Buber describes man's ability to come to know and relate in "I-It" as man looking back, reflecting on his past "I-Thou" relations. Looking back these "I-Thou" relations are viewed as an object to be known, as "It". "I-It" relating allows man to interpret, categorize, and accrue scientific knowledge.
Finally man relates with others as "We." This permits the phenomenon of community and of adult unique contribution. So man becomes through relating with family, others, and community, like Hesse's onion or a being who actively moves toward ever more integuments, qualities, threads, and complexity.[9] Many unique contradictory type beings, then, have influenced the becoming of each individual human person. In a sense each unique person might be viewed as a community of the beings with whom he has meaningfully related in struggle and/or complementariness. In fact Buber talks of thinking man as a dialogue of internalized "Thous."
If each man can be likened to a community of his internalized "Thous," logically think of the outcome of many men struggling together supposedly for a common purpose. Since time began, man in community has been experienced by man as chaotic. Thus Plato wrote _The Republic_.[10] This presentation depicted an impossible scheme for developing an ideal community. As a classic, _The Republic_ continues to be a thought provoking thesis. Its antiquity makes one realize that this desire to control, our continued concern with genetic planning, is a part of the very nature of man. And yet, considering man's ever existing recognition of the chaos of community how naive we often behave, for example, enraged at experiencing _another_ communication break.
Plato envisioned regulating and controlling almost every dimension of the individual's existence in accordance with his particular potential for development to fulfill the needs of his ideally conceptualized community. Today Heinlein, a science fiction novelist, still writes of breeding for longevity in man, as we breed animal stock for the greatest amount of meat and profit.[11] Giving Plato his due, he recognized at the end of his book concern and doubt as to whether men so carefully mated and reared would fulfill their designated responsibilities. He wondered if things could, would, or would not go in accordance with his plan. He then logically indicated the process and kinds of community deteriorations which could ensue. Plato had a concept of an ideal community, of ideal types of necessary men, and of ideal male-female breeding relationships. He viewed our present-style family as one that saps the { 46} strength of community and does not support this concept. He conceived of communal living more like the communal living of our present-day communes. However, Plato's communes would have been regulated by the plan as he conceived it. Existence in these communes was to be predetermined and very determined.