Carlos John M.

Barrera V24; BS-Applied Economics De La Salle University

Beginning of human personhood

The beginning of human personhood is the period in an individual's life when he or she is recognized, or begins to be recognized, as a person. The precise timing and nature of this occurrence is not universally agreed upon, and has been a subject of discussion and debate in science, religion and philosophy. The question of when and how personhood begins is often the nexus of controversy on issues such as abortion, stem cell research, reproductive rights, and fetal rights.

Human
Humans (variously Homo sapiens and Homo sapiens sapiens) are primates of the family Hominidae, and the only extant species of the genus Homo. Humans are distinguished from other primates by their bipedal locomotion, and especially by their relatively larger brain with its particularly well developed neocortex, prefrontal cortex and temporal lobes, which enable high levels of abstract reasoning, language, problem solving, and culture through social learning. Humans use tools to a much higher degree than any other animal, and are the only extant species known to build fires and cook their food, as well as the only known species to clothe themselves and create and use numerous other technologies and arts. The scientific study of humans is the discipline of anthropology. Humans are uniquely adept at utilizing systems of symbolic communication such as language and art for selfexpression, the exchange of ideas, and organization. Humans create complex social structures composed of many cooperating and competing groups, from families and kinship networks to states. Social interactions between humans have established an extremely wide variety of values, social norms, and rituals, which together form the basis of human society. Humans are noted for their desire to understand and influence their environment, seeking to explain and manipulate phenomena through science, philosophy, mythology, and religion. Homo sapiens originated in Africa, where it reached anatomical modernity about 200,000 years ago and began to exhibit full behavioral modernity around 50,000 years ago. The human lineage diverged from the last common ancestor with its closest living relative, the chimpanzee, some five million years ago, evolving into the Australopithecines and eventually the genus Homo. The first Homo species to move out of Africa was Homo erectus, the African variety of which, together with Homo heidelbergensis, is considered to be the immediate ancestor of modern humans. Homo sapiens proceeded to colonize the continents, arriving in Eurasia 125,000 60,000 years ago, Australia around 40,000 years ago, the Americas around 15,000 years ago, and remote islands such as Hawaii, Easter Island, Madagascar, and New Zealand between the years AD 300 and 1280. Humans began to practice sedentary agriculture about 12,000 years ago, domesticating plants and animals which allowed for the growth of civilization. Humans subsequently established various forms of government, religion, and culture around the world, unifying people within a region and leading to the development of states and empires. The rapid advancement of scientific and medical understanding in the 19th and 20th centuries led to the development of fuel-driven technologies and improved health, causing the human population to rise exponentially. With individuals widespread in every continent except Antarctica, humans are a cosmopolitan species, and by 2012, their population was estimated to be around 7 billion.

Plato

In the platonic and aristotelian philosophical thought living things are distinguished from non living ones by the fact that they possess or are driven by something they call soul (greek: , latin: anima). Plants posses souls that are confined to the first level, i.e. plants grow and live their lives without being able to move as units and to perceive their environments, animals can move and perceive and relate themselves to their environments, and finally humans possess full-fledged souls that enable them not only to grow, to move and to perceive, but also to have an epistemic access both to the natural world and to their special mode of existence. The platonic and aristotelian concepts of the soul differ, however, in an important point, namely in the constitution of individual personhood: while Plato regards individual personhood as an additional feature that cannot be reduced to or emerge from the three faculties of the human soul, reason, will and desire, Aristotle seems to think that individual persons are manifested in the same way, in which the soul of any other living species transforms and orders matter to the spatiotemporal unit that is an individual manifestation of its kind. This means that in the same way, in which the cat soul actualizes the cat form as an individual cat by transforming and organizing matter into individual cat flesh, bones, body and behaviour, the human soul transforms and orders matter to flesh, bones, body and personality of an individual human being. The individual person is the actual manifestation () of the potentiality () given by the human form. A good individual human life is given when this life has exhausted the full potential of the human form. In contrast to Aristotle, Plato seems to think that personality is the actualization of an idea that is somehow connected to the general activity of the soul, but separated from it. In other words, Plato's concept of personhood is thus compatible with the idea that there could exist rational beings without individual personality forming something like a collective rationality. The introduction of a separate instance of personality by Plato reflects the fact that humans live their lives not in a general and abstract good manner, but regard each individual life as an eternal good and as something that shall serve as orientation point both to contemporary and future fellow humans. Thus it is necessary that individual personality is itself an eternal ideal that outlasts an individual life. Despite this difference both agree that the properties constituting any living thing including persons are not just factual occurrences that may add up or not to the individual in question, but manifestations of a normative power that determines what the end of the life process is. This means that:

Person as a moral status and individual personality as spatiotemporal manifestation are inseparable. There are no personalities without the moral status of person. A human being not displaying the traits of personality is a defect personality and not a non-person, in the same sense that a three legged horse is a defect horse and not a new sort of animal.

Confronted with the question if personhood is a trait of a specific animal species the aristotelian position would agree to this, adding perhaps that the existence of more than one person-forming species would be a case of analogy, like the existence of many water-living or many feathered species. From the platonic point of view, however, being an animal is just a necessary condition of being a person, so that personality can manifest itself in form of more than one animal species.

