  From his early reading of philosophical literature Buber retained some of the most basic convictions found in his later writings. In Kant he found two answers to his concern with the nature of time. If time and space are pure forms of perception, then they pertain to things only as they appear to us (as phenomena) and not to things-in-themselves (noumena). If our experience of others, especially of persons, is of objects of our experience, then we necessarily reduce them to the scope of our phenomenal knowledge, in other words, to what Buber later called the I-It relation. Yet Kant also indicated ways of meaningfully speaking of the noumenal, even though not in terms of theoretical reason. Practical reason – as expressed in "maxims of action," categorical imperatives, or principles of duty we choose for their own sake and regardless of outcome – obliges us to consider persons as ends in themselves rather than means to an end. This suggests something like an absolute obligation. Teleological (aesthetic) judgment, as developed in Kant’s Third Critique, suggests the possibility of a rational grounding of representation. Taken together, Kant’s conceptions of ethics and aesthetics resonated with Buber’s notion that the phenomenon is always the gateway to the noumenon, just as the noumenal cannot be encountered other than in, and by way of, concrete phenomena. Thus Buber managed to meld Kantian metaphysical and ethical conceptions into a more immediate relation with things as they appear to us and as we represent them to ourselves. Buber succeeded in translating this theoretical dialectic of immediacy and distance, phenomenal encounter and reflexivity, into a style he cultivated in his writing but also in his manner of personal interactions. Buber sought not only to describe but to live the tension between a Dionysian primacy of life in its particularity, immediacy, and individuality and the Apollonian world of form, measure, and abstraction as inter-dependent forces. Both are constitutive of human experience in that they color our interactions with the other in nature, with other human beings, and with the divine Thou. Buber thus developed his own distinctive voice in the emerging chorus of writers, thinkers, and artists of his time who rallied against the widely-perceived "alienation" associated with modern life.