On Being Someone , livre ebook

Andrews UK - Helen Oppenheimer

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134 pages

English

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This book continues the discussions in "What a piece of work: on being human" (Imprint Academic 2006) and may be considered its sequel.Among all the creatures in the physical universe, humans seem to be more than simply physical, because they are aware of being creatures in the universe. Human beings essentially belong to the world of nature, yet stand out as the most complex and fascinating of all living beings. Like and also unlike other animals, they respond to what happens to them; they make plans and carry them out; they recognize one another, sometimes lovingly; they make friends and enjoy their company; they shape the world around them for convenience and for delight; they ask questions both practical and theoretical; and many of them try to praise God. In What a Piece of Work, Helen Oppenheimer considered humankind as part of the natural universe which Christians believe God set in motion, asking how human beings stand among other creatures and how they are to be valued. In this volume she leaves aside comparisons with our fellow creatures in order to attend to our own experience. It makes a good start to think of oneself as a human animal, but then we need to go further and ask what does it mean to be a person, to be counted as someone?

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Christianity

Philosophy of mind

Philosophie et théologie

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Publié par	Andrews UK
Date de parution	01 août 2016
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781845404222
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0550€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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On Being Someone
A Christian Point of View
Helen Oppenheimer
imprint-academic.com

Publisher information
2016 digital version by Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright © Helen Oppenheimer, 2011, 2016
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism and discussion.
Imprint Academic, PO Box 200, Exeter EX5 5YX, UK

Dedication
To my great-grandson
REUBEN MOSLEY
who is much too young to read this book
but who I hope will
be pleased with it one day.

Preface
This book continues the discussions in What a piece of work: on being human (Imprint Academic 2006) and may be considered its sequel. I especially want to thank my husband, as ever; for all his help; and my three daughters and their families for all manner of encouragement. I owe specific thanks to: Ivo Mosley for benevolent appraisal; Xanthe Mosley for simplifying the title; Adam Scott for helping me to argue myself out of a dead end; Matilda King for information about medical ethics; Noah Mosley for keen friendly arguments ; and my niece Patricia Brims for judicious advice at an early stage.
I should like to thank the Society for the Study of Christian Ethics, for helping a free-lance academic to keep in touch; and the parish of St Martin de Grouville and its Rector, Mike Lange-Smith, for providing a firm foundation for chapter 19. The late Gordon Dunstan keeps cropping up with gratitude, especially in chapter 6.
The numerous notes and the sketchy bibliographies represent my efforts to apply the maxim of a maths teacher long ago: ‘Show your workings.’ They may be taken as an optional extra, for the benefit of people who like looking things up and for people who find it annoying when they cannot look things up. I have indicated where I have been recapitulating and refurbishing ideas from earlier books now out of print. I am grateful to Anthony Freeman of Imprint Academic for coping doughtily with my footnotes and for providing a congenial reference on page 180.
Helen Oppenheimer

