An ode to ‘you’: the power of the second-person pronoun

Meg Giordano

‘You’ is quite a marvelous word. It indicates an interconnected set of individual experiences that each stand on their own, and yet which are different for having crossed paths.

For example, ‘There you are!’ is a perfectly lovely affirmation of one person’s presence being anticipated, noticed, and celebrated by another. The person has not only been seen by another, but sought.

Negative examples also abound, in which the word is used to cruel effect. ‘What do you want?’ ‘Who asked you?’ ‘It’s all your fault’ carry remarkable weight.

Why is this? For good or for bad, for intimacy or for harm, ‘you’ statements seem to carry tremendous personal power. One obvious reason that first leaps to mind, implied above, is that they are direct statements – they indicate in-person interactions. But what does this mean, beyond the simple, experienced reality of talking directly to someone?

The extraordinary power of ‘you’ is grounded in its function as the second-person pronoun. In order for it to work in a meaningful way there must be ‘logically present’ at least two ‘I’ figures. Two individuals who each have a sense of themself as a subject in their own right, as the main actor in their own narrative. ‘I’ indicates self-aware agency. But this is just the foundation, the raw materials for a second-person exchange.

If one person sees another person busy with their own thing, such that the second does not see them back, there are indeed two I’s, but not yet a ‘you.’ If the person looks away, and the second looks up and sees them, it’s still not a ‘you.’ If one person talks at another, and then the other talks back at them, it’s not necessarily yet a ‘you’ moment.

A genuine ‘you’ moment, a true second-person relation, requires one person’s acknowledgment of the other person being aware of the interaction. This is a bit ridiculous to describe with precision. It goes something like this: I seeing you seeing me seeing you. It sounds like an overstatement to put it like that, but that’s what ‘you’ does mean in its fullest sense – it implies a full closing of the circle.

That’s why negative ‘you’ statements have so much power. They imply ‘I know you heard me, and you know that I know.’ Most of us have experienced that unpleasantness, or pain, in one form or another. Hardly more needs to be said.

Positive ‘you’ statements, on the other hand, seem to me underappreciated for their ability to affirm a person’s sense of self and agency, to foster humility and empathy, and to enable moments of learning and growth. How? They contain the possibility of the additional experience of ‘joint attention.’ This phenomenon occurs when two people not only are aware of themselves and of the other, but then go on to have a shared experience of attention to some other thing. At its most basic it means one person getting another’s attention (i.e., a second-person moment), and then directing that attention toward something else. This is more, however, than just two people having seen the same thing. The presence of one person actually shapes the other’s experience of that thing. Their view of it is different for the other person being there. This is sometimes also called a ‘shared stance.’ (For those interested, Andrew Pinsent does some very interesting work in his book The Second-Person Perspective in Aquinas’s Ethics [2012]). A genuine shared-stance version of the question ‘What do you think about x?’ includes a willingness on the part of the asker to be led to look at the thing in a certain way, from a certain perspective. It entails blurring the lines of what ‘I’ know about something, by allowing another person temporarily into the driver’s seat of my engagement with the world. It is still me ‘knowing,’ and I can always decide I don’t quite agree with the other’s conclusions. But my experience of the thing will now always be marked by, even contain data from, having been seen in a shared stance with another person.

Second-person relations of this kind entail, therefore, a tremendous vulnerability. But if a person is willing to pay that price, they are setting great things in motion. First, they are giving one of the finest gifts a person can give to another: their genuine, active attention. How affirming of the other person’s agency! ‘What is it you wish to show me?’ affirms that the other person, as the subject of their own story, has thoughts and experiences that make them a relevant truthteller about the world. Second, such an orientation to another nudges a person toward humility and empathy – such questions provide concrete opportunities to practice these qualities that most of us technically value but which can be so darn hard to really get a hold of. Finally, such relations are also a gift to ourselves, by intentionally opening ourselves up to pathways that are not naturally our own. We might say we want to grow, but how can we know about what is precisely not in our natural environment or perspective? Growth that actually takes us into new areas requires knowing that those other places exist. It entails the belief that worthwhile things are happening there, and the sensitivity to understand what it is we are seeing and experiencing. For this, just as with most travels to a new place, a guiding hand is an invaluable resource.

Of course, we can also reject the relation of a shared stance. We can refuse the legitimacy of the other view as seeing something meaningful about the world. We can assume that what ‘I know’ about the world is sufficient. We might, for good reasons in our past, not be willing to be vulnerable to another person taking lead of the moment. We may refuse to be the ‘you’ to someone else’s ‘I.’ There may be all kind of reasons for these decisions. It is up to us to sort them out, affirm the ones we want to keep, and perhaps revisit those that may not hold up any longer.

It may even be that a well-chosen ‘you’ could help us do just that.