Human Dignity

by Jim Beauregard

So far, no one has advanced definition of human dignity that has been universally accepted. It is a concept that has existed since the ancient world, and while the content of the concept has changed over the centuries, it has been looked to again and again in defence of human rights and as an aspect of understanding who persons are.

Human dignity is concept that is reached frequently in the domain of bioethics, and here the concept is contentious as well. Much of the criticism of the concept of dignity in contemporary bioethics traces its root to a brief 2003 piece by Ruth Macklin in the British Medical Journal titled “Dignity Is a Useless Concept.” Macklin argued that respect would be a better term, including respect for persons and for individual autonomy. The debate continues.

This blog opens a personalistic dialogue between myself and Simon Smith on the concept of dignity and what place it might have and personal was thinking. As such, the concept touches on many areas including the nature of persons, medical ethics, public policy, international relations, war, etc. As will become evident in this conversation, Simon and I come from different personalist backgrounds, he from the traditions of British personalism, particularly the work of Austin Farrar, and I from the European tradition of personalism, looking to the work of philosophers such as Juan Manuel Burgos, Emmanuel Mounier and Karol Wojtyla.  Each of the philosophers I’ve mentioned bring something unique to discussions about human dignity.

We’ll see what happens.

To begin with, I would pose a question – can dignity be defined? This is related to the question, “Can persons be defined?”  Many personalists of my acquaintance would argue that persons can be not defined, but rather described, as there is an aspect of their nature that is open-ended. To create a definition is to close the circle, to say, “This and nothing but this.” Human possibility stubbornly resists such limitations.  This is captured in the title of Robert Spaemann’s book, Persons: The Difference Between Someone and Something.  The personalist turn is a turn from thing to person, a turn from “what” to “who”.

The 20th century raised questions of human dignity more acutely than perhaps it had ever been raised before. It was a century of two World Wars, a century of genocide, beginning in Armenia during World War I. After the Second World War, the United Nations was founded and one of their early documents was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Notably, the personalist philosopher Jacques Maritain had a role in the formation of that document. The common denominator in the numerous documents that have been produced over the course of the 20th Century is that dignity is assumed but not defined. One might say, it is recognized and included in these documents while concerns about definitional description are left to a later date. This is a test really, I think, of personalist attention, particularly in light of the world that appears to be listing towards the right wing politics of exclusion, a phenomenon which of essence argues that some people count more than others.

What, then, is the state of human dignity today? I will close out this post with reference to David H. Calhoun’s useful chapter, “Human Exceptionalism and the Imago Dei” in Human Dignity in Bioethics: From Worldviews to the Public Square (Stephen Dilley and Nathan J. Palpant, Eds.  New York: Routledge, 2013).  He examines the concept of human dignity over the past 150 years and suggests that there are six traditions touching on human dignity that have emerged since the time of Kant: Adapters, Debunkers, Saboteurs, Caretakers and Restorers. 

Adapters: John Stuart Mill and William James are included in this category, who used the language of dignity in their work. James referred to dignity in The Varieties of Religious Experience, contrasting various religious traditions, some life-giving and some more constrictive.

Debunkers: under this heading Calhoun places those who have attacked the concept of dignity directly, asserting that the concept is incoherent, too broad to be useful etc. Also, included in this category would be Freud and B. F. Skinner, who thought dignity an unscientific notion, not operationalizable (more on this later).

Saboteurs: in bed with the debunkers of the saboteurs who indirectly supplant concepts of dignity through a re-visioning of anthropology. Darwin’s work would be an example of this, or perhaps more specifically, the use that has been made of it. Operating in John Macmurray’s Fields of the mechanical and the organic, human dignity can have no foundation. Darwin’s work called into question the very concept of human distinctiveness, and with it, the concept of dignity.

Cautionary prophets:  this group emerged as a reaction to the Saboteurs and also in response to the general breakdown of trust in social institutions during the 20th century, particularly in the wake of the First World War. It includes, but is not exhausted by, the existentialist tradition, growing from the work of Heidegger and Sartre.  Heidegger played an important role in discussion of dignity by raising the issue in the context of technology.

