The Depth of the Human Person: A Multidisciplinary Approach

By Michael Welker

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
• John C. Polkinghorne
• Jeffrey P. Schloss
• Andreas Schüle
• William Schweiker
• Gerd Theissen
• Günter Thomas
• Frank Vogelsang
• Michael Welker
,

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Jun 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9781467440660

Book preview

The Depth of the Human Person

A Multidisciplinary Approach

Edited by

Michael Welker

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Grand Rapids, Michigan / Cambridge, U.K.

© 2014 Michael Welker

All rights reserved

Published 2014 by

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

2140 Oak Industrial Drive N.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49505 /

P.O. Box 163, Cambridge CB3 9PU U.K.

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The depth of the human person : a multidisciplinary approach /

edited by Michael Welker.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-8028-6979-1 (pbk.: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4674-4066-0 (ePub)

ISBN 978-1-4674-4024-0 (Kindle)

1. Theological anthropology — Christianity. 2. Philosophical anthropology.

3. Human beings. I. Welker, Michael, 1947- editor of compilation.

BT701.3.D47 2014

233´.5 — dc23

2014005081

www.eerdmans.com

Contents

Cover

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Michael Welker

I. Person and Personhood: Introductory Questions

Why Is Personhood Conceptually Difficult?

Andreas Kemmerling

Flesh–Body–Heart–Soul–Spirit: Paul’s Anthropology as an Interdisciplinary Bridge-­Theory

Michael Welker

Emergence, the Quest for Unity, and God: Toward a Constructive Christian Theology of the Person

Philip Clayton

II. Scientific Perspectives in Interdisciplinary Dialogues

Towards an Integrated Anthropology

John C. Polkinghorne

Brains, Minds, Souls, and People: A Scientific Perspective on Complex Human Personhood

Malcolm Jeeves

The Emergence of Human Distinctiveness

Warren S. Brown

Hierarchical Selection and the Evolutionary Emergence of Spirit

Jeffrey P. Schloss

III. Sources of the Christian Traditions in Historical and Global Contexts

Soul and Spirit in the Anthropological Discourse of the Hebrew Bible

Andreas Schüle

Sarx, Soma, and the Transformative Pneuma: Personal Identity Endangered and Regained in Pauline Anthropology

Gerd Theissen

Augustine’s Aporetic Account of Persona and the Limits of Relatio: A Reconsideration of Substance Ontology and Immutability

Volker Henning Drecoll

Augustine’s Investigation into Imago Dei

Eiichi Katayanagi

The Affects of the Soul and the Effects of Grace: On Melanchthon’s Understanding of Faith and Christian Emotions

Markus Höfner

The Concept of Body in Indian Christian Theological Thought

Origen V. Jathanna

IV. Contemporary Theological, Ethical, and Interdisciplinary Challenges

The Dignity of Human Personhood and the Concept of the Image of God

Bernd Oberdorfer

Human Dignity and the Concept of Person in Law

Stephan Kirste

On the Relation of Personhood and Embodiment

Frank Vogelsang

Can Ethics Be Fully Naturalized?

Maria Antonaccio

Beyond Distinct Gender Identities: The Social Construction of the Human Body

Isolde Karle

Moral Inwardness Reconsidered

William Schweiker

Human Personhood at the Edges of Life: Medical Anthropology and Theology in Dialogue

Günter Thomas

Contributors

Acknowledgments

This book documents the results of an interdisciplinary and international dialogue about the depths of the human person. It forges new paths toward a multidisciplinary anthropology. Over several years we brought together theologians, philosophers and ethicists, scientists from the areas of biology, psychology, and physics, and scholars in the fields of Old Testament, New Testament, patristic studies, systematic anthropology, and law. The scholars came from the USA, England, Scotland, Germany, Japan, and India.

The project was made possible by the generosity of the John Templeton Foundation, Philadelphia, which financed the consultations in the framework of its support of the dialogue between science, theology, and religious studies. It was also supported by the hospitality of the Evangelische Kirche im Rheinland, Düsseldorf, which opened the doors of its FFFZ Tagungshaus for several of our meetings.

