Humans and Persons
As a human person, you are a particular
kind of animal that, in community with other members of your species,
is being a person by engaging with the world in certain
community-defined ways. As we will see below, this engagement is an
activity that particularly involves:
• being one kind of person or another by performing a community
defined and enabled rôle or rôles of some kind in the world (e.g., you
become a baker by performing as a baker, you become a liar by
performing as a liar, and so on),
• evaluating the possibilities in the world, for being one kind of
person or another, for their relevance [value] to the kind of person
you are being,
• choosing to actualise the possibilities that you
value most at the expense of those that you value less, and thereby
• both making a difference to the world and actualising a possible character for your self.
Although being human and being a person
normally coincide in our world, being human is a
matter of belonging to the mammalian animal species homo sapiens while being
a person is an ongoing activity; not what you are
so much as what you are doing with what you are. You have no control
over having been landed with humanity or personhood, and not a lot of
individual control over the world in which you find yourself obliged to
be a human person, but you do have considerable control over what kind
of life you are living and thereby what kind of person we are being.
For this reason, it is the activity of humans being violent persons
which will exercise me most in this book.
A human person is what you are. Who you are is your self. This self is
the integrity of your biological character, your cultural character
[your ethical and psychological personality], and your particular way
or ways of being a person in the world over time. What you are is just
a fact of your existence. The cultural character of your self, however,
is an ongoing product of how you are living your life. If you are
presented with the possibility to lie or tell the truth, for example,
choosing to lie will not only make a difference to the world but make
you a liar; choosing to tell the truth will not only make a different
difference to the world but make you honest (i.e., give your self the
character of being honest).
You share being what you are with millions of other humans who have
experimented, are experimenting, and will experiment, with various
possibilities for being persons over human history. Who you are is
unique to you; no one else is, ever has been, or ever will be, you. It
is yourself with which you are most intimate, and it is a valued
cultural character for yourself that you are endeavouring to actualise
by the way in which you are living your life. You inherit the
biological aspect of a human self from your forebears, but you create
and maintain the cultural character of your self for yourself by what
you do and don't do with whatever possibilities your personal
circumstances and history allow you for being one kind of person or
another.
The traditional and still dominant notion of what and who you are is
that of a person-thing [a soul, mind, consciousness, or whatever] that
has various thing-like attributes [a sensory system, language, hands
with opposable thumbs, self-consciousness, and so on]. This
person-thing is fundamentally a subject of experiences and, because it
cannot get outside of its mind and/or body to check the accuracy of its
senses, the big issue for it is whether its supposed experiences of an
external world are of a real [objective] world or not. This picture is
misleading. If you put theory aside, and simply pay careful attention
to your own experience of being a human person, you may note that:
- you are not primarily an observer of the world but an actor in the
world for whom observations of the world are a means to an end (i.e.,
that of being able to act more skilfully towards living whatever you
define as a good life).
- what matters to this actor is not what the facts are so much as
what possibilities the facts open and close. Humans don't study, work,
play, enter politics, or take up a religion, because 'that's what
humans do' but because those projects actualise possibilities as states
of affairs that persons consider valuable for one reason or another.
-
there is a circularity about this activity; how you act in your
daily life is creating and maintaining a possible moral/psychological
character by repeatedly acting in ways that are valuable to the
character which your actions are creating and maintaining. You are not,
for instance, an honest or dishonest person-thing, with no more choice
than to be true or false to your honest or dishonest nature; you make
yourself more or less honest by variously telling the truth and/or
telling lies. Both of these activities exploit possibilities, for being
honest or dishonest, that are provided by the world within which you
perform. But you exploit one or other of these possibilities only
because of the value that truth or lies variously have for the possible
character that they are actualising.
There is not much you can do about where and when you were born, the
condition of the world in which you find yourself, who your parents
were, or how they treated you. But your possibilities for actualising
one kind of character or another are a different matter. Regardless of
your factual situation, there are always at least some possibilities
open to you. By choosing to actualise some possibilities at the expense
of others, you are choosing to actualise a cultural character for
yourself at the expense of other kinds of person that you could be.
This means that what kind of character you are being is an issue for
you (i.e., a matter which you have to settle by making choices about
how to act). Indeed, it is the only real issue you face because
everything else is already settled for you by the facts with which you
find yourself landed.
