Being Human: Bodies, Minds, Persons

By Rowan Williams

What is consciousness? Is the mind a machine? What makes each of us a person? How do our bodies relate to our minds?

In this deeply engaging exploration of what it means to be human, Rowan Williams addresses these frequently asked questions with lucid meditations that draw from findings in neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, and literature. Then he presses on to ask, Might faith be necessary to human flourishing? If so, why? And how can a traditional Christian practice—namely, silence—help us advance on the path to human maturity?

The book ends with a brief but profound meditation on Christ’s ascension, inviting readers to consider how, through Jesus, our humanity in all its variety and vulnerability has been transfigured and taken into the heart of the divine life.

Being Human is a book that readers of all religious persuasions will find both challenging and highly rewarding. Questions at the end of each chapter encourage personal reflection or group discussion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Sep 4, 2018
• ISBN: 9781467451505

Rowan Williams

Rowan Williams, Baron Williams of Oystermouth, PC, FBA, FRSL, FLSW, is a world renowned theological writer, teacher, and poet. He was the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury (2002–2012) before becoming Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge. His most recent books include Luminaries (2019), Being Human (2018), God With Us (2017), Being Disciples (2016), Being Christian (2014) and The Poems of Rowan Williams (2014).

Book preview

Introduction

This book completes a sort of unintended trilogy, following earlier books, Being Christian and Being Disciples. It is less about the basics of Christian belief and behaviour and more about the sort of questions in our culture that make us wonder what ‘real’ humanity is like and whether our most central ideas about what is human are under threat in this environment. As these chapters suggest, there are grounds for being a bit concerned about our current models of human life and human well-being. No need to panic; but if we are to think and act in a way that helps to make the world more rather than less human – and humane – we do need more clarity than our culture usually gives us as to what we think is ‘more’ human. So the chapters of this book examine some sources of contemporary confusion, and outline some of the characteristics that we might look for in human lives when they are in touch with or in alignment with the grace and joy of what is ultimately true – with God and with the will of God, as Christians would say.

These pieces are a bit more demanding in some ways than most of the shorter talks collected in the earlier books, so it may help to give a quick sketch of each chapter to draw out the main arguments.

Chapter 1 looks at the question of what we understand by being conscious and self-conscious. A lot of popular scientific literature these days encourages us to think of the mind as a machine or the brain as a computer or whatever. But it’s impossible to think consistently about being conscious without reference to our locality in a material world, without a sense of narrative, the story of a self, and without factoring in our relationships and our language.

So what is a ‘person’ in the light of all this? Chapter 2 tries to suggest some answers. A person is not simply another object, and not something whose presence or absence we can decide just by applying a set of objective criteria. Persons are more than ‘individuals’; they are both spiritual and material, and their uniqueness is fulfilled in community not in isolation and total independence.

And if we ask what it means to say that a person is both spiritual and material, we are in the territory covered by Chapter 3, which looks at body–mind relations in the light of some of the recent scientific discussions of left-brain and right-brain functions and the complex role of the body in what we call thinking. We think with our bodies because we have to learn how to find our way in a world of bodies. And this should make us wary of any picture of our humanity that isolates it or imagines our human knowing as being like beams from a lighthouse playing over a world of passive stuff – rather than being a process of rich interweaving of stimulus and imagining, worked out in and through bodies.

We are very much in love these days with the ideal of ‘autonomy’, self-direction, the independent control of our environment. Chapter 4 looks at the ways in which religious faith helps us understand how we can be dependent without humiliation, as it also helps us deal with the educating of our instincts and passions, with the passing of time and the acceptance of our mortality. Part of the good news that faith offers is the realization that learning to depend on God and to live with (not in opposition to) our limits in time and the body is something that increases our freedom rather than reducing it.

And this means that in our life and our prayer we do not have to be afraid of letting go of the need to be in charge, to be explaining and organizing all the time. As Chapter 5 suggests, human beings who have grown into their full freedom will be at home with silence and openness before God. Which is also why good worship is worship that takes us beyond the urge to explain and manage, and leads us to take the time we need to open up to the endless richness of divine life that has been offered to us through the life and death and resurrection of Jesus.

In fact, we are brought back to the basics of belief again – to the conviction that to understand properly what our humanity really is we need to look to Jesus. The book ends with a sermon about the Ascension of Jesus as a sign that all the diverse aspects of human experience, including its darkest moments, are capable of being taken up and transfigured in the action of Jesus Christ.

Unless we have a coherent model of what sort of humanity we want to nurture in our society, we shall continue to be at sea over how we teach, how we vote, how we save and buy and sell, how we entertain ourselves, how we think about the beginning and the end of life. This little book will not provide once-and-for-all answers to the various questions this involves, but I hope it may help clarify what sort of priorities a Christian might want to have in mind in engaging with them; just a little bit of a manual of resistance to the forces – political, economic, psychological – that pressure us to be less than God wants us to be.

Once again, my thanks go to Philip Law and all at SPCK for their encouragement to pull together this group of talks and reflections, and their dedicated help in producing a publishable text.

1

What is consciousness?

The study of human consciousness encompasses an exceptionally wide range of questions in neuroscience and philosophy, as well as some questions that impact very directly on many of the things that theologians or ethicists most want to talk about. So although I won’t be talking very much in this chapter about theology as such, I hope that some of the trails I lay might suggest some of the theological possibilities that arise in thinking through the fundamental questions about the nature of consciousness and what it is to be human.

But before embarking on the detailed questions, there is a general point worth remembering. ‘The question of consciousness’ is now a question that is best and most effectively addressed on the frontiers of different disciplines, so that the sort of book that has this kind of title will very often draw from physics, neuroscience in particular, philosophy, psychology, literature and many other fields. It’s a helpful reminder that some of the rigid divisions of subject matter that so often afflict the academy won’t quite do when fundamental issues of this sort are at stake. This has both positive and negative effects: positive, because conversations between different academic areas are among the most fertile discussions that happen in universities; negative, because the literature that can come out of this may be lacking in the rigour that applies in any one of those areas left to themselves. Some of what I say here will, I hope, help to identify those areas where lack of rigour is a problem, and doubtless a great deal more will illustrate the problem of lack of rigour in other ways. But I think it is worth beginning by reminding ourselves of this very significant fact in the current intellectual climate. While we talk, and talk freely, about ours being a very specialized era where people go more narrowly and deeply into questions than once they did, it is perhaps also the case that the biggest issues that confront us as a human race are issues that require a certain amount of multidisciplinary skill if we’re to tackle them effectively.

The biggest issues that confront us as a human race are issues that require a certain amount of multidisciplinary skill if we’re to tackle them effectively

Is the mind a machine?

Let me begin with two negative points about recent discussions of consciousness in some of the literature. There is a consensus in many quarters, philosophical and scientific, that one thing we can confidently say about consciousness or the mind is that it is a kind of machine. A recent book on the