Me, Them, & You, Part 2: Speaking to Things

Seeing Face to Face

Last week, we examined (in very summary fashion) the basic method common in analytic philosophy, and noted that this approach, that relies on propositional logic, leaves some important aporia. Most importantly, I argued that if we only attempt to describe reality from a third-person perspective, we cannot possibly hope to capture any reality that might be available only through other perspectives. For example, the irreducibly first-person perspective of immediate qualitative experience. My suggestion at the end of the piece was that phenomenology (especially capital-p Phenomenology) was at least one important way we could engage in serious philosophical reflection on or from a first-person perspective. Yet, even if we generated a synthetic philosophical method formed from a combination of third-person and first-person accounts of reality, there still seemed to be important aspects of reality that might be left out, namely: our relationships with other persons and, more broadly, ethical considerations.

Me, Them, & You, Part 1: Speaking of Things

Now, some people might deny that these topics reveal any problem with our previously discussed method(s); indeed, as I suggested last week, plenty of philosophers think that all aspects of reality can be exhaustively described and explained purely from a third-person propositional method. If, however, we accept that our own reflection on phenomenality itself, which is, after all, the very window through which we experience reality at all, shows that a purely third-person description of reality will always both be incomplete and also dependent on the very thing it often is used to deny (and my whole substack is basically an extended argument to that effect), then I believe we can discover for ourselves, in the immediacy of the presentation of reality itself, a need for both a third-person and a first-person account of reality—and that, indeed, epistemologically, the latter must always come first.

But if we do accept this delimitation of any third-person philosophical method, including propositional logic, then I believe we must also accept a corresponding delimitation of any phenomenological first-person method, as well. This latter method indeed does give us much that the third-person approach lacks, but it is itself not complete (even if we reduce the third-person method to it). We can come to see this by simply reflecting on the reality of other first-person perspectives.

Unless we are solipsists, in affirming the reality and significance of our own first-person perspective, we are immediately required to also affirm that a vast number of such perspectives exist: presumably, at least every adult human being currently alive who is not in a coma, and quite possibly a much expanded collection of beings beyond that (most if not all children, perhaps most or even all non-human animals, possibly those who have died (depending on one’s own spiritual views), possibly any number of angels, demons, demigods, not to mention possible sentient lifeforms in other solar systems, etc., etc.) And if, indeed, there are at least many billions of beings who have, or are, or do, their own phenomenality, then surely this is a philosophically relevant fact.

Furthermore, and even more to the point, all of us are in relationship with some of these phenomenality-having/doing/being things: our parents, our spouses, our children, our siblings, our friends, our coworkers, our neighbors. Presumably, we can agree that the way we interact with these first-person-perspective-bearing entities is different from both how we treat mere things, but also quite different from how we relate to our selves. In short, when we theorize about or interact with other conscious persons, neither a purely third-person or first-person account—or even some sophisticated synthesis of them—will suffice.

This need to discover or develop a method for taking inter-subjective relations seriously was central to the work of the Jewish German philosopher Martin Buber, especially in his most famous book, I and Thou. In that text, Buber argues that humans most often relate to the world in an I-It relation: we come across some thing, and we decide how to interact with it according to our own needs, desires, opinions, logics, and habits. Here we see the two previous methods we have discussed working in a partnership; note that Buber basically takes the reality of the first-person subject for granted, and then posits that this subject discovers a world of things (which could be described via propositions) standing before it.¹

Much of reality, and much of our interactions with reality, follows more or less cleanly from this basic I-It relation: I need a house, I cut stone and build it; I need to walk through a forest, I cut a path. But this isn’t what interested Buber. He wondered—and worried—about what happens when we stumble across a fellow subject. Do we continue to relate to other persons via the I-It relational framework? As a European Jew, Buber would have known all to well that the answer to this question is often yes: humans often treat other humans as mere things, as objects in our reality that we can—and even should—manipulate to our advantage, just as we we would cut stone into blocks to make a house or cut back the branches of a tree to make a path.