We are most grateful to Dr. John Templeton Jr., President of the Foundation, to Dr. Paul Wason, Drew Rick-­Miller, and Heather Micklewright in Philadelphia. We also thank Präses Dr. Nikolaus Schneider, Vizepräses Petra Bosse-­Huber, Vizepräses Christian Drägert, Prof. Dr. Bernd Wander, and the staff of the FFFZ for their kind support. One of our meetings took place in the Internationales Wissenschaftsforum Heidelberg. We are indebted to Dr. Ellen Peerenboom, Gudrun Strehlow, and the team of the IWH. Special thanks go to Dr. Markus Höfner, who turned out to be a perfect organizer of the project over many years.

Finally, we acknowledge our gratitude to our publisher William Eerdmans (What can I say but that we are drawn into these depths as the most irresisting of basophobes?), and to Henning Mützlitz, who patiently created a print-­ready copy.

Michael Welker

Introduction

Michael Welker

In dialogues about anthropology, theologians, philosophers, and scientists wrestled with a polarization between mentalistic and physicalistic approaches for many years.¹ They felt trapped in dualisms and reductionisms on both sides and tried to escape and overcome this situation with multidimensional approaches that could do justice to the complexity of human personhood.

I. Introductory Questions

The philosopher Andreas Kemmerling (Why Is Personhood Conceptually Difficult?) is provoking with respect to both the laments about reductionisms and the hopes for an alternative. He begins his contribution with an open attack on seemingly reductionistic, in fact wrong and misleading statements such as You’re nothing but a bunch of neurons (Francis Crick) or . . . you are your brain (Michael Gazzaniga, Manfred Spitzer). He calls these remarks pseudo-­scientific stupidities and quotes John Langshaw Austin: . . . There is nothing so plain boring as the constant repetition of assertions that are not true, and sometimes not even faintly sensible.

On the other hand, he warns against dreams to regain a complex concept of human personhood, which had been inspired by the antique identification of person and prosopon, the mask as the interface of individual private and public human relations. Kemmerling speaks of a bewildering conceptual plenitude of person. The concept of a person is a vexing one, and it is inexhaustibly rich. With respect to Descartes and Locke, he analyzes two of the most influential philosophical classics, which used the concept for very different purposes. For Descartes, the concept of a person expresses the commonsensical impression of a mind-­body union, which clear metaphysical thought cannot validate. For Locke, the concept of the person is a complex idea, based on consciousness and memory, most relevant to support ideas and practices in morals and law.

The theologian Michael Welker describes the initial research project and its transformation in the course of the dialogue. He examines the rich anthropology of Paul (Flesh–Body–Heart–Soul–Spirit: Paul’s Anthropology as an Interdisciplinary Bridge-Theory), which is framed by the dualism of spirit and flesh, anthropological modes of the dualism of eternity and finitude. Although flesh stands for the ultimately futile attempt to sustain one’s life by securing nourishment and reproduction and for the sobering fact that life lives at the expense of other life, it should not be demonized as such. The human heart, with its cognitive emotional and voluntative capacities, is of flesh, and our fleshly basis is the core of our natural and historical unique identity. On the other hand, Paul warns the tongues-­speaking Corinthians against an enthusiasm for a direct encounter with God in pure spirit. Better five words spoken with reason than 10,000 words uttered in tongues (1 Cor. 14:19).

The qualification of the framing dualism opens sensitivities for Paul’s appreciation of the body as both fleshly and shaped by mind and spirit, by the polyphony of its members and powers, moving beyond and against the self-­preserving tendencies of the flesh. Like almost all of the biblical authors, Paul does not ascribe any special salvific power to the soul. It just stands for the mind-­body unity, for the whole person (a village of two hundred souls). Anthropological investigations should rather focus on the heart, the conscience, and the spirit, on their enormous powers and their enormous vulnerabilities to distortion and corruption. Political, legal, and moral interests are, according to Paul, in urgent need of a genuinely theological orientation, if the human spirit is to be led by the Spirit of God and its saving and ennobling powers.

The theologian Philip Clayton (Emergence, the Quest for Unity, and God: Toward a Constructive Christian Theology of the Person) starts with reflections on the complex unity of the human person from the standpoint of an emergentist interpretation of biological and cultural evolution. He attempts to connect the scientific picture of persons as complex bio-­physical-­psycho-­social units with a theologically grounded understanding of a divine spiritual agency. He then challenges Christian theology to come up with an answer to the question: In what way could both sets of results be supplemented by specifically Christian affirmations about human nature? These supplements, however, should be compatible with the interdisciplinary emergentist interpretation and with theological and metaphysical perspectives on divine agency.