There are two kinds of possibility involved in being a person; the
possibility which you are [your potentiality] and the possibilities
which facts have because of the possibility you are. The possibility
which a fact has is a state of 'could be different but isn't yet'. As a
category applied to facts, possibility is grouped with actuality and
impossibility; an actuality is a fact which does exist, a possibility
is a fact which is not actual but which, unlike an impossibility, could
be actualised [made actual] by some kind of agency. The possibility
which you are is that of being a possible builder or destroyer, a saint
or slob, cruel or kind, and so on. The possibilities which facts have
depend on the possibilities which persons are; a rock is a possible
tool or weapon, for instance, only because persons are potential
builders and fighters.
Because persons live the lives of potentialities for whom possibilities
in the world matter, you can be a person only in a world, and this
world is not just a collection of stuff in space and time but the
'workshop' in which you are going about projects that actualise some of
your potentiality. Traditional, thingish, notions of personhood detach
persons from the world - we just happen to be landed among a bunch of
stuff in much the same way as a tree may be landed among the other
things in a forest, and you could be a person even if you weren't
engaged with a world. Such a thesis misrepresents the fact that ∙ not
only is there no world without persons but that the world is a world of
persons (i.e., the world is an integrity of nature and persons) and ∙,
as a person, you are and must be engaged with a world of persons in the
same way that a worker is engaged with the workshop environment that
provides her with the materials, tools, and/or workmates that she needs
and uses for doing the job she does (i.e., for being the kind of worker
that she is). This is a particularly intimate, active, and necessary,
way of integrating who you are being with the world in which you are
being it.
As a person, you have to be in a world, as part of the world, just
because the process of being a person is one of actualising some
possibilities at the expense of others. Only a world can give you
possibilities for being one kind of person or another. You could not,
for example, be loving except in the presence of possibilities for
acting in ways that are loving or hateful or indifferent, and so on. A
world of some kind is necessary for this; you need to be actualising
actualisable possibilities just to be a person, and some kind of world
is necessary to provide you with actualisable possibilities. This world
must, moreover, be compatible with what you are just for its
possibilities to be actualisable by you. You can't love 'someone
special' just by feeling something; you need to be living in a world
which contains persons towards one of which you can act in ways that
are loving rather than indifferent or whatever. In short, to be a
person, you need to be in, and part of, a world to which you can make a
difference.
This means that being a performer in the world, intimately and
actively engaged with the possibilities present in the world as a
workshop of character-making, is a fundamental and necessary condition
of being a person. This engagement ∙ is unique to entities that are
being persons, ∙ collectively defines the world as the world [the
workshop of being a human person which is made into a workshop by the
activities of all the workers who are working, and have worked, in it],
and ∙ uses communally actualised tools to live a personally chosen way
of life which thereby actualises a possible cultural character.
The observation that being a person is necessarily an engagement with
an environment (which I owe to Heidegger, 1927) emphatically breaks
with the traditional notion of your being in the world as a receiver of
sense impressions who best knows the truth reflectively by 'standing
back' and thinking about it. Being a person is more like being in love
with someone - you are not being in love by being in the presence of
something called 'love' but by engaging with someone in a particular
way. As a person, you are not a spectator of life in the world; you are
a performer in the workshop that is the world. This is shown by the
fact that, and is the reason why, you first grasp the character of
objects in the world by using them as instruments that are relevant to
what you are doing, and then you want to know about them for the same
reason. A baby, for example, first plays with objects in its
environment - toys, bedding, furniture, mum's face, its own feet. It
uses this play to explore the possibilities of being a baby. Play with
objects leads to an understanding of how the objects can be used to
create certain effects and achieve certain goals. Only later does the
baby seek, or has thrust upon it, information and narratives about
objects of attention; being engaged with the world comes before
practical know how which, in turn, comes before knowing-that.
Most humans assume that their cultural character is governd by some
fact about them such as their race, gender, upbringing, personality
type, community, star sign, social position, and so on. In truth,
however, these facts are not chosen and are not an issue unless you
and/or your community choose to make them an issue. No actual or
supposed fact about you determines your choice of who you are being.
Being a slightly built and fair-skinned boy may, for example, inhibit
your chances of being picked to play Queen Victoria in a costume drama,
but it won't stop you from being an actor. You are not born an actor
any more than you are born honest or dishonest; you make yourself one
or the other by repeatedly choosing to act, lie, or tell the truth.
