intersubjectivity and interpersonal relationships
October 13th 2007 15:01
Relationships are one of those topics that receive a great deal of attention. Everyone from psychologists to newspaper columnists talk about it. Women’s magazines always feature at least one or two articles about better understanding relationships. Books on every aspect of relationships from better listening to better sex are readily available from every imaginable perspective. Some of the literature is great and some of it is shallow, useless crap. However, as a philosopher, the element of interpersonal relationships that I find the most interesting comes out of the existentialist schools of thought: intersubjectivity.
Intersubjectivity, in brief, is the idea that when dealing with another person you grant them, or at least should grant them, the status of a being-for-themselves*** rather than that of an object of your perception. That seems simple enough in theory. Now think about any interpersonal relationship that you have. Have you ever stopped listening to the other person and thought about what you are going to say next? Of course you have. We all have at some point. That’s one of the ways to turn someone into an object, rather than granting them a legitimate status as a being-for-themselves. To treat someone as a being-for-themselves is to acknowledge that they have an existence, a mind, and thoughts independent of you and that this entitles them to not be treated as an object by you. If you stop listening and think about what you’re going to say next, you have chosen to make that person an object whose purpose is to be the recipient of your ideas.
Most of us have people in our lives that we pretty consistently treat as beings-for-themselves: significant others, family members, and close friends. Those represent deeply personal or highly valuable relationships with complex and profoundly charged emotional content. There is a matrix of expectation, obligations, and cultural norms that predispose us to offer a heightened state of attention and being-for-themselves status to those with whom we share these relationships. In point of fact, to fail to offer them being-for-themselves status can not only have powerful social consequences, but can lead to painful cognitive dissonance. Being dismissive of those we care about, whose opinions we value, is a difficult and maybe even an unnatural act. Yet, those relationships represent a very small percentage of the interpersonal relationships that we engage in on a regular basis. What about the relationships that we are less invested in? The casual acquaintance? The co-worker? The register-jockey at the grocery store? Do the same rules apply equally there? Should they?
The answer is, of course, that we don’t deal with the randomly met person, casual acquaintance, or counter clerk with the same level of attention that we do when dealing with the more personally valuable relationships in our lives. The same set of expectations, obligations, and cultural norms don’t apply in those situations. We don’t experience the same emotional content. In simple terms, the interpersonal context has changed in dramatic ways. It is those changes which make it so easy to dismiss the pain of the person we just met as not our problem, to accept the firing of a casual acquaintance with aplomb, or to treat a clerk as a moron. They don’t exist as beings-for-themselves to us. They exist as objects and we give them the same regard we would an object. This is the juncture at which the concept of intersubjectivity becomes problematic.
The argument can be made that we should be offering the same being-for-themselves status to any person that we encounter. The more realistic view of this is that we cannot offer that status to everyone and do anything else. Consider the amount of time and energy and attention that needs to be devoted to maintaining close personal relationships. That is essentially the expenditure that would have to be made on every person you encounter in a day to treat everyone as beings-for-themselves. It would not only be exhausting, it would consume every moment of your day. It is probably only realistic to maintain between six and twelve of these genuinely intersubjective relationships at a time.
That is not, however, to say that we can’t apply some of the lessons of intersubjectivity to the more casual relationships in our lives. While it is not practical to try to treat everyone as a being-for-themselves the way we do family, friends, and lovers, we can certainly work to remember that the people we encounter do have thoughts and feelings independent of our own. We may not respect those thoughts or know what those feelings are, but we can remember that our behavior will have more impact on another person than it would on the object we try to treat that person as being.
***Alas, even philosophers make mistakes occasionally. I had the term being-in-themselves here and throughout the essay. It's supposed to be beings-for-themselves. Just goes to show that you should always fact check your own work before you post it. I'm just glad I'm the one who caught it.
Most of us have people in our lives that we pretty consistently treat as beings-for-themselves: significant others, family members, and close friends. Those represent deeply personal or highly valuable relationships with complex and profoundly charged emotional content. There is a matrix of expectation, obligations, and cultural norms that predispose us to offer a heightened state of attention and being-for-themselves status to those with whom we share these relationships. In point of fact, to fail to offer them being-for-themselves status can not only have powerful social consequences, but can lead to painful cognitive dissonance. Being dismissive of those we care about, whose opinions we value, is a difficult and maybe even an unnatural act. Yet, those relationships represent a very small percentage of the interpersonal relationships that we engage in on a regular basis. What about the relationships that we are less invested in? The casual acquaintance? The co-worker? The register-jockey at the grocery store? Do the same rules apply equally there? Should they?
