The Other Is Not a Means

There are two ways to be with a person. Most of the time we only use one — and it is the lesser.

You can feel the difference the moment it happens, even if you have never had words for it. Most conversations are two people waiting for their turn to talk, each quietly running the other through a calculus — what do they want, what can they give me, where do they fit. And then, rarely, someone actually meets you. They stop managing the exchange and simply see you, and something in you straightens up, a little startled, as though you had not been seen in a while. Those two experiences are not different degrees of the same thing. They are two entirely different ways of being with another person — and almost all of us live in the poorer one without noticing.

Two ways of relating

The philosopher Martin Buber gave these two modes their clearest names. In the first, which he called I-It, I relate to the other as an object — something to be used, categorized, known about, fitted into my plans. The server who brings my food, the colleague who can approve my project, the account I am trying to close: in that mode, each is a function in my world. In the second mode, I-Thou, I meet the other not as a function but as a whole presence — a subject as real and unfinished as I am, encountered rather than used. The first is a transaction. The second is a meeting. And the strange, important thing is that they feel completely different from the inside — to both people.

You cannot possess a Thou

Here is the part that took me longest to understand. You cannot know a Thou the way you know a fact. The moment you are certain you have someone summed up — I know exactly what she is, I know just what he’ll say — you have quietly turned them back into an It, a closed object you are finished with. A real person is never finished; they exceed anything you know about them, always. To meet someone as a Thou is to stay open to the part of them your summary leaves out, which is most of them. It is why the people who love us best are not the ones who have analyzed us most thoroughly, but the ones who keep letting us be more than they expected.

A life needs both, but starves on one

None of this makes I-It a sin. It is necessary; no one could survive meeting every stranger, every transaction, every passing face as a full Thou. The world runs on functions, and it has to. The danger is subtler: it is living so completely in I-It that you forget the other mode exists — treating a partner as a set of roles, friends as a network, your own children as a project to optimize. A life with no Thou in it is efficient and quietly starving. Something essential happens only in the meeting, and if you never make room for it, you can go years without it and feel the lack only as a vague hunger you cannot name.

It changes you, too

And meeting another as a Thou does something people rarely mention: it changes you. Buber’s insight was that the ‘I’ who uses is not the same ‘I’ who meets — you become a fuller person in a genuine encounter than you are in a transaction. We tend to think we are the fixed point and other people are the variables. It is closer to the other way around. Who you are is largely a matter of how you are meeting whoever is in front of you right now. Spend a life using people and you become a user. Learn to meet them and you become someone capable, in turn, of being met.

A small practice

You cannot force a Thou — it is not a technique — but you can clear the room for it. Once today, with one person, set down the agenda. Put the phone face-down, stop rehearsing your reply, drop the quiet calculation of what they are for, and simply attend to the person in front of you as a someone, not a something. Ask a real question, and actually wait for the answer. It may last ten seconds. But you will both feel the register change, and that change is the whole of it.

What this has to do with the art

This is the root of things I have written around the edges of — what love asks that mere feeling doesn’t, why how you treat those who can do nothing for you reveals you, what the stranger is owed. Each of those is I-Thou, worn differently. And it reaches the art as well. Buber thought a true work of art could itself be met as a Thou — not consumed, not decoded, but encountered as a presence that meets you back. That is exactly what I mean when I say a piece is a thing that looks back. The collections are my attempt to make objects worth meeting that way. But the person across from you today is the real practice.