Nietzsche on Personhood
Considering the infamous reputation of Nietzsche and the misreading and exploitation of Nietzsches rhetoric done by the Nazis one could fairly easily do the assumption that Nietzsche only considers the so called overman (bermensch) as a person. And that his extreme critique of the so called herd mentality and slave morality could be understood as Nietzsches repudiation of the status of personhood from such people. But in my understanding this is not the case at all. Altogether, Nietzsche does not deny the personhood or even humanity of his opponents. In fact, what they appear to be is human, all too human. The qualities that make us humans and persons are common to all human

beings i.e. memory, language and through them creation of history, morality and religions. That is what makes us humans. But this does not prevent Nietzsche from criticizing the qualities that he does not consider as improving humanity i.e. life-denying and nihilist attitude towards life which are manifested especially in Christianity. But there is no such concept in Nietzsches philosophy as under-man which could be interpreted as a non-person whereas only the overman could be interpreted as a person. As a matter of fact Nietzsches overman is about cultivating human beings as individuals and this does not include some sort of condemning others as lesser humans or persons or the complete denial of their personhood. The main reason for Nietzsches condemnation of equality and its main manifestations in Western culture (Christianity as a religion and in politics pursue of democracy and liberation of women) is the disappearance of life-improving competition. Nietzsche regards both of them as leveling out the highest expressions of human endeavor. Altogether, Nietzsches philosophy is about pursuing after the highest possible kind of embodiments of human beings as persons and individuals. But what is the basis for this in Nietzsche? We are more familiar with idea of the highest specimen of humanity but what are the qualities that makes as human? What are the qualities that enable at its best the overman? Nietzsches basic assumption seems to be that we as humans are conscious and self-conscious. What makes this possible is our capability of remembrance and linguistics. We are able to recall and make stories about our past lives as individuals and also as cultures which Nietzsche illustrates in On the Use and Abuse of History for Life. This also enables the creation of morals which Nietzsche demonstrates in On the Genealogy of Morals. As Nietzsche puts it in (somewhere?!) the conception of selfhood is completely fabricated in retrospect as we recall our histories. Thus, human self-consciousness and conception of ourselves are something that we create afterwards. Although that might sound as a defect or a flaw it is in the matter of fact a very important capability. The picture of Nietzsches understanding of personhood now appears to include three important factors that all are possible at least to human beings: the capability of remembrance, usage of language and retrospective storytelling of our own pasts.

Marx
The Political Economy of Personhood by Charles W. Mills To speak in the same breath of personhood and political economy sounds odd because of the seemingly obvious radical difference between the two worlds of their application. On the one hand, a straightforward moral term from everyday life referring to the status of our fellow humans; on the other hand, a technical theory with roots in 18th-century French and British philosophical thought about the interrelation between economic production, society, and the state. What could these two possibly have to do with each other? Lets start with personhood, a term far less straightforward than it seems. To begin with, we cant use person and human interchangeably because, as science fiction reminds us, when the aliens do eventually arrive they will presumably expect to be treated with the respect due to self-legislating beings. Personhood is a moral status that is not limited to humans. For that matter, right here on our own planet, some animal rights advocates would want to extend it to great apes, or even more broadly. Nor is a biological incarnation necessarily even a prerequisite. Recent exponential advances in AI technology open up the future possibility of self-conscious computers and robots whose potential moral rights as self-aware entities have likewise long been a staple of science fiction. Personhood is a moral status that is not limited to organic life. Indeed, in a legal sense (if admittedly more fuzzily in a moral sense), personhood is independent of such considerations, as demonstrated by the U.S. Supreme Courts 1886 decision to recognize corporations as persons under the Fourteenth Amendment and their more recent 2010 Citizens United decision removing, under the First Amendment, limits to corporate political spending. Person, as John Locke pointed out long ago, is a forensic term, though even he did not realize how liberated from the biological it would eventually come to be. So person may extend far beyond the human. But my concern here is, so to speak, with movement in the other direction: not the speculations of novelists or the

jurisprudential decisions of legislators about the non-, trans- or extra-human, but the restriction of who is counted as human within the borders of the human. Not, in other words, the demarcation and adjudication of the non-human person but rather the demarcation and adjudication of the human non-person. It was, after all, that same U.S. Supreme Court so generous in its recognition of corporations that had earlier, in the 1857 Dred Scott decision, judged that blacks were beings of an inferior order with no rights which the white man was bound to respect, so that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit, this being an axiom in morals as well as in politics, which no one thought of disputi ng. Clearly if these beings were human they did not reach the threshold of personhood. And though the Civil War and post-bellum Reconstruction swept away the decision, leading to the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, the withdrawal of federal troops after the 1877 Hayes-Tilden Compromise would enable the re-subordination of blacks under the new regime of Jim Crow, to be given formal federal sanction in the 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson decision. A case can be made that no conjunction of events more clearly summarizes the political economy of personhood in the racial capitalism of the United States than corporations being recognized as persons in the same post-bellum period when blacks personhood was being taken away. Orto move to the presentthat corporate political power has been given free rein through the Citizens decision at the very time that mass incarcerations from the War on Drugs are, in a new Jim Crow, disenfranchising and rendering politically impotent hugely disproportionate numbers of African Americans.[i] In sum, person is not co-extensive with human because to be human is neither necessary nor sufficient for personhood. Non-human entities exist that count as persons while human entities exist that do not count as persons. Not all humans have been granted the moral status to which their presumptive personhood should have entitled them. When I speak of the political economy of personhood, then, I really mean the political economy of socially recognized personhood. I am taking for granted that morality is objective, so that peoples actual personhood continues to exist independent of social convention.[ii] But I am drawing our attention to how serious an error it is to assume that ones humanness guarantees that ones humanness, and corresponding presumptively equal moral status, will actually be acknowledged. In fact, I would suggest that this elision, or slide between the two, is facilitated by the term person itself. We tend to use it to signify both a factual characterization (roughly, human) and an achieved moral status (roughly, human recognized as equally human). We conflate, in other words, the factual and the ideal, the descriptive and the normative. And what I am suggesting is that we need to peel these apart and face the reality that, historically and still currently, most humans were not and are not socially recognized persons, or, more neatly and epigrammatically put: most persons are non-persons. Now this claim may seem extremist. But I would contend that if it does, it is only because our consciousness has been so colonized by the official narrative that white male normativity still unconsciously shapes our frameworks. The rethinking of social theory in the light of several decades of feminist and critical race theory scholarshipthe rethinking that should have placed in a new light for us the hegemonic framings of the humanhas not yet been sufficiently thoroughly carried out. We still think of personhood, at least for the modern period, as being the default mode, the norm, when in actuality non-personhood is the norm. Even in the official narrative, this is more or less conceded for the pre-modern epoch. The periodization of the past few thousand years is standardly recounted as follows. In the ancient and medieval world, inequality and ascriptive hierarchy are the norm. People are divided into citizens and slaves, or lords and serfs. So the individual is not really a significant category. What is important is your estate membership, which largely determines, from birth to death, your status and your fate. Modernity represents a tectonic moral break with this world, since people (conceived of as generic) are now recognized as morally equal individuals. Thus we get the inspirational story of the American and French Revolutions, the famous declaration that We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and the slogans of liberty, equality, and fraternity. In this new world, the individual becomes the central bearer of value, so that government can only be justified with respect to the consent of these individuals, and social justice is supposed to be determined by their needs and interests. Liberalism is then the normative vehicle of this emancipation of individuals, persons, from absolutism and moral inegalitarianism. But what if there are gender and racial prerequisites to being an individual? The problem with the orthodox narrative is that it limits ascriptive hierarchy to estate membership, conceived of as classes. The formal abolition of class hierarchy is then taken to be equivalent to the formal abolition of ascriptive hierarchy simpliciter. Previously, as in the writings of Lockes political adversary in the Second Treatise, Sir Robert Filmer, white males were deemed to be themselves hierarchically ordered. Whether through noble blood or divine dispensation or both, some white

