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User:VargasMilan/I and Thou/Part 1 (view source)
Revision as of 11:39, July 22, 2019
, 11:39, July 22, 2019+ sect. 21
Yet the man who straightforwardly hates is nearer to relation than the man without hate and love.
Yet the man who straightforwardly hates is nearer to relation than the man without hate and love.
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B{{sc|ut this is the exalted melancholy of our fate}}, that every ''Thou'' in our world must become an ''It''. It does not matter how exclusively present the ''Thou'' was in the direct relation. As soon as the relation has been worked out or has been permeated with a means, the ''Thou'' becomes an object among objects—perhaps the chief, but still one of them, fixed in its size and its limits. In the work of art realisation in one sense means loss of reality in another. Genuine contemplation is over in a short time; now the life in nature, that first unlocked itself to me in the mystery of mutual action, can again be described, taken to pieces, and classified—the meeting-point of manifold systems of laws. And love itself cannot persist in direct relation. It endures, but in interchange of actual and potential being. The human being who was even now single and unconditioned, not something lying to hand, only present, not able to be experienced, only able to be fulfilled, has now become again a ''He'' or a ''She'', a sum of qualities, a given quantity with a certain shape. Now I may take out from him again the colour of his hair or of his speech or of his goodness. But so long as I can do this he is no more my ''Thou'' and cannot yet be my ''Thou'' again.
Every ''Thou'' in the world is by its nature fated to become a thing, or continually to re-enter into the condition of things. In objective speech it would be said that every thing in the world, either before or after becoming a thing, is able to appear to an ''I'' as its ''Thou''. But objective speech snatches only at a fringe of real life.
The ''It'' is the eternal chrysalis, the ''Thou'' the eternal butterfly—except that situations do not always follow one another in clear succession, but often there is a happening profoundly twofold, confusedly entangled.