Copyright © Peter McCormick & Copernicus Center Press, 2020

Editing
Aeddan Shaw

Cover design
Michał Duława

Cover image
ivstiv | iStock.com

Typesetting
Artur Figarski

This book is a result of the research funded by Palacký University Olomouc as the project Providence and morality (No IGA_CMTF_209_001)

ISBN 978-83-7886-550-6

Kraków 2020

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Selected works by Peter McCormick

Restraint’s Rewards: Limited Sovereignties, Ancient Values, and the Preamble for a European Constitution

Moments of Mutuality: Re-Articulating Social Justice in the EU

Aspects Yellowing Darkly: Ethics, Intuitions, and the High European Modernist Poetry of Suffering and Passage

Poverty Among Immigrant Children in Europe (co-author with A. Bhalla)

Eco-Ethics and Contemporary Philosophical Reflection: The Technological Conjuncture and Modern Rationality

Eco-Ethics and an Ethics of Suffering: Ethical Innovation and the Situation of the Destitute

The Negative Sublime: Ethics, Warfare, and the Dark Borders of Reason

When Famine Returns: Ethics, Identity, and the Deep Pathos of Things

Philosophies, Fictions, and the Problems of Poetics

Modernity, Aesthetics, and the Bounds of Art

Heidegger and the Language of the World

Modernities: Essays on Histories, Beliefs, and Values

Solicitations: Essays on Poverties, Discourses, and Limits

The Spirit That We Sought: Essays in Aesthetics

In His Own Arms: Essays on Events, Actions, Persons

In Times Like These: Essays in Ethics: Situations, Resources, Issues

Blindly Seeing? Essays in Ethics: Discourses, Sayings, Sufferings

In the Moment of Your Passing: Essays in Ethics, Aesthetics, and Metaphysics

Of Three Minds: Essays in Ethics: The Political, the Social, the Global

For Hélène Bessière

And for Anne Critchlow and Laure Puech

“It may be that in all her phrases stirred

The grinding water and the gasping wind;

But it was she and not the sea we heard.

For she was the maker of the song she sang.

The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea

Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.

Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew

It was the spirit that we sought and knew

That we should ask this often as she sang.”

...

It was her voice that made

The sky acutest at its vanishing.

She measured to the hour its solitude.

She was the single artificer of the world

In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,

Whatever self it had, became the self

That was her song, for she was the maker.”

Wallace Stevens (1936)[1]

Preface

“Nature. An indefinitely mutable term, changing as our scientific conception of the world changes, and often best seen as signifying a contrast with something considered not part of nature.”

S. Blackburn[2]

“Ground. A metaphysical priority relation distinct from causation ... Grounding is often considered to obtain between facts, i.e., if fact x is grounded in fact y, then y metaphysically explains fact x.”

T. E. Tahko[3]

Relational. “The general kind of objects that do the discerning in all cases form a category that has received little if any attention in metaphysics. This category of objects lies between indiscernibles and individuals and is called relationals: objects that can be discerned by means of relations only and by properties.”

F. A. Muller[4]

This short reflective essay is a quite limited attempt to elucidate how the nature of persons is grounded in their fundamental relationality with themselves and others. I will be arguing that, fundamentally, persons are not individuals; fundamentally, persons are relationals.[5]

The historical and cultural contexts here are mainly, but not exclusively, contemporary European, admittedly with all the serious inadequacies of such restricted contexts in more global times. And the scientific and philosophical contexts are mainly English language work with, again, all their own insufficiencies in times like these.[6]

The aim is to offer some critical but constructive reflections on the still vague but quite important idea of persons as more than either individuals or members of social groups. Accordingly, the extended argument is that persons are most basically neither individual entities nor social entities but essentially relational entities, both with respect to the unity of their own natures as well as with respect to other persons near and far.

In the jargon of category theory,[7] persons are not then “individuals” in the sense of being absolutely discernible by there being at least “one permitted property that the object has and the other objects lack.” Rather, persons are “relationals” in the sense of being, in an encompassing sense, “objects” that nonetheless do not absolutely distinguish themselves from other objects but do so only relatively. They do so relationally through transitive, irreflexive, asymmetric, and extendable foundational relations.[8]

That is, after reflection I do not think that someone can be a person properly speaking without incorporating one’s essential connectedness both to oneself and to other persons; otherwise, one remains just an individual and/or a member of a group.

The first two chapters, which are largely empirical, set up and then critically explore a contrast between two basic contemporary perspectives on human beings and persons, an exclusively naturalistic one and a non-exclusively naturalistic one. The next two chapters look more closely at the social and linguistic dimensions of human beings and persons. The last two chapters, which are largely non-empirical, assemble some of the fundamental ontological and metaphysical reminders for what are arguably any philosophically tenable not exclusively naturalistic conceptions of persons. An envoi looks briefly at what still seems to be most at stake on such a relational account of what and who and how persons are.

If some readers were to find several of these reflections cogent and persuasive, then perhaps some of their thoughtful and collective responses to such urgent global problems today as vastly increasing migrations, climate changes, extinctions, pollutions, pandemics, growing dangers of nuclear warfare, and ever more generalized violence might very well become more effective.

