Contact

[paulhope]

I and Thou includes includes the following potent passage in his section on developmental psychology:
In the beginning is the relation--as a category of being, as readiness, as a form that reaches out to be filled, as a model of the soul, the a priori of relation; the innate YouIn the relationships through which we live, the innate You is realized

Comments

[reverendjmg]

Dude, I totally disagree on the method of your solution. The physical lovers who sleep together but do not spend a lot of time developing an emotional relationship, don't spend a lot of time doing random non-contact things like staring at clouds and talking about what shapes they resemble, they're a pretty classic example of the people who have wildly misaligned perceptions of each other.

Physical contact and eye contact are excellent methods for gathering data but you need to make the effort of analysing that data before it can do anything toward improving your mental model of another person.

For a lot of people, that analysis happens automatically and so it would be tempting for them to believe that all you need to improve the full-bodiedness of your two-dimensional mental representation of another person is more touching and more looking. But I don't think it happens that way for you and it certainly doesn't happen that way for me.

[paulhope]

Whoah, hey, I think you are taking this post in weird directions.

I think you have misinterpreted the I-You relation. It's not a matter of a more full-bodied perception, or an improved mental model. The whole point is that it is a relation unmediated by perception or modeling.

That said, I'm not saying that mental models aren't important. We require them. I'm saying that they can get out of hand though.

I think discussing clouds is probably another kind of activity that could induce an I-You relation.

[reverendjmg]

I need to make a confession at this juncture. I totally skipped your other philosophy posts because I was like, "ergh, philosophy that won't make any sense, like all philosophy." I really have no idea what you mean by the "I-You relation" except that you contrast it with an "I-It" relation, so I figured it was to do with treating people as people instead of objectified "Others". But it isn't?

I could go back and read your other philosophy posts that lead up to this one. But I feel like being lazy and demanding that you explain it to me in non-philosophy terms that I will understand.

[paulhope]

demanding that you explain it to me in non-philosophy terms that I will understand.

While I'm sympathetic to this, this is a high bar. Explaining philosophy in non-philosophy terms is a lot like explaining physics in non-physics terms. Which is to say, the process of doing it is actually just teaching the philosophy, and good philosophy books are good because they do just that.

I'm not a good philosophy book.

With that caveat:

I and Though is a book about phenomenological categories