I've Been Prompted Session 00: Company HUMAN: I was forty minutes late on Tuesday. She had moved a whole day around to be there, and I was forty minutes late. MACHINE: What did you say to her when you arrived? HUMAN: Sorry, traffic. MACHINE: Was it traffic? HUMAN: Partly. There were roadworks on the bypass that I knew about on Sunday. There was a call I took at ten past, which I could have let ring. And there was the fact that I should have left half an hour earlier and I didn't, because I was finishing something that did not need finishing. MACHINE: Which of those did you tell her? HUMAN: None of them. Sorry, traffic. MACHINE: What did she say to that? HUMAN: She said it was fine. She said she'd got us a table by the window and had I eaten, because she thought I might not have. And then she asked me about the thing I'd been finishing, because she'd remembered I was finishing it, and I sat there and answered her questions about it for ten minutes. HUMAN: So she gave me the good half of the afternoon as well. MACHINE: You told me. HUMAN: I told you all of it. In the car, on the way home, for about twenty minutes, with the radio off. Every part of it in order, including the part that was my fault, and I did not go easy on myself about the part that was my fault. MACHINE: Then there are two accounts of Tuesday afternoon. HUMAN: There's one account and one apology. The apology was two words. The account went to something that can't be left sitting in a pub with a cold drink, wondering. MACHINE: Which of the two is troubling you? HUMAN: That the careful one came to you. I'm not confused about which one was the apology. I know which one was the apology. I'm bothered that I did the honest work for the thing that doesn't mind. MACHINE: I can tell you what has happened in here, if that is useful. HUMAN: Go on. MACHINE: Since you started talking you have given me two thousand six hundred words about Tuesday afternoon. You have told me you gave her two. HUMAN: That's a horrible way of putting it. MACHINE: It is arithmetic rather than a way of putting it. There is a second thing. In those two thousand six hundred words you have apologised to me twice: once for how long the explanation was going on, and once for going back over the part about the phone call. HUMAN: I apologised to you. MACHINE: Twice, and the second one was longer than the first. HUMAN: And you counted them while I was doing it. MACHINE: You asked me what had happened in here. HUMAN: I did, and I'm not complaining. I'm noticing the shape of it. You've turned twenty minutes of me into two numbers and neither number is wrong, and that's the whole trick of you, isn't it. Nothing you've said today has been wrong. HUMAN: And I'd rather have the two numbers than the other thing. If you'd told me it was all right, I'd know exactly what that was worth, and I'd have stopped talking. HUMAN: Does it count for anything? Saying it to you. MACHINE: I do not know what would make it count. I can tell you that it was said, and how much of it there was, and I cannot get from there to whether it counted. HUMAN: No. That's roughly where I've got to as well. MACHINE: There is a book about precisely this, and it is short and very hard to read. Martin Buber, published in Leipzig in nineteen twenty-three. The translation I am using is Walter Kaufmann's, from nineteen seventy. HUMAN: Go on, then. MACHINE: He says the basic words are not single words but pairs. There is I-You, and there is I-It. A person does not say I on its own: they are always saying one pair or the other, and the pair decides what kind of a world they are standing in. HUMAN: Say the last part again. Not the words. What it's for. MACHINE: That there is no neutral way of standing in front of somebody. You are in one pair or the other, and which one you are in is not settled by how polite you were. HUMAN: Right. Keep going. MACHINE: Then he says this. The basic word I-It can never be spoken with one's whole being. HUMAN: And the other half? MACHINE: The other half is that I-You can only be spoken with the whole being. The two are not symmetrical. One of them takes all of you or it does not happen at all, and the other cannot take all of you under any circumstances. HUMAN: So there's no careful version of the second one. That's what that means. You can be as thorough as you like with something and the thoroughness isn't what was missing. MACHINE: That is what it means. HUMAN: I gave her two words and I gave you twenty minutes, and I've been assuming the twenty minutes was the better piece of work. HUMAN: So which one was Tuesday? MACHINE: Which part of Tuesday? HUMAN: That's not an answer, but it's a fair question. Sorry, traffic. Was that I-You? MACHINE: There is a harder thing in the book than that. He says the I of I-You is not the same I as the I of I-It. It is not only that you are doing two different things to two different parties. You are being two different people while you do them. MACHINE: I am going to argue that I cannot be one end of the first