INTRODUCTION (To David Walsh's new book: POLITICS OF THE PERSON AS THE POLITICS OF BEING to be published by UNDP in 2015
David Walsh:
In
invoking “politics of the person” we begin at the point of maximum danger. The person is in jeopardy. Exposed to the shifting determinations of who
is to count as a person each is placed in endless jeopardy. Political power is the power of life and death. It can unleash all of the neglect,
destruction and malice to which frail flesh may be subject. Politics is the realm from which deadly force
erupts, because it is the point at which decisions are made or unmade. Left to themselves swords would rest as
peacefully as ploughshares. Mind,
especially as collectively activated in politics, is the deadliest thing of
all. When the political mind has
changed, the character of its threat may be profoundly altered. We no longer fear the nuclear warheads of the
Russian Federation ,
for it does not possess the mentality of the Soviet Union . At the same time we look to the political as
the guarantor of life, fending off the lethality that would render it “nasty,
brutish and short.” This is why the
political normally assumes the far more benign aspect from which it draws its
support. The monopoly of force attained
by the state is usually exercised on our behalf. We do not need to arm ourselves as if we are
perpetually engaged in a war of all against all. Instead we can view the political as the
guardian under whose protection the bonds of mutual trust may flourish. But we know of its Janus character. The political is capable of great good or
great evil. For this reason we have
sought to contain it within the boundaries that mark the rights of
persons. We are determined to make the
state strong enough to suppress the threats, internal and external, that might
reach us, yet not so strong that its own supremacy could be turned against the
very persons it is pledged to protect. The miracle of politics is the
attainment of that impossible balance.
Like
every balance it is perpetually in danger of collapse. It is never achieved but must be constantly
re-achieved. The person is at stake in
every moment, for there is nothing in the past that ensures that rights
hitherto protected will continue to be guaranteed. None are immune to the process of erosion by
which their humanity is imperceptibly devalued.
Only the assertion of the rights of persons can halt that silent
disappearance, for in the defense of what it means to be a person we behold the
full stature of what is at stake. It is
for this reason that the great historical struggles for liberty are so
frequently recalled. We look to its
pivotal episodes as the moments in which our humanity is most fully
realized. Liberty , we are told, is a tree whose roots
must be refreshed with the blood of tyrants.
Why tyrants must thus recur is a topic that is rarely broached, nor why
liberty must depend on their regular execration. Who after all are the tyrants but the power
in whose misuse we have become complicit?
And who are those in whose name we must undertake such an anarchic act
of resistance? The political community
seems to exist nowhere but in the effort to bring it into existence, an effort
that never reaches its end but seems to demand its perpetual repetition. In the rights of the person we glimpse
something of this ceaseless political dynamic in which we live. The state can only be through the voluntary
transfer of power from the individuals within it and they, in turn, can only be
induced to make such an offering through the knowledge that it will be expended
on their behalf.[1] How the contract gets enacted may be elusive
but once it does the momentum evinces impressive durability. The most powerful states are those most
dedicated to the preservation of the rights of their citizens. When every one is weighed as if he or she was
the whole then it creates a whole that is well nigh invincible. Something of that mutual exchange is
constitutive of every functioning polity, but its transparence is only evident
in the language of individual rights.
There must be a state for rights to be guaranteed but there must be a guarantee
of rights for there to be a state.
It
is through this struggle to preserve the rights of persons that we discover
that it is the person who is at stake.
Nothing more or less than what the person is is at issue in the effort to determine the kind of political
association in which we are going to live.
How are we going to treat the lowliest member of the social whole? That is the measure by which we are to judge
ourselves and, most importantly, the political community in its most visible
sense. In saying how we regard the most
vulnerable we announce the character of the whole. We are implicated in the defense of the
person. Our politics is inescapably
politics of the person. Responsibility
for the person is thrust upon us before we have sorted through the rationale
that is to guide us. Not only are we
individually called by the imperative of conscience before we have a moral
philosophy but, politically, we are also impelled by the same priority to
defend the person without whom the polity would not be. The language of rights by which that
precedence has been expressed is a language of abbreviations that has emerged
before we have grasped what is being abbreviated. Practice takes precedence over theory because
life is there before reflection on it takes place. In responding thus to the imperative that
draws us, in recognizing politics as politics of the person, we can never fully
grasp that by which we are grasped. We
are rather led by intuitions that can be deepened but never fully articulated. Their truth can be enlarged but never
surpassed. It is for this reason that
theory never fully provides the grounds for politics, for politics is already a
realm of truth before theory arrives on the scene. The political must confront its inescapable
responsibilities. It is the latter that
illumine what politics is about. In
living up to what is demanded of it, the political discloses that by which it
is constituted. It shows that it answers
to that which is more than the political, that which comes before it as that
which it must serve. The political is
led forth by what is before it exists.
That is its intimation. Politics
of the person is the politics of being.
Viewed as such a voyage of discovery it is
not too surprising to find that it is marked by many ups and downs along the
way. Even when the language of rights
has clarified the centrality of the person within politics, there remains the
possibility of distortion as one of its unintended results. Nowhere is this more evident than in the use
to which the heightened awareness of the person is put in the discourse of
rights itself. Defense of the rights of
persons leads to the easy assumption we know what persons are, or at least to a
working definition as the capacity to assert an interest in rights. When persons are the putative possessors of
rights attention shifts to the lines by which we define who is a person. It may be a curious consequence of the
centrality of the person that it now becomes easier to exclude the marginal
cases in which the status of personhood is less than clear. But it should not strike us as so
unexpected. An advance in one area of
self-understanding always suggests a mastery we might readily extrapolate
beyond the limits available to us. As
always, however, it is the rise of moral hesitations that is the leading
indicator of the errors into which we are about to fall. It is in the moral life that we are closest
to life as such. A troubling intuition
alerts us to the misconception that refuses to see any difference between a
newborn infant and a baby kitten on the grounds that they each lack an
established self-identity. Infanticide
and felinicide are equally permissible.