Caretakers: the long tradition of dignity expressed in religious tradition and in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant did not meet its demise in the modern world, though it has come under heavy criticism. This group includes some famous individuals, some of them operating consciously out of personals tradition: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Gabriel Marcel, Martin Luther King Jr., and Pope John Paul II (Wojtyła). 

Restorers: Calhoun sites this group is those who have acted on the concept of human dignity, rather than working in a more academic setting to define and describe it. These individuals work in the context of international relations, law, bioethics and direct patient care, and the vision is embodied in such documents as the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Helsinki Declaration, the Belmont Report and others.

Simon and I will be having a back-and-forth about this topic in the months ahead – you too are invited to join the conversation.

My Emerging Interest in Emergence

by Jon Fennell

Like much of my thinking and nearly all of my writing in recent years, my ruminations on emergence grow out of repeated encounters with Personal Knowledge by Michael Polanyi. For readers of a certain sort, the final chapter and closing sections of this book, which offer a dramatic chronicle of emergence (of life as well as of the universe generally), are extremely moving. For those who have been repeatedly disappointed by various reputed sources of meaning, Polanyi’s emergent account, founded on his unique epistemology and supported by his confessedly circular account of justification, is a much appreciated oasis in a vast and often baneful wasteland.

In 2012 I wrote a Polanyi-informed review (published in 2013) of Thomas Nagel’s strikingly honest Mind and Cosmos. During this enterprise it became clear that emergence was at the heart of Nagel’s atheistic account of a meaningful universe. But, while emergence is centrally important to both Polanyi and Nagel, Polanyi’s account is richer and more complex (though not for that reason necessarily more accurate). A comparative analysis of their underlying conceptions of emergence would have been quite fruitful in identifying their differing presuppositions. Alas, the review was already substantially beyond the allowable length for the journal in which I aimed for it to appear. So, rather than pursue the discussion, I simply noted its importance and implied that I might return to it at a later time.

As Polanyi and kindred authorities invite us to do, in the months that followed I remained open to new ideas and possibilities, allowing them freely to incubate when they arose. One such episode began when in late 2013 I read an essay by David Bentley Hart in First Things, titled ‘Emergence and Formation’. What most struck me in Hart’s article was his forthright rejection of the logic of emergence. Persistently piqued by Hart’s position, a new inquiry began to take shape. In the disarray that typically accompanies such preliminary reflection, one thing was beyond question: Polanyi was to be the vehicle by which I would move ahead.

For Hart, emergence is the ‘idea that in nature there are composite realities whose peculiar properties and capacities emerge from the interaction of their elements, even though those properties and capacities do not reside as such in those elements themselves’. He states that one such instance of (alleged) emergence is water: both hydrogen and oxygen are combustible, but water, formed by the conjunction of the two elements, is well known for its use in extinguishing fire. Hart argues that it is manifestly false to say that water is not reducible to its constituent elements. To say so is to ‘confus[e] irreducibility with identity…water’s resistance to combustion is not identical with any property resident in either hydrogen or oxygen molecules, but it is most definitely reducible to those special molecular properties that, in a particular combination, cause hydrogen and oxygen to negate one another’s combustible propensities’. He concludes, ‘At the purely material level, whatever is emergent is also reducible to that from which it emerges; otherwise, “emergence” is merely the name of some kind of magical transition between intrinsic disparate realities’.

I should quickly add that Hart is by no means a materialist, and his full position includes a critical role, as a formal cause, for the soul. Equally interesting is that Polanyi was a world-class chemist. But he is a chemist who enthusiastically embraces emergence, even, in the non-sentient domain. Take, for example, a clock. Insofar as it keeps time, the clock (which manifestly is composed of atoms, molecules, minerals, etc.) is, in light of what it does, fundamentally and ontologically different from the elements of which it is constructed. The clock, says Polanyi, is an instance of a lower level (here, a level well described by physics and chemistry) being seized by a higher level (the ‘operational principle’ measuring and telling time) and turned to its purpose. Polanyi invites us to recognize similar relations, in a hierarchical scale, between chemistry and biology, biology and physiology, physiology and (a healthy) body, the body and the intellect, and the intellect and moral and spiritual excellence. Polanyi’s emergentist account may be a corrective to the accounts offered by Nagel and Hart. It is, in any event, a comprehensive picture, given that Polanyi, consistent with evolutionary theory, but in vehement opposition to the claims of natural selection, explains in terms of emergence not only the appearance of life but also the wholly implausible but altogether remarkable existence of truth, beauty, and the good. In Polanyi’s grand drama, we find ourselves in a universe that is unfolding according to intrinsic ordering principles that, under suitable circumstances, are capable of actualizing a potential that was there from the beginning.