More will be said on this below. In the meantime we need note only that:
- your way of life, which creates and maintains your cultural
character, is not determined for you by any fact [actuality] but chosen
by you from among a limited range of real possibilities,
- the lack of a foundation in fact makes persons feel anxious. Their
attempts to deal with this anxiety explains a lot about human behaviour.
Projects and Performances
Being a person is a lifelong project that can be understood only in
terms of a cultural/natural integrity, such as a human person, engaging
with a cultural/natural environment [the world] to some purpose. This
purpose is that of ∙ making and/or maintaining your part of the world
as a congenial place to be and ∙ actualising a possible cultural
character for yourself by engaging your potentiality with the
possibilities present in your environment.
Analysing a way of life is far different from analysing things.
Things are objects with characters that emerge from what they are. In
our dealings with the world, things are categorised as what they are in
terms of thingish properties such as taking up space and having
sense-detectable properties. In the relationship between, say, you and
a colleague, the bodies of you and your colleague are things (they take
up space and have sense-detectable characters). The relationship
between you, however, is not a thing because relationships do not
occupy space and have no sense-detectable character. Thingish analysis
may describe human persons as thin, kind, hairy, mammalian, sexy,
introverted, and so on. Such classification could describe your facts
in exhaustive detail, and have all its details true, without even
beginning to describe how you are going about being who you are. This
means that, as well as invoking thingish categories to clarify what you
are as a human, you need another kind of classification for the way in
which you go about being a person in the world over time. I call this
kind of classification 'performal.'
To perform is to combine various actions and inactions in a
particular way with the intention of ∙ causing a valued effect and/or ∙
not spoiling a valued effect of which you are not the cause (e.g., to
not say something, out of kindness, is a performance even though you
don't actually do anything). Whereas both things and persons may act,
only a person can perform. So the term 'performal' refers to the facts
which are relevant to living the life of a person in the world.
Thingish spatiality, for example, is made up of length, breadth, and
height. Performal spatiality, on the other hand, is the activity of
locating yourself, and your performances, in relation to the tools and
materials that you need to be who you are.
Your way of life - which determines the cultural character of who
you are [your self] - is made up of projects which are made up of
performances which are made up of various actions and inactions. The
distinction between thingish and performal descriptions of personhood
matters precisely because being a person is not a matter of being a
person-thing (a soul, human, self-conscious, or whatever) but of
performing in a certain way for a reason that has to do with who you
are being. You live the life of a person by repeatedly choosing between
possibilities for living, in one way or another, with at least some
understanding that actualising different possibilities matters for
being whatever kind of person you are choosing to be. In the process of
living in one way or another, you are not only making a difference to
the world but also creating and maintaining a cultural character for
yourself by working with the instruments [materials, tools, cultures]
which you find in a 'workshop' of character-actualisation (i.e., the
world). So whereas sparrows, for example, build and maintain nests in a
way dictated by their species-structure, persons ∙ build, buy, or rent,
shelters of many different kinds, ∙ neglect or care for them to
different degrees, and ∙ contribute to the actualisation of the kinds
of person they are by the kind of shelter they choose to live in and
how they live in it. Keeping a tidy and well-kept home, for instance,
actualises one kind of possible character; keeping an untidy and
unclean home actualises a different kind of character. Both of these
are possibilities that have to be, and are, chosen for their value to
who the home-occupier is being.
Ways of life, projects, and performances, are not static, not abstract,
and not objective; they are lived by some actual person in an actual
environment, over time. You are, for example, an honest person for just
so long as you are performing honestly. For a long time in New Zealand
now (and I suspect elsewhere), whenever someone has been convicted of a
serious crime there has usually been a friend or family member on hand
to say “He's not really a bad person.” This just doesn't make sense. If
you perform badly, according to an ethic, then you make yourself a bad
person; if you perform decently then you create and maintain a decent
character for yourself, and you can change from one to the other at any
time you like. There simply is no such thing as a person who is
basically good but just happens to do bad things. There are only people
performing differently in various circumstances over time and thereby
actualising various cultural characters for themselves.
The categories of possibility, which describe how someone is going
about being a person in the world, are performalia. Performalia
(plural) are not just actions and/or inactions but sets or 'families'
of possible performances, related in a larger integrity, which apply
only to the activity of being a person in the world. For example, the
possibilities of being variously sceptical, gullible, or a mix of both,
constitute a performale (singular) because ∙ these possible ways of
performing are differences related within a larger culturally integrity
- a 'family' or set - and ∙ only persons can and must choose to perform
in one of the ways in this set at the expense of the others. A rock,
tree, cow, or motorbike, for example, cannot be said to be either
sceptical or gullible, but every response by any person to any belief
is always somewhere on the sceptical-to-gullible spectrum. This means
that this particular range of possible performances is a performale.