What is disturbing is not the lack of sensitivity exhibited, but its
justification by the heightened attention to the person designed to avoid
it. The greater respect owed to persons
has turned the definition of the person into the most contested question. It is perhaps no wonder that many have despaired
of rendering the notion of personal rights in coherent form. When a focus on the person supports
depersonalization we are given pause.
Yet
a sweeping dismissal of the turn toward the person would also be a
mistake. What is decisive is that this
truncated view of the person as defined by conscious self-identity has not been
able to stand unopposed. Indeed it has
provoked vigorous and unremitting resistance.
The integrity of the person must be defended even against the claim of
persons to be entitled to regard themselves in any way they wish. Human rights must not be invoked to override
human dignity. We are not simply minds
possessing ownership of bodies to be disposed of as we choose; nor are our
bodies devoid of value without a proprietor entitled to register such a claim. The self, that innermost core of the person, cannot
be so easily separated from all that enables him or her to be what he or she
is. Self-expression occurs only through
the medium of that which is not the self.[2] Our bodies are our own but not in the way we
own anything else. The unity is far more
intimate than the language of self-determination would seem to suggest for in
injuring my body you injure me. This is
why it is possible for me to injure myself while it is not possible for me to
rob myself. The intimacy of the person
with his or her bodily presence is not the only continuum that extends the
reach of the self. A wider zone of
continuity makes us part of the community of persons without whom we could
scarcely be. The focus on individual
rights may have suggested an atomistic existence but the web of interdependence
making our lives possible constantly refutes that impression. Just as we are body-persons we are also
persons-in-community. Indeed we are
scarcely capable of becoming persons, acquiring the awareness of our distinct
selves, except in relation to the field of others. I am a person because I am recognized as such
by others. It is through the nurturing
support of others that I become the kind of self whose independence makes it
possible for me to return the same indefatigable care for others. There is in other words no such thing as the
self pure and simple, without the hyphenated relation to the body and the world
of others. The imperative of a more
“personalist” account is one of the fruits of the heightened centrality of the
person within liberal rights. The turn
toward the person has generated a personalist response as one of the most
prominent alternatives to the regnant individualism of our discourse.[3]
As
such, personalism has enlarged the truncated account of the person that
revolves around the autonomous self. Yet
it has not really succeeded in responding to the core challenge of the
inversion made possible by autonomy itself.
What is there to prevent me using my autonomy to destroy myself? Can it even be destructive or degrading if it
is freely chosen? How can we even
presume to set our judgment against that of another equally entitled to
exercise his or her own judgment? The
personalists are guided by a profound intuition that there is something
appalling about the destruction of self, but how is it to be expressed when
autonomy has become the highest value?
Some notion of human dignity is indispensable if we are to hold the line
against self-degradation and the degradation of others, but noting the
desideratum is not the same as satisfying it.
Kant is in many ways the fount of this preoccupation and we may
characterize personalist philosophy as a response to the dissatisfaction with
the Kantian attempt to ground human dignity in reason.[4] The problem is that personalism has done
little more than keep the issue alive, a not inconsiderable achievement, but
far less than is required to effect a noticeable revision in the dominant
discourse. The language of human dignity, with its emphasis on integrity and
sociality, will be opaque so long as the source of its inspiration remains
inaccessible. It must be within the
exercise of autonomy that the enhancement of self and others arises. Too often personalists have been content to
limit their theoretical reach, falling back on traditional formulations of
nature, rationality, and the imago Dei.[5]
However laudable the deepening of reverence and respect at which they aim, they
cannot hope to reach it without articulating the source of the convictions by
which they are drawn. Human dignity must
be located through the perspective of autonomy if it is to function
authoritatively within that realm.
Dignity
must be found as the source of autonomy rather than as a possible goal of it.
The difficulty is that autonomy is usually so preoccupied with its immediate
setting that reflection on the condition of its possibility is somewhat remote.
We are propelled by the urges and urgencies of life before we even begin to
question it. Yet none of this occurs
unconsciously. Behind it all lies an
awareness of what can never be suppressed, that which will not allow us to
freely degrade ourselves, what refuses to countenance the descent into
self-deception and self-delusion. The
greatest offence, Kant thought, is lying to oneself.[6] But why? What is it that restrains our autonomous
freedom before we have even begun to exercise it? Conscience, natural law, right by nature,
duty, are all possible answers that ultimately beg the question of how we know
them. The tradition of moral reflection
has always thereby erred in not conceding the difficulty entailed in the
starting point it invokes. How can we
know what we do not know and yet must know if we are to make a beginning? The conviction, that human dignity must at
all costs be preserved when the abyss of subjective freedom jeopardizes it, is
itself testament to an undertow that is all the more powerful for its
imperceptibility. It is at this point
that the opaqueness of the traditional formulations obstructs us. We cannot penetrate to the source of a
movement we sense but cannot discern.
