The Depth of the Human Person

A Multidisciplinary Approach

Michael Welker, Michael Welker

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781467440660
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

This volume brings together leading theologians, biblical scholars, scientists, philosophers, ethicists, and others to explore the multidimensionality and depth of the human person. Moving away from dualistic (mind-body, spirit-flesh, naturalmental) anthropologies, the book's contributors examine human personhood in terms of a complex flesh-body-mind-heart-soul-conscience-reason-spirit spectrum. The Depth of the Human Person begins with a provocative essay on the question "Why is personhood conceptually difficult?" It then rises to the challenge of relating theological contributions on the subject to various scientific explorations. Finally, the book turns to contemporary theological-ethical challenges, discussing such subjects as human dignity, embodiment, gender stereotypes, and human personhood at the edges of life. Contributors:

• Maria Antonaccio
• Warren S. Brown
• Philip Clayton
• Volker Henning Drecoll
• Markus Höfner
• Origen V. Jathanna
• Malcolm Jeeves
• Isolde Karle
• Eiichi Katayanagi
• Andreas Kemmerling

,

• Stephan Kirste
• Bernd Oberdorfer
• JohnC.Polkinghorne
• Jeffrey P. Schloss
• Andreas Schüle
• William Schweiker
• Gerd Theissen
• Günter Thomas
• Frank Vogelsang
• Michael Welker
• ,
  

Why Is Personhood Conceptually Difficult?

Andreas Kemmerling

The concept of a person is a vexing one.

There is ample evidence for this claim, both in time-­honored works and in recent publications. Before I concentrate on some of the old stuff, let me briefly turn to recent examples. The following sample of quotations from a Nobel laureate, a leading neuroscientist, and a German professor of “neurodidactics,” may illustrate how deep the confusion about what a person is can go among the educated, even today. Francis Crick stated his Astonishing Hypothesis as follows:

“You” . . . are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: “You’re nothing but a bunch of neurons.” This idea is so alien to the ideas of most people alive today that it can truly be called astonishing.1

A few years later, this “idea” seemed not anymore astonishing to Michael Gazzaniga, who prefers to put it this way: Some simple facts make it

. . . clear that you are your brain. The neurons interconnecting in its vast network . . . — that is you.2

It required the brilliancy of a German professor to take it to a further extreme. He found a way to expand Crick and Gazzaniga’s point by enriching it with a homespun piece of congenial ludicrousness. In a German radio broadcast in November 2006, Manfred Spitzer declared:

You don’t have your brain, you are your brain.

Maybe this is a world record. Is it humanly possible to display more fundamental confusion in less than ten syllables? (Well, in fairness to Spitzer, in German, the saying doesn’t take less than ten.) One is almost inclined, with respect to someone who says such a thing, to believe at least the first part of his dictum.

Note that in these three quotations we are addressed directly, by use of the word “you.” As who or what might we consider ourselves so addressed (given that we are, in the same breath, straightforwardly identified with our brains)? Clearly not as human beings. Human beings aren’t just brains. Almost all of them have one.3 And some of them use it, before they make grand claims. Let’s assume that this much is known even to those who would make, or agree to, such claims as the ones I quoted. It’s unlikely that even they simply confuse a human being with one of his or her organs.

So assuming that we are not addressed, in the statements quoted above, as members of the species Homo sapiens, the question remains: As whom or what do Crick, Gazzaniga, and Spitzer presume to address us, when they say “you”? Well, I guess, we are meant to be addressed as persons. What the two neuroscientists and the professor of “neurodidactics” want to tell us seems to be this:

You, the person you are, are your brain.

A human person nothing but his or her brain? The negative answer is obvious again. You, as person, are you altogether. When considered as a person, you are considered, so to say, as the completeness of what you are. You are not just an assemblage of certain parts, facets, or aspects of yours, however interesting or prominent each of them may be. You’re not what or how you feel. You are not how you came to be what you are. You are not what you did or may accomplish. You are not your looks, moods, skills, genes, memories, sentimentalities, failures, hobbies, hopes, or sexual obsessions. You are not your intelligence, deftness, body, body/mass index, charm, career, musicality, brain, character, hormonal state, social behavior, or innermost thinking. All the items just mentioned, and indefinitely many more of those, contribute, or may contribute, to you as a person. But they aren’t you. Obviously, none of them, taken separately, is you. Arguably, even all of them together, taken collectively in their (impossible) summation, isn’t you either. In brief, “You are your brain” is to be taken as seriously as “You are what you eat.” It may sound nice as an advertisement jingle, but taken literally, it’s just rubbish.

I shall not go into this once more.4 Instead I shall address, in what follows, a different, an etiological, kind of question: How can it happen that some people get so confused as to identify persons (and for that matter themselves) with their brains? Part of the explanation seems to me to be this: Our very idea, or concept, of a person is utterly baffling. And I shall investigate some of the reasons why this is so.

* * *

Given that the concept of a person is a vexing one, what is it that makes it so?

