The Selfhood of the Human Person, By John F. Crosby. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1997. Pp. 313. $34.85 (cloth), $19.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8132-0864-5 (cloth), 0-8132-0865-3 (paper).
This book marks a milestone in Catholic philosophical anthropology. It is probably the most significant original contribution to the field, from the perspective of phenomenological personalism, to appear in the English lan-guage in recent years. No less important, it is clearly and accessibly written. Any reader who has languished through the iniquitous translation of Karol Wojtyla's The Acting Person, or who finds phenomenological approaches frequently impenetrable and mystifying, will be pleasantly surprised by the remarkable clarity and accessibility of Crosby's crisply written and well-organized presentation. Crosby draws from phenomenology (Scheler, Wojtyla, Edith Stein, and his own mentor, von Hildebrand), personalist sources (Kierkegaard, Newman, Wojtyla again, and Josef Seifert), neo-Thomism (Maritain) and the philosophia perennis, combining many of the same sorts of perspectives one finds in Wojtyla. Readers of Crosby's painstaking phenome-nological analysis of human "selfhood" may find portions of his discussion so penetrating and compelling as to induce an eerie sense of having been con-ducted into the precincts of that profound, mysterious interiority called the "self" as if for the first time.
The book is divided into three parts. In part 1 ("Selfhood") Crosby argues for the "reception" of modern insights regarding the subjectivity and interiority of the human self by those who stand in the tradition of the philosophia perennis. He seeks to show, for example, how far one can go in pursuing profitably the insights of Kant concerning the autonomy and dignity of persons as ends in themselves without departing from the philosophia perennis or accepting the whole of Kantian philosophy. In part 2 ("Selfhood and Transcendence") and part 3 ("Selfhood and Theonomy"), he reverses per-spectives and endeavors to show how those who stand in the modern tradition of freedom and autonomy stand to benefit from accepting the idea of personal transcendence towards truth, moral good, and ultimately God. Here he ad-dresses the typically modern fear of heteronomy awakened by the idea of such transcendence.
Accordingly, Crosby's argument plays both sides of the coin. He argues, for instance, that
those who affirm that persons are ends in themselves may rebel against the idea of being subject to God and may be too quick to suspect heteronomy in the religious existence of human persons, just as those who are glad to exist under God may be too slow to assert the selfhood that is their birthright as persons and may even incline to a kind of religiously motivated nihilism with regard to human things and human values.
Thus, like Wojtyla, Crosby seeks to balance a traditional Catholic understanding of transcendence with a deepened appreciation for the in-teriority of the person, even as he seeks to counterbalance the typically modern appreciation for autonomy and subjectivity with a deepened understanding of the personal transcendence by which such autonomy and subjectivity are properly grounded.
Starting with the assumption that it is in the moral life that we have our clearest experiences of ourselves as persons, Crosby begins his discussion by analyzing the phenomena of moral consciousness associated with depersonalizing ways of treating human beings. Why do we feel outrage at the idea of punishing an innocent person as a scapegoat, even if it serves the socially useful purpose of deterring crime? Why do prostitution, human eugenic experimentation, slavery, and violence against persons offend our moral sensibilities? Many of us would probably echo Kant's assertion that by treating others as means instead of ends in themselves, we do violence to their dignity as persons and moral subjects. Even the idea of God using us and discarding us as instrumental means is repulsive to our moral consciousness. Aquinas himself points out that "rational creatures are subject to divine providence in a special way"--that is, in a way that defers to the dignity of their free agency. In this sense, human persons belong to themselves and to no other. They are incommunicably their own and never mere specimens or means. They are wholes in themselves and never mere parts, even as members of a larger whole such as society. Hence, the Reformation-era principle cuius regio eius religio, according to which the religion of a principality was determined by the prince, failed to give proper regard to the integrity of the individual's conscience. Aware that this may sound like an apology for individualism, Crosby argues that such respect for personal selfhood also provides the only possible basis for authentic community, as explicitly recognized by the Vatican II "Declaration on Religious Liberty."
In elaborating upon the uniqueness and "unrepeatibility" of each person's self, Crosby seeks to distinguish between what is communicable and what is incommunicable in the person. A traditional Aristotelian answer would be that a being's act of existence is the only thing incommunicably its own and that all of its essence is universal and common to others of the same essence. Yet no concrete substance seems to have anything general as one of its real, concrete ingredients. Socrates' humanity belongs to his essence, yet this essence is individuated in Socrates as something incommunicably his own. "Essence," as Scheler points out from a phenomenological perspective, "has nothing to do with universality." There are essences that are given only in a particular individual. Aquinas would have recognized this as true of angels, each of which, he said, is its own species. Crosby appeals to a distinction by Josef Seifert between "concrete" and "general" essences, which uniquely combines Platonic and Aristotelian insights. Thus the "concrete humanity" of Socrates is incommunicably his own, even while participating in "the universal form of humanity" common to all human beings.
This incommunicable concrete essence of each self, far from tending to solipsism, constitutes the basis for genuine communication and encounter between persons. It is the basis for true self-knowledge, love of others, even encounter with God. This is what constitutes the value and dignity of the selfhood, rather than any communicable attribute such as "greatness." Thus, Crosby objects to the "Beethoven argument" against abortion, which says that we are indebted to Beethoven's mother for not aborting him because of his genius. On the contrary, the primary loss is that the world would have been deprived of an incommunicable person.