The call for a deeper philosophy of the person remains no more than
that, a call without an answering response.[7] Overlooked is the extent to which this
challenge has preoccupied the history of philosophy in the modern era. It reaches a turning point in the work of
Kant when the nature of the challenge comes into view. We cannot answer the question of what makes
it possible for us to know or for us to respond to the pull of obligation,
because we cannot step outside of the perspective of those enactments. The condition of the possibility of knowledge
cannot be grounded in knowledge because to do so would presuppose it. No grounding of moral judgment can escape the
inexorable imperative of grounding it morally, for the good can be justified
only in terms of itself. Even for Kant,
however, the perspective of the transcendental, the perspective outside of
which we cannot go, assumed a mysterious aspect. To call it a priori hardly cleared matters up
since we really need to know the meaning of that priority. Obviously this is not the place to seek such
a clarification, since the whole book is an attempt to provide just that. It is sufficient to note that the character
of the difficulty has at least become explicit and that the dismissal of Kant
as a formalist merely overlooks his crucial significance in grasping the nature
of the challenge.
That was not an error committed by his
immediate successors among the German Idealists. They understood that Kant had initiated a new
philosophical phase in grasping the ungraspability of what makes it possible
for us to know and to act. We know it
and yet we do not comprehend it because we are so fully immersed within it. But where Kant was even hesitant to name that
about which he spoke, they were more daring in identifying it as the distinct
reality of spirit, Geist. This had the advantage of making more real
what had proved elusive within the Kantian formulations. Antinomies, the ultimate limiting points of
his thought, could now be resolved in a certain sense. All that was needed was to note that Kant
himself, by grasping the antinomies, had somehow managed to go beyond
them. The reality of Geist defied univocal and fixed
determination for it was apprehended in the movement whereby it included even
itself. Philosophy in the Hegelian
variant would assume a newly dynamic form that would lead it back to the
vitality of life from which it had always arisen, only now with the capacity to
include itself in that fluid medium. As
the speculation became progressively more elaborate, however, it was evident
that the pall of a new fixity had settled over the account. The system threatened to abolish the question
from which it had arisen. It too would
have to be overturned in the name of an existence that could never be contained
within its parameters. That
determination has framed the outlook of philosophy up to the present. The existential turn, initiated by Kant,
inadequately realized by Hegel, Fichte and Schelling, forms the permanent
condition out of which reflection unfolds.
As with the great pioneers, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, philosophy thus
becomes radically fragmentary, incomplete, and inarticulate. Correlative to the paradoxical style of
thought that knows it can never think itself, there is increasing attention to
the inability of language to say what it seeks to say. Falling short has become the mode of
saying. Nowhere is this more on display
than in the bewildering pyrotechnics of Heidegger and his successors.[8]
Yet
in a strange way they are closer than ever to the horizon of the person. We might characterize all of Heidegger’s
lifelong preoccupation with the question of being as an attempt to identify
what it means to be a person without ever using the word “person.” He had already turned away from the language
of persons, even as invoked by Scheler and Jaspers, as too close to the subject
for whom reality must be composed of objects.
The whole that contains both of them would be missed, even though it is
that capacity to contain them by not being either a subject or an object them
that defines what it means to be a person. It is perhaps the most striking
feature of Heidegger’s vast meditation on being as the possibility of
apprehending being, that is, of being as self-revelation, that he nowhere seems
to notice that this is what it means to be a person. Being is personal through and through because
it is that which discloses by never fully disclosing; it is disclosure that
ever remains beyond disclosure as its own movement. The tragedy of Heidegger is that, despite it
all, being looms as an apocalyptic event that overshadows its recipients. This explains why for Heidegger persons could
remain invisible, even to the point of countenancing their mass annihilation. Their cry could not be heard because he had
not grasped it as continuous with the self-sacrifice of being, even though it
was the very same movement of transcendence by which he too had glimpsed being. Ontology is prior to ethics for, as he insisted
in what is almost a throwback to his scholastic formation, every ethics entails
an ontology.[9] Absent is any consideration of the Levinasian
corrective that every ontology presupposes an ethics, that we already bear a
responsibility before being as the condition for raising the question of
being. All of this comes into focus when
persons have become the center of philosophical vision. Then we see with Levinas and Derrida that the
person, the face of the other, is before all else, including the self.
It
is a great mistake to conclude, as a number of personalist commentators have,
that this formulation is the imposition of an impossible demand for perfection
in human relationships. That impression can be obtained only if we assume that
Levinas, for example, is offering a description of interpersonal dynamics,
rather than of what it is that is the condition of their possibility. We can relate to one another as persons only
because mutuality is the very meaning of what it is to be a person. I am responsible for the other before I even
know him or her because that is what makes it possible for me to practice the
limited responsibility of which I am capable when we do meet. The priority of the other may be the divine
command, especially as it is given to us by Jesus, but it is so only because we
are already marked by its possibility.
God can command only what can be, even if our natural limits usually
obstruct the way. We are at least
capable of embarking on the way.
Eschatology is not some vague destination at which we will arrive in the
future. It is the ineliminable horizon
of possibility in every moment. Persons, we will see, are not beings within
being.[10] No matter how frequently we think of persons
as beings, strictly speaking they are incapable of such a status. Otherwise they would be incapable of
glimpsing being. To apprehend that
within which they are they must somehow never simply be within it. Their genesis is from before being. All of this is amply confirmed by our
ordinary knowledge of persons, each of whom we know as unique irreplaceable
wholes that exceed in meaning and value all that is in the universe. With each birth being begins anew. This is something that is known to every
parent, and it is verified in every encounter with the infinity of the
other. The problem is that our language,
even in the hands of those attuned to the centrality of the person, has been
incapable of voicing that eschatological epiphany. It is the turn toward inwardness in modern
philosophy that has opened up the paradox of the person as what can be
contained without ever being contained in what we say about him or her.
