by Simon Smith
Conceived as a social reality,
the self is a powerful philosophical tool. Understand the relation between self
and other and we understand the nature of personhood. Understand that, and we
have the antidote to many of the debilitating dualisms from which western
thought has constructed itself. Antiquated oppositions – mind and body, subject
and object, transcendence and immanence – may be realigned within a framework
in which self and other are intimately reconnected. In order to deliver this
antidote, however, the social self must walk a narrow path, one bordered on
either side by those very oppositions and the ever-present threat of reduction
to one or the other.
On one side,
it seems, lies the lure of sociality itself. Too far in that direction and the
self is lost amid the flux and flow of interpersonalities. That was Levinas’
famous challenge to Buber’s primal connection, succinctly expressed in the
primary word I-Thou. The sheer
‘inclusivity’ of this, Levinas argued, fatally undermines the ontological
security of both self and other, so
defeats the possibility of real relation: without relata, there can be no
relation; and without relation, the essence of personhood itself, morality,
must be abandoned. The net result is liable to be some kind of behaviourism, or
functionalism as it has become. We are, as Sartre saw, what we do, no more.
Concede as much, however, and empirical thinkers will not be long in pressing
home their advantage: materialist reduction awaits. With morality gone and
nothing to account for but flux and flow, why speak of persons at all? Why
speak in fact, of anything but the colliding forces that make up the physical
universe?
So much for
sociality. Of course, the other side of the path offers no better prospect.
Step that way and we are on the road to retreat, back to ontological priority
and Cartesian ego-isolationism. One might suppose that, since the laying of
Descartes’ machine-dwelling ghost last century, there would be little threat
from that quarter. The spirit of radical subjectivity is a restless one,
however. Not only does it haunt every kind of realism, as the likes of Peter
Byrne and William Alston have unwittingly made clear, it also finds new
votaries among trans- and posthumanists – Oxford’s Nick Bostrom, for example –
and neuroethicists. Even the most dedicated scholars of personhood, such as the
noted Personalist, Juan Manuel Burgos, cannot escape its influence. Burgos’
Modern Ontological Personalism seeks to explicate the self in all its richness
and complexity; but still it remains in thrall to the self-in-itself.
Evidently,
what is needed here, if we are to keep our concept of persons on the straight
and narrow, is a radical re-think of the terms in which philosophical
anthropology may be conducted. For this, we turn to two thinkers not commonly
associated: Austin Farrer and Ludwig Feuerbach. Serving the more facile needs
of empiricists and realists, popular opinion of Farrer and Feuerbach has tended
towards misconstruction and the rationalist’s propensity for all-too-easy
pigeonholing. Thus, the former is usually designated a merely traditional thinker, an orthodox Anglican apologist; the
latter meanwhile is a merely
transitional figure, frequently sidelined in favour of more familiar purveyors
of the hermeneutics of suspicion. Popular opinion is, of course, entirely
wrong.
In fact,
Farrer and Feuerbach had more in common than many commentators realise.
Crucially, for our purposes, what they had in common was a visionary concept of
the self, one that remains in the vanguard of philosophy and theology.
The key to
this visionary concept is action; action in the full and proper sense, that is: action
as essentially personal; acts owned and authored; acts intended, deliberately
executed; acts that body forth those intentions and deliberations, that embody meaning.
Such acts are, indeed, the primary manifestation of personhood. For
action is ontologically basic; in Farrer’s Latin phrase, esse est operari: to be is to act, better still, to interact. Further, that locates the self
in a world of objects and, most importantly, others; for action is inherently
correlative: it requires at least two interagents.
Therein lies
the vital clue, not only to what it means to be a person, but to how I become
one. Personal action co-opts both self and other in the process of mutual
self-construction. In short, personhood is interconstitutive,
fully participative: personhood is
creative participation in the becoming of another.
Just as it
reconnects us, one to another, so personal action also supplies a much-coveted
identity criterion. It preserves the self from dissolution, not by capitulating
to demands for the prefabricated priority of a self in se, but simply by commissioning each of us as the agent of our
own acts. Nota bene, the inference
from intended act back to intending agent cannot be made logically
‘watertight’. Rather, it is presuppositional, supplies, that is, not necessary
but adequate conditions for making
sense of acts as intended, as meaningful.
Fully
qualified (in every sense) by the logic of intending, personal action also
carries the first condition of knowledge: concrete connection. Reconnecting
knowing subjects with objects known overcomes the substantival disjunct at the
heart of rationalist thought. In so
doing, it converts empiricist demands for evidence into a pragmatic principle:
reality known by the experiencable
difference it makes to those who know it. Deny this and every act of explanation,
including the one in which we are here engaged, is logically forfeit.
Ultimately, as
both Farrer and Feuerbach show, realigning philosophy’s founding dualisms –
subject/object, self/other – within a framework of personal action and
explanation destabilises the classical metaphysics of the self. In its place,
we find a new kind of metaphysics, an anti-metaphysical metaphysics which
establishes persons and person-concepts as the logical, ontological, and
epistemological bottom line, the key to measuring reality.
