A THEORY OF PERSONS

BY RICHARD OSTROFSKY, SECOND THOUGHTS BOOKSTORE

ne way or another, political philosophy can scarcely avoid getting started from, and basing itself upon, some theory of the person as the subject of relationships and associations, political activity and government.

In our own society, we tend to see the person as a locus of desires and needs and interests, and of rights and obligations. We think of the corporation as a kind of fictitious, legal person; but in some respects, it might be more correct to say that we imagine the person as a kind of animate, mortal corporation buying and selling, producing and consuming, and pursuing business interests of profit, power, growth and market share.

This liberal version of personhood is challenged by communitarian ideas, which prefer to see the person as embedded in (and sometimes wholly owned by) one or another ethnic and/or cultural collectivity. The argument between these visions is often rich and interesting. Just as often, it becomes obtuse and abusive, with neither side willing to hear or respond to what the other is saying.

Important as it is, I will not retrace that argument here. Rather, I wish to explore a different perspective to date, more influential in the field of clinical psychology than in political thought: the vision of the person as locus of a sui causa (roughly, self-creation) project.

According to this theory, the human animal becomes a person by latching onto one or several existential projects aimed at giving meaning to his or her life. These may be almost anything from making music to running the family farm, from advancing knowledge to raising children. These specify and modify themselves as the person develops, but show a remarkable continuity.

By the age of four (give or take) the child shows an awareness of the scandal of its own contingency and fleshliness. (Mommy and Daddy made me by doing that??!!) By the age of six there is in place an enterprise of transcendence, aimed at redemption and transfiguration of the dependent creature as a social being of volition and spirit.

The nature of this project varies greatly according to the examples and cultural materials available, and (very probably) according to the physiology and "bent" of the individual child. The occurrence of such a project, and the age at which it becomes manifest, seem to be grounded in the biology of the human species.

My cat was a cat from the moment she was born. My daughter formed herself in stages, as I myself did once upon a time. By now, she is her own work of art as I am, as we all are: an artifact of self-projection through our various life projects.

This conception of personhood seems to me in better keeping with the facts than either Lockean individualism or any version of communitarianism; and its political consequences are more acceptable.

With the former, it conceives the person as en soi and pour soi: in himself and for himself, to use the existentialist language. But it allows that the individual may find fulfilment not only in projects pursuant to some idea of self-interest, but in projects appearing to require the abnegation of self and self-interest. (Indeed, most people seem to find much deeper fulfilment in giving of themselves than in merely taking, and throw themselves into their crassest commercial activities with ascetic zeal.)

This conception gives the poor man no automatic claim upon the fortune of the rich one, but it endorses social justice as an ideal worthy of commitment by rich and poor alike. It rejects a priori claims of ownership of the person by familial, ethnic or religious communities. On the other hand, it allows such communities to offer themselves as worthy objects of commitment, and furtherance of their aims as a worthy project. It suggests, for example, why religious education should be a permissible tactic in claiming the child for a particular community, while ritual mutilation should not. It is right and proper to invite your children to enlist in your own cherished projects. It is clearly wrong (from this perspective) to conscript them irrevocably without their conscious consent.

The real interest of this conception lies in its qualified Lockean liberalism and libertarianism. Prima facie (it suggests), the person has a right to seek fulfilment in projects of his own devising. The community and the private person both have the right to propose themselves as projects for the participation of others, and to solicit their commitment toward themselves and their projects. They are wrong when they attempt to foreclose the commitments of others or circumscribe their freedom to do so. The good society is one in which individuals have a maximum of real freedom for creativity in their existential projects.

Obviously, freedom in some directions will have to be purchased by constraints in others; but the burden is on those who would limit freedom to show why limitation is justified, and less existentially constraining than what it proposes to disallow.

Admittedly, nothing limits existential freedom more than the need to wrest some kind of living from society and the Earth. We must tolerate a very considerable loss of freedom to sustain our lives and keep any freedom at all. It follows that economic arrangements should be judged as solutions to this conundrum: how to reconcile human freedom with productive efficiency? The real question is not whether individuals have abstract rights to property and the pursuit of property. Rather: when does the exercise of these alleged rights destroy more human freedom than it allows?