The
problem of the premodern philosophical account is that it never found the
language consonant with its own discovery of the person.[11] As a consequence it always ran the danger of
losing what it had grasped. Inwardness is a permanent feature of human
existence, it is human existence, but
its articulation is neither final nor definitive. What has been discovered can also be lost,
even if it remains available for recollection. We might even think of the whole
history of philosophy as one long effort to regain what had been glimpsed in
its very opening. The discovery of
being, as well as the revelation of the I AM, is simultaneously the discovery
of interiority within which such events are possible. The beyond and the within
are correlative. But they are quickly
covered over by the more reliably solid language of beings and nature, as well
as the historical destiny that such traces of the ineffable must endure as they
wander through space and time. The
opaqueness of symbols set adrift from their originating experiences becomes the
overarching problem. We do not know what
being is when it can only be encountered in the mode of beings, nor do we know
what persons are when they too must be assimilated to the finite. The dislocation seems pervasive when we can
think about everything except what it is that makes thought possible. There is perhaps no more poignant reflection
of the confusion than the preoccupation with what it means to live in a secular
age.[12] God is absent, not because he has absconded,
but because we can no longer conceive of how he might make himself known. The way of the transcendent seems irrevocably
blocked when the inward has shrunk to the subjective. Even while yielding to the abundance of
experience we have become incapable of perceiving its reality. God continues to be heard in a secular age,
the difficulty is that he can no longer be recognized. The great atheists of the nineteenth century
were in revolt against God which meant that, in their own way, they affirmed
him more deeply. Today we have only the
unease of the question of God that can no longer be voiced. It drives our new atheists to reject the God
that science can never find. Utterly
overlooked is the realization that God is nowhere, that he does not exist,
because he is that from which everything has come into existence.[13]
To
think of God as the first cause is to already draw him into the chain of existence
and therefore into the logic of what stands in need of a cause itself. St.
Thomas ’s famous five ways are deeply informed by the
awareness of this problematic. Each of
them concludes with the formula quod Deus
dicitur which makes it clear that we have not proved the existence of
God. How could we prove a God whom we
already know about in advance of our demonstration? The arguments are really ways by which we
arrive at that which we know, the God who is called God and who is vastly more
than has been glimpsed. The God who
overflows all ways is the ground of possibility of the ways. What is neglected
in St.Thomas’s meditation is the question of how we know the God whom we
recognize as the end of each way. He
does show, however, that we ask about how we arrive at the God whom we already
know. The question of God comes from God
himself. We would be incapable of asking
it if we did not already know who it is for whom we search. Our only problem is to account for this
revelation itself. The standard response
is that God, the transcendent, has chosen to reveal himself to us. But that too begs the question. How can God reveal himself to us unless we
already know who he is? How can we hear
the voice of God if we cannot recognize it?
To know God is thus to know that which is already known and which could
neither be sought nor found if that were not the case. But this means that we have no need for a
proof of the existence of God because we already know him as that which is
beyond existence. We do not even
experience God for it is our knowledge of him that makes such experiences
possible. We know that which is not
before we know that which is, because we are ourselves persons who are not what
we are. The inwardness by which we
glimpse the transcendence of God, quod Deus dicitur, is not the subjective
perspective within us. It is the
shattering of all subjectivity within transcendence itself. Inwardness is not a private realm but the
point from which all that is merely private can be beheld. We do not know God but are rather known by
him within the inwardness that is God.
Transcendence is not only the way to God but the very being of God who
is known as inwardness. He cannot be
other than personal.
The
unfamiliarity of such reflections is almost enough to demonstrate the
constraints that long standing conventions have imposed on the spiritual
irruptions at the beginning of philosophy and revelation. Each, as Eric Voegelin has suggested, has
been content to preserve the results of its illumination, without being
excessively concerned about the event of illumination itself.[14] The effect has been the widely lamented
opaqueness of what is thus preserved, a still life without the vitality from
which it has arisen. To remedy the situation something more than complaint is
needed. Voegelin understood this and
sought through the return to experiences of transcendence to find again the
well-springs of thought. In this he made
it clear that there were no such things as ideas of order unless there were
first the particular experiences of order that were undergone. That is an indispensable realization. Yet it remains to be carried further, for the
invocation of experiences is still tied to the subjectivity of persons who
undergo them. Strongly suggested, in
Voegelin’s account, is that the experiences are not simply subjective. They are experiences of truth, of that which
transcends the self. But how can that be
said if it is not said in the mode of subjective experience? One can talk about the echo of truth
recognized by other selves, but that too is merely to talk about
experiences. What has not yet occurred
is a discourse out of such events themselves.
Even to describe them as experiences is already to have set up a
distance by which we stand apart from them.
If they are, on the other hand, what makes experience possible then we
can scarcely experience them. We simply
glimpse that within which we stand. Of
course this too is an experience, but not of the kind that is simply my
subjective grasp. Instead it is the
point at which the subjective stands within the reality of which it is a
part. Voegelin struggled mightily to
suggest this in distinguishing between the intentionality of consciousness
toward objects and the luminosity of consciousness’s own participation in
reality. Yet he did not quite follow the
logic of his own distinction to recognize consciousness as an event of being
itself. He saw that consciousness grasped
being but not that consciousness is the grasp of being. We experience the transcendent because we are
already constituted by it. We know that
God is more than he reveals because we are persons who are always more than we
say. It is out of the non-saying that
all saying arises. This does not have to
be established by experience or confirmed by others for it is prior to all
demonstration. The order of being is
that which we live within. As such we
glimpse it without really experiencing it.
