In Out of the Caves I distinguish between humans as a biological species, as persons (an encultured, rule-following species) and as selves (as persons with a distinct character and self-identity). Briefly, being human is a function of our biological nature, being a person is a function of engaging a personhood culture, and being a self is a matter of embodying various beliefs, habits and values in living a life. Both personhood and selfhood are a function of the stories that we tell ourselves and each other. For more, read on (for a lot more, buy the book!).

All human beings are members of a person-species; that is, a species of sentient beings whose members normally evaluate ['read' for meaning] their world, themselves and their experiences, by means of narratives [stories about themselves and our world that integrate language, number, reasoning, rules, values and beliefs]. Persons are story tellers. And it is because humans are persons that we understand our world by means of the stories we tell about it. Perhaps more to the point, it is because we are persons that we define ourselves, and live our lives as selves in a world, by the stories that embody beliefs, values, models of personhood and habits of thought. This is all a matter of culture [language and rule-following] rather than of nature [biology]. Humans do not, for example, have laws and governments, knowledge, reasoning, religion, schooling, medicine, economics, gender, science, morality and art out of any natural structures built into our biology but because we are an encultured species - we live by following and using rules which are derived from the rule-governed nature of language (see Integrity, Value and Rules).

Being a human is not the same as being a person.Being human is a matter of nature [biology], on a par with being a sheep or a fish or other species. Being a person is a matter of culture - of using language, telling stories, following rules and so on. Human biology occurs lump-by-lump as separate human bodies; these lumps become persons by sharing in a personhood culture. Human personhood is a shared, species-wide, rule-making and rule-following culture embodied in instances of human biology - our nature makes us human, our culture makes us persons. So culture and nature are integrated in human persons. The biggest difference between the natural [human] part of human persons, and the cultural [person] part, is that there are no rules in nature (nature just 'is') whereas culture is actually made of rules. Storytelling, evaluation, art and morality, belief and self-consciousness, thought and reason are all rule-governed functions of culture because culture is a function of language, the values and rules embodied as language, and the evaluation enabled by the values and rules of language. Nature, on the other hand, is the arrangement of things, forces, events and relations which we inherit from the dynamics of matter and energy in space and time. There are no rules in nature - the sun, for example, doesn't rise because it 'ought to', it just does it.

It would be misleading to think of human persons either as fundamentally animals [language-using apes] or as fundamentally persons [souls or selves who have been given bodies to drive around this world in]. Human persons integrate nature, in the form of human biology, with personhood culture in a way that makes us evaluating integrities; that is, individually distinct 'knots' of nature and culture (lumps of stuff in which personhood and human biology are joined as one) who evaluate ourselves and our surroundings. So we cannot be understood except as both humans and persons.

There may or may not be other evaluating integrities in the universe or even on this planet - there are certainly many variously person-like integrates, such as whales and dolphins, kea, domestic cats and some primates, on earth - but it is to human persons that the thinking in Renovation Philosophy is limited because it is with human violence that I am concerned.¹

Each human being is an evaluating integrity in two, intimately related, senses:

• what we are (persons). In this sense, a human person is an encultured animal (an integrity of the natural and cultural) which evaluates its experiences. I am a person just by being a human evaluator. This 'what I am' integrity is itself a platform or vehicle for,
• who we are (selves). In this sense, each human person realises a distinct personality, with her or his own self-identity, preferences, values and moral character, who evaluates her or his experiences in her or his own way.

As humans, we all want safety, comfort, stimulation and other kinds of pleasure. As persons we want to be significant (we want to matter) and we want to understand (we want to know what things and events 'mean'). Traditionally we have secured these wants by integrating our intelligence and sociability into various kinds of highly-successful team violence. It is the mind-set of this team violence which keeps us locked into violence even after many of us have long recognised that violence is more trouble than it is worth. In Out of the Caves, I reason that human persons normally and compulsively violate integrity on a conditioned, and often unadmitted, assumption that such violence, and only such violence, makes us safe, strong and significant. This conditioning is explained in terms of us each being variously addicted to certain long-standing and warrior-like habits of thought which we each absorb in the very process of each realising our personhood. This complex of habits and assumptions, by which present-day humans still think like members of an ancestral warrior society, and to which we are addicted, is what I understand as the addictive (or hunter-warrior) mythos (see the 'Addiction Hypothesis' in about violence).
        An understanding of human personhood matters for dealing with human violence because it is in the process of realising our personhood [making an actual personality real] that we internalise the habits of thinking like members of a warrior society. This is because, although we are born human persons, we are not born human selves. Our selfhood - our personality, character and self-identity - is a unique combination of various tastes, traits, habits, values and attitudes that we evolve as we live. Persons are what we are, selves are who we are - each human person is fundamentally the same as every other human person, each human self is unique. Self-awareness begins with our awareness that others are other (we begin to realise that we are who we are once we begin to realise that others are not who we are). This begins after birth, during the first year of life, and is realised through our engagement with human personhood culture. As we learn to live the life of persons - acquiring language, knowledge, rule-governed behaviours, values, habits, character traits - so we learn the habits of warrior-thinking which make violence seem both natural and attractive to us. The hope for human persons keeping our power and realising our significance without violence lies in detoxifying our selfhood from the habits and half-truths of warrior thinking. Everything that human persons do is formed out of nature by the stories which embody our values, beliefs and ideas about what it is to be a human person. Changing those stories changes who we are. Changing those stories is what the Renovation Project is now all about.
 

Steven Foulds entry last modified 19 July 2006

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1. Note here that by 'violence' I mean more than physical assaults - violence is the violation of integrity with the intent or effect of causing harm, so lies, political and economic oppression, verbal abuse, bigotry and smashing up the natural environment all count as violence, see about violence)