Jacques Maritain, Materiality, and Personhood

Jacques Maritain, the important neo-Scholastic philosopher of the mid-twentieth century, also contributed to the conversation on Christian Personalism. His most important book on the subject was his 1946 The Person and the Common Good. In this work, Maritain distinguishes individuality and personality:

"As an individual, each of us is a fragment of a species, a part of the universe, a unique point in the immense web of cosmic, ethnical, historical forces and influences-and bound by their laws. Each of us is subject to the determinism of the physical world. Nonetheless, each of us is also a person and, as such, is not controlled by the stars. Our whole being subsists in virtue of the subsistence of the spiritual soul which is in us a principle of creative unity, independence and liberty" (38).

Maritian is invoking and answering the Kantian distinction between the physical and moral universes. For Maritain it is important that we recognize that we are both material and spiritual:

1. We are each individual. We exist separately in a material manner from other material organisms and objects. We each occupy distinct places in space. Our material existence receives a particular form-a particular shape and identity which is an expression of a more general type. We are each members of and particular examples of a species. Our bodily lives are grounded in our senses and desires.
   
2. Yet we are also persons. We have particular personalities. "Personality is the subsistence of the spiritual soul communicated to the human composite" (41), and because of this, persons communicate with other persons; they commune with them to a greater or lesser degree. Persons are oriented to each other by love and faithfulness, by recognizing the innate dignity in another who is made in the image of God.
   

For Maritain, our orientation to one of these has all to do with what we become. If we are dominated by our material selves, our higher personalities become debased and wanton. If we are dominated by our spiritual call and direction, our selves take on admirable and truly human expansiveness:

"If the development occurs in the direction of material individuality, it will be oriented towards the detestable ego whose law is to grasp or absorb for itself. At the same time personality, as such, will tend to be adulterated and to dissolve. But if the development occurs in the direction of spiritual personality, man will be oriented towards the generous self of the heroes and saints. Thus, man will be truly a person only so far as the life of the spirit and of liberty reigns over that of the senses and passions" (44-5).

Thus, true personhood points to the shape of the political society. Human beings are innately political because they are innately social. Will our common polis then be a society of individuals each tearing at the other in demands and negotiations, or will our common life be orientated to a common good? "The common good is common because it is received in persons, each one of whom is as a mirror of the whole" (49). Maritain is quick to stress that if we misunderstand the common good to be a collective goal other than the good of each person, we end with a totalitarian collective. If however, there is no common good, we end with radical individualism and no higher vision of human life.

The common good should be the development of the good life, the life of virtue, friendship, happiness, family, and so on. When this is the case, then the common good flows back to the benefit of each member, helping him or her to develop true liberty and freedom. But even this will eventually go wrong if it is not oriented to the greater end of the love of God and the beatific vision: "The common good of the city or the civilization . . . does not preserve its true nature unless it respects that which surpasses it, unless it is subordinated, not as a pure means, but as an infravalent end, to the order of eternal goods and the supra-temporal values from which human life is suspended" (62).

Any good political society will consider that the goods it imparts to its persons will ultimately recognize that as persons they are oriented to the eternal: "the common good by its essence must favor their progress toward the absolute goods which transcend politcal society" (76). Persons are created to serve their communities, but communities/societies that treat persons as material individuals will enslave most of them for the profit of a few. The Church is thus a society that models for other political societies God's best. Maritian sums it up this way:

"If we consider this grand City as living in its entirety upon the common good which is the very life of God, communicated to the multitude of the just and seeking out the errant, then each stone is for the city. But if we consider each stone as living itself, in its personal participation in this common good, upon the very life of God that is communicated, or as sought after personally by God, who wills to communicate His own life to it, then, it it toward each one that all the goods of the city converge to receive of their plenitude. In this sense, the city is for each stone" (86-7).

John MacMurray & the Personal Structure of Freedom

"Until we recover our sense of proportion, until we recognize our creaturliness and our dependence, we shall continue to frustrate our freedom by desiring what cannot attain, and by using our resources for our own destruction. Humility is the handmaid of freedom. It is the meek who inherit the earth."--John MacMurray

Moral philosopher John MacMurray was particularly concerned with how the intersubjective nature of personhood shaped the conditions of freedom. For MacMurray, the personal and the community are tied together. The personal does not exist without the life of the community. How can this be the case?

1. MacMurray starts by stressing the action of a person. A person intends to act in a certain way; this requires a motive. Persons have free will which allow them to choose to act for certain reasons before they act.
2. But free will defined this way is only the beginning of freedom. The conditions of true freedom are achievable only by having a moral end which governs our techniques. Thus, we absolutely need self-control, and one is not truly free without it.
3. Action is inevitably interaction. MacMurray insisted that the arena of human action is for the most part that of persons-in-relation not that of individuals as a simple aggregate. Persons are still individuals but they are are truly persons only in their nexus of relations.
4. The highest relationships are that of persons in interaction together exhibiting true love, not that of unequal master-slave relations based on fear and desire for power. Persons cannot be reduced to relations of power.
5. "Community," for MacMurray is closer to friendship than society. True freedom is found in community, not society.
   
6. "Society," as he defines the term, is an impersonal interaction of persons based on mutual cooperation but motivated by fear and a concern with a justice of the distribution of goods, duties, and burdens.
7. "Community," on the other hand, has a common life based around a common purpose. Its end is itself. It pursues the living of its friendship. It is motivated by love, not self-interest and fear, and according to MacMurray is always universal in its potential scope--all are invited.
8. The common purpose and end that creates this community is genuine religion. God as the Wholly Personal Other is the ground of a community's love and friendship. Religion both creates and celebrates community. It is what gives rise to the tradition that offers some continuity of the community over space and time.
   
