As a part of the Western philosophical cannon, Buber's thought is best understood as a reaction to two previous attitudes toward the question of religious meaning. The first, which can be loosely termed "enlightenment theology", tried to carve out a place for God within the new, modern, rational understanding of the world. The second group, which were atheistic philosophers, attempted instead to deny religion any legitimate place at all within human experience. On the surface, Buber's ideas seem to have more in common with the first group, since he does, after all, believe that there is a place for God in the world. But Buber was deeply influenced by atheistic philosophers, particularly by Friederich Nietzsche, and his theory bears strong resemblance to their thought.
In trying to forge a place for God within the rational world, enlightenment theologians often reduced the deity to a rational principle. Instead of the personal God familiar from traditional religions, these philosophers viewed God as something abstract and fundamentally rational. These philosophers used God as a basis for enlightenment values, for ethics, for tolerance, and for rationality itself. But in their view, God had almost no other qualities or capabilities. In a way it was only a small step for the 19th and 20th century atheists, such as Karl Marx, Freiderich Nietzsche, and Siegmund Freud, to claim that there was, in fact, no divine being. Enlightenment theologians had made God into an abstract principle, with no anthropomorphic features; the atheists simply took the next step and made God into a myth.
According to the atheistic philosphers, the human notion of God is nothing but a sign of weakness or distress. Religion, in fact, prevents us from addressing the most fundamental problems of humanity by creating an opiate which dulls human suffering without actually healing the problem. According to Karl Marx, for example, religious desire is a symptom of social conditions that are not providing people with the proper environment for their flourishing. He sees religion as a drug which helps soothe the pain caused by the improper conditions, without doing anything to actually improve the situation. For Nietzsche, religion is a crutch that is used by the weak to avoid facing life in its full power and unpredictability. For Freud, religion is an obsessional neurosis that keeps us from reconciling ourselves to the burden of culture.
Buber partly directed his thought towards answering these atheist philosophers. He wanted to prove, first and foremost, that religious experience is not deceptive: it is not a mask that hides deep human problems. Instead, it is a true experience of communion with a higher power, an experience that has tangible and wholly desirable results. But Buber was also unsatisfied with the religious thought of the enlightenment thinkers. He saw that the God they envisioned was merely a tool for human reasoning, a principle that they used rather than a being with whom we can relate. Nietzsche, then, Buber claims, was absolutely correct when he argued that such a God is dead; such a God, in fact, could not possibly be alive.
While the enlightenment theologians tried to carve out a space for God within the realm of reason, and the atheists tried remove God completely from the picture of human life, Buber takes a third path: he removes God from the realm of reason, but does not therefore discard Him. Buber claims that there are two modes of engaging with the world. There is the mode of experience, in which we gather data, analyze, and theorize; and there is also the mode of encounter, in which we simply relate. The first mode is that of science and reason. When we experience something in this mode, we treat it as an object, a thing, an It. If God existed in this realm, as the enlightenment theologians believed that he did, then He would have to be a thing, something we use, such as an opiate, a crutch, or an obsessional neurosis. But religious experience is not a part of this realm, Buber claims; religious experience can only be achieved through the second mode, encounter. Through encounter we relate to another as a You, not as an object to be used, but as an other with whom we must relate.
I and Thou is written as a series of long and shorter aphorisms, divided into three sections. The aphorisms within each section are arranged without any linear progression; that is, they are not supposed to be read as subsequent steps in an argument, but as related reflections. Each of the three sections taken as a whole comprises a stage in Buber's larger argument. The first part of the book examines the human condition by exploring the psychology of individual man. Here Buber establishes his crucial first premise: that man has two distinct ways of engaging the world, one of which the modern age entirely ignores. In the second part of the book, Buber examines human life on the societal level. He investigates both society itself and man as he exists within society. In this section, Buber claims that modern society leaves man unfulfilled and alienated because it acknowledges only one of our modes for engaging the world. The third part of the book deals with the subject of religion. Building on the conclusions of the first two sections—that man has two ways of engaging the world, and that modern society leaves man alienated by valuing only the first of these—Buber tells us how to go about building a fulfilling, meaningful society (a true community) by making proper use of the neglected second mode of engaging the world, and by using this mode to relate to God.
The fundamental concept underlying the entire work is the distinction drawn in the first section between the two modes of engaging the world. The first of these, which Buber calls "experience" (the mode of 'I–it'), will be familiar to any reader, since it is the mode that modern man almost exclusively uses. In Experience, man collects data, analyzes it, classifies it, and theorizes about it. The object of experience (the It) is viewed as a thing to be utilized, a thing to be known or put to some purpose. In experience we see our object as a collection of qualities and quantities, as a particular point in space and time. There is a necessary distance between the experiencing I and the experienced It: the one is subject, and the other object. Also, the experiencing I is an objective observer rather than an active participant in this mode of engaging the world.
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