In Buber's seminal work I and Thou he argues that our experience of the world can come in one of two basic forms, "I-It" encounters and "I-Thou" encounters. Buber describes the difference in a famous passage regarding how we might relate to a tree:
I consider a tree.
I can look on it as a picture: stiff column in a shock of light, or splash of green shot with the delicate blue and silver of the background.
I can perceive it as movement: flowing veins on clinging, pressing pith, suck of the roots, breathing of the leaves, ceaseless commerce with earth and air—and the obscure growth itself.
I can classify it in a species and study it as a type in its structure and mode of life.
I can subdue its actual presence and form so sternly that I recognise it only as an expression of law — of the laws in accordance with which a constant opposition of forces is continually adjusted, or of those in accordance with which the component substances mingle and separate.
I can dissipate it and perpetuate it in number, in pure numerical relation.
In all this the tree remains my object, occupies space and time, and has its nature and constitution.
It can, however, also come about, if I have both will and grace, that in considering the tree I become bound up in relation to it. The tree is now no longer It. I have been seized by the power of exclusiveness.
To effect this it is not necessary for me to give up any of the ways in which I consider the tree. There is nothing from which I would have to turn my eyes away in order to see, and no knowledge that I would have to forget. Rather is everything, picture and movement, species and type, law and number, indivisibly united in this event.
Everything belonging to the tree is in this: its form and structure, its colours and chemical composition, its intercourse with the elements and with the stars, are all present in a single whole.
The tree is no impression, no play of my imagination, no value depending on my mood; but it is bodied over against me and has to do with me, as I with it — only in a different way.
Let no attempt be made to sap the strength from the meaning of the relation: relation is mutual.
We can approach the tree as an inert object, as an "it." A purely materialistic and scientific description of the tree "subdues" and "dissipates" the sacred aspect of the tree and reduces it to an "it." This "I-It" relation to the world is the disenchanted imagination. In the disenchanted imagination our relation to the world is no relation at all as the encounter is asymmetrical: a subjective "I" encounters an inert, mute, and lifeless object, an "it." In the language of the Psalms, the world has no "voice."
In an "I-Thou" encounter with the world we hear a voice and experience a true relation, a relation that is "mutual." Instead of an "it" I encounter a sacred presence, a "Thou." In this enchanted experience, the tree interrupts me and pulls me into a relationship with itself. As Buber says, if I have "both will and grace" to see the tree as a Thou "I become bound up in relation to it."
Importantly for Buber, in the I-Thou encounter I don't have to give up my scientific understanding of the tree. There is "no knowledge that I would have to forget" about the tree. Organic chemistry still applies. It's just that this scientific understanding of the tree is only a small part of "a single whole."
Lastly, and this is key, this sacred, enchanted encounter with the tree isn't a figment of my superstitious imagination. In an I-Thou encounter I'm making contact with a reality that exists outside of and independently of my own private subjectivity. In the I-Thou encounter there is no "play of my imagination" and the experience isn't "depending upon my mood." The Thou-encounter is, rather, "bodied over against me and has to do with me." Something is "there" that addresses me and pushes back against me. So a key practice in cultivating an enchanted imagination is not trying to diminish or question this experience, the temptation to "sap the strength of the meaning of the relation." Enchantment keeps the relationship there as relationship. The "relation is mutual."
Using Buber's work, then, we can describe the rise of modern disenchantment as a movement away from an enchanted I-Thou experience of the world into an increasingly I-It experience of the world.