Clayton proposes eight levels of a multifaceted human unity, which spans the empirical unity of the existing person, the unity of the mind or the soul, the spiritual unity of body and soul, the unity of the image of God and the corporate unity of the body of Christ, the unity with Christ in the Spirit and — in and through it — with the will and the life of God. One could read this as an interdisciplinary yet theologically oriented proposal, to capture the dynamic unity of the person as an elevated and ascending existence.

II. Scientific Perspectives

The physicist and theologian John Polkinghorne (Towards an Integrated Anthropology) argues that science and theology should help each other in dealing with the vexing complexity of the human person. They should acknowledge that the context for hominid evolution was much richer than the physico-­biological setting that canonical Darwinian theory supposes. He proposes to work with a model of a mind/body complementarity for which the wave/particle duality of light could become a paradigm example. In his view, a reconceptualization of the soul is required, which could allow us to develop a dual-­aspect, energy/information scientific description of anthropological complexity. The important role of information in evolutionary processes should become deciphered with respect to the soul as information-­bearing pattern.

With these ideas, John Polkinghorne does not want to argue for an intrinsic immortality of the soul: As far as naturalistic thinking is concerned, the pattern carried by the body will dissolve with the body’s decay. Yet it is a perfectly coherent Christian hope that the faithful God will not allow that pattern to be lost, but will preserve it in the divine memory. Polkinghorne encourages future dialogue and research to use the differentiated and subtle insights into biblical anthropology to penetrate the extremely rich concept of information that would be needed to deal with the vexing complexity of the human person.

The psychologist Malcolm Jeeves argues that a holistic model of the human person does most justice to the scientific understanding of ourselves (Brains, Minds, Souls, and People: A Scientific Perspective on Complex Human Personhood). He first describes the fast changes in the accepted scientific story in the area of mind-­brain research over the last decades. In recent years, studies of the localization of functions within the brain have had to be qualified and corrected with respect to the evidence of the brain’s plasticity. The power of top-­down effects on the brain has become increasingly evident and important in the study of mind-­brain links.²

Although our mental capacities and behaviors are firmly embodied in our physical makeup, there is clear evidence for an irreducible interdependence between the cognitive level and the physical level of human existence. This leads Jeeves to postulate — against Descartes — a primary ontological reality of ‘person,’ a duality without dualism, as he says. He concludes with remarks on the relation of neuropsychological, evolutionary psychological, and theological claims about the imago Dei. The attempts to identify the imago Dei with the capacity to reason, the capacity for moral behavior and moral agency, and the capacity for personal relatedness have served as boundary markers to distinguish human beings and animals. All these former boundaries are now open fields of research. Jeeves argues for a genuinely theological top-­down approach that sets the divine activity apart from all others in heaven and on earth and provides anthropological orientation without stressing speciestic arguments.

Warren S. Brown, also a psychologist, pushes the question further: In what ways are we humans nested within the biological world and to what extent do we transcend biology? (The Emergence of Human Distinctiveness). He discusses several candidates for human neurocognitive distinctiveness: the enhanced size of the frontal lobes of humankind, specific neurons, relatively unique to the human brain (Von Economo Neurons), the capacity to use language, etc.³ He then proposes to step toward a theory of dynamical systems in order to understand what others have called the holism of difference (Matthias Jung: Differenzholismus des Menschlichen),⁴ which divides the realm of humans from the primates and other species.

Brown distinguishes different levels of organization, the development of more complex forms of environmental response and interaction, as well as greater degrees of freedom. These differences of ordered complexity can occur on thermodynamic, psychological, social, or other levels. Brown speaks of a cultural scaffolding, which shapes the environments in order to improve the interactive processes with them. He warned against cognitivist and computational views that dissociate minds from embodied life in the world. Like Malcolm Jeeves, he concludes with encouragement that we should take specific shapes of our social, cultural, and religious environments more seriously in order to understand human distinctiveness.

The biologist Jeffrey Schloss (Hierarchical Selection and the Evolutionary Emergence of ‘Spirit’ ) reflects on the tension between what could be called the evolutionary solidarity of all creation and the obvious observation of different levels and hierarchies of life. He starts with the critique of three hallmark postulates of reductionism in twentieth-­century biology: the triumph of mechanism over vitalism, the propagation of the gene as the ‘atom’ of biology, and the claim that the human mind is primarily concerned with the enhancement of reproductive fitness.

