Recently, I’ve read a good bit of the philosophical poem-essay hybrid I and Thou by Martin Buber. The basic gist is that Buber believes relationships are what make human existence meaningful, and he organizes those relationships into two word-pairs: I-It and I-Thou. I thought I’d take some of these concepts for a spin and apply them to the focuses of our class. In some ways, I am most definitely misunderstanding Buber’s work, but he’ll have to forgive me here; besides, he’s dead and will never read this blog post anyway.
What, then, is an I-it relationship? It is the relationship form that inhabits the entirety of the modern world, actually. It is cold and calculating, even in the acts of love. It is detached and one way, even in the transactions of two. Buber, being both philosopher and theologian, basically never gives us a concrete simple definition. I’ll use this quote from the book to try and make it clear: “The man who experiences has no part in the world. For it is “in him” and not between him and the world that experience arises.” (Pg 5) The I-It is defined by experience: the extraction of knowledge and material benefit from the world around him, whether “inner” or “outer” experiences. The I-it relationship experiences the world, but only in sense that the world and his experience belongs to him.
So how doe this relate to sustainability? In fact, this is the key issue of sustainability. So much of the messaging is about how us, the collective humanity, must turn towards more sustainable means for the benefit of ourselves. We talk about the ramifications of our actions in very much the same way our fathers before spoke about the effects of their colonial and imperialistic usage of the world around them. The message is more hip, perhaps, but the message still asserts the I, humans, and the it, the world. I don’t want to make it seem like all of this is a bad thing. It’s rhetoric, and in the world of rhetoric we take unclean positions, stretching the truth just enough to only slightly lie in the hopes that we can achieve something above ourselves.
But it is nonetheless shallow; half stuck between the relationships of the old world and the the holistic world. For what reason should the auto-mechanic on the ford production line put down his tools and agree with us that his entire livelihood is a relic of the past and harmful to our future? Why should the farmer support vertical farming or artificial meat, when those very fields will not make room in their stuffy intelligentsia offices for him? Must we really expect the coal miner, stuck impoverished in the corpse of coal country, to move on from the tradition that his father and his father before that fed their families with?
This is the fundamental issue with many of the ways we try and build the world of the sustainable future, and why enemies of common sense and reason are able to coax so many to their side. You can warn all you want about water wars and climate catastrophe, but why should any of those I’ve already mentioned care? The very things that will save the world will destroy there’s. The truth is this: You cannot superimpose your It relationship onto your opposites It relationship.
What’s the answer? Maybe, or maybe not, the I-Thou. What’s that? a topic for the next blog post. I need to read more of the book and figure out what in god’s name he’s actually saying.