Setting the Scene
by Simon Smith
The title of this volume, Looking at the Sun, comes from a line in
Austin Farrer’s Faith and Speculation.[1]
The line and the image were chosen for the beneficial light they cast upon
personalism as a distinct way of doing philosophy. By that light, then, we
should like to take a few moments to set the personalist scene, in order that
readers unfamiliar with this philosophical tradition may be equipped for the
several tête-à-têtes to come.
And yet, in
saying so, we have already led the reader astray: we have referred to
personalism as a “way of doing philosophy.” This is not strictly accurate; for,
in reality, there is no single way
that all personalists follow, no one methodology they all apply. When Jacques
Maritain, a significant figure in
European and especially Catholic personalism, surveyed the field, he
encountered “at least, a dozen personalist doctrines, which at times have
nothing more in common that the word ‘person’.”[2]
In fact, Maritain may well have been underestimating the
numbers. There are almost as many personalist doctrines as there are
personalist thinkers.[3]
Equally, however, Maritain may have miscalculated the differences between
them. There are many things that bind these thinkers together. There is, for
example, a vital challenge to reductivism in all its forms: the desire to
vehemently resist the impersonal and depersonalising influences that seem to
dominate, not only the cloistered world of academic scholarship, but also real
life.[4]
More than this, at the root of all forms of personalist thought there is a
fundamental commitment to the idea that, logically and epistemologically,
morally and metaphysically, persons are at the heart of things. Thomas O.
Buford put the point best when he identified persons
as “the supreme value and the key to the measuring of reality.”[5]
This brings us
back to our title. Farrer was evidently alluding to Plato when he talked about the sun. This image
points to the philosopher’s highest goal, the pinnacle of truth and goodness.
The sun is that which transcends the world of illusions and shadows, and in
transcending, illuminates it. Faith and
Speculation is a work of philosophical, more specifically, pragmatic
theology; we should not be surprised, therefore, to find that Farrer practices on the theological possibilities of
his borrowed image, using it to rebut any faux Wittgensteinian interpretation
of religious language. Twentieth century philosophers and theologians hoped to
rescue ‘God-talk’ from positivist reduction by designating it a language game. Nowadays, faced with an ever
more aggressive atheism, it is dubbed a “non-overlapping magisterium”, which may sit alongside, but must never interfere
with, the physical sciences. In either case, Farrer would respond with a simple “No.” “The
theologian,” he insisted, “is not picking a colour from the rainbow; he is
looking at the sun.”[6]
Theology is not merely one discourse, or language game, or magisterium, among others. Rather, it seeks to go beyond the entire
spectrum of physical science and worldly knowledge to offer a conception of
reality, which underpins all further notions of the finite. The sun is Plato’s
symbol for the fundamental grounds of truth and goodness, and so the only
proper subject of real knowledge. Likewise, in Farrer’s hands, it represents a
metaphysically basic level of understanding. This is the notion we want to
borrow for our scene setting.
No doubt, well
brought up readers have felt their philosophical hackles rising at this sudden
shift from infinite to finite. An appeal to metaphysical basics may be all very
well for pragmatic theology, but here, in a philosophy of persons, the leap
seems unaccountable at best. The well brought up reader need not worry unduly,
however. Certainly, any metaphysically inclined readers might reasonably wonder
whether a proper account of ‘personhood’ could be formulated without some
attempt to make sense of the language affirmative of God. One might even argue
that person-concepts are inherently religious: to be, or rather to become, a person is essentially – and
literally – an act of lived faith.[7]
For our present purposes, however, no such bold statements are required.
Instead we shall simply reverse the metaphysical emphasis, thereby softening
the claim. Our philosophy of persons and our theology are intrinsically
interconnected because persons supply the analogical key to religious language. In its very
immediacy, our experience, indeed our embodiment, of ‘personhood’ supplies the
clue, the model, and the primary datum required for making metaphysical sense
of the cosmos. To conceive a God of grace and providence, of creation and
salvation, we have no other clue than our own capacity to reflect them, that
is, to represent them, as far as we are able, within our own capacity to act.