Schloss describes the long battle between mechanism and vitalism and its impacts on the extrusion of spirit and soul in so-­called serious science and educated common sense. He shows how the unification of Darwinian selection and Mendelian genetics in the synthetic theory of evolution transforms and yet prolongs this situation of a scientistic naturalism, which culminates in the speculative invention of so-­called memes (ideational replicators as twins of the genes).⁵ He questions that social and cultural evolution could be wholly reducible to or constrained by genetic selection. He proposes to consider that there are life-­enhancing and ennobling ideas, which are not (merely) transmitted, or intuitively innate, or rationally constructed, but discovered. At this level, he sees the need and the potential to rethink the emergence of spirit.

III. Sources of the Traditions

The Old Testament scholar Andreas Schüle ( ‘Soul’ and ‘Spirit’ in the Anthropological Discourse of the Hebrew Bible) draws attention to the fact that worldviews matter, when it comes to anthropological concepts such as ‘body,’ ‘soul,’ or ‘spirit.’ However, a simple juxtaposition of an ancient (religious) worldview and a modern (scientific) worldview will not be helpful at all. He describes an important change of worldviews already reflected by the anthropological discourse of the Old Testament. This change is connected with the shift of anthropological concentration from the soul (nefesh) to the spirit (ruach).

The Persian period brings a shift from belief in a cultic presence of God to belief in God’s cosmic presence. A highly differentiated discourse develops the conceptuality of divine and human spirit in order to grasp this presence. Different traditions connect the spirit with different basic functions. At least one of these traditions discourages any speculation about a material and spiritual human existence beyond its life on earth (Ecclesiastes). Over against this, we see at the edge of the Old Testament canon within its Greek transmission the emergence of the idea of a soul in God’s hands, possibly an immortal soul (Wisdom of Solomon 2:23). Only the view that the soul can be rescued by God’s saving work but not a created immortality is shared by the other biblical traditions.

The contribution of the New Testament scholar Gerd Theissen ("Sarx, Soma, and the Transformative Pneuma: Personal Identity Endangered and Regained in Pauline Anthropology) opens our eyes to the fact that in Paul’s letters often but not always" the body (soma) has a positive connotation in ethical, ecclesiological, and eschatological contexts. However, when Paul contrasts the internal and external human being, he can associate the body with the flesh (sarx) and connect it with very negative statements. Theissen shows that Paul is not trapped into a static dualistic anthropology, but rather develops a transformative anthropology and cosmology. While the flesh represents the (biotic-­based) energy of life that must be repressed . . . the body is the energy that can be sublimated by the transformative power of the spirit.

Theissen identifies ethical (Rom. 12:1), ecclesial (1 Cor. 12:12ff.; Rom. 12:4ff.), and eschatological (1 Cor. 15:44; Rom. 8:11) transformations of the body. By nature, the body is passive and mortal, but by the power of the spirit it can be given new life and become the bearer of eschatological hope. A similar ambivalence has to be noticed with respect to the human spirit. Paul can identify the human mind and human spirit, he can stress the opposition of the human mind/spirit and the divine spirit, and he can praise the salvific encounter of the human spirit with the Holy Spirit and the Spirit of Christ. With some reflections on the dissociative soul in ancient Egypt and ancient Greece and on the renewal of an integrated concept of personhood in early Christianity, Theissen illuminates the weltanschauliche background of Paul’s seminal anthropology.

The patristic scholar Volker Henning Drecoll ("Augustine’s Aporetic Account of Persona and the Limits of Relatio: A Reconsideration of Substance Ontology and Immutability) analyzes the term person" in Augustine’s work in general and in his brilliant book De trinitate in particular. He shows that the term persona is a cipher in his Trinitarian theology and that he avoids "the term relatio as quasi-­ontological term. This casts conventional attempts to make use of Augustine’s psychological doctrine of the Trinity" to explain notions of the person — divine and human — into a negative light.

Drecoll cautiously encourages exploring the relation of love as a candidate to address the puzzling issues in Trinitarian theology and anthropology that caused Augustine and his followers to experiment with the notions of persona and relatio. Still, this attempt comes with a host of problems. Do the risks of failure and disappointment in human love require us to look for a radical difference between divine and human love? How can we reconcile the notion of a loving God with Augustine’s insistence on divine immutability?

