by Zadie Smith
To man the world is twofold, in accordance with his twofold attitude.
The attitude of man is twofold, in accordance with the twofold nature of the primary words which he speaks.
The primary words are not isolated words, but combined words.
The one primary word is the combination I-Thou.
The other primary word is the combination I-It.
I-Thou and I-It: two attitudes with which to meet the world. And it is when we meet the world with an I-It attitude, argues Buber, that we find ourselves in the realm of things. It is with an I-It attitude that a man confronts the apparent “content” of his life, meets the objects and ideas, nations and institutions, trees and cars, the sky and the sea. The world of things is always at his disposal. It is in this world that he is able to manipulate and control, order and create, decipher and destroy, and variously exercise his will. It is in this world that he spends all his time. Well—you might say—and what of it? You are suspicious, perhaps, that Buber is going to turn out to be one of these mystical types who wants to tell you that the world of things—the one that sustains forks and tax forms and cheese and Justin Bieber—is only an “illusion.” But Buber is not one of those. He has one foot firmly planted on the ground. Buber defends the importance of the world of It. Aside from anything else, this is where the various achievements of man take place. It is also where all pain, poverty, cruelty and exploitation occur, none of which is ever illusory to those who suffer them. But still, Buber insists, we are twofold beings: “In all the seriousness of truth, hear this: without It man cannot live. But he who lives with It alone is not a man.” For, alongside our relationship with things and ideas, we are also human beings who meet and form relations with other beings. This is the world of I-Thou. It concerns genuine meeting between persons, and is quite different:
When I confront a human being as my Thou and speak the basic word I-Thou to him, then he is no thing among things nor does he consist of things. He is no longer He or She, a dot in the world grid of space and time, nor a condition to be experienced and described, a loose bundle of named qualities. Neighborless and seamless, he is Thou and fills the firmament. Not as if there were nothing but he; but everything else lives in his light.
Other people, for Buber, are radically other—they are “what is over and against us”—and as such cannot be reduced or assimilated, absorbed into our person or bent to our wills. They are not another item in our worldly list of things. Nor are they ever fully contained by our accounts of or experiences with them. And yet we are always, according to Buber, trying to turn the I-Thou relation into an I-It, a state of affairs which (refreshingly!) he finds perfectly natural, only to be expected. Buber sees that we must—if we want to live effectively in the world—call these others “He” or “She” or “Justin Bieber” or “Belieber,” and that we will make use of them, and treat them as objects presented to our consciousness—even as tools for writing an essay. But when we are doing this sort of thing, Buber argues, we should at least be aware that this is what we are doing. We should recognize that we are back in the world of I-It, and the “person” we imagine we are meeting is, in the final analysis, just another thing of the world to us, another object we have “experienced.” Because it’s by recognizing and naming our I-It relations that we will be better able to note and nurture the rare appearances of I-Thou in our lives:
I do not experience the man to whom I say Thou. But I take my stand in relation to him, in the sanctity of the primary word. Only when I step out of it do I experience him once more. In the act of experience Thou is far away.
This is a bit perplexing; I need to unpack it a little for myself. And Bieber can be of help here if only because he is such an extreme instance of our experiences of other people that his example possesses an odd kind of purity, like an isolated sample laid out on a Petri dish. So now I think again of a Belieber in the Justin Bieber signing queue. She is lining up for an experience, an experience which even as it is happening seems to be relegated to the past tense, as in: I just held his hand, he just hugged me, I just met Justin Bieber . . . Not only is this meeting always already a story, it only really exists as narrative. And it’s because Bieber is Bieber that we can see this so clearly. It’s obvious that a Belieber’s only relation with the globally famous Bieber is as a piece of narrative to be told and retold—to herself, to other people—and that Bieber himself, in his human reality, is barely involved, almost unnecessary. It’s easy to scorn the Beliebers for this, and yet we may also recognize elements of a Belieber’s encounter with Justin Bieber in many of our own relations with perfectly unfamous people: with our sister-in-law or mother, with our friends or partners, with our colleagues, even with our own children. If we are honest with ourselves it is not often that we let these people “fill the firmament.” Most of the time they present themselves simply as objects in our way, as examples of something, as annoyances and arguments, as assets that in some sense belong to us, or as the cause of—and explanation for—various elements of our own identities. But every now and then we do enter into an I-Thou relation with another person—as we never could with Bieber—and in those moments everything is different. Meeting Justin Bieber is nothing at all like looking into your father’s eyes as he is dying, or having your gray and slimy baby placed, for the first time, on your chest. It is not like meeting up with your lover the day you realize you love her, nor is it like the moment you seem to meet yourself when your doctor sits across a desk from you and speaks aloud the dreaded diagnosis. That is not to say that all these moments are not also easily recounted as experiences, but while they are happening they are not quite experiences, they are I-Thou encounters with another being (or with one’s own being), and they seem to exist only in the present moment. Because one of the vital ways we recognize an I-Thou relation, according to Buber, is the manner in which it seems almost to suspend time:
The I of the primary word I-It, that is, the I faced by no Thou, but surrounded by a multitude of “contents” has no present, only the past. Put in another way, in so far as man rests satisfied with the things that he experiences and uses, he lives in the past, and his moment has no present content.
