III. THE NATURE OF PERSONS

I suppose this could be titled, “The Nature of Humanity,” but that seems too generic and, well, impersonal, or “The Nature of Man,” although it’s hard to cleanse that of its sexist overtones. In any case, I have already said more about persons in the two previous posts than anything else. There is a sense in which the very substance of my World View is a paradigm of my view of persons.

• I believe that human beings are meaning-and-pattern-seeking creatures;
•  that it is crucial to our survival and definitive of our existence that we make some “sense of things;”
• that we will look for order in our experience and where order is not evident, we will create it;
• and, as Nietzsche said, and Viktor Frankl has more recently reminded us, a person who has found a “why” can endure almost any “how.”

In a revision of a lecture he delivered at the University if Indiana in 1961, Brand Blanshard—who expresses it far better than I could—put it this way:

The effort to understand is not a passing whim or foible; it is no game for a leisure hour or “lyric cry in the midst of business.” It is central to the very nature and existence of humanity. . . .To anyone who sees this, philosophy needs no defense. It may help in practical ways, and of course it does. But that is not the prime reason why people philosophize. They philosophize because they cannot help it, because the enterprise of understanding, ancient as humanity itself, has made us what we are, and alone can make us what we might be.  (Adapted from Brand Blanshard, “The Philosophic Enterprise.” The Owl of Minerva, Charles J. Bontempo, S. Jack Odell, eds. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975, 163-177. )

We seek our sense of meaning, our “seeing life together,” in a variety of ways that can be summarized, it seems to me, in the twin metaphors of the “filter” and the “funnel.” That is, we possess (or are possessed by) certain basic assumptions about the world. We employ those assumptions—sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously—as filters through which we view the world: i.e. we use them as categories or clues or codes by which we interpret our experience. Or, to put it another way, we use them as funnels through which we “pour” our experience.

These assumptions we so employ are, I would argue, never our inventions. We don’t create them, we inherit them; we don’t compose them, we learn them. But we also appropriate them, so that the “filtered and funneled” world which results from our uses of them—the world we have thus “seen together”—will have clear commonalities based on many of our culturally derived assumptions. But they may also be highly individualized. Indeed, the notion that “experience is the best teacher” is misleading in its simplicity—as John Dewey reminded us, experience is neutral until we reflect on our experience and learn from our interpretations of our experience.

As for my own “filtered and funneled” world, I must acknowledge that I have ingested some large doses of existentialism, which have influenced and provided some categories for my view of the nature of persons. From Pascal and Kierkegaard to Tillich and Sartre, the existentialists have provided an analysis of the human condition that is, for the most part, diagnostically profound and conceptually appropriate. It is interesting, for example, that Tillich’s existentialism comes from and permeates a basically Christian and theological approach, while Sartre’s existentialist foundation and conclusions are soundly atheistic (think of No Exit or Being and Nothingness). And yet I find that their assertions of the awesome freedom and finitude of persons and their call to an authentic existence that summons the “courage to be,” offer a compelling and needed challenge to the depersonalizing tendencies of contemporary life. Although my own commitments are less individualistic and less pessimistic than many of the existentialists, their general approach I believe to be largely compatible with the reverent humanism I have defined. 

I have also been attracted, and in some ways shaped, by an exposure early in my graduate studies to process philosophy, primarily through Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man. I want to say some things directly about his significant contributions, but he is also a symbol for my long and thoughtful journey from the purely “creationist” view of the fundamentalist church in which I was raised, to my college and early graduate school introduction to an evolutionary “process” that modern science had developed—a scientific theory that was summarily rejected and excoriated by my conservative Christian church and my circle of friends.