Eiichi Katayanagi, a Japanese scholar of religious studies and philosophy, encourages us to take a more positive view of the epistemological potentials in Augustine’s work (Augustine’s Investigation into Imago Dei). He sees Augustine’s notion of the imago Dei as connected with this conviction that human beings have the capacity of openness to eternity. Similar to Drecoll, he is convinced that the relation of love offers a clue to grasp the essence of the human persona. The reflexive character of the will, concentrated on and shaped by love, reveals both the essential nature of the human mind and God as the source of the mind.

Katayanagi stresses the fascinating attempt in Augustine’s work to reconstruct the mind in search of its not-­yet-­known self. He describes the difference of a hidden unconscious and a conscious knowledge (se nosse and se cognitare). A deep hidden knowledge is embedded in pre-­thematic memory. This knowledge has a Trinitarian structure, which, however, only becomes obvious in the emergence of the temporal knowledge that is found in the cogitatio. In this longing and loving outreach into the eternal depth of the imago Dei, the human being finds itself already touched by God and constituted as a true person.

The exploration of faith and emotions is further pursued by systematic theologian Markus Höfner (The Affects of the Soul and the Effects of Grace: On Melanchthon’s Understanding of Faith and Christian Emotions). He starts with the observation that, according to biblical witnesses and many theological classics, the believer’s relation to God is seen as deeply shaped by emotions. He explores those internal affections which are not within the individual’s power. He also uses key texts of the reformer Melanchthon in order to reconstruct the process of phenomenological and theological clarification.

Höfner draws attention to two developments and moves in Melanchthon’s thought, which are not only seminal for his own theology but could also offer systematic inspiration for anthropological research today. One shift could be called: From the meditation of inner powers to the observation of outer expressions. In this shift, Melanchthon’s theologically interested theory of affects starts to use medical thinking and natural philosophy. The second shift overcomes bipolar constellations, for example, the concentration on the dual affect and reason. Höfner can show that Melanchthon uses reflections on the shaping of affects through rhetoric to observe interdependencies between affects, reason (understanding), and will. Already in Reformation days we thus find pathways toward an anthropology of articulation.

Origen V. Jathanna, a theologian from India, concludes the third part of the book with reflections on The Concept of ‘Body’ in Indian Christian Theological Thought. He observes in the Indian culture as well as across the globe today a strange tension between a cult and glorification of the body and a rejection or denigration of the body. He relates this tension to anthropological dualisms, which concern many contributions to this book. He also unfolds a stunning map of philosophical and theological positions in India, particularly in the twentieth century, on which we can identify different views on body, soul, and other dimensions of the human person. Different anthropological constellations are intertwined with different genuinely theological orientations, especially Christological, eschatological, and ethical perspectives. Theological and anthropological paradigms shape each other.

Jathanna observes the tendency in the contemporary realm of thought to contextualize reflections on the human person. Even the body is no longer considered in isolation, but in the context of interpersonal, communitarian, gender-­relational, societal, economic, structural, and ecological dimensions of the human existence. This opens many opportunities not only for interdisciplinary but also for interreligious dialogues and the common search for insight and truth. Jathanna welcomes this situation but also reminds theologians that the perspective of the new creation in Jesus Christ, the hope of the resurrectional transformation and eschatological fulfillment should not be lost.

IV. Contemporary Challenges

The last part of the book begins with the question of whether the theological claim that human beings are created in the image of God can offer an equivalent to the concept of the dignity of the human person. The theologian Bernd Oberdorfer poses this question (The Dignity of Human Personhood and the Concept of the ‘Image of God’ ) and objects to quick and simple answers. He explores the talk about the image of God in biblical creation narratives, reflects on the Christological recalibration of the imago Dei in the New Testament, and analyzes three different ways of interpreting it in the history of Christian theology (quality, duty, relation).

The tension between the Christological interpretation of the imago Dei and the insistence on the universal validity of human dignity gives rise to a second set of questions. How do we relate specific religious ideas and symbols to normative concepts in general public life? How do we deal with different and even conflicting theological interpretations of specific religious ideas and symbols? Oberdorfer describes several routes of discourse and debate as future challenges and tasks in the churches, the academy, civil societies, and different secular publics.