The range of related performances to do with being loving, hating,
indifferent, friendly, and so on, constitute another performale.
Performalia need to be sharply distinguished from thingish
categories when it comes to understanding personhood. Performalia are
not the thingish facts about you and your character but constituents of
the ongoing activity of being a person - they define sets of lived
[performed] choices that make you a person rather than just a thing, a
'who' as well as a 'what'. The thingish character of a given nurse, for
instance, will include his race, gender, height, build, and so on. The
performal character of the nurse - which gives him his cultural
character - are measured by where his performances, both on and off
duty, stand on continua of kind-to-cruel, conscientious-to-lazy,
relaxed-to-tense, honest-to-dishonest, and so forth.
Integrity
The traditional thingish human ways of picturing personhood consider
persons and the world as things apart which somehow interact after each
exists as what it is. This is a bit like studying two sides of the same
sheet of paper as if each side was a thing in itself. It doesn't matter
how thin a sheet of paper is; even if it is only one molecule thick, it
still has two sides. You can study each side separately but you cannot
have one side without the other. To talk as if one side of the sheet is
essentially self-contained, could exist separately to the other, and
has to somehow be joined with the other to make a whole sheet,
misrepresents the reality of the sheet of paper. Neither one side nor
the other is independent or has priority. The sheet comes first as a
whole sheet, and you either have one two-sided sheet or no sheet at
all. Being a person in the world is similarly a single phenomenon which
can be considered from the person side or the world side. This means
that the basic datum of my present study is not three related objects
(a person, a world, and the person's way of life) but a single
integrity (the life-long project of being-a-human-person-in-the-world).
The necessary integrity of being a person in the world is not the only
integrity to play a role in personhood. Indeed, it would be hard to
overestimate just how important integrity is to every aspect of being a
person in the world. An integrity is the fact, process, and character
of parts or aspects being joined together. Everything, anything,
something (and nothing), all have an integrity. Every difference,
activity, fact, thing, person, language, idea, artifact, body of
beliefs, community, and value, is nourished by and dependent on
integrity. Every imaginable object - every actual and possible state of
affairs, every thing, person, language, idea, illusion, body of
beliefs, artifact, community and value - exists and is made real only
through integrity. The only reason that we can differentiate various
objects in our dreams and imaginings is because even facts that exist
only in the imaginings and/or narratives of persons, have their own,
and distinct, integrity. In short, there is no reality, no world, no
things, no persons, no knowing or faith, no reasoning, no facts and no
values, no perception and nothing to be perceived, without integrity. I
suspect that human violence is an issue for human persons not just
because of the suffering it causes but also because it violates
integrity and thereby harms the project of being a person in the world.
This suspicion is yet to be confirmed but will be explored in Part Two
of this book
Integrity further matters because what any object, difference,
possibility, fact, or event, means is how and where it fits into an
integrity. The meaning of shoes, for instance, is not found in their
thingish structure but in where they fit into the projects of
protecting feet, keeping them comfortable, and/or being fashionable.
These projects themselves have meaning by how they fit into the larger
project of being a person in the world. For example, whether or not
your shoes are a fashion instrument is wholly a function of how various
humans are going about the project of being person in the world. Being
a person entails tracing and/or creating larger integrities out of
smaller ones. Making a shoe, for example, is a matter of integrating
certain materials (themselves each an integrity) into a larger
integrity that is relevant to a way of being a person in the world.
Understanding the meaning of shoes is a matter of tracing the
connections within this integrity. The largest, and most inclusive,
larger integrity with which we engage as persons is the world.
Nature and Culture
The world, as a workshop of personhood, is a single integrity of nature
and culture. Nature is the whole, natural and artificial, aspect of the
world ∙ which is constituted of matter and energy in space and time and
∙ in which transfers of energy from object to object take the form of
cause and effect. Causality has a predictable structure but is not
rule-guided because rules are cultural constructs. There are no rules
of any kind - no 'ought', 'should' or 'should not' - in nature.
