Intersubjectivity and Relationships

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.