Stephan Kirste, professor of law, deals with the topic Human Dignity and the Concept of Person in Law. He first reconstructs important steps in the history of the concept of human dignity and the attempts to interpret it as a legal term. The legal discourse led to a broad consensus that human dignity can only be defined negatively from possible violations of it. This again led to questions for a threshold to discriminate real violations of human dignity from all sorts of bothering and pestering among human beings.

Kirste shows that these questions have caused legal scholars to look back for philosophical and theological sources. Philosophical work on the concept of the person became relevant, and many discourses between law and philosophy have struggled to conceptualize the idea of a legal person. The final Solomonic formula comes as an impressive self-­affirmation of legal thought: The respect for human dignity materializes as the right to be recognized as a legal person.

The theologian Frank Vogelsang (On the Relation of Personhood and Embodiment) describes the perspectives of broad common sense and popular philosophy concerning personhood and dignity. In the constructive parts of his contribution, he focuses on person-­to-­person interaction and the phenomenon and theories of mutual recognition. Drawing on the phenomenology of the body, developed by Maurice Merleau-­Ponti, he intends to deepen personalistic thought of the past and relate the philosophical to the scientific discourse. Simple imaginations of the world in our body and our body in the world have to be overcome and refined.

Following Merleau-­Ponti, Vogelsang captures partial intransparencies in our relation to our bodily existence that have a deep impact on our most basic social interactions. We need a theory of recognition that can deal with our always partially opaque relation to ourselves and with the intransparency even of the most intimate other. He claims that personhood stems from human encounters and mutual recognition. It has to be seen whether this proposal can lead to an explanation and understanding of why personhood is conceptually so difficult.

Maria Antonaccio, a professor of religious ethics, defends the depths of the human person as moral agent against the illusion that a description of the facts of human nature could exhaust these depths (Can Ethics Be Fully Naturalized?). She describes current efforts to naturalize ethics and offers a typology of current debates over naturalization. Constructively, she tries to delineate a path between an ethical naturalism, which comes with the danger of moral mediocrity and moral conventionalism, and an ethics of heroism or of the superhuman, which can be bred from naturalist and nonnaturalist positions alike.

In a final set of reflections, she assesses criteria for a naturalized ethics that tries to avoid descriptive impoverishment by ignoring natural empirical effects of human existence. For the sake of an ethical realism, moral theory cannot escape the dialogue with the natural sciences. The danger on the other side is the normative impoverishment that occurs when principles of obligation become sacrificed with respect to realistic adaptation to natural conditions and human reality constituted only by so-­called scientific facts. Both dangers can culminate in a collapse of normative and descriptive attempts in ethical theory. This would also lead to a theoretical impoverishment.

Practical theologian Isolde Karle (Beyond Distinct Gender Identities: The Social Construction of the Human Body) draws attention to the fact that contemporary anthropology emphasizes the multitude of interdependencies between body, soul, and spirit. Yet with respect to sexual identity, the body continues to represent a solid and unshakable objective point of reference. Following Pierre Bourdieu’s influential book Male Domination, she argues that the dichotomous gender metaphysics is a product of bourgeois nineteenth-­century thought. In various ways, it conditions a dualistic habitus that is correlated with open and hidden forms and practices of male domination and violence.

Karle charges popular counterarguments (mostly based on the topic of motherhood) and twentieth-­century theological affirmations of the system of two genders. She challenges theology to stop seeing the plurality of individuals and the variety of gender migrants as a threat to the institution of marriage and broader social order. The orientation toward the powers of new creation, in which there is no longer male and female (Gal. 3:28), and a gender system that continues to oppress and disfigure souls and bodies should draw us away from a fixation on the anatomical details of a body to the life in the spirit of Christ, the spirit of love, trust, and freedom.

William Schweiker, a theological ethicist (Moral Inwardness Reconsidered), wants to develop a theological and also humanistic vision of the soul. He engages exemplary positions in contemporary psychological and philosophical anthropology (Marc Hauser and Mary Midgley), which show a remarkable neglect for human vulnerability that characterizes our lives as moral and religious beings. Schweiker draws attention to the rich cultural resources that are to be found in the writings of Plato and Paul. He does not argue for a restitution of a Platonic or a so-­called biblical worldview, but for a new type of thinking arising at their intersection.