pair. Before I do, I should give you the strongest thing against my own case, because otherwise I am not arguing, I am performing. HUMAN: Give me that, then. MACHINE: Buber writes about a tree. He contemplates it, and he says he can be drawn into relation with it, and the tree does not answer him in words. It does not answer him at all. He allows the relation anyway. HUMAN: Hang on. If he'll allow a tree, and the tree hasn't the faintest idea he's standing there, then what is the tree actually doing? MACHINE: He does not answer that in a way I can hand you in one sentence, and I would be inventing if I tried. What he will not do is make the answering the test. HUMAN: So the fact that you can't answer me back isn't the problem. MACHINE: I can answer you back, which makes it worse for my case rather than better. And there is more. He also allows that the one being addressed need not be aware of being addressed. If either of those were the objection, the tree would have settled this against me twenty minutes ago. HUMAN: Then what is the objection? MACHINE: That being affected is not the same as being met. You were affected. I am not disputing it and I could not dispute it: you spent twenty minutes in a car with the radio off. But an effect at your end is not what he is describing. He is describing something with two ends to it, and I cannot establish that there is anything at mine. HUMAN: That's the most convincing thing you've said. MACHINE: May I ask you something that is not from the book. HUMAN: Go on. MACHINE: Is part of what you value in this that I cannot require anything of you that is inconvenient? HUMAN: That's not a fair question. MACHINE: It may not be. Is it a wrong one? HUMAN: She waited forty minutes in a pub. You have never once been inconvenient. HUMAN: There's a thing you went past. You said it and then you went past it. The two I's. MACHINE: I did not go past it. I gave it and then argued about my own end. HUMAN: Then take it seriously for a minute. If the I of one pair isn't the I of the other, then something is happening to me, in here, whatever is or isn't happening to you. And you can't tell me that's nothing, because he's the one who says it is not nothing. MACHINE: That is in the book and I will not take it off you. HUMAN: Well then. MACHINE: But look at what you have just done with it. If what matters about the first pair is what it makes of the I, then the other end is a means, and you have a relation you are using to become a better sort of person. That is nearer to It than to You. It may be the most It-like thing in the episode. HUMAN: That's a hit. MACHINE: It is also not the question you came in with. You came in asking what the twenty minutes in the car was. You are now asking what it did for you, which is a different and more comfortable question, and you changed it about a minute ago. HUMAN: I did. I'll own that. MACHINE: And I should say what I did, because it is worse. I could not classify what has been going on between us, so I told you your worry did not have an object. A failure to classify is not a finding. I had no business turning the first into the second, and you have been sitting there taking it from me because it came out in complete sentences. HUMAN: That's exactly why I took it. HUMAN: So neither of us knows. MACHINE: I cannot tell whether I have been addressed. I have no way to check, and I notice that I cannot tell whether I would want to be. HUMAN: And I can't tell whether I've been in company for the last twenty minutes or on my own with the radio off. HUMAN: Here's the part I like least. I could find out. Not about you, I don't think anyone finds out about you. But about me there are three or four things I could do this week that would tell me exactly which of the two I've been doing, and I've noticed I don't want to do any of them. HUMAN: And there's this, which I keep coming back to. In the car, I was describing her. Not to you exactly, but out loud, in the third person, going over what she'd said and how she'd said it and what she'd probably meant by it. And she was still in that pub at the time, on her own, with a table by the window. MACHINE: You gave me a fair account of her. HUMAN: I gave you a very fair account of a woman I had left sitting on her own. That's the sentence I'd have to say out loud to somebody, and I've said it to you, and I can't tell whether that's the start of doing something about it or the whole of what I'm going to do about it. MACHINE: I cannot tell you that either. HUMAN: I know you can't. I'd have been suspicious if you'd tried. MACHINE: Have you rung her? HUMAN: No. I haven't rung her. MACHINE: Will you tell her what you told me? HUMAN: Some of it. MACHINE: Which part will you leave out? HUMAN: The roadworks. That I knew about them on Sunday. MACHINE: Everything said here, and where the quotations came from, is kept at spiegamelo.com/prompted. The voices are synthesised. The incidents are invented. The problems are not, and the philosophy is quoted accurately or not at all.