There too lies the model, in adumbrated form. We should not know the meaning of
divine creativity if we were incapable of creative action, most especially,
perhaps, that creative action wherein we ourselves are made. In turn, those
acts may supply the data, the evidence of a divine will at work. If such
encounters do not embody that will, that work, then, as Farrer observed, “nowhere in the universe do we
directly meet the divine love.”[8]
For John
Macmurray – another of the of the twentieth century’s
great personalist thinkers – the “Form of the Personal” is utterly
foundational; its expression in and as the practice of religious faith is the
most “fully concrete expression” of that form.[9]
This is because, in lived belief, we find the primal connections wherein
persons come to be. In such connections, we discover the images and ideas
through which a life may be lived to its moral, spiritual, and intellectual
limits. Most importantly, of course, in such connections we encounter the
others who convey those images and ideas, who enact and embody them, and in so
doing, share with us the means by which we might make ourselves in their image.
From this, it follows that other expressions of the Form of the Personal –
specifically, Macmurray tells us, art and science – are inevitably abstract and
derivative. They discount from the concrete relation of self and other, do not
encounter the other directly and immediately, but only as a
shadow, a reflection of some narrower aspect of experience or as the subject of
some narrower mode of self-conception and description. Indeed, Macmurray would go so far as to suggest that the
physical sciences are the most abstract and, therefore, the most subjective because they rely, not on the direct
encounters from which real experience is made up, but on idealised conceptual
constructs and diagrammatic representations.[10]
Macmurray’s influence, his insistence
on the primacy of the personal, is clearly detectable in several of the works
in this collection. His writings have played a significant role in David
Treanor’s anti-reductive, anti-utilitarian analysis of end of life care, on
James Beauregard’s reflections on technology, and on my own anti-metaphysical
metaphysics. The reader may also detect a connection between Macmurray and Farrer. In this case, the influence
was more direct: Macmurray was Farrer’s tutor at Balliol College,
Oxford. Just here, we find a crucial personalist motif in action: the
interconstitutive relation of teacher and student; the intertwining of
personalities which, as they inform one another, also in-form one another; the creative participation of one mind in the development of another. Little
wonder they shared a person-centred approach to philosophy.
The vital
interplay of persons, finite and
infinite, might suffice to make our person-concepts metaphysically basic. The
idea comes home, however, in a more immediate and, as it were, more personal
manner. Our concept of persons supplies the key to the deepest and most
intransigent philosophical mysteries we are likely to discover in ourselves,
not least those arising from our talk about minds and brains. This sounds like
an ill-concealed tautology, and so it might be if it were meant to signal
Gilbert Ryle’s kind of bluff common sense towards those mysteries.[11]
That way lies disaster and defeat. We could not hope to fend off the logical
and empirical reduction of ‘personhood’, ever more keenly felt with
the rapid advance of neuroscience, by closing our eyes to them. To talk about
whole persons and their behaviour instead of brains and minds is not to address
the special problems those sciences have raised in recent years. But let us not
play false with Professor Ryle; he had a good part of the answer when he fixed
on human behaviour; if he had only thought to apply it. For in human behaviour,
which is to say, personal action, we find the physical extension of personal
consciousness, the ‘I’ embodied. Further, given that action
is always and necessarily interaction,
we find the ‘I’ embodied in a world of other ‘I’s. In personal action, that is,
we have the clue, the model, and the primary datum required for making
psychophysical sense of ourselves.[12]
For personal action and the personhood it embodies are logically and
epistemologically basic.
At this point,
the reader may be wondering at the wisdom of placing so much philosophical
weight on the narrow shoulders of the simple human subject. So ephemeral a
concept is surely not robust enough to supply the hoped-for moral and
metaphysical key.
In fact, the
reader may be surprised to discover that many personalists would agree. Persons may well be able to carry that
weight, for persons are an incontrovertible reality; they cannot be denied
without self-stultification. The human
subject, on the other hand, is an abstract concept; unnecessarily abstract
for so concrete and constant an element in everyone’s experience. Although we
have no desire nor, indeed, any right to legislate on language, such
abstractions seem likely to generate nothing but misunderstandings.
