I and Thou
I and Thou (1954) by Colin McCahon
Martin Buber in Ich und Du wrote of two different relationships we can have with other entities:
‘I-It’ - we view the object of our perception as separate from us, as discrete, as bounded, as ‘one of a type’. We interpret the entity through the prism of our expectations.
‘I-Thou’ - a pure relationship - the whole of our being communing with the whole of another’s.
In the ‘I-It’ relationship, ‘It’ can be replaced with ‘He’ or ‘She’. When we relate to people in this way, we relate to them as objects, as limited fragments of being.
We do this constantly. I don’t see the guy who hands me my coffee as a rich, multifaceted human being. I seem him as ‘the barista’. There’s ‘the doctor’, ‘my inspiring boss’, ‘mum’, ‘that weird girl over there’. There is also ‘my pot plant’ and ‘my loving boyfriend’.
These are shards of truth. Your boyfriend is loving, but he is also irritable, scared, controlling, and funny. He is a constellation of billions of cells, a vehicle for DNA strands, a member of the human race, an accretion of stardust. All the universe has to do with him, and him with all the universe.
When we drop the concepts of ‘boyfriend’, ‘barista’, and ‘plant’ and perceive the totality of another being we enter the shimmering realm of ‘I-Thou’. By opening ourselves completely to another and seeing them in their entirety we touch the universal, the divine.
Try it sometime. Just maybe not with the barista - there’s a queue waiting, after all.