Instrumental Understanding

 

Crow on a Tree by Shinso Yogetsu, ca. 1485

In How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell considers why curiosity in our surroundings is important.  First, she says, "it is enjoyable.  Curiosity, something we know most of all from childhood, is a forward-driving force ...  [it's] a pleasant sensation of unfinished-ness and of something just around the corner.... Curiosity is what gets me so involved in something that I forget myself."

Second, 

doing so allows one to transcend the self.  Practices of attention and curiosity are inherently open-ended, oriented toward something outside of ourselves.  Through attention and curiosity, we can suspend our tendency toward instrumental understanding -- seeing things or people one-dimensionally as the products of their functions -- and instead sit with the unfathomable fact of their existence, which opens up toward us but can never be fully grasped or known.

Odell then invokes Martin Buber's "I and Thou" and the difference between I-It and I-Thou.  She notes, "the 'thou' does not need to be a person; famously, Buber gives the example of different ways of looking at a tree, all but one of which he classifies as I-It."

He can "accept it as a picture," describe its visual elements; he can consider an instance of a species, an expression of natural law, or a pure relation of numbers. "Throughout all of this the tree remains my object and has its place and its time span, its kind and condition," he says. But then there is the I-Thou option: "it can also happen, if will and grace are joined, that as I contemplate the tree I am drawn into a relation, and the tree ceases to be an It.  The power of exclusiveness has seized me." [my emphasis]