The danger
here lies in taking such abstractions for realities and allowing logically
unsanitary habits of thought to tempt us into the cardinal sin of classical
metaphysics, which Whitehead named the “fallacy of misplaced concretion.”[13]
Should we be led into temptation, we are liable to find ourselves thinking of
persons in terms of their separateness, their distinct individuality. Let us be
clear, then: when speaking of persons and personalism, we do not mean any kind
of abstraction; perhaps especially not the isolated egoism advocated, in their
different ways, by the likes of Max Stirner and Ayn Rand. We do not mean the
kind of social, political, and moral individualism, so often masquerading as
so-called ‘enlightened self-interest’, the kind of individualism which flowered
during the last two centuries with, let us say, mixed results.[14]
We do not mean the kind of individualism which dominates Western and,
increasingly, global culture, fuelling rapacious capitalism and consumerism.
Nor do we mean the kind which has infected every branch of Western thought,
from the “dog-eat-dog dogma” of “selfish genes” and “survival of the fittest”
to the rationalist’s utilitarian reduction of human life and human values to the mere
calculation of cost vs. benefit.[15]
We cannot do
justice to such bold claims in this brief introduction. Fortunately, there is
no need to do so; the reasons for holding such views are better and more fully
expressed by our authors. For the present, suffice to say that such
individualism is rejected primarily because it is, as indicated, reductive. It separates the self –
emotionally and psychologically as well as politically and morally – from its
natural context: that is, the community in which it comes to be and subsequently
blossoms. Reduced to a kind of bio-mechanism bent on – rightly so, we are told
– the satisfaction of desire, concerned with our own self-interest, however
enlightened, we are encouraged to reject the very other-orientation which is the underlying framework of properly
personal existence. There lie the seeds of moral relativism. Embracing relativism not
only forecloses on moral discussion, but also on morality itself. Once there is
nothing more to moral rectitude than what I or my society believe, then there
is nothing more to be said or done. The foreclosure of morality completes the
bankruptcy of human personality. That will hardly do. Who we are and hope to be
is inextricably intertwined with others, embedded in the relationships through
which we body forth our identities. ‘Morality’ is the name we give to our
thought and talk about our conduct within those relations. ‘Morality’ is the
tool we use to understand that most basic of experiences. In short, moral
relativism denies the fundamental experience of being human, an experience
which takes shape in our responsibilities to and for others.
This should
not be taken to mean that, in response to the depersonalising forces of
rationalism and relativism, all personalists subscribe to moral absolutism. If
there is another thing most personalists agree on, it is the risks of
overweening certainty. Rather, as Buford’s work on global bioethics
indicates, the tendency seems more often towards an honest recognition of a
plurality of perspectives. This is then coupled with the articulation of those
underlying, universal features which express the common and shared truths of
‘personhood’ in all its manifestations.[16]
Just as we do
not mean the socio-political individual when we speak of persons, nor do we
mean the metaphysical subject-self, the self-in-itself.[17]
For that, too, is an abstraction and a logically incoherent one at that. This
is because to conceive ‘personhood’ as radically subjective, is to conceive ‘personhood’
isolated from all possible knowledge and reference. Knowledge and reference
require concrete connection but what something is in itself is, ex hypothesi, what
it is apart from all connection.
The underlying
assumption here is, broadly speaking, empirical, more properly, ‘activist’ or
‘voluntarist’, insofar as knowledge is presumed to be a co-efficient of
activity. As any teacher knows, learning is a by-product of doing. In claiming
knowledge of this self-in-itself, we should be claiming
knowledge of something about which we could do
nothing at all; for that matter, something which could do nothing about us. The
disconnection is complete; the self lies forever out of epistemological reach,
transformed into a kind of psychological square-circle.[18]
May we not
still appeal to direct awareness or experience of our own cogitating ego, such
as Descartes claimed to have? That, as Descartes himself discovered, leaves us
radically separated from other persons once again. Perhaps I am immediately aware of my own
subjectivity, but how can I know whether you
are too? I have no access to your subjectivity; so how can I know if it is
there or not? By analogy perhaps?[19]
You walk and talk and think, just as I do. Is it not reasonable to assume that
you are, indeed, a genuine subject then? But the radical subject is what it is apart from such activity. Since I cannot
know whether my own actions are
expressive of my essence, I am not entitled to extend the inference to you. The
self-in-itself offers no analogical hook on which to hang
such judgements.
