Concluding Reflections

 John Hedley Brooke 

The many fine contributions to this conference were valued because they illustrated a great diversity in the methods and disciplines that can be adopted when approaching the subject of human personhood:

 In her opening address, Margaret Yee introduced the large audience to Austin Farrer’s metaphysics, with its distinctive emphasis on the human subject as the focus for discussing divine agency in the world.  Building on Farrer’s insights, Edward Henderson explored more fully how human activity could also be said to be divine activity when certain conditions are fulfilled. Within Christian theology, God allows us to make ourselves as we take up God’s will as our own.  This raises the question of how we might know the will of God.  This problem was addressed by Nancey Murphy with special reference to the Catholic modernist theology of George Tyrrell.  Here the focus was on impulses from a spirit reality that can suddenly irrupt into human consciousness and which can be experienced as guidance on optimal behaviour in a specific moral context. In Ron Cole-Turner’s paper questions about what it means to be a member of the human species were thrown into relief by discussing new biotechnologies that permit the creation of cybrids and chimeras.  Several papers (including those of Thomas Moellenbeck and Stephan Schaede) addressed the issue of human dignity, whether it is constituted naturally, whether by virtue of a special relationship with God, or whether, as Burkhard Liebsch argued, it is something than can only be conferred as and when we dignify others in response to their claims upon us. In addition to these themes of human subjectivity, human dignity, human activity, human freedom and consciousness, and the human as a biological species, there were edifying discussions of human identity (as expressed in the arts); human initiative (explored in Patricia Rehm’s account of Maurice Blondel on new beginnings); and human vulnerability to violence and pain.  In John Ozolins’s paper the question of human nature took centre stage as he called for a multi-disciplinary account that would, ideally, have universal application.  With reference to debates concerning the moral status of human embryos, Angeliki Kerasidou offered an engaging critique of attempts by Peter Singer and John Harris to use human personhood as an abstraction from a holistic understanding of human life. This rich diet was further enriched by John Polkinghorne’s outline of hominid evolution and the critical stages in that process as novelties appeared – notably the emergence of a rationality that eventually made science possible.  The methods adopted by physical scientists, and their limitations, were the subject of an authoritative lecture by Jurgen Ehlers, who drew attention to a human absence in physicists’ conclusions about the world. In his own words: “Just as a painter cannot represent himself totally in a picture he creates, so a physicist cannot be part of the physical system he represents”.  But it was also clear from his lecture that human emotion cannot be disregarded in the lives of scientists.  His example was Einstein, who was excited by the conviction that nature had spoken to him.  It was Einstein who once said that the state of mind in which great scientific discoveries are made is like that of the religious person or the person in love.  And it is ultimately humans who give wider cultural meaning to scientific theories and their interpretation. In many of the conference papers it became clear that the question of context is of primary importance and this is a theme that deserves closer analysis.  During the discussion of Cole-Turner’s paper the question arose whether human intentions should affect our judgement of human actions, whereupon it was pointed out that it is very difficult to accommodate intentions in legislation.  But to take a specific example: why is it that the destruction of surplus embryos in the context of in vitro fertilisation now causes less reaction than in the case of stem-cell research?  One suggestion might be that the intentions and immediate purpose in the former case, namely to help an otherwise infertile couple, wins a greater public approval than the more abstract intention of advancing medical research.  In other words, context may play a large part in affecting judgement.  The importance of context was recognised in another feature of Cole-Turner’s lecture – the contrast between attitudes towards cybrids in the United Kingdom and the United States of America.  The existence of such cultural contrasts has been recognised in other disputes, notably those concerning genetically modified food and debates over Darwinian evolution. This theme of cultural context was explored during the conference through an attractive presentation by Michael Howlett, Colette Moloney and Fiona Dowling who examined what was distinctive in examples of Irish poetry, art and music.  This raised the fascinating question whether one culture would ever be able to fully understand the music of another, which was clearly as much nurture dependent as nature dependent.  Here the question of context becomes critical and constitutes a particularly rich theme.  One might, for example, recognise in the opening bars of Shostakovich’s fifth symphony a typically Russian emanation, but the context becomes even more salient in the light of the composer’s concession that the work was a response to just criticism – a hollow and satirical concession discernible in the music itself.  And with the seventh symphony, performed during the siege of Leningrad, the context carried even more sombre weight. The importance of context also surfaced in Liebsch’s account of human vulnerability, in that he criticised timeless accounts of what makes humans human (eg their creativity) and timeless accounts of human dignity.  His point was that it is in specific contexts that claims are made on us to confer dignity.  His analysis has a direct relevance to our understanding of gang violence, which has been much discussed in Britain recently.  The worrying thing is that there is evidently a local etiquette that is invoked when accusing others of showing disrespect.  The nature of the claim for respect and the conventions for conferring dignity are context-dependent and dangerously so. A critical role for context could be illustrated from other conference papers.  It is in specific situations, particularly when a moral choice has to be made, that the impulses discussed by Murphy will materialise.  In the discussion of Kerasidou’s paper it was pointed out by Amanda Hayes that with reference to the status of embryos, legislation differs in Austria from that in Spain and Portugal, which in turn differs from that in Ireland.  Explicit in John Polkinghorne’s talk was the need to place hominid evolution “in the right context” when discussing what is meant by the changing environment in which it took place. There is a science that deals with context – and that science is history.  The question I therefore wish to raise is whether what we mean by ‘human nature’ can be sufficiently understood biologically.  The origin of our capacities may be biologically rooted; but what makes us human persons is not so easily reduced.  May we not learn more about what humans are from what they have done rather than from how they are constituted physically and biologically?  In one of the conference papers, the anthropologist John Blacking was quoted: human individuality “is the result of the discovery and development of the self in a series of circumstances and encounters whose sum is unique for each person”.  The point is that circumstances and encounters are events that cannot be immediately, or perhaps even at all, explicated biologically, but can be biographically. This may open a door to one of the ways in which Ozolins’s plea for an eclectic account of human nature might be met.  If we focus not merely on human creativity but on human self-creativity then our account of what human nature is must embrace not simply what humans are but what humans do, have done and can do.  This point is well made by Roger Smith in his recent book Being Human (Manchester University Press, 2007).  Smith argues that there is more access to self-knowledge through interpreting what people have actually done than through some supposed privileged insight into consciousness.  This capacity for self-creativity (discussed in the conference by Henderson and Yee) seems to me to merit a closer analysis because it may leave questions about the essence of human nature more open-ended than our taxonomic impulses presuppose and may, to some degree, militate against a quest for normativity.  With specific reference to human nature, Smith observes that “the appropriate myth is an endless quest not a hunt for buried treasure.  There is no ‘right’ or ‘objective’ or neutral picture of human nature; each picture is part of the self-creative activity of being human”. Human persons can exercise some control over the choice of person they wish to be.  Most of us recognise our propensity to modulate our nature according to the person or persons with whom we are in correspondence at any given time.  Put another way: human beings “are never simply what they ‘are’, like other animals, but are as they take themselves [and make themselves] to be” (Smith, p.254).  What historical knowledge suggests is that there are different forms of knowledge, not because there are different objects in the world but (as the philosopher Hilary Putnam has observed) because we have diverse purposes and ask diverse questions.  Human nature and human personhood illustrate this principle perhaps more than any other objects of knowledge.