If People are Genuine Agents . . .

A post on Siris here recently gave a fascinating if brief quote from a paper by Jeremy Waldron, of the New York University School of Law, entitled Image of God: Rights, Reason, and Order. The paper itself is accessible here, but to get it you have to download the paper with a click. The phrase in the title, Image of God, refers to Genesis where God is quoted saying, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Waldron examines this framing as the potential foundation for human rights—which is a rather refreshingly traditional look at a thoroughly modern notion, namely inalienable human rights. I’d never linked the two myself, revealing how alienated I’ve become from modernity—and it was therefore refreshing for me, too, to imagine that the endless hue and cry about rights might actually have something to do with a fundamental tenet of my own thought, namely that people are genuine agents, thus belong to another order than matter—which exhibits no agency at all.

By interesting coincidence, a C-Span discussion just a week or so ago about Economics and Environmentalism, both labeled secular religions, featured a theologian who, in commentary, cited the same verse in Genesis to speak about dominion. The verse is:

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. Genesis 1:26.

The theologian was at pains to point out that, in this verse, dominion meant caring and responsible oversight by a created being endowed with agency by the Highest—with emphasis on care and keeping rather than selfish exploitation for limited ends. Brigitte noticed this first and then drew my attention to it. I watched the replay with great pleasure. The traditional ways of seeing Reality are returning. You see and hear them on TV these days in the least expected places.

A third coincidence was a New York Times article today reporting that modern medicine has now succeeded in nearly fail-safe early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, producing a dilemma. Should the patient be told—especially in light of the still persistent incurability of the disease? To tell the patient is tantamount to announcing a sentence to senility. I got to thinking about that. The dilemma is deep indeed. If people are genuine agents, they have the right to know. They have the right to have an opportunity to make such arrangements as they still can in their outer and inner affairs before the disease claims them. They also have the right to refuse. But to refuse, they have to know something, don’t they? The problem is real. Is it right to impose a burden of responsibility on a person? I think yes. Because we are real agents, each and every one of us, and knowing is better, even when painful, than not. In the long run. And there is a longer run even beyond death.

The pleasing aspect here is that the times, they are a changing. Ever more frequently, you hear Reality discussed in the clear even in our media.

The Roots of Dualism

In consciousness the presentation of content must be viewed as separate from the perception of content. William James does that, in effect, by discussing the role of attention. The materialistic mode of thought, however, by speaking of attention rather than of the soul or the self, obscures what in effect can be seen as a radical duality. James himself (in Talks to Teachers) rejects the possibility that consciousness can be the consequence of mechanical processes. In this context he means the composite of presentation and perception. The nature of whatever it is that bestows attention to the flow of consciousness is altogether inaccessible to observation, as James himself notes. That this whatever picks and chooses what to notice and what to neglect is the basis for the faculty we call the will. James holds for a free will but thinks that its freedom cannot be proved. To lean in one direction or the other is itself a choice.

The traditional approaches to the mind are based on a narrative of reality in which responsibility is central. In effect you cannot have a meaningful narrative without real characters, thus agents. Agents without freedom of will cannot claim to be agents. Whatever cosmic narrative we choose, the characters within it must have freedom of choice. They need very little else. Angelic communities may rebel, for instance, and this alongside a presumption that they are immaterial. You might say that from the traditional perspective the fact that humans have bodies is almost incidental to their core being. In that agency must have free choice and free choice cannot be conceptualized without understanding of the choices before the agent, the very notion of agency includes consciousness and will in a single complex; you cannot remove one without negating the other.

The content of consciousness must be separate from the act of perception if language is to correspond to reality in any meaningful way. When I say "I am aware of XYZ," I'm positing two distinct phenomenal realities. One is awareness and the other is XYZ. Aquinas argued that the self cannot become aware of itself except by its acts. We can examine this assertion by pondering Franklin Merrell-Wolff's notion of consciousness-without-an-object, M-W's idea of the absolute. That phrase is without meaning. Consciousness-without-an-object is akin to the paradoxical concept of Aristotle's potential, a capacity out there in some ontological limbo without actuality.

In this relationship I discern a fundamental dualism beneath reality. If consciousness is, something else must be there too. The object seen cannot at the same time be the object that sees. Once we accept this, we have a reasonable basis for looking at reality. We have minimal orientation. Neither a materialistic nor a pure idealistic position is tenable. The materialistic view denies the reality of an agency. The idealistic denies the reality of anything over against the agency; it treats everything as a mirage produced by the mind.