The difficult times we are in cause me to often turn inward. It doesn't feel like an escape, but a necessity. I want to save my soul and preserve my sanity.
As with many people, the pandemic has caused me to realign my focus. I spend time in my backyard experiencing an enhanced sense of beauty that the woods behind my house provide. My forest is inhabited by a family of deer, young fawns as well as majestic bucks with antlers aligned in perfect symmetry. They wander back and forth, and with the woods almost denuded of leaves, they appear quite often during the day. They always attract my attention and introduce some novelty, surprise and beauty into days too often rendered flat by routine.
I have become more sensitive to and appreciative of discrete experiences I cordon off from the flow of time. These moments have me focused on the activity of birds at my feeders. During the spring and summer just past I paid special attention to the color, shape and intricacy of the flowers and plants placed in resplendent variety around my home.
But when is comes to special moments, it is time with friends that I cherish most. If truth be told, my desire for encounters with people dear to me have been enhanced by my widowhood. I have spoken of my grief several times before and a most burdensome component of my grief is being alone; not solitude per se, but solitude coerced by circumstance. The house feels vacant, like a space with the air sucked out of it. And it is. My beloved wife filled up our domestic environment with her presence and much of my inner life also. Knowing that she is gone, starkly and forever, is painful. Not having someone to share my experiences with someone to come home to, not to hear her voice or to touch her, feels unnatural.
It is this deprivation that amplifies my appreciation of spending time with people I care about and who care about me. It is not people in groups I yearn for most, but quiet times with a single friend. I am intellectual, hyper-verbal and love ideas. I am also introspective. So times with friends are rich opportunities to explore and play with ideas, philosophical, political, speculative. They are opportunities to share my interiority; my problems, insecurities and how I cope with the challenges I confront. Sometimes I am looking for support. But there is always time for recounting joyous and lighter experiences. I often like to indulge a sense of irony.
But it is reciprocity that enriches these encounters. If my conversations were merely monologues, I would not only suffer the monotony of verbal solipsism, but would feel the guilt that comes from exploiting my interlocutor as a mere sounding board for my needs.
The thesis of this essay is that the human encounter raises profound questions that go to the heart of life's deepest meaning.
The Ethical Culture Movement to which I have devoted myself professionally for over half a century, places at the center of its values a respect for the dignity and worth of the human person. On the surface this ideal can be dispensed through prescribed conduct, through formal courtesies and manners. But to understand its full significance one needs to travel beneath the surface of mere conduct to understand the type of being we are who is worthy of this respect.
In other words, we need to appreciate the nature of humanity, and what it signifies at the most ulterior level. If we continuously peel away at the skin of the onion, where do we arrive? In short, what is humanity? To answer that question goes beyond the issue of definition; it places us in touch, as noted, with the very wellspring of life's meaning.
When I ponder the meaning of humanity my mind turns readily to the ethical thought of Immanual Kant. In his Prologue to the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant lays down the Categorical Imperative, the supreme moral law. It has three instantiations, but it is the second that I find most applicable to the human situation. It is perhaps the most significant moral dictum ever rendered, and I conclude if we lived by it we would have a better world. It is terse and yet deceptively rich in its implications. Kant bids us to “Act in such a way so as to treat the humanity in others and in ourselves as an end and not merely as a means”
The operative significance is reasonably clear: we employ all things in this world to satisfy our wants, needs desires and lusts. The ox to pull our plow, the car to transport us to where we want to go, my laptop to produce this essay. But there is one thing we may not use for our own interests, and that is the humanity that is resident in all persons without exception.
The immediate practical implications are prohibitive. We may not enslave, murder, rob, cheat or deceive a fellow human being. Such conduct is a manifestation of abuse, of exploiting another to serve our interests.
Kant furthermore informs is that all things we employ have a value or a price. Value and price are relative to the one doing the evaluating and to circumstance. What is of great value to me may be valueless to you. I would pay two dollars for a cup of bottled water. But if I were a billionaire lost in the desert and dying of thirst, I would give away my fortune for a life-saving drink.
Kant contrasts value and price, which are tagged to instrumentalities, with the concepts of worth and dignity, which only we as human beings possess. Price, again, is relative, but human worth and dignity are absolute.
On the positive side, Kant's most important value is not love, but respect. We cannot command love, but we can command that we treat others with respect, in short that we not violate or exploit them.
Humanity, dignity and respect issue from the metaphysical reality that human beings exclusively are “ends-in-themselves.”