For once persons, institutions, and communities, were to try to radically change their most basic priorities from mainly preserving individual and social privileges, whether those of the governing or of the governed, to mainly serving the communal and fundamental relational values of all, both history and experience show that emergent, innovative solutions to the most urgent of global problems today would become more probable.

But changing one’s most basic priorities requires something quite difficult, namely changing one’s basic mentality. Given the many interests, forces, contingencies, and given, too, the deep pathos of things,[9] many reflective people today believe that fundamental changes in mentality of such a very general sort are probably impossible. However, this wide-spread, uncritical belief I think is mistaken.

For as some rather recent events demonstrate, such basic changes have already occurred several times. Most evidently, various popular contemporary movements have transformed community and state relationships to the surrounding natural world. Think of the novel ecological mentality with respect to catastrophic decline of the environment and of species, and, to a lesser extent, think also of the novel anti-nuclear mentality with respect to continually increasing global energy needs.

Still, much geopolitical, economic, and cultural practice today appears to show that similar fundamental changes in mentality regarding the true nature of persons as essentially relational and not just individual or social entities are, however necessary, not yet effective enough. The hope, therefore, is that this brief essay might make some difference, however small.

By way of acknowledgements, I owe my sincere thanks for the intellectual challenges, sensible expectations, and institutional support in different ways to the following institutions. The Palacky University in Olomouc in the Czech Republic, and especially to the Vice-Dean of its Theological Faculty, Vit Husek, for ongoing research support and publications, the Akademie international für Philosophie in Liechtenstein, the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv in Ukraine, the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung in Germany, the Institut international de philosophie in Paris, and the Royal Society of Canada in Ottawa. I thank Professor Bartosz Brożek and the Board of Directors of the Copernicus Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Kraków for accepting this book for publication in their prestigious series. And I also thank Piotr Majorczyk, Aeddan Shaw, Artur Figarski, and Renata Kluska of the Copernicus Centre Press for all their help with the manuscript.

I owe very much to many truly excellent students over the last years and to just as many excellent colleagues. Specifically, I owe quite special thanks to the professional, collegial, and personal support of Adib Aburukin, Czeslaw Porebski, Martin Cajthaml, Mariano Crespo, Volodymyr Turchynovskyy, Ken-ichi Sasaki, Frank Peddle, and Timothy Tackett. Despite the difficulties of different languages, cultures, and professional trainings, their long and unfailing friendship over many years has made this work so much less imperfect than it sadly must remain. Finally, my deepest thanks over many years go to Hélène Bessière and to our family.

Peter McCormick

Paris, Easter 2020

Endnotes

Note: Full references are given for the first occurrence of an author; further references to the same work are given by the author’s name and the date of his or her work only.

Notes for Epigraph and Preface

[1] What appears to differentiate persons from human beings and their closest relatives, as I will be arguing here in this reflective essay, is most likely their regular uses not of symbolic behaviors generally, but in particular of symbolic discourse. The expression “symbolic discourse” may be understood here roughly as persons’ distinctive uses of language that both say something literally while signifying something non-literally. The instance in this epigraph is that of a woman walking alone on a summer evening’s beach, singing. The singer voices the sound of her song in such verbally symbolic ways as directly to denote some things while indirectly signifying for two close listeners nearby the sound of the sea’s waves. The phrase comes from Wallace Stevens’s well-known 1936 poem, “The Idea of Order in Key West” cited here from Wallace Stevens, Selected Poems, ed. J.N. Serio (NY: Knopf, 2009), p. 75. “...The song and water were not medleyed sound,” Stevens writes, “Even if what she sang was what she heard, / Since what she sang was uttered word by word... Whose spirit is this? we said because we knew / It was the spirit that we sought and knew / That we should ask this often as she sang.” (Although he does not mention Stevens, the distinguished prehistorian S. Mithin’s book The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body [Oxford: OUP, 2005] may come to mind.)

[2] S. Blackburn, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, 3rd ed. (Oxford: OUP, 2016), p. 323.

[3] T. Tahko, An Introduction to Metametaphysics (Cambridge: CUP, 2015), p. 238.

[4] F. A. Muller, “The Rise of Relationals,” Mind, 124 (2015), pp. 201 and 207.

[5] On the cardinal concept here (and throughout) of “fundamental” see Tahko 2015, pp. 120-150, and his “Fundamentality and Ontological Minimality,” in Reality and Its Structure, ed. R. Bliss and G. Priest (Oxford: OUP, 2018), pp. 237-253.

[6] See P. McCormick, In Times Like These. Essays in Ethics: Situations, Resources, Issues (Nordhausen: Bausch Verlag, 2017).

[7] See among other J.-P. Marquis, “Category Theory”, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2019 Edition), ed. E. N. Zalta , URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/category-theory/>.

[8] See the essays in Bliss and Priest 2018, esp. their introductory piece, pp. 1-37.

[9] Cf. P. McCormick, The Deep Pathos of Things: Famines, Philosophies, and Philosophical Ethics (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2003).