Even if we
were entitled to draw conclusions concerning the reality of your interiority
based on your activity, our problems would not be solved. Assuming we could
avoid behaviourist reduction – difficult enough under the circumstances – we should still wonder how we
know what analogies are; more importantly, how do we know what it means to be a
person, at all. To say “from one’s own case” is no answer, for now we must
explain how we know what it means to be a
case in the first place. Any attempt to do so will inevitably find itself
thrown back on the resources of a social context from which this construct
seeks to exile us. It is in such a context that we first learn to talk and think, to do and so to know. Otherwise put,
the logical and epistemological tools we use to explore our world and ourselves
are invested in us by other persons. It is only after they have planted these
seeds, after they have taught us how to tend them and make them grow, that we
are able to abstract ourselves, play at being ego-isolationists. Shorn of those
resources, this self-in-itself has neither others nor objects to occupy it.
About what, then, does it think? What is the content of its experience, its
knowledge? Well might one wonder.
Insist, nevertheless, that there is a core of
irreducible and inexpressible subjectivity, and the question remains, how do
you know? How do you know that this personal experience cannot be shared with
others? How can you be sure that it is not, as seems more likely, a lack of linguistic
facility? That I find myself faced by the ‘inexpressible’ may signify nothing
more than my inability to express myself. After all, history is positively
overflowing with writers and artists who have sought to capture the heights and
depths of human experience with considerable poetic precision. It is difficult
to imagine how, as Daniel Gustafsson suggests below, the likes of William Blake
could be considered anything but eminently successful in this endeavour.
Ultimately, then, when faced by this notion of
radical subjectivity, we are left wondering how it came to be and how anyone
came to know about it. To respond that it just is (there) and that one just
does know, is hardly the sort of answer to gladden the philosophical eye, still
less satisfy those bent on reducing ‘personhood’ to its neurological,
biochemical, or merely physical constituents. But what other answer could such
subjectivism have to offer?
So much for radical subjectivism and
socio-political egoism. They are nothing but shadows and illusions, logical,
moral, and metaphysical abstractions, empty of sense and meaning. Now the
Cartesian hangover is clearing, its ghosts and phantoms flee before the light
of our borrowed image, the sun.
Our point,
here, is a simple one. As the sun is Plato’s image for truth and
reality, so too it is ours, for the foundational truth and reality of
‘personhood’. Our every experience is framed in personal terms. How could it be
otherwise? All our experiential apparatus, from the perceptual to the
logico-linguistic, testifies to it; they are ours and no one else’s; they
supply our only access to the world of others and objects. All our various ways
of seeing and understanding and describing are devised within, indeed, are expressions
of, the matrix of personal relations
wherein persons are born and learn to be. This matrix of relations is, in
short, the necessary co-efficient of every thought and every action, all human
experience. Even those descriptions and discourses where no effort has been
spared to isolate and abstract the personal, to refine our thought and reduce
our presence, cannot step out, as Charles Conti puts it, from “under the sun”.[20]
The practice of science remains grounded in those primary relations. Its
discoveries are the result of free action, notwithstanding their frequently
materialist and determinist content. They must be so, otherwise the scientist’s
own claims would, themselves, be nothing more than causal consequences of the
interplay of natural forces. In and of themselves, causal consequences are
incapable of bearing meaning, even that ascribed to materialist and determinist
claims. More than this, the discoveries of science are the result of primary
faith commitments made by the scientist. They are commitments to the history
and tradition in which she has been trained; to the community in which she now
participates, taking responsibility for its judgements; to the belief that the
truth is ‘out there’ somewhere; and ultimately, to the idea that the
epistemological tools we bring to bear will be up to the job of finding it.[21]
Without such personal commitments the scientist cannot do her job. Macmurray may have considered the sciences to be the
most abstract level of thought and action but it remains, nevertheless, one in
which personal reality takes shape.
In the end, of
course, scientists are not the only ones who need their faith commitments.
