Ordinarily, in our scientific and technological age, we think of things [and now people, too!] as “facts”: atoms obediently moving by laws of motion and changing according to chemical laws of interaction. But Buber was interested in that quality of experience—the “you” (or, to use the older intimate form, the “thou”)—in which I am overwhelmed by an experience of a person, a relationship, an encounter for which no set of facts seems adequate to explain. Lewis found this a healthy corrective to the perennial tendency in “religion” to reduce an I-Thou encounter with God into an I-It affair of the
...more
