#iandthou

Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NYC, 2023

<Expanding Connections>, 2019

Publication Design <I and Thou>: When open the first white coloured cover, the harmonious coloured cover appears.

Inspired by the typographic term hyphen(-),‘Expanded Connections’ explores the human hyphenation from various perspectives. The ultimate goal of our connection is to have an authentic relationship. This project consists of a series of related works based on this concept; expanding connections. With this concept, I designed the book  "I and Thou" by the German philosopher Martin Buber as a first work where he represented a deeper sense of connection between 'I’ and 'Thou’(you).

Note on the text: I used Ronald Gregor Smith’s translation of the second edition of Martin Buber’s I and Thou published by Charles Schribner’s Sons in 1958.

The biggest thing to appreciate in Martin Buber seminal philosophic text, I and Thou, is how he describe the I-It relationship as coming out of an impulse for an I-Thou relationship.

“I perceive something. I am sensible of something. I think something. The life of a human being does not consist of this and this alone. This, and the like, together, establish the realm of It” (4). The I-It relationship is the relationship we have with objects of a physical and non-physical nature, this includes people. Well it is one kind of relationship that we have with those objects, there is another, more primal, relationship that we seek out. What could be more primal, more basic, than the one just described? The I-It relationship reflects the non-reciprocal relationship we have with those objects. The I-Thou relationship on the other hand reflects the reciprocal relationships we have with those objects, ones in which the object can relate back to us. Ones where the object actually offers you something in return above and beyond that which you sought to get from it. What you get receive from the objects that you engage with in an I-Thou type of relationship is, in essence, a fuller picture of yourself. 

Experiencing an object as an object does not expand your understanding of yourself in any way. Seeing a tree as just something that is tall, leafy and green adds nothing to your experience of yourself because you’re cutting up the tree into individual pieces that all individually fit into your world-view. If however you see an individual being, as something that lives outside of the categories that you put it into, then you can learn things about yourself from the tree.

This sounds like hippy-dippy bullshit, but it isn’t really. We actually instinctively want to interact with the world in an I-Thou type of way, and it is out of this primal instinct that the I-It relationship, the mode of thinking that we are used to using in our interactions with the world, comes out. The former is natural and the latter builds upon it. When a child reaches out to touch something he is not actually seeking to learn anything about the object itself, but the about the object’s relation to himself: it hurts me, its skin is rougher than mine, I like it, I don’t like it etc. These all reflect the child’s relationship with that object, and the object in turn teaches the child something about himself and who, or what he is: “it is not the case that the child first perceives [an] object and then,as it were, puts himself in relationship to it. But the effort to establish [a] relation comes first- the hand of a child [reaches] out so that [whatever] is over [and] against him may nestle [on] it” (27). The reason for this is that it is “through the Thou that a man becomes ‘I’” (28). It is only by seeking things out on their own terms, by seeing what they are “in themselves” that we learn how we are. The touches a candle, experiences it, and realizes something about himself: that he is not on fire, not that small etc. The child hears another baby crying and realizes that that is another baby, separate and distinct from himself. But all these revelations can only happen when we encounter something either for the first time or in a new way. Repeated exposure to those objects solidifies the way that we interact with them, and codifies that which those objects, and again this includes people, have taught us about ourselves. A flame cannot teach an adult any more about what it is to be human than it has already done- the adult knows that he burns.

Repeated exposure to objects distills everything into various categories of facts. This has to happen as it is “the exalted melancholy of our fate that every Thou in our world must become an It” (16). As soon as the relationship between the subject and the object has been worked out the Thou becomes an It- simply another object among objects. Once he has recognized his relationship to that object, once it has become an I-It relationship, than that relationship, for the most part, becomes locked in the past; and “in so far as man rests satisfied with the things he experiences and uses, he lives in the past” (12). He expects that object, a flame for example, to interact with him in the way that it always has, and it is very hard, though not impossible, to move from an I-It relationship to an I-Thou relationship. Generally it means experiencing that object in a whole new light: like the difference between the flame of a candle and the flame of a volcano. But the object in an I-It relationship no longer has the ability to teach the person something new about himself. As I said before, the adult already knows that he is the type of being who will burn if he touches the flame.