Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Bubers I and Thou

Buber’s I and Thou

Contents
Introduction 1
Metaphysics 1
I-Thou 2
How do we access Thou? 3
History 3
The emotional outcome of living with Thou 4
Modern World 4
Freedom 5
Destiny 5
The Eternal Thou 6
Implications for Psychotherapy 6
Bibliography 7

Introduction
Here I will look at Buber’s thoughts from I and Thou, with most focus put on the I-It and I Thou relations, as opposed to the Eternal Thou, which I struggle to agree with. Then I will look at some of the implications for Psychotherapy of Buber’s thoughts.
Metaphysics
Buber’s project in I and Thou is an understanding of what I am, effectively an ontological examination, what it means to exist:
“There is no I taken in itself, but only the I of the primary word I-Thou and the I of the primary word I-It”. (Buber 1937 p11)
Thus the existence of self is only to be understood in the two relations either I-Thou or I-It. Thus Buber’s position is one that sees existence as a relational aspect and not, as with the sciences one of a subject object relationship.
When we relate to objects, for example, I see a cat, then this is an I-it relationship, indeed when we think, feel, or imagine something, this is an I-It, a relationship between two objects of subject I and object Thought\feeling etc. Thus there is a finite relationship:
“For where there is a thing, there is another thing. Every it is bounded by others, it only exists by being bounded by others.” (Buber 1937 p11)
So the I-It relationship, objectifies both the I and the It.
The I-Thou relationship is different:
“When Thou is spoken, the speaker has no thing; he has indeed nothing. But he takes his stand in relation” (Buber 1937 P11)
Buber therefore sees the I-It as the combination of objects, a finite and restricted combination and with I-Thou there is relation, where I and Thou are both no-thing and free.

The I of the I-it exists in space and time, the I-Thou is relational.
I-Thou
There are three areas where we see relations in the world
1. Relations with Nature, but here whilst creatures live and move they do not respond as Thou, as there is no reciprocation of Being, whilst a dog can show his devotion with you, he cannot reciprocate in your full range of being, and linguistically, the description of Thou, with Nature “clings to the threshold of speech” (Buber 1937 P13). Therefore what Buber appears to be saying is that to fully use Thou, there must be a relation of meaning, a relation of being.
2. Relations with Humans, here “the relation is open and in the form of speech” (Buber 1937 P13). Here Buber sees the I-Thou possibly in its strongest clarity, in some sense the blue print, that he uses for the other two relations, with nature, and spiritually.
3. Relation with Spiritual Beings: here Buber sees the relation as clouded but “yet it discloses itself..we feel we are address and we answer” (Buber 1937 P 13)

The I-Thou relationship that we have with humans, is however a derived one from the I-Thou relationship we have with spiritual beings: “in each Thou we address the eternal Thou” (Buber 1937 (Buber 1937 p14))

For Buber to encounter Being, is to be in relation. "in considering the tree I become bound up in relation to it. The tree is now no longer It. I have been seized by the power of exclusivity" (Buber 1937 p14) Thus to be in relation to something in its totality, in all the things it can be and its uniqueness is to be in relation to its being. To be in relation to a tree can take it out of an I It relationship, but there is no reciprocity of being, so not a truly I-Thou relationship.
To encounter Thou is to encounter a melody, a chord. As a harmony is produced by 3 notes you cannot find the harmony by taking any of the individual notes and looking at them. So it is with Thou, the existence that emerges as the totality of being in its uniqueness.
So the I –Thou relationship is characterised by its uniqueness and also its inclusivity. To have a Thou relationship is to meet the uniqueness of the Other, and to be fully in relation to it, I.e. inclusive.
However to access the Thou to relate to it is not via experience, as Buber says “In the act of experience Thou is far away" (Buber 1937 (Buber 1937 p15)). Any act of experience is an act of object relations. So how do we relate to Thou, if it is not via experience?
"The primary word can be spoken only with the whole being. Concentration and fusion into the whole being can never take place through my agency, nor can it ever take place without me" (Buber 1937 p17). To be in relation requires all of me and all of you relating. To fully relate to my whole being I would need to step outside myself to see my limits which is impossible, of course without me I could never access my full being. Thus the I-Thou is a relationship you can come to, it is not a relationship you can force, nor can it happen without you.

