I just finished rereading Buber’s “Distance and Relation”, and it made me want to list the ways other people can exist to one another.
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Another person can be nonexistent, latent in the environment: unnoticed, in blind irrelevance.
Another person can exist as an object that emerges from the environment: noticed, but relevant functionally, not a subject. (Never forget: symbols are functional…)
Another person can exist as a person in principle: a subject-within-an-object, but the subject is one in whom we are not involved. We leave the subject sealed inside the object until the subjectivity makes itself relevant to us. (Note regarding William Ayers: Fear makes what is feared instantly relevant. Terrorism is the method of using fear to make one’s systematically disregarded subjectivity relevant to those who wish to ignore it out of existence.)
Another person can exist merely psychologically: a subject which is experienced by means of its behavior. The behavior can be studied as behavior or it can be comprehended empathetically, but in the end the other person is grasped as a subject-within-an-object and reduced to objective terms, a perceptual/behavioral system. The person is rendered functionally predictable, and, wherever necessary, subjectively irrelevant.
Another person can be a person, present to us: a subject with whom we engage as a subject, whose subjectivity we know directly through the changes we experience in our own subjectivity. What exactly does a change in one’s subjectivity look like? When one’s objective world changes all at once, as a whole. When one would write different poetry or compose different songs for his involvement in the other. In this other person, nothing can be dismissed as irrelevant: whatever is relevant to this other is by definition relevant to us, and not out of duty but spontaneously, for no reason at all.
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I am going to post the entire final section of this essay in the comments of this post. I already posted a large chunk of it yesterday, but when I looked at it again I realized the part I posted, while rich in insight, lacked the practical force of the whole.
Final section of the essay:
4.
The realization of the principle in the sphere between men reaches its height in an event which may be called ‘making present’. As a partial happening something of this is to be found wherever men come together, but in its essential formation I should say it appears only rarely. It rests on a capacity possessed to some extent by everyone, which may be described as ‘imagining’ the real: I mean the capacity to hold before one’s soul a reality arising at this moment but not able to be directly experienced. Applied to intercourse between men, ‘imagining’ the real means that I imagine to myself what another man is at this very moment wishing, feeling, perceiving, thinking, and not as a detached content but in his very reality, that is, as a living process in this man. The full ‘making present’ surpasses this in one decisive way: something of the character of what is imagined is joined to the act of imagining, that is, something of the character of an act of the will is added to my imagining of the other’s act of will, and so on. So-called fellow feeling may serve as a familiar illustration of this if we leave vague sympathy out of consideration and limit the concept to that event in which I experience, let us say, the specific pain of another in such a way that I feel what is specific in it, not, therefore, a general discomfort or state of suffering, but this particular pain as the pain of the other. This making present increases until it is a paradox in the soul when I and the other are embraced by a common living situation, and (let us say) the pain which I inflict upon him surges up in myself, revealing the abyss of the contradictoriness of life between man and man. At such a moment something can come into being which cannot be built up in any other way.
The principle of human life which we have recognized suggests how making present may be understood in its ontological significance. Within the setting of the world at a distance and the making it independent, yet also essentially reaching beyond this and in the proper sense not able to be included in it, is the fact of man’s himself being set at a distance and made independent as ‘the others’. Our fellow men, it is true, live round about us as components of the independent world over against us, but in so far as we grasp each one as a human being he ceases to be a component and is there in his self-being as I am; his being at a distance does not exist merely for me, but it cannot be separated from the fact of my being at a distance for him. The first movement of human life puts men into mutual existence which is fundamental and even. But the second movement puts them into mutual relation with me which happens from time to time and by no means in an even way, but depends on our carrying it out. Relation is fulfilled in a full making present when I think of the other not merely as this very one, but experience, in the particular approximation of the given moment, the experience belonging to him as this very one. Here and now for the first time does the other become a self for me, and the making independent of his being which was carried out in the first movement of distancing is shown in a new highly pregnant sense as a presupposition — a presupposition of this ‘becoming a self for me’, which is, however, to be understood not in a psychological but in a strictly ontological sense, and should therefore rather be called ‘becoming a self with me’. But it is ontologically complete only when the other knows that he is made present by me in his self and when this knowledge induces the process of his inmost self-becoming. For the inmost growth of the self is not accomplished, as people like to suppose today, in man’s relation to himself, but in the relation between the one and the other, between men, that is, pre-eminently in the mutuality of the making present — in the making present of another self and in the knowledge that one is made present in his own self by the other — together with the mutuality of acceptance, of affirmation and confirmation.
Man wishes to be confirmed in his being by man, and wishes to have a presence in the being of the other. The human person needs confirmation because man as man needs it. An animal does not need to be confirmed, for it is what it is unquestionably. It is different with man: Sent forth from the natural domain of species into the hazard of the solitary category, surrounded by the air of a chaos which came into being with him, secretly and bashfully he watches for a Yes which allows him to be and which can come to him only from one human person to another. It is from one man to another that the heavenly bread of self-being is passed.