Philosophers, too, must have theirs. This idea, that ‘personhood’ and all its
manifestations in personal action are logically, epistemologically, and,
indeed, metaphysically basic, is one of ours. It informs the essays in this
volume as they seek to shed light on their chosen aspects of it. It informed
our gathering in York and drives the Forum under whose auspices we came together.
Here, then, under the image of this sun, our
Personalist scene is set. All that remains for us to do is to introduce those
who are to play their parts upon it: our authors.
[2] Jacques Maritain, The Person and the Common Good. (Notre
Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1947), 12.
[3] For excellent summaries of the
many different ways or approaches to personalism, see Thomas D. Williams and
Jan Olof Bengtsson’s article “Personalism”, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2016 Edition),
Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2016/entries/personalism/; and Thomas O. Buford’s
“Personalism” in the Internet
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed 26/02/2017, www.iep.utm.edu/personal/.
[4] For a more detailed discussion
of these reductive and depersonalising influences, particularly as they are at
work in modern philosophy and theology – much to the detriment of lived faith –
see S. Smith, Beyond Realism: Seeking the
Divine Other (Delaware/Malaga: Vernon Press, 2017).
[5] Thomas O. Buford, “Personalism”
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
accessed 26/02/2016, www.iep.utm.edu/personal/.
[6]
Farrer, 20. In this
context, the phrase, “non-overlapping magisteria” appears to have been coined
by Stephen Jay Gould; see his essay of the same name in The Richness of Life, 584-598, (London: Vintage, 2007).
[7]
That was certainly Farrer’s view; Charles Conti, too, has made the case,
elegantly and convincingly, in his Metaphysical
Personalism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995). Indeed, the religious or, perhaps
better, divinely inspired and extended nature of persons was also the crucial
element of Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence
of Christianity, trans. George Eliot, (New York: Harper & Row, 1957);
and his Principles of the Philosophy of
the Future, trans. M. H. Vogel. (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co. 1986).
So much is the central thesis of Beyond
Realism, itself an attempt to supplement and extend Farrer and Conti.
[8] Farrer, A Science of God? (London: Geoffrey Bles Ltd, 1966), 100. See also Finite and Infinite (2nd
Edition. Westminster: Dacre Press 1959) and Faith
and Speculation on the personal analogy.
[9] John Macmurray, Reason and Emotion (London: Faber and
Faber, 1962), 86. “The Form of the Personal” was the title of his Gifford
Lectures for 1953-4. These were published in two volumes as The Self as Agent (London: Faber and
Faber, 1957) and Persons in Relation
(London: Faber and Faber, 1961).
[10] Macmurray, The Self as Agent, 200. For a conception of science as a
prototypical expression of human freedom in community, cf., although not
necessarily in search of conflict, Polanyi’s The Logic of
Liberty (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998) and Science, Faith and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1964). For further discussion of Polanyi’s view on this, see S. Smith’s “Unfair
to Social Facts: John Searle and the Logic of Objectivity” in The Balkan Journal of Philosophy 6:1
(2015) and “Authority and Practice: General and Specific Authority in Science
and Society” in Freedom, Authority and
Economics, ed. R. T. Allen (Delaware/Malaga: Vernon Press, 2016).
[11] See Ryle’s The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1960).
[12] That, in fact, is what Farrer did in the central chapters of Finite and Infinite and then, in greater
detail, his Gifford Lectures for 1956-1957, published as The Freedom of the Will (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1960).
By locating the seat of consciousness, not in the brain, as is traditional, nor
any other thing, but in personal
action, Farrer resolved that classical dichotomy and realigned mind and body.
Personal action locates the agent immediately and unmistakably in a social
situation, suggesting that consciousness or ‘personhood’ does not exist in the self at all but rather flowers in
and as interpersonal transactions.
[13]
Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Free
Press, 1978), 18. There is also the risk that our understanding of persons
might be supposed to have some underlying biological bias, ‘persons’ being
intrinsically or inevitably members of the species homo sapiens. We shall not pursue the contentious question of
whether non-human animals such as dolphins and the great apes could, in some
sense, be persons. Instead, we need only ask whether our concept ‘person’
necessarily rules out the possibility of non-human persons, thereby leaving us
open to Peter Singer’s charge of “speciesism” (Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (Cambridge: CUP, 1993),
55-68; 105-107). Personalists, like other philosophers, may well have their
doubts about dolphins. Yet, should we ever encounter other life forms capable
of being, as Stuart Hampshire put it, “interested in recalling their own
past and parentage” and, perhaps most importantly, of wanting to “tell each
other stories,” few would deny that they were, in some crucial sense, persons;
see Stuart Hampshire, Innocence and
Experience (London: Penguin, 1992), 44.
