Martin Buber wrote a book that in English has been called I and Thou. Thou is a tragically misleading translation: thou is distant, archaic, a remnant of a time of kings and lords, of Shakespeare and of King James. Buber’s book did not intend this distance, instead, he intended to convey the most intimate and closest relation possible when he said, in German, du. Lover’s whispers and mother’s lullabies say You, friends call out to You, even the clerk at the corner store greets You. No one says thou in the ordinary course of their day, but You surrounds us.

We are also surrounded by It, by things. It is from the durability of these things that a world of use emerges, a world of safety, security, and sureness. We count on things, our lives depend on things, things can make us comfortable. Things are everywhere.

Martin Buber describes a twofold world that emerges from out of the twofold attitudes of human being. This duality unfolds from out of what Buber calls the basic words, which are word pairs, there is I-It and there is I-You. “Basic words … by being spoken they establish a mode of existence.” I-It establishes a mode of existence as experience, as an experience of some particular thing, of an object. I-You establishes a mode of relation, one stands within a mode of relation and a relation is between an I and a You. Saying It or You establishes the world of It or of You.

The It world is not only a world of experience and objectivity, but also a world of use and order. Experience divides things into discrete quanta in a Cartesian space time grid, and It divides things into categories of usefulness, of purpose. The It world has been the object of study of modern philosophy, and if You are familiar with Kant you will correctly hear a connection between what Buber and Kant both call erfahrung, experience.

The It world combines “experience, which constitutes this world ever again, and use, which leads it towards its multifarious purpose — the preservation, alleviation, and equipment of human life.” The ability to confront a world of discrete things is an indispensable aspect of human life and survival. The objectification of the world of experience is not evil, but, “when man lets it have its’ way, the relentlessly growing It-world grows over him like weeds, his own I loses its actuality, until the incubus over him and the phantom inside him exchange the whispered confession of their need for redemption.” We can neither do without the It world, nor can we, if we wish to live without despair, spend all of our lives in the experience of objects.

Albrecht Dürer — “Pine” (1495)

Buber speaks about the many ways that you can contemplate a tree. You “can accept it as a picture, a rigid pillar in a flood of light” and experience the tree aesthetically as some beautiful thing. It is also possible to “feel it as a movement, the flowing veins around a sturdy striving core” and to experience the tree as a living process. A tree can be seen merely as an “instance” of its species. You can further abstract from the actual presence of the tree and “recognize it only as an expression of … those laws according to which a constant opposition of force is continually adjusted” or, “dissolve it into a number, into a pure relation between numbers.” All of these ways of contemplating a tree separate a discrete chunk of experience from the tree that is before us in body no less than a carpenter who is only looking for material to put to use. “But it can also happen, if will and grace are joined, that as I contemplate the tree I am drawn into a relation, and the tree ceases to be an It”.

Buber makes it clear that as the tree ceases to be an It it does not lose any of the aspects of experience that we were but a moment ago contemplating. When a tree is addressed as a You all of those myriad experiences of the tree are joined. When we leave the It world we leave behind the separation that the It world allows, instead, we confront the tree exclusively and indivisibly. What is true of the tree is equally true of every he or she or it that has been divided from the presencing world. “He is no longer He or She, limited by other Hes and Shes, a dot in the world grid of space and time, nor a condition that can be experienced and described, a loose bundle of named qualities. Neighborless and seamless, he is You and fills the firmament. Not as if there were nothing but he; but everything else lives in his light.”

When a person says You, and really means You, the I that speaks enters into an immediate and intimate relation with the You. Just as the You one addresses fills the world “The basic word I-You can only be spoken with ones whole being.” It should be clear that when relating to a tree no less than to a person, that this is no meeting of souls, but if there is soul, it too is collected into a totally present I relating to a fully present You. No things, means or divisions penetrate the relation, the whole of Being is gathered in unison. This is not a mystical fairy tale, but the life of the body, the development of both the human race and of every single human being.

“In the beginning is the relation.” To show the priority of relation over experience Buber looks to the sentence-words of “primitive peoples” whose objective world of experience has not begun to overwhelm the relation from out of which it grows.

“The Fuegian surpasses analytic wisdom with a sentence-word of seven syllables that literally means: ‘they look at each other, each waiting for the other to offer to do that which both desire but neither wishes to do.’ In this wholeness persons are embedded like reliefs without achieving the fully rounded independence of nouns or pronouns. What counts is not these products of analysis and reflection but the genuine original unity, the lived relationship.”

The primitive sentence, Buber admits, is only a suggestion of the truly primal, before an I emerges from the “original relational event [where] the primitive man speaks the basic word I-You in a natural, as it were still unformed manner, not yet having recognized himself as an I.”

The emergence of the I in the truly primal human is echoed in the development of every child born into, and who must learn to live in, the modern world. In the womb every child lives in a pure natural association with the mother, both bodily and in “the life horizon” the child exists entirely in relation to the mother. However, “the womb in which it dwells is not solely that of the human mother” rather “every developing child rests, like all developing being, in the womb of the great mother — the undifferentiated, not yet formed primal world.” Buber points to this original relation as the inspiration for the great wealth of myths, whose exact details vary the world over, but which all speak of the origin of the world from out of the womb of the great mother goddess.