men were judged to be naturally superior to other white men. The overturning of this hierarchy is then supposed to sound the tocsin of the new egalitarian world order. But what it really does is signal the equalization, the ascent to personhood, of white males in general, who are then entitled to rule over naturally inferior white women and the new category of people of color, who are likewise deemed inferior.[iii] Consider gender. As Catharine MacKinnons powerful essay Are Women Human? should bring home to us, women of all classes have been denied the status of full personhood for thousands of years, including the present, at least if we take personhood to beas we shoulda robust moral status implying not merely formal juridical equality, but substantively guaranteed equality, in the sense of the political will and allocation of material resources to actively enforce anti-discrimination measures and correct for the legacy of past discrimination. So thats half the population to begin with. The dawn of the modern age is supposed to dissolve caste and social estate and usher in the epoch of the individual. But of course it does not do this for women, who remain imprisoned in a gender caste, a female estate. And crucially, the dissolving of caste hierarchy for white men coincides with the introduction of a new kind of casteracefor what become people of color. Across the globe, hundreds of millions of people are now categorized as belonging to a less-than-full-persons nonwhite category, whether as Amerindians on the two continents, native Australians, African slaves, or colonized Asians. From the 15thcentury Catholic Doctrine of Discoverythrough the rulings in international law, slave codes, and racial regulations of the colonial periodto the 1919 vetoing by the Anglo-Saxon nations (Britain, the United States, Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand) at the post-World War I Versailles conference of the Japanese delegations proposal to insert a racial equality clause in the League of Nations covenant,[iv] the ethico-juridical inequality of people of color was globally affirmed. A patriarchy that was already planetary was joined by a white supremacy that, by the start of the 20th century, would become planetary also. Once we face this history without evasion, we should be able to see that the claim that, even under modernity, only a minority of humans are socially recognized persons is, far from being radical and extremist, obvious and undeniable. Women of all races and male people of color put together constitute the majority of the population. How could this not have implications for the modal distribution of personhood? Once gender and race are seriously taken into account rather than being theoretically bracketed, the official narrative of modernity, liberalism, and the individual is dramatically overturned. Liberalism must then be reconceptualized not as the normative vehicle of the emancipation of all individuals, but as the normative vehicle of the justifiable absolutist rule of equal white male persons over morally inferior, gender- and racially-demarcated sub-persons. And that brings us to political economy. For once we realize how contingent the connection is between actual (objective) personhood and socially recognized personhood, we should be moved to ask the question: what determines this granting and denial of social status? The mainstream response will cite individual bigotry and prejudice. But I think it is more illuminating to turn to social structure and political economy. Political economy in the classic 18thcentury sense tries to understand the overall dynamic of a social system, including the workings of the state, the legal system, and the moral economy, through a focus on economic production. In the specifically left tradition of Marxism, this becomes an analysis of the class structuring of the economy and of the class dynamic at work. Marxs most famous text, Capital, is subtitled A Critique of Political Economy, not because Marx was against this project of understanding the social dynamic but because he thought the centrality of class conflict and class exploitation was being denied by his predecessors and contemporaries. Marx did not see economic production as a harmonious cooperative process but one in which conflicting class interests were at stake. So one way of thinking of Marxs project is as a challenge to liberalism and liberal representations of capitalism. Political economy in the left tradition rejects the atomic individualist ontology classically associated with liberalism for a social ontology of classes. It denies the reciprocally beneficial character of economic transactions for a diagnosis of exploitation. It points us to material group interests as a factor that needs to be taken into account in any realistic assessment of the possibilities for social change. And it suggests that peoples moral psychologies (their motivations, their beliefs about the world, their sense of right and wrong) are going to be significantly shaped by their locations in different classes. Now the socialist dream associated with this project has, needless to say, fallen on hard times. But that prescriptive failure has not, to my mind, discredited the diagnostic value of a left political economy approach to understanding social dynamics, given its insights about the centrality to the social order of domination, exploitation, and conflicting group interests in sum, its materialism. However, at least two key weaknesses in this tradition need to be addressed. One is Marxs onedimensional focus on class. He did not appreciate that there needed to be a political economy of gender and race