The argument can be made that we should be offering the same being-for-themselves status to any person that we encounter. The more realistic view of this is that we cannot offer that status to everyone and do anything else. Consider the amount of time and energy and attention that needs to be devoted to maintaining close personal relationships. That is essentially the expenditure that would have to be made on every person you encounter in a day to treat everyone as beings-for-themselves. It would not only be exhausting, it would consume every moment of your day. It is probably only realistic to maintain between six and twelve of these genuinely intersubjective relationships at a time.
That is not, however, to say that we can’t apply some of the lessons of intersubjectivity to the more casual relationships in our lives. While it is not practical to try to treat everyone as a being-for-themselves the way we do family, friends, and lovers, we can certainly work to remember that the people we encounter do have thoughts and feelings independent of our own. We may not respect those thoughts or know what those feelings are, but we can remember that our behavior will have more impact on another person than it would on the object we try to treat that person as being.
***Alas, even philosophers make mistakes occasionally. I had the term being-in-themselves here and throughout the essay. It's supposed to be beings-for-themselves. Just goes to show that you should always fact check your own work before you post it. I'm just glad I'm the one who caught it.
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Comment by Dexter
Seek Extreme
Comment by Mr. D and Philosophy
Philosophy Philosophy
Comment by Anonymous
Comment by Mr. D and Philosophy
Philosophy Philosophy
Comment by Mr. D and Philosophy
Philosophy Philosophy
So, for the purposes of responding, I'll work from the position that what you mean by "properly" is to have a relationship that involves genuine emotional intimacy and personal, non-public knowledge about another person.
In terms of solipsism, if you mean the position that one's mind/mental states is/are the only mind/mental states and that the whole of reality is encompassed within that/those mind/mental states, I would answer your question this way. There is no debate because there are no other people with whom to have relationships of an intersubjective kind (or any other kind for that matter). At that point, the question becomes one of how well do you know yourself since the "other" people you know are simply projections from your own mind. Argument over.
If by solipsism you mean something of a more Cartesian nature, that your mind (inner life) is the only thing that you can know with certainty, then you are dealing with fundamentally the same problem whether you are putting it terms of solipsism or intersubjectivity. The problem you are confronted with is the asymmetry of knowledge and the acceptance of a handful of assumptions about the world.
For there to be relationships with others you must more or less accept that there is a world outside of yourself. You must accept that there are other "people/minds" in that world. You must accept that you can at least minimally communicate in some fashion with those others. Assuming that you accept these assumptions, you would have to address the problem of the asymmetry of knowledge.
You can do this in one of two ways, generally speaking. The first way is to say that you simply cannot know another person because the only thing you can know with certainty is your own inner life. This would go for either existentialists or for your Cartesian solipsist. The other way to handle the problem is to deal with self-established probabilities.
For the existentialist, to have have an intersubjective relationship relies on your treating the other person as a subject, but it also hinges on something they call good faith or bad faith. To act in good faith is essentially to act without deception, to others or self. To act in bad faith is to act with deception of self or others. (The concepts of good faith and bad faith are a bit more complex than I've given here, but this simplified version are functional for the topic.) However, the asymmetry of knowledge forces you to decide how probably you find it that the other is acting in good faith. The problem is identical for the Cartesian solipsist insofar as they have to decide how probable it is that the information that they are getting from another person is accurate.
My answer, to both of these positions on the question of the possibility of knowing another person, at least philosophically, is that you can never really know another person. The asymmetry of knowledge simply precludes any sort of objective knowledge. That said, in personal terms, I think we all do the probability assessment and derive contingent knowledge of others that we take to be more or less objective knowledge. We assume we know others because their behaviors are consistent in given ways and we are able to predict their future behaviors. This creates the belief that we know others, even though that belief is not really objective knowledge because it lacks absolute certainty.
I hope this was helpful.
A good article on solipsism can be found at this web address. Really Long Link