Experience is not Presence
In the first Chapter of I and Thou, Buber distinguishes between the You and the It. In doing so, he maps onto this pair a number of other pairs. In particular, he associates the You with being present and being in relation. In contrast, he associates the It with being in the past and experiencing. It may be unexpected to associate experience with the past rather than the present. After all, when I am eating this meal or drinking this water or going for this walk, I seem to experience the sensations in real time. What resolves this irony, however, is the status of the It. The point is that when we experience something, we are distinct from the thing we are experiencing. Thus, to say I am eating this meal means that I am distinct from the meal I am eating. It is as if I am observing myself eating rather than being completely immersed in the eating itself. This is what experience means: a kind of distance and observation. And that means the object of the experience itself is in the past, even if just an instant in the past, because I am not completely immersed in the present of the action itself.
Tragic Irony of Humanity
In discussing the relation between You and It, Buber remarks that they are not two different kinds of objects, but rather two different ways of approaching objects. I can either be in relation with something or else observe it more objectively and from a distance. There is a tragic irony, however, in how we cannot avoid at some point perceiving an object as an It:
This, however, is the sublime melancholy of our lot, that every You must become an It in our world. (68)
For Buber, this is the case because it is impossible to sustain complete relation with the spirit of the world. In order to survive as biological organisms, we have to manipulate and use the world to meet our needs. We build shelters to make our lives more comfortable. These necessary tasks require us to treat the world as an object to be used rather than something to be engaged in complete immersive relation with. Thus, there is an irony that the necessity of human life requires a diminishing of human relation.
Irony of Progress
Related to the irony that every You must become an It, Buber also comments on how the two different modes of existence, I-You and I-It, are not only different, but seem to compete with one another. This produces an irony that the successes of one mode erode the other:
The improvement of the ability to experience and use generally involves a decrease in man’s power to relate. (92)
Here, using and experiencing are associated with the It and the power to relate is associated with the You. In order for the human species to progress, we have to use and experience the world. That’s how we make the world better shaped to our needs, which Buber calls making the world more “comfortable.” But the very thing that extends our life expectancy may diminish the quality of life, because it pulls us out of the world, making it harder to relate to one another and to God.
