I-Thou relation to a nonhuman other is reciprocal, not imaginative projection

Evidence

Here, we encounter the tree in all its otherness, a recognition that draws us out of ourselves and out of a worldview in which everything exists for us. The tree exists out there: “The tree is no impression, no play of my imagination, no aspect of a mood; it confronts me bodily and has to deal with me as I deal with it—only differently. One should not try to dilute the meaning of the relation: relation is reciprocity.” (In his translation from the German, Walter Kaufmann notes that “it confronts me bodily” uses a highly unusual verb—leibt, where leib means body—so that a more precise translation would be “it bodies across from me.”) Does this then mean that the tree has consciousness in the way that we would understand it? For Buber, the question is misguided because it relapses into I-It thinking: “must you again divide the indivisible? What I encounter is neither the soul of a tree nor a dryad, but the tree itself.” — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 377

Categorization

• DEFINE: The Kaufmann note on ‘it bodies across from me’ crystallizes the bodily, non-projective quality of I-Thou encounter — useful for the section on how attention constitutes a shared world.
• ADDENDUM: Relates to the tamarisk/aspect of ‘Grafting & Growth’ (trees encountered as subjects) and to the sacrificial ‘corpses’ essay’s concern with non-instrumental relationality.
• XREF: connects to: Reciprocity with the earth is a hard-won harmony, not a naturally given state — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 1377