Personality, Personhood, and Self

 

Friend Xerxes suggests that COVID rates don’t mean anything until a person you know is affected. Although Confucian morality might agree, that is wrong for Christians, who hold that all men are brothers. This is the point, for example, of the parable of the Good Samaritan. The fact that people are dying right now in Afghanistan does not affect me personally, or involve anyone I know. Probably not you either. Yet we have a moral duty to care and to do what we realistically can.

It is similarly wrong to “take things personally” when a general principle is at stake. That violates the universal moral principle: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Which translates in political terms to always supporting not self-interest but the greatest good to the greatest number. 

The feminist phrase common some years ago, “the personal is political,” uses “personal” in this selfish sense. 

There is another sense in which making things personal is good: when the person referred to is not one’s self, but another. One ought to treat other people as persons, not as things; in Kant’s formulation, as ends, not as means.

Including God. William Blake caught the point when he said “Picture a holy cloud, you cannot love it. But picture a holy man within the cloud, and love springs up.” He also said “man cannot conceive anything greater than a perfected human.” This is one reason why the incarnation is vital, and why it is necessary and necessarily correct to conceive of God as a personal being, not an abstraction. Anything else is less, to the human mind, and so falls short of reflecting God’s greatness. Anyone who imagines God as something other than a person is in fact imagining God as lesser than themselves.

This is the same point Buber makes with his “I-Thou” relationship. We must understand God as a person, like ourselves. Indeed, every encounter with another person is indirectly an encounter with God: personhood or thou-ness is the essential divine attribute.