CONTENTS

1   INTRODUCTION

2   TRANSCENDENCE AND THE PERSON

3   THE COMPONENTS OF PERSONHOOD

4   THE VALUE OF THE PERSON

5   OBJECTIVE MORAL IMPERATIVES

6   AUTHENTIC PERSONHOOD

7   CONCLUSIONS

3   THE COMPONENTS OF PERSONHOOD - CONTINUED

UNBOUNDEDNESS

One could imagine a being with conceptual self-awareness, and autonomous desires, which nevertheless was perfectly content to stay with the original set of desires, or at most wished to modify them only in a finite set of ways. We would say that this state of being does not fully match up to personhood as it is manifested in human beings.

In the discussion of self-awareness, I described our ability to redefine ourselves in indefinitely many ways. By unboundedness I mean the desire to use this ability. This desire is a crucial feature of the human experience. Among our desires is a profound discontent with the finite given. We obsessively explore alternative ways of being. This is especially true of children; the practicalities of adult life close down the possibilities, especially as the ultimate finite given, mortality, looms ever nearer. And yet many of us do childish things, like run off to Tahiti to paint, or to Nepal to climb Mount Everest, or to the study to wrestle with the problem of personhood.

There is more to freedom than just self-rule. For the person to be genuinely free, the self-rule has to exercise itself within the framework of a potentially infinite repertoire of behaviour. This is another difference between a dog and a human being. The dog has a finite pattern of behaviour: something like sleeping, investigating, socialising with other dogs, hunting, feeding, mating. Of course human beings have their own biological heritage of behaviour too: walking, talking, our own primate modes of basic socialising. But typically human beings want to do more. Not satisfied with running we want to go faster, and end up riding horses and bicycles, and driving cars, and even then still want to go faster. Not biologically aquatic we want to swim across rivers, or under the water, and end up crossing oceans on vessels of our devising. Then we want to climb mountains, and fly in the air, and fly into space. Not content with understanding the world immediately around us, we lust after an understanding of the stars and the atoms.

Even more striking than our ability to do all these new things, is that we want to do them. Consider again the behaviour of small children. A puppy learns to be a dog; a kitten learns to be a cat. But a human child tries out being a dog, a cat, any other animal it sees, a motor car, an aeroplane, and so on. Anything that moves is not merely imitated, but has its identity assumed for a while. What is being rehearsed is not a single identity, but a remorseless plasticity, which is the identity of the human person.

From the earliest times the story of Homo sapiens (and even of earlier species of the genus Homo) is one of a revolt against biological nature. This revolt took a tropical African ape into all the world's terrestrial habitats: from Iceland to Tasmania, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. No other animal has done this. No other non-flying animal imagines that it might fly, expresses disappointment that it can not fly, and finally uses technology to allow it to fly. Intelligence is important here, to allow us to conceive of our situation being different and to devise the means of changing our situation. But, to reiterate the point, more important is the fact that these capabilities are driven into action by a restless desire.

An objection to this account says that both the desire and the ability to do radically new things are always marginal, always confined to a few exceptional individuals. The answer is that while this is true of the great leaps of the inventive imagination or the great acts of physical courage, the vast majority of people seek for some way, commensurate with their abilities, of stretching their limits, of proving their worth against some challenge. Take, as an example, the popularity of skiing. A Darwinian explanation of this phenomenon might be as follows:

being proficient at skiing sends out the message: look at me, how healthy and daring I am; why don't you entrust your genes to mine in the making of new babies.

But there is also an existential explanation along the lines of:

look at me - I have broken the bounds placed by nature on the speed at which the human body can move.

This latter type of explanation accords with an account of human nature as rebelling against any imposition placed on it by the world in which we are embedded. In this case the limitation is that placed on the speed at which we can move, either just for the sake of moving at a certain speed, or to get from one place to another.

It must be recognised as well that there is a force acting against the desire to prove unboundedness. This is the desire for security. Pushing physical limits is physically dangerous. Beyond that there is the existential danger of the infinite responsibility entailed by unboundedness. If there are no prior constraints on my identity, then perhaps I may end up having no identity at all. These constraints may be physical, biological or social. Of these three types, the social constraints are the most important, for it is in the eyes of the persons around us that we find the part of our identity that we care the most about. Only other persons, who know what it is to be a person, can make valid judgements on the worth, the authenticity, of a given personal identity.

Many people do not want to have to make radical choices from an unbounded set of possibilities. Instead they seek refuge in the security of fixed systems of rules. It sometimes seems that the success of religions is in direct proportion to the strictness of the rules with which they bind their adherents. Nevertheless there remains a strong intuition that those who strive against limits are more admirable, more noble. This suggests that we see unboundedness as being a part of authentic personhood.

4   THE VALUE OF THE PERSON

To begin with let me introduce the following conjectural definition of "value":

        A value is a feeling articulated conceptually in language.

I could insist on this as the definition of how I use the word "value", demanding that the reader forget all previous usages of the word. I am however treating this as a conjecture as to how to characterise the existing usages of the word - or at least as a maximal coherent subset of the usages. (It is entirely possible that the totality of usages is incoherent, and cannot be captured by a single definition.)