as well as class, one that looked in their specifics and their multi-dimensionality at the distinctive systems of patriarchy and white supremacy. The second is his failure to take morality seriously, which he thought in my opinion wronglywas incompatible with materialism. Though much of his writing is marked by a sense of outrage that seems to imply a clear moral condemnation of capitalism, this judgment is undercut by the contemptuous and dismissive remarks he makes elsewhere about morality in general, and by a theoretical framework that renders it marginal. Marx seems to have thought that rights were a necessarily bourgeois concept, and that utilization of a moral discourse proved one endorsed the nave belief that moral suasion of the privileged could on its own bring about radical social change. And the result of this dual failure is that nowhere in his work did he come to recognize and theorize the peculiar ramifications of the fact that unlike the class ontology of white malesthe social ontology of both gender and race is a moralized one, in which white women and people of color are constructed as morally inferior. Marx characterizes the 18th-century liberal revolutions as bourgeois revolutions. But his criticism is not that they have failed to abolish non -class ascriptive hierarchy, but that their abolition of class hierarchy has not eliminated the material domination of the privileged classes, the emergent bourgeoisie. The famous atomic individuals are actually asymmetrically located in economic power relations. But they are still individuals, persons, whose equal moral status is not under contestation, only the range of options liberalism unrealistically attributes to them. What he does not see is that white women and nonwhites do not even attain this status. So his critique of liberalism, and the left tradition in political theory this critique inaugurates, is focused on liberalisms neglect of material class advantage and disadvantage. The materiality of non-personhood, and its radical implications for the theory, is not explored. This conceptual blindness generates a white-male political economy that, over the subsequent century and a half, would consistently fail to apprehend how patriarchy and white supremacy, as systems and sub-systems of domination, shape not merely the exploitative labor regimes under which women and people of color work, but their very moral status, their socially denied personhood. What would a necessary rethinking mean? It would produce a revisionist narrative of modernityand, more generally, of the periodization of the Westand a different perspective on liberalism and its persons. On the conventional narrative, we move from two epochs (antiquity, feudalism) characterized by social hierarchy, moral inequality, social estates, and the absence of the individual to a third epoch, modernity, characterized by social equality, moral egalitarianism, the disappearance of social estates, and the emergence of the individual. Liberalism in its different versions (right/laissez-faire and left/social-democratic) is then the ideology of this epoch, for which the person is central. Since equality is supposedly taken for granted by all sides, it is not an issue. Instead the crucial moral and political debate is the dispute between weak egalitarians (who only recognize moral, juridical, and political equality) and strong egalitarians (who want in addition a greater degree of material equality), the classic dispute between the right and the left. But once we recognize the fictitiousness of this putative equalization of status, we will see that there is a moral and political debate arguably more foundational, whose centrality to the making of the modern world has been concealed by the seemingly innocuousbut actually hugely consequential and question-beggingassumption that all persons have in fact been recognized as persons. Liberalism has in reality been both patriarchal and white-supremacist, so that the achievement of gender and racial equality requires its fundamental rethinkingan enterprise not at all the same as the standard advancing of left-wing claims about class handicap. It is not just a matter of material economic barriers but materialized norms of the legitimately human that are embedded in the political economy itself. In the long historic struggle across the planet for womens rights, in abolitionism, in the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist cause, in the fight against segregation and racial inequality, a political battle has been ongoing for centuries still not conceptualized as such because of the dominant white-male cartography of our ethico-political maps. This ongoing struggle for equally socially-recognized personhood, for the redefinition of the human, needs to be appropriately centrally located in our social and political theory. We need to formally acknowledge the political economy of personhoodand its deprivation of the majority of humanity of this status.

Bronfenbrenner
Perspectives in psychology and philosophy in general, are developed to help explain and shed light on various human behaviors that not only boggle and are difficult to understand. There are controversies that ensue and

these also make interventions difficult at the same time. Bronfenbrenner's ecological theory of development is not an exception. Though tending to posit a more comprehensive and less simplistic picture of the complications of life and human nature, the Biblical viewpoint however, at times clashes with some of the presuppositions of this perspective, and vice versa. This paper attempts to critically assess in precise Uri 's theory and reflect them in view of the spiritual and /or Christian worldview and how they both traverse in some themes and clash in others.

Many find the contemporary theory on child development as put forth by Uri Bronfenbrenner as relevant because it incorporates the whole system that basically surrounds the individual as emphasized in his terms as ecology , macro , micro , meso- , exo- , and chronosystems . This is especially applicable to various counseling situations and it presupposes that crucial to a child 's development into personhood is his support structure or system that basically impact many of the aspects of his individual growth and development (Bronfenbrenner Morris , 1998. This paper describes and explains the impact of Bronfenbrenner's theoretical perspective on the work of counseling, culture and the biblical stance that the Bible may have on the theory. As far as his theory is concerned, the exhaustive attempt to understand the child 's development rests on a collaborative effort of all the said ecological system.