In his phenomenological analysis of subjectivity, Crosby cites Wojtyla's seminal essay, "Subjectivity and the Irreducible in Man," where Wojtyla argues that the cosmological perspective of the Aristotelian tradition risks "reducing man to the world" by exclusive recourse to its otherwise helpful categories of substance, potentiality, rationality, etc. Hence Wojtyla welcomes the emer-gence in modern philosophy of a more personalist perspective that can serve as a corrective with its uniquely personal categories of interiority, self-presence, subjectivity, and self-donation (thus, Wojtyla sees beneath the cosmological procreative significance of the marital act the more basic personalist meaning of spousal self-donation).
Taking his cue from Wojtyla, Crosby offers a sustained examination of the phenomena of subjective consciousness. Rejecting the view of Brentano and Husserl that consciousness is essentially intentional, he argues that all consciousness is anchored in the interiority of a nonintentional conscious self-presence. This subjective consciousness is not the intentional reflexivity by which I make myself an object of consciousness, as described by Sartre, but a nonintentional reflexivity by which my subjective interiority is co-presented along with my intentionally-directed object-consciousness. Analogously, we can experience our bodies both objectively from a point outside ourselves (in a mirror), or subjectively from within.
Can we reflect on subjectivity philosophically? There are many, of course, who would deny this possibility. Maritain, for example, insists that "Sub-jectivity as subjectivity is inconceptualizable." Again, Scheler argues that persons can never be made objects without losing them as persons. However, Crosby maintains that, at most, certain elements of my own experiencing are unavailable to me as long as I am having the experience, not before or after having it; and these elements may be available to other observers besides myself. This in no way tells against the possibility of philosophically reflecting on subjectivity and understanding what it essentially is.
Crosby illustrates how personal selfhood presents itself in the experience of "recollecting" ourselves after being ecstatically immersed in our surroundings. The initial state of mind is revealed in the glazed look on our faces, our passivity, our loss of self-presence. Such states of consciousness approach a mere succession of impressions in which we are ecstatically lost, living completely in our present impression. But we always have the possibility of "recollecting" ourselves again, of coming to ourselves so that we gain distance from what we experience, transcending it. "The more recollected I am, dwelling with myself, the more I experience myself from within myself," says Crosby; and the more empowered I am to intentionally transcend myself towards what is given to me. This is particularly true in love for another, in which I enter into his or her subjectivity. Thus, this self-presence is as far removed as it could be from anything resembling solipsism.
Yet while defending the irreducible subjectivity of persons against the cosmological perspective, Crosby insists no less on distinguishing personal being from subjectivity. While personal being "actualizes itself in subjectivity," he says, it "does not exhaust itself in subjectivity." Thus, he maintains, like Seifert, that the metaphysics of substance is capable of a personalist articulation. Against the "subjectivist" objections, he offers two phenome-nological arguments. First, the very possibility of recollecting ourselves when we experience ourselves as dispersed in our environment shows that we as persons are in reality incommunicably and substantially ourselves and not reducible to the subjective experience we have in the state of dispersion. Second, the fact that wrongdoing is not always experienced as harming ourselves morally shows that we as persons are more than our conscious experiencing. Here Crosby parts company with not only Scheler but Ratzinger, each of whom rejects substantial conceptualizations of personhood. He develops fascinating phenomenological arguments against abortion and eutha-nasia based on a personalist metaphysics of substance.
Crosby turns from these inward-looking aspects of selfhood in the last two parts of his book to examine the outward-directed aspects, which transcend self-presence toward truth, beauty, moral goodness, and love. Here Crosby makes a number of controversial points that will provoke debate. For example, it is not clear that metaphysical realism demands the rejection of Husserl's theory that intentional acts are in some sense constitutive of their objects, as Crosby suggests. He prefers describing intentional acts as receptive to being; yet it is not clear how this differs from Husserl's notion of "passive synthesis," which would seem amicable to a realist interpretation along lines suggested by Robert Sokolowski. He scores against Scheler's denial that persons can be experienced as objects by explaining how "others see in me what escapes me." But his criticism of Scheler's view of our response to values as excluding any "decision for value" seems to overlook Scheler's distinction between mere conation and conscious willing. Nevertheless Crosby's point about the necessity of a decision for value is an important one, reminiscent of Hans Reiner. Most of the discussion in this part of his study focuses on the experience of moral value and obligation, and is substantive and interesting.
In his concluding section on selfhood and theonomy, Crosby shows that it is only through recognizing the finitude of ourselves as creatures that we come to recognize in each other, as persons, something transcending this finitude. Though many aspects of our finitude may be enumerated, "personhood" is not among them. It is by virtue of our being persons that we resemble God. Though our human personhood is limited in various ways, personhood as such is not limited. In Crosby's words: "we human persons, limited though we are, are not limited because we are persons." We come to know God by knowing the human person, and to know the person through knowing God.
Philip Blosser
Lenoir-Rhyne College
Hickory, North Carolina
Copyright © 1998 The Thomist Press. All rights reserved.
Revised: December 20, 2002