Alan Watts, in The Book…

All winners need losers; all saints need sinners; all sages need fools—that is, so long as the major kick on life is to “amount to something” or to “be someone” as a particular and separate godlet.

But I define myself in terms of you; I know myself only in terms of what is “other,” no matter whether I see the “other” as below me or above me in any ladder of values. If above, I enjoy the kick of self–pity; if below, I enjoy the kick of pride. I being I goes with you being you. Thus, as a great Hassidic rabbi put it, “If I am I because you are you, and if you are you because I am I, then I am not I, and you are not you.” Instead we are both something in common between what Martin Buber has called I–and–Thou and I–and–It—the magnet itself which lies between the poles, between I myself and everything sensed as other.

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