In coming to terms with and then writing on Polanyi’s emergentist philosophy, I soon realized that there already exists a literature on this subject. There is, moreover, a vast literature on emergence that preceded and extends beyond Polanyi. There is a reason for this. The human mind, in pursuit of the truth, is rationally led to consider emergentism. One suspects there is no other way to explain the world in which we live.

Jon M. Fennell is professor emeritus and formerly Dean of Social Sciences at Hillsdale College. Author of numerous studies on Michael Polanyi, he has also published widely on the philosophical dimensions of politics and education through essays on figures ranging from Rousseau, Dewey, and Rorty to Leo Strauss, Harry Jaffa, and C. S. Lewis.

A Poet’s Appeal to Personalism: a Note on Alyosha (Augur Press, 2016)

by Daniel Gustafsson

Two things, it seems to me, threaten the irreducible reality and dignity of the personal life today: reductionism and relativism.

In the struggle against these twin tendencies of a depersonalised age, philosophy should resign its role as the henchman of science – let’s be done 

With doubt, with your school-yard squabbles and hair- 

splitting, your wisdom’s distrust of delight... –

and accept instead its vocation as the shield-maiden of poetry. Personalist thought, certainly, must be responsive to both ‘extra-utile’ and ‘extra-rational’ sources of value and revelation.   

Hence my fond invocation of Alyosha Karamazov, saintly foil of the sceptical Ivan. Alyosha’s loving response to his brother’s venomously disenchanted worldview – his relational and symbolic refutation Ivan’s rational-empiricist argument – should be the riposte of the poet and personalist alike to the negations of materialism.      

He tells you, don’t look, don’t love, only think!

It’s enough to make the world shrink…

For the world does shrink, and we with it, if scientism and solipsism prevail against our mutual and ek-static mode of being. Poetry, meanwhile, is entirely premised upon the personal. The relational and irreducible is not only the subject matter of poetry, but its very medium and material – manifesting the ineffable in the corporeal, the invisible in the apparent: 

Grant us beauty to cleanse our vision…

 

For beauty is a radiant proof of that in human experience which overspills or oversteps the merely causal and mechanical. It is one of the surest signs of our moral and spiritual dignity and potential. Beauty should therefore be no less a source and aim of the personalist, than of the poetic, endeavour:   

That true design may vanquish false powers… 

For it is the poetic mode of apprehension, and the poetic mode of re-presentation, that safeguards a world abundant in its offerings of splendour and significance:  

The ground is littered with anemones,

And the finches are in flitting and flight…

Hence these poems seek to give place to wonder and reverence, the origin of real philosophy: not a practice of academic speculation, but a life lived in response to wisdom’s incarnate and ineffable disclosure.     

It is an unshakable tenet of personalist thought that we are dialogic beings. We exist face to face and, as it were, mouth to mouth; for language is an essential aspect of our inter-personal reality:  

Our lives are unfolded in language,

And we languish without conversation…

Language, for beings like us, is not only the functional projection of thought. Reflective, diachronic and metaphoric, the fabric of language itself offers new possibilities of meaning and of personal expansion. In poetry, this dialogic mode may be realised in its most distilled form. Dialogue can change us, improve us, and involves us in mutual transformation:

This is the fabric of our passion,

This is how we fashion ourselves… 

The lack of a dialogic sense has repercussions for the way we inhabit the natural as well as the cultural world. In a post-colonial and post-modern climate, pathologically uneasy about inherited goods and values, it becomes difficult to motivate care for a shared world, a shared language and a shared place. Our own time, zealous in its pursuit of progress and levelling, is impatient with reflection and disdainful of cultural preservation. Also our efforts to salvage the environment may, I believe, suffer from a lack of a relational anchoring and approach.  

