One half-hearted conversation that changed a philosophy

Martin Buber, a Jewish philosopher born in Vienna, distinguished between treating people and the world as tools ('I–It') and meeting them fully ('I–Thou'). After fleeing the Nazis to Jerusalem in 1938, he continued his philosophy of dialogue for the rest of his life.

Buber confessed that when a young man once visited him, he was friendly but his mind was elsewhere. Later learning that the young man had come carrying a desperate question, he called the episode a 'conversion' and wrote that it taught him a genuine meeting means being fully present.