Existenz

Buber writes that it is possible for nature to also become a Thou for us, even though they lack the consciousness, continuity, and independence that make us human. The consequence of this is that non-human entities are given a true “otherness.” The Thou is the only way in which these beings are capable of having such an otherness, and elevates them above the level of passive objects of our thought or tools for us to use.

For Buber, then, we are bound to the world but are not one with it. Our intellect keeps us separate from the world, while our intuition allows us to peer into its depths. All things within the world of the senses arise out of meetings and the other that is a part of that meeting with each of us. These are meetings of being and being between an individual and an “other” that we are unable to know as it is in itself, a notion reminiscent of Kant. It is from these instances of interaction that our senses create what we witness as another being in nature.

The ethical is only to be found in those instances in which humans are confronted with their own potentiality and makes a decision based solely on a determination of what is intrinsically right and wrong in their own specific situation. Buber calls these decisions an individual’s “personal direction,” something which hinges on what one is meant to be. The ethical decision is supposed to be made with this thought in mind, making it a completely personal decision. This is a freedom of response and responsibility, not an ethics couched in a concrete morality; norms should not become maxims.

Buber avoids charges of moral relativism by explaining that the command to follow these norms is always latent within us, but is called forth in some way by a concrete situation that we never could have anticipated. Therefore, the norms take on different meanings in the various contexts in which they are needed. The ethical action is an action that moves between the I and the Thou and that binds them together. The good of the ethical then is not a concrete thing but grows from the concrete nature of situations encountered everyday, from which decisions are made based on our “personal direction.”

Buber’s “eternal Thou” is God, but not in a traditional way. He rejected any and all proofs of God’s existence, and says he knows nothing of God nor of any metaphysics of faith. Buber is instead interesting in the path to God, as we can never actually know God or his attributes. The only way we can know God is through our relation to him. He says, “God…[can] only be addressed and not expressed.” God is then found in any place in which we also find the Thou, such as nature, other human beings, and art; when we see the Thou in them, we also see the eternal Thou.

Buber’s God is not metaphysical God, nor is it a person, and can never be an object of our thought. To be faithful is to be in a binding relationship with this Being that is the eternal Thou, which Buber describes as having found “the certainty that the meaning of existence is open and accessible in the actual lived concrete.” The eternal Thou is constantly and in every moment met in the present, and manifests itself through the concrete. It is this participation that is human truth.

Source: A Companion to Continental Philosophy. Ed. Simon Critchley and William R. Schroeder. Blackwell Publishing, 1999.

The I-Thou and I-It relations are central to Martin Buber’s philosophy and provide the dichotomy with which he describes reality and the world around us. The I-It relationship is straightforward, as it is the subject-object relationship we are accustomed to. The I-Thou is, in the words of Maurice Friedman, “the relationship of mutuality, directness, presence, and openness.” This relationship leads to Buber’s conception of how we relate to the world, nature and, ultimately, God.

Buber’s reality is one of relations with others, or with individuals. These relationships with other individuals can only be truly cultivated when there is a distance observed between the two parties. This distance preserves independence and the individual self of each participant, as the two confirm one another. In this way, each participant is “made present” by the other and retains a uniqueness not found otherwise. For Buber, however, this self-realization is merely the by-product of the goal of confirmation and dialogue allowed for in the distance relation.

As humans we have the unique ability to “impose an insurmountable limit to [our] objectification.” The only way in which we are able to be perceived as whole is through a relationship with a partner, but this wholeness is impossible if the partner remains just an observed object. A key distinction for Buber in this relationship is the distinction between being and seeing.

This distinction hinges on perception and spontaneity. If one individual in the relation is “dominated” by being then the relation is spontaneous and she throws herself into the interaction without analyzing the consequences. The seeming person, however, is preoccupied with the other’s thoughts about her and instead of acting spontaneously interacts with the other in a premeditated manner that belies authenticity. This is driven by the need for confirmation, and the preference for false confirmation over the prospect of no confirmation at all. The only way to truly be in possession of a self is to go through the process of mutual confirmation with an other that is the product of a relationship through distance and predicated on spontaneity.

The I-Thou is direct knowing that involves a fully reciprocal relation between existences. This relation is mediated by the senses and the “word,” which includes such things as art, literature, ritual, language, and music. These are the things which enable the entering into an I-Thou relation for individuals. The I-It knowledge is then the product of the I-Thou relationship. If this knowledge is forgotten or obscured then it is unable to point back to the direct knowing of the I-Thou and becomes a hindrance instead. In this conception, the true nature of knowledge is communication.