These poems enjoin us, therefore, to care for a world endangered by entropy, deconstruction and desecration:  

          this frayed and threadbare fabric

Is not ours to unmask or unmake;

Our task is to love…

When gratitude is replaced by entitlement, mutual responsibilities by individual rights, resulting in a loss of historical as well as situated consciousness, personalism should serve to affirm those relations that make us who we are, as persons inhabiting – as well as inheriting – a particular time and place. We are not self-sufficient. Nor are we simply consumers. We are heirs and stewards, and the world is ours by trust: 

                   Now that we are of the living,

This long-cherished landscape belongs to us

Only in the lasting need of giving…

      

We live at a time when reductionism is becoming increasingly politicised. In the discourse of rights, the personal is entirely overshadowed by the individual and the collective, the quantifiable monads and masses susceptible to standardised solutions. To speak, as I believe we must, of the spiritual aspects of personal dignity and relationality is becoming all but impossible; indeed, religiously indebted and inflected language is becoming increasingly unintelligible.  

Hence my fervent invocation of Yuri Zhivago; for this poet and physician, an object of mockery for the materialist-determinist powers that be, was persecuted for his defence of the personal in conditions too like our own:         

And you’d never enlist with your scalpel,

The quill and chisel of your healing arts,

For their cure-all campaign of negation:

You have witnessed their botched operation…

We too have witnessed the wasteland of utility and universality, of platitude and bureaucracy; the reduction of all that is most particular, precious and perplexing in life to calculations of the lowest common denominator; and we summon against this malaise the healing arts of empathy and imagination; for we know 

That life is all muteness and misery

Unless blood is married to metaphor,

Unless the heart-walls and the measured floor

Break open to music and mystery…

Daniel Gustafsson is a bi-lingual poet and philosopher. Working at the intersections of philosophy, theology and the arts, he seeks to affirm the irreducible nature of language, beauty, and personhood. Daniel received a PhD in Philosophy from the University of York in 2014. Debut collections of poetry in both English (Alyosha, Augur Press) and Swedish (Karve, Axplock) appeared in the summer of 2016. Daniel currently works in secondary education and divides his time between Yorkshire and his native land. In his spare time, he practises the patient arts of angling and tea-drinking. 

On Human Dignity

by James Beauregard

My first trip to the International Conference on Persons was the conference held at the University of Lund Sweden in August 2013. A few months earlier, I had emailed Jan Olaf Bengtsson about his entry on personal in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and in the conversation that followed he invited me to submit an abstract for consideration for the 13th ICP, and then, suddenly, I was walking down the oldest street in Scandinavia, learning to say, "hey hey” in greeting upon entering the city’s many shops, and, in the company of Dick Prust, learning that Lund has some excellent Italian restaurants.

At the opening event for the conference, I was very vivid memory of Randy Auxier getting us organized and ready to go, and not infrequently I recall his brief comments on human dignity as something that ought to be concerned with. This is an enormously refreshing, moving as I often do in a clinical, medical and scientific world in which such considerations tend to be raised only on occasion and bioethics committees.

The question of dignity, though, is bigger than that and I'm in agreement with Randy that it is something about which all Personalist thinkers ought to be concerned. Being an academic as well as a clinician, one of the recent ways that concern emerged was in a review of book on human dignity and bioethics that I wrote for the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, and, if any further proof was needed that no good deed goes unpunished, I was asked by the I was ultimately asked by editors to do a podcast on human dignity. Needless to say, this has caused me to think of some length about it, as have my discussions with my British friend and colleague Simon Smith, is an ongoing part of our transatlantic discussion.

What is dignity and how is it grounded? As is the case with many questions of philosophy, the answer begins somewhere else, and specifically with persons. Dignity questions are, I would suggest, at the root ontological and epistemological ones which bear fruit in philosophical anthropology and ethics. The 13th ICP was fertile ground for all of these, as the Anglo-American and European traditions of personalism came into a more conscious conversation.

Some years ago, neuroscientist Ruth Macklin referred to dignity as a “useless concept” when speaking of the field of bioethics, and instead argued that concepts such as "autonomy" will be much more useful, the term dignity being far too vague to be useful. But, our autonomy and dignity the same thing? The latter seems far more extensive than the former, and respect for autonomy really can't cover all of the issues that are rising concerns about human dignity and human rights, and a becoming ever increasingly intertwined in contemporary discourse.

What’s needed in the end is a robust and full throated conception of persons out of which a defensible concept of dignity can flow.