On Buber and love

The way of love

is the way of no-expectation.

(Osho)

In his book ‘Io e Tu’ Martin Buber talks about the philosophy of the meeting, about how we are created by the fundamental encounter with the other: we were nothing, or only things, before we were brought together. Or in other words, a human being only becomes a human being in the middle of other human beings. 
Once this has been said, it can be no wonder that according to Buber, the love for the other person is our intimate destiny. He believes that in the time we currently live in, we are declined to operate only in the world of It, in the world of things, and to forget about this love for the other person. We tend to reduce our fellow human beings to things, to describe them, analyse them, put them in a certain order. 
But this is nowhere near the world of Me and You, as in that world the other appears in all his uniqueness, he is no longer a thing between things , not a he or a she, not a certain way of being, not someone I know or have experienced, but You, a You that fills the horizon, that has now become my way of looking at the world. In fact, in this relation, I see everything in the light of the other person, he is All and everything exists through him,  by him. There can be nothing between the You and the Me, and this relation exists only in the present. I act on this You as he acts on me, for every relation is reciprocity. The relation has become our way to see the universe, and it’s only through You that I understand the meaning of trees, flowers, or a blue sky. 

In the words of Buber himself: “ What can I experience from You? Nothing, as You cannot be experienced. What can I know from You? All or nothing, as there is no partial knowledge about You.”

I had the chance to meet this You once in my life, not so long ago. I met another human being and through this relationship, I learned how to see him as You, as a being in all his comleteness and uniqueness. I learned to stand in his light and to look at the world through him, to not experience him but to live by the connection we now had. I affected him just as much as he affected me, I acted in him just as much as he acted in me. I didn’t look for this relation, and even though I surrendered myself to it, it wouldn’t have happened without me. I became me by saying You, understood the meaning of this world only in our meeting. I was nothing before, and nothing after, only in our meeting did I exist. 
Some would call this love, and I follow Buber on this matter: love is a fact to be realised, it’s what exists between You and Me, it’s where a human being lives in once he had the chance of this fundamentally deep encounter. Love also means to take on a responsability for the You I’m in a relation with, in fact that’s what defines the evenness between two beings that have love for each other. 
Feelings are only accessory to this love, they are what comes with, what we have, and therefore they can never be what defines our relation. What do defines it is the essence of You, the essence of this being I am now interconnected with. This You can never be the You of any other person but me, for our relation exists only in the present, and only between me and this person I have love for. There can be no third person, as I am the only one who is faced, who is connected, with the strength of the uniqueness of my You. I don’t see parts of my You, no characteristics or features that make him more special than any other, but the wholeness of what he is, not only his soul or his heart but all, and all at once.

This wholeness is what made me put my own safety at risk, what made me go into extremes only to witness the encounter with my You once again. Why don’t I stay in the reality of my life, if that’s what I have to go back to after every meeting? Because in order to live a full life, in order to become a being in the living sense of that word, in order to be more than a thing among things, I have to escape the world of It to make my way to the present, the present of You. That’s the only way to become what I am and want to be. So I packed my things and crossed the Atlantic ocean, to follow the destiny that was put upon me by God and Martin Buber: as I stated before, that destiny being my love for the You I’m encountering.

As I am going on and on about love, an attentive reader could wonder, ‘what about hate’? This is wat Buber states on this topic: For as long as love is blind, and does not see the integrality of the being that is loved, it can never be in the fundamental relation of Me and You. And as hate is bounded to stay blind (you can hate only a part of a being), there is no possibility for hate to enter this relation. From the moment in where one sees the being in his wholeness, that one won’t be able to hate. I myself have never felt much for feelings of hate, and I will agree with Buber that there is no way the same connection can be felt through hate as through love. In fact, this connection is what comes first, but it will never generate hate as it generates love. Once you see the world through the eyes of a You, there is no place for hate.

