Tuesday, December 05, 2006
(9:34 PM) | Anonymous:
Winning the Brother for Christ (ii)
Winning the Brother for Christ (ii): Person and IndividualIn one of the key arguments of Silence and Honey Cakes Rowan Williams draws on the theology of Vladimir Lossky to establish a distinction between "the individual" and "the person". This is essentially a distinction between the chooser and the chosen: between this or that volitional agent milling about in the crowd, and the uniquely interpellated subject of a vocation. The individual "has choices", but exercises them in conformity with both his own nature, as a needy creature of appetite and emotion, and the state of affairs in which a given range of choosable options is laid out. The plight of the individual is appropriately exemplified by the figure of the rebellious teenager:
...[T]he problem is that we are actually so naive about choices, forgetting that this world of maximal choice is heavily managed and manipulated. The rebellious teenager has a ready-made identity to step into, professionally serviced by all those manufacturers who have decided what a rebellious teenager should look like: advertising standardizes our dreams. Our choices are constantly channelled into conformist patterns, and when we try to escape, there are often standard routes provided by the same market...
The desert-within-the-desert of the monastic cell represents one possible halting point for the restless sifting of alternatives that characterises the individual's pursuit of spiritual satisfaction. It is not at all a satisfying place to be; rather, it is the place where akkedia seriously starts to bite, and where one may have to sit in silence and contemplate its fangs. It is also a place where the "heavy burden" of individual self-justification may be laid down, and where the person "created, loved and healed" by God may begin to emerge.
It is not simply the case that "the individual" is the human animal considered in isolation from his fellow human animals, and "the person" that being which exists in personal relationship to other beings. On the contrary, "the individual" is already intensely, even pathologically, social, involved in myriad relationships of projection in which individuals seek to find their identities reflectively confirmed by others:
To solve the stress by not fleeing, by resorting to "human company", is to blur the sharp edges of responsibility and to imagine that you can arrange your situation to your comfort. Change the furniture, change the scenery, and you can change your inner landscape; talk to others and manipulate their reaction to you, and you can soften or share out the guilt you feel and fear. Someone has offended or hurt me, accused me of something, pointed out something I'd rather not recognize; the attractive way through is to talk to someone else and get them to reassure me that I'm wonderful and (ideally) that my critic is not worth listening to. But this is as useful in the long term as drinking salt wayer; I shall have to work very hard indeed at silencing the critical voice, and it can become an obsessive search for absolution.
Self-justification is not the hidden, sustaining vice of a private conscience, but the continuous symbolic labour of public selfhood. Conversely, personhood is not simply a matter of belonging to the community of persons, of being addressed as "thou" by others whom one in turn addresses as "thou". Personhood has an inexorably secret dimension, which cannot be reduced to the reciprocal exchange of tokens of respect and recognition. Perhaps a better word than "secret" would be "discrepant". In Orthodox Christology, as Williams points out, much is made of the discrepancy between the notions of "will" and "person": for the Eastern Church, it was possible to speak of two natures (and thus two wills) in one person:
To have a "will", for the Orthodox theologians of that era, was to have a set of dispositions that went with your nature: if this is the kind of being that you are, this is the kind of thing you're likely to want. Choosing among the kinds of things you're liable to want is on this account a "natural" activity. So, for Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, the human will is active, and the human will, like all human wills, wants to survive and rebels against the thread of not surviving...But the human will is not the human person, and all this is quite abstract when considered apart from the person who activates the willing...Persons do the deciding; and when you have a person who is wholly self-consistent, whose identity is completely bound up in the calling to live in unreserved intimacy with God as Father, there is, as we say, no choice.
Decision is the domain of the person as choice is the domain of the individual: the person is that person who decides, in such a way as to leave no choices open. This does not make sense if we regard decision as a form of judgement, the exercise of a discriminating faculty which evaluates choices and selects the most advantageous option. But decisiveness is predicated of persons in the same way as it is predicated of a contingency which comes to determine the course of events: a person's decision is a function of what he is, not (or not exclusively) what he thinks.
When, finding ourselves unable to know what to do for the best, we complain of our own indecisiveness, it is not a failure of evaluative strategy we are bemoaning (since we are often faced with options between which there is little to choose) but our inability to act, in spite of this failure, in such a way as to resolve the situation. This inability to act decisively points to a failure of self-consistency: a failure to be, qua person, the deciding factor in our own actions. This view of human agency and its vicissitudes is specifically opposed to what Williams has called the "false anthropology" of Thatcherism, at the heart of which is a vision of the individual as a rational agent bent on maximising benefit to himself and participating, through the local evaluation of cost and benefit, in the vast information-processing apparatus of the Market. This rational agent turns out to be a kind of failed person, a person enslaved by choices and incapable of decision (and hence of any determinate project). It is one of the hallmarks of Williams's style of argumentation that while he almost never resorts to explicit polemics, even his most apparently abstruse and technical discussions often have a considerable, if veiled, polemical force.