Buber, though, argued passionately that we needed to employ a radically different relational framework in our interactions with other people. And he argued that we should do this not only because of social convention, political theory, or our own psychological preferences, but because when we stand before a fellow subject, we are standing before an entity which is truly ontologically and perhaps even metaphysically quite different from any mere thing, any mere It.²

We have already rehearsed this logic above: if I indeed consider my own subjectivity to be real and significant, assuming that I think other human beings also are or have their own real subjecthood, then I am, at least implicitly, recognizing that other people simply are not mere things. I owe them a different kind of interaction because of what they truly are—a subject, like me, and deserving of precisely the same concern that I have for myself.³

If this is right, I can’t treat other humans from a merely third-person perspective, and I can’t reduce their reality to propositional logic alone (although of course plenty of propositions will be applicable to them, just as plenty of propositions are applicable to me). But since I don’t have immediate access to their qualitative experience, I also can’t pretend to interact with them through my own first-person lens either. I need something different—a second-person perspective.

And this is precisely what Buber works towards. Although he thinks that the I-It orientation is the one we basically start with in life, as far as he is concerned, the heart of genuine spirituality, religion, and ethics is the maturation into also employing the I-Thou relation (Buber wrote in German, but his English translators have chosen to use the archaic thou instead of you. I think there are good reasons for this, though I personally think the use of “thou” probably obscures more than it reveals for 21st century English-speakers. Even so, I follow this convention below.)

When we stand before a fellow human being, Buber insists, we must relate to them as both an object but also as more than an object; we must recognize that “within” them lies another subject, one who like us knows itself in its own immediacy and who can suffer. If we can simply recognize this, then we have entered the I-Thou relation, and hence discover new ethical duties towards this fellow human. We cannot treat them as an object, as merely a thing we can manipulate to our advantage, because to do so would be to deny our own value as a subject, insofar as we recognize an equally valuable subject in the other person.⁴

Now, it’s important to note that for Buber, the truth of this I-Thou relation does not somehow disprove or deny the I-It relation; both are critical and different situations will require one or the other. Indeed, Buber recognized that in many situations, we do have to treat other humans as objects, at least to some extent. For example, if I break my arm and go to a doctor, I want her to focus on my body as a complex machine that needs repair. She will likely only do her job well if she is able, more or less dispassionately, to evaluate my arm in the cold light of science, and decide on a course of action informed more by the reality of how bones, ligaments, and tendons work than by my feelings in the moment. There are times where the I-It relation is not only permissible, but even required, even when dealing with our fellow human beings.

Of course, even in this example, that isn’t the whole story: the doctor needs to be able to switch between both the I-It and I-Thou relation as she navigates different tasks. Obviously, the only reason repairing my arm is even worth doing is because I am a conscious subject; we do not normally worry about resetting the broken arms of dead people. So, even as she objectifies my being in order to properly diagnose it, she must remember that the point of doing so is to serve and care for my life as a conscious being, and she should also be thinking about things like pain management and informed consent, not only because these things may make her job easier (and make her less likely to get sued) but also because reducing my pain is, in and of itself, a good thing to do.

But Buber’s approach must also be stretched in the other direction—if humans must sometimes be regarded as objects, at least provisionally, then its also true that non-humans must be treated as subjects. Indeed, at the heart of Buber’s project is the claim that reality itself must be regarded as a subject, or even as The Subject: God. For Buber, our learning to treat other humans as “thous” is both important on its own terms but is also essential tutelage in genuine spirituality and religion. Once we can appreciate the reality of subjecthood in other humans, we slowly gain the ability to realize that the I-Thou relation is not some special one-off case in a world otherwise truly defined only by the I-It relation. Instead, Buber argues, upon discovering and truly accepting the reality of the I-Thou relation, we come to know that we ourselves are always being addressed as Thous by the great and original I, the one who identifies themself as I Am Who I Am. And genuine religion and spirituality, then, is never really speaking about God, but always accepting that we are both addressed by God and must in turn address God too. Genuine theology—like genuine ethics—is always a dialogue, and never a diagnosis.

