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Personhood and Community in a New Context

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 March 2013

Joseph A. Bracken S.J.
Joseph A. Bracken S.J.
Affiliation:
Xavier University
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Abstract

What it means to be a person is a key issue in contemporary bio-ethical issues. A new socially ordered metaphysics with greater emphasis on the long-range interests of the community might provide common ground for resolving points of difference. Colin Gunton's trinitarian approach to contemporary social issues and a somewhat modified notion of “society” in the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead are used in this essay to sketch such a new social ontology and to indicate how its use might at least change the tone of the current debate.

Type
Articles
Information
Horizons , Volume 35 , Issue 1 , Spring 2008 , pp. 94 - 110
Copyright
Copyright © The College Theology Society 2008

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References

1 Gunton, Colin E., The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 13–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Ibid., 17–18.

3 Ibid., 22–27.

4 Ibid., 34.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid., 149–54.

7 Ibid., 152. Not only Gunton, of course, but many other contemporary theologians have seen the value of the notion of perichoresis for the “social” or “communitarian” model of the Trinity, e.g. Elizabeth Johnson, Catherine LaCugna, Jürgen Moltmann, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and, in the Greek Orthodox tradition, Zizioulas, John D. with his influential books Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1985)Google Scholar and Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and Church, ed. McPartlan, Paul (New York: T. & T. Clark, 2006).Google Scholar As one might expect, they do not all interpret the concept the same way, with some like Johnson, LaCugna and Zizioulas emphasizing personhood as the indispensable precondition for community, and others like Moltmann and Pannenberg stressing community as the result of ongoing interpersonal relationality. I favor the latter approach since it better fits a social ontology in which the emphasis is more on the totality than its constituent parts or members.

8 See Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologiae IGoogle Scholar, q.3, art. 7.

9 Gunton, , The One, the Three and the Many, 166.Google Scholar

10 Ibid., 183.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid., 190.

13 Ibid., 181.

14 Ibid., 229. From my perspective, this is an important distinction which I do not find, for example, in the work of John Zizioulas. While he rightly emphasizes that personhood is a relational reality, his emphasis on being as “personal” (Being as Communion, 41, n. 37), on God the Father as the personal Cause of everything that exists (ibid., 40–42), on Christ as the divine person who mediates between God and creation (Communion and Otherness, 29), and on the way in which not only human beings but also non-human creation must be “hypostasized,” incorporated into the person of the Incarnate Word (ibid., 32), suggests to me that Zizioulas is still working with the classical Platonic paradigm for the relationship of the One and the Many in which ontological unity is always grounded in an individual entity, not a social totality. In describing the relation of God the Father to the other two divine persons, for example, he says that the Father “is himself One of the Many and at the same time the One of the Many who, in his capacity as a radically other person, yet inconceivable without the radically other persons, causes otherness and its ontological content [otherness as constitutive of the notion of communion]” (ibid., 36). This is certainly defensible theologically, but it is very different from the vision of community entertained by Gunton (see on this point his essay “Trinity, Ontology and Anthropology: Toward a Renewal of the Doctrine of the Imago Dei,” in Persons, Divine and Human, ed. Schwoebel, Christopher and Gunton, Colin E. [Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1991], 59Google Scholar: “To be a person is to be constituted in particularity and freedom—to be given space to be—by others in community”). Gunton's notion of “space to be” is quite comparable to how I will reinterpret the Whiteheadian doctrine of “societies” later in this essay.

15 Gunton, , The One, the Three and the Many, 225.Google Scholar

16 Ibid., 226.

17 Ibid., 231.

18 See Whitehead, Alfred North, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corrected ed., ed. Griffin, David Ray and Sherburne, Donald W. (New York: Free Press, 1978), 18, 34–35.Google Scholar See also Bracken, , The One in the Many: A Contemporary Reconstruction of the God-World Relationship (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), 146–55.Google Scholar

19 Whitehead, , Process and Reality, 6.Google Scholar

20 I find support for this idea in the notion of “non-duality” which has been so prominent in East Asian philosophies, e.g., the non-duality of Atman and Brahman in Advaita Vedanta Hinduism, Form and Emptiness in Mahayana Buddhism, and yin and yang in classical Confucianism. For that matter, with proper qualification, it seems likewise to characterize the non-dual reality of matter and form within finite reality in the philosophy of Aristotle and Aquinas.

21 Whitehead, Alfred North, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Free Press, 1967), 204.Google Scholar

22 Ibid.

23 Whitehead, , Process and Reality, 18.Google Scholar

24 Ibid., 34–35.

25 That is, for Whitehead the “common element of form” for the society as a whole is a derivative reality, an abstraction from the concrete unity of each of its constituent actual occasions. My own position, on the contrary, is that the objective unity proper to the society is primary and that the subjective unity proper to the individual actual occasions is derivative from that higher-order reality. At stake here is the difference between a “concrete universal” where the whole is more than the sum of its parts and an “logical universal” formed by a process of abstraction from particulars. Whitehead would presumably defend his position by arguing that unity presumes an antecedent process of unification and that “agency belongs exclusively to actual occasions” (Process and Reality, 31). Yet, for me, Whiteheadian societies (structured fields of activity) also exercise agency, albeit of a different kind than what Whitehead had in mind for actual occasions: namely, the agency proper to a group of entities working in collaboration. I am, for example, the collective unity of all the agencies at work in my body at any given moment. My mind is only one agency, albeit the most important single agency, within me as an integrated totality of agencies, both organic and inorganic.