I don’t think it’s possible to prove objectively any of what Buber is saying here; I can only apply it to the measure of my life, and yours. And I put it to you that when you meet someone you love, when you give birth, when you seem to encounter yourself in a moment of extreme physical peril*—something funny happens to time on these occasions. You are uniquely attentive to the present moment. You are aware of living in it.
• • •
All real living is meeting. But what most of us do, most of the time, feels more like “presenting.” As in: I present myself, with all my individual qualities, to you, and you present yourself back. You experience the style of me, my identity. Subsequently, we have “feelings” for each other. But even our “feelings”—that most treasured aspect of our identities—are, to Buber, secondary in importance to our ability to enter into relation: “Feelings are ‘entertained,’” he writes, rather loftily. “Love comes to pass. Feelings dwell in man; but man dwells in his love. That is not metaphor, but the actual truth.” This, as Buber notes, is especially hard to comprehend “[i]f, like the modern man, you have learned to concern yourself wholly with your own feelings.” Feelings—or so we are told from childhood on—are what is naturally “inside of us”; they are what make us special. They form our “identity.” But Buber’s problem with feelings is their conveniently hermetic nature. The thing about feelings is that they are, in the end, easily self-generated, easily celebrated, treasured and fetishized within oneself—just as easily sloughed off—and all this can be performed internally, without the least disturbance from another human soul. And (if you want to be cynical and a bit Marxist about it) they are also, in this late-capitalist society, a form of intimate distraction, slyly offered as compensation for the often brutal, mechanized and
underpaid anonymity of our working lives. “Feelings are ‘within,’” writes Buber, “where life is lived and man recovers from institutions.” Hey, girl, here’s Justin Bieber! Stop worrying about unionizing! Have some feelings about him!
Taking his stand in the shelter of the primary word of separation—which holds off the I and the It from one another—he has divided his life with his fellow-men into two tidily circled-off provinces, one of institutions and the other of feelings—the province of the It and the province of I [. . .] Neither of them knows man: institutions know only the specimen, feelings only the “object”; neither knows the person, or mutual life.
I don’t know about you but I find I want to resist Buber here. Because personally I am pretty attached to my own feelings (and the complex, fascinating personality they imply). Also, however much Buber may critique them, I can’t seem to help but have them. But even if I can’t accept Buber totally here, I do find him a useful correction to some of my worse instincts. Looking at my life through a Buber lens, for example, I see that it is quite possible that my feelings, as strong as they may be, may disclose no more of reality to me than is afforded by the outline of my own self-image. This is useful knowledge. Every day I am confronted by situations in which I must judge the reality or otherwise of a situation by way of my feelings about it (this is especially acute in marital arguments). But just because I feel something very strongly, does this make it true? Isn’t it possible that in many cases where my feelings are strong I may indeed be no different to all those delusional girls in the Bieber signing queue, who have so many feelings for him, after all, so very many sincere, deep, excruciating feelings, which are, of course, what define their identity, what makes of each of them Beliebers . . .
• • •
Let’s pause here for a musical interlude to consider the lyrics of Bieber’s smash hit “Boyfriend.”* They strike me as a fair example of the self-deceiving, twofold world most of us live in, most of the time. What are all young Bieber’s songs about, in the end? Relationships. Wanting them, getting them, needing them, having them. In this sense Buber and Bieber are, again, rather close—not only in name but in spirit—for Buber’s writing is likewise entirely preoccupied with relationships. And yet the world of Bieber—no matter how smoothly it masquerades as the world of I-Thou—is unmistakably the world of I-It. There is a sharp division, for example, between Bieber the “boyfriend” and this anonymous girl he hopes to capture. Bieber being the one with all the feelings, all the desires. The girl, by contrast, seems a kind of thing, to be kept on his arm, like a watch or a bag. And as the song progresses Bieber does not seem to be entering—as Buber would hope he might—“a living mutual relation” with another person. No. He is listing all the things he could do for her and to her and all the things he himself has and could be. It is easy to take a dim view of Bieber’s world of I-It, but as I say: isn’t this in fact the world most of us live in, most of the time? Here is an individual with a strong will and plenty of ambition (he’s going to take her places she ain’t never been before), who also happens to be a generous person (he’s got money he’s interested in “blowing”), not to mention a good-natured soul, of pacifist intention, apparently sincerely desirous of another person’s happiness (he doesn’t want to fight. He wants her shining brightly like a snow angel). This is not a bad guy per se. This is a guy operating pretty sympathetically in the world of I-It. He’s even willing to change the kind of guy he is, as required. He certainly feels he is in a relationship with another human. But from Buber’s point of view there are some problems. Many problems. First and foremost the monologic nature of the Bieber approach. He keeps saying, “Hey girl, let me talk to you,” but he isn’t really talking to or with her or with anyone—he’s talking at a girl (who is everywhere silent) while he slinks around to an R&B beat, now behind her, now at her ear, now sitting with her in a car, in that creepy pop version of man-splaining which is so inexplicably popular in the video charts (see also Justin Timberlake, Pharrell). In Buber’s terms, the girl is merely an experience Bieber is having, but he has no real relation with her, and so she does not yet have any reality—she may as well be a figment of his imagination. Similarly, Bieber himself—though he may be a very famous and popular individual—is still not yet a person:
Individuality makes its appearance by being differentiated from other individualities.