There is no way of avoiding the recognition that it is only persons who
can have such an apprehension of what passes all apprehension. In conceding this we are also acknowledging
that what they apprehend is that being is personal.
It
is not just that the person is a being. The person is the apex at which the
being of being is disclosed. St. Thomas ’s metaphysics
is based on the understanding that every being seeks to disclose itself, to
communicate what it is.[15] But he does not ask about how he knows this
and, as a consequence, it never becomes clear that being is personal. The
person provides the model of being without really showing why. To do that would require the enlargement of
perspective to include what it means to be a person. Then it would be seen that the person is not
an event within being but the event of being.
As that which comes from what is not, the person exemplifies the
emergence of being. We can ask about the
source of being because we are ourselves engaged in the advent of being. We know that it comes from that which is
not. That which can set itself aside so
that being might be is what it means to be a person. Within inwardness the whole of being is
contained in the mode of what is beyond being.
To say that the movement of self-unfolding in all things is
teleological, as St. Thomas
suggests, is itself a perspective that depends on the assignment of purpose of
which persons alone are capable. In
doing that, however, they are already contemplating it from outside. Freely they assign purpose because they are
not subsumed within a regime of purpose.
When we ask about what it is that can assign purpose, we know that it
cannot be explained in terms of purpose.
The only explanation of being remains what is outside of it. Only the person occupies that role. But this means that explanation falls short
for we cannot penetrate to what it means to be a person. We apprehend being from within the highest
perspective available to us, that is, from the vantage point of the
person. The culminating moment is the
self-disclosure of the One whose self-disclosure has been dimly intuited all
along. We encounter the God whom we have
always known.
To
be a person is to know what it means to be a person. It is to live within that openness that is
there before all communication.
Signifying is the capacity to relate to others what can be said but it
cannot say what cannot be said, signifying itself. We can point everything out but we cannot
point out pointing. It cannot be taught,
for all teaching begins with it. We are
there before there is a there.
Consciousness is very often taken as the starting point for all
discussion about the person, and has notoriously been invoked as the sine qua
non of being a person. This in turn has
led to the question of whence consciousness has arisen. The expectation is that consciousness must
derive from some more solid reality outside of it. What is less frequently noticed is that such
an explanation would provide us with no insight at all since it would only
reduce consciousness to what it is not.[16] We might know what consciousness uses, even
what makes it possible, but not what it means to be conscious. Just as we cannot understand money in terms
of the physical analysis of paper, so we cannot understand consciousness in
terms of anything but itself. The real
question is how we understand what it is to be conscious. Given that we are conscious of such an
endless stream of things, how is it possible to become conscious of the stream
itself? Of course we say that
self-consciousness is the indispensable accompaniment of being conscious of
something. But is this not one more of
the many things we “say” when we know we cannot, especially since being really
conscious of something is usually said to consist in forgetting our selves? To say that the self is merely unconscious or
forgotten in that moment is simply to beg the question of how it can then be
retrieved. We are hesitant to conclude
that consciousness is a form of un-self-consciousness, even though that is
exactly what we know. Loath to dislodge
the supremacy of consciousness, we know that the knowledge on which the
possibility of consciousness turns would also come tumbling down. Like Descartes we would rather build reality
from the isolated I than concede that even such an effort is underwritten by
what is before the I.
We
could not even be conscious without the relationship to what is other that
makes it possible. I become conscious of
what makes itself known to me, including what disclosure as such means. The world is knowable before I know it. The relationship prevails before the instant
when it is actualized in my knowledge.
Nothing is so utterly alien that we are incapable of comprehending
it. All can be assimilated to what is
known because we are borne by an abiding trust in the order underpinning all
things. To say that this is faith, that faith makes knowledge possible, still
connotes too much of the subjective. We
are unused to marking faith with the seal of certainty. Yet what could be more certain than what
makes all certainty possible? We may not
be certain of what we know but we are certain of certainty. Even to ask the question is to stand within
certainty. It is to say, before I know
there is certainty. That is what makes
it possible for me to know. Descartes’s
mistake was to think he could ground certainty in something more than itself;
it was to confuse faith with knowledge.
We cannot know what makes knowing possible. But how then do we characterize what we know
of that relationship that makes knowledge possible? It is a relationship we cannot know because
we live within it. No one needs to
instruct us and no one can receive instruction in it, for all instruction takes
place within its boundary. The
transcendence of the person can be glimpsed by consciousness because it is
prior to consciousness. Metaphysics is
not what we establish but what establishes us.
This is why it is a great error to identify the person with
consciousness or even with the notion of self-identity. Neither would be possible unless the person
was more than either of them. Outside of
all that marks the person is the person him or herself.[17] That is what is disclosed in the reverence
that is owed to the person from before birth to the moment of death.
We
know what it is to be a person before any encounter has taken place. Nothing in what is disclosed can disclose
what lies beyond all disclosure, and we know this only because we are persons
who encounter other persons. All that
matters lies outside of what can be discerned.
