“Mystical Potency”
Buber thinks the I-You relation is the original relation of man to the world. Over time, the I-It may come to predominate, but the I-You relation is always lurking. In the following quote, he discusses “primitive” cultures and how the I-You lurks in spiritual experiences that people might call “mystical”:
The appearances to which [the primitive man] attributes a “mystical potency” are all the elementary relational processes—that is, all the processes about which he thinks at all because they stimulate his body and lave an impression of such stimulation in him. The moon and dead who haunt him at night with pain or lust have this potency; but so do the sun that burns him, the beast that howls at him, the chief whose glance compels him, and the sharma whose song fills him with strength for the hunt. (71-2)
In these instances, Buber imagines man being immersed in a relation, as if possessed. That is one sense of what it means to be in relation, to not be distinct from the world but involved in intimate connection with it.
Natural Association
Buber provides an image of “natural association,” or the relation when man and nature in which they are both subjects rather than separated as subject and object, in the form of a great “womb”:
Every developing human rests, like all developing beings, in the womb of the great mother—the undifferentiated, not yet formed primal world. From this it detaches itself to enter a personal life, and it is only in dark hours when we slip out of this again (as happens even to the healthy, night after night) that we are close to her again. (76-7)
Just as a fetus is not distinct from its mother, but involved in complete relation with her, so too do humans begin in harmony with nature before being differentiated from it as a separate being.
Cross-Fertilization of It and You
Buber’s complaint about the modern world is that the I-It relation predominates over the more spiritually-fulfilling I-You. He provides this powerful image:
But 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. (102-3)
Notice that Buber is not calling for the I-You to completely replace the I-It, as we have to objectify the world at times in order to survive. But in calling for the “cross-fertilization” of the It and You, he hopes that relationality can once again infuse our objective interactions with the world.
