A Humanists Perspective on What it means to be Human

[rug]

“Impoverished is he who can predict economic trends but who does not well understand his own self.” ~ Christian Smith



BY EMANUEL L. PAPARELLA, PH.D. JAN 24, 2017
N.B. This article appeared in Ovi magazine on May 18, 2013. It was relevant three years ago, it is even more relevant today, the era of alternate facts and post-truth.

There is a book, which came out some six years ago, which ought to be read by every person concerned with the sorry trend that our civilization has taken in the last twenty years or so. The author of the book is the William R. Kenan professor of sociology Christian Smith of Notre Dame University.
He directs the Center for the Study of Religion and Society as well as the Center for Social Research at the same institution. The title of the book is What is a Person? Rethinking Humanity, Social Life and the Moral Good from the Person Up.

Here are a few particularly meaningful excerpts from Smith’s book: “When we look at the models of the human operative in, say, exchange theory, social control theory, rational choice, functionalism, network theory, evolutionary theory, sociobiology, or sociological Marxism, we may recognize certain aspects of our lives in them. Otherwise the theories would feel completely alien and implausible to us. But I suspect that few of us recognize in those theories what we understand to be most important about our own selves as people. Something about them fails to capture our deep subjective experience as persons, crucial dimensions of the richness of our own lived lives, what thinkers in previous ages might have called our ‘souls’ or ‘hearts’… There is nothing new under the sun. And so the case I build contains no particularly novel ideas… I mostly weave together certain perspectives and insights that others have already expressed… In the wake of the postmodernist critique from the humanities in the face of the rapidly growing power of biotechnology and genetic engineering in the natural sciences, many people today stand uncertain about the meaning or lucidity of the very notion of a coherent self or person, unclear about what a person essentially is or might be whose dignity might be worth preserving, as technological capabilities to reconfigure the human expand.”

Those short excerpts give us a concise idea or the essence of the book. No doubt some critics, especially those who tend to superficially remain at the surface of the human condition, may well turn them against its author and end up branding him as deficient in originality, a sort of reinventing of the wheel; but that would be quite shortsighted and may hint at a desire to sidestep the issue.

http://moderndiplomacy.eu/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=2177:a-humanist-s-perspective-on-what-it-means-to-be-human&Itemid=146

[Bretton Garcia]

1. Notre Dam(e) has been adamantly Catholic

In fact it's been the flagship of academic Catholic ambitions.

In particular, the notion of personhood became relevant to Catholics, as the center of the debate on abortion. Which asked whether a human embryo was a human person.

That's where Christian Smith is partly coming from. Though he seems to extend the debate, in Paparella's account, to how modern and postmodern thought might problematize claims of personhood.

These debates have been common in Science Fiction, since the days of "I Robot."

[Jim__]

2. "... man can be understood but not explained like a machine."

I agree with just about everything in the article. Our awareness is subjective. If we want to understand people, we need to come to some understanding of human subjectivity.

How do you read this sentence:

As Vico, Kant, Croce and Erick Fromm have shown us moderns and post-moderns, man can be understood but not explained like a machine.

I agree that man is not any sort of machine and so any machine metaphor used to explain him will come up short. I believe that we can come to some understanding of man; but I don’t think he can be completely understood.

[rug]

3. I take it the way I take vision.

An ophthalmologist can explain how it works but cannot explain what we see. We are more than the sum of our parts.

[Jim__]

4. That makes sense. - n/t

[Bretton Garcia]

5. Psychology and sociology tell us something about our inner experience.

Between them and say the study of literature, we might not be falling as short of our inner lives, as our present author imagines.

The Church often asserts that it, it's morality, explained the "why" behind human behavior. But in some ways, the Church's "whys," seemed often too simple too: seeing life as a black and white contest between "good" and "evil," God and a Devil, for instance.