by Simon Smith
Einstein supposedly defined
insanity as ‘doing the same thing over and over again, while expecting
different results.’ I’m not sure. I’ve made pizza dough many, many times and have
no intention of stopping, even if everyone begs me, for the love of God, to
stop. One could call that ‘insanity’.
Or ‘malice’. I prefer to think of it as ‘practising’. And yes, I do hope that
one day will see a different result: viz. an edible pizza crust.
I’m
exaggerating; technically, it’s always
edible.
Another
name for lunatic repetition might be ‘philosophy’. Not the sort wherein one
reflects upon one’s values and the goals at which one aims. By ‘philosophy’, I
mean the sort in which people, in full retreat from real life, abstract and conceptualise
concrete relations utterly, while simultaneously over-simplifying and
over-complicating everything: i.e. academic
philosophy.
Philosophy
often seems to be an endless reiteration of the same debates without the least
hope of anyone changing their mind. Hence one reviewer’s comment on my book
(still available from
evil
empires and
not-so-evil-empires
): the arguments are perfectly sound, but it’s unlikely to convince anybody.
Well, of course not. What kind of idiot would be convinced by sound logical
argument?
(My
favourite response was from the commentator who observed that, ‘nothing could
improve this book’. Is that a complement or not?)
Or take the
ever-lasting, fart-flavoured gobstopper that is philosophical realism. That
realism is logically incoherent and empirically false
means nothing; realist philosophers remain committed to this rubbish, not for
philosophical reasons, but for theological ones; and a bad theology at that.
Sadly, personalist
philosophers don’t buck this trend very hard. This is frustrating because those
within the tradition often regard personalism as radical, even revolutionary. When
personalists foregather, however, we discuss – endlessly – the nature of
‘personhood’: what persons are or
what it means to be a person. Consequently,
personalism rarely gets very far or does anything very useful. And when someone
does put personalist ideas to work in some concrete way, their efforts fall
flat because they’re predicated on a concept of persons that hasn’t been
thought through. It’s catch-22 without the funny bits.
That’s the
trouble with grounding your philosophy in a single idea: if you can’t agree
what the idea means, you’re stuffed.
Not all personalists don’t disagree about everything, of course. Many, for example,
resist definition of the term ‘person’ because definitions risk foreclosing on
meanings. Instead, they aver, there is a dynamism to ‘personhood’ which
definition can’t capture. And they aver this, spite of their hidebound
attachment to an antediluvian and unworkably inert metaphysics of substance.
There’s
also the idea, borrowed from the late Robert Spaemann, that a person is not
something but someone. This does not, I think, help us
very much. Very well, we agree what persons are not; the question is, what are
they? Moreover, unless we can explain what we mean by ‘thing’ without relying
on the as-yet-unexplained notion ‘person’, what have we done but beg the
question?
Just here,
someone will almost certainly start thumping on about God. We are persons
because God made us so. Quite possibly, but what have we actually explained by saying
so? Sweet Jemima Crankshaft, that’s what.
And then
there’s the tendency to regard ‘person’ as a moral term; that’s my particular
error. Simply put, it means, to be a person, one must behave personally, i.e.
treat others as persons: participate constructively in their development.
Whether an
essentially moral conception of ‘personhood’ explains anything is debatable.
What it most assuredly doesn’t do is explain everything we might mean when
talking about persons. It does not, for example, explain bad people. It just writes
them out of our philosophy. But do we really want to deny that bad people are
persons? Possibly, but it’s not a good idea. We don’t really want to say it’s
acceptable to treat someone as an object as long as they’ve acted like an
arsehole. For one thing, denying others their personhood isn’t a very personal
way to behave. For another, give us each our deserts and which of us should
‘scape whipping?
Everyone is
selfish or thoughtless sometimes. Who hasn’t ever pushed an old lady in front
of a bus, or stolen from a homeless person, or sold drugs to children, or
pandered to the fear and ignorance of a privileged majority in the name of
political and economic short-termism, or contributed to the slow death of the
planet, or ignored the fundamental exploitation at the heart of the global
economy, or wished failure on their friends, or thrown away food despite
poverty and starvation, or sacrificed a virgin to the old gods by cutting out
and eating his or her heart, or deliberately hurt someone’s feelings, or
deliberately hurt someone’s body, or systematically undermined the basic human
rights of minority populations, or been a bit racist,
or punched a guinea pig in the face, or laughed when their mother fell down the
stairs, or…?
