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Philosophy: Self and Person

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Robert Sokolowski (Phenomenology of the Human Person) finds contemporary talk about “the self” extraordinary: “How odd it is, even gramatically, to speak of ‘the self.’ The linguistic strangeness of the term the self is matched by the oddity of the terms the ego and the I, which are often used as its synonyms. Under what normal circumstances would we ever refer to ‘the I’? Why have we not contrived to speak of ‘the he’ or ‘the she’ or ‘the they’ or even ‘the you’? Furthermore, why should we reserve to ourselves the privilege of being ‘selves,’ when every entity shares in that distinction? Everything – a horse, a tree, a ruby, a molecule – is itself, and hence it is ‘a self,” is it not? Why do we presume to take ourselves as ‘the selves,’ the paradigms of identity? We seem to claim for ourselves alone the identity that belongs to all beings. Is this not metaphysical arrogance?” He quotes Charles Taylor’s observation that “making ‘self’ into a noun” shows “something important which is peculiar to our modern sense of agency.”

Sokolowski prefers to speak of persons, defined as “agents of truth” in preference to the Aristotelian “rational animals.” His term has two advantages, in his view:

First, “it expands the meaning of thinking and truth. The word rational seems to limit thinking to calculation and inference, but the new phrase does not connote such a restriction It encompasses all the forms of understanding, including those that go beyond language.”

Further, to speak of the person as an agent of truth emphasizes that “attaining truth is an accomplishment and not merely passive reception. It speaks not just about reasoning but about success in reasoning, and so designates human being in terms of its highest achievement: the human person is defined by being engaged in truth, and human action is based on truth.”

Sokolowski’s characterization of language of “the self” is not entirely fair. Surely, the reservation of “the self” to humans has more to do with self-consciousness than with metaphysical arrogance, the self-consciousness that Sokolowski himself makes the opening move of his phenomenology of the person: “Our rationality is exhibited and our personhood is made manifest in our very ability to use the first-person pronoun.” Humans, presumably, are “selves” precisely because we possess this ability. Still, he is correct about the oddness of the grammar, and probably correct that this “could not have come unto use except through some philosophical contrivance.” I trust that Taylor is also correct that the terminology is of recent vintage, perhaps a secularized replacement for traditional talk about the “soul.” Given that our terms shape our concepts, wariness about “the self” is warranted.

N.B.: This post is a self-rebuke, um, er, a rebuke to my own person.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 2:39 pm

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Philosophy: Self and Person

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