26 Whitehead, , Process and Reality, 99, 103.Google Scholar

27 Ibid., 100.

28 Ibid., 31.

29 Ibid., 34.

30 Ibid., 61.

31 Ibid., 31.

32 Buber, Martin, I and Thou, trans. Kaufmann, Walter (New York: Scribner, 1970), 89–92, 111–17.Google Scholar

33 See on this point Doak, Mary, “Resisting the Eclipse of Dignitatis Humanae,” Horizons 33 (2006): 33–54, esp. 45–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Doak summarizes the argument of John Courtney Murray, one of the architects of Dignitatis Humanae, on the issue of the state's guardianship of public morality as follows: “the public morality to be enforced by law is that minimal moral behavior necessary for a decently functioning society” (47). But she also concedes that there are strong tendencies within Roman Catholicism and other Christian denominations at present to try to legislate morality in terms of a specifically Christian code of ethics and thus to restrict the freedom of conscience of non-Christians and perhaps even some Christians who for various reasons think otherwise. Dignitatis Humanae, of course, was one of the more influential documents issued at Vatican II in the 1960's (cf. The Documents of Vatican II, ed. Abbott, Walter M. S.J., [New York: America Press, 1966], 675–96Google Scholar).

34 This, of course, is especially true of the unborn and the comatose in beginning-of-life and end-of-life situations. They are unquestionably more vulnerable to attacks on their personal rights than a normal adult able to speak up for himself/herself. But, if the exercise of personhood is intrinsically related to life in community with others as I have argued in this essay, there may be at times circumstances where the needs of other persons in the community or the common good of the community as a whole would urge that the rights of a single individual in the community even to life itself be reevaluated and possibly revoked. Life sometimes demands very hard choices. But the thrust of this essay has been that, if such choices seemingly must be made, they should not be made by individuals acting on their own behalf but only in virtue of an explicit community policy that has been carefully worked out with full awareness of the dangers to victimization of others, above all, those who for whatever reason are unable to defend themselves.

35 Buber, , I and Thou, 112–15.Google Scholar

36 Ibid., 62: “I require a You to become; becoming I, I say You.” In his own way, therefore, Buber is much more alert to the reality of intersubjectivity than Whitehead, perhaps because he was thinking as a humanist rather than as a scientist preoccupied with cosmological issues. At the same time, if one allows for my reinterpretation of “societies” as structured fields of activity for their constituent actual occasions, then Whitehead's scheme provides a better explanation of what is meant by intersubjectivity than Buber's. For the notion of the “Between” in Buber's I and Thou is quite elusive. It only lasts as long as two human beings address one another as I and Thou. It evaporates as soon as the moment of existential encounter is ended and the two individuals begin treating one another again as He, She or even It, part of the “furniture” of their separate mental worlds (ibid., 68). Thinking of Whiteheadian “societies” as overlapping fields of activity for their constituent actual occasions, however, allows one to claim that the “Between” is a standard feature of all forms of intersubjectivity, not only at the human or divine level of existence and activity, but likewise at all levels of existence and activity within Nature, from the atomic to the intergalactic.

37 See Hegel, G. W. F., The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. Baillie, J. B. (New York: Harper, 1967), 229–40.Google Scholar

38 Ibid., 227: “Ego that is ‘we,’ a plurality of Egos, and ‘we’ that is a single Ego.” Hegel, of course, in the Phenomenology of Mind is working toward an understanding of Absolute Spirit which is in the end an individual, not a collective reality. But his insight into the dynamics of the master-slave relation is valid quite apart from the details of his own system.

39 See here Nichols, Terence L., The Sacred Cosmos: Christian Faith and the Challenge of Naturalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2003), 175.Google Scholar Nichols believes that the developing fetus at conception or sometime thereafter enters into a relationship with God which elevates him/her into an awareness of God as transcendent Other and thus establishes the possibility of eternal life for the soul after the death of the body. In this way God unilaterally confers personhood on the developing fetus, quite apart from any response to the gift of personhood on the part of the fetus (at least for the moment).

40 See Shannon, Thomas A. and Wolter, Allan B. O.F.M., “Reflections on the moral status of the Pre-Embryo,” Theological Studies 51 (1990): 603–26, esp. 622–26.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

41 See here Murphy, Nancey and Ellis, George F. R., On the Moral Nature of the Universe: Theology, Cosmology and Ethics (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), 115–40, 173–201.Google Scholar The authors, both in the Quaker tradition, make a strong case that self-renunciation for the sake of the other is both the dynamic principle of cosmic evolution and the core of the Gospel message.