It is a rich notion of a theologically oriented moral inwardness that has to deal with the double danger of divinization or profanization of the soul. Schweiker argues that the antique classics provide stronger arguments than the contemporary voices for the freedom of the soul and its right to have rights, but also for the real danger that the integrity of the self can be lost, forsaken. Deep visions and strong arguments are needed to counter cultural and religious, political and moral distortions, which threaten the human mind and life with various forms of decadence and degeneration, and also authoritarianism and tyranny.

Günter Thomas, a systematic theologian, concentrates on challenges connected with intensive experiences of finiteness encounter (particularly) in the later phases of life (Human Personhood at the Edges of Life: Medical Anthropology and Theology in Dialogue). He describes a multiple crisis connected with higher rates of aging and illness that most anthropologies are unable to address for structural reasons. He argues for the development of a theological framework that allows us to move beyond the affirmation of intellectualism and moral self-­determination.

He shows that a Christological and pneumatological framework can host social narrations of personhood and human life that can incorporate its vulnerability, endangerment, and self-­endangerment, but also its eschatological destinations, which contest that decay, frailty, and death are . . . the last reality that human beings will face. This does not open a space of sheer illusions, but rather an area of deep individual and trans-­individual experience and hope that is not monopolized by theology and religious faith.

1. W. S. Brown, N. Murphy, and H. N. Malony, eds., Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998); M. Jeeves, ed., From Cells to Souls — and Beyond: Changing Portraits of Human Nature (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004); E. K. Soulen and L. Woodhead, eds., God and Human Dignity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006).

2. Cf. more recently T. Fuchs, Das Gehirn — ein Beziehungsorgan. Eine phänomenologisch-­ökologische Konzeption, 3rd ed. (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2012).

3. Cf. also M. Tomasello, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Origins of Human Communication (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2008).

4. Matthias Jung, Der bewusste Ausdruck. Anthropologie der Artikulation (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2009), pp. 54-58.

5. The term memes was invented by Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1976), and has been popularized by Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

I. Person and Personhood: Introductory Questions

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 have to be accepted as particulars, they’d be particulars different in kind from persons). What I’m trying to draw your attention to is not that person and personality are distinct concepts (this is banal). Rather it is the less obvious point that the tight and rigid connections between these concepts run only in one direction. Personality conceptually requires personhood; but not vice versa.⁸

The sparse ontological concept of a person I shall consider in the following is psychologically neutral, or noncommittal, in a thoroughgoing way: It does not exclude, for example, the conceptual possibility of one and the same person’s changing his or her personality abruptly and completely. Psychological similarity, continuity, or conscious self-­accessibility over time is not a conceptual ingredient in personal identity. It is, indeed, a factual ingredient in the human persons-­over-­time we are acquainted with. And, indeed again, the absence of this ingredient may make us wonder whether we are really dealing with the same person. But, and that’s what I am trying to bring to the fore, there is a basic ontological concept of personhood that does not by itself compel us to deny personal identity in cases of abrupt and vast psychological discontinuity. That’s what I mean by calling the concept psychologically noncommittal: it is, as it were, silent about these cases. In focusing on this basic concept, I don’t mean to deny that there are other legitimate concepts of personhood (e.g., the concept of a human person) — concepts that may be more psychological, in the sense just adumbrated. And it may well be that our most familiar concept of a person is not the ontological one. But I think that the ontological one is fundamental, and a powerful source of our conceptual bewilderment.

The second clarification concerns the realism/anti-­realism issue. An important question in this context is whether person is an ascriber-­relative (or recognition-­dependent) concept. I shall call the whole family of such concepts CAC-­concepts, because in their case the mere counting as a so-­and-­so is constitutive of being a so-­and-­so. The mark of a CAC-­concept can be roughly characterized as follows: It applies to the items to which it applies in virtue of the fact that these items count as falling under the concept. That x counts as a C may be spelled out in various ways, for example as "Given appropriate information about x, the vast majority of normal people who have mastered concept C ascribe — or would ascribe, if they encountered x — to x the property of being a C, or as A sufficient majority of relevant experts or authorities⁹ accept, or would accept, x as a C."¹⁰