Christian Anthropology
Ecce Homo: Theological Perspectives on Personhood and the Passions Patrick McArdle ORIGINS OF THE TERM PERSON IN CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY He phrase Ecce Homo derives from Pontius Pilate displaying Jesus to the crowd during his trial and saying here is the man (Jn 19:5), though the Latin term homo is better translated as person rather than the gendered man. The phrase has become associated with images of Christ with the Crown of Thorns and having been scourged and now almost certainly aware that he is about to be condemned to death. Ecce Homo is also the title of Friedrich Nietzsches autobiography subtitled, How One Becomes What One Is. In the Preface of that work Nietzsche writes Hear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all, do not mistake me for someone else. This cry for recognition is not unique to Nietzsche; it is the cry of every person and it seems that across the span of human existence our self-articulation and the points at which we call for this recognition are intrinsically linked to the pivotal points of human emotion. Those points in the lives of individuals when they must confront who and what they are without any dissembling; the points at which individuals are exposed to the world, regardless of whether they choose to be so exposed or not. Viola has taken up this tradition of art and thought and has begun to explore them through a very contemporary medium that is nonetheless tied to the very origins of the exploration of human personhood. The term person finds its origins in a rich legacy of meaning and ideas that have developed over centuries. The Latin term persona, meaning mask, has evolved into the term person. However, the Latin term in turn derives from the Etruscan word, persu, for face. These two meanings, face and person, have links in other ancient languages: the Hebrew word panim also means both face and person; likewise, the Greek term prosopon means person, but also had an original meaning of face. It is obvious that this historical meaning, centred on the face or countenance has resonance in Violas recent work, particularly this exhibition. This can be seen in most of the works and typically in Observance and in Six Heads.

Christian theology about persons originally derives from two distinct sources: Greek philosophy and Hebrew theology. These have bequeathed to Christianity very different but very rich legacies surrounding the concept of personhood. In Hellenistic philosophy the term person signified that the human being was the bearer of certain values, but was not an ontological concept, in the sense of referring to the fundamental, or metaphysical, characteristic(s) which make(s) a being that particular kind of being. In other words, the Greek view of persons was not a principle of differentiating one kind of being, say a cat from another, say a dog. These kinds of beings are animals, their proper state is to be living, they are carnivores, they are of a particular level of intelligence. Ontology is concerned with what makes the cat, cat and the dog, dog. While the Greek philosophers used metaphysical categories, the term person was not one of them. Plato (428-348 BCE) and Aristotle (384-322 BCE) were principal architects of establishing an understanding of person as an ontological category. They had quite different views about this, but agreed that what constituted a person as such was intrinsic and generic. In other words, they were not particularly focused on what makes an individual but on what it is that individuals share that enables them all to be persons. A very different strand of thinking about persons in Christian theology derives from its roots in the thinking and theology of Ancient Israel. Hebrew theology presents the view that humanity is only genuinely understandable in terms of the relationship with the Divine Being. Persons are those created by the one God to be in relationship with the Divine Being. This was understood in an absolutely fundamental fashion. Humanity is created in the image and likeness of God (Gen 1:26). While this reference is to all of humanity, and is not as strong a claim for the distinctiveness of humanity as Christian theology often asserts, it is clear, in the way that the theology of the Hebrew scriptures develops, that it differs from the ontology of the Greeks in two ways: it gave an essential prominence to the special significance of each person, since each one is created in the image and likeness of God; secondly, this personal significance was understood as the concept which binds all humans together into a community. A human person is a whole entity, a body in a fundamental spiritual relationship with God and with other human persons. Early in their theological tradition the Hebrews articulated a materialist view that understood human personhood as co-terminus with the existence of the body. Immortality was understood as the endurance of the community, especially through children. Gradually this view gave way to one that included an understanding of personal immortality and a sense of after-life. Woven through the theological perspectives of the Hebrew scriptures is a third view of persons which is implicit but did not form a substantial part of the ancient theological reasoning the idea of a person as relation. It is clear that persons are in relationship with each other, the rest of creation and with God, and that these relationships shaped the individual and the community of Israel in basic ways. But the idea of an individual being formed and shaped by the relational encounters of their lives was not developed beyond an embedded sense by Hebrew theologians. That task was taken up in Christian theology. The Hebrews did not have the need for a philosophical ontology of persons because what distinguished humans from non-humans was their particular relationship with the Divine: humans are created in the image and likeness of God to serve God in ways powerfully different to other creatures. Whatever the linguistic origins of the term or category of person in Greek, Etruscan and Latin usage, the development of the understanding of person in late Republican and the Imperial Roman culture gave to the term person a conceptual framework which established it as a category for philosophical reflection in its own right. The development of the Latin term persona into the concept of a legal entity in Roman society had several important influences on the understanding of person. Firstly, the term became closely associated with the use of an individuals name. Linked to this is idea that the name and the image of the person are in some sense aspects of the person. Mauss traces the development of the legal term principally through trials related to people usurping the name of a family or individual. This was viewed by the Roman courts as an attempt at impersonation and a violation of the personhood of the individual. We can see that there are echoes of this in Nietzsche as well. From this it can be argued that, in taking the name of another, one is offending the individual.