As established by this working definition, the concept of value is securely located right at the point where the thinking and feeling parts of personhood come together. It is the conceptual articulation of feelings which allows the logical relations between them, and with facts about the world articulated in the same conceptual framework, to become visible. Thus, and only thus, can a single, coherent value-system come into being, ready to be identified as the values belonging to an individual person. (Clearly, this "belonging" relation has to be explained.)

Within such a system the individual values refer back to a central "I want". I assign food a positive value because it is the means to satisfy my hunger, and this hunger is one of the constituents of the "I want". Likewise I assign poison a negative value because it could kill me. In many cases both sorts of value can reside in something: I may keep the poison because it also have the positive value of killing rats. Fire is a classic example of a human technology which has high positive and negative values.

The existence of this single focus, this single "I want", is what I mean by the fully developed autonomy of the person. It contrasts with:

• heteronomy - being driven from the outside;
• being driven by an inarticulate, incoherent collection of competing desires (which perhaps could be called "polynomy").

Within a value-system, the means to an end have what might be called "hypothetical" value - their value is explained by reference to the value of something else. Within the value-system belonging to a person all of these explanatory chains converge on a single value, and then stop. It makes sense to call this teleological first-cause, this categorical value as the value of the person. Each individual instance of this is the value of the individual person. In general it is the value associated (as a matter of logical necessity) with personhood.

To many people this account of the value of each person as coming from within that person will seem seriously inadequate. "Of course," they might say, "it is easy for me to say that I am valuable. But what is it that really makes me valuable?" Implicit in this question is the intuition that the individual does not have the authority to declare him or herself to be important. Instead the questioner looks for a source of external validation of his or her self-worth.

In the framework of religion, this external source will be divine. Christians, for example, would say that we are the children of God, and, as it were, inherit our value from our heavenly Father. We can trace our worth back to first final cause of all the universe:

                "....la divina potestate,
        la somma sapienza, e il primo amore."

(Here we are appealing to the "primo amore" aspect of God, the first and loving will.) In a purely secular context, individuals look to the approbation of society, of the people around them, for this external validation of their worth. Self-valuing is seen as too subjective, too influenced by the self-interest of the individual carrying it out.

This objection is based on a profound misunderstanding of the relation I am trying to establish here between the categorical value and the person. It makes the tacit assumption that there is some prior framework of values against which each individual is being judged, and within which the individual makes the judgement of his or her own worth. Instead we must understand a picture in which the individual human person, and the associated value-structure, emerge from an entirely value-free physical world. (There are of course in this world previously existing persons. This complication is discussed in the next section. Here we speak as if the emergent individual were alone in the world, and later will show that the presence of other persons does not affect the main conclusions.) The emergence of the person and the value-structure are strictly simultaneous.

This simultaneity rules out two other potential relationships between the person and the values:

• the values are prior to the person, who then has to justify him or herself against them - in which case the person can not be seen as the primal categorical value;
  
  
• the person is prior to the values, and then makes them up, as a conscious (or indeed unconscious) act of will.

To understand this account of the value of the person, each person must be seen as constituting a complete, enclosed monadic value-world. There is no prior value of which the person-values form a subsystem, no reference beyond these person-values to values on which they logically or temporally depend. There are emergent, posterior value-systems which over-arch the individual systems, which will be discussed in the following two sections under the headings of morality and authenticity, but they are ontologically dependent on the prior and mutually independent first final causes which constitute each individual person.

So I am not claiming I have the authority to proclaim my categorical worth. This act of proclamation has a strange amphibian quality. It is not wholly prior to me, in terms of which my value is defined, nor can it be wholly made by me. It is a transformation which starts out with me not existing, and therefore starts out as more a physical process than a linguistic act. Along the way it brings me into existence, and ends up being my first act of will, expressed and executed by use of language.

In this context where there is no prior value-system having jurisdiction over me, the question of what authority I have to give myself value does not arise. The authority of a judge within, say an English court, derives from his or her being appointed as a judge according to the provisions of English law. In the case of a first final cause emerging from a world devoid of purposes there is no such prior basis for giving authority. Instead my authority as a valuer within my own value system is brought into being by the same process, just described, by which I and the categorical value which attaches to me come into being. There is no prior authority from which I have to seek permission for this step, nor any prior standard against which I must measure myself. Of course once the whole system is in place I can (and often do) judge myself against my own standards and find myself wanting. This does not in any way affect my status as the "what it's all for" of the system. I am the end to which all the means are directed, however well or badly I turn out to serve my own end.

It is important here to grasp just how different the categorical value is from the values we are used to dealing with . The latter are quantitative in nature: we can talk about how well or ill we measure up to them, or how well or ill our actions serve our ends. The categorical value of the person is intrinsically qualitative, it is either there or not there. There are only two points on the scale: zero (not a person) and one (a person). At this stage there is no sense in which we can strive to be a better person. Further down the line we shall find emerging ways in which this does make sense, but these will presuppose the qualitative value under discussion here.

For this reason, this talk of the fundamental value of the person may be of little use to those who are suffering from problems of self-esteem. They most likely to be looking for some quantitative measure, some scale on which they could be compared with others and on which they could improve their position by diligent effort. Something that is the same for all persons, and can neither be improved or diminished whatever they do (apart from dying, which moves the value from one back to zero) is not relevant to these concerns. Nevertheless, the concept of the categorical value of the person is, I argue, of critical theoretical importance to the understanding of the nature of personhood, and the validity of all subsequent values, including moral ones.

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