Series:
Essay #6:
Synopsis:
It and Thou
Thou
Thou is a good-for-nothing, where there’s nothing to be used or gained, nothing but relating with a person and that’s everything
I’m always talking about Thou. It’s time to explain this magical creature. For starters, the Thou relation is the opposite of the It relation. When I relate as It, I use other beings (and myself) as tools. I judge everything by its use-value. Thou is a different way of relating to you, where I see you, not a tool. And when I call you Thou, I feel myself breaking out of a narrow frame into a broad field, and I see a different reality where I make sense of things in a different way (to paraphrase Dr. Charles Taylor in Sources of the Self).
The movie, Lost in Translation, shows what it’s like to break out of that narrow frame into the deeper relation of Thou. Bob Harris (Bill Murray character) is a past-his-prime movie star who comes to Tokyo to do advertisements for a Japanese whiskey. Bob is settled into a 25-year marriage. Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson character) is a young graduate of Yale, recently married, and because she has nothing better to do, she comes to Tokyo with her husband who is a photographer on a shoot. Bill Murray said of his character in Tokyo, “He was trapped.... When you go to a foreign country, truly foreign, there is a major shock of consciousness that comes on you when you see that, Oh God, it’s just me here. There’s nobody, no neighbors, no friends, no phone calls. Just room service.” Charlotte felt the same because her husband was always on a shoot. They were alone in Tokyo in a luxurious and barren hotel with severe insomnia and no one to talk to. They become friends (never lovers).
In the hotel, Bob and Charlotte are objects for service by attendants who don’t speak English. It’s worse for Bob when doing the whiskey promotions, because he’s just a celebrity-It being pushed and prodded around like a circus animal. All communication gets lost in translation. Bob and Charlotte, alone in Tokyo for a few days and never to meet again, connect as Thou. They watch TV, have adventures, they talk. Bob says his marriage has become the daily minutiae of kids and home improvement; Charlotte doesn’t know what she wants to do in life or who she wants to become (she’s already had her photography phase). Advice is neither requested nor given. We’ve all known friendship like this where it’s a good-for-nothing, nothing to be used or gained, nothing but being with a person and that’s everything.
Want a fast lane to Thou? get a dog. Most dogs are good-for-nothing except Thou. Martin Buber said, “An animal’s eyes have the power to speak a great language.” Thou is in the gaze, and all dog owners know this to be true, which is why we love our dogs. Thou relations are all around me: it’s there when me and my friends bust out laughing, when I throw the football with my son, when I’m chatting with my wife and neither of us wants anything from the other and there are no subtexts. It was there on the jailhouse roof in Shawshank Redemption, when Andy and friends “sat and drank (beer) with the sun on our shoulders and felt like free men.”
Marriage can be a Thou relation. Roger Scruton, in his essay, Becoming a Family, called marriage a sacred vow, a “transfiguration of everyday life,” but not a contract. When my wife and I made our vows, we freely chose constraint in the form of commitment. We each committed to the other and to the marriage, and with that commitment came a broader field for Thou. The well-being of my wife is my well-being, and the strength of the marriage is our strength.
I worry that we’ve set too high a bar for the transcendent. If the Thou relation is a world-obliterating ecstasy, a rapture, then I’ve never felt that. Must I join a monastery, take LSD, or meditate for hours until the transcendent comes and overwhelms me? No, all this feels more like a relation to It, where I force an experience then possess it, to have and to hold. For me, transcendence is more about my relation with you, with God, with a living Thou, and I can neither compel nor possess you. Entering into relation is more grace than will. Buber: “The Thou meets me through grace – it is not found by seeking. But my speaking of the primary word (Thou) to it is an act of my being, is indeed the act of my being.”
Hence this essay is a failure. Why? because I make an analytical attempt to pin down the nature of Thou thereby making an object of Thou. By explaining Thou, I transform it into its opposite It. But what choice do I have if I want to talk about Thou? I meet Thou in temporary relation, then I record the experience in memory for later thought and analysis, even though this constitutes my return to It. More Buber: “That is the melancholy of man, and his greatness. For that is how knowledge comes about, a work is achieved, and image and symbol made, in the midst of living beings…. Only as It can it enter the structure of knowledge.”
The Thou relation exists momentarily and then it’s gone and I’m back in It. I always return to It. Buber speaks of “the exalted melancholy of our fate, the change…of every isolated Thou into an It…. How powerful is the unbroken world of It, and how delicate are the appearances of the Thou!” Yes, the pain is knowing of Thou and living in It. If I have a little argument with my daughter, later we circle each other warily, and the words are careful and reserved. Both of us want to regain the possibility of Thou, but for now we’re stuck in It. My relationship with God is even more separated: when I say Thou to God, He exists… but then the relation slips and I find myself back in It where God is an object of discussion. I go back to talking about Him; always talking.