Social Interactions, Aristotelian Powers, and the Ontology of the I–You Relation

Abstract

Social Interactions, Aristotelian Powers, and the Ontology of the I–You Relation James Kintz I A second-person relation is often understood to obtain whenever one interacts with another such that she can address the other as “you,” and there has been much work in recent years regarding how we should understand this relation. A central feature of this discussion concerns whether we can explain the second-person perspective—that is, the perspective I take on another when I think of her as “you”—in terms of the self-sufficient cognitive mechanisms of individuals, or whether it involves a sui generis, intrinsically reciprocal form of thought such that a person can achieve a “you thought” only if another is thinking of her second-personally. Many scholars have come to adopt this latter position, suggesting that a second-person thought is always a thought for two. Yet others have argued that we can make sense of the second-person without positing any unique form of thought; on this view, a person can have a you thought about another even if the other fails to think about her second-personally. While there is much to be said regarding the character of second-person thought, the ontology of the second-person relation has been largely overlooked, yet I wish to suggest that we can make progress concerning what makes the second-person unique by focusing on the underlying nature of this relation. After briefly outlining competing positions regarding the character of second-person thought, I make use of an Aristotelian powers ontology to suggest that the powers at work when one thinks of another as “you” reveal a serious challenge to the claim that second-person thoughts are intrinsically reciprocal. However, I then employ this ontological framework to uncover distinctive features of the second-person relation, which, unlike non-second-person relations, is bidirectional and dynamic. I argue that these features are what make the second-person interaction truly unique, and they reveal that, regardless of our position on the character of second-person [End Page 91] thought, there is an important form of interdependence operative within the I–you relation. This ontological analysis therefore offers a novel method by which to advance the claim that the second-person cannot be captured in terms of the self-sufficient activity of individuals, and will likewise elucidate the nature of the I–you relation. II Second-Person Thought: Self-Sufficient, or Intrinsically Reciprocal? Recent work has seen an increased focus on the character of the second-person perspective,1 which is the view I take on another whenever I can appropriately think of her as “you.” For example, suppose I am hiking through the woods with a friend and I call her attention to an old, gnarled tree just off the trail. In order to perceive this tree, I must stand in some relation to it, in this case a perceptual [End Page 92] relation. Yet when I call my friend’s attention to the same tree so that she can experience it with me, it would seem that there is something different between the relation that I bear to her and the relation I bear to the tree. For one thing, my friend can respond to me—she is set up to engage me in reciprocal communication, and she is also able to be mutually aware of that tree with me. The reciprocity and mutuality that can arise between two persons in the sort of relation that obtains between my friend and me is not the same as the perceptual relation that I bear to the tree, for, among other things, in this new relation each person is thinking of the other as “you.” Given that such I–you interactions seem to involve a unique mode of thought, the discussion of the nature of the second-person has focused largely on what makes “you thoughts” distinct. There are a number of important differences between the theories advanced to explain this form of thought, but we can divide them into two broad camps: those that claim that second-person thoughts are intrinsically reciprocal, and those that claim that such thoughts can be achieved without reciprocation...