For Buber, then, employing the second-person I-Thou relation is the essential act in both true ethics and true religion—and he worries that modern, post-Enlightenment philosophy, science, and politics is dangerous precisely because it refuses to accept the reality of this relation. If we always and only regard reality as describable through a third-person lens, and if we therefor accept that our relation to any reality is always and only properly true if constituted by propositional logic, then, as far as Buber is concerned, we have sown the seeds for horrendous violations of our ethical duties.

And it seems to me that Buber is largely right: as I suggested in my previous post, the insistence in analytic philosophy of mind to describe “mind” in purely propositional, third-person terms has nearly always come along with an equal insistence that mind is basically either un-real or at least metaphysically and ontologically unimportant (eliminativism and epiphenomenalism, respectively). And if there really isn’t any immediate conscious experience, it’s hard to know how we could have any ethical duties to one another; does a hammer have any ethical duties to an anvil?

Of course, there are analytic philosophers of mind who do want to affirm the reality of immediate qualitative experience, and while I applaud them for their willingness to stick to their guns in a philosophical environment that has often been hostile to them, I still think that their commitment to propositional logic as the way to describe reality completely hamstrings their work. Most analytic philosophers who want to defend the reality of “mind” will either be neo- or post-Cartesian dualists, or some kind of panpsychist (or, quite possibly, some blend of the two). But these approaches have run into massive conceptual problems in crafting anything like a systematic philosophy of mind.

My contention is that the basic method employed is the main problem here: if we treat mind through a purely third-person perspective as a phenomenon, a being, an entity among entities, we have already committed such a massive category error that there can be no progress. We might as well hope to make progress in mathematics by asking what color the number 6 is.

My claim is that philosophy of mind needs to embrace a broader set of methods if wants to make any headway in philosophy of mind. Last time, I insisted on the usefulness of genuine phenomenology, and today I add to that the need for some kind of truly second-person method, though I admit that what I have done above is more a call for such a method, without actually giving anything like a true description of it. In truth, I think the second-person relation will be the most difficult of the the three to really pin down. We will probably only develop it by doing it: for example, by pursuing philosophical truth not only in long proposition monologues (articles and books) but in actual dialogue where we respect the perspectives of our interlocutors.

My intuition—though at present I have to admit it isn’t much more than that—is that a second-person relation or method will prove to be an essential one, and indeed may better reflect the reality we live in; that is, that we are neither free-floating individual subjects or mere objects bumping into each other in space, but already and always constituted by, in, and through community. In other words, I think it may prove to be the case that both the third- and first-person perspectives on reality are metaphysically dependent on the second-person one. I certainly think any robust theology must center itself here.

There is of course much more to say, both about Buber’s work, about the work of related philosophers who came after him and both built on and critiqued him (like Emmanuel Levinas or even Jean-Luc Marion), about the theological implications and applications of this thought, and much more besides. But this article is already long enough, I think (and I dare to guess you, gentle reader, probably agree). So I will conclude here, but with the intention to return to these topics many times in the future.

1. Buber would be regarded as in the continental stream of philosophy, broadly speaking, but his education was as much in social thought as in “pure” philosophy, and he was already a mature thinker by the time Husserl’s phenomenological writings were beginning to have a big impact.

2. As I note below, Buber would eventually suggest that actually nothing is truly a mere it, but discussing that now would be putting the cart well ahead of the horse.

3. It’s important to note again that, of course, there is no reason this concern for the subjecthood of other entities must end at other human beings. I think other humans constitute the necessary minimum sphere of concern here, but definitely not its exhaustive limit.

4. In this, Buber both agrees with but goes well beyond Kant’s categorical imperative, since for Buber the important question is not mere logical consistency but allegiance to the call of ontological intimacy.