Buber compares the eyes of Me in the meeting with You with the eyes of a child, a child too young to have any consciousness of himself as a being. He does not see himself as I, and therefore can only respond to the world through a relation of Me and You. That relation is what comes first, is what marks the baby’s first encounter with his universum. An universum that in fact is not his to have yet. Only when he starts knowing, and therefore owning, that universum, and at the same time starts to see himself as an acting subject in the mirror, will het enter the world of It. This derives from the fact that a child, still in the womb of his mother, exists only of this complete, pure and natural connection. That’s what he knows first, and therefore that’s what he will keep looking for all his life. Once born, this child lives from one sleep into the other, in the total reciprocity of the encounter. In that child one can find why we need en keep needing this encounter so much: he stares, scrutinizes his horizon, looks at the babyblue on his wall untill he had understood the essence of that babyblue completely, has a deep contact with his teddybear. Both that babyblue and his teddybear are now a You for the child, even if this You is still immature, innate, an ‘a priori’ for the relationship. 
The last time I spent some time with a child, I was fascinated by the eyes he was able to set on the world. These eyes were full of wonder and astonishment, he looked as if he wanted to swallow everything he saw all at once. There is a reason why they say one should never lose ‘the eyes of a child’, for this means to me that we should never lose the ability of the encounter, of being in a relation between Me and You.

Sadly enough, we live in a world marked with ambiguity, and our attitudes are equally double: we experience the world, learn what things are made of and how they are composed, and through this process we make that world our own. But at the same time we meet the essence and uniqueness of things, and from that moment on a thing is no longer a thing, but a You. 
There is no way, even if we sometimes desire nothing more, to live only in and through this You, as we cannot live only in the present: it would consume us. There is a way to live solely in the past, but that’s not what I like to call life. 
The truth is, one can not live without It. But if he lives only with It, he will never be fully human.

If we look at the history of the world as we know it, the constant evolution of a humanity that is never satisfied, we see that we gain more and more knowledge about nature, which, as we have known since Foucault, translates in power, about all kinds of techniques to produce and reproduce, about social interactions, about the mind and the body, and so on. I tend to see a paradox in this trend, for as we have interactions with our fellow beings that only become richer and more complex, this has as only result that the world of It is growing bigger every day. How can we explain this? 
Those interactions are characterised by the knowledge we cumulate about them, and by the way in which we try to order them: which kind of interaction, with whom, etc. We organize our social life in an attempt to make it clear and manageable, but unfortunately this can never bring us to a true encounter, to a connection with a You: we stay and remain in the world of It, and even if It may be a very significant relationship, it will never be more than a thing, it will never truly affect us. We may have a thousand of relatives, friends and acquaintances, none of them will move us to our core, and we will remain in inertia, not even close to what life could be.

And it’s getting worse, the world of It only grows bigger as we proceed, as we keep gathering little pieces of information on what surrounds us. This is what men call ‘the development of intellectual activity’, which in fact is a development of dead activity. Dead because it will never conceive a state of true living, of fully significant encounters with a You. On the contrary, the world of You is overpowered by all this intellectual, technical and social violence. We think we are getting smarter, while in fact all we do is kill our chances on a real life.

We could say the spirit of the human being is his anwer on the You he is encountering. That spirit stands between You and Me, and the human lives in his spirit if he finds a way to answer his You. But there is a problem here: the stronger his answer gets, the more that answer is holding on to his You untill it will suffocate it. Only silence kan give his You freedom, a presence of his spirit without any manifestation. Every answer would take You to the world of It, and this may be the greatest pain a human being has to deal with in life, it’s the price he pays for his knowledge, his works, his images. 
So in my opinion, we have to learn how to live within our spirit without giving it a voice, we have to find a way to keep this spirit silent, even if all that spirit wants is to cry out how much it was affected by the encounter with You. That spirit wants to know if he can trust the You, wants to be sure if pain isn’t the only thing he will find at the end, wants to say how much it was moved by You. It may be the hardest thing to keep all those voices, all those questions, silent, but it’s worth the try, for this is the only way we can remain in the present of You, and not in the past of memories, that by definition are only things, or in the future of questions, that are still things to become. 
We have to let the present of our encounter with You affect us, we have to jump in head first, and from the moment we start with the questions and the doubts, even if they come directly from what is affected: our spirit, they will kill You, and take it into the world of It.

