Singing sonar songs, we flit in the dark, not even flying, bouncing words off invisible ears arrayed in space, ascertaining where this other stands relative to ourselves in reality.

*

“Eyes are more accurate witnesses than ears.” — Heraclitus

“What Homer says of it is so true and so terrible it pierces us through: ‘the muse loved him dearly and gave to him good and evil; for she took from him his eyes and bestowed upon him sweet song.’ — This is a text without end for the thinker: she gives good and evil, that is her way of loving dearly! And everyone will interpret for himself why it is we thinkers and poets have to give our eyes in exchange.” — Nietzsche

“The life of human beings is not passed in the sphere of transitive verbs alone. It does not exist in virtue of activities alone which have some thing for their object. / I perceive something. I am sensible of something. I imagine something. I will something. I feel something. I think something. The life of human beings does not consist of all this and the like alone. / This and the like together establish the realm of It. / But the realm of Thou has a different basis. When Thou is spoken, the speaker has no thing for his object. For where there is a thing there is another thing. Every It is bounded by others; It exists only through being bounded by others. But when Thou is spoken, there is no thing. Thou has no bounds. / When Thou is spoken, the speaker has no thing; he has indeed nothing. But he takes his stand in relation.” — Buber

“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.” — Buber