"I-It" And "I-Thou"

In English Romantic Period, the major English poets (including Wordsworth, Coleridge,Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Southey) wrote much about the orient in their poetic works, andthus manifested an immense interest in the orient. Critics are inclined to interpret these worksfrom a post-colonial perspective and tend to believe that their oriental writings are closelyconnected to British politics, history and culture and therefore are embedded with a profoundnational-political and post-colonial connotation. Based on the close reading of the six poets’literary works, including poems, essays, and letters, this dissertation adopts Martin Buber’sdialogue philosophy as the theoretical foundation, scrutinizes the oriental writing of the poetsand finds in their works both typical western “I—It” prejudice, and “I—Thou” preferencebetween the east and the west. This dissertation extends and specifies the connotation of thetwo relations and puts them under detailed and specific categories: the relationship of “I—It” includes “My fascination about it”,“My prejudice against it” and “My conquering of it”,whereas the “I—Thou” relationship is found to contain “My knowledge of thou”,“Mymerging with thou” and “My admiration to thou”. The category above is virtually based onthe fundamental theoretical principles and assertions proposed by Buber. But this dissertation,on the formerly established theoretical ground, further exemplifies, deepens, extends, andenriches some of Buber’s ideas by means of analyzing specific examples of romanticorientalism.This dissertation falls into five major parts. In the introduction, some aspects or fields ofromantic orientalism are listed and discussed, including the study of the relationships betweenromantic orientalism and British imperial thoughts, imagination, exoticism, and culturalstudies, so as to summarize the past and the present of the related research and furtherexpounds the significance and innovation of this dissertation. Simultaneously, in this chapteralso appears the theoretical foundation of Martin Buber’s philosophy, which is introduced andreviewed from the distinguished traits of “I—It” and “I—Thou” respectively.The first chapter relates the background research of romantic orientalism. The specificinformation includes the British imperial history as long as over300years, especially thefacts and significance of its invasion and conquering of the countries in the east. At the sametime, this part also sees the elaboration of the influence of oriental cultures on the westernsociety (chiefly including cultures of China, India and Arabian). In addition, the features andtendencies of oriental writing before the romantic period are also under discussion, along withtheir influence upon the romantic poets.Chapter Two is chiefly concerned with three sub-divisions of the “I—It” relationship,namely,“My fascination about it”,“My prejudice against it” and “My conquering of it”. Andthe conclusions are as follows: the “I—It” relationship could be constructed when thefollowing requirements are met: the object degrades itself as merely to become a tool used to fulfill the subject’s desire; the subject lacks the understanding of the object, which,metaphorically speaking, means the subject could only see the trees rather than the forest; thesubject cannot or is not willing to abandon his formerly established opinions and hypothesisof the object; the subject means to repress and even smother the object.In Chapter Three, the connotation of the “I—Thou” relationship, the sub-categorizationincluding “My knowledge of thou”,“My merging with thou” and “My admiration to thou”.The conclusion has been reached that the following requirements should be satisfied if the “I—Thou” relationship is about to linger and last long: the subject can overcome the“common-sense concept” and “universal thoughts” which bind and confine the object, and ina position to currently and objectively depicts the object, regardless of the traditionalknowledge and impressions about it; the subject should get along with the objectharmoniously, merging into each other, learning from each other’s merits and making the bestuse of “love” to dissolve the conflicts between each other; the subject should be immune tothe “egoism” notion, always seeing thou in me, and vice versa. If the above requests areadequately answered, then hopefully the harmonious relationship of the “I—Thou” willfinally come into being.The last part of this dissertation, presumably, is the conclusion, which summarizes thecentral idea of this dissertation and attempts to find reasons for the “I—It” and “I—Thou”conflict in the same oriental writings by the romantic poets respectively. It also extends todiscuss the significance of Buber’s theory in cross-cultural dialogues today.This dissertation expects to clarify people’s misunderstanding or stereotype of theoriental writing as pure production of western power and the prejudice against the orient asthe “other”, so that people can hold a objective and impartial attitude when studying andevaluating the role romantic poets play in the macro-cultural dialogue between the east andthe west, along with the significance of oriental writings in the process of the cultural clashes,communication and cohesion between the east and the west.