I’m aware of the overlap with previous posts, but the space wasted is only virtual (and so compatible with sustainability):
1. Everyone knows that the species—unlike God or country or family—is something less than oneself. Losing myself in the species is obviously unworthy of me. Only persons (such as Janice in the thread below) can say something like: Even if evolution is true, why should I do what it tells me to do? Nature’s indifference to me as a person can’t be the standard for my personal choice.
2. Devotion to God and country have to be understood as good for their own sakes—as the bottom line. They are unrealistically devalued by Darwinian explanations. Those explanations account for part, but not the best parts, of the relevant phenomena. Harvey Mansfield, in his MANLINESS, attributes the origin of religion to our natural desire to find support for our individual significance. People slighted mere biological self-preservation to build monuments to the gods or God who could see them as they truly are Some religion-like Buddhism—is about the disciplined negation of the person, and our New Agey religion is about the negation without the discipline (or obviously a self-help failure).
3. For Christians, the person retains his unique and irreplaceable identity in his loving relationship with a personal God. The Biblical God is the only One who can see a person just as he is, with a conscience or inward life, full of erotic longings with an irreducibly personal or relational dimension, caught between good and evil and knowing them both to be real, and with a singular personal destiny. This, of course, is no proof for the existence of any kind of God, but only a way of suggesting the limits of Darwinian explanation for the religion we can see with our own eyes.
4. Most of us are way too personal—which means, in a way, way too Christian—to understand ourselves in terms of impersonal science or impersonal religion. Because we’re more than minds, we can’t make a religion, so to speak, out of reason alone. Nor can we understand ourselves these days as parts of any whole. Since the coming of Christianity, we’ve known that we’re more than merely citizens—or citizens or philosophers. We’ve also known that we’re more than parts of nature. The attempt to restore what the Greeks and Roman called natural theology—based on Aristotle’s or Spinoza’s or “Nature’s” God—and civil theology—such as Rousseau and “nationalism”— as comprehensive accounts of who we are have failed. And so too did the monstrous attempts to understand persons as merely parts of History—as expendable parts of a process that will produce some future perfection. History (with a capital “H”) and civil theology (even as Founderism) both seem pretty dead, and they can’t be replaced by classical natural right.
5. We persons refuse to be “species fodder” or “country fodder” or “History fodder” or “religion fodder” or even, more than ever, “family fodder.” Philosophy today is about making the person the bottom line. The point of the work of America’s political philosopher, John Rawls, is to explain that we’re neither more nor less than persons. Each person is to be regarded as having a free, equal, unique, and irreplaceable existence. And so no person exists merely to serve another, and each person is free to choose how to live his or her life. Each person, as a rational agent, is free from nature and so can’t be used as a mere resource by others. Most of our scientists defer to our “humanistic” philosophers on these claims, whether or not they believe it’s really true.
6. Our philosophers no longer ask with any rigor why all this is so. That they assume it to be so is their rather unacknowledged legacy from Christianity. They also tend to assume the personal God who used to be the source of personal identity doesn’t exist. They don’t knock themselves out reconciling what they assume to be true about the person with what the scientists claim to be true. To be fair, they can be regarded as choosing (some of) what they can see for themselves about personal freedom over impersonal self-forgetfulness.
7. It’s a mistake to call our personal orientation “nonfoundationalism.” The person is the foundation—the bottom line. What’s wrong with other foundations is they get persons killed; they turn personal being into nonbeing. Persons are sacrificed for God, country, or noble principle. No foundations, no wars and no cruelty is especially the European thought these days, although our philosopher Richard Rorty did a better job of defending it. Having what John Lennon imagined becoming real is best for personal being.
8. “Nothing to kill or fight for, and no religion too” is not nihilism. It’s the view that—along with high technology—that allows each person to be a person for as long as possible. It’s easy to call nihilism the view that there’s nothing higher than me. But, the person responds, I’m not nothing! I’m uniquely and irreplaceably significant, and, from my view, being itself is extinguished when I am. The downside of “no religion too” is persons are on their own in securing who they are.
9. Still, the existentialist view of the person seems to be fading. The “howl of existentialism” Solzhenitsyn claims to have heard surely is still beneath the surface, but it’s less of a humanistic theme these days. The big-name existentialists, after all, were dangerous fanatics—Heidegger a Nazi and Sartre a Stalinist. Telling people they should feel miserably insignificant without God or whatever leads them to strike out against wildly against persons—beginning in a suicidal or self-destructive way against themselves.
10. Both existentialists and fundamentalists think they’re sure that they’re should be more to life than is reasonable, and so they can’t appreciate that we live in the best time for persons ever. Rorty aimed to defang Heideggerianism by curing it of its whiny and counterproductive obsession with one’s own death. And even Nietzsche, as Nietzsche feared, is becoming nothing more than the philosopher who celebrates the equal or incommensurable creativity of every person.
11. If Rawls is the philosopher of personal justice, Nietzsche is the philosopher of personal choice. He tells sophisticated persons how to enjoy their free time. Rorty was right to see his (and Rawls’) position as somehow both postmodern and bourgeois, while Nietzsche can be read as a nonself-destructive (unlike, say, Jim Morrison) and even non-nauseous bohemian. As Rawls’ explains, our personal choice of a lifeplan is reasonable if it has a high probability of personal success. Rorty and Rawls give us the good news that the two contemporary aspects of being personal—pragmatism (or doing what it takes to secure one’s own being) and existentialism (or trembling before the abyss that surrounds the ephemeral absurdity of one’s own being)—can be reconciled if we persons become more laidback on both fronts.
