written by Mark Bunnell

Do we need to connect with other people?

I’ve been writing about connections and their role in relationships, but I’ve left an important underlying question unaddressed.

Do we actually need to connect with others?

If you’ve read anything else on this site, you know where I stand, but what might be clear to me may not be clear to you, so I want to talk about this for a little bit.

If connections are the basis of relationships, then the question is really whether or not we need relationships, and that question is really asking whether or not we need other people in our lives. And that question is really asking if we are truly intertwined with other beings or if we (humans) are actually just isolated packets of being and consciousness that believe there are connections between us.

In other words, are we self contained islands or one interconnected and intertwined continent?

This question matters. If we are disconnected islands, then we don’t really need relationships and they’re just a means to some sort of end, but if we’re an intertwined continent, to ignore relationships would be to ignore that which makes us who we are.

Think about your body for a moment. There are many different parts that make up our bodies. It isn’t a bunch of tiny people that can function on their own but for some reason come together to form one big human being. It’s a ton of tiny different pieces that are all interconnected to make up one whole person. If your liver was actually a small person performing that job, it could leave and still function on its own (sorry, this analogy is really strange, bear with me). But your liver isn’t a small person so it can’t ignore the “relationship” it has with your lungs, brain, and heart. Neither the parts of the body nor the liver can function properly without the other.

On its own, it doesn’t survive, but when it is plugged into the system it was designed for, it not only survives, it flourishes.

Charles Taylor is a Canadian philosopher and professor at McGill University that wrote a book (it might be more accurately described as an encyclopedia) called “A Secular Age” that sheds light on this discussion. In “A Secular Age”, Taylor examines “our contemporary lived understanding”, which can be rephrased as our social imaginary, or our background understandings that inform social life and shape the way humans conceptualize the world they inhabit.

In less philosophical terms, Taylor examines how we think about ourselves in relation to ourselves and every thing or being around us. He’s talking about whether or not we are connected to the world around us.

Taylor comes up with two terms to describe how we think about ourselves and our relatedness: the porous self and the buffered self.

“The porous self stems from the social imaginary of an enchanted world; its primary trait is an openness toward the world as a casual matrix filled with other humans, spirits, demons, and cosmic forces that produce meaning.”

“The buffered self is a mind-centered self in which a boundary between the interior and exterior worlds is in place.”

So a porous understanding of one’s self is that we are intertwined to every thing and being around us. There’s something that we can’t see, but it’s connecting us. In contrast, the buffered self is completely closed off to the world around it. It exists exclusively in itself and doesn’t need any thing or being around it to survive and flourish.

Now notice here that the distinction is between porous and buffered, not open and closed. Buffered signifies having a boundary, which essentially can be understood as closed, but something that is porous isn’t completely open or closed. It’s more of an openness. It isn’t a wide open door, it’s more of a mesh screen door. These terms aren’t necessarily binary categories, but sign posts on a spectrum. If buffered or closed is on one end, open would be on the other, and porous would be in the middle.

|——————————|——————————|

closed                         porous                           open

Now, different cultures understand themselves in different ways and could be placed at different spots along this spectrum. All the way to the left we might find an extremely introverted culture (Northern Europe), and all the way to the right we might find an extremely extroverted culture (Latin America). Each culture will tend to see “the way things work” differently. And many people could be placed at all points along this spectrum in regards to how they think that the world works. But the most important question—how does reality actually work— is still unanswered. If reality is a buffered or closed system and we think it is completely open, we’re going to spend a lot of our time doing things that don’t actually matter. To return to our body analogy, we’ll spend way too much time being a liver when we can be a fully functioning human on our own. But if reality is actually an open system, and we think it is closed, then we’ll injure ourselves and others by trying to function on our own.

Just pause for a moment and imagine a liver jumping out of someone’s body and trying to run down the street. What a sight that would be.

How we think about “the way things are” will inform how we act (which on a cultural level will just reinforce our thinking), and how we act most definitely influences the trajectory of our lives. So the way we think about “the way things are” is very important.  

I think it’s important to be able to point out where on the spectrum we act like we are (which will reflect where we really think we are) and where reality actually is.

For example, I think reality is a porous system but I often act like it is a closed system. To some extent, we are our own entities, but we’re interconnected in ways we can’t explain, and that makes us porous. But I act and talk like reality is a closed system. I act like there’s a barrier between what is interior to my being (what’s in my head) and what is exterior (the world around me, other beings, relationships, etc). I act like I don’t actually need anyone else into order to flourish, that I can be me without other people. At this point I have to acknowledge that I am a product of my upbringing and culture. Our western culture celebrates individualism and autonomy. We see ourselves as a large group of self contained entities that make connections as a means to an end. We find our “being” (our existence) in ourselves. As Rene Descartes put it, “Cogito, ergo sum” (or in English, “I think, therefore I am”). We believe we exist because we can think and acknowledge ourselves, and since our existence is solidified in our own self acknowledgement, we don’t actually need other beings in our lives.

If this is true, then we don’t need relationships. But what if it’s not and we still continue to live as if it were?

What if in disconnecting ourselves from the whole we are disconnecting ourselves from being?

I very much appreciate Taylor’s description of the porous self. I think it is an appropriate term to describe the way things really are. We aren’t self contained independent entities. We can act like we are, but we aren’t. We are all brought into existence from someone (our parents). Even if we were developed in vitro, we still had to come from someone. Parts of someone were still used to bring us into existence. But to some extent we have boundaries between us. We are different from other people, we are aware of our selves, and we can comprehend of ourselves as distinct from the whole.

But are we separate and disconnected? No.

Even our distinctness is only realized in relation to other beings. I know that I am somewhere, that I exist, based on the responses around me. I know that I can actually talk because other people respond when I talk to them, so I know that what I think is happening isn’t just a figment of my imagination. Even beyond other humans, I know that I exist materially because the ground pushes against me. There’s a response to my action. I know that I am as a result of the responses to what is around me. And when we look at our interactions with other people, I know that I am different from others, that I am distinct, because of their responses to me. People say different things, like different things, and act different ways. If people were to say the same thing I said, like everything that I liked, and act exactly as I acted, I wouldn’t know that I was distinct. Instead, I would just see a bunch of projections of myself around me.

So we are truly intertwined, even in our believed “disconnected” state.

Relationships are vital to who we are, to our being, to our identity. We can’t establish who we are without other people. Heck, we can’t even establish that we are without other beings and things. Interactions and connections are necessary for our survival, and meaningful connections are necessary for our flourishing.

So where does that leave us? How do I stop acting like we’re all disconnected? What if I have believed that we’re disconnected for so long that I don’t remember how to connect with others?

Connecting with others can start small. It can start by simply looking the cashier at Vons in the eye when you’re checking out or asking how your coworker’s weekend was (and actually finding out what they did). It might be scary and it will definitely require something of you, but it is so worth it.

Your flourishing depends on it. It is part of what it means to be human.