Buber, the I, thou and it….
Martin Buber famously suggests that there are two main ways of relating: ‘I-thou’ and ‘I-it’; recognising that the ‘I’ exists within these relationships: “All real living is meeting”.
In the I-thou relationship we treat the other as an opening, a mystery, a being full of potential, full of value, which resists reduction to linguistic labels, which can modify us and be modified by us, which we have responsibility towards, offer respect towards, and so on. As we are open, we are vulnerable, so it involves a risk.
We attempt to encounter the other in their whole being; this may be impossible, but it is the aim. The relationship is mutual, possibly uncertain and ambiguous, because of its unpredictable and transformative possibilities.
In the I-it relationship the other is an object to be manipulated – the it is limited in its response, it rarely if ever opens us up, other than through what we do with it. It is an object, not another rich ‘subject’. We often tend to make our enemies its, then refuse to deal with them, and lock ourselves down. It is possible to suggest that the I becomes something of an impersonal it, when it treats an other as an it. However, much of life is easier if we treat some beings as ‘it’s, as when we build a lego object, change a light bulb, fill the car with petrol, and so on, so there is some ambiguity here – although perhaps all these it creations are forms of modern life.
This distinction seems a very simple point to make, but confusing the two, or extending the I-it relationship to situations in which it is not appropriate seems a major cultural flaw.
Psychoanalysis
You may think psychoanalysis is invalid for any number of reasons, but let us just look at one. Freud called unconscious processes the id, or the ‘it’. This automatically suggests unconscious processes are mechanical rather than subjects. The id is not something to be entered into relationship with, not something which can be plural or creative, but something repetitive to be manipulated, constrained, disciplined and brought under control. The best the ‘it’ can hope for is ‘sublimation’, or being bent to the will of the ego.
Jungians, to the extent they get Jung’s breakthrough, treat unconscious processes as a ‘thou’ another subject, with consciousness, wisdom, creativity. This may well be a difficult set of subjects to relate to, as it is made other by the ego’s suppression or misperception, but they can be respected, successfully dialogued with and lived with. They will never be exhausted, or made entirely clear; in short unconscious processes are thous.
Buber’s distinction helps us understand this difference, and it is irrelevant whether Buber and Jung got on, or understood each other, shadow processes happen to the best of us…
Without having done the research I would hypothesise that many (but not all) therapies treat internal processes as ‘it’s, to be mastered, released or accommodated to…
Existentialism: de Beauvoir
We can see a similar issue arise in de Beauvoirs ethics, and the distinction between the ‘free’ and the ‘determined’, or the ‘for-itself’ and ‘the in-itself’. Recognising oneself and the other as free opens the possibility of an I-thou relationship. To be ethical, one opens consciousness to open the freedom of the other. However, towards the determined, we appear to have no necessary care, no requirement to be open or to open, it is merely an ‘it’, something beyond relationship. It can be subject to instrumentalism, even as it escapes because of its complexity.
Where de Beauvoir adds to Buber is in asserting the ambiguities of response, of relationships, of situations, and the impossibility of always being able to produce the results we might desire, or of even deciding what is ethical in particular situations. But we can still ask, if we can behave ethically to an it? An it is not an equal. Therefore if there are defined its in the world we can attempt, but sometimes fail, to bend them to our wills. We may not have to respect their freedom or unknown way of operating.
An ethics may need to recognise that determining that something is determined it, is ambiguous at best.
Politics of Environmentalism
It seems obvious that, in Australia at least, the problems for the two main parties are that they are not able to conceive of ecology as a thou, which they can have a serious relationship with. For them ecology is an it, to be manipulated, exploited and subject to the will – or rather to the fantasies of will. Thus they fantasise, we can sell coal and gas and cut emissions. They fantasise that the world will not bite back and that they have plenty of time. They fantasise that Carbon Capture and Storage will have to work in time. They don’t really accept that the world could change – they fantasise they world is inert, a dead ‘it’, rather than a complex subject which responds to provocation in ways of which we are uncertain in advance. There is no sense, in our political discourse, that we need to establish a friendly relationship to ecology, an open relationship to ecology, or even a learning relationship with ecology. They act as if we should be the masters of it, and that ecology is an it. There is little recognition of mutuality.
With this view, we will never establish a mutually beneficial relationship. We can only head for disaster….
The tragedy is, that I doubt that any indigenous person, with their roots still in country, would need to be told any of this. They would already know much more, much better than me, and be able to ‘say’ much more if we could listen, or they might ask us to listen to the world as thou, because it seems obvious, it consists of many thous. That way we might come to learn.
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There are some subsequent comments in the next post Buber and binaries
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