The "Thou" of Revelation ... (Q2Q IX)

Martin Buber's I and Thou

In Thouness (Q2Q VIII), the previous post in this, my "Quickening to Qualia" series, I took up the insights of the late Jewish thinker Martin Buber into "the primary word I–Thou," as presented in his 1923 book I and Thou. I had an intuition that, in the conscious experience of a human being, what I spoke of as "Thouness" amounts to the "qualitative feel" of encountering another self-aware, conscious, autonomous person.

If that person is experienced as an object, not as a subject blessed with conscious experience of his or her own, the qualitative feel will instead be one of "Itness." In Buber's terms, the primary word I–It will be spoken, not I-Thou. The basic nature of the I relatant will accordingly change from the I of I–Thou to the I in I–It, a wholly different kind of I.

Speaking to God or another person using the primary word I–Thou and not I–It is an act which lies at the core of religious experience for Buber. My intuition here is that saying I—Thou is possible at all for us only because we humans possess consciousness.

David J. Chalmers's The Conscious Mind

This intuition accords with ideas about consciousness broached by philosopher of mind David J. Chalmers in The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Chalmers makes a formal, technical argument to the effect that the consciousness that accompanies the causal, functional, psychological aspects of the human mind is not itself causal or functional. Nor can it be fully explained by any appeal to strictly physical levels of causation.

Rather, Chalmers thinks, some yet-to-be-discovered natural law determines that consciousness will inevitably arise from the merely psychological workings of the mind, in creatures like us with complex enough brains. Chalmers makes no claim to belief in God, but theists such as I are free to imagine this natural law being added to the others ordained for this world by God himself, in accomplishing his creative act.

Millard J. Erickson's's Christian Theology

One clue as to why God might have done this comes from Christian Theology, a review of Christian belief by theologian Millard J. Erickson. (This book is now in its second edition. I have the original edition.) The clue concerns a particular theological slant on divine revelation's relationship to human history: revelation through history (pp. 183 ff.) It is the view of a number of theologians who have called themselves neoorthodox that:

Historical events should not be identified with revelation ... . They are merely the means through which revelation came. For revelation is not seen as the communication of information to man. Rather, it is God's presentation of himself. Revelation is a personal encounter between God and man.

The distinction between revelation and "the communication of information," intriguingly, patterns closely with Chalmers's distinction between a conscious mind of subjective experience and a psychological, strictly functional mind which is basically tasked with ... wait for it ... information processing. I imagine these two halves of our human mental whole as, respectively, "the inner mind" and "the outer mind." Without what I think of as the inner mind, says Chalmers, we would be but functionally equivalent zombies lacking all conscious experience, blind to the qualitative feels of "redness" or "juiciness" ... or, I would add, "Thouness."

"Thouness," furthermore, can be thought of the qualitative feel of each and every "personal encounter," whether the Thou which the I encounters is God or man.


Erickson continues his discussion of "revelation through history" by alluding to the Old Testament encounters of Moses and Isaiah with God. He then says:

But the accounts of these events are not revelation, for the events themselves were not revelation. Thus, one may record the words spoken by God, as the Book of Exodus claims that Moses did, and another may read those words, and read of the circumstances of the event, but one will not thereby have obtained revelation. The revelation of God came through the words and deeds of Jesus, but those words and deeds were not the revelation per se. Thus, the Pharisees did not meet God when Jesus performed miraculous deeds. Rather, they maintained that he did what he did by the power of Beelzebub. There were many who saw and heard Jesus, but did not meet God. They simply came away convinced that he was a remarkable man. ...

Revelation, then, is not perceived as an occurrence of history. The event is merely the shell in which the revelation was clothed. Rather, the revelation is something extra added to that event. It is God's direct coming to someone through that event. Without this direct coming, the historical event is opaque; indeed this was the case for numerous persons who observed but stood by unmoved.

A "something extra" that is added to an observed event seemingly patterns with the "something extra" by which Chalmers says the phenomenon of consciousness augments the mere information-processing transactions of the psychological mind. We might accordingly say that the outer, functional mind is "merely the shell" of the inner, experiential mind. That inner mind takes in what phenomenologists speak of as "raw sensations," as that of "redness." The arrival of the quale of "redness" at the gateway to the inner mind feels, indeed, like a "direct coming." So, too, with the quale of "Thouness."


When Buber speaks of "experience" (pp. 5-6), he identifies it as an experience of "something" in the world, even if it is of something "inner" — by which I think he, for example, means the experience of being hungry. He contrasts this realm of experience with "the world of relation."

What Buber is talking rather disparagingly about as mere "experience," in which the word I is but that of I—It, may be what Chalmers refers to as "awareness." Awareness, an aspect of the outer, functional mind, likewise is always of something.

Or, possibly, Buber and Chalmers are talking about "experience" in exactly the same phenomenological way. Buber invokes the word "experience" in this manner (p. 5):

The man who experiences has not part in the world. For it is "in him" and not between him and the world that the experience arises.

The world has no part in the experience. It permits itself to be experienced, but has no concern in the matter. For it does nothing to the experience, and the experience does nothing to it.

This usage patterns with Chalmers's idea that conscious inner experience is not in the causal loop of events participated in and caused by the functional, psychological component of the mind.


Whether Buber's "experience" equals Chalmers's "awareness," or both thinkers mean the same phenomenological thing by "experience," the be all and end all for Buber is "the world of relation," established by speaking the primary word I—Thou.

The distinction which Buber draws between the experiential and the relational is not one which Chalmers says much about. He does allude to a possible third component of the mind, in addition to the psychological component and the conscious component, which he calls relational: " ... it is not much of a burden [on his main argument concerning consciousness] to note that there might also be a relational component to certain mental states, over and above the psychological and phenomenal components. Either way, no deep further mystery arises" (p. 21).

Here, perhaps, Chalmers is being a bit spiritually tone deaf. To him, all "manifest phenomena ... fall into two classes, those we have third-person access to, and those we have first-person access to." Buber might say that the former are merely the It of I—It , and the latter are merely the I of I—It. To Buber, the world of relation, established by the primary word I—Thou, does actually involve a deep further mystery, one to which he devotes his book. Perhaps Buber would even say that the Thou is the one manifest phenomenon that we have second-person access to.


I have little doubt that it is only those who say I—Thou to God who get a revelation, where others see only an historical event. I have no reason to think I myself would have understood the "something extra" that Jesus represented, or Isaiah, or Moses. In fact, I rather think of myself as a tone-deaf Pharisee, not as an in-the-know disciple.

Still, I think I see some of the implications of all this talk of phenomenal consciousness à la Chalmers. It looks as if there is within the inner mind of conscious experience an innermost holy-of-holies: an interior world of the I—Thou relationship.

Since this spiritual inner sanctum is nestled within our conscious mind, it follows that we need the phenomenon of consciousness to be able to hope to approach God properly as a Thou and not a He, She, or It.

Chalmers says consciousness is something extra that is associated with the complex information processing of the psychological mind. That capacity, in turn, evolved out of the lesser complexity of the brains of other animals. Moreover, the association of consciousness with human information-processing capabilities happens only by virtue of a natural law which — hypothetically, if there is a God — came from him.


That suggests to me that Christians need not fear Darwin's theory of evolution as in any way threatening to the revelation of God to them in Jesus Christ.

In fact — though it is an argument for another day — I would imagine evolution (rather than special creation) as the only way in which God could create persons who are autonomous agents possessed of free will. Perhaps free will, like consciousness, is part and parcel of our unique ability to speak the primary word I—Thou. If that is so, Darwinian evolution could turn into Chistianity's best friend!