Argument for Buber and Marcel

April 27, 2012 at 3:14 pm (Uncategorized)

Say that epistemology from Plato to Bergson was right to make the fundamental opposition of knowledge the opposition of subject and object. On this account, “object” is “whatever the subject knows” or “whatever is outside his cognitive power”. So what about when I speak to you about some object? I’m not speaking to an object about an object. “Speaking to an object” is just wrong – it’s the language of a disease, the language of autism. One can’t speak to an object – even when he is speaking to an animal or an inanimate thing, and certainly not when he is speaking to someone. We can say we are speaking about some thing even when we are discussing a person as a person, but we can never be speaking to something. The relations between I-you and I-it are not the same, but are four really different relations made from three terms, and the third (it) proceeds from the first two. Objects, therefore, can’t be constituted by being outside of me but properly by being outside of us so far as this “us” is constituted by the double relation I-you.

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