This reasoning moved the meaning of the term from that of a role that one had or of a part that was played, to a meaning linked with the nature of the individual. As Christianity appropriated the theology of the Hebrew scriptures, and the philosophy of the Greeks and Romans, the term person and its range of meanings (face, mask, theatre character, individual, human being, being of some value) became crucial for the articulation of Christian theology. To the Greco-Roman understanding of person as a role, and the philosophical distinction between beings and as a legal entity, Christianity added the sense of a being with an interior life, a self-reflective entity possessing a conscience. The Hebrew view of the special relationship with God was further developed in Christianity through a deeply personal sense of relationship between God, through Jesus, with each person. The changes in thinking about persons in Christianity so dramatically altered the concept that several Christian theologians argue that the concept of person is a specifically Christian idea. W. Pannenberg (1928 -) and J. D. Zizioulas (1931 - ) both contend that while the word derives from Greek and Latin sources, the concept of an unique subsistent individual in relation with other unique subsistent individuals derives from the Christological and Trinitarian controversies of the early Christian communities. Zizioulas traces the development of person from primitive uses of the term in Greek theatre to indicate the non-personal, to a personal concept. Particularly interesting in this account is the dissonance between the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers/authors who strove for a personal concept of person but were frustrated by the prevailing cosmology which was the context for their thinking. These ancient origins of the term and concept of person have not been abandoned in more recent thinking; they remain part of how the term has been understood across time. As I indicated at the beginning I want to now turn to an outline of how human personhood has been understood philosophically and theologically. The first approach to personhood can be termed, the person as metaphysical substance and, the second, person as relational subject. Person as Metaphysical Substance The term person is intrinsically linked with the evolution of Christian thought and Christian doctrine. Gil Bailie, among others, has argued that only in Christianity did the term acquire the rich and profound meaning that we glimpse today. Bailie extends this view to claim that our appreciation of the depth of meaning which the term acquires in Christian theology is still to be fully understood and articulated. Person has been used as the vehicle for expressing Christological beliefs that is, how Jesus can be both fully human and, at the same time without any loss of humanity also divine; the reality and nature of the Trinity that the one God can be three persons without intrinsic division; and, the relationship between humanity and God. The basic theological definition of the concept person from antiquity is that of Boethius (480CE-525CE): persona est naturae rationalis individua substantia, a person is an individual substance with a rational nature. This definition has served as the philosophical standard over a considerable period of time. As a statement of anthropology concerning persons, it is consistent with, though not identical to, a range of Christian theological views. Essentially, the phrase of Boethius has been used to convey the Christian conviction that person is an ontological category or, in other words, a person is a member of a particular category of beings which have a common substance or essence. To hold that person is an ontological category is to hold that there is an objective reality to which the term person corresponds. A person is a being. The raw statement of Boethius was qualified in several ways during the late medieval period (c.1100-c.1450). Richard of St Victor (d.1173) emphasised the relational and transcendent dimensions of persons; Bonaventure (1217-1274), Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) and Duns Scotus (c. 1265-1308) focused on the independence and dignity of the person. Even prior to Boethius, Christianity was moving toward accepting an ontological understanding of personhood. Colin Gunton (1941-2003) notes that the distinction of Irenaeus (c.130-c.200) between image and likeness is the beginning of the process that lead to reason becoming both a chief ontological characteristic and a criterion of difference between human and non-human. This process develops in Christianity in such a way as to promote an idealist and dualist perspective that radically affects anthropology through to Descartes (1596-1650). The

argument holds that fundamental aspect of human persons is that in which they image God. This cannot refer to the body since God is incorporeal, and so must reflect the mind or soul. A consequence of this kind of thinking has been an excessive emphasis on individuals as distinct from communities and also the tendency to divorce humanity from the rest of creation. This mode of thinking about persons has developed into a range of moral precepts, especially the idea of the sanctity of human life. For the purposes of this topic, the doctrine of the sanctity of life can be taken in its broadest sense there is something uniquely worthwhile about human individuals which means that they have infinite value. While the precept is under significant practical challenge in the contemporary world, there is little sign that communities or nations are prepared to simply abandon the idea of there being something intrinsic to human persons that is morally significant and which includes some basic presumption that human life is special. Viola can be seen to embrace aspects of this view. His art focuses almost exclusively on the human person. When the art includes other items, imagery or artefacts these serve to focus or re-focus attention on the person or persons. Emergence is a classic example of this with the use of the altar, water and the vibrant colours of the clothing worn by the women, all serving to focus our attention on the three persons who each emerge in the course of the video re-presentation. Six Heads also reflects this concern to explore the specialness or uniqueness of human existence. We are asked to explore with Viola the essence of these beings and their experiences which though unique to the individuals are also the emotional journey of all humans. The cycle of life and death is part of what defines these beings as persons yet the experience of the various dimensions of the cycle is utterly unique. This metaphysical mode of thinking about persons has been dominant in Christian theology; it is contested by a second way of thinking about persons as relational subjects. In my view, it is this latter view which Viola engages with, despite drawing inspiration from mediaeval art which is steeped in the anthropology of the former method. Person as Relational Subject In the post-modern era (c.1968-) the understanding of personhood is transformed in a radical way. The human person is considered to be the ultimate subject, though this is established differently in post-modernism than is the case in the modern paradigm. Both these frameworks for thinking about the contemporary world have their roots in the philosophical, religious, social and political movements of the past. They emphasise process over product, patterns over events, factors over outcomes. In this Viola mirrors the philosophical movements which have shaped the contemporary world. His art challenges traditional ideas about processes in art and about the static or objective nature of products. It is not possible to view this art without becoming part of the process and, in a sense, without becoming part of the product. This is the case with all human relationships since human persons are relational beings who become who they are through their relational encounters. To justify this claim it is necessary to lay out an argument about the development of the understanding of persons as relational beings. Post-modernity calls the inherent optimism of modernity into question. It argues that the promises of modernity have not been realised, that the power, prosperity and liberation that has been achieved has been only for a few, powerful people and societies, and at the cost of greater impotence, poverty and oppression for the majority of the worlds people. The watershed for post -modernity was the impact of the modern revolutionary movements. The communist revolutions of Russia, China and parts of Asia, and the Fascist revolutions of Spain, Germany and Italy, became emblematic of the failures of modernity. In the public mind, abuses of persons through medicine and biological research are closely associated with these regimes, though only the Nazis in Germany had a systematic program of abuse. These revolutions came to be associated not with the freedom and improvement that they promised, but totalitarianism characterised by the authority of uniforms. As an aside, it is interesting that the revolutionary movements still viewed as valid and libratory never adopted distinctly recognisable uniforms.

