jgyoungmd

You may be familiar with Martin Buber’s “I and Thou.” Though I am not a religious person, what he says rings true to me. He says we experience the transcendent through the I-Thou relationship. Most understand the Thou as being another person, but the Thou can be a stone, a tree or perhaps a film. “The extended lines of relation meet in the eternal Thou. Every particular Thou is a glimpse of the eternal Thou.” I believe that we can negotiate rapture in our I-Thou relationship with films, paintings, music as well as other persons.

I-It is the other mode of being. I-It does not know relationship; it is controlling, experiencing, i.e. knowing the other cognitively to have certain properties.

Negotiating rapture can be a tricky thing. It is a matter of being willing rather than willing, being captivated rather than capturing. It is treating the other as an end not a means to some other end. The negotiating then is putting ourselves in a receptive space, to be with, rather than objectifying, no matter how loving or sincere we may be.

But that is where I have trouble with academia and also with medicine. I would prefer to be in relation, captivated, enraptured, but we have to move to the I-It to negotiate life. There is the rub.

• See also my book, Love: Poetry and Philosophy