This notion is not self-explanatory, and has long set me on the road to speculation. What precisely is the essence of humanity that Kant wants us to believe is unique in nature? What does it mean for human beings to be ends-in-themselves? What unique attributes does it suggest?
For starters we might conclude that it signifies that other human beings, like ourselves, are autonomous agents. We are free to make our own decisions. Kant doesn't mean this in a political sense, but in a metaphysical sense. And for Kant, our freedom emerges from our being rational agents. To his thought, the processes of reason stand outside the determinism of physical and biology laws. Reason also stands as the attribute that gives rise to moral principles, the Categorical Imperative most of all.
Without saying more at this moment, Kant's notion of the freedom inherent in our rational capacities has a type of transcendent reach. There is a property in us that extents beyond our natures as merely biological beings. It has been argued that Kant, who was of devout Lutheran heritage, strove to translate traditional religious precepts into secular terms. Such more broadly was the project of modernity. The Categorical Imperative could thereby be seen as a secular version of divine law. And human freedom, vested in the unique capacities of reason that stand somewhat outside the control of the laws of nature, could be considered as analogous to a human soul, which is independent of the body and devoid of physical properties.
But what is it about our humanity that renders it unique and requires of us that we treat it with respect? What does it mean to be an-end -n oneself? I would argue when we encounter another, in the manner in which Kant intends, we are not confronting an object but an autonomous and free agent such as ourselves; not an object but another subjectivity.
These Kantian ideas had a great influence and were central to the German idealistic tradition in philosophy. They gave birth to the romantic movement, which went beyond Kant to assert that through feeling and intuition we could get to know transcendental realities, a position Kant stridently refuted. This movement jumped the Atlantic and found a home among the New England Transcendentalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the foremost among them. Clearly Felix Adler, Ethical Culture's founder, born and educated in Germany, through his own philosophizing to prove the absolute worth of the person, stood firmly in this tradition as well.
The effort to explicate the uniqueness of the person and the special quality of the human encounter was perhaps most exquisitely articulated by the German-Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber. He does this in his best known work, I and Thou.
I and Thou is not a treatise of well-argued philosophy. It is rather a work of philosophical poetry.
For Buber, relation is prior to all else. Man is ontologically a relational being. He begins I and Thou asserting that we can relate to the world in two ways. In line with Kant's dichotomy, we can address the world as an object, with all that such implies, or relationally so that we encounter the other, not as a thing, not as an it, but as a “Thou.”
To underscore the relational character of human interactions, Buber rejects using the word “experience.” “Experience” implies personal, egoistic fulfillment that denies the primacy of our relational nature. He prefers the term “encounter.” He begins as follows:
To man the world is twofold, in accordance with, his
twofold attitude.
The attitude of man is twofold, in accordance with
the twofold nature of the primary words which he speaks.
The primary words are not isolated words, but
combined words.
The one primary word is the combination I-Thou.
The other primary word is the combination I-It;
wherein, without a change in the primary word, one
of the words He and She can replace It.
Hence the I of man is also twofold.
For the I of the primary word I-Thou is a different
I from that of the primary word I-It.
Primary words do not signify things, but they intimate
relations.
Buber asserts that these modes of relating are protean. The I-It can be transformed into the I-Thou, and vice versa.
.
What is the nature of the Thou? We live mostly in the realm of the I-it. But Buber notes, “When Thou is spoken, the speaker has no thing for his object. For where there is a thing, there is another thing. Every It is bounded by others; It exists only through being bounded by others. But when Thou is spoken, there is no thing. Thou has no bounds.”
It seems clear that for Buber the I-Thou relation defies objectification. While Kant's ethics situates us in a vertical relationship to principles that we apply, Buber radically has us in the deepest sense directly in relationship with others. For him the human being is radically social and our most significance encounters take place between us, in the realm of meeting.
Buber is not an easy thinker and his poetic style leaves his thought perhaps more suggestive than one might like. But I come away with the sense that such insights touch upon what matters most in the human realm. It's Buber message, as I understand it, that when we encounter another person with the right attitude we are engaging in an encounter of a special, indeed unique, and highly precious nature. To sit opposite another person, a friend perhaps, face to face, and encounter him or her with an appreciation for their full humanity, to take them in in their wholeness, so to speak, is to place ourselves at the threshold of the transcendent. It is to appreciate the other as more than a mere object, indeed much more, ineffably more.
We have come to touch the humanity that lies beyond the surface.
Such encounters at this stage of my life are among my most cherished moments.