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Personhood and the problem of the Other

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Ian McFarland
Ian McFarland
Affiliation:
Department of Divinity and Religious StudiesUniversity of AberdeenAberdeen AB24 3UB Scotland, UK Email: i. a. mcfarland@abdn. ac. uk
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Extract

The question of what it means to be a person is hardly new in theology, but it has arguably been posed with renewed urgency over the past generation. On the one hand, traditional answers have been challenged by those whose personhood had long been viewed inside and outside the church as somehow inferior or deficient (especially men of colour, and women of all backgrounds). On the other, reflection on the situation of people suffering from severe mental retardation, psychosis and dementia (not to mention the debates over abortion and euthanasia) has cast doubt on ancient and modern attempts to understand personhood in terms of self-consciousness or some other mental capacity.

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 54 , Issue 2 , May 2001 , pp. 204 - 220
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 2001

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References

1 See Zizioulas, John D., Being As Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir's Seminary, 1997), 33–35.Google Scholar

2 See, for example, McFadyen, Alistair I., The Call to Personhood: A Christian Theology of Individuals in Social Relationships (Cambridge: Cambridge ?Publisher?, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. McFadyen does argue that even in refusal ‘human being is always a response to God’ in so far as human intransigence is incapable of nullifying God's intention for dialogue (p. 45); yet the force of this point is muted by his subsequent assertions that the self ‘is not something one has so much as something one does’ (p. 70) and that ‘a person is to be thought of primarily as a pattern and organiser of communication’ (p. 78).

3 McFadyen clearly wants to avoid this implication, arguing that among those who cannot communicate (specifically, the severely demented), ‘[m]ere personal presence is enough to make some sort of claim for recognition as a point of orientation towards whom one ought to be directed’ (McFadyen, , Call to Personhood, 180)Google Scholar; but it is not clear how this idea squares with the notion that ‘there is essence and personal identity only in communication’ (p. 156; cf. pp. 69–71).

4 See the critique of McFadyen and others by Harris, Harriet A., ‘Should We Say That Personhood Is Relational?’, in Scottish Journal of Theology 51:2 (1998), 214–234CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I concur with Harris' view that it is important to distinguish the claim that relationships define the way in which we are persons from the idea that relationships constitute our personhood as such.

5 In this context, it is worth noting that John Macmurray, perhaps the most well-known proponent of the relational character of personhood, defines an infant as personal not on account of its capacities (for it has none), but in terms of its dependence upon others who treat it as a person. See Macmurray, John, Persons in Relation (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1991), 48–51.Google Scholar

6 For an analysis of the dynamics that shaped this debate, see Todorov, Tzvetan, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 146–167 and passimGoogle Scholar. Cf. Gutiérrez, Gustavo, Las Casas: In Search of the Poor of Jesus Christ (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993), especially chs 5–6.Google Scholar

7 Thus, the force of Kathryn Tanner's careful argument that human beings are owed respect solely by virtue of their status as God's creatures would seem to be compromised by her admission that ‘[t]he minimum standards of well-being to which one has a right will obviously vary depending upon the creature at issue’. See Tanner, Kathryn, The Politics of God: Christian Theologies and Social Justice (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1992), 179.Google Scholar

8 See, for example, Fulkerson, Mary McClintock, ‘Contesting the Gendered Subject: A Feminist Account of the Imago Dei’, in Horizons in Feminist Theology: Identity, Traditions, and Norms, ed. Chopp, Rebecca S. and Davaney, Sheila Greeve (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1997), 104–105.Google Scholar

9 These poststructuralist insights regarding the occlusion of the other were anticipated by Emanuel Levinas, who argues that the goal of Western philosophy from Plato to Heidegger has been the overcoming (and thus the exclusion) of alterity (see, e.g. Levinas, Emmanuel, ‘Ethics as First Philosophy’, in The Levinas Reader, ed. Hand, Sean [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989], 77)Google Scholar. As Margaret Archer has pointed out, however, within any given system, it is important not to view the fact of occlusion as the result of some intentional conspiracy. In itself, exclusion ‘is no “rule” except in the trivial and truistic sense that to include a figure is to exclude its background’. She concedes, however, that exclusion will become more a deliberate practice as a successful semiotic system becomes entrenched in practice over time. Archer, Margaret S., Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 181; cf. 177–8.Google Scholar

10 Fulkerson, 107.

11 The problem of occlusion is also raised, albeit in different terms, by Macmurray, who sees in the dependence of the Self on the Other the root of those practices whereby we displace on to the Other contradictions in ourselves, so that fear or hatred of the Other is ‘an original and necessary motive in the constitution of the personal’. Unlike poststructuralist thinkers, however, Macmurray does not regard the state of alienation from the other as irreparable; on the contrary, he sees the ‘implicit objective’ of all personal action as the resolution of such alienation through the ‘achievement and maintenance of a fully positive relation to the Other’. Macmurray, , Persons in Relation, 75, 108–9.Google Scholar

12 It is important to note in this context that the degree to which post-structuralism is inherently relativistic is a subject of some debate; Jacques Derrida, the most well-known exponent of the school, has vehemently denied that he is nihilist, or that he subscribes to the belief that there is ‘nothing beyond language’. See Derrida, Jacques, ‘Jacques Derrida’, in Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers: The Phenomenological Heritage, ed. Kearney, Richard (Manchester: Manchester ?Publisher?, 1984), 123–124.Google Scholar

13 Fulkerson, 111.

14 Fulkerson, 112.

15 Fulkerson, 114.

16 Fulkerson, 115.

17 This is not to deny that these instances of speech may show forth the gospel to persons witnessing them; only that Jesus is not in these instances proclaiming the gospel to demons, trees, or meteorological phenomena.

18 Similarly, God's injunctions that the earth bring forth vegetation and the waters living creatures in Genesis 1 do not imply that the land and sea are persons.

19 Cf. Harris, 222.

20 Fulkerson, 114.

21 This point has been developed most persuasively by John Zizioulas (see especially Zizioulas, , Being As Communion, 27–49)Google Scholar, though intimations of it can be found in Barth—who was otherwise quite suspicious of the term ‘person’ (see Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics I/1, ed. Bromiley, G. W. and Torrance, T. F. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975), 138).Google Scholar

22 See also the imagery of the disciples ‘abiding’ in Jesus in John 15:4–7.