As we find ourselves in the middle of a loneliness epidemic, the difficulty to create and sustain meaningful connections with others is being foregrounded. While there are certainly barriers that are unique to our time, relationships have always come with challenges.
It is difficult to be vulnerable with others. To take off our masks and reveal ourselves for all our needs and desires. To risk being “too much” or “not enough,” those fears that many of us harbor deep down.
Inversely, it can be difficult to fully experience other people without centering ourselves in our experience of them. To see other people as they actually are and not make our interactions with them about us and what we want/need from them. It can be challenging to make space for someone to fully show up as their whole, unique self and accept them without condition.
This is what Martin Buber challenges us to do in his philosophical treatise, “I and Thou”, first published a century ago in 1923. For Buber, there were two modes of experiencing other beings: I-Thou and I-It.
I-Thou relationships are vulnerable, direct, and reciprocal relationships between individuals, characterized by a deep, present, and empathetic connection. They involve two people who are able to hold the wholeness and complexity of the other in their minds. In the I-Thou modality, relationships become more than mere interaction but an “encounter” where two people co-create something greater than each person’s individual contribution.
I-Thou is an unspoken acknowledgment of our shared condition, whether it be the humanity between two people or the interdependence between a person and the world. It happens when both people or beings are able to fully and directly experience the other in the present moment. “A melting of the between.” No expectations. No assumptions. Two beings fully aware of one another, allowing for the power of their presence to dissolve the barriers that lie between them.
These deep, mutual connections are what Buber believed to be at the center of a meaningful, human experience. In fact, for Buber, it is how we stood a chance of communing with the divine (e.g., God - the Eternal Thou).
I-It, on the other hand, refers to a mode of relation where beings may interact but do not fully meet. In the I-It mode of relating, other beings are mere concepts in our minds. They are canvases onto which we project our beliefs, needs, assumptions, and misconceptions. In the I-It modality, other beings are mental representations and, as a result, we relate more to our own thoughts than we do to other beings. I-It is a monologue rather than a dialogue.
While I-It can sound narcissistic, I would argue that these kinds of interactions are the most common type of relationship we experience. When I interact someone at the grocery store, I am not having an “encounter.” While I may be friendly, I am tired, and hungry, and I want to get home after a long day at work. The person at the grocery store is just an “object” in my way, a background actor in the story of my life’s story. It is self-centered and transactional but I don’t believe I am alone in this.
This line of thinking reminds me of the address David Foster Wallace gave at Kenyan College in 2005, now colloquially known as the “This is Water” speech.
In this speech, Wallace addresses the way we can fall into this I-It mode of treating other people as characters in our life’s story.
Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.
One example that Wallace uses to illustrate this “default setting” is the experience of getting stuck in traffic. We often react to this experience in terms of its immediate impact to us, personally, framing the entire experience from our point of view. I-It. Typically, we don’t even think of other drivers as humans but as mere vehicles on the road around us. In his speech, Wallace gently challenges us to take another perspective.
The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it’s not impossible that some of these people in SUV’s have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.
Wallace encourages us to be aware of how we center ourselves in our experiences, so we can make choices from this place of awareness. When we are aware of how we default to this I-It mode of relating, we improve our ability to shift our attention to other people, make space for the wholeness of their experience, and create more opportunities for I-Thou encounters.
Of course, Buber and Wallace would both contend that maintaining this kind of awareness is not always possible. I-Thou requires attention and it lacks permanency yet it is something we can reach toward. We can remain aware of our natural tendencies toward I-It and seek to open ourselves to these moments when I-Thou is possible. We may not always be successful – we may not even always try – but when we are, it will be in these fleeting moments that we awaken from the illusion of our separateness and become fully human.