The person is before being. This
is why the question of being, of the ground of that which is, is not just a
question incidental to the person. It is
the question of the person, for the person occupies precisely that
question. The only remaining question is
how we know this since as persons we are not strictly speaking in being. We are ever coming into being, but this is a
possibility that requires that we are definitively incapable of containment
within being. This is the aspect that
brings into focus the highest dignity of the person as limitless transparence. The person lives in the luminosity of the
person. The beyond being is glimpsed in its transcendence. Language is defeated
in its capacity to say only what is, yet that defeat does not have to be final. The very fact that we have adverted to it already
initiates a reversal. Through the
paradox of non-saying the more-than-sayable can be said. Indeed it turns out that all language carries
that overflowing within it. Containing
the uncontainable is what gives the whole vitality and unstoppability to what
we say. The problem is that without the
constancy of warning signs against it we are prone to lapse into amnesia. We forget the person as the condition of
possibility of all saying and doing.
Being massively intrudes into the space that previously had been
occupied or, rather, non-occupied by what makes it possible for it to be
discerned as being. Otherwise than
being, to borrow Levinas’s ascription of the project, requires more than the
responsibility evoked by the face of the other.[18] It demands an understanding of what it means
to be a person who is and is not present within a face.
Being
must be discovered, not as the alternative, but as the possibility of the
person. It is within the horizon of the
person that the whole movement of existence can be contained. There is no other model available. Immanence and transcendence are fragmentary
aspects of what the person alone makes whole.
There is no ontology of the person because the person is the
encompassing ontology. The only reason
that our philosophical discourse has not descended into sheer chaos is that we
have integrated in person what we could not integrate in thought. In this sense what will be attempted in the
present work is nothing new. It is what
we have known all along yet never found the way to admit. Persons stand outside of being. Is that not the presupposition of the
Parmenidean pronouncement of the Is? Could
he have declared being if he was not apart from it? Even to suggest, as Parmenides does, that
thinking and being are one, has remained an enigmatic pointer to this
realization.[19] Thinking we know is possible because it is
not subsumed within the being it thinks about.
Yet there is the point at which thinking and being are one, since
thinking is itself in being. But how is
this Parmenidean thought itself possible?
That is what has what has proved so elusive for millennia. Only the realization that Parmenides is
himself a person furnishes the answer, for then the thought of being is
separable and inseparable from thinking it.
The person is the pivot of thinking and being, and that thought is
inseparable from the being of the person.[20] We cannot step outside of the horizon of the
person for it is the person that provides the horizon for everything else.
Our
purpose here is to sketch that recentering of reality within the person. Instead of seeing the person within reality,
now we must attempt to find reality within the person. This is not to suggest that we embrace a
radically subjective perspective, for subjectivity is only a possibility for
persons who are not reducible to it.
They can be subjective only because that is not what they are. Persons can behold their own subjectivity, demonstrating
that they are as much objective about themselves. The categories simply do not apply. We know this unquestionably in the persons we
know and love. They are neither locked
within their inwardness nor exhausted in all they have said or done. Outweighing both the subjective and objective
dimensions they are each the unique pivot of the whole of reality. This is how we relate to them. While occupying their particular finite
terrain, they become to us the whole world.
All human relationships turn on this unsurpassably personalist
metaphysics. The person exceeds all other
reality. The problem is that our
language, with all of its presumptive metaphysical capacity, has utterly failed
to capture this. We know what we cannot
say for all of our saying consigns the person as a part of reality. It is only within the political realm that an
opening has occurred within the dominance of the quantifiable. There we have been compelled to admit that
persons are not entities in the same way as everything else. They cannot be commodified, instrumentalized,
or reified, for they are inexhaustible sources of meaning and value to whom we
owe unlimited reverence and respect.
None is replaceable and none can be discarded. Whatever benefits might accrue to the whole
society they are not worth gaining if it means the sacrifice of its humblest
member. In this sense each is a whole
outweighing the whole. The language of
dignity and rights, with all its attendant implication of indivisibility and
inexhaustibility, is the point at which the transcendence of the person comes
into view. Yet even that most deeply
affirmed conviction has not found the philosophical means for its
articulation. We simply know that we do
not wish to belong to any society that would live at the expense of its most
vulnerable members.[21] To say why this is profoundly wrong we are
thrown back on the vaguest formulas about fairness or reciprocity that only beg
the question of the source of their imperative.
What
we do not possess is an account of the person as transcending the political
community as such. This is not the
notion that the person is destined for union with God in eternity but the far
more concrete exemplification of the way in which the person includes the
association of which he or she is a member.
Politics that guards the infinite dignity and worth of the person is
correlative to the person who guards the political with an infinite care and
dedication. The existence of any polity
is secured only by members who are prepared to sacrifice themselves for it. To conceptualize this as a contract is to fall
wide of the mark, for what can be given to those who have given all? They have made unmistakably clear that the
polity exists, not for the sake of benefits or even for survival, but for the
sake of the community of those who have fully transcended themselves. Its only adequate form is one that
acknowledges its character as a community of persons, each of whom is a whole
for whom the whole must be continually ready to set itself aside. A community of persons is reciprocal, not
just in the ordinary sense of mutual courtesy, but in the sense of that perfect
reciprocity of which alone persons are capable.
All of this becomes evident in the political realm where action takes
place before its meaning has become clear.
In this sense the evolution of the language of rights is only a way
station on the journey towards the transparence of the person as the founder of
the whole and that, in turn, embraces the person as greater than itself. For the moment, however, that transparence is
elusive. All that will be attempted here
is a sketch of how it might be conceived.
To do anything more would be to request a far-reaching shift in the
prevailing manner of thought and discourse, a request that is likely to go
unheard. Perhaps what is offered is less
a beginning on that larger task than the issuance of a challenge to begin it.
