It and Thou

                I found these excerpts from Buber particularly meaningful as I fell that I am at a stage in my life where I am coming to understand more and more what it means to look at other people as subjects rather than objects. I want to talk about a specific time in high school when I had a sudden realization that the life forms that were sitting next to me in class and walking through the same hallways as me were individuals who had their own projects and views of the world.

                For the majority of my time in high school, I was oblivious to this idea that each person I was interacting with was their own and had their own project. My whole thought process was thinking how I could get the most out others and how I could make them fit into my project. For the most part, my project throughout high school was trying to figure out how I was going to get pot to get high for the next week. My focus was on me me me. I think that this quote from Buber is an accurate depiction of how I was living in those years:

“The detached I is transformed–reduced from substantial fullness to the functional one-dimensionality of a subject that experiences and uses objects–and thus approaches all the ‘It for itself” (Buber)

Everybody that I was coming in contact with was no longer a “you” but an “it” that I wanted to get the most out of. They were nothing more than “an aggregate of qualities, a quantum with a shape” (Buber).

                It was not until I had a very profound religious experience where I encountered the God of the Bible in such a way that I was a “thou” that was worth dying for. I realized that by Grace I no longer was working for my selfish project in this life, but instead part of an infinitely large project for this God. After this my whole view of people changed. I began encounter the world for the first time instead of experiencing it. I was concerned for and contributing to other people’s projects. When I approached people, I did not have anything, I was purely standing in relation with this other “you”. To me, this can be a scary experience. I like to have neat lines around everything that I do and around the people that I meet, but if I am truly encountering a “you”, I have to realize that a “You has no boarders” (Buber). Even in myself that can be scary to think about. I like to put boarders up in myself to make sure I always know what is happening, but in reality if I am a “you” to somebody else, I can never fully be known, even to myself.  My relationship with others has finally become “unmediated” as I come into conversations with no expectation for myself except to encounter this other person on a fundamental level.