Cultures, on the other hand, are made of rules and, where there are no
rules in nature, there is no natural causality in cultures. In place of
causality, cultures give us reasons for performing in a certain way
just so long as we accept the culture. Nursing, for example, is a
culture in which a particular set of performances is prescribed by the
rules which integrate those performances as a project and distinguish
nursing from other ways of being a person in the world. If you want to
be a nurse then you have to conform to the rules of nursing (which are
different from those of being a cook or cab driver), if you want to lie
then you have to follow the rules of lying (which are different from
those of being honest or playing rugby), but you do not have to be a
nurse or a liar or anything else if you choose not to be.
The character of a culture emerges from the rules which ∙ govern it and
∙ distinguish it from other cultures. Being a nurse, a teacher, a
criminal, a mathematician, or a parent, are cultural projects. Being
violent is a culture; so is being kind or outgoing. Ethnicity and
gender are cultures (race and sex are not, which is why they don't
change from place to place or time to time, but ethnicity and gender
are cultural ways of being persons in the world, which is why they do
change). This is because all of these activities are rule-guided. Being
racially Chinese, for example, requires nothing of you at all. Being
ethnically Chinese, however, entails belonging to a cultural community
which prescribes certain cultural ways of being a person as
appropriate. For a Chinese person to also be a nurse requires that he
or she further conform to a set of rules which integrate various
performances as the culture of nursing.
Like the world, human persons are an integrity of nature and
culture. Indeed, it is only because persons integrate culture and
nature that the world integrates nature and culture. Human persons use
∙ the rule-guided [cultural] aspect of their cultural/natural integrity
to think, form beliefs, talk with each other, and generally be one kind
of person or another, and ∙ the cause-governed natural aspect to engage
with the world. It is only by being a cultural/natural integrity,
within a larger cultural/natural integrity [the world], that human
persons are able to both 'stand back' from the world in awareness of it
and 'be in' the world as part of it. The natural aspects
of being a human person in the world are subject to cause and effect.
The cultural aspects of being a human person in the world (e.g., work,
play, true and false belief-formation, discourse, and thinking) are
subject to rules. We cannot avoid subjection to cause and effect or
rules, but whereas we just have to live with cause and effect as it is,
we get to make up rules which we can then follow or not. All cultural
[rule-guided] activities need some sort of community to generate and
sustain them; that is, a number of persons who share a rule-guided
[encultured] way of being in the world. We may leave the company of
other persons if we so choose, but it is the cultures of cultural
communities which allows and enables us to be persons in the world.
Awareness
In order to live the life of a person in the world you must be aware of
the world. As a human person, your awareness of the world includes ∙
the sentience compatible with human biology, ∙ an awareness of objects
such as time, space, possibilities, thoughts, and absences, that are
not sense detectable, and ∙ an awareness of being aware. As a human,
your awareness of natural objects is limited to light frequencies which
are accessible to the human eye, sound frequencies which are accessible
to the human ear, and so on. As a person, however, even your natural
sentience exceeds that of other animals by being encultured
[rule-guided]; animals sense differences (as do humans), but only
persons can be aware of facts. Facts are any real or imagined states of
affairs, things, possibilities, thoughts, differences, relationships,
or feelings, that can be perceived, pictured, believed, experienced,
intended, remembered, dreamt or talked about by a person. The important
character of facts is that they are:
- outside of awareness even though they include our own thoughts,
feelings, and experiences - which is why you can 'stand back' from your
own thoughts, etc., in awareness of them. Even something as intimate as
a headache stands 'before' awareness (your awareness isn't in pain but
an awareness of pain).
- meaningful to persons; that is, they play various actual and
possible rôles in the world. Indeed, the world (which includes our
thoughts, feelings, and self) just is the totality of facts, and it is
the worldhood of the world [it's instrumental character as a workshop
of character actualisation] which frees human persons to be
aware of possibilities despite possibilities not being detectable by
our natural human senses. The enculturation of awareness is
such that you cannot even imagine an awareness of the world which is
not informed by language, concepts, rules and values. You can verify
this for yourself by stopping what you are doing to focus on your
awareness of what you have been doing. In such an experiment you will
find that the awareness which withdraws from your engagement with the
world, in order to be aware of it, carries your enculturation with it.
It is by the integration of culture and nature that your awareness
includes being aware of ∙ being aware, ∙ possibilities as well as
actualities, and ∙ a past and future (as you have to be if you are to
be aware of possibilities).
Being aware of differences, actualities, possibilities, absences, and
so on, is rule-guided. This is because being aware of objects as facts
is a matter of bringing rules, such as 'different from/same as', and
concepts, such as shape or number, to sensory experience so as to be
aware of something meaningful - of something that has a place in the
cultural/natural integrity of the world.
