一橋大学（2008）
A woman whose sister had recently died got a call from a male friend who had lost his own sister a few years before. The friend expressed his sympathy, and the woman told him painful details of the long illness her sister had suffered. But as she talked, she could hear the clicking of the computer keys at the other end of the line. Slowly she realized that her friend was answering his e-mail, even as he was talking to her in her hour of pain. His comments became increasingly hollow and off the point as the conversation continued. After they hung up, she felt so miserable that she wished he had never called at all. She'd just experienced the interaction that the philosopher Martin Buber called "I-It. "
In I-It interaction, Buber wrote, one person has no attunement to, or understanding of, the other's subjective reality: in other words, that person feels no real empathy for the other person. The lack of connectedness may be all too obvious from the receiver's perspective. (1)The friend may well have felt obliged to call and express his sympathy to the woman whose sister had died, but his lack of a full emotional connection made the call a hollow gesture. Psychologists use the term "agentic" for this cold approach to others. I am agentic when I care not at all about your feelings but only about what I want from you. That egocentric mode contrasts with "communion," a state of high mutual empathy where your feelings do more than matter to me---they change me. While we are in communion, we stay within a mutual feedback loop. But during moments of agency, we disconnect.
When other tasks or concerns split our attention, the shrinking reserve left for the person we are talking with leaves us operating on automatic, paying just enough attention to keep the conversation on track. Should more presence be called for, the result will be an interaction that feels "off. " Multiple concerns damage any conversation that goes beyond the routine, particularly when it enters emotionally troubling zones. To be charitable, the multitasking sympathy caller may have meant no harm. But when we are multitasking and talking gets added to the mix of our activities, we readily slide into the It mode.
There is another form of interaction. Take the example of a tale I overheard at a restaurant: "My brother has terrible luck with women. He's got terrific technical skills, but zero social skills. Lately he's been trying speed dating. Single women sit at tables, and the men go from table to table, spending exactly five minutes, and they rate each other to indicate if they might want to get together. If they do, then they exchange e-mail addresses to arrange a meeting another time. But my brother ruins his chances. I know just what he does: as soon as he sits down, he starts talking about himself nonstop. I'm sure he never asks the woman a single question. He’s never had any woman say she wants to see him again."
For the same reason, when she was single, opera singer Allison Charney employed a "dating test"; she counted the amount of time it took before her date asked her a question with the word "you" in it. On her first date with Adam Epstein, the man she married a year later, she didn't even have time to start the clock-he passed the test right away. That "test" looks for a person's capacity for attuning, for wanting to enter and understand another person's inner reality. This sort of empathetic connection is called "I-You. "
As Buber described it in his book on a philosophy of relationships, I-You is a special bond, an attuned closeness that is often-but of course not always found between husbands and wives, family members, and good friends. The everyday modes of I-You reach from simple respect and politeness, to affection and admiration, to any of the countless ways we show our love.
The emotional indifference and remoteness of an I-It relationship' stands in direct contrast to the attuned I-You. When we are in the I-It mode, we treat other people as means to some other end. By contrast, in the I-You mode our relationship with them becomes an end in itself.
The boundary between It and You is fluid. Every You will sometimes become an It; every It has the potential for becoming a You. When we expect to be treated as a You, the It treatment feels terrible, as happened on that hollow phone call. In such moments, You is reduced to It. Empathy opens the door to I-You relations. We respond not just from the surface; as Buber put it, I-You "can only be spoken with the whole being." A defining quality of I-You engagement is "feeling felt," the distinct sensation when someone has become the target of true empathy. At such moments we sense that the other person knows how we feel, and so we feel known.
・Point
When other tasks or concerns split our attention, the shrinking reserve left for the person we are talking with leaves us operating on automatic, paying just enough attention to keep the conversation on track. Should more presence be called for, the result will be an interaction that feels "off. "
leftは分詞（節の中は下記）。leaves は the shrinking reserveに対する本動詞
構造
the shrinking reserve {left for the person we are talking with} leaves us operating on automatic,
the person の後の関係詞省略
原著