The world of It is constituted of the absolute sovereignty of causality. Everything that happens has been triggered and is a trigger for something else, and the human being is caught in this ungoing order of things. 
But there is a way to escape this fatal determination, as the human being knows that he not only has the world of It but also the world of You, the world of the relation, in which he can hide from this exhausting causality to be in the freedom and reciprocity of the encounter. In fact, he perpetually goes on between the world of It and the world of You, where destiny and freedom are bounded to one another: only in freedom can one find his destiny, only when released from every causality can one truly be free and will the answer on that freedom appear as his destiny. In this sense, Buber claims that the union between freedom and destiny gives life it’s meaning. 
I found these thoughts significant and inspirational, and they helped me believe that when one follows his path, independent of every order or causality he should pursue, he will eventually find what life has designed for him. If one makes a decision from his deepest essence, not taking any causality or ‘I should’ in account, that one will be freed from the world of It to enter the world of You. Meaningful encounters will follow, and he will start living a true life. 
I think we are all too often caught in a certain order of what life should be: we should finish highschool, we should go to university, we should get married, we should start working; this all being part of the world of It, and therefore this all can never have a real meaning that moves us in the purest sense. All this will never give any significance to our life, will never be what we will recall as the life-changing moments we have witnessed. There is only one should for every human being: he should know the encounter, the present, the You, at least once in his life. 
I had the fortune of running into one of those moments in the past. I suddenly found myself in the present, in the middle of an encounter with a You that chose me, but that would never be without me. It changed my being, but I couldn’t keep my spirit still for very long, and there came the questions: ‘where is this going, what should I do, should I stay here to continue the order of my life as it was designed for me, or should I go and start living my real life, will I get hurt, will I always know this relation in the way it was revealed to me,…’, and there came the world of It. The pain that came along with all this doubts, the pain of discovering that I was in fact not free, but bound to a certain causality, the pain of falling into a existential crisis: ‘who am I? Who will I become?’, would be nothing compared to the pain and uncertainty of leaving everything behind me to follow my destiny, so I stayed and did what everyone expects of me. 
And I was safe but imprisoned. 
Caged into the world of It, that marks more and more our world, our society. That world of It that crushes the human being under a heavy, massive fatality, until that human being believes there is no way out, nothing between voluntary slavery and useless rebellion. But what is in fact deadly for the human being is believing in this fatality, for the world of You is never closed: who approaches it with an open spirit, will find freedom. So I know there is still hope, hope that I will once find the courage to discard myself from causality and to take the decision with all I have in me, and hope that on this moment, my destiny will reveal itself.

After every true encounter, we are not what we were. We have changed, we have received something we didn’t have before: a presence, a presence that at the same time is also a strength. However, this is only possible in true reciprocity. After the encounter with my You, I changed indeed, and I will never be the same as I was before. This can be scary, but it’s also what makes life worthwhile: I am now more than I was, because I have met my You in a certain present, and now I have my memories to recall this one moment of true living.

To conclude these writings, I want to say something about language. Mankind speaks many different languages, and still the spirit knows only one. So when we talk about Io e Tu, Je et Tu, Ich und Du or Me and You, we talk in one and only language: the language of the spirit, of the essence of our being. It’s what Matisyahu, a Jewish reggae singer says in one of his songs: ‘I give myself to You from the essence of my being’.

Lady Bird

Geciteerd werk

Buber, Martin, Je et tu, (1935), éditions Montagne, Paris.