In the form of 'consciousness,' being aware is often reified as some
kind of self-, soul-, or mind-, thing. In truth, however, being aware
of an object is not a thing but an activity. Being aware is, moreover,
confined to the given person who is aware. You are aware of your
awareness of the world from your point of view, I am aware of mine, and
if there is an omniscient God then He, She, It or They is/are aware of
His, Her, Its or Theirs. No one shares in another person's awareness.
Even if we were souls or person-things, and my mind or soul could
somehow occupy your body, then I would experience only my awareness of
your body, not yours. Of course, the reason why my being aware cannot
enter your body, or vice versa, is precisely that being aware is a
function of the body, and each different body has a different
experience and point of view.
Being aware is that aspect of being a person in the world by which you
discover what is there to be discovered. Awareness does not manufacture
the world of which it is aware, has no interaction with it, and no
influence on it. Being aware of a tree or a bird song, for example,
doesn't affect the tree or the song in any way.
Obviously you cannot be aware of an object unless you can pick that
object out, as distinct, from what would otherwise just be a chaos.
And, in fact, all your awareness is directed towards specific objects.
Once again, your own experience will show you that even your widest
being aware of the world in general actually flits from object to
object; your awareness is always directed towards where some real
object of attention is, or is thought to be, or to where some imagined
object of attention would be if it was real. The object of attention is
whatever fact, outside of your awareness, towards which your awareness
is directed. The objects of attention may be clear, indistinct, actual,
possible, or imaginary; they may be things, a difference between
things, a similarity, a goal or outcome, an event or state of affairs,
a memory, thought or feeling; it may even be no more than your being
aware that you are aware. Whatever the case, you know, just from your
own experience of being aware, that ∙ there is no awareness that is not
awareness of an object and, ∙ the object of which you are aware is not
your awareness of it. To postulate or assume that awareness could
simply 'be,' in the absence of specific objects towards which it is
directed, is like trying to separate hearing from the process of
detecting some sort of sound or sounds. What could it mean to hear if
hearing is not the activity of detecting something that can be heard?
Hearing simply is, and must be, the hearing of sounds. This means that
hearing sounds is all the proof we need that sounds exist (even a
'ringing in the ears' is a sound that has a physical explanation).
Similarly, awareness is not a state of being aware but only and always
an awareness of some object, and you cannot be aware of something
unless there is a something of which to be aware. This means that ∙
persons wouldn't be aware without a world of objects of which to be
aware, and ∙ the fact of being aware of the world is all the evidence
we need that a world outside of awareness exists.
Being-towards, Being-useful-towards, and Being-pointed-towards.
Awareness is not passive; persons are always on the lookout for facts
that are relevant to who they are being. If you are thirsty, for
example, then you will be more alert to possibilities for drinking than
you would be were you not thirsty (see ¶3.1). This alertness is an
aspect of being-towards; that is, the way in which you are always
actually and/or emotionally turning towards or away from various
possibilities in the world that are of concern to you and your ongoing
engagement with the world. If you are thirsty then you will be-towards
drinking, if you are saving towards a purchase then the performance of
saving is being towards that purchase, and so on. Because possibilities
are not actual in the present but could be in the future, being-towards
a future takes precedence over being-towards the past or present when
you are being-towards the actualisation of possibilities. The future
that you are being-towards may never be actualised, but that doesn't
stop you being towards it as a possibility. It is your being-towards
the future that gives your life its 'go forwards'.
Persons are never just 'there'; we are always being-towards some
possibilities and away from others. This is perhaps most commonly seen
in the way we turn ourselves towards our daily tasks when we awake in
the morning and away from them in the evening. It is also clearly seen
in romantic love, which turns towards the person we care about and away
from those we don't, and fear which turns away from the feared object
and towards safety. The being-towards - which includes being turned
towards and away from - is a cultural and evaluative extension of the
directionality of being aware. With being-towards you are not only
aware of a fact but have evaluated the relevance that it has for you
and turned towards or away from it accordingly.
The being-towards character of being a person in the world issues in
the being-useful-towards relations of instruments with the projects in
which they are used. When the instrument in question is a rule or sign,
the being-useful-towards relation becomes a being-pointed-towards one.
Being-useful-towards is a rule-guided relationship, between an
instrument and a project, that imitates the being-towards relationship
between persons and projects. If you use a hammer as an instrument for
building houses, for a example, then the hammer is being-useful-towards
the project that you are being-towards.