How do we access Thou?
Buber’s words here can be instructive. " we do not find by seeking" (Buber 1937 p17) but rather by meeting it, so "we know nothing isolated about it anymore" (Buber 1937 p17). This act of meeting the whole unity is "the act of my being" (Buber 1937 p17).
What then is the relationship of Thou? Being in relation to Thou, means activity and passivity "being chosen and choosing, suffering and action in one;" (Buber 1937 p17). To meet the Thou, to meet your totality to the totality of the other due is "bound to resemble suffering" (Buber 1937 p17). Here Buber is slightly mystical where to meet the Thou, involves suffering. The only possibility I can see here is that to give up myself and the other that has things, experience feeling and concepts is to open us up to the wild roar of uncertainty. As Spinelli said our Worldview is a necessary construct to make life bearable, here I feel Buber doing the same, to lose self and self construct is a scary thing.
The effect of relating I and Thou, is that of love. This is not the feeling of love that you may have for an object, a partner or a pet. This is the love that encompass man, the majesty and wonder of being As Buber says "feelings dwell in man; but man dwells in his love" (Buber 1937 p18)
To meet Thou is to meet it in the present. This present isn’t the current now in a series of nows, "the point which indicates in our Thought .. The conclusion of 'finished' time " (Buber 1937 p18). Rather "the real filled present exists only so far as actual presentness, meeting and relation exist" (Buber 1937 p18). To objectify things is to put them in the past, to view things in relation, is to pull things to the present. Time for Buber is thus a concept that emanates from our relations to being in the world, and not a container in which we exist. The more we understand existence as a related event the more it exists in our present and the closer we get to being and Thou. As Buber says “true beings are lived in the present, the life of objects is in the past" (Buber 1937 p18)
History
The I-Thou, is the original relationship out of which the I-It relation emerges, this can be seen from the linguistic structures of ancient people, where “far away: the Zulu has for that a word which means, in our sentence form:”There where someone cries out ‘Oh mother I am lost’” (Buber 1937 p22). Here we see the relational understanding, both to emotion and to the other, where there is no primacy of I. Indeed I, the split between subject and object, I and world, only comes later through splitting. Indeed the word I, used to only give the sense of uniqueness, rather than, ownership, and primacy. “In the primary relational event, in virtue of its exclusiveness, the I is included” (Buber 1937 p24)
This separation of mind to body, or self to others and world causes both consciousness and melancholy. To live relationally is for Buber to live closer to God, and to live consciously and objectively is to live around nothingness, as nothingness only arises when you have something. The does remind me of the Freudian idea, where all encompassing feelings can be sought, through affect or substance to take you back to the primal unity of child in womb.
We develop the world of objects in so far as we affect and are affected. “For no-thing is a ready-made part of an experience: only in the strength, acting and being acted upon, of what is over against men, is anything made accessible” (Buber 1937 p27). Thus for Buber the world of the It, of something and nothing, comes through power, but this is not truth. On one hand is there is the functional world of objects that we can affect, and can be affected by, but this is a different realm to the world of truth, which is relational and pre conscious. A thing is the sum of all qualities, Being is the sum of all relations.

The emotional outcome of living with Thou
“To man the world is twofold [...] things entered in the graph of place, events in that of time” (Buber 1937 p30). This provides a reliable world, “You cannot hold on to life without it, its reliability sustains you” (Buber 1937 p31)
The other option is to encounter the world as one being, the world of Thou. This world is unreliable, “it vanishes when it is tightly held” (Buber 1937 p31) “It cannot be surveyed, and if you wish to make it capable of survey you lost it” (Buber 1937 p31) “ It does not help to sustain you in life, it only helps you to glimpse eternity” (Buber 1937 p31)
The world of It is a necessary one “the world of It [..] the world in which he has to live, and in which it is comfortable to live[..] indeed, which offers him all manner of incitements and excitements, activity and knowledge” (Buber 1937 p32)
The Thou world is more dangerous, “the moments of Thou appear a strange lyric and dramatic episode, seductive and magical, but tearing us away to dangerous extremes, loosening the well-tried context, leaving more questions than satisfactions behind them, shattering security-in short uncanny moments that we can well dispense with “(Buber 1937 p32)
“Without It man cannot live. But he who lives with It alone is not a man.” (Buber 1937 p32)

Modern World
The modern world is defined by its ever increasing refinement of the world of It. As advancements come in our ability to experience and use the world, so we come more abstract, more distant both from the world from either direct relation with the world of It, and more significantly from the world of Thou.
Interaction with the Thou is paradoxical, on one level the most profound interaction, but “The stronger the response, the more strongly does it bind up the Thou and banish it to be an object. Only silence before the Thou[..] leaves the Thou free.” (Buber 1937 p37)
The I It world, is constituted by two things the I and the It, between I and It there is separation, where there is not between I and Thou. The It is outside the I, it is the place of Institutions, where the I is that of feelings “where life is lived and man recovers from institutions[..] . Here he is at home” (Buber 1937 p39) Both of these though because they deal at the object level are short when it comes to Spirit to the Thou “Institutions yield no public life, feelings no personal life” (Buber 1937 (Buber 1937 p39)