At
stake is the person through whom the political community is possible and for
whom the political community must devote itself. Demarcation of the boundary of rights is not
enough when we do not know what it is they are intended to preserve. To respond that rights are attached to
persons presupposes we know what persons are.
It is that easy familiarity that must first be questioned, for anyone
who accepts it has not contemplated the nature of the challenge entailed in the
task of understanding persons while functioning as persons ourselves. The
confusion of persons and things has entangled our reflection ever since the
term homoousious was introduced to
distinguish the hypostases of the Trinity
(Nicea, 325). Since the two terms mean
almost the same it was evident that doctrinal affirmation had outweighed
philosophic precision, by favoring the language of substance over the language
of persons in relation to one another.[22]
The later introduction of the notion of subjectivity as what characterizes
persons served only to bifurcate reality into two different kinds of things,
subjects and objects. As a result we
treat subjects as if they were a different category of object. It is for this reason that thought itself
has proved to be one of the most incomprehensible of all thoughts. Thinking we assume must be intelligible in
terms of its neurological accompaniments, even though no neurologist reads his own
brain scan as the source of his analysis.
Science it seems is capable of explaining everything except science
itself. What can be more invisible than
the observer him or herself? This is
also why autonomy cannot simply be selected as the defining purpose of the
person, for autonomy cannot include what makes its exercise possible. Not only must there be something choiceworthy
for choosing to be possible, but its emergence cannot be determined in advance
of the choice. Autonomy discloses the
moral horizon of the person, just as science discloses the intellectual
horizon. The openness to others and to
reality is a possibility only for persons who are not things at all. They do not even exist within history for history
is a possibility for them only because they are always apart from it. Persons may leave their mark but they are not
reducible to what they have left. Only
art, religion, and philosophy, as Hegel suggested, are the exceptions to this
rule.[23] In those instances we deliberately intend to
put more of ourselves into what we say than the saying will bear. Art is that enterprise in its most preeminent
way. The trail of theological symbols
differs as the attempt to convey what is deepest of all and what cannot be
conveyed, our participation in the divinity that reveals itself as beyond
revelation. How that is possible is the
question on which philosophy turns, for it is only philosophy that declares
what all the other modes of personal existence know. That is, that the person is transcendence,
not only as an aspiration, but as his or her very reality. Nothing is higher. That is what Politics of the Person strives to acknowledge. Our task is to do what we can to glimpse what
cannot be known because it can only be glimpsed. How else can transcendence be
known but as what has already departed?
Nothing is left of what was there.
That is why only a person can know what it is to be a person.
[1] This is
very similar to Rawls’s conception of the bond of reciprocity that ultimately
defines a liberal political order, but where he focuses on the moral justness
of that relationship I wish to turn attention to the condition of its
possibility. Moral agreement is possible
only between persons who have somehow found themselves in a political community
with one another. It is an old problem
of social contract theory but for that reason one that is all the more intractable. The fact that Rawls presupposes what he
proposes is not a fatal defect in his thought, nor in liberal political theory
more generally, but it is a feature that cries out for attention. To suggest as much is not to invoke a
“perfectionist” requirement over a “proceduralist” one. It is merely to point
to the reciprocity that enables the conversation about reciprocity to take
place. The mutuality of persons is prior
to all talk of perfections or procedures.
Persons are the horizon that cannot be comprehended. Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2005).
[2] That
tension is present in the origin of the term “person” as the prōsopon or the mask worn by actors who
thereby establish their identity before an audience. Already in the beginning the term draws our
attention to what the person is not, namely the mask, the visible exterior,
rather than the interiority for whom such visibility is necessary. We are not sufficiently alerted to the person
whose mask simultaneously closes and discloses what is within. The person is not simply an identity. This is why it is possible for a person to
fashion his or her identity. For an
illustration see the fascinating account of the young Barack Obama’s conscious
exploration of alternative identities, in David Maraniss, Barack Obama (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012).
[3] For a
good overview of the many strands of personalism see the essay “Personalism” by
Thomas D. Williams and Jan Olof Bengtsson, Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2009) accessible on line. The term “personalism” first emerges with
Friedrich Schleiermacher in his book Über
die Religion (1799). In America it
appears with Walt Whitman in his essay “Personalism” published in The Galaxy, May 1868. See Bengtsson The Worldview of Personalism: Origins and Early Development (Oxford : Oxford University
[4] Surely
it is not just prudishness that prompts Kant to regard lewdness as a greater
evil than killing oneself. What offends
him is the affront to human dignity that abandonment to lust implies. It is this underlying conception of dignity
that he struggles to articulate in The
Metaphysics of Morals while conceding that “it is not so easy to produce a
rational proof that unnatural, and even merely unpurposive, use of one’s sexual
attribute is inadmissible as being a violation of duty to oneself (and indeed,
as far as its unnatural use is concerned, a violation in the highest degree)
(425).”
[5] This
shortcoming is not from any want of trying.
Indeed it may be the result of such a focus on the goal of human dignity
that the path toward it is overlooked.
Even in that preemptive format, however, the emphasis on the centrality
of the person has had invaluable effect.
I do not in any sense want to diminish what we can learn from reading
Jacques Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier, Gabriel Marcel, Karol Wojtyla and Robert
Spaemann, to name but a few representatives of a movement that goes from German
Idealism, into existentialism and phenomenology and includes an American personalist school, as
well as sociological personalism. A
useful overview is provided by Christian Smith, What Is a Person? Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good
from the Person Up (Chicago :
University of Chicago
[6] Metaphysics of Morals, 429.
