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Should We Say that Personhood Is Relational?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Harriet A. Harris
Harriet A. Harris
Affiliation:
Department of Theology, University of Exeter, Queen's Building, The Queen's Drive, Exeter EX4 4QH, UK
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Extract

A current emphasis in theological anthropology is that we become persons through our relations to others. Ethically valuable and pastorally illuminating insights that as persons we develop in relation to others have been used wrongly to underpin the claim that personhood is relational — a claim which is logically confused and ethically precarious. Alistair I. McFadyen, whose book The Call to Personhood has been influential in this respect, describes personhood as the ‘sedimentation’ of interpersonal relations. Elaine L. Graham places the stress on cultural interaction as a prerequisite for the development of beings into persons. In her study of gender and personhood, Making the Difference, Graham argues that her ‘relational’ account of gender is ‘suggestive of a model of human nature as profoundly relational, requiring the agency of culture to bring our personhood fully into being’. The potential ethical danger behind a view of personhood as relational is apparent from statements made by Vincent Brümmer in his volume The Model of Love, to the effect that ‘both our identity and our value as persons is constituted by our relations of fellowship with others’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , May 1998 , pp. 214 - 234
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1998

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References

1 The Call to Personhood: A Christian Theory of the Individual in Social Relationships, CUP, 1990, passim.Google Scholar

2 Making the Difference: Gender, Personhood and Theology, London: Mowbray, 1995, p. 223.Google Scholar

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4 Christoph Schwöbel draws our attention to the bewildering variety of concepts of personhood today. See his ‘Introduction’, in Schwöbel, Christoph and Gunton, Colin E. eds Persons, Divine and Human: King's College Essays in Theological Anthropology, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991.Google Scholar

5 See Shoemaker, Sydney and Swinburne, Richard, Personal Identity, Oxford: Blackwell, 1984Google Scholar. Swinburne advances a dualist account of personal identity and so of a person as a soul to whom bodily continuity is not essential.

6 Cf. Parfit, Derek, Reasons and Persons, Oxford: Clarendon, 1986, pp. 201–202.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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8 Brümmer, pp. 164–65; cf. Lucas, J.R., Freedom and Grace, London: SPCK, 1976, pp. 60–62.Google Scholar

9 Brümmer, p. 172.

10 See Model of Love, pp. 4–10, 232–36.

11 Frankfurt, Harry, ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person’, Journal of Philosophy, 68 (1971): 5–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 Cf. Parfit p. 202. Parfit comes to argue that what matters is not personal identity but rather psychological connectedness and/or psychological continuity (Reasons and Persons, Part Three). While his thesis may sound more radical than do relational accounts of personal identity, Parfit does intend to preserve both the unity of consciousness and the unity of a whole life. He explains these unities in terms of relations between experiences. A relational account of personal identity which depicts personal identity as the latest product of a history of relatedness jeopardises both one-one identity and psychological continuity or connectedness. This is because the latest product of a history of relations must be different at each new moment of time. In order to affirm psychological continuity or connectedness with previous products, some further notion must be employed, such as that of a ‘deep self’ which is ‘removed from particular relations’ (McFadyen, p. 102). For similar anxieties over relational accounts of personal identity see White, Vernon, Paying Attention to People: An Essay on Individualism and Christian Belief (SPCK, 1996), pp. 102–105.Google Scholar

13 ‘Conditions of personal identity’, in Ruddock ed. pp. 93–125, p. 104. Ruddock writes: ‘The assertion that we change ourselves as we change our roles is unlikely to meet with general assent. Most of us feel ourselves to be somewhat different in different roles, but not absolutely. There is a central sense in which we feel ourselves to be more than a thread of memory on which roles are strung. Objectively, we observe behaviour changes in others as they move from role to role, but not to the extent that we think of them as different people. Indeed, if a person presents himself as differently as that, we have a sense of discomfort’ (p. 104).

14 For example, throughout his study McFadyen draws on Rom Harré's social constructionist view that an infant becomes a person through being treated as a person. (See Harré, Rom, Personal Being, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984Google Scholar.) From this view one can draw important theological, moral and pastoral implications for our responsibility towards one another. However, one cannot base either a normative or an ontological account of personhood on social constructionism. Harré's view is that people rely upon one another for acquiring abilities essential to being a person (notably, self-referential abilities). He regards this sort of claim as different in kind from but compatible with Strawson's philosophical account of persons as basic beings, publicly identified by a cluster of bodily, behavioral and mentalistic attributes. (See Harré, Rom and Shorter, J.M., ‘person: concept of’, in Harré, Rom and Lamb, Roger eds, The Dictionary of Personality and Social Psychology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 239–240Google Scholar.) An ontological account which stresses our relational nature, ‘as persons through our relation with God’ (McFadyen, p. 206), is not more obviously in accord with social constructionism than is Strawson's account, and does not bridge the gap between ontology and social psychology.

15 Ruddock, p. 5.

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24 Baier, Annette, ‘Trust and Anti-Trust’, Ethics 96 (January 1986):231–260, pp. 247–8 [reprinted in Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics, Harvard University Press, 1994). See Held, pp. 47–48.Google Scholar

25 Graham, ‘Gender, Personhood and Theology’, p. 358.

26 ‘Trust and Anti-Trust’, pp. 247–8.

27 Okin, Susan Moller, Justice, Gender and the Family, New York: Basic Books, 1989Google Scholar; Nussbaum, Martha, ‘Justice For Women!’, New York Review, October 8, 1992:43–47Google Scholar, and ‘The Feminist Critique of Liberalism’, Amnesty lecture, partially reprinted in The Times Higher, February 2, 1996:17–18; Held, pp. 44–45.

28 Marilyn Friedman distinguishes between conceding and endorsing the influence of one's communities on one's development, and sees the process of questioning their influence as a journey of ‘personal redefinition’. ‘Feminism and Modern Friendship: Dislocating the Community’, Ethics 99/2 (1989): 275–90, quotation p. 290.

29 Similar criticisms are made of communitarian ethics where they do not enable adequate responses to non-ideal communities. For a succinct discussion see Will Kymlicka's response to Daniel Bell in Bell's Communitarianism and its Critics, Oxford: Clarendon, 1993, pp. 208ff.Google Scholar

30 ‘More than 100 Million Women Are Missing’, The New York Review, December 20, 1990, pp. 61–66. The women are ‘missing’ in that the basic medical, nutritional and social requirements for their survival have not been met. Sen attributes this partly to the deprived status of women in families, and consequently their low standing in the wider culture, particularly when women do not work outside the home (and so, we might say, have no extra-familial social standing). Sen focuses on Asia and North Africa. For instances in US law where the label person has been arbitrarily withheld from women see Nussbaum, ‘Human Capabilities’, pp. 75–76 n. 42.