On Human Personhood

A further proof:


This is where I tell Friedrich to go screw himself. Nietzsche ist tot.

At least in time, that is.


One of the many seminal things that our culture has received from the Christian Faith is belief in human personhood.

Of the many the things that Western culture takes for granted in its Christian patrimony, this is one of the most important.

Know this: belief in your own existence, belief in the existence of other people, belief in each of our freedom and dignity as human beings, are all just as much articles of faith - that is, articles of the Faith - as is belief in God.

Belief in personhood is rooted in belief in the Incarnation, which is to say the Holy Trinity, which is merely another way of saying the Personhood and Humanity of God.

Our being and humanity is predicated upon His Being and Humanity.


For this much is irrefutable:

Without some manner of transcendence, human personhood is a fiction. If you do not transcend death, then you have no real being at all.

In ontological terms, "you" would be merely organized energy suffering from the illusion of self-hood.

Without some form of transcendence, "you" will cease to exist at death, which in essence means that "you" do not really exist at all.


If you do not transcend time, you are merely a field of organized energy evaporating before it.


Without transcendence "you" would have no more importance, reality, or dignity than a goldfish or a rock. You would have no moral agency, no true freedom. For none of your choices or decisions would be ultimately meaningful, in that without eternal consequence they would evaporate in time with "you."


Any idea you may have to the contrary would be mere convention; born of sentiment, a delusion.


This is why you must have faith.


First, faith in your own existence.

Then, faith in the existence of others - Which, again, you cannot prove - Every time you speak or communicate in any other way with another person, you are making an act of faith in that person's existence.

All of which leads to belief in the transcendent source of our personhood - for we did not create ourselves, nor do we sustain ourselves, nor can we transcend death and time by ourselves.

This leads us to belief and then faith in God, without whom we cannot be ourselves.

---

Post Script: Later on I may discuss Nietzsche's idea of eternal recurrence - which pertains to the argument I just laid out, because he recognized this very problem. I'll only say that he posited the idea of eternal recurrence without providing any reasonable agent to cause it. The idea is far more absurd than belief in God is.

On the same note, Descartes' lack of faith in his own being led him to radical doubt and hyper-rationalism, and the absurd formulation "I think therefore I am" (which is clearly not true) and set the context for modernity's rise and then inevitable collapse in upon itself. Faith is both a necessary prerequisite to thought as well as sanity.

(I will add a note in passing that René died a Catholic, and received the viaticum on his death bed. All of you who attack the Church for her supposed backwardness are provincial ignoramuses who have no sense of history nor any idea of what you are criticizing - for example: the Encyclopedists (Voltaire, Diderot, etc.) were almost without exception trained by the Jesuits, and almost every University in Europe - to include the Cathedral School of Paris (now better known as the Sorbonne), as well as the University of Bologna whose philosophy faculty was the main force that drove to have Galileo condemned for offending the Ptolemaic/Aristotelian scientific orthodoxy of that day, where nearly all established by Catholic priests (go Dominicans! hooray Franciscans!) and rulers (how about them Medicis!)..

More to come here on this all too disregarded history later, of course .. )


I'd carry on about people like Peter Singer, but I'm not in the mood. That will have to wait.

Cheers.



---