27 - Jacques Maritain's personalist conception of human dignity

Summary

If civilization is to be salvaged, the new age of civilization will have to be an age of theocentric humanism. Today, human dignity is trampled under foot far and wide. Even worse, it collapses from the inside, for guided by the pure perspective of science and technology we are at a loss when it comes to discovering the rational foundations of the dignity of the person, and to believing in these.

(Maritain 1990: vol. IX, 363)

This text, uneasy, written at the end of the Second World War as bolshevist totalitarianism spread over large parts of Europe, clearly marks the twofold character of Maritain's approach to dignity: rooted in a lucid and bemused view of historical actuality, it calls for philosophical, metaphysical and even theological steps towards finding an adequate response to the challenges of the present; challenges which science and technology are incapable of meeting. As such, Maritain the metaphysician (and theologian) is inseparable from Maritain the political watchdog – and even agent, since he was one of the indirect architects of the 1948 Charter of the United Nations on account of his membership of a UNESCO enquiry commission on human rights. His concern for human dignity, therefore, does not ignore the diversity of conceptions and practices made manifest to him by his experience with the preparation of the Charter. Yet, at the same time, the philosopher is convinced that, without a strong metaphysical foundation, the concept of dignity risks being effaced from the human consciousness. It is with this metaphysical and historical background in mind that Maritain's philosophy of dignity ought to be approached.