A person makes his appearance by entering into relation with other persons. The one is the spiritual form of natural detachment,* the other the spiritual form of natural solidarity of connection.
Like Bieber, we treasure our identities as individuals, and, like Bieber, work hard to differentiate ourselves. Like Bieber, we feel we are having relationships even if, much of the time, our relations with others seem to exist mainly in the stories we tell (to ourselves, to others). But what’s the solution? From Buber’s point of view a good place to start is moving from monologue to dialogue. Like, if Bieber’s song was a duet? Then Bieber could be more like Socrates. Buber likes Socrates: “How lovely and how fitting the sound of the lively and impressive I of Socrates! It is the I of endless dialogue . . . This I lived continually in the relation with man, which is bodied forth in dialogue. It never ceased to believe in the reality of men, and went out to meet them.” Recognizing the reality of other people—and having them recognize the reality of you—is at the heart of the matter. But this is easier said than done. Allowing another person to truly exist as a person—independent of your own fantasies, desires and feelings about them—proves to be, I have found, one of the more difficult things in the world to do. Surely especially difficult for Justin Bieber, who finds himself trapped by the fantasies of millions. And if Socrates is the model of a dialogic existence, to be as famous as Bieber, in the twenty-first century, is to live as pure monologue. I imagine even Socrates—with his boundless enthusiasm for meeting and greeting—would have found it hard to believe in the reality of others after spending two days in an empty stadium in Tokyo meeting five thousand of them. Buber has a term for this phenomenon, he calls it “the demonic Thou.” His own example is Napoleon: “He was for millions the demonic Thou, the Thou that does not respond, that responds to Thou with It.” All cult leaders speak the demonic Thou, and there are many more Beliebers in the world right now than ever fought for Napoleon—though of course it cannot be said that Justin Bieber, troublesome tyke that he is, has ever massacred whole villages of Russian peasantry. His harmful acts—such as they are—are largely directed at himself. Drugs, DUIs, court appearances, racist outbursts, promises of early retirement . . . As if only by destroying the perfect love object of our creation can he get back to that half-forgotten, human person, who looked into the gaping maw of YouTube, all those years ago, and sang his little heart out.
• • •
Look, I may not be a Belieber—but nor do I want him deported to Canada. The overwhelming feeling I have when I consider fame on this scale is pity. I wouldn’t wish the demonic Thou on my worst enemy:
To him everything flames, but his fire is cold. To him a thousand several relations lead, but from him none. He shares in no reality, but in him immeasurable share is taken as though in a reality. He sees the beings around him, indeed, as machines, capable of various achievements, which must be taken into account and utilized for the Cause.
To he who speaks the demonic Thou everyone and everything is to be utilized. (“Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a Belieber,” wrote Justin, in the guest book of the Anne Frank Museum.) Everything is an object, up to and including the self. As Buber has it: He treats himself, too, as an It. Now, I know that committed Beliebers feel that there is at least someone in this world with whom their hero can truly say I-Thou, and that this person is his on-off actress girlfriend, another globally famous young person called Selena Gomez. And perhaps he could, and perhaps she was—for a while. But the I-Thou relation is notoriously difficult to maintain—constantly under threat fr
om the I-It—and I imagine that this proves especially true if you happen to be a very rich, lonely young man, about to lose the only mutual relation you ever came close to having, who is presently texting someone you love(d) as they try to break up with you (and gently suggest rehab):
“Enjoy life withOUT ME BITCH!!!! Fuck you!”
“Can’t hear you over my cash, babe!”
“Come on. Don’t tell me you don’t miss this: [Insert “dick pic” here.]”*
The demonic Thou, speaking loud and clear.
• • •
Postscript: It will be obvious to committed Beliebers that this essay was written around 2013, that is, before the release of Bieber’s smash-hit album Purpose (on which I was delighted to find the I-Thou rearing its head more than once) and long before he announced on Instagram, during the spring of 2016, that he didn’t want to do paid sign-and-greets anymore because “It filled [me] with so much of other people’s spiritual energy that I end up so drained and unhappy.”
LOVE IN THE GARDENS
Boboli, Florence
When my father was old and I was still young, I came into some money. Though it was money “earned” for work done, it seemed, both to my father and me, no different than a win on the lottery. We looked at the contract more than once, checking and rechecking it, just like a lottery ticket, to ensure no mistake had been made. No mistake had been made. I was to be paid for writing a book. For a long time, neither of us could work out what to do about this new reality. My father kept on with his habit of tucking a ten- or twenty-pound note inside his letters to me. I took the rest of my family (my parents having separated long before) to a “resort” back in the “old country” (the Caribbean) where we rode around bored in golf carts, argued violently and lined up in grim silence to receive a preposterous amount of glistening fruit, the only black folk in line for the buffet.