Freedom
In the world of It, we have the world of causality, every effect has a cause and everything is determined. In the world of Thou we have freedom. “Only he who knows relation and knows about the presence of the Thou is capable of decision” (Buber 1937 P44). How then can we make decisions using the Thou when we must objectify to take decisions? In choosing to do one thing we always reject another, or plurality of other choices. “But he alone who directs the whole strength of the alternative into the doing of the charge, who lets the abundant passion of what is rejected invade the growth to reality of what is chosen [..] makes decision, decides the event” (Buber 1937 P44). Thus Buber is saying to be free we need to operate in the world of Thou, and to take decisions freely then our action needs to be infused with the choices that we have discarded. We decide therefore relationally.
“In my discovery of the deed that aims at me, in this movement of my freedom the mystery is revealed to me [..] He who forgets all that is caused and makes decisions out of the depths [..] is a free man” (Buber 1937 P45). For Buber, to act freely, with the Thou, can be to discover action, to find out what the world asks of you, as opposed to what you ask of the world.
Destiny
Destiny and freedom go hand in hand, “Destiny and freedom are solemnly promised to one another. Only the man who makes freedom real to himself meets destiny” (Buber 1937 p45). Here Buber sees that we have destiny and that through living in the I-Thou we will access it. Man accesses his destiny when “he intervenes no more, but at the same time he does not let things merely happen. He listens to what is emerging from himself, to the course of being in the world; not in order to be supported by it, but in order to bring it to reality as it desire, in its needs of him” (Buber 1937 p49). Thus Buber sees humans as having two wills, self will, the will of causality and utility, and grand will, the deep will of freedom and of destiny.

The Eternal Thou
For Buber, “Every particular Thou is a glimpse through to the Eternal Thou” (Buber 1937 p61). The Eternal Thou, being the Thou, that cannot be It.
Implications for Psychotherapy
The world of I-It, is one of causality, necessity supported on nothingness. The world of I-Thou is the world of freedom, destiny and meaning.
The world of I-It makes the world bearable and predictable. The world of I-Thou, gives meaning, unity and mystery.
The world of I-it is one that is created, the world of I-Thou is a world that is met.
The world of It-it is one that is experienced the world of I-Thou is one that entered into.
If we are to take Buber at his world, then he offers us much as therapists.
To work with the client relationally, to see what emerges between you, to not direct but rather meet, will have a movement towards the Thou. The effects of this will be to create a closeness, an intimacy between you. To see yourself and your client in all that they may be, rather than any specific aspect that you or they may show, will take to you to the Thou of Freedom. This will offer both to the client and to the therapist the option of change, which can be of benefit in the therapeutic relationship.
The effect of moving from a subject object relation with the client to a relational one could be profound. To see meaning and action as something that comes from the relation rather than something that we bring as subject can have significant effects.
It is quite often with a client that they have problems. They are depressed, they have a problem with their relationships. Implicit within this are meta-feelings, i.e. feelings about feelings. So that if I am depressed, then I can be angry and disappointed that I feel this way. If I have problems with my relationships then I can have feelings of failure of myself because of this. Looking at the problem as being something that exists between yourself and your world weakens the sense of your being responsible for this, and therefore reduces the meta-feelings.
To work with a client relationally can also have significant impacts as it can be that the pain a client may feel can be the outcome of a mismatch between how the client sees or wants the world, and how the world presents to them. If a more relational approach is taken then this gap can reduce and with it the pain that is felt trying to maintain the gap.
For Buber reality is within presentness, the past is that of objects. Thus he would advocate a phenomenological approach, where we look to access that which shows itself as itself. The benefit to working with a client in this way is several fold. When working like this, there is a concomitant sense of wonder as mystery as new relations of things are shown, as new ways of understanding and interacting with the present are shown. This sense of mystery and wonder can again be invigorating to a client, to encourage their investigation of their world, attached to the dynamicism that new understandings can provide.

In must be noted, as has been stated above, that the I-It is a necessary construct to make the world bearable, where the I-Thou is a construct to make it desirable. Therefore in working with clients, there will inevitably be a combination of these two ways of working, to fully move into the world of Thou, would be a destabilising and uncomfortable world, and leave the therapist, joined in unity but without consciousness, in something of an unaware state.

The other aspect I think is notable is how Buber doesn’t see feelings as giving access to the personal life. Standardly within therapy the goal seems to be to remove the bad feelings, the pain, and to replace with the good feelings, happiness, joy etc. For Buber feelings act at the I-It relationship, with the It being either yourself or the other. For Buber I think working with feelings in a therapeutic relationship which is common, would be to extend and deepen the understanding of the feeling. To have feeling is to interact with one part of a person, or event. For Buber this would be only a partial understanding of them, and that through seeing more of their possibility and indeed yours. To take his project through to his conclusion would be to reduce all feeling to that of love, and that is not a love for someone or something, but rather a foundational love, in which you and they exist. A wonder of the mystery that is being.

Bibliography
Buber I and Thou 1937

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