Personhood Chart Assignment

Personhood Chart Assignment

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This chart contains a grid for different philosophical anthropologies that answer the question of personhood.

Complete the following chart in the context of defining what it means to be human according to Christianity, Materialism, and your own Personal View.  Refer to the assigned reading for explanation of characteristics listed on the left.

Personhood as a Distinctly Human State within the Natural Order

The postulate that personhood is a distinctly human state within the natural order is basically an assertion of human exceptionalism. However, for many in our time, the controlling dogma of human existence rests upon the notion that humanity is nothing more than a highly developed animal state. The idea of the human species as relatively indistinct from other animals predates modern thought by millennia. In an early expression of naturalistic thought, Pliny the Elder described man as animal in being, though he viewed man as “the animal destined to rule all others.”³ Pliny spoke of man comparatively, being the least of the animals in the frailties of birth and early development, though perhaps superior by virtue of self-awareness.⁴ Even so, Pliny believed that both man and other animals were the result of some creative force.⁵

The concept of man solely as an animal form derived by indifferent acts of the laws of nature reached a later expression in the nineteenth century thought of Charles Darwin. Citing trans-species similarities in embryologic development, in anatomic structure and function, and in the geologic record, Darwin (1874, 694) concluded that ‘man is the co-descendant with other mammals of a common progenitor’. Adopting an expressly naturalistic explanation for human existence as a part of the animal world, Darwin (1874, 693–694, 695) stated that

the great principle of evolution stands up clear and firm, when these groups of facts are considered in connection with others…. He who is not content to look like a savage, at the phenomena of nature as disconnected, cannot any longer believe that man is the work of a separate act of creation….

Through the means just specified, aided perhaps by others as yet undiscovered, man has been raised to his present state.

However, Darwin (1874, 696) went further than classical naturalism. Of mankind he held that ‘the high standard of our intellectual powers and moral disposition’ also reflected evolutionary advancement. The former, Darwin (1874, 696–697) stated, could easily be explained as a natural refinement of the mental powers of higher animals. The latter, moral, nature of man Darwin (1874, 697) admitted as “a more interesting problem.”⁶ Nonetheless, he construed the moral nature of man to be founded in a combination of the expression of social instincts common to lower animals, such as an enjoyment of the company of other individuals, and an expression of higher intellectual powers, such as the ability to recall past experiences with the ability to generalize them to future events, all refined by the naturally selective processes of evolution (Darwin 1874, 697–700). Finally, Darwin held that the nearly universal conviction of mankind in the existence of a powerful Deity was merely a further development in the evolution of morally relevant social and cognitive behaviors. The construct of a Deity allowed man to transform those behaviors into customs extending beyond the confines of a given social context, thus becoming ‘habitual convictions controlled by reason’ (Darwin 1874, 700). The construct of the Divine as a manifestation of social evolution minimized the relevance of an immortal soul and dismissed as invalid the observation that ‘the belief in God has often been advanced as not only the greatest but the most complete of all distinctions between man and the lower animals’ Darwin (1874).⁷ For Darwin, humanity, as characterized by morality and personhood, required no divine principle, nor imago Dei, but only the relentless force of natural selection.⁸

So, then, do we humans exist only as an exalted mammalian phenomenon, driven to our current state by the invisible power of natural selection? Certainly many think not. Plato found intelligence to be the obvious distinctive between man and animal. As Grube (1958) noted, Plato found intelligence as “the most divine thing in man, the most essentially human because [it is] the only part of himself which he does not share with the animal kingdom….”⁹

Aristotle also found man, though animal in nature, still distinct from other animals. Randall (1960, 68) noted that Aristotle held physiology to be common to all living things, and sensing and responding to stimuli as common to man and animals.¹⁰ However, Aristotle held the nous as distinctive to man, being “the power of responding to universals and meanings, the power of acting with deliberation, with conscious forethought, or acting rationally” Randall (1960, 68).¹¹ In the Metaphysics, Aristotle (ca. 350 B.C./2008) held that among animals “endowed with sense” humans were distinct in that “the human race exists by means of art also and the powers of reasoning”. St. Thomas Aquinas combined these three functions—nutritive, sensory, and rational— into his unitary construct of humanity, with rationality forming the distinctive nature of the human person (Kretzmann and Stump 1998). And it was here that St. Thomas found company with St. Augustine in holding this distinctive rationality as the central virtue of the imago Dei (O’Callaghan 2007¹²).

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