Since the I-It knowledge ends up as the product of the I-Thou relation, it always occurs after the present has become past. The I-Thou relation, conversely, is always entered into in the present. Since the I-Thou is distinctly present, our interaction with the other is solely based in the things as they are and not as they have already been filtered through our minds previously; all we know is our immediate relation to the other.

This I-Thou relation can also be extended to nature, and then to God. This will be continued in the next post.

Simone De Beauvoir was, much like Sartre, at the heart of the French existentialist movement. Theories of the self, the other, and intersubjectivity were central to her writings, especially her most famous work, The Second Sex. For De Beauvoir, the crux of human reality lay in the split between freedom and situation. As described in the previous post, these are transcendence and facticity, respectively.

The goal within this split is self-identity, yet it is our freedom, inextricably tied to our facticity, that gives us our sense of self. It forms how we view our past and does not ever provide closure. Our sense of self is always changing and evolving into the future, and there is never a point at which we can be in possession of a fully formed self-identity. Problems arise when we think that we are able to do just that, have freedom without facticity or vice versa.

Our facticity and the issue of the subject bring about the problem of the existence of the other. De Beauvoir solves this problem by asking what universal experience leads us to believe that other human beings are conscious as well. The answer that she posits is the phenomenological event of experiencing oneself as the object of another’s look. The experience of being looked at and judged by another has an altering effect on our consciousness, as we realize that we have an unlimited number of selves, as represented by the numerous objective selves that exist for all others about us. It is only consciousness that could cause such a reevaluation of self.

The shift from experiencing oneself as subject to oneself as the object of the other is at the center of De Beauvoir’s theory of intersubjectivity. No self, neither as subject nor as object, can ever be an object of consciousness, which means that they are all in a sense equal to one another. This is an idea far removed from the privileged idea of the subject posited by Descartes and other philosophers in the past, as De Beauvoir places her conception fully within the existential framework in which she wrote.

This subject/object relationship and the problems that can arise from it are at the center of bad relationships between people. If one is to assume the role of the object in a relation with the other, then the freedom of the other is denied. This is the base of De Beauvoir’s feminist theory, as laid out in her work The Second Sex. She is able to take the subject/object relationship and apply it to a group dynamic in which two people objectify a third. The more people that are added to the group dynamic, the more possibilities there are for intersubjective relations.

This is a template for the intersubjective analysis that De Beauvoir creates in The Second Sex. She treats gender as a societal and cultural construction and not as an essential category, while using the template of her subject/object dichotomy to show how women have been treated as the “eternal other” by men. Treating the problem from the point of view of the self—as outlined at the start of this post—De Beauvoir is able to show how this intersubjectivity can be subverted and our consciousnesses shifted. What is needed is for women to reassert their subjectivity in order to reverse the situation of repression.

The concepts of intersubjectivity and the other are key to Continental philosophy. We have already seen how the other is treated by Levinas (see the post Ethics as First Philosophy); here the focus will be on French existentialism, specifically Sartre and De Beauvoir. Inextricably linked in both philosophy and their personal lives (they were life partners for 51 years until Sartre’s death), both intersubjectivity and the other are integral to their thoughts and ideas. First Sartre, and in next post De Beauvoir.

Sarte’s most famous work, Being and Nothingness, is filled with his interpretations of the other. It all begins with his conception of being, which has three parts: being-in-itself, being-for-itself, and being-for-others. None of the three have primacy over the other two. The being-in-itself of a phenomenon is its being that lies in the background, unseen; it is the “more than meets the eye” of the phenomenon. This idea he calls the “transphenomenality of being.”

The being-for-itself is the counter position to the in-itself, and is refers to a negativity or a lack. The very title of Being and Nothingness refers to this duality. While the former refers to phenomena and their thingness, the latter is spontaneous and is not connected to any specific phenomena. Rather, it refers more to human reality and the human being in general; consciousness as opposed to being. As being-for-itself, this consciousness projects otherness into the world.

This being-for-itself is temporal in nature, and causes the lived time of personal experience. It is within this lives experience that the other is truly felt. In Being and Nothingness Sartre proffers the following example as to how the feeling of shame shows us the way to the other and to intersubjectivity. As person A watches couple B interact through a keyhole. This voyeuristic action allows A to transcend B, while qualifying B’s freedom through the interpretation A ascribes to B in viewing B. A then hears footsteps approaching from behind, and feels shame in being discovered spying. A’s shame is a direct result of being objectified in the gaze of another person, C. In this one action A experiences the other as subject—in viewing B—and feels objectified. What emerges is an immediate awareness of another subjectivity.

