Eu e Tu

The inverse of the I-It demands something else. The I-Thou encounter has an inherent egalitarianism that dissolves self-interest. As Buber outlined, in the human realm there is no full escape from the I-It – we also love people for dull, functional reasons; we make selfish use even of our soulmates. But at the core, the I-Thou always demands vulnerability, weakness, a cracking of the hard shell of the egoistic self. Real love, the sort of love people wander through their lives craving, wants above all to distance itself from lust by shedding its preening self-regard. Falling in love is partly the terrifying realisation that you have stepped into reciprocity; that someone is now able to cause you terrible pain. This is the cost, the gamble. As Buber said, love ‘without real outgoing to the other … love remaining with itself – this is called Lucifer’. A love that can’t travel is the love of a narcissist. A life immersed exclusively in the I-It is the life of a sociopath. Extreme examples again, but what Buber does is show that, without conscious vigilance, innocuous moments can tend in such extreme directions. 

Even if indiscriminate love is impossible, it is a glorious and gloriously daunting ideal. 

A life immersed entirely in the I-Thou hardly seems plausible either. If the world didn’t eat you alive for your kindness, you would be condemned to a glazed and useless hippiedom. The fall from innocence to experience is nothing if not the realisation that, in order to survive, you need to learn a little cruelty. But whatever the root of the human predicament, it clearly isn’t too much compassion. Or not enough self-interest. 

Despite these tendencies, Buber argued, it would be better, surely, if we all lived more by the rule of Thou than by the rule of It. This is the understanding that I and Thou so poetically frames. Even if indiscriminate love is impossible, it is a glorious and gloriously daunting ideal. Within a Christian framework, it is precisely the tragedy of mankind that the one person capable of it was tortured to death. Buber, who was unusual among Jewish thinkers in regarding the Jewish Jesus as a spiritual brother, saw this, and revered ‘him who, nailed life-long to the cross of the world, dares that monstrous thing – to love all men.’

M. M. Owen sobre o que importa: a prática, aqui.