Susan Watkins -- Outside Reading 3

I was thinking today about Martin Buber's I and Thou, and about how we relate to nature and to eachother. Buber argues that since humans are inherently relational creatures, we live our lives in a process of relationship to everything around us regardless of whether we're aware of it or not. He says these relationships can be classified as either "I and Thou" relationships or "I and It" relationships, depending on whether we view the other participant as a personality or an object/tool.

It seems to me that a lot of people favor the "I and It" relationship unless they are thoroughly convinced they should enter into an "I and Thou" state, kind of like "guilty until proven innocent." Because, really, the "I and It" relationship allows a staggering amount of room for self-interest on the part of the "I." In this mentality, if the other participant is a mere object it cannot have any worth beyond its usefulness to the "I." So if we approach situations assuming an "It," we have the right to do absolutely whatever we want without heed for the other participant's feelings or needs [because theoretically it doesn't have any]. The problem is that when we assume this, we run the risk of treating a "Thou" as an "It," a tragic blasphemy.

If we assumed an "I and Thou" relationship with our surroundings, how would our situation look different? The worst risk we would run would be to treat an "It" with too much respect, too much goodness. No harm done. But what it comes down to is that it's so much more work to assume things are "Thou's." We have a tendency to fall into laziness and selfishness, to prefer the path of least resistance and interest in our own comfort to the path of pursuing goodness even above and beyond what is strictly required.

What if there really is a judgment day, and what if we get there and find out we've been treating everything and everyone around us as "It's" when the whole time they've been "Thou's"? What if we find out we've destroyed countless examples of beauty in our laziness? I'd far prefer to run the risk of creating too much goodness and kindness in the world, even if there's no eternal reward, than risk destroying precious things and finding out far too late their value and my travesty.