The authoritarianism of social and religious structures, which modernity sought to expose and reject, was transformed, it is argued, into more violent manifestations which were too powerful for individuals to successfully oppose, at least in the short term, and which the previous institutions had been rendered powerless to overcome. In place of the traditions and hierarchies of the past, modernity offered the power and promise of the centre, the corporate structure able to deliver unending development and prosperity. These structures, while claiming to uphold individual freedoms, frequently and systematically oppressed people on the grounds of their membership of particular groups and communities, for example, the Jews in Hitlers Germany and Stalins Russia, members of other religious groups in Francos Spain and Communist China, members of minorities based on culture, ethnic origin, and sexual preference. In place of the centralist idealism of modernity, post-modernity calls attention to the periphery and the real state of most peoples lives. It argues that comparatively few, if any, have benefited from the progress of the modern era. The voiceless people in traditional hierarchies are still unheard and have been joined by those who have been marginalized and rendered mute by modernity. It might be interesting to speculate whether this is part of the reason for a lack of sound in Violas presentation of the Passions. When these works become the focus in the dark and silence, they become impossible to ignore. The same is true when we focus on the marginalized: they are generally easily to ignore but, when we do focus on marginalised persons, it becomes impossible not to be moved by their plight. Persons in modernity are conceptualised as the rational autonomous (hu)man. While gender is not explicitly indicated as a criteria, the very functional and rational nature of the person emphasised in this way of thinking is established in such a way as to discount the insights of women. The model of person presented by modernity is one which focuses on, and increases the power of, those at the centres of power. It does not challenge existing structures so much as reformulates them with greater power. In contrast, the person of post-modernity, the person as relational subject, is conceptualised as a being only partially grasped and only able to be understood in the context of relationships. While not denying that persons have a rational dimension and are free to make choices, the relational person is one whose rationality and autonomy is circumscribed by her/his relational matrix. The focus is not so much on what the person can do, or how the person functions, as on an understanding of human relations characterised by equality and mutuality. To argue that, in the last century or so, the concept of person has become one of person as relational subject actually encompasses a wide set of views. Within post-modernity there is a spectrum of ideas and interests. Broadly, however, just as these movements reflect on social structures in a different way from those of preceding philosophical movements, so too do they think of person in a different way. Previous models of understanding persons were concerned with person as an entity in terms of existence or, if you like, what kind of being is a person or, in terms of functionality, what can this kind of being do. The post-modern contribution takes up the modern concept of the person mapping a certain space but, in contrast to modernity post-modernity argues that the space articulated and created is a social space. Viola demonstrates this concept particularly in Catherines Room. The inspiration from this comes from the idea of a nuns cell, but the monastic image is not a removal from the world in Violas interpretation; it is a social space within which the identity of the person is explored Post-modernity holds that the modern emphasis on reason, the ego and the creation of an interior space for the I encourages and formalises a sociology of strangers. The strangers are those who are excluded by the social group, even when remaining members of the society (the poor, unemployed, disabled, people of colour, women, etc.) and can also be those who are outside the boundaries of the society (those of other nationalities, ethnic origins, sexual orientation or who think very differently). In contrast, post-modernity argues that persons are entities that occupy a public space created in and through discourse. In Catherines Room, which is clearly a personal space, it is not private because the viewer is invited into the space, not as a voyeur but as a participant in the discourse of Catherines life. The narratives or

discourses that form the identities of persons are subjected to critique of a particular kind, usually termed deconstruction. This should not be thought of as destruction, though it is often characterised that way by opponents, but rather a critical examination of the history of a concept or story to determine the baggage and political effects this has given rise to.34 Discourse means that persons are always in the public sphere, since they enter into conversations with other persons. The discourse gives shape to public spac e in which the conversation takes place, the kind of person one is conversing and even to ones self. The thinking of the post modern era challenges the link which modernity made between rationality and personhood; it challenges the modern view of sameness or equivalence of persons. The former is accomplished by demonstrating the constructedness of the concepts and actuality of rationality and personhood, the latter by noting difference and the significance of the other. Contesting the sociology of strangers, post-modernity argues that the subjectivity of the I enables a profound recognition of the not-I. In recognition of the other there is the possibility not of two individuals who are strangers to one another, but of becoming subjects-in-community. It is when this is recognised that there is the possibility of love, integration and transformation. The inclusion of the social dimension enables a recognition that the term person is a community term and focuses moral attention on the vulnerable and the victims. To call an individual a person is for society to confirm the significance of the beings identity. The individual and person should be distinguished, according to Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955), in order to make it clear that person is a social concept and that to be a person is to be a complex of social relationships. Persons are beings formed in and through relationships. They have, as it were, an ontological or intrinsic relationality which can only reach its fullest expression in and through interpersonal relationships. Pannenberg has argued that all human life has this characteristic which, following Buber (1878-1965), he terms an I-Thou relation. This relation is the basic form of community and directs or calls the self into relationship with others.40 Characterising relationships as I-Thou recognises the interpersonal dimension present, or at least as a possibility, in all encounters between persons. Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) critiqued this understanding of interpersonal relations as being too positive. Instead of a relation in which the I and Thou are essentially the same and equal beings responding to the other, Levinas argues for a relation of essential difference. Levinas philosophy takes account of human suffering and misery. Writing after the Holocaust, Levinas argues that relations between persons are not constituted by nurture but as a fundamental challenge to personal identity. For Levinas, the relation that constitutes persons is a relation through which I am challenged by the face of the other. In meeting the eyes of the other I am subject to the call, do not kill me. The Other is never reducible to the same as I, but always preserves the Otherness. The relation as understood by Levinas cannot be reduced to a selfish reinforcement of the I, or a form of possession. Instead recognition of the other, in their otherness, will lead to forms of self-denial. Recognition of the Other makes me responsible for the other, such that I take my own food to give to the other in their need; it involves a dislocating of the self. There are a number of fairly obvious links between this way of thinking and Violas art. In my view they clearly link Viola to this understanding of the human person as a relational subject. This is apparent in the works which involve more than one person, but I think it is intrinsic to Violas premise in all of these works. VIOLA, THE PASSIONS AND PERSONHOOD Bill Viola in this series, The Passions, has linked himself to an era of transition in the past. While the late mediaeval period retained the philosophical, theological and many of the art-forms of the ancient world, new ideas, new forms of creative imagination, were beginning to be explored and to take hold. In this sense, it is not unlike our own time. Using the inspiration of the art and mysticism of the mediaeval period, Viola is tying himself to an exploration of personhood which is inherently social in nature. The reason that diptychs and portable religious art became