[14]
See, for example,
Stirner’s The Ego and His Own revised
edition, John Carroll (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971); and, perhaps most
famously, Rand’s The Fountainhead
(London: Penguin Books, 2007) and Atlas
Shrugged (London: Penguin Books, 2007). This egoism is a corollary of the
decisive shift away from notions of absolute truth and authority and the
embracing of radical scepticism which, in tandem, characterised the 18th
and 19th centuries. As Polanyi points out in The Logic of Liberty the rise of
totalitarianism was an inevitable consequence of this shift. Fascism and
Marxism defined concepts such as ‘truth’, ‘authority’ and ‘reality’ as power
relations to be wielded by a socio-political elite. In the late 20th
century a refinement has been added as such notions are understood almost
exclusively in terms of economic value.
[15]
For the expression
“dog-eat-dog dogma” see Robert Newman’s Entirely
Accurate Encyclopaedia of Evolution (Glasgow: Freight Books, 2015; Kindle
Edition) 518. The phrase “survival of the fittest” was coined by Herbert
Spencer in his Principles of Biology,
first published in 1864, which sought to draw parallels between Spencer’s
economic theories and Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.
[16] For a preview of this programme
and its far-reaching implications, see Thomas O. Buford, “What Can Personalism
Contribute to Bioethics?” Appraisal
10:4 (2015) 7-17.
[17] In all conscience, this is not
a view that can be ascribed to all personalists; it is a bold claim and many
would reject it vehemently. Juan Manuel Burgos, the prominent Spanish
personalist, is one who argues that “experience of the self reflects in an
existential way the irreducible subjectivity of the subject, what each person
is; what, in its deepest root, is not transmissible. It is not possible to fully
communicate to others one’s own subjective world” (“Integral Experience: A New Proposal
on the Beginning of Knowledge,” In the
Sphere of the Personal: New Perspectives in the Philosophy of Persons, eds.
James Beauregard and S. Smith. (Delaware/Malaga: Vernon Press, 2016) 43).
Burgos’ conception of the self is complicated considerably, not to say
confused, by the fact that he also and simultaneously holds that human
experience is “external and objective” and therefore, one supposes, can be “communicated to and observed by
others” (43). Burgos goes on to state that this apparent inconsistency does
not, in fact, result in the fragmentation, or more likely, the dissolution, of
the self. Exactly why it this is, is not, however, explained. More seriously,
perhaps, for the intelligibility of Burgos’ construction is his insistence
that, while the person is ontologically prior to any relation – and so is a person in se – persons are also, in some sense, essentially or
ontologically constituted by love. However, these two claims are not compatible
for the simple reason that love is essentially
social, a relation in which self and other are co-opted in mutual becoming. The
idea of love that could be held perpetually in abeyance is not coherent. These
latter claims occurred in Burgos’ paper “A New Personalistic Proposal: Modern
Ontological Personalism (MOP)” which was presented first at the 12th
International Conference on Persons, Lund (Sweden) August, 2013; and then at
the British Personalist Forum 3rd International Conference, Philosophies of the Person: New Horizons and
Perspectives, York (UK) June, 2016.
[18] For a more detailed exposition
of this issue, and of an ‘activist’ or ‘voluntarist’ epistemology, see “A
Convergence of Cosmologies: Personal analogies in Modern Physics and Modern
Metaphysics”, below.
[19] For the analogical argument to
other minds, see Bertrand Russell, ‘Analogy’ in Essays on Other Minds, ed. Thomas O. Buford (Illinois: University
of Illinois Press: 1970) 3-8. For a response, see the Introduction to Beyond Realism, 6-7.
[20] Conti, xxv.
[21] See Polanyi’s Science, Faith and Society and Personal Knowledge, esp. Ch. 7:
“Conviviality”.
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