“I Want Thou”: Probing the I-It to I-Thou Continuum

Author: Yuval Klein

Martin Buber’s I-It refers to an instrumental, irrelational/unidirectional way of relating to people, social formations, etc. Conversely, I-Thou is a more open, reciprocal way of relating. The biological and behavioral sciences, social sciences, and humanities–all vast fields of knowledge–each relate to this spectrum in different and fascinating ways. The januslike, humanizing and dehumanizing qualities of each have always been a source of dread and perplexity for me, but Buber–this bearded, mystical being–has given some clarity to that effect. Many questions naturally follow, and I will attempt to answer them as empirically as possible. Above all, the I-It serves to abstract an object from a subject: e.g. authors creating characters out of others and selling them as art objects, anatomists and behaviorists delimiting the human apparatus–sometimes imposing order in (as well will see) unordered situations, ethnographers instrumentalizing groups and people in service of an argument, sociologists dealing–and in doing so, reifying–units of analysis, activists packaging an ideology or an identity to orient people in a certain direction, and so on… I-It permeates into all of these fields of knowledge, and so, before thou, I must confront the dissonance–the monstrous ambivalence this friction creates. How can one reconcile the tendency to objectify things–most disturbingly, people–with the apparently more humanistic I-Thou mode of relationality? Like Buber, I believe that the ability to ground oneself in an I-Thou outlook is crucial, but as we will see, not always. The disaggregated approach to ontology is also sometimes unfruitful. Rather than railing every field of knowledge to the gutter of obfuscation, I will emphasize the beauty of knowledge production: emergent categories, how we can bypass the constraints of a language simply by modifying it, how the brain is both magnificently structured and less mechanical than it was previously thought to be… It is an evocative and overwhelming tangent–arguably, important, too. As I cannot avoid this contradiction, alas I must pursue it. 

The first corollary of an I-It approach is–as Levinas writes–a “totalizing” of another person, network, and the like. Some languages, such as Japanese and Ojibwe, do not allow one to speak for another. I cannot say that “Noboru is happy” in Japanese, only that he appears happy. Likewise, there’s a suffix in Turkish that grounds hearsay in its rightful epistemic nebulousness–not “once upon a time,” rather “apparently once upon a time.” To impose an “it-ness” on someone easily allows you to instrumentalize the person before you: this could be a store clerk or a friend. To suspend judgement is vital in myriad relationships. Again, this is never absolute, but there are moments in which the I-It is more pronounced, in which the ego curbs a reciprocity of thou-ness. Milan Kundera writes:

“Suspending moral judgement is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding. From the viewpoint of the novel’s wisdom, that fervid readiness to judge is the most detestable stupidity, the most pernicious evil. Not that the novelist utterly denies that moral judgement is legitimate, but that he refuses it a place in the novel. If you like, you can accuse Panurge of cowardice, accuse Emma Bovary, accuse Rastignac–that’s your business; the novelist has nothing to do with it.

Creating the imaginary terrain where moral judgement is suspended was a move of enormous significance: only there could novelistic characters develop–that is, individuals conceived not as a function of some preexistent truth, as examples of good or evil, or as representations of objective laws in conflict, but as autonomous beings grounded in their own morality, in their own laws…”

Yet, I don’t merely want this thou-ness to be achieved in an “imaginary terrain,” in stylized “novelistic” conjurings. It should–to some hazy extent–be constitutive of actual relationships. This can be achieved by simply seeing the person before you as “grounded in their own morality…”  Now that there’s a solution, I will complicate it by describing the importance of I-It-ing in various situations, and also, how the utility of I-Thou can jut its head–oh so gracefully–in unexpected “terrains,” not just in Kundera's beloved human-ities. 

In learning about something, one is often trying to make a jump to object-ification–in a way, transforming I-Thou to I-It. One wants to prove the rightful it-ness of a subject through inquiry into whatever is most essential about it, what must be learned about it–hence, the term essentialism. Once you parse its significance, you lose the significance of learning about it. It is in this same vein that ideologies harden one’s dispositions towards the world; the contours of an ideology delimit a realm of dogma, a moral terrain. Precisely in the confluence of a question, the answer of borders gives way to formlessness or modifications–the ideology is hollowed of its hallowed it-ness; questions must once again be asked, and judgement must be suspended. As Mary Douglas notes, anomalous or ambiguous things have an uncanny ability to pollute cognitive categories, depriving them of their hard-earned legitimacy. She calls such impositions "dirt...matter out of place," but they can also be seen as questions eroding at the prevailing answer.