It was a jarring experience of several years, during which I was disturbed and hesitant—in my confused mind and my fearful soul—to accept what I was learning.  Some of my professing Christian teachers and friends had apparently figured out how to reconcile the evolutionary conclusions of science with the creation narratives in Genesis and the pictures of a creationist God in other Biblical accounts. I was much slower to reach such a comfort zone on this issue! But more and more of my professors and fellow students had come to terms with the evolutionary “picture” of nature that embraced the emergence and development of life, including human life, without losing their faith in a Divine Being who “started” the whole process. The closer I came to them, the closer I came to my own acceptance of this somewhat paradoxical and often confusing coalition of science and religion.  With the exception of the fundamentalist “band of brothers” in which I had spent my teenage years, this was one of the few times in my life when serious issues were decided by “jumping on a bandwagon” for the safety of numbers. This was also the beginning of my much longer journey of truly working through an understanding of the evolutionary process and of finding a number of issues that ultimately called for figuring out the relationship, or lack thereof, between faith and reason.

This leads me back from this important detour to Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit priest, paleontologist, philosopher, and theologian who became my mentor as I worked my way through a personal and broader understanding of this scientific orthodoxy. Teihard viewed evolution as a process that leads to increasing complexity. Before humans appeared, life was composed of a huge pool of separate, unorganized branches. He argued that the appearance of humans marked the beginning of a new age that brought an added dimension into the world—the power acquired by consciousness to turn in upon itself, which he defined as the birth of “reflection”: animals know, but a human knows that (s)he knows—recall John Dewey’s reminder mentioned earlier that we do not learn from experience, “we learn from reflecting on experience.” Since Teilhard also theorized that evolution has gone about as far as it can to perfect human beings physically, its next step will be social.  This was something he saw already beginning to develop in his time through technology, urbanization, and modern communications, which provided more and more links between different peoples’ politics, economics, and habits of thought. As fellow scientist and supporter of Teilhard’s  thought, Julian Huxley, put it—all of these social connections were providing the evolutionary process “with the rudiments of a head.. . . . evolution was at last becoming conscious of itself. “

While I would never pretend to be or have been an expert in existentialist or process philosophy—at my age, I’ve probably forgotten more than I knew—their basic trend in moving away from the “static” to the “kinetic,” from the “inert” to the “dynamic,” appeals to my sense of the nature of human life.

I think that I have established sufficiently my view of the centrality of the dialogical, reflective, and relational character of persons.  I have not, however, been explicit about the implications of that for the ethical dimension of human relationships. My ethical stance is that of “situationism” and I have been most influenced at this point by Joseph Fletcher. In oversimplified, plain English, this means that I believe rules and principles alone—as important, as inevitable, and as usually sufficient as they are—to be inadequate for making all moral choices. They cannot “cover all the bases” and the attempt to make them do so results in the multiplying of rules and sub-rules and precedents and exceptions—the kind of ponderous and unmanageable casuistry that Jesus confronted among the Pharisees of his day and that he declared to be bankrupt.

Rather, I believe that I must confront my moral choices armed with what I inevitably possess and do not wish to disown—

• the wisdom of the past,
• the rules of my culture,
• the investigations of science,
• the guidance to be found in the basic teachings of Jesus,
• and the shared values gleaned from other religions—

all seen through the filter (or poured through the funnel) of what I have acknowledged to be my prime value: the supreme worth of human personality.

Each ethical dilemma is new and cannot be prejudged or predecided, and my responsibility for my own choice is non-transferrable—not to another person, nor merely to a set of rules. While rules and principles usually suffice, sometimes they have not and they may not again. If what I value most—the supreme worth and dignity of persons and a selfless, loving wish for the good of other persons (enshrined in the Greek word agape)—seems best served by the alteration or abandonment in a given situation of a normally adequate rule or principle, I am prepared to do just that, and to regard it not as a “permissible immorality” but as the most moral act possible in that situation.

