A worldview where everything doesn’t exist for us
I'm reading How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell, and she mentions the German philosopher Martin Buber and his book I and Thou.
For Buber, there are two ways of looking at the world:
I–It
In the I–It way of looking, I see the other person or thing as an “it,” something that serves my goals. I meet everything through myself and my aims, which means I never truly encounter anything outside myself.
I–Thou
In the I–Thou way of looking, I encounter things and beings in their full otherness — “a recognition that draws us out of ourselves and out of a worldview in which everything exists for us”.
I am immediately drawn to this way of looking at “being”. It reminds me of James Bridle's book, Ways of Being, where he proposes we expand our understanding of intelligence beyond the human and acknowledge the otherness of other beings.