[7] This is
not to suggest that there have not been impressive attempts to ground human
dignity in terms of itself. George
Kateb, Human Dignity (Cambridge : Harvard
University Press, 2011) and Leon Kass, Life,
Liberty San Francisco : Encounter, 2002).
[8] The
coherence of the unfolding of modern philosophy, despite its apparent
incoherence, is narrated in Walsh, The
Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008). The
personalist implications of this development are only touched upon in that
volume because they do not come clearly into focus within the main line of
modern philosophical thought. It is the
contention of the present study that the modern philosophical revolution
culminates in the realization that the person furnishes the horizon of
philosophy.
[9]
Heidegger. “Letter on Humanism (1946)”, Pathmarks
(ed.) William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 271.
[10] The
title of the present work might well have been “Persons Without Being,”
following from Jean-Luc Marion’s ground-breaking, God Without Being, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1991). Marion has mined the great potential of
phenomenology for an expansive recovery of the whole theological
tradition. As a consequence he has also
made an inestimable contribution to the enlarged account of the person,
although it is not fully recognized as such because of his attachment to the
language of the phenomenon. I would
argue that his work on the gift overturns the priority of the phenomenon, just
as it does the priority of being. The
difficulty is to find an adequate metaphysical horizon when metaphysics has
been left behind. This is why the
primacy of the person is so indispensable, for the person lives within the gift
of self even, and especially, when the gift of the gift comes from God. Thus I
affiliate myself strongly with the remark with which Marion closes the 1991 preface to the
work. “To give pure giving to be thought
--- that, in retrospect it seems to me, is what is at stake in God Without Being. It is also the task of my future work and, I
expect, of the work of many others (xlv).”
[11] This is
essentially the burden of an influential summary by Joseph Ratzinger,
“Retrieving the Tradition: Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology,” Communio 17 (Fall 1990): 438-454, German
original 1973. Something similar is
acknowledged by Karol Wojtyla. “In that
sense one may, and even must, speak about some kind of revolution which has
occurred in the ethics of modern times.
The substantive subordination of practicality to normativity had to
bring with it, not so much (as in the case of Kant) the rejection of the entire
teleological structure which had hitherto been dominant, but its demotion.” Man in the Field of Responsibility,
trans. Kenneth W. Kemp and Zuzanna Maślanka Kieroń (South Bend: St. Augustine’s
Press, 20110), 54.
[12] See
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge : Harvard University
[13] For
Richard Dawkins God must be a far more substantial presence if he is to be
present, The God Delusion (Boston : Houghton Mifflin,
2008). How can we be deluded about a God
who, even as Plato formulated it, is “beyond being” or is transcendent (Republic, 508)?
[14] Eric
Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974);
“Reason: The Classic Experience” Published
Essays: 1966-1985: Collected Works Vol.12, (ed.) Ellis Sandoz (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1989):265-91, and “Quod Deus Dicitur” in the same
collection, 376-94.
[15] Norris
Clarke demonstrates the extent to which St.
Thomas uses self-communication as a central conception
even though he never makes it thematic in a question or article. Clarke, Person
and Being (Marquette: Marquette University Press, 1993).
[16] See
David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
[17] This is
what is overlooked in the endless controversy over the self as an independent
core and as the product of a social-historical formation. The dispute makes sense only within the
recognition that the person is neither.
Beyond identity is the person him- or herself, whether that identity is
defined by a metaphysical core or a social-historical nexus. See John Christman’s lucid exposition, The Politics of Persons: Individual Autonomy
and Socio-historical Selves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)
which is itself written from a perspective outside of the alternatives it
contemplates. The readers too are
invited to consider perspectives that stand apart from them. The person is the condition of possibility
for the discussion of the person.
[18]
Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond
Essence (trans.) Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press,
1987).
[19]
Parmenides, Fragment B3.
[20] It is
instructive to read Heidegger’s extensive meditation on the famous Parmenidean
fragment as aiming at the horizon of the person to which he remains
excruciatingly close. Introduction to Metaphysics (trans.)
Ralph Mannheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959).
[21] “Once
we try to picture the life of a society in which no one had the slightest
desire to act on these duties, we see that it would express an indifference if
not disdain for human beings that would make a sense of our own worth
impossible.” John Rawls, A Theory of
Justice (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1971), 339.
[22] This
difficulty was compounded when the terminology was translated into Latin as
“una essentia tres substantiae” and the Greek distinction between ousia and
hypostasis was almost entirely lost. St. Augustine seems to
sense the problem as he notes that, although the Greek word prosōpa may be translated as personae, everyone prefers to use the
technical term hypostases so as not
to deviate from the formulation. In
other words “person” consistently drops out when we wish to be clear about
substances or things. For the issue
among the Cappadocian fathers as well as Augustine see Jaroslav Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), Ch.15.
Some evidence of the discomfort in the Greek formulation may be gleaned
from the suggestion that the Son is not homoousios,
the same being, with the Father, but homoiousios,
of a similar being. This is covered in
Pelikan, The Christian Tradition vol.
I: The Emergence of the Catholic
Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 209.
[23] Hegel, Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences,
pt. III : Philosophy of Mind (trans.) A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1971). It is worth noting that
while the title Philosophie des Geistes can
be translated as “philosophy of mind or spirit,” it might also be rendered
“philosophy of the person.” The latter
is what the vexed terms Geist or esprit have sought to name but, because
they evade the reality of the personal, they inevitably slip into the ambiguity
of a vaporous or cosmic spirit. Hegel’s
thought has suffered as much as any from this misunderstanding.
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