relatively common rather than popular in this period was due to the increase in affluence which gave rise to an increase in mobility for significant numbers of people. This is also a feature of our own time. Perhaps in contrast to our own era, mediaeval people were also rooted to a deeply religious culture which meant that expressions of wealth and of piety were linked to religious art. For part of the mediaeval period, for example, a person of a certain wealth or social status would carry with her/him a diptych of their favourite saint, image or religious scene but would not carry with them a book which was considered far too valuable for the most part. While we would generally consider some long haul flights appropriate for a trash novel we would not, usually take a work of art with us. That being said, many of us might carry images of loved ones in mobile phones or pdas. My point here is simply that Violas links to the art of the past is not simply due to the types of images portrayed it is also because of his, perhaps innate, recognition o f art as also being an exploration of the meaning of human existence at a time of fundamental social change. Two features of Violas art link him with the post-modern emphasis on the person as relational subject: his focus on the emotional life of persons and how that fundamentally shapes personhood and, secondly, the way Viola seeks to shape the social space between persons. I want to explore each of these with reference to what I consider to be the pinnacle of the collection: Emergence. This work is very obviously religious in character and investigates a fundamental religious theme. It is also, in my view, the most pertinent in terms of the exploration of what it means to be a human person. Emergence is linked to a tradition of religious art which focuses on the dead Christ figure and on the grief of the women surrounding him, particularly his mother. This interpretation of the Pieta by Bernini demonstrates the style which Viola has taken up. The images here are of grief, death and the promise of afterlife as indicated by the presence of the angels who prefigure the two angels announcing the resurrection. Again in the Masolino Pieta we see a very obvious visual connection with Emergence. Emergence, using the possibilities opened by video instead of static images, however, focuses on the emotional power, the idea of death being a re-birth and the cycle of death within life in dis Watching the entire sequence of this video it is impossible not to see the images as joined and as representing the life of every person. From the moment of conception, through our emergence into life, we are intimately and profoundly linked to other persons and, at the same time, the seeds of our mortality are present. Part of that sense of mortality or recognition of the connections between life and death is the impact that the phases of a persons life have on the relationships which give shape, meaning and context to our lives. Part of the fallacy of the model of personhood in the modern era is that the pinnacle of human existence is the autonomous rational individual who is able to choose and function independently of all other persons. The reality is that such a life is not worth living and that such a person, if it is actually possible to be such a person, is not someone most of us would want to know. Instead, Viola presents in Emergence, and other works in this collection, persons as beings who are fundamentally in relationship with each other. Note in this particular work that the central emerging figure is never really alive. The emerging person is the dead person; the pain of grief is never separate from the joy of witnessing a persons self creation or emergence. The supporting women are not crippled by their grief but motivated by their connections to each other and to the emerging one. This is one perspective on the story of human personhood. I do not think that the scenario need be grief or those emotions we usually consider in a negative light but, as George Khushf writing in a very different context indicated, it is these moments of pressure, of confrontation, which highlight for humanity the frailty, the need for relationships which is always present but able to be ignored. It is in our insufficiency we turn to others; it is in our times of crisis that our truly relational natures are revealed. The grief or other crisis emotions do not create this need, rather it is unveiled by the crisis.46 Viola is capturing not just the imagery of

the grief or even the story of the human life-cycle. He is also representing the need of persons for persons; even though we know relationships are always tied to loss and to suffering they are what enables us to be persons. At the beginning of this paper I suggested that The Passions could develop our self-understanding in new ways. This art blurs the boundaries of what is permissible and what is not; what is possible and what is not. From a relational perspective, this is a key feature of human existence. The human person is a being who is on the one hand is a given, an entity that derives existence and meaning from participation in metaphysical category. From a relational perspective this static understanding of personhood is always insufficient. Human persons are relational beings that are formed in and through the relationships which call them into being. Violas art challenges our preconceptions of art both through the forms he uses, the subject matter he explores and in that he attempts to call forth the viewer through an engagement which allows the person watching to, as it were, enter the art. The setting of the exhibition in silence and darkness disengages the audience from the outside world but, on reflection, it is also the case that the boundaries between the art and the viewer are blurred. The time necessary to watch these images unfold functions to draw in the viewer so that passivity is rejected and engagement and participation are demanded. This is also the story of what it means to be a person. There are times when all of us wish we could simply live the life of the autonomous rational individual or the member of the collective whose identity is assured because of an unassailable metaphysical status. Human personhood is more wonderful and more tenuous than that: the only way to be a person is to engage with others and to participate in the relationships to which we are called to commit ourselves. It is our relationships which call us forth, which shape the kinds of persons we can be.

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http://onthehuman.org/2011/04/political-economy-of-personhood/#sthash.A4FEg8qS.dpuf http://aejt.com.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/395737/AEJT_7.18_McArdle.pdf https://www.jyu.fi/en/congress/personhood/programme/souls-and-persons