There are various ways in which a concept may perplex us. First, there are concepts that may strike one as inherently unthinkable — or, to put it less sloppily: Concepts such that the items of which they purport to be concepts seem unthinkable. Infinity may serve as an example. (Ask a theologian or a philosopher, if you are keen on more examples of this sort.) Second, there are concepts that are, or seem, analysis-­proof in a very peculiar way. They are, or seem to be, innocent, well-­functioning nonprimitive concepts that we, as normal speakers, have fully mastered; and, moreover, we are perfectly in the clear about what we consider as their most important ingredients. Nevertheless there is at least one further conceptual ingredient that consistently resists our attempts to make it explicit. Knowledge is an example. It is fairly uncontroversial that knowledge entails truth, belief, and justification, and it is also clear that knowledge is not merely justified true belief — but nobody has been able to pinpoint what else is required for knowledge. The concept of knowledge contains at least one component, that vexing “last bit,” which seems inexplicable. Third, there are concepts that are, or at least seem to be, paradoxical, although they appear to be well functioning, some of them even indispensable, concepts. Take the concept of being uninteresting. It lends itself to the comparative and the superlative form. But isn’t the most uninteresting event of all times ipso facto an interesting one? I, for one, would be anxious to be informed about it. Or take the concept of a belief. One holds each of one’s beliefs to be true (this is what believing is, after all), but at the same time, a sane person believes that some of his beliefs are false. Or take truth itself. The so-­called Liar-­paradox has been known and unsolved since ancient times: “What I hereby say is not true.” Or, for that matter, take any of those countless concepts for which a paradox of the Sorites type can be construed — like, famously, for the concept of a heap itself.

The conceptual difficulties concerning personhood seem to be of an altogether different kind. Prima facie, personhood is nothing inherently unthinkable; there’s no problem with a deeply hidden conceptual “last bit” (we’d be happy to get hold only of the uncontroversial first bits); and we have no compelling reason to think that the very concept itself is paradox-­ridden.5

On the one hand, the word “person,” as it is commonly used, seems to be not much more than a singular form of the word “people”; it serves to denote human beings like you and me. In normal conditions, as soon as we have recognized an adult human being, we have recognized a person; we don’t need any extra information about special features of this particular human being in order to draw the “further” conclusion that he or she is a person. In the absence of very weighty counterevidence or of compelling reasons to withdraw judgment, the presumption, concerning any human being, that he or she is a person, is not just epistemically admissible or reasonable, it is morally obligatory.6 The application of the concept of a person, in familiar standard cases, does not appear to involve problems that are harder than those involved in recognizing people: normal members of the human race.

But the concept itself is problematic. At least it is difficult to say, in plain words or, for that matter, more refined ones, what a person is — even given the most basic and austere sense of the word “person.”

1. Person as an Ontological Category Concept

Two attempts at clarification. The first one concerns the question how much psychology comes with the concept of a person. Addressing this question seems necessary in the light of the best recent discussions concerning personhood I am aware of.7 When I talk in the following, interchangeably, of “the concept of a person,” of “person,” or of “(the concept of) personhood,” I do not have a psychological concept in mind. Person, as I shall consider it, is an ontological concept. For it is meant, by me here, to pick out a special category of entities — a category that is worth considering when the question is raised: “What sorts of particulars are part of the ultimate furniture of the world as we know it?” As an answer I’d mention, with no attempt at originality: physical bodies, fields of gravitation, events, abstract particulars (sets, numbers, propositions, and maybe others), and . . . persons.

I don’t mean to be making a big claim here. I am not saying that persons are particulars that do, in the final analysis, belong to the ultimate furniture of the world as we know it, i.e., particulars that cannot be reduced to (combinations of) more basic particulars. I would simply like to rank them among those entities that should be considered carefully as candidates. (Descartes for example, as we shall see, considered them as candidates, but decided not to assign to them the ontological status of basic entities.) Now — and that’s what I’d like to emphasize at this point — the ontological concept of a person should be kept as pure and austere as possible. In particular it should be kept distinct from any psychological notion, however seemingly close, like, e.g., the concept of a personality. A personality, I take it, is something a person has (and presumably it is not a particular, but some universal that, at least in principle, different persons may share; but even if personalities would ha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I. Person and Personhood: Introductory Questions
• Why Is Personhood Conceptually Difficult?
• Flesh–Body–Heart–Soul–Spirit: Paul’s Anthropology as an Interdisciplinary Bridge--Theory
• Emergence, the Quest for Unity, and God: Toward a Constructive Christian Theology of the Person
• II. Scientific Perspectives in Interdisciplinary Dialogues
• Towards an Integrated Anthropology
• Brains, Minds, Souls, and People: A Scientific Perspective on Complex Human Personhood
• The Emergence of Human Distinctiveness
• Hierarchical Selection and the Evolutionary Emergence of “Spirit”
• III. Sources of the Christian Traditions in Historical and Global Contexts
• “Soul” and “Spirit” in the Anthropological Discourse of the Hebrew Bible
• Sarx, Soma, and the Transformative Pneuma: Personal Identity Endangered and Regained in Pauline Anthropology
• Augustine’s Aporetic Account of Persona and the Limits of Relatio: A Reconsideration of Substance Ontology and Immutability
• Augustine’s Investigation into Imago Dei
• The Affects of the Soul and the Effects of Grace: On Melanchthon’s Understanding of Faith and Christian Emotions
• The Concept of “Body” in Indian Christian Theological Thought
• IV. Contemporary Theological, Ethical, and Interdisciplinary Challenges
• The Dignity of Human Personhood and the Concept of the “Image of God”
• Human Dignity and the Concept of Person in Law
• On the Relation of Personhood and Embodiment
• Can Ethics Be Fully Naturalized?
• Beyond Distinct Gender Identities: The Social Construction of the Human Body
• Moral Inwardness Reconsidered
• Human Personhood at the Edges of Life: Medical Anthropology and Theology in Dialogue
• Contributors