4 SEPTEMBER 2010: PERSONALYSIS COMES OF AGE

Locutions like ‘man’ and ‘human’ and ‘humanity’

(as in ‘the rights of man’ and ‘he is very human’ and
‘man’s humanity’) are puns—and, I say, spiritually
nasty puns. The puns are evidences of the mind-
boggling self-hatred of “modern Western man.”
(There’s ‘man’ again.)
In the first instance, humans are animals, as
near to apes as makes no difference. Humans are
studied by physical anthropologists and medical
biologists. Evolutionary biology has fairly precise
dates on which humans as we think of them came
into being and dates on which our immediate
predecessors died out. There is more to it than that.
Biologists tell us that we are five per cent
Neanderthal. There was some hanky-panky going on
in the old days that the survivors would prefer to
forget, probably. And under what circumstances did
our dear cousins disappear? There is more to it than
that. How many species of Homo are extant? The
best biologists tell us, this is not a non-question; it
has to have a well-substantiated answer. Mindful of
this question, the eminent biologist Hamilton
advocated proactive miscegenation so that the
answer “one” would be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Humans, the scientific materialists assure us,
differ from worms or electric fans only in complexity.
I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but assertions
like this give the game away. If that is how it stands,
then the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
(there’s ‘human’ again!) is as sickeningly insincere
as any lie of a totalitarian regime. How can an
electric fan have “rights”? No doubt electric fans
have a nice line in self-hatred, hmm?
As to the puns, ‘man’ and ‘human’ and
‘humanity’ also refer to something which Western
modernity has been unable to get a handle on ever
since words like ‘mind’, ‘soul’, and ‘spirit’ were
forbidden to it. Temporarily we may call it “the
whatever.” The whatever is referred by in tortured
expedients such as “man’s interiority” (‘man’
again!). We may say of somebody, “he is very
human.” We may not mean that he is certainly a
higher ape on whom AIDS vaccines can be tested.
We may mean that the whatever is very evident in
him. But what is the whatever? The smartest men
alive cannot begin to say—unless they crumble and
revert to the locutions associated with myths that
say that the universe was created six thousand years
ago. (Those myths, by the way, are not united: the
Abrahamic religions are at each others’ throats.)
Actually, there is an obscure academic discipline
called moral psychology which ambiguously gives
some recognition to the whatever. But we will never
get anywhere backing into the whatever like this.
Those with a taste for the higher politics will
note that Western civilization can say everything that
has just been summarized without being called on it.
There is a discrepancy between ‘human’ and
‘human’ that screams to high heaven—but not one
word is ever spoken about it. Only in documents that
are almost secret do the spiritual leaders of Western
civilization pour out their hearts and say that man is
no more than a baboon or a grain of sand, that the
talk of the sanctity of the human person makes them
sick.
 I decided in 1980 that there must be an inquiry
into the whatever. I am afraid that a few scholars
will say, Heidegger had a monopoly on the whatever.
I admit that Heidegger is a stimulating author. But
the last two-thirds of Being and Time was never
delivered, because Heidegger couldn’t deliver it. Let
us not be told that Heidegger “took care of the
problem.” Part of the time Heidegger was the
problem. He said, “only a god can save us.” Nobody
ever called him on it; nobody asked, “what’s a god?”
In 1980, I announced that I would inquire into
personhood and that the inquiry would be called
personhood theory. I hated those locutions so much
that I looked for a more mellifluous way of saying it
in German. There isn’t one.
4 September 2010 is a red-letter day for me.
After thirty years, I have settled on ‘personness’ and
‘personalysis’ as the required locutions. The
locutions have been entered on the home page of my
web site, and are meant progressively to be entered
in all “personhood theory” documents.
Personalysis is not concerned to contribute to
physical anthropology and medical biology.
Personalysis concerns personness as we encounter it.
Do angels and demons have personness? This
question cannot be answered until the exposition of
personalysis commences. It is a methodological
question. Methodologically: a personalysis of angels
or demons can only be written by an angel or a
demon. (No anonymous publication, please!)
Myths about angels and demons do not have
enough detail in the right places. If they did, one
could write a fake personalysis for angels or demons.
If there were an unlimited amount of time, and if the
public were not fools, then such a fake personalysis
could be instructive for the advanced student.
That poses a subsidiary question. Does the
constituency of personanalysis consist of humans in
the biologist’s sense? Again, the question receives
not an experimental answer but a methodological
one. The constituency of personalysis consists of
personanalysis’ readers.
One might ask whether biology or psychology
divides humans into those who can read it with
understanding and those who can’t. So far there has
been no motivation for making the distinction. It has
been found politically expedient, or wise, to treat
members of the genus Homo as the same even if
they are differently abled.
Let me repeat the main remark. The inquiry into
personness does not plant itself in physical
anthropology and medical biology. Sooner or later,
personalysis has to say:

Physical anthropology and medical biology are

activities of personness. They are concocted
by personness and for personness.

Physical anthropology and medical biology

presuppose consciousness, linguistic meaning, and
“freedom” (realized choices). It turns out that it is
even more acute than that. Without personness, no
assertion, true or false, has ever been made. Even a
mere encoding to mark a happening must be freely
considered and made responsibly to have assertoric
force. Absent that, it is no more than a mechanical
encoding of a detection. (Think a burglar alarm.)
Then to say that it is false would only mean that the
detector was malfunctioning. The detector would not
have any investment of intent in being accurate.
(This line of thought is due to Paul Weiss.)
This observation is rather ruthless toward
scientific materialists who would like to dismiss
personness. If any scientific theory, say the theory of
evolution, is a mere output of a nonsentient
mechanism, then it does not assert: it doesn’t even
have any investment of intent in being right. It is
worth no more than the output of a (possibly broken)
burglar alarm. (Of course the analogy overlooks one
major point: we ourselves fabricated the burglar
alarm from scratch.) Then for scientists to consider
the theory of evolution to be one of their glories is a
preposterous relapse into sentimentality.
We should stop using ‘man’ and ‘human’ and
‘humanity’ as puns, and consign these words to the
biologists. We should say ‘personness’ in place of
these words in their second meanings. Then what
we say will be less drenched in self-hatred. At times,
just that substitution of terms will expose what was
wrong with this or that cliché about “man.” Thinking
can make an immense advance just on the basis of
face-value considerations.