In relationships, there’s also a high-stake dialectic between I-It and I-Thou. A relationship’s longevity is contingent upon the sanctity of the I-Thou. A marriage or any commitment to a long-term relationship–romantic or platonic–is a commitment to reciprocity, to invigorating and re-invigorating a long-winded dialogic process, a perennial I-Thou-ness. Conversely, divorce or separation is akin to synaptic pruning (discarding obsolete neural circuits/connections), a totalizing answer: an appraisal has been made, and the persistent questioning ends thereafter. Of course, marriage and divorce are both answers, but the answer of marriage is to keep questioning, keep I-Thou-ing, whereas the answer to divorce is eliding the other’s thou-ness; after all, thou is invoked–in both English and German–in intimate settings.

An intimate space is guarded, so that imposing answers don’t enter. A “safe space” is a place in which the answers that you dread will not be uttered to your dismay. This is why many academics complain about this neologism, claiming that it’s anti-academic–it’s anti-answers, so yes, it’s anti-academic (do not conflate “answers” with “truths.” An answer can also be a contested term or political opinion). Insofar as academia values the answers that intimacy scorns, there is indeed a lot at stake. Musa al-Gharbi notes that the ethos of academia is–in a sense–contrary to human nature. Accepting others' answers–even when they challenge the very substrate on which one's work or self-orientation exists, incorporating information even if it is detrimental to one's interests–these norms are difficult to reconcile with an innate human desire to continue believing what one already believes. Open-inquiry is thus in constant tension with closed dogma(s).

This is relevant in the macro-political sense, too. George Lakoff writes extensively about discursive cognitive frames, and how complex associations (or “metaphors) tacitly inform thought. In Moral Politics, he describes how governments use the rhetoric of a patriarch to address its children, i.e. vote-bearing citizens. The Republican party is the stringent, didactic (I-It-ing) parent, while the Democratic party is the lenient, accepting (I-Thou-ing) parent. There is, however, another framing that I believe is more pertinent in light of the recent elections. The Republican party has achieved the intimacy of I-Thou-ness that fortifies them against certain answers, whereas the Democratic party presumes and emanates an audacious claim to omniscience and moral rectitude. When Republicans are wrong, they have an apparatus of intimacy that circumvents harmful answers, whereas when Democrats are wrong, there is no protection. 

As Michael Herzfeld claims, “...the degree to which the idea of the nation-state succeeds [is] in large measure because its formal ideology encapsulates, or, perhaps, incorporates, all the inward flaws and imperfections to which it is officially and ostensibly opposed. If the nation is credibly represented as a family, people are loyal to it because they know that families are flawed–that is part of love–and so they rally to the defense of its compromising but warmly familiar intimacy.” I recognize in myself this desire to insulate people with whom I’m intimate from certain answers. It can be virtuous, or it can be dangerous; it can be loving, or it can be lovingly fascistic. Buber’s I-Thou and I-It distinction is useful, but his unequivocal exaltation of I-Thou-ness over I-It-ness is where his argument errs. Like weight (eternity, responsbility, values) and lightness (mortality, whimsicality, bachelorhood), the answer and question are perplexingly multivalenced. Both can be "unbearable," to wit "the unbearable lightness of being," or rapturous.

Just as circuits in the brain are reduced in the process of synaptic pruning, language is subjected to a similar fluctuation We bend to the will of language, but at a moment in which one really wants to say something, neologisms form. Words–like neural circuits–also recede into the margins. The translation of Buber’s work unwittingly exemplifies this linguistic pruning. In old English, “Thou” and “You” were used alternately; the latter was invoked in formal address, the former in more intimate settings. Notably, God belonged to the “Thou” category. This leads to another clash of I-thou-ness and I-it-ness: the philosophical versus anthropomorphic conception of God in monotheistic theology. People of the philosophical school, such as Maimonides and al-Farabi, proclaimed that one must subsist with the question of God’s form; the commoners, instead, arbitrarily gaped massive epistemic gaps in order to worship the answer of God. Both sides were, in a way, right to note that their adversaries’ conception of God violated the most basic tenets of monotheism. The philosophers berated their anthropomorphic brethren for being idolatrous; constructing a God in the absence of one can plausibly be described as such. However, the philosophical school is essentially agnosticism in denial, a question masqueraded as an answer. We are constantly calibrating the degree of skepticism (questioning) and belief (answering) in our grope for truth. Invocations of I-It and I-Thou are variable.

In neuroscience, an important–and still incipient–paradigm shift has occurred: the view of the brain as an object that is hardwired a certain way–and therefore, cannot change nor surprise–has yielded to a recognition of the brain’s ability to reorganize itself, thereby transcending the stipulations of its apparent it-ness (the latter theory is ‘neuroplasticity,’ the former ‘localizationism’). And yet, the I-It, mechanistic approach remains useful–the answers are still there, organs still correlate with functions; but the questions assert themselves alongside the answers. Although difficult to reconcile, the duplicity of questions and answers–I-thou and I-it–is vital to every discipline of knowledge, be it intellectual or interpersonal.