While there is a great deal more that could be said about persons, I’ll mention just two other points. Our language and, consequently, our thought patterns tend to be dualistic and thus cause us to view ourselves as a body/soul duality. I am as infected by that as anyone else and yet I find myself rebelling against it. In the ancient Hebrews, in modern science, and in the process philosophy/theology I mentioned earlier, the picture of humankind that predominates is holistic: all see persons as psycho-physical wholes and regard as inconceivable the idea of a disembodied spirit. That makes sense to me; it harmonizes with my experience. It does, however, raise some problems with regard to the prevailing view of the destiny of persons, which we have inherited from the Greeks; and, for that matter, it may run afoul of my own use of the term “spiritual” as a modifier for my humanistic approach.  That is the second point I want to touch upon.

We are preoccupied with the finality of death just because it seems so ultimately conclusive. It is the end of anything we can recognize as “life” and for that reason language fails us in trying to talk about anything that lies “beyond” death, particularly if one is uncomfortable, as I am, with the concept of a disembodied spirit. I don’t pretend to know what, if anything, lies beyond this life.  I am familiar with all the theological and philosophical arguments, as well as the problems they seek to address. Whatever might lie beyond death, I can use the word “life” only as an analogy or symbol to refer to it. In spite of that, the belief in and hope for that “something more” is among the most tenacious of human longings and shared, in one form or another, by many cultures and religions.

The Biblical promise of resurrection has the virtue of being compatible with a holistic view of persons. Like all other conceptions of life beyond death, it is unpicturable and unimaginable. There are analogies, of course, in nature and human life of one kind of existence as a preparation for a new, very different, and inconceivable kind of existence—e.g. the fetus in the womb, the caterpillar in the cocoon, etc. While there is nothing overpoweringly persuasive about such analogies, they do provide a point of reference for a hope that, in my best moments, I try to keep within my grasp.

With all of that said, I must confess that little is so persuasive for me personally as the intuition, the stubborn logic and the unrelenting hope that claws itself to the surface of my questioning mind and my longing-to-be-believing heart when I think about such persons as the several of my dear friends and members of my family who have passed from this life. And that hope has clearly grown since, within the last few months, I have lost both of my daughters. I accept that they, and my friends, are gone from my world of time and space, have mourned their absence from my life, and cherished their memory, but that is not enough—in no sensible world can such fair spirits as these be exhausted by however-many years.   The unimaginable grief that such losses have brought is touched with that tenacious hope for “something more.”

Finally, as for my use of the term “spiritual”—which is both relevant to the preceding paragraph and seems at odds with a holistic view of persons—I can only say that, like many others, I have experienced numerous moments in my life when I have been “touched” and overwhelmed

• by the beauty of nature, music, art;
• by intense feelings of satisfaction in an accomplishment;
• by many transformative moments of “becoming” someone else in a theatrical character;
• by the recurring ecstasy of a physical, emotional, loving “connection” in a personal relationship;
• by “rapturous” connections with what I can only describe as “the Ground of All Being.”

These human experiences—which, harking back to empiricism, they indeed are— seem inadequately described as mere biological responses or cranial synapses—which, indeed, they also are. But because I posit as well that there is “something more” hovering over such experiences, I turn to the familiar term “spiritual,” which may be a metaphor . . . . or more than a metaphor. And so, acknowledging the emergence of the notion of paradox, I’m saying that an experience which has a biological explanation, may also have a non-biological explanation, and I offer this as consistent with the definition of paradox on the Home page of this blog: “two statements or ideas that seem to be self-exclusive, inconsistent, but which, on reflection, may come together to provide a glimpse into the truth of things.” I offer the reminder, then, that even nature is not always utterly consistent, and if paradoxes can be found there, one might need to be open to their appearance at this significant level of our human existence—and, in some form, perhaps—our continued existence.

If in all of these reflections on personhood and human existence, I seem to fail from time to time to fulfill my beginning affirmations that we will make some “sense of things,” and where order is not evident, we will create it, you are probably correct! While I stand by my belief that these are crucial to us as human persons, I don’t offer myself as one who has “arrived” at every destination, but as a “seeker” who will continue—as long as I live and am mentally able—to try to “close the gaps” that remain, and live with those that don’t.

In the next post, I will with increasing humility turn to the nature of the natural world.