The split in the world is not between I-it and I-thou, but between I-thou and I-they. For one, objective 'it's only arise out of a dialogic I-thou. Without someone else with whom you can, as it were, compare notes, you can't distinguish any objects from you own mental projections, from dreamed stuff. For another, 'thou' in English has some unnecessarily lofty connotations from its being conventionally limited to prayer and love poetry; nothing more should be intended than I-you where you is understood as singular, no more than an us-two. Reality you might say is intersubjective, between two subjects. The problem arises however out of a certain incompatibility between different 'I-you's - the world is differently viewed and hence different in being by way of different us-twos, or since the I part is nominally the same, by way of different yous. This incompatibility is interesting and complex in itself and so the world, but the I-they is its false solution, reality by way of the abstract social other, the amorphous and tyrannic Other, or simply the Heideggerian 'Das Man'.
Sunday, 16 August 2020
The split in the world is not between I-it and I-thou, but between I-thou and I-they. For one, objective 'it's only arise out of a dialogic I-thou. Without someone else with whom you can, as it were, compare notes, you can't distinguish any objects from you own mental projections, from dreamed stuff. For another, 'thou' in English has some unnecessarily lofty connotations from its being conventionally limited to prayer and love poetry; nothing more should be intended than I-you where you is understood as singular, no more than an us-two. Reality you might say is intersubjective, between two subjects. The problem arises however out of a certain incompatibility between different 'I-you's - the world is differently viewed and hence different in being by way of different us-twos, or since the I part is nominally the same, by way of different yous. This incompatibility is interesting and complex in itself and so the world, but the I-they is its false solution, reality by way of the abstract social other, the amorphous and tyrannic Other, or simply the Heideggerian 'Das Man'.
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