What were
we talking about? Oh right, persons. Again.
Conceive
‘personhood’ as a moral category, as I was wont to do, and there are some serious
consequences. For a start, not everyone is a person and none of us are persons
all the time. Even if we’re philosophically tough enough to take that on the
chin, it still leaves the fundamental question, ‘what are we when we’re not persons?’
While I
still believe that ‘personhood’ is actualised in constructive participation –
for good philosophical reasons – I no longer do so as insistently as I once
did. Clearly, to account for the complexity of real life, we must accept that
constructive participation is only one
form of ‘personhood’. There are others and they won’t all be nice.
The trouble
with all this talk about persons is that, even if we agree that persons aren’t
something, we still seem to be thinking about persons as some ‘thing’.
We’re trying to find a way of talking about this – what? Entity? Being?
Substance? But aren’t they just different ways of trying not to say thing or ‘thing’ while still very
definitely thinking it? They are.
Taking a
leaf out of Farrer’s book,
the solution to this, and to the broader question of what ‘personhood’ means,
is not to solidify the self but to liquidate it. Accept it: there’s no such
thing as a person. Not because persons aren’t objects (or ‘objects’) but
because, in one philosophically crucial sense, they don’t exist at all.
‘Person’ is a myth; that is, a story that becomes true in the telling and, more
importantly, the living of it. You are, in short, the story of your life. No
more no less.
Naturally,
some stories are better, i.e. healthier,
than others. They contribute to our development, our ability to fulfil our
potential and become what we may. Such stories will be constructive,
participative: they put us in harmony with others and the world, not just
interactively but interconstitutively. Other stories, I’m sure, aren’t constructive
or healthy at all. They may be stories of separation and difference, of the
other as a threat, something to be
feared and hated. Some are about the ossification and isolation of the self. And
we don’t always choose what kind of stories we live. We may choose some, but
we’re also born into stories, many of which we simply accept as being true. Who
we are and who we become depends on the interplay between these two kinds of
story: the one’s we create and the ones we accept, often without realising.
But surely that’s
another oversimplification. Are there really only two kinds of story at work in
any life? Clearly not. The interlacing web of narratives within which we
structure our lives is far more complicated. It will, most likely, comprise of
healthy bits and unhealthy bits: i.e. bits wherein we strive to fulfil
ourselves and support others in doing likewise and bits where we seek to defeat
ourselves and others with selfishness and rodent punching. Quite likely there
are also long periods where we stand around scratching our arses and picking
our noses because we can’t think of anything good to do.
Before
anyone starts muttering about how stories need or better still, entail,
storytellers, we’ve already been through that back in April, while
thumping
on about Derrida.
Of this I
am certain: there are no storytellers outside of the stories we tell; we are
made of myths. The person I am began life as a character in the story of
others: viz., my family. The story they told about me was a story about someone
who would make up his own story. This, I have attempted to do. Not with any
marked success, mind.
We’re made
of myths. That’s probably why evidence and reasoned argument don’t change
people’s minds, whereas a good, or at least oft repeated, story will.
Is that the
end of the conversation? Unlikely, I’m afraid.
One last
thought. There’s a theological problem that’s been bugging me for years, almost
since I began my studies. It’s this: once we realise that God-talk is, as it
absolutely must be, analogical, metaphorical, mythical, is a life of faith
still possible? Otherwise put, can one live a life in real, personal relation
to metaphors and myths as religious praxis
demands? The answer, evidently, is ‘yes, we do it all the time’. Money, power,
economics, politics, technology: all these are myths, stories we tell. Gender
is a myth; even individuality is a myth: disconnect the individual from the
network of physical and social connections which constitutes her environment
and what’s left? Nothing at all.
Given that
our entire lives are constituted by a matrix of interconnecting myths,
conceptual maps wherein we plot the course of our existence, the idea of living
one’s life in relation to the myths that we call ‘religion’ poses no difficulty
at all.
In fact, the real question isn’t, ‘can we live
our lives in relation to myths and metaphors?’ It’s ‘can we live without them?’