The title of this volume,
Looking at the Sun, comes from a line in
Austin Farrer’s
Faith and Speculation.
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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?
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.