Both being-towards and being-useful-towards are directional; they
are being towards the actualisation of some possibility. A sign is an
instrument that is established by a culture to make the 'towards' part
of a being-towards or being-useful-towards relationship explicit. Signs
such as Office ☛ are rule-guided instruments which stand in one place
and direct the reader's attention towards an object in another place.
The word 'or' is a sign that stands between two words or phrases in a
sentence and points-towards a rule that integrates both of them in a
logical relationship that is distinct from an 'and' or 'therefore'
relationship. Similarly, a sign saying STOP stands at a place and
points towards the end of a particular performance (or, if you like,
points towards the place the someone intends that a performance should
end). Pointing is itself a rule-guided performance which imitates the
directionality of being aware and has to do with being-towards an
object, or objects being-useful-towards each other, within an
integrity. Signifying (sign-ifying) is the rule-guided [cultural]
activity of persons whereby we narrate or 'read' facts as signs
pointing towards other facts within a larger and/or more complex fact.
We use signifying to establish meaning. If, for example, you evaluate a
build-up of dark clouds as meaning that a storm is imminent then what
you do is read one fact (the build up of dark clouds) as signifying
[pointing towards] another fact (the coming rain storm) with which it
is connected. Our reading of energy transfers as cause and effect is a
classic case of signifying. By interpreting facts, as
being-pointed-towards other facts in an integrity, cultures imitate the
directionality of awareness with a rule [a reason for performing in a
certain being-useful-towards way].
Being-towards, being-useful-towards, and being-pointed-towards, are
rule-guided relationships which integrate the world as a meaningful
workshop of personhood. If, for example, you trace all the
relationships between all the aspects of making and selling a single
bottle of beer, then you will find that each 'node' in this web - the
growing, harvesting, transport, and storing, of ingredients; the
brewing process; the manufacture of bottles from mined and processed
minerals; the distribution and sale of the finished product; and so on
- is being-useful-towards another node or nodes. The mining and
refining of silicon dioxide, for instance, is not an isolated activity
(which would be pointless) but a way of life which is
being-useful-towards making glass and thereby providing a livelihood
for miners, processors, managers, transporters, administrators, share
holders, and such like. As well as this, at each node of the process
you will find being-useful-towards connections to other ways of life
such as the manufacture and supply of mining or bottling equipment; the
financing of livelihoods; the building, maintenance, and use, of
transport systems; research and educational activities; the supply of
products and services to folk who work in the node; the training of
accountants and supply of accounting machines; and so forth. Although
it isn't practical to trace all the relationships involved in all the
ways that humans go about being persons in the world, if you could
start with one glass of beer, and trace the being-useful-towards
relationships from there, eventually they would all connect into the
integrity that is the world.
Standing on Nothing
As a person, your way of life is not determined for you by any fact
about you. This shown by the way that humans who are racially Negroid,
for example, can be found speaking different languages, and living
different ways of life, all around the world. If a way of life was
determined by a fact such as race then Negroid humans all around the
world would be living in exactly the same way. They don't because to be
Ghanian, German, Scottish, or whatever, entails choosing to live your
life in a certain way regardless of your race. But the possibility of
living a Ghanian way of life, say, exists only because human beings are
potential members of a Ghanian community. In the same way, being a
pastry cook is a possibility for being a person that is found in the
world only because the world is inhabited by persons who are possible
pastry cooks. There is no foundation to this in fact simply because
possibilities are not things. You could analyse a human being down to
the nth fact and not find the possibility of her being a pastry cook
anywhere.
The truth that your way of life is not determined by any fact about
you is further shown when you think about performing in one way rather
than another. Whenever and however you perform, you always have a
reason for performing that has to do with the value that you attach to
that performance. The value you attach to the performance
arises, in turn, from being a certain kind of person; the possibility
of lying, for example, has quite a different value for a liar than it
has for an honest person. You, and you alone, are responsible for who
you are being and, therefore, for the reasons that validate one
performance and not another. You, in other words, are responsible for
the rules [the 'should do this' and 'shouldn't do that'] which guide
your performances. So say, for example, that you are presented with a
possibility for being fair or unfair. Whichever way you choose, there
will be a reason for your choice. This reason will ultimately depend on
the value that you attach to being the kind of person who is fair,
unfair, or tries to avoid the choice. Thus:
......➔ you perform for a reason ➔ your performances actualise a
possible cultural character ➔ you actualise one possible character for
your self because you consider it to be more valuable to you than the
alternatives, ➔ what is or is not valuable to you depends on the
character that you are creating ➔ the character you are creating gives
you your reasons for performing as you do ➔ you perform for these
reasons ➔ your performances actualise.....