9. Without true community, society-whatever its democratic claims--can only offer a limited freedom of negotiation and fear. Society's justice is a thin project of mediating competing claims.

"Friendship reveals the positive nature of freedom. It provides the only conditions which release the whole of the self into activity and so enable a man to be himself totally, without constraint. It is in this sense, in particular, that freedom is a constitutive principle of friendship. "

Pedagogy and Friendship

John Henry Newman understood only too well that professors influence students; the question is not if influence will take place but what kind of influence. He held that a pedagogy without the friendship of professor and student can only expect an environment of distrust and hostility: "An academic system without the personal influence of teachers upon pupils is an arctic winter; it will create an ice-bound, petrified, cast-iron University and nothing else."

Strangely, this is a result that many in the modern university not only accept as normal but practice as a virtue. The pedagogical practices inherent in Alasdair MacIntyre's encyclopedic method and the genealogical critiques may not know it, but they exist in ethical practices, though ones gone terribly array. Their methods of objective distance and power distrust have been made more believable by being offered in an ethical and pedagogical environment that reinforces their claims-- its very structure, at once supposedly objective yet lacking in anything like a curricular common vision.

Mark Schewn places much of the blame for this at the heart of the nineteenth-century German research institution, as well as the Weberian distrust of emotion and relationship in university education. Phillia, Weber holds, always pollutes the objectivity necessary for true research. But is this really the case?

Michel Polanyi observed that research is more intuitive in nature than is mostly admitted, and it is often passed along in non-verbalized ways to its new initiates. He called this "conviviality," the communication of true knowledge on the inarticulate level. Such knowledge involves a fair level of trust between teacher and student, and is therefore, essentially a-critical in nature. As such it is a tacit knowing: "We must now recognize belief once more as the source of all knowledge. Tacit assent and intellectual passions, the sharing of an idiom and of cultural heritage . . . No intelligence, however critical or original, can operate outside such a fiduciary framework."

The modern university by its overt distrust of friendship creates a world where encyclopedia and genealogy tragically seem true, though at the most human level they must continue to teach and research despite this, living off the cultural capital of intellectual honesty, collegiality, freedom of conscience, trust in rational discourse, scholarly discipline, a dependence on continuity with the past, even the desire for mentorship between student and teacher--all ethical practices which must be taken on faith, as Polanyi observes, even when honored in the breach.

Note how in Henry James' story, "The Figure in the Carpet" that once the narrator experiences knowledge as utility and as mastery, it soon replaces joy and delight in the love of learning:

[W]hat now occurred was simply that my new intelligence and vain preoccupation damaged my liking. I not only failed to run a general intention to earth, I found myself missing the subordinate intentions I had formerly enjoyed. His books didn't even remain the charming things they had been for me; the exasperation of my search put me out of conceit of them. Instead of being a pleasure the more they became a resource the less; for from the moment I was unable to follow up the author's hint I of course felt it a point of honour not to make use professionally of my knowledge of them. I had no knowledge - nobody had any. It was humiliating, but I could bear it - they only annoyed me now. At last they even bored me, and I accounted for my confusion - perversely, I allow - by the idea that Vereker had made a fool of me. The buried treasure was a bad joke, the general intention a monstrous pose (293).

Treating your education in a purely instrumental way is to succumb to the encyclopedia project of which MacIntyre warned, which only too quickly leads to the distrust and suspicion of genealogy. Such a disposition of mind and heart can occur in any educational environment, but the modern ethical chaos of individualism only lends it a deeper epistemic credulity. We have literally created academic structures that make the modern and post-modern assertions feel true, even as our humanity must struggle against them. As such, these structures are traditions who have hidden from themselves their former purpose for existence, living in a practice that once had the higher end of the love of knowledge from a dedication to the truth as the gift of God.

This current state of things suggests that Christian institutions of higher learning need to be cognizant and intentional about friendships between faculty and students. Learning is not just factual but intuitive and initiatory. Mentoring is often a two-way street because education is founded on the practice of submission, initiation, cultivation, and eventual contribution and clarification. As Jaroslav Pelikan reminds us,

The moment of truth comes . . . [as] the student begins to arrive at conclusions different from those of the master, as the largely unilateral power relationship of apprenticeship gradually yields, or should yield, in a healthy relationship--to authentic community and a deepening collegiality between teacher and student . . . it is a rite of passage filled with joy and fulfillment for all concerned, as well as with moments of deep anxiety.

What renders this "moment of truth" and "rite of passage" meaningful is a shared commitment to something like the academic ideal, a belief in freedom of inquiry as an essential aspect of our true humanness. As such, it demands of us personal virtues, fiduciary skills of trust and time, and they can exist for a season in systems of thought that mitigate against themselves.

Yet the cultures of encyclopedia and genealogy are finally pedagogically incoherent. These virtues cannot stand by themselves for very long. What they need is the larger theistic framework of the purpose of knowledge and of intellectual service to humanity to render their academic ideal an ultimately meaningful practice. Faithfulness in this context means an investment in others; it requires a certain speed--a slow listening and speaking that "hears" the tacit dimension in the other person. We all have favorite teachers in our lives, and those of us in higher education can each recall very significant professors who shaped our future callings, answered our questions, guided our thinking, assuaged our doubts, and disturbed our complacency.

In a Christian context, we need the hypergood, the telos, or final end we are pursuing set before us always, what the Westminster Confession so lovingly made proverbially:

Question 1: What is the chief and highest end of man?
Answer: Man's chief and highest end is to glorify God, and fully to enjoy him forever.