I. Humanity
1. Who Are We?
What is man, that thou art mindful of him: and the son of man, that thou visitest him?
Psalm 8.4
Among all the creatures in the physical universe there are some who seem to be more than simply physical, because they are aware of being creatures in the universe. Though human beings essentially belong to the world of nature, and that is to be gladly emphasized, they still stand out as the most complex and fascinating of all living beings. Like and also unlike other animals, they respond to what happens to them; they make plans and carry them out; they recognize one another, sometimes lovingly; they make friends and enjoy their company; they shape the world around them for convenience and for delight; they ask questions both practical and theoretical; and many of them try to praise God.
The old enquiry ‘What is man?’ used to be a compact way of identifying our questions about human nature and human value, exerting ourselves to take thought about the status of human beings in the world. The enquiry now appears both sexist and ‘speciesist’ and cannot be expressed so neatly any more. ‘What are human beings?’ is more politically correct, but it seems to be almost pointless to ask it. We have a clear idea what human beings are and know a good deal about their biology and their history. The sorts of things we want to say about them are apt to be fairly straightforward. We can describe them in general and in particular and understand that in some ways they are like and in other ways not at all like one another. Even when people baffle us, that is a practical perplexity about how to deal with them, not a theoretical perplexity about understanding the world.
Yet there remain the fundamental questions which ‘What is man?’ used to raise, concerning how to think of humanity. The traditional problems about our nature, value, prospects , fears and hopes still need to be put into words. In a small book called What a piece of work , [1] I embarked on these problems by considering humankind as part of the natural universe which Christians believe God set in motion, asking how human beings stand among other creatures and how they are to be valued,
There comes a time for leaving aside comparisons with our fellow creatures in order to attend to our own experience . It makes a good start to think of myself as a human animal, but then what does it mean to be a person, to be counted as someone? The question ‘What is man?’ turns into ‘Who are we?’ We do not have to be especially perplexed by the particular human beings around us to be impressed by the peculiar fact that conscious experience is a feature of the universe.
George is a straightforward sort of person who is not given to hiding his feelings, so it is quite clear what is fretting him. We can tell that his finger is hurting. He is worrying that it may be septic. We can ask him where the pain is and he can show us the sore place. What he cannot show us is his worry. It is just as real as the inflammation, but where is it? Is it in his head? Even a brain surgeon could never find it, though anxiety may be giving George a physical headache . The brain surgeon could not even find the headache, however up-to-date his apparatus. Cells, even cells which hurt, are a different kind of thing from pains, even well-understood pains. We know what we mean by saying that George cannot have a headache unless he is conscious, but is his consciousness a sort of thing we could locate, and if so what sort of thing?
People are not obliged to go in for deep thinking about thought, but once they have begun they cannot simply stop. Hamlet announced that
... he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and god-like reason
To fust in us unused. [2]
Do we really know what it means to say that George is conscious? We know that as the dependable man he is, he is likely to behave in certain ways, but is his real self somewhere , so to say, behind his characteristic behaving, hidden behind it out of our reach or even out of his reach?
Once we start asking these questions, comprehending what a person is does not seem so straightforward. The point of posing problems like this at the start of a small book about Christian theology is not to claim to offer thorough solutions, but to set up a frame of mind which does not always expect reductive commonsense to provide the whole answer. Suppose we find more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of by philosophical self-assurance, it is worth looking into their meaning.
When people set about using their god-like reason for trying to understand the world, and especially when they hope to commend their thinking to scientists, they must recognize from the start that the truth is to be found out, not made up. Whether they are trying to discover what is causing a small pain or what the vast universe is really like, it is not good enough to say, ‘Well, that’s the way I see it.’ They are required to look at whatever data there are objectively, from outside anyone’s individual point of view. They must try to take what Thomas Nagel called ‘The view from nowhere.’ [3] But Nagel’s paradox really is a paradox. Views are logically from viewpoints. If I make the effort, perhaps I can learn to disengage myself from my own particular situation and look at where I am from outside, but this scientific detachment has to be an achievement and is not to be taken for granted.
Whether it is the nature of the cosmos or my own nature which I am exploring, I may hope to win through to a just appreciation of reality; but I have to begin somewhere, not nowhere, in order to advance to anywhere else. That is, when I am considering what there really is I have to start looking from some point of view, restricted or far-reaching, high up or low down, ordinary or strange. I, myself, shortsighted or long-sighted as I may be, cannot simply be taken out of the whole picture, if there is any picturing going on. Just to say that I am looking at what the world is like draws attention to my own particular experience of looking, even if the ideal is supposed to be complete detachment.
Among all the things there are, we find that we must allow for ourselves, that is, for one sort of object which is not merely an object, a kind of thing which is not inert but mindful of other things. The curious basic notion of awareness is wrapped up in the data. When questions are asked and answers are given about what there is in the universe, the reality of consciousness and its strangeness must be taken into account.
When one considers how consciousness fits into the world of physics, puzzlement may lead to wonder; but the problem at first is an intellectual enquiry concerning facts rather than values, not yet an enquiry about spiritual realities . ‘Consciousness’ is a morally neutral concept which is roughly synonymous with ‘awareness’. The vocabulary of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ arises naturally for picking out the difference between a conscious being and an inanimate object.
There are plenty of possible complexities. A tree responds to its surroundings and is indeed a living thing, but we do not believe that a tree is aware of its surroundings. There are insect-eating plants which are called ‘sensitive’. Wordsworth declared his ‘faith that every flower Enjoys the air it breathes’ and there is no need to call this meaningless; but it would be confusing to take it prosaically. If what Wordsworth meant was that trees and flowers were like people in literally having a subjective life, he was sur