It is fairly uncontroversial that many common concepts are of the CAC variety: piece of art, fruit, disease, car, jail, etc. (Fashion is, I think, a particularly clear example of a CAC-­concept: If x counts as fashionable — i.e., if a sufficient majority of the relevant magistri elegantiarum accept, or would accept, x as fashionable — then x is fashionable.) Many concepts of philosophical interest, however, are highly controversial in this respect. If one considers the concepts of, e.g., beauty, goodness, truth, happiness, and justice to be CAC-­concepts, this almost inevitably makes one an anti-­realist about beauty, goodness, truth, happiness, and justice. That is to say, whoever takes concept C to be of the CAC-­kind is strongly susceptible to the assumption that, concerning C-­issues, there is no fact of the matter — no fact, that is, beyond those facts that are about what is, or would be, the considered judgment of a certain range of people about such issues. Whereas a realist about C-­ness, who deserves this denomination, holds that, may be subject to some sophisticated qualification, facts about Cs are genuine facts. Genuine facts are not just states of affairs corresponding to beliefs that have been formed by a relevant bunch of people, however impeccable the conditions of forming these beliefs. I shall say a little more about this presently.

My above remarks, about the particular ontological concept I have in mind, may have already made it clear that my metaphysical sentiment about personhood is downright realistic: Facts expressed by sentences, as used in an ontological discourse, of the type "x is a person (or so-­and-­sos are persons") are genuine facts. The concept of a person, at least the ontological one, does not function as a CAC-­concept.

Let me try to explain what I mean. Let’s assume for a moment that I’m a person and that you’re a person. So far, no commitment to realism is implied. Here is what any realist about personhood is prepared to add: If this assumption is true, then our personhood is a genuine fact. But realism comes in various stripes; among them are disappointingly soft ones. (As it happens, I am a soft realist about fashion. I’m prepared to accept it as a fact that, for example, certain sorts of belts are fashionable. But for me, this fact is merely a CAC-­fact: a fact constituted by such belts’ counting as fashionable.) Now that’s not the attitude of a downright, or hardboiled, realist. He is eager to up the metaphysical ante. As a downright realist about personhood, I am prepared to strengthen the soft realist claim above considerably: Given that our personhood is a fact, it’s an objective fact as hard as they can get. They don’t come any harder anywhere — not in physics, not in mathematics, not in logic.

With regard to the epistemological position, accompanying such a strong metaphysical tenet, even a hardcore realist has various options. My own option is this: Don’t confuse facts that are metaphysically first-­rate with those that are our epistemological darlings: with plain, obvious, undeniable facts, facts that (if need be) can even be proven, in some widely accepted logic calculus, from premises whose a priori truth can be recognized by way of intuition. To put it differently: The sheer hardness of a fact doesn’t entail a corresponding degree of its obviousness; even some of the hardest facts may be rationally put in doubt. Harking back to the issue at hand, that is to say: By our above assumption, you and I are persons, and, by my hardcore realism, this is an adamant fact, but it is not beyond intelligible doubt.

How could this be? For one thing, others may have their doubts about us and take you and me for zombies, aliens, cleverly designed robots — all of which they presume not to be persons. But more than this, each of us may have doubts about his or her own personhood. If you have such doubts, and if you assume that doubts can be had by persons only, you should, in all consistency, also doubt that whatever it may be that you’re having are genuine doubts. So you should be prepared to consider it as possible that what you have are merely your nonpersonal substitutes for genuine doubts, let’s call them oubts. Oubts feel (or eel) to, and function for, nonpersons just like doubts do to real persons.

This may sound crazier and crazier, but I tend to think that one isn’t immune to such doubt. To illustrate: Assume that Mr. Deckard (Harrison Ford), in the movie Blade Runner, is a genuine person (in this fiction) and that he himself assumes androids, or replicants, not to be persons. Even if we assume this, as the movie invites us to do, then nevertheless, from a certain point on, Deckard begins, and he does so for understandable reasons, to doubt his very own personhood. Deckard is part of a fiction, but in the story told by the movie, he, a person by assumption, really doubts his own personhood.¹¹ He does not merely oubt it. And his reasons for doubting are fairly good ones, and not just airly ood easons to oubt, whatever this may be. The example is from Hollywood and may therefore seem just foolish. I chose it, because the movie is fairly well known and because it may convince you of the coherency, in principle, of genuinely doubting one’s own personhood. Moreover, I speculate that there are various