This interaction with the other and what these interactions produce makes possible the entirety of human relationships. Sartre says, however, “the essence of the relations between consciousnesses…is conflict.” This is in a similar vein to the concept of the other of Levinas, discussed in the post mentioned above. The being-for-others, the third type of being for Sartre, and the one that deals with the public realm, is the mode of being that comes from presence of other objects, humans included.

As in the voyeur example above, we are exposed to the meanings that others would ascribe to us; we are defenseless against these assignations. These are most felt through feelings of shame, as A felt upon discovery. These situations that we are in throughout daily everyday life is our facticity. This is anything from the past right up to, but halting just before, the present, that contributes to our situation. The present, and how we deal with it, is referred to by Sartre as our transcendence.

The problem that Sartre sees among us as humans is the futile desire to combine our facticity and our transcendence. This is an impossible task due to the temporal nature of our lived experience. We are unable to fully realize our facticity and transcendence in a single moment, thereby collapsing our temporal nature; it is a contradiction. Both our facticity and our transcendence are ever evolving, just as we move forward temporally.

The other, then, plays a key role for Sartre. Our existence is temporal, as we experience lived time. In this lived time we are exposed to the other and feel their existence through their judgments made upon us, judgments that are beyond our control. This is the conflict that Sartre says is at the center of interacting consciousnesses. The presence of the other is an empirical fact, only able to be understood through experience. It is not an a priori concept.

Source: Flynn, Thomas R. “Sartre,” A Companion to Continental Philosophy. Ed. Simon Critchley and William R. Schroeder. Blackwell Publishing, 1999.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty has the distinction of being the face of phenomenology in France in the 1930’s, soon after its inception in Germany by Husserl. His philosophy focuses mainly on the body, and how it interacts with the world around us. The body is our guide to the world, our mode of access to it as such. Merleau-Ponty does not assign the body to either nature or mind, thus requiring that it must be thought of as both, instead of either/or. The fact that one side of this duality cannot be privileged over the other gives his philosophy an air of ambiguity and fluidity. Found within this characteristic of his thought is something he calls the third dimension.

This dimension is described as a place “in which philosophical reflection and positive knowledge can meet.” The upshot of this idea is that neither science nor philosophy is given primacy over the other. Rather, they are meant to intersect and enter into a reciprocal relationship. Merleau-Ponty used this relationship to posit a theory of behavior in his first major work—The Structure of Behavior (1942)—that is not at all a mechanical behaviorist theory such as those favored by psychologists of the era. Instead, Merleau-Ponty developed a theory of consciousness using his idea of the third dimension discussed above.

Integral to this dimension are the concepts of shape and structure. These are not ideas as they are usually discussed, but are the ways in which reality organizes itself. It becomes obvious here that Merleau-Ponty’s thought is inextricably connected to the physical. Any conception of mind, consciousness, or freedom must be connected somehow to the body and its relation to being in the world. Organisms, mirroring reality as such, also organize themselves through shape and structure, a connection of both the interior and the exterior.

In focusing on lived experience Merleau-Ponty concentrates on perception. Perception is spontaneous and open, as well as providing a direct link with reality; it is the tool used to create the backgrounds for life’s experiences. There is a distinction to be made between original perception and secondary perception. While the latter recognizes the familiar and is empirical, the former—the focus of phenomenology—is inexhaustible and “concentrates on a sense in statu nascendi.”

The way that he defines perception lets Merleau-Ponty connect it directly to the body. Our existence as bodies in the world is made possible by perception, the link between the two. As we perceive the world through things such as space, movement, sexuality, expression, and linguistics we are opened up to the world, to others, and to ourselves. In this way we are constantly engaged in dialogue with the world through our senses.

This relationship is completed by the dialogue with others. Nature and culture are in a both/also relationship just like the body and the mind described earlier; there is no either/or. As the body, the world, and others all come together in an ever-evolving dialogue of relationships they create the transcendent phenomenological field that is “being-for-itself.” This is in essence a field of freedom, in which a person’s actions determine how free they really are.

This philosophy very much depends on open structures. In a way it can be seen as a precursor to hermeneutics in the way Merleau-Ponty does not allow for one side of a duality to win out over the other. The constant push/pull between the idea of the both/also resists the all or nothing characterization. The freedom that Merleau-Ponty describes is situational, and comes about through the response to what is experienced, a notion incompatible with the all or nothing idea of freedom described by Sartre in his earlier work, especially his masterwork Being and Nothingness.

Sources: A Companion to Continental Philosophy. Ed. Simon Critchley and William R. Schroeder. Blackwell Publishing, 1999.

Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty.  Routledge, 2002.