This is a performal circle without a foundation (the schema above could
start with any of the arrows). Your cultural character is not your
foundation because it is being created by your choices, and your
choices are not your foundation because they are chosen as valuable to
the cultural character you are creating by them. There is nowhere that
you can break into this circle with a fact that will settle who you
should be (which is precisely why who to be is an issue for you). The
circle is driven by values, and you are free precisely because there is
nowhere in the circle that grounds the values which drive it. You do
not have to be fair or unfair, and there is no fact that will help you
choose one over the other, but you do choose, you have to choose and,
in making your choice, you have to choose your own reasons for
preferring one over the other. So say, for example, that you perform
unfairly. In this case (starting the schema at another point),
......➔ performing unfairly is valuable only to someone who is being a
cheat ➔ being a cheat gives you your reasons for performing unfairly ➔
you perform unfairly for these reasons ➔ performing unfairly actualises
the character of a cheat ➔ being a cheat gives you reasons.....
Having to choose a way of life for ourselves, because there are no
facts about us which will absolve us of that responsibility, is a
proper source of anxiety for persons. It is from this anxiety that we
turn away when we perform as if a social, racial, religious, sexual, or
occupational, preference was some sort of fact about us which we just
have to accept.
Evaluation
To be a person in the world (i.e., to live the life of a potentiality)
you must evaluate the possibilities, for being one kind of person or
another, which being a person in the world brings to light. To evaluate
any possibility is to calculate its actual or possible value
[relevance] for an integrity. If, for example, a certain amount of
water serves the integrity of a tree, while fire violates its integrity
as a tree, then fire and water have different kinds of relevance to the
tree. The value of this relevance will ultimately have to do with the
tree's role in the world of persons (there is no evidence that the tree
itself is a person with a culture, who thinks in terms of values, is
choosing to be a particular kind of tree, or understands the relevance
of fire and water to being whatever kind of tree which it is choosing
to be). If the tree plays an important rôle in your life then the
relevance of fire and water to its integrity will carry greater value
to you than will other objects that play no such rôle. The instruments
we use in evaluation are evaluative cultures such as reasoning and
belief formation.
Values are measures of relevance. Evaluation is a matter of
calculating how much, and/or in which way, an actual or possible has
relevance/value to some fact that has to do with you being the person
you are. Because facts are meaningful, they do not exist as facts
except in a signifying [cultural] context. Just to be aware of a fact
as a fact is already evaluative because all that our sentience gives us
are differences that are different to us only because we have rules for
deciding difference and sameness. You can, for example, perceive a
tree, as a fact of the world, only if you have ∙ criteria for
distinguishing trees from other objects and ∙ rules for reliably
applying the criteria. Criteria and rules are cultural (rule-guided)
constructs that emerge from a community of persons. In that
regard there are no facts in the world without an integration of nature
and culture.
The evaluation of a fact entails (1) tracing the relationships
between it and other facts using signification, and (2) judging the
relevance [value] that it has for a project to do with being one kind
of person or another in the world. The first of these activities
evaluates the fact in terms of its meaning (i.e., where it fits into
the world as a workshop of personhood), the second in terms of its
relevance/value to the world of personhood. The integrity of meaning
and value gives the fact its significance. Both of these activities (1
and 2) are also rule-guided and have a narrative character; persons
'read' objects as signs signifying [pointing towards] other objects
with which they are integrated. Narratives emerge from discourse
[people talking with each other] as stories picturing how objects of
attention do or could cohere to form an integrity. Persons evaluate the
world, and their being persons in it, primarily by means of narratives.
We also actualise a possible cultural character for ourselves by
conforming to the value-defining stories that we implicitly or
explicitly believe. Indeed, persons are story-users and all story-users
treat everything as a message. Human beings 'read' all reality,
including life itself, as if it was a message which could be decoded,
understood, and talked about. If I met a non-human which made up
stories about its world, which understood and related to that world by
means of those stories, which communicated stories and was guided in
its relationships and self-definition by narratives, then I would be in
no doubt that I was dealing with a person, regardless of how unlike a
human that person was otherwise.
|