1958).
Here Arendt stands close to Buber. Both reject the notion of the human being as an isolated individual. For both, humanity becomes real in a space between people.
But they place the emphasis differently.
Buber examines the encounter between I and Thou.
Arendt examines the public world that arises when people act and speak together.
Buber shows how the human being comes into being in relation.
Arendt shows how people create and sustain a shared world.
When the Other Becomes an Administrative Problem
The connection between Buber and Arendt becomes especially clear in Arendt's analysis of Adolf Eichmann.
In Eichmann in Jerusalem, she did not describe Eichmann as a demonic being possessed of extraordinary evil will. She was struck by his thoughtlessness, his use of clichés, and his inability to view the situation from another person's standpoint. Her phrase “the banality of evil” was not a claim that the crimes themselves were banal. It described how an apparently ordinary person could participate in extraordinary evil without making an independent moral judgment about what he was doing (Arendt, 2006).
Here Arendt and Buber can be read together.
Buber might have said: the other ceased to be a Thou and became an It.
Arendt might have said: the perpetrator stopped thinking about what he was doing.
For Buber, dehumanization occurs within the relation. For Arendt, it also occurs through thoughtless obedience to language, routines, systems, and authorities.
The person becomes a category, a transport number, an administrative case, or an obstacle to the execution of a plan. The concrete other disappears behind the function. When no one any longer sees a Thou, and no one any longer thinks from the other's perspective, responsibility can dissolve into procedure.
This is not only a matter of totalitarian regimes. The mechanism can appear in far less dramatic contexts.
It is present when professionals stop seeing the person because the case has already been defined by the file.
It is present when a child's account does not fit the system's categories.
It is present when the elderly become a care burden, the sick a diagnosis, the unemployed a cost, and the stranger a risk.
Neither categorization nor administration can be abolished. But they must always be accompanied by the capacity to see and to think.
Buber reminds us to meet the other as a human being.
Arendt reminds us to think independently about what we do to the other.
Existential Guilt as Responsibility for the World
Together, Buber and Arendt make it possible to understand guilt as more than self-reproach.
For Buber, guilt arises through the concrete rupture in the relation. For Arendt, responsibility also arises because our actions are part of a world we share with others. No one acts in a vacuum. What we do sets in motion processes that affect people we may never meet.
Arendt was cautious about the notion of collective guilt. If everyone is declared guilty, the actual guilty party risks disappearing. Guilt must be attached to specific acts committed by specific persons. But responsibility can be broader. We can bear responsibility for a world and for institutions we did not create alone.
This is an important distinction.
I cannot take on another's guilt. But I can take responsibility for how the world we share is organized. I can ask what role I play in institutions that violate, exclude, or render people invisible. I can refrain from the comfortable claim that I was merely following rules or performing my task.
In this way, Buber's existential guilt and Arendt's political responsibility converge.
Guilt requires that I acknowledge what I have done.
Responsibility requires that I ask what world my actions contribute to.
Professional Practice Between System and Encounter
This has direct bearing on social work, healthcare, education, and other professions in which people encounter people within institutional frameworks.
Professional practice cannot manage without I–It. It requires documentation, assessment, diagnosis, legislation, budgets, plans, and evaluation. The professional must be able to create a certain distance in order to analyze the situation and act competently.
But if this becomes the only form of relation, the person disappears behind the case.
The helper therefore needs both Buber's relational presence and Arendt's critical thinking. Being kind is not enough. Following procedures correctly is not enough either. The professional must be able to meet the other while also asking what the system, the language, and their own practice are doing to the other.
Buber teaches us that no method can replace the encounter.
Arendt teaches us that no rule can excuse us from thinking.
Husserl teaches us to return to experience before we explain it.
Heidegger teaches us that we always already find ourselves within historical and practical contexts that shape our understanding.
Together they offer not a single unified theory, but a demanding foundation for professional judgment.
The professional must be able to say:
I will try to see how the world is experienced by the other.
I know that both the other and I are already shaped by a historical world.
I will not reduce the other to a category.
I cannot delegate my moral responsibility to the system.
A Digital Present
Buber's relevance is undiminished in a digital age.
We communicate more than before, but we do not necessarily meet more often as human beings. Social media make it easy to reduce the other to an opinion, a profile, or a representative of a group. Algorithms sort people according to probable interests and behaviors. Digital systems assess risk, predict behavior, and shape which possibilities become visible to us.
Artificial intelligence can produce persuasive language, analyze information, and simulate conversation. It can be a valuable tool for thought and work. But it also creates the danger that simulated dialogue is mistaken for a genuine, mutual human encounter.
A machine can respond, but it cannot bear existential guilt.
It can analyze a moral dilemma, but it cannot stand responsible within a shared world.
It can use the word “Thou,” but it does not live within the mutuality Buber describes.
This does not mean that technology must be rejected. The I–It world is necessary. But technology must remain subject to human responsibility. The more advanced these systems become, the more pressing Arendt's question becomes: who is thinking about what we are doing? And the more pressing Buber's question becomes: what happens to the concrete other?
Philosophy's Test
When Husserl, Heidegger, Buber, and Arendt are read together, a coherent yet conflict-ridden movement emerges.
Husserl leads philosophy back to experience and discovers intersubjectivity as the foundation of a shared world.
Heidegger breaks with the philosophy of consciousness and shows that the human being is always already being-in-the-world and being-with-others.
Buber holds that being-with is not sufficient. The human being truly becomes an I only in the encounter with a thou.
Arendt moves this relational insight into the public world and asks how plurality, action, thought, and responsibility can be safeguarded.
Yet Heidegger also stands, at the same time, as a disquieting figure within this development. His philosophy opened new possibilities for understanding the human situation, but his political choices showed that ontological depth does not in itself guarantee moral judgment.
This is precisely why Buber and Arendt are needed.
Buber reminds philosophy of the concrete other.
Arendt reminds the philosopher of responsibility for the shared world.
Husserl reminds us that experience must be allowed to appear.
Heidegger reminds us, perhaps even against his own biography, that the human being never stands outside history.
Why Buber Remains Our Contemporary
Martin Buber remains relevant because the modern world continually tempts us to replace relations with categories.
We know more about people, but we do not necessarily meet them better. We have ever more information, but not always greater understanding. We have developed systems capable of processing enormous quantities of data, yet incapable of taking responsibility for the people that data concerns.
Buber offers no method that can guarantee the good encounter. The I–Thou relation cannot be produced through technique. Nor can it be demanded of the other. It arises when a person dares to step forward and respond to another person's presence.
This makes his philosophy at once vulnerable and demanding.
It does not exempt us from knowledge, analysis, or institutional responsibility. It only asks us to remember that all of this is insufficient if the other disappears.
Existential guilt arises when we recognize that we have failed within this space between people. Healing, therefore, cannot consist merely in reducing feelings of guilt. It must also involve a movement back toward reality: toward the concrete act, the damaged relation, and the responsibility that can still be taken.
Not everything can be repaired. The dead cannot be brought back. What has been said cannot always be unsaid. The violated person has no duty to forgive. Reconciliation can never be demanded as a resolution to which the guilty party is entitled.
But a person can acknowledge.
They can refrain from self-deception.
They can stop making their own guilt feelings the center of attention.
They can attempt to repair what can be repaired.
And they can act differently in the future.
Perhaps it is here that Husserl, Heidegger, Buber, and Arendt finally meet – not in agreement, but in a question that remains open:
How can a human being live such that the other does not disappear?
Husserl teaches us to see experience.
Heidegger teaches us to question our way of being in the world.
Buber teaches us to meet the other.
Arendt teaches us to think and act responsibly within the world we share.
Philosophy becomes practical only when these questions are not merely understood, but have consequences for how we live.
References
Arendt, H. (1958). The human condition. University of Chicago Press.
Arendt, H. (1978). The life of the mind. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Arendt, H. (2006). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. Penguin Books. (Original work published 1963)
Buber, M. (1957). Guilt and guilt feelings. Psychiatry, 20(2), 114–129. https://doi.org/10.1080/00332747.1957.11023082
Buber, M. (1965). The knowledge of man: A philosophy of the interhuman (M. Friedman, Ed.; M. Friedman & R. G. Smith, Trans.). Harper & Row.
Buber, M. (1970). I and Thou (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). Charles Scribner’s Sons. (Original work published 1923)
Buber, M. (2002). Between man and man (R. G. Smith, Trans.). Routledge. (Original work published 1947)
Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). Blackwell. (Original work published 1927)
Husserl, E. (1982). Cartesian meditations: An introduction to phenomenology (D. Cairns, Trans.). Martinus Nijhoff. (Original work published 1931)
Mendes-Flohr, P. (2014). Martin Buber and Martin Heidegger in dialogue. Journal of Religion, 94(1), 2–25. https://doi.org/10.1086/673540
Pettersen, K. T. (2012, March 15). Buber’s theory of existential guilt and shame. Praktisk Filosofi – Practical Philosophy.
Pettersen, K. T. (2009). A study of shame: The role of shame in child sexual abuse [Doctoral